1937 – Kolyma, that Pole of Cold and Cruelty

By Lisa Green

Heaving the shovel over his shoulder, Viktor drags himself out of the hole he had been digging. Noticing the disruption to Viktor’s routine, his teammates glance at him. For the prisoners of Kolyma, solitary confinement was the ninth circle of Hell. It will be Viktor’s first time in the cell, but the stories he had heard from the other prisoners in the mess hall were enough to make his stomach churn.

One of his teammates, Sasha, stops digging to offer Viktor some sound words of advice.

“Don’t let the silence get to you, eh Viktor. Embrace it.”

He slips a cigarette between Viktor’s fingers, “to keep you warm.”

There is no comfort in the tall man’s eyes, but the usual hard edge to his voice is gone. A seasoned general, Sasha was imprisoned because the party perceived him as an imagined threat to the regime and its vision, his power a potential weapon against Stalin.

Another faceless guard appears, a Charon to shepherd Viktor to his wretched fate.^iv The guard urges Viktor to move, and with a final glance back, he walks away from Sasha and his barrowful of dirt.

*

Everything in the cell is grey – there is no window for the light to come through, and only a few strands of yellow dusk manage to slip under the door. There is not enough light to breathe life into his shadow, no carbon copy of his own body to comfort him in his solitude. The only sound comes from the air that rattles its way through his lungs and comes spewing back up in a hacking cough. Sasha’s cigarette lay on the ground by his feet; he forgot to bring a match to light it.

Viktor tries his hardest to not touch the ground, the icy concrete is similar to the games of lava from his youth – if he falls in he is out of the game. He coils his feet under his legs on the straw mat, tucking his head in to his neck. His mind is telling him that the smaller surface area he creates the warmer he will be. But reason has no role in Kolyma – the cold still creeps into his clenched armpits, clinging to the lobes of his ears, and forming a thin film of moisture on the tip of his nose.

A damp patch upon a wall resembles his wife Anoushka, the pert nose and round chin distinctly hers. Craving her warmth, Viktor extends his arm towards her, caressing the pockmarked surface. But Anoushka is no longer there – the darkness has swallowed her whole.

Don’t let the silence get to you, Sasha had said. But how could he not? The silence is lonely and hollow. Viktor hiccups, the staccato sound breaking the solemnity of the cell. Its echo bounces back and mocks him, playing tricks by suggesting that there are a hundred other men in the cell with him. Every flicker of his eyelashes conjures another grey zek. He can sense the pressure of a hundred pairs of indistinguishable eyes staring back at him noiselessly. The air he breathed ought to be stifling, bloated with Russian, Estonian, Ukrainian voices.

Sounds from outside are muffled as they travel through the thick concrete walls, and Viktor can only catch slivers of conversation as prisoners and guards alike pass by. Each conversation revolves around food, and his stomach grumbles violently; a small bowl of skilly sounds like an extravagant feast. Ignoring his hunger Viktor begins to slip into sleep, the lull of the silence and the cold forcing his eyelids to close. He does not want to sleep. Falling into an eternal sleep was a weak man’s death. His eyelids are fluttering, caught in a stalemate of want and need. As he stands on the precipice of unconsciousness, the words of a prisoner’s song drift under his door:

I know not of a land where our hearts can beat so free.

Viktor snakes his hand beneath his jacket, clutching his heart through the scratching material of his undershirt. Is it beating? His hands are numb, he feels nothing. Wait! No, there is definitely a dull thrum against the skin of his palm. He clamps his eyes shut, savouring each beat. Before, he had mistaken his heart’s tenacity for a curse that had imprisoned him in Kolyma. He knows better now. Every beat pulses blood through the veins of his body, providing precious manna to his mind. It’s a message to him that says: “as long as this heart is beating, you will be free.” He is free from the confines of labour, the tedious suffering; he has freedom to think and to be. As his heart beats, his mind hums, imagining a great escape. His earthly body remains tied here to this unforgiving land, but his heart can leave freely – he leaps over the wire fences and steals away. The dark is closing in, trapping him with the sinking of the sun, but his heart is lifting out of his chest, slipping through the hairline cracks in the walls and fleeing. As his heavy lids finally succumb to sleep, Viktor realises that like the coveted gold that lay beneath the cement floor, his soul was untouchable, free from the cold and greedy hands of Kolyma.

ⁱ Kolkhoz: a collective farm in the Soviet Union.
ⁱⁱ Zek: colloquial term for a labour camp inmate.
ⁱⁱⁱ Skilly: thin gruel or porridge.
^iv Charon: From Greek Mythology. Charon is the ferryman of the river Styx who carries souls to the underworld.