Beneath the Darkest Sky Page 14

  “With seven months to plan,” said Bobby, “I’m sure everyone will indeed be there. But I’m looking forward to the Christmas Eve party for now.”

  “I wish I were going to be here to see it myself,” said Bullitt. “I’m sure you’ll fill me in, George.”

  “Most assuredly. When do you leave for Washington?”

  “October 10th,” said Bullitt. “I understand the famous Negro actor, Paul Robeson, is planning to be here in Moscow in December as well. You should invite him.”

  “He won’t come,” said Bobby. “Some members of Stalin’s Politburo being here is understandable because it’s viewed by the public as two nations simply gathering on a leadership level. Robeson, on the other hand, is of the people, of the revolution. Our capitalist government is part of the problem in his eyes, and his supporters would find it unacceptable for him to be hobnobbing with us. It’s really quite simple.”

  I continued listening to the men ramble on about the Christmas Eve party, all the while thinking about Paul Robeson’s pending visit to Moscow. I figured Lovett might know much more about the details and I couldn’t wait to find them out.

  13

  Magadan, Russia

  November 1937

  WE’D SURVIVED THE LA PÉROUSE STRAIT AND THE STONE OF Danger, barely it seemed, as there’d been one day that had sent us zeks tumbling from one side of the hold to the other, many left to pick stiff bodies off of them in the dark. But the tilting, rattling ship slamming into violent waves had little effect on us, for the mental anguish we’d already survived left us half wishing the boat would run aground.

  Beginning from the Sea of Japan and ending at the Sea of Okhotsk, our ship had finally entered the Nagaev Bay, where we’d disembarked near the town of Magadan, a place that, according to the old man, had been built for the sole purpose of advancing Stalin’s Dalstroi, his Far North Construction Trust. In fact, when James and I had first boarded the train back in Moscow and met the old man, he’d already known exactly where we were all going. He’d just decided not to tell us until we’d arrived in Vladivostok.

  According to the old man, the Dalstroi was developed to have prisoners mine for gold that would line Stalin’s pockets. “He’s a filthy, soulless animal,” he’d said of Stalin while we were lying in our bunks back at the transit camp. “He has created a forced labor system in the far northeast called Sevvostlag that serves the needs of the Dalstroi, and it will leave more than I can imagine dead eventually. And don’t be so sure that you and your son will be mining for gold. You may be forced to continue the construction of the Kolyma Highway, a road that begins in Magadan and stretches to God knows where. Prisoners started building it in 1932.”

  “It sounds like another planet!” I had said.

  “If they do put you and your boy on road detail, you must know that you are building a road that is designed for the sole purpose of making it possible for future prisoners to more easily access areas rich with gold. Maybe they won’t have to walk someday, as you will.”

  “He’s using us to explore new lands, Abram.”

  “Yes, there have been stories of men literally making a path for a future road by exploring the mountainous terrain on foot, creating footprints for others to follow, many falling to their deaths because of the unexplored area. They were the . . . how do you say in English . . . the—”

  “Guinea pigs!” I said. “Sacrificial lambs!”

  “Yes.”

  “I refuse to believe that this will be our fates, Abram.”

  “The terrain will be horrible, the mountains, the ice . . . rock-hard, the frigid air . . . unbreathable. Whatever thick clothing they provide, take good care of it. Keep the snow out of your boots by tucking your pants into them and tying a sock around the tops tightly. Never take your ushanka off, if they give you one. Try to keep your mouth closed and breathe lightly through your nose. Keep your head down and dig.”

  “We will.”

  “They don’t call that highway the Road of Bones for nothing, Prescott. Many have, and will, be buried right under it.”

  It was very cold and windy when we disembarked, but not nearly as cold as the old man had said it would be in December. Nor was it as cold as it would be at the mines, which were located near the distant mountains and far beyond the closer hillsides, both of which were currently being smothered by a thick fog. Still, the old man had painted a picture.

  After walking inland about four miles on a road that had been partially carved through the high Nagaev Bay cliffs, we arrived at Magadan, a lonely, depressed place that resembled nothing I’d ever imagined. And it certainly wasn’t a town in any traditional sense whatsoever. It consisted of a snow-cleared dirt road, watchtowers, barbed wire, fuel tanks, and barracks. According to the guards, thousands were being held here temporarily, and it appeared that thousands more would follow, maybe millions.

  At the entryway of the camp was a large sign above that read: WORK IN THE USSR IS A MATTER OF HONOR AND GLORY. Of course, I saw it much differently. The sign was missing two key words. “Forced” at the beginning and “not” after “is.”

  Based on what I’d seen upon arrival when they opened the hatch and brought in the lamps, I was guessing that at least a hundred had died in the hold. There were only nine hundred of us now. We marched through the dark clouds that had fallen, the seasickness still in our legs. We passed by columns of shabby barracks. I wondered if zeks were asleep inside or if the buildings were empty. Whatever the case, it looked like a snowy ghost town on the moon.

  Walking behind us in the distance toward a different area of the camp were the women from our ship, maybe a few hundred of them, some holding babies. The old man had said there were nurseries and maternity wards in the camps. Stalin hadn’t missed a thing.

  Continuing to discreetly gaze back at them, I couldn’t help but try to find a couple of black faces, but it was pointless. My wife and daughter had gone north from Moscow.

  As we walked deeper inside, there were guards with big-eared, pointy-faced, mangy-looking, vicious dogs on chains patrolling everywhere. We passed by one wooden structure after another, all of them properly built actually with solid foundations and sturdy beams. A food barracks on the left that smelled of cabbage had a poster on the front door with an image of a hand clutching a snake near the head. At the bottom it read: WE WILL ERADICATE SPIES AND DIVERSIONISTS, AGENTS OF THE TROTSKYITE—BUKHARINITE FASCISTS!

  With smoky fog feeling like it was coming up from the ground, we approached a nicer-looking structure where the NKVD might be stationed. Or perhaps this was also the Dalstroi headquarters, because it looked official, the red and yellow state flag blowing high above. An officer stood in front in the distance and held a megaphone.

  “Davai! Davai!” he said. “Bystrey! Bystrey!”

  We sped up, but he kept repeating those same words in his violent Russian. “Get going! Get going! Faster! Faster!”

  With our accompanying guards repeating his command, we began to run until we arrived at the stone building, which was painted white. “Catch up, you lazy zek!” the commander said through the megaphone. I turned and, through the fog, could barely see a prisoner laboring behind in the distance. He was limping but trying like hell to join the rest of us.

  “Ubey yego!” said the commander, looking up at one of the watchtowers and nodding.

  An NKVD man stationed up high pointed his rifle downward and fired two shots at the zek, dropping him to the permafrost. He lay there facedown. Dead.

  “Welcome to Magadan, zeks!” the commander said through the black megaphone, as if nothing had happened. “I am Commander Drugov. You are part of the new system. We may be several time zones away from Moscow, but the Central Committee has spoken to us. They have been coddling the zeks for years here in the Sevvostlag system. But our great Stalin has replaced all of the Sevvostlag commanders with new, more knowledgeable ones. There will be no more wasting time and money.”

  I gazed to my left at James and was hoping
he’d grown accustomed to hearing lectures that sounded far too intellectual for him. He knew I’d explain things later.

  “The Central Committee has voted to make Kolyma more productive,” he continued. “The mines and roads are not being worked hard enough. The loggers are not sufficiently cutting the trees down in the taiga. The women are not harvesting peat beside the river fast enough, or washing clothes, cooking, cleaning, and sewing rapidly enough. They are being scolded for such things over in their camp.”

  He pointed to the right in the distance.

  “But that will all change now,” he continued. “You will get your daily ration, but it will consist of hand-sized black bread for the day, hot soup in the morning, gruel for lunch, and hot water for dinner. You are henceforth to be known as Lagpunkt Seventy-Nine. Your ship was supposed to only be for hauling ammonium nitrate, but they managed to squeeze your little unit in.”

  He put the megaphone down and was handed a sheet of paper from a guard. I was still thinking about being several time zones away from Moscow. It seemed we were closer to Alaska.

  “Kolyma is called ‘the island,’” he continued. “Not because it’s an actual island, but because it is all alone away from the mainland. Once you are out there some three hundred miles minimum from here, we won’t try to stop you from escaping. Just know that no one has ever made it out. Never! Understand?”

  “DA!” we yelled.

  “Fortunately for you, however, for the time being, you are being assigned to build more barracks here in Magadan, structures that will further serve our ever-growing Dalstroi headquarters. Nice offices for our great Stalin to sit in whenever he visits! Yes?”

  “DA!” we screamed.

  “Your thirty-day slog through the ice and snow won’t begin just yet. As you can see, this holding camp is very large. There are many thousands here, all with their own schedules for departure. But within the camp, there are a few cordoned-off sections for smaller communities to live as separate lagpunkts and remain here indefinitely. Magadan itself needs a myriad of jobs done for its own community. Yours will be to shut your fucking mouths and hammer nails while most of the zeks come from the ships and head straight to the mines. Yes?”

  “DA!” we shouted.

  “Stand in line and wait for the guards to check you in, zeks. Oh, and one more item. If you decide to break into the women’s camp and rape a female zek, you will be shot in your mouth straight away. Stay in your lines now!”

  James and I waited and waited until finally a short officer with a clipboard approached. “Give me your papers!” he said, his Russian rather high-pitched, his breath, rotten.

  “Prescott Sweet!” he said, searching his list, flipping pages, his short, little finger running over the names. He’d actually pronounced my name, “Sveet,” like every other Russian, as the w sound didn’t exist in the Russian language, but I always immediately translated it to the proper “Sweet” as my ear took it in.

  “You are now number 22-AA,” he continued. “Don’t forget! Now . . . what was your profession?”

  “Engineer,” I said.

  He looked at me sternly. “Go line up at building nineteen. It is there!” He pointed south. “Past the top commander’s office.”

  “This is my son.”

  “Shut up, zek! Shut up now! He can stay here in line. Go to nineteen!”

  I reluctantly left James behind, but it had given me encouragement to see him nod for me to go. It was like he was becoming a burgeoning young man, almost fifteen. He was more confident in himself, and I hadn’t noticed until now how tall he was getting, maybe five-eleven.

  There were about ten men lined up when I arrived at nineteen. When we were finally let inside, I made note of how much warmer it was, as this was one of the meeting barracks for the officers, equipped with rows of wooden benches and a podium up front.

  “Come and sit,” said the commander, walking up to the lectern. “So many things will be changing in the coming years in Magadan. The state has not even given it town status yet, but that will likely happen next year. Meanwhile, you have all claimed to have been professional engineers.”

  He surveyed the ten of us and half smiled. I was glad to be in the company of a man who enunciated his Russian words with calm precision. He was intellectual sounding, his green uniform well kept, and his Nordic-looking face clean-shaven.

  “I have been put in charge of structural and mechanical development for Magadan,” he said. “Prisoners will continue to flow in from Vladivostok, and this port location will need to keep expanding. Shipments of gold, tin, etcetera, will be trucked in from the mines and shipped out more rapidly with each passing year. We do not have the adequate infrastructure to handle the quick pace at which the Dalstroi is growing. We need to meet the demands of our great Stalin. Understand?”

  “Da!” we said.

  “Most of the engineers, doctors, nurses, dentists, and paramedics are what we call ‘freely hired’ men and women. But others in these disciplines are zeks like you. If you were to be working alongside a freely hired man, you must listen to him, for he has authority over you. Raise your hand if you know how to build an engine from scratch?”

  Only four of us raised our hands.

  “Raise your hand if you can do land excavation.”

  Only five of us raised our hands.

  “Raise your hand if you can do all of the following: load fuel and oil tanks, design irrigation and pipe systems, operate heavy machinery, design and assemble buildings from ground to roof with the proper installations, and with zero supervision. Before you answer . . . just know that a lie could cost you your life. I don’t say that to threaten you, I say it because it’s the truth. Raise your hands.”

  Only one of us raised his hand. Me.

  “Very good,” he said. “What is your name?”

  “Prescott Sweet, sir!”

  “Comrade Sweet, I would like for you to stay here and complete a written examination. The rest of you sign your name on the paper beside the door and then go back to the lines. I will have an officer retrieve you when it’s time to assign jobs.”

  After they exited, the officer stood at the lectern studying some documents. I sat in the front row with my back straight, hands resting on my knees. I was nervous.

  “Comrade Sweet,” he finally said, looking up, “can I see your passport? Bring it here.”

  I immediately stood and walked up. Handing it to him, I stood there waiting while he read.

  “You can go back and sit now,” he said, still reading while I quickly sat down. “I am certain you will do well on the examination, as it simply consists of math and physics, but it is important for you to know something. For the past six months since I arrived here, every time a new shipment of men comes in, only a few are chosen to lead a construction team. It is a fortunate assignment because it’s a way for you to avoid the dreaded Kolyma highway and the frozen mines near the river. Yes?”

  “Yes, sir!” I said.

  “Men like you are too valuable to send out there to die within weeks. Eighty percent of the men who leave here don’t survive. Our great Stalin can always bring us new labor, but he also understands the importance of getting value out of uniquely skilled zeks. Why waste you, correct?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Call me Commander Koskinen. I am talking to you as though I already know that you can do the jobs you’ve so claimed you can do. That’s because you will be shot if you can’t. You are so lucky to be an engineer. Of course, there are other good jobs a zek can be given to do. Some are cooks and clerks. But most are simple hands, waiting to die. They have no useful skills. They are all intellectuals or simple kulaks who’ve known nothing but tilling soil and milking cows. I have one piece of advice for you, as I’m not the head of the Dalstroi or the Sevvostlag camps by any means. Work hard!”

  “Yes, Commander Koskinen!”

  “It certainly isn’t customary for a commander or anyone else in the Dalstroi to speak to a zek with such
decency. It’s a good thing you were educated as an engineer. It might keep you alive. Of course the examination is only part of your being put in this position. I will be looking into your background to confirm your profession. Do you have any questions before the exam?”

  “I have a son. He is fifteen. He is very good at science and math. Might he be able to work alongside me?”

  “If your work is pleasing to me and the other Dalstroi heads, maybe we can make arrangements for that in a couple of weeks. It will certainly keep him here for as long as you are, if you can learn to be trusted.”

  * * *

  A month passed and I’d already impressed Koskinen enough to make him assign James to my team of one hundred. I’d scored a perfect score on his examination and had since been able to turn a set of Koskinen’s architectural drawings into a rectangular, sixty-by-thirty, one-story shell. This after having leveled the site, put up wooden forms, dug the holes and trenches, installed footings, poured concrete, and allowed it to cure. The shell would soon serve as an office building for some Dalstroi heads.

  With limited winter sunlight, it was still grueling, sixteen-hour-a-day work, as the camp lights were turned on when the sun disappeared around four p.m. I’d been given the same daily rations as the others—herring head or animal lung soup with bits of cabbage for breakfast, tasteless gruel for lunch, and hot water for dinner. But there was one difference. Obviously the cooks had been told something, because my morning soup had more fish or lung in it than the others.

  I’d actually been skipping my breakfast every other day and saving it for James to eat at night. I was making sure he’d been getting a bit more protein. Why they made us have the soup for breakfast and the gruel for lunch puzzled me at first, but then I realized they wanted the protein in us first thing.

  The only difference between me and the other zeks was that I was in charge of a work crew. But I still had to do the same labor. There were a few other zeks like me who’d come here recently and were highly skilled engineers. I could hear them barking orders to their men, too, across the frozen alleys at the other worksites, NKVD men patrolling the maze of barracks. But most of the engineers were free hires.