Свердлoвск, Saturday, October 5th, 1940

We crossed the Ural Mountains and are now in Siberia. I remembered that it was here in Sverdlovsk, back when it was still called Yekaterinburg, that the Tsar’s family was imprisoned twenty-three years ago. The Czechoslovak legionaries captured the city, but it was too late: by the time they got there, the Bolsheviks had cruelly slaughtered the Tsar, the Tsarina and their five children.

A city can burn down, be completely demolished and rebuilt, and yet it is still the same city as long as the name stays the same – take London, for example. A city can be completely abandoned and then re-established some distance away, and yet it is still the same city as long as the name stays the same – t Sparta, for example. The name of a city conveys its very essence and its fate is written into it. Recently, however, too many cities have been changing their name as readily as though it were merely a series of letters.

 

Нижний Тагил, Sunday, October 6th, 1940

The train halted in Nizhny Tagil, the end of the line. The guards opened all of the cattle trucks and, with the help of furiously barking dogs, herded us like sheep towards the front of the station, where there is a monument to the first Russian steam locomotive built in 1834. This made an impression on me. It is obvious that the Russians are a nation of skilled and cultured people.

It’s a pity that the skilled and cultured people have all disappeared and I’ve been left with all the boors and ignoramuses. When one of the guards noticed me reading the inscription on the monument, he dashed over and slammed his rifle butt into my head – just because he was angry that I can read and he can’t.

From here on we will continue on foot.

 

Ивдель, Tuesday, October 15th, 1940

For nine long days we marched across the taiga. Lakes, swamps and endless dense forests of spruce and fir stretched out on either side of the track. Every evening we had to construct dugouts that would keep in some animal warmth to stop us from freezing in our sleep. The guards in their long coats and caps with red stars on them rode on horseback and cooked hot food. Every day we got the same thing: a swig of vodka, a chunk of rye bread and a cube of beef stock – though we had nothing to cook it in and so had to chew it, even though it was disgustingly salty. Those who couldn’t go on were given some encouragement using a nagayka – a riding whip with an iron ball sewn into the leather tassel at the end. And if they didn’t get up after being beaten, they were simply left lying there on the road.

The labour camp is located by the settlement of Ivdel. A checkerboard of low wooden barracks is surrounded by a wooden stockade, with barbed wire adding the finishing touch.

But I’m overjoyed – Vasil Dulov is here! They sentenced him while I was lying in my sick bed with typhus. He got three years and has been in the gulag for over a month now, so he knows what’s what. He kept a bunk for me in the barracks, which was built by the Czechoslovak prisoners and therefore keeps out the wind and rain.

The prisoners can walk about freely inside the perimeter but are only allowed outside for work under the watchful eye of the guards. Overseers are thin on the ground here – in reality the camp is ruled by the most hardened criminals, mainly thieves and murderers. They like to torment the political prisoners, most of whom are intellectuals, and steal food from them, so it’s better not to show any signs of education. In their eyes it is a serious crime to be able to read, as I found out for myself at the station in Nizhny Tagil.

 

gulag Ивдель, Tuesday, November 7th, 1940

In the camp it’s impossible to move for communist slogans, red stars, hammers and sickles, and crudely painted portraits of Comrade Stalin. From morning till night the loudspeakers blast out military marches and rousing communist songs – especially Katyusha, Shiroka Strana Moya Radnaya and Stalin’s beloved Georgian ditty Sulika. They’ve left us so befuddled that we end up humming along with the gramophone.

What’s more, today is the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution and so the ideological barrage has intensified. Each prisoner also received a gift from the Soviet state in the form of 100 millilitres of vodka and a packet of Belomorkanal cigarettes, whose name commemorates the completion of the White Sea–Baltic Canal. During its excavation, twenty-five thousand political prisoners like us died a miserable death.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to write my diary. I only have a little time in the evening before I doze off from exhaustion. The only electric light is in the guards’ towers. There aren’t even any candles in the barracks, so I have to use the light from the open hatch to the stove, which then belches out horrendous smoke.

We work every day from dawn till dusk. We’re building a road across the taiga heading north as straight as a ruler. First we have to cut down the trees and prise out the stumps, then we level off the bare ground with pickaxes and shovels. After that we dig up rocks, smash them into pieces with sledgehammers and then uses them as ballast. Finally we cover the road with a layer of gravel. The worst part is when we run into a swamp and have to hammer stakes into it. It’s brutal, back-breaking toil.

There are two types of Czechoslovaks here: The first, such as Vasil and me, fled to the Soviet Union to fight the Nazis. The second are communists who came here under the delusion that they were going to build a paradise on earth. When I ask them why they were locked up in a gulag, they don’t want to talk about it.

 

gulag Ивдель, Friday, December 6th, 1940

Today is St Nicholas Day, but no angel has appeared. The ground is frozen. To avoid breaking the pickaxes, first we have to pile up stacks of timber and warm up the soil using fire. This has slowed down the construction of the road, and if we don’t fulfil our daily quota, we won’t get supper.

The overseers aren’t actually that bad as, unlike the jailbirds, they don’t beat us or humiliate us. They just couldn’t care less if we live or die. If someone gets sick or collapses from exhaustion, they’ll kick him or even stick him with their bayonet just to make sure he’s not faking. No reaction? Then they leave you to die.

This nearly happened to my fellow inmate Rudolf Turpekl, a skinny little man, but what little muscle is left on his bones never seems to tire. We were smashing rocks together. When they freeze, the iron just bounces off them. He took a swing with the sledgehammer and it ricocheted off and walloped him between the eyes. He looked worse than death, but his heart was still beating, so I put him beside the fire to keep warm, and then when dusk fell, Vasil and I carried him back to the camp.

A crowd of poor souls known as the ‘coffin dodgers’ is permanently camped out around the sickroom. Some of them hobble around in never-ending circles, while others lie helplessly in the snow. They can no longer work, so they don’t get any food, and they’re not allowed into the infirmary as there is no cure for exhaustion. By morning the majority of them will have frozen to death and a clear-up squad will haul them off to a storeroom for corpses in one of the outbuildings. When the storeroom is full, they load the stiffened corpses onto a sleigh and take them to a gorge in the taiga where the wolves will devour them.

We arrived with Turpekl and pushed our way past the ‘coffin dodgers’ to the sickroom, where fortunately they took him in.

 

gulag Ивдель, Saturday, December 7th, 1940

After work I went to visit my compatriot Turpekl in the sickroom, where he had already regained consciousness. There was a square-shaped depression in the skin on his forehead where the blunt end of the sledgehammer had imprinted itself on his skull. But he could see and hear, and apparently he’d soon be back at work. He didn’t remember anything about yesterday, but he’d learned from the camp doctor that I had saved his life and so he smiled at me in gratitude. When I was about to leave, he said to me out of the blue: “Do you want to know how I got here? Well, I’ll tell you. I used to be a miner in Kladno. I had my own house, a wife, five children and a goat. Fifteen years ago the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Comrade Haken, came to one of our meetings and said: “Comrades, don’t let yourselves be exploited anymore and go to the Soviet Union to build communism. You’ll be better off there.” So my friends and I set up the Comueden collective. We sold everything we had – my house and the goat – and we used the money to buy tools, cattle and seed. We travelled for a long time. The train took us past the Volga to the empty steppe. We barely survived the first winter in dugouts. Almost half the children didn’t make it. In the spring we began to cultivate the virgin land and build houses. We survived famine, illness and raids by nomadic bandits. Within a few years we had managed to build a mill, a tannery, a school and even an electricity generator. We dug a pond, bought a tractor, and even set up a band and an amateur theatre group. I learned how to repair machines. When an aeroplane crashed nearby, I recovered the engine from the wreck and built a propellor-powered aerosledge. It was the only vehicle for miles around that was able to travel across the frozen steppe. In the winter I used the aerosledge to take pregnant women to the maternity hospital in the town. Just when we were finally beginning to prosper, the local soviet transformed our Comueden into a kolkhoz with one thump of an official stamp. Anyone you resisted had all their possessions seized and had to leave. The only ones left were myself, my wife and a few others who had nowhere to go back to. The people from the kolkhoz elected me chairman. I didn’t want the position, but they talked me into it. Three years ago I was arrested along with all the remaining Czechs and we were accused of espionage. They threw me out of the party. The judge gave me the death penalty, but they mixed up the papers and hanged someone else instead of me, and I got his ten years of forced labour. My wife died when she fell down the stairs after an interrogation, the children were sent to an orphanage, and I found myself here. Just your typical story.”

“So what are you going to do, Rudolf, when they release you?” I asked.

“Rejoin the party, because the only thing I believe in is communism. People are fallible, people make mistakes – yes, unfortunately that’s true. But sooner or later we will build a classless society, because it’s the inevitable outcome of the historical process and economic forces. Comrade Marx promised us that.”

 

gulag Ивдель, Tuesday, March 11th, 1941

I’ve lost all sense of time. I don’t even know what month it is. Each day is the same as the last: the same drudgery, cold, fear and hunger.

When we were building the road today, we came to the edge of a bottomless swamp. One stake after another disappeared into it without a trace, as did the boulders. We argued with the engineer who is measuring out the road. According to his orders, the road has to lead directly north, and so he won’t allow us to go round the swamp. We’ll have to drain it.

I’m digging a channel with a hirsute Russian. I’m amazed by his hair and long beard. All the other prisoners are clean-shaven and have their hair shorn off to deter lice.

For lunch they brought us buckwheat porridge boiled in water with rancid margarine. The bearded man offered me his entire ration. I wolfed it down gratefully and then asked him if he wasn’t hungry. “I am,” he replied, “but today is the 26th of February, the first Monday after Cheesefare Sunday, so for me this is the start of the forty-day Great Fast before the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. I can only eat dry food once a day in the evening. I am an Orthodox pope. You can call me Father Arsenie.”

“Father Arsenie, what is the date today according to the Gregorian calendar?”

He counted under his breath. “Tuesday the 11th of March. And you be careful, son, watch out for your…your…”

“My neck?” I said, finishing his sentence for him.

“That too, probably, but also another orifice…” Father Arsenie blushed. “I’ll put it another way. Do you know who really rules the gulag?”

“Criminal elements. Murderers, thieves and rapists.”

“They are only enforcers of power. The real masters are called oborotens. In Russian fairy tales an oboroten is a human being who can turn into an animal. For example, when a boy turns into a wolf, that’s a werewolf. And when a princess turns into a swan, that’s a ballet. And the local oborotens are capable of changing into women, if you know what I mean.”

I finally understood. I had heard about this. The gulag was secretly controlled by a brotherhood of sodomites, convicted of sexual deviance. They were all Muslims and from the Caucasus. Their motto in life was “living is fine, fucking is essential”.

In addition to their night-time orgies with men and even animals, they also ran the black market in tobacco, vodka and food. Apparently the camp accountant and cook featured among them. We political prisoners, worn out by hunger and slave labour, had no appetite or strength for sex. Naturally, the oborotens didn’t work and had plenty of food.

So they’ve taken a fancy to me. From now on I’ll have to have eyes in the back of my head and avoid going anywhere alone.

 

gulag Ивдель, Sunday, April 20th, 1941

The pope was right. A week ago the oborotens invited me to one of their sodomitic orgies. I didn’t go. Last night they sent a couple of murderers to our barracks to tie me up and carry me off. They crept from bunk to bunk, searching for me by the light of a burning match. Fortunately I was sleeping with one eye open and woke up before they could knock me out with their clubs. I let out a roar and managed to kick one in the knee, so he let out a roar too. The noise of the struggle woke Vasil in the next bunk, and he threw himself at the intruder without thinking twice. More of our compatriots awoke and immediately joined the fray. In the dark it was impossible to tell who was who, so a few fratricidal blows were landed. Luckily, I had the idea of singing the Hussite song “Ye who are warriors of God” and all of our boys joined in. After that it was obvious that whoever wasn’t singing wasn’t Czech, and so with our combined forces we beat the two villains to a pulp and kicked them out into the frost. In the morning I found some treasure under the bunk: a box of matches the scoundrels had dropped.

We had won the battle, but the war was far from over. I knew that the oborotens wouldn’t give up – they’d be biding their time.

According to the old calendar, today is Easter Sunday. Frozen cranberries can sometimes be found in the taiga, though they’re rare because animals live off them during the long winter. Whenever we come across them, we stuff them into our mouths right away. Father Arsenie has been collecting them for weeks and bringing them back to the camp, where he secretly made wine from them in a jar at the barracks window. When we got back from work, we discovered the jar had been drained and then smashed on the floor. Without wine there can be no Easter service. Father Arsenie tore at his prison smock in his grief.

 

gulag Ивдель, Thursday, May 1st, 1941

We celebrated Labour Day by labouring. Although it’s not so cold now, the days are getting longer and so are our shifts. I saw a great tit in the forest stopping in mid-flight to peck at some droplets of meltwater from an icicle on a branch. It was so beautiful I wept.

While I was breaking rocks with Father Arsenie, the talk turned to how we had ended up here. When I recounted my story, he shook his head in disbelief. Then it was his turn. His story was quite brief: “It occurred to me that Stalin was Satan. And so I said so, but just to myself. However, my young son overheard me and told his Pioneer leader. She turned me in. They arrested me during mass. He got a red scarf, and I got twenty years. I’ve already forgiven my son, but he has yet to forgive me.”

In the evening the right half of Mr Turpekl’s body became paralyzed. It looks as though he is wearing a mask across part of his face. Vasil and I took him to the infirmary. The camp doctor, Nikolay Feofanovich Myednobordny, has a thin goatee, a squashed nose from years of wearing a pince-nez, and a strange scar in the shape of a bird’s footprint on his cheek. He thought that Turpekl had had a stroke and so he thinned his blood with a decoction of birch bark. He wouldn’t have treated a Russian in this condition, but he holds us Czechs in high regard as he still remembers how our legionaries brought order here during the Civil War. They defeated one Red Army after another, delivered civilian letters for free along with the military dispatches, distributed food fairly among the local people and even put on puppet shows for the children.

The birch bark didn’t help; with a twitch of his eye, Mr Turpekl died. Dr Myednobordny gave me the key to the storeroom with the corpses and asked us to take our compatriot there. When we placed him on the pile, we noticed that there were chunks of flesh missing from several of the corpses. Mainly from their backs, thighs and cheeks. They hadn’t been bitten off by animals but cut away cleanly with a sharp knife. I returned to the sickroom and told the doctor. He promised to bring it up with the camp commander.

 

gulag Ивдель, Friday, May 2nd, 1941

In the evening two guards with rifles on their bacs came into the barracks. They had to bend down as they came through the door so their bayonets didn’t get stuck in the doorframe. Apparently they were to take me to see the camp commander at once. I said goodbye to my friends and prepared for the worst.

There was an extravagant warmth in the officers’ quarters and a rug, probably sewn from sacks, on the wooden floor. The commander, Major Volkolak, was a mountain of a man with a Stalin-like moustache beneath his red nose and sealskin boots turned over below the knee to show off the fur lining. He ordered me: “Sit at the table. You can join me for dinner. Today we’re having Chinese mutton.”

The chef, with a long black beard and an equally tall Cossack hat on his head, placed a bowl of wonderful strong broth on the table. I emptied the bowl to the very bottom. Then he brought skewered shashliks. I stuffed myself until I was fit to burst. Finally a tray piled high with chunks of steaming meat landed on the table.

“Thank you very much, but I’m full,” I demurred.

“Nonsense,” said the commander, smiling. “That was just the starter. You have to try the cheek at least,” placing it on my plate himself. When I began to cut into it, I spotted a strange scar in the shape of a bird’s footprint on the roasted skin. I was eating Dr Myednobordny. I leapt up from the table, knocking over the chair, and fled into the darkness. Through the open door behind me I could hear Volkolak’s mad laughter: “Ha-ha-ha! Chinese mutton! It’s to die for!”

More than anything I want to vomit, but my stomach refuses to give up this unusually nutritious fayre. I have to get out of here at all costs.

 

gulag Ивдель, Saturday, May 3rd, 1941

Since morning we’ve been cutting down trees – beautiful straight larches with dense rings and wood saturated with fragrant resin. After removing the branches, we drag the trunks to the riverbank, where we bind them into rafts in groups of twelve and then lower them onto the water.

They brought us lunch at noon. While the other prisoners and the guards were eating, I discreetly slipped an axe under my coat and disappeared in the direction of the river. Nobody paid any attention to me. I jumped into the water and waded upstream to throw the dogs off the scent. After a few hours I began to lose the feeling in my legs because of the cold. I scrambled onto the bank, cut down a larch and made a fire with the aid of the matches I’d bagged. As soon as I’d warmed up and dried out my boots, I ran until dusk towards the mountains, as far away from civilization as possible.

I’ve heard that Siberian natives travel this way from the taiga to the tundra following the reindeer herds. I mean to join them, cross the Urals to the west and reach Finland, where they have more lakes than communists.

 

Siberia, Sunday, May 11th, 1941

I’ve been wandering across the deserted taiga for over a week now. Surprisingly, there’s more food here than in the camp: a lot of raspberries, cranberries and mushrooms grow out here. Occasionally I catch huchen or trout with my bare hands.

I finally came across one of the natives’ camps. They have round, flat faces with prominent cheekbones. The men have long, drooping moustaches, while the women have brass rings set into unnaturally elongated earlobes. The chief knows a few words of Russian. I asked him if I could join them. He discussed it with the shaman for a while and then told me that the tribe would accept me on the condition that I completed three tasks: first, repair a rifle; second, catch a reindeer and ride it around the camp; and third, pass the ‘Yir’ test. He couldn’t or didn’t want to explain what this ‘Yir’ meant.

The gun was easy to fix. It was an old Mosin repeater and some joker had tried to load larger calibre rounds into the magazine, probably for a German Mauser 7.92mm. I took it apart, prised out the bullets that had got jammed, lubricated the breech with wolf fat – the closest thing they had to oil here – and then put the rifle back together. Tomorrow I’m off to catch a reindeer.

 

Siberia, Wednesday, May 14th, 1941

As luck would have it, the reindeer herds passes through here at this time every year. I had remarked before that reindeer have a fondness for sweet things and are particularly keen on raspberries. So I found a clump of bushes in the taiga which were laden with the pink berries. I borrowed some stout rope from the chief, tied a loop in it and then hid downwind in the bushes. For two days nothing happened, but on the third day my luck finally changed. A beautiful young reindeer came up to the raspberries, gave them a cautious sniff and then got stuck in. At that moment I threw the lasso just as my friend Emil Sedmerád had taught me back at the Pérák mine, and the loop flew over the reindeer’s antlers, landing on its shaggy neck.

The reindeer turned and tried to flee, but it was dragging me on the rope behind it. I leaned back and dug my heels into the dirt. The animal was soon out of breath. I jumped onto its back and loosened the loop so it wouldn’t choke. I held on tightly to the long fur on its neck and rode it round the camp three times before setting it free.

All that remained was to complete the third task. The shaman said that ‘Yir’ could only be carried out when Etpos was at its height, which it will be in just under four weeks.

We packed away the leather tents onto primitive sleighs made from flexible sapplings, pulled by domesticated reindeer. Then the whole tribe set off northwards, following the herds.

 

Siberia, Monday, June 9th – Tuesday, June 10th, 1941

I can now communicate fairly well with the natives. They are kind, hospitable people, completely unspoiled by electricity and politics. The Russians call them Voguls or the Mansi people, whilst they call themselves Chumi, meaning Men. The etiquette here is quite simple: it is not polite to eat badgers, blow your nose in public or look someone in the eye. Other than that, anything goes.

The red Chotal fell behind the jagged horizon and Etpos swung into the sky at its height. It was time for the ‘Yir’ test.

The shaman put on a mask decorated with antlers as the reindeer is considered a holy animal which accompanies the fallen hunter into the underworld. Then we left the camp and headed to where our shadows pointed in the pale moonlight. An eagle owl hooted somewhere in the distance. It seemed to me that my shadow in front of me was real and I had to slavishly follow its movements. The road kept going up. The taiga thinned out and the trees were replaced by moss and lichen, covered here and there by patches of snow. It got colder. Finally we clambered onto a bare, rocky peak. The shaman told me it was called Cholat Chachal – the Mountain of the Dead – and that ‘Yir’ meant to sacrifice yourself to Torum, the god of the underworld. If Torum accepted my sacrifice, I would die and immediately be reborn as Chum. He untied a leather pouch and handed it to me: “Drink this down to the last drop.”

It tasted awful, but I did as I was told.

“This is Saoma,” he explained. “An infusion of red toadstools that has been drunk and then excreted by one of the tribe’s virgins. If you drank the pure concoction instead of the urine, it would make you sick to the stomach.”

I was sick to the stomach as it was, but I kept that to myself. The girl must have suffered terribly in order to spare me. “What should I do now?” I asked.

“Now you must pass through Etpos, and that is all I can reveal.”

For a while nothing much happened, except that I stopped shivering with cold. Then I started to feel hot. Suddenly I noticed that the moonlight had begun to flow. I waded across the current of this light and squeezed through the round hole of the Moon to the other side of the heavens.

I was met by a dizzyingly tall golden needle. Its point disappeared high up in the clouds. I tried to climb up it, but its sides were so steep and smooth that I kept sliding back down. It occurred to me that it would be easier if the needle was twisted into a spiral shape like the horns of the racka sheep that grazed on the puszta. No sooner had the thought crossed my mind than the needle really did twist, and I started up the curved edge. Just then there was a rhythmic rumble from above. “Pup, pup, pup.” As it got nearer, it became faster and louder. “Pup! Pup! Pup!” A round, living eye bigger than my head came bouncing round the bend towards me. “Pup!!! Pup!!! Pup!!!” The eye hopped around me, trying to knock me into the abyss. I remembered I was still wearing the masonic artificial eye around my neck. I aimed it at the bouncing ball, which began to shrink, and a hole formed in the centre, which grew larger and larger until there was nothing left of it.

Now there was nothing standing in my way. A carefully balanced black knife lay on the tip of the needle. I took it in my hand. The sky above me was covered by the face of an old man, stretching out from horizon to horizon. “I am Torum. Have you seen my eye?” he asked in a thunderous voice, his empty eye socket blinking. “It keeps running away from me. It answers to the name of Pupyg.”

“I’m sorry, but Pupyg has disappeared,” I answered. “My glass eye bored a hole in it.”

“Bored a hole in it, eh? Well, I never! So what will you give me in its place?”

I thrust the black knife between my ribs, cut my heart out of my breast and handed it, still beating, to Torum. He placed it into the empty socket and looked down at me kindly. The eye/heart continued beating. “I accept your sacrifice. You may return to earth.” The old man’s giant face faded and vanished.

I slid down from the top on my back and was about to pass through the lunar hole again when I spotted a zigzagging crack in the shadow behind the golden needle. It wasn’t a crack in something, like rock or wood, but a crack in itself. I went towards it. It hung motionless in the air about a metre above the ground and it was possible to walk around it. A crimson glow emanated from the front and back. I put my hand into the crack up to the wrist, but it didn’t come out the other side. I felt a trembling warmth on my hand. I wanted to go through the crack, but the lunar hole was starting to narrow. I quickly ran through and awoke on top of the mountain.

“You almost ended up staying there,” said the shaman. “Etpos has already begun to set. How do you feel?” He handed me another leather pouch filled with a sparkling green liquid: beer made from the tips of pine needles, chewed by a virgin – probably the same one who drank the infusion of toadstools for me. I drank it down thirstily in one go. I was numb with cold, but otherwise I was fine. The shaman asked a lot of questions: “What did you find at the flipside of heaven? How did you get rid of Pupyg? What did you sacrifice to Torum?”

“A golden needle; with a glass eye; my heart. But where does the crimson crack lead to?”

The shaman removed his mask and wiped away his frozen sweat. “I don’t know. If memory serves me well, no-one has ever made it that far.”

 

Siberia, Wednesday, June 11th, 1941

I had passed all the tests and the Chumi had accepted me as one of their own. They all greeted me with a friendly flick of the thumb to my ear, which is like us shaking hands in our country. There was just one young hunter called Nyechys who looked me in the eye at the same time, which is like us looking away in our country home.

The virgin who selflessly drank and urinated the infusion from toadstools and chewed pine needles to make forest beer is Chalev, the eldest agi of Chief Otyr. The chief wants to offer Chalev to me as my wife. It is a great honour for me, but I would like to get to know her a little beforehand. All I know about her is that she is a kind girl who is good at milking reindeer.

Nyechys went off hunting. I wanted to go with him, but he refused to take me. It seems he doesn’t like me because he is secretly in love with my bride, Chalev. I fear he is going to cause more trouble.

 

Siberia – gulag Ивдель, Saturday, June 14th, 1941

I am taking Chalev as my wife and she is taking me as her husband. Chief Otyr arranged the wedding reception. Forest beer and fermented reindeer milk flowed in abundance. Before I had a chance to get properly drunk, Chalev took me by the hand and led me to her tent. Wedding garments from all cultures are incredibly difficult to unfasten. Just when I had finally made it through to her naked body, the sound of a machine gun thundered from outside and men in uniform dragged me out of the tent.

My rival in love, Nyechys, had returned. But he hadn’t gone hunting – he’d gone to the Ivdel gulag to turn me in. The NKVD had brought along a tachanka, which is a carriage drawn by three horses and equipped with a water-cooled Maxim machine gun. A typical Russian invention, a kind of living tank. The main drawback of the tachanka is that it’s best at firing backwards, so it’s particularly useful when beating a retreat.

It wasn’t difficult for the Russians to spot me: I’m a head taller than the other Chumi and my moustache doesn’t grow down the way but out to the sides. They arrested me, tied me up and tossed me onto the floor of the tachanka like a parcel.

Meanwhile, Nyechys wanted ammunition for the rifle, which the patrol commander had promised him as a reward for capturing me. The commander drew a revolver out of a leather holster and emptied the entire chamber into Nyechys’s chest with the words: “Here is your ammunition, traitor!”

They wouldn’t even let me say goodbye to Chalev. With a crack of the whip, we were off. Although the tachanka had wheels from a truck with wide rubber tyres, they kept getting stuck in the soft earth of the taiga until we finally reached a track reinforced with tree trunks.

By evening I was back behind the barbed wire of the gulag. I expected to be put in the barracks again, but they kicked me to the bottom of a deep pit with cold, dirty water up to my knees. In it were seventeen Bessarabians also awaiting justice – like me, they had been caught attempting to flee the paradise of the Soviet correctional system. Three times I tried to scramble out of the pit and three times I slipped back down its muddy sides into the water. I told the Bessarabians – and even showed them in the moonlight – that if we formed a human pyramid we would all be able to climb out of the pit and escape. They stared at me indifferently. Then I gave up.

 

 

Translated by Graeme Dibble