Kolia Page 2

  As their classes evolved over the following year, Kolia would invariably come up with the right answer. And one morning Iosif decided that in addition to Russian, he would teach him French and the rudiments of calculus, as well as how to survive in the shithouses of the USSR.

  “It’s called ‘The Code of the Zek,’ and you are going to learn it by heart.”

  He then began teaching Kolia the rules that he had lived by since arriving in Siberia, rules the boy would adopt as the tenets of his own art of war:

  Eat less than your daily ration to accustom your body to hunger. Do not eat all of your bread in the morning. Keep what you don’t eat in your pocket.

  Never give the extra bread to a thug or a bullyboy, but rather use it for trading. Make sure it’s you that has the advantage.

  Remain inconspicuous. Only allow yourself to be noticed when you are stronger than your opponent and he is incapable of defeating you.

  As soon as you are able, start reading. Read anything, even the obscenities written on a wall. If you cannot read, recite something you have heard, something that comes from outside of you. Recite the meaningless snippets of conversation you overhear.

  Practise your French when you are cold or hungry. Conjugate a verb in French and repeat its declension in Russian. Always be ready to respond in either language.

  Imagine Moscow or Paris or Leningrad. Create these cities from what I have told you. Smell them, touch them. Don’t forget this.

  Your mind is free. Think of anything you want to.

  Above all, question everything that is said to you. Practise doubt as a discipline.

  Iosif did his best to describe the world he had known extra muros. They would sit beside the coal stove when the temperature dropped and the guards were obligated to light it. They talked and wrote. Iosif recited entire poems he had committed to memory, in both Russian and French, even clumsily acting out a few passages from King Lear as best he could. He also described his own country and the French provinces with which he had some familiarity.

  Kolia learned to read and write Russian amidst the sounds of machine-gun fire, pickaxes, and the anonymous howls and shrieks coming from the other side of the wall. But even the hot-blooded language rising from his own belly was not enough to keep his fingers from turning numb in the cold. During the winter, he could tolerate his writing exercises for no more than five minutes at a time and then would place his hands over the stove to warm them. Looking out the only window, which he could barely get his head through, Kolia could see dead bodies, sometimes the bodies of men he knew. Over time, he no longer felt anything when confronted with the sight of the dead and the dying. The cold can paralyze limbs, but the death of others numbs all the senses. Kolia found himself missing his mother or at least the memory of some maternal figure, but the reality of the camp kept bringing him back to the present, to his most basic needs, driving him deeper inside himself. He became increasingly attached to Iosif, who continued his instruction at night, speaking to him in French from time to time, even though they faced the reprisals of the guards. Iosif explained how each language was a world unto itself and that speaking his own language allowed him to escape the boundless expanse of time that was life in the K Mountains. No one knew when he had arrived at the camp, nor did they know what it was that had brought him there.

  The authority of the guards, the sentries, and those prisoners dispatched to tyrannize their comrades with batons, was rarely challenged. Officially, prisoners were to be treated according to a strict code of conduct. One night after returning from the mine where he had been beaten by a guard, a zek decided to take revenge on a fellow prisoner by denouncing him with accusations that he had made derogatory statements about the Ukraine. Shitting on another zek to show superiority, grinding a heel into those who were weaker, and watching them suffer was part and parcel of the caste system of the camp and a means of exacting some form of retribution for its daily hell. The guard grabbed the accused man by the back of his neck, which was nothing more than protruding vertebrae, and dragged him to the shit hole and plunged his head into it. Then he presented the zek’s face, smeared with feces, to the informer.

  “Lick him.”

  By the age of twelve, Kolia had already witnessed similar scenes. The guard’s name was Ousov, and he hadn’t smoked since the previous day. It was imperative to find him some tobacco to calm him down.

  “Lick his face.”

  Ousov struck the zek in the shin and raised his voice. His Russian was crude. He noticed Kolia gesturing to Iosif with an imaginary cigarette and was about to grab hold of him in turn when Iosif interceded.

  “I can get you tobacco by tomorrow night.”

  The offer pacified the guard. He turned around and ordered the snitch to get on his knees.

  “I said lick him.”

  The snitch began to lick the other man’s face and then suddenly vomited a spray of bile and started choking. Ousov struck his right ear with the back of his hand.

  “Clean all that shit off his face.”

  At night while the others slept, Kolia and Iosif continued to speak French under their breath, falling silent as soon as they heard the sound of approaching boots.

  Over time Kolia began to understand that his mentor enjoyed the favour of a person of influence. Iosif always worked indoors and a little less than the others. He ate better and received mail written to him in French. To receive a letter at all was a rare occurrence. To receive one written in French which had not been censored by the hand of some unknown civil servant was unheard of. The sender was Iosif’s sister, Tanya. She lived in Moscow with a man who was not her husband.

  There were nights when Iosif would leave the barracks. Kolia played dead. He knew instinctively not to ask any questions. The next day, Iosif would return with a letter. Tanya’s letters brought him news of the world and included transcriptions of poems written in French — some from works which had been officially sanctioned, others from books that circulated clandestinely. Kolia began to draw his French vocabulary from the texts of Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Villon, Hugo. With Cendrars, he journeyed across his own country for the first time.

  When Kolia turned fourteen and found himself being eyed with interest by another zek in the showers, which would have brought back the horror to a survivor of Auschwitz, Iosif added the final rule to the Code of the Zek:

  If somebody puts his hand on your ass, tell him you’re sick. With any luck, he’ll leave you alone.

  By the winter of 1952, Kolia had spent sixteen years in the camp. Nobody knew exactly how long Iosif had been there . . . six, seven, eight years.

  THE NEW MAN

  IOSIF DISAPPEARED A FEW months before Stalin’s death. In the camp, death was always the logical conclusion. But Kolia, who was in the habit of keeping his thoughts to himself, could not accept the terse official version. It had already been presented to him to explain the disappearance of his mother.

  He approached a man he had seen several times in the company of Iosif. The next day, the man handed Kolia a large envelope and asked him to hide it — if he didn’t, they could both end up with problems.

  “What kind of problems?”

  The man didn’t answer. He shut his eyes tightly and a frown line formed between his eyebrows. When he opened them again, Kolia understood. He asked where Iosif was, but the man told him to hold his tongue, which was exactly what Kolia did most of the time. He patted Kolia on the shoulder and then walked back towards the administration building.

  Stalin died in March 1953. Kruschev would be named First Secretary of the Communist Party in September. Amnesties were granted and Kolia found himself among one of the first groups of liberated prisoners. The new men that Stalin had wished to create emerged haggard and haunted. Kolia left the K Mountains at the beginning of autumn. He took with him his threadbare blanket, his louse-infested underwear, a pa
ir of woollen pants that left red blotches on his calves and thighs, one shirt, a padded jacket full of holes, a hat, gloves, and the envelope containing Iosif’s papers along with his own. He also took a few rubles he had earned working. He was dropped off in Magadan — it could have been the middle of the jungle.

  The coastal town of Magadan had been built almost entirely by convict labour. On the road that stretched between the camp and the town — a road whose innards concealed the bones of prisoners crushed to a fine powder — another man who had received a pardon began to wish aloud about taking the train back to Moscow, his native city.

  “My son is twenty-five now; my wife, forty-five. She was beautiful. And she’s still beautiful, I’m sure of it — her mother was beautiful at that age.”

  Kolia had stuck closely to this man for the entire journey, from the K Mountains to Magadan.

  “If I could, I would follow you all the way to Moscow, Alyosha.”

  “Well, come with me!” said the man. “Ask for a visa here. My wife makes the best soup. My God, the taste of that soup!”

  “But are you sure you have everything you need to return home?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said the old man brandishing his papers, “I have everything, everything’s in order. As soon as I step foot inside my bedroom, I’m going to close the door, barricade it with a chair, and stuff my head between my wife’s breasts! Her name is Anna.”

  He flashed a toothless smile at Kolia. He did in fact have one tooth left: a dubious grey molar that the tip of his thick tongue kept seeking out and whose shocking singularity aged him by a good twenty years; according to his documents, he was fifty. Everyone who left the camps returned much older.

  After presenting himself to the authorities, Kolia decided to make the journey across Siberia as Alyosha had suggested — by train. This raised some eyebrows and provoked a few belly laughs before he was told that it was impossible. He was given authorization to take up residence in Khabarovsk, where the Amour and Oussouri rivers converge, less than fifty kilometres away from the border with China.

  He arrived in Khabarovsk after a voyage that navigated the coasts of both the Okhotsk and Japan seas. When he stepped off the train, he was immediately struck by the symmetry of the architecture, the grey apartment buildings, the contour of the three hills on which the town had been built. One of the banks of the Amour River boasted sandy beaches, but Kolia couldn’t imagine baring his body in public to go swimming. The only world he knew was one populated by pine trees and the vegetation native to the K Mountains, the snow, the mountain peaks, the almost lunar horizon, and the long, numbing route which had brought him from the camp to this port town. In Magadan — freezing cold and bundled into himself — he had seen nothing, he had followed the others like an automaton.

  Kolia had no idea what it was to live as a free man. A whole new language needed to be learned. He was offered a small pension, which allowed him to rest up for a short time before he was assigned a job. He began to develop a pain in his right hip that would crop up just before a storm. The life of a Soviet citizen offered barely more freedom than the life of a zek.

  He still didn’t look quite like a man. In fact, it was difficult to determine Kolia’s age. He was thin, with thick hair and a boy’s beardless face that nonetheless betrayed his time in the camps; it was obvious by looking at him and his papers, and by the stink of his clothes, that he had just arrived. When the caretaker handed him the key to his room, she couldn’t look him in the eye; instead she dictated the building rules to his shoulder. Men who had been liberated were reputed to be liars, to distort the truth of life in the camps, and were regarded by most as simply crazy. Kolia knew absolutely nothing about society and its conventions and didn’t attach great importance to her apparent mistrust.

  During the three months granted to Kolia for his recuperation, the only time he left his room was to buy food. The town scared him; he felt he was being watched everywhere he went. He spoke to no one. By the end of the third month, he had reconciled himself to the life that was being forced upon him: he was to return to work because he was young and clearly more robust than when he had arrived.

  Kolia spent his days working on a road maintenance crew. During the winter of 1953/54, he shovelled snow and cleared the streets of his district, chopping through ice until he reached the gravel road beneath. A life of routine was nothing new to him, but his muscles, which he’d never really had before, started developing at an astonishing and painful rate. His arms were suddenly covered in wine-coloured stretch marks. He slept fitfully, longing to hear the sounds of other bodies around him, but the only sounds he brought home were the crunch of the shovel and the ringing of the pickaxe. The deep silence of his room was too much for him. In these moments, he would have preferred living in a hostel, surrounded by the warmth, the smells, and the violence of others. He couldn’t bring himself to use the shared toilet; instead he relieved himself in the chamber pot in his room and emptied it every morning before his neighbours rose. There were times when he thought things would be much simpler if he were dead.

  Food was more plentiful than it was in the camp, but there wasn’t a lot of choice. Kolia didn’t cook. For months, he lived off dry bread, boiled cabbage, soup broth, and dried fish. He learned to make tea, which had him pissing like a little boy. And when he ran out of food, a cup of tea would fill his stomach. Slowly his tastes expanded to include strong black tea into which he would drop some cardamom seeds.

  Kolia was officially “rehabilitated” in the spring of 1954 and was issued a document which granted him the right to travel anywhere on Russian soil. What he didn’t receive was any information regarding either his mother or his real father, whose existence remained unknown to him. Both his Russian nationality and his Soviet citizenship were clearly inscribed on the pages of his de facto passport.

  In order to travel to Moscow and reside there, his papers had to be stamped with a propiska — a residency permit which allowed authorities to control the migration of the population and keep the big cities free from an influx of recently liberated criminals, as well as the children of dissidents.

  Kolia wrote a letter to Iosif’s sister, Tanya. The letter would certainly be read by some nameless third party who would most likely censor it. He decided not to take any risks and wrote it in Russian, composing four rough drafts on the flaps of two cardboard boxes. In simple language, he described his pardon, his arrival in Magadan, and his daily life in Khabarovsk. He expressed how much he wanted to see Moscow and his strong desire to move there. He wrote of Iosif’s disappearance, but carefully avoided the word dead. Without mentioning the source, he quoted a Russian poet he didn’t particularly care for, simplifying the passage somewhat and working it into his letter as if the words were his own: I will cross my motherland, slipping through like the slanted rain of summer. Perhaps Tanya would understand. He wanted to impress her — if she agreed, the trip could be made that summer. He mailed the letter at the post office and began to count the days.

  In his growing impatience, he started to daydream. He attempted to take stock of his country and to measure the scope of his time in it. He had been free for six months. He had lost the only person who had ever really mattered to him; now he clung to the photo of Tanya and the clipped French sentences of her letters.

  It was a passport photo taken in Moscow in 1951. On the back, beside the date, was her name: Tanya Branch. Kolia had found it in the envelope containing Iosif’s documents. For months, he slept with the photograph in his hand as if it were a religious icon. She was the spitting image of her brother, without the wrinkled skin, and with hair that turned to curls at her shoulders. In the chaos of Khabarovsk, he found himself incapable of approaching women, in spite of his intense adolescent desire. He kept the photograph with him always.

  Forty-two days later, Kolia found out that Tanya’s Russian sentences weren’t anywhere as concise as those she wrote in
French, but full and graceful, almost sinuous: as if she were clearing a path towards meaning and truth, in order to unearth them.

  TOWARDS MOSCOW

  IN HIS SUITCASE KOLIA HAD packed provisions for the trip: four sausages, some smoked herring, and three round loaves of bread, one of which he had cut into slices to dip in his black tea. Apart from that and his papers, not much else. His ticket for Moscow was rolled up tightly and rested between his lips like a cigarette. The day felt summerlike and he instinctively readied himself for the squalls of dust that would leave his teeth coated in grit.

  He studied the movement of the passengers on the platform in order to determine how to board the train. His papers were checked first — the only trace of the gulag was his place of birth — and then Kolia faced the provodnik who stood in front of the entrance to the car.

  “Ticket.”

  As he unrolled his ticket, Kolia’s knapsack dropped to the ground and his blanket fell open. The provodnik took a step backwards and then accepted his ticket with disdain. On the blanket, Kolia had sewn his name, Nikolai Vladimirovich, and, in a statement of bravado, the years 1937, 1943, and 1953. The dates were glaringly obvious. The Great Purge, the war, the death of Stalin — events that traced Kolia’s genealogy, like the branches of a family tree with no trunk.

  He sat beside the window behind a big family who smelled strongly of something they were eating, something good. He ate some bread and waited for the train to leave. The open compartment filled up in a matter of minutes. Moscow, which he had once seen in a photograph, lay at a distance of almost nine thousand kilometres from where he sat. The train started moving.