Kolyma Stories (New York Review Books Classics) by Shalamov Varlam

Author:Shalamov, Varlam [Shalamov, Varlam]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

ESPERANTO

A TRAVELING actor, a prisoner-actor, reminded me of this story. After a show by the camp Culture Brigade, the main actor (who was also the director and set-builder) mentioned the name of Skoroseyev.

It was as if my brain had been burned: I recalled a transit camp in 1939, typhus quarantine, and the five of us who endured and came through all the many transfers, the various parties of prisoners, the hours spent standing in sub-zero temperatures, and who were caught in the net of camps and cast out into the boundless taiga.

The five of us learned nothing, knew nothing, and didn’t want to know anything about one another until our party had reached the place where we were to work and live. In our party the news struck us in differing ways. One of us went mad, thinking that he was being taken off to be shot, when he was being taken off to live. Another tried to outwit his fate and almost succeeded. The third—that was me!—was a man who’d been “on the gold,” a miner, who’d become a skeleton who didn’t care. The fourth was a jack-of-all-trades, well over seventy. The fifth was—“Skoroseyev,” he said, rising up on tiptoe to look each of us in the eye. “Score . . . save . . . get it?”

I didn’t care. I’d lost forever any taste I had for puns. But the jack-of-all-trades kept the conversation going.

“What was your job?”

“Agronomist in the Ministry of Agriculture.”

The chief of coal prospecting flicked through Skoroseyev’s file when he took over our party.

“Sir, I can also—”

“I’ll make you night watchman.”

Skoroseyev was a very diligent night watchman for the prospecting team. He never left his post for a minute, fearing that a fellow prisoner might take advantage of any blunder he made to denounce him or sell him out, or to attract the boss’s attention. It was better not to take risks.

Once a blizzard raged all night. Skoroseyev alternated shifts with a Galician called Narynsky, a somewhat fair-haired man who’d been a prisoner of war during World War I, and who had been sentenced for starting a conspiracy to restore the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was just a tiny bit proud of having such a rare, unprecedented case file among the swarms of “Trotskyists” and “saboteurs.” When Narynsky took over from Skoroseyev, he would laugh and point out that even when a blizzard was blowing Skoroseyev would not move from his post. Such devotion was noticed. Skoroseyev was securing his position.

A horse collapsed in the camp. That was not such a great loss; horses didn’t do well in the Far North. But the meat! Meat! The horse had to be flayed, but the corpse had frozen in the snow. Nobody had the skills or the desire to do anything. Skoroseyev offered to take the job on. The boss was amazed and pleased: a skin and meat. The skin would have to be accounted for, but the meat would go into the pot. The whole barracks, the whole settlement was talking about Skoroseyev.

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