Beneath the Darkest Sky Page 18

  “I can’t thank you enough,” I said, truly stunned at his kind gesture.

  “This should work for a while, until your comrade realizes you’re not answering any of his questions. Yes?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Could work for a year or so before he grows truly suspicious.”

  “But maybe our Trotskyist takeover will happen before then. It is only a matter of time before we Trotskyists rise up and retake control by force, allowing our Leon Trotsky to return and lead us. Many men with guns across the country, and many inside the Kremlin, are Trotskyists. All of us former and current military men are simply awaiting the Kremlin overthrow. I won’t say his name, but a top member of the Politburo is a Trotskyist. He is in position to seize power and send orders to us loyalists. We want a war. Understand?”

  “Very much.”

  “Still,” he said, picking up his cigar, “I can’t help you beyond this mailbox arrangement. But just know that NKVD would never release you if your comrade learned of your arrest and demanded such.”

  “I understand, Commander.”

  “They would tell him you’d committed certain crimes against the State and then proceed to secretly kill all four of you in order to prevent an ongoing investigation by your government, and that’s assuming your Roosevelt would even consider such. He has never done so for any other to this date. Why would he concern himself with a Negro? It is this simple.”

  “Thank you, Commander,” I said with a lump in my throat.

  “I found out where your wife and daughter are,” he said, picking up a sheet of paper and reading. “They are near a town called Kirovsk. It is all the way across the country, up near Finland. They’re at the MR4 Labor Camp. I know the director of that camp, a pig named Colonel Ivan Zorin. Now he, for one, is certainly a devout Stalinist!”

  “If I might ask, what type of labor do you think he has my wife and daughter doing?”

  “They mine apatite at MR4. Apatite is a pale-green mineral used to make fertilizer. So they are probably doing very difficult hauling and cleaning of the freshly mined stones . . . even if they are pregnant. As you already know, based on this camp alone, many women get pregnant in the camps. And again, this Colonel Zorin is a real pig.”

  “Do you know anything else about him?” I said, halfheartedly. He began rattling off all sorts of details about Colonel Zorin, and I was listening astutely, but his previous comment—“even if they are pregnant”—was echoing loudly in my head.

  Koskinen finished talking. He then held the thick cigar near his lips and turned it several times before taking a big drag and exhaling directly at me, as if he knew I was enjoying it. “What was something pleasing you did in our beautiful Moscow with your family, Comrade Sweet?”

  I took a second to think back, still trying to ignore the image I had in my mind of my sweet wife and daughter being violated. I wanted to jump up and grab him and demand him to do something immediately. I was enraged inside, perhaps even twitching on the outside. Maybe the smoke was keeping him from seeing the impulse bubbling up in me to want to vomit all over his well-organized, wooden desk. But I breathed in deeply and focused.

  “There were so many,” I said, my Russian words trembling, a tear forming in my eye. “But the most enjoyable thing we did in Moscow was go to the Theater of People’s Art and listen to the Anglo-American Chorus. It was comprised of forty-five Americans, men and women. They sang Negro protest songs to a largely Russian audience. Their applause was so grand and heartfelt at the conclusion of ‘Dis Cotton Want a Picking.’ So grand! So heartfelt!”

  I looked at Koskinen and thought about the part of this story that I wouldn’t be telling him. It involved how Loretta and I had actually felt that night. We had looked down at our twins as the applause had continued. We realized that our children had never known America. But part of us was glad they had never known that ugly bird called Jim Crow. Still, as the next Negro protest songs had continued from the stage, Loretta and I hadn’t been able to help but feel the souls of our American ancestors. We hadn’t been able to help but miss some of what our children would never know—the unexplainable, ever hopeful, good essence of the United States of America. I missed it.

  “Where your wife and daughter are located doesn’t get very cold,” said Koskinen. “Nothing like Magadan, and certainly not like Kolyma’s frozen road. Men who know about what it feels like to work in forty below temperatures will do anything to avoid it, it seems. I can tell you such things. One zek, when I first arrived here, refused to join the lines and leave for the mines. He nailed his own testicles to a wood bench in the washtub barracks. It didn’t work, however. The NKVD guards yanked him up, sent him to the medic, and a week later he was sent to the mines.”

  “He truly wanted to stay here,” I said, trying not to grimace.

  “I think . . . after that visit to the medic . . . you should be saying ‘she’ truly wanted to stay here, Comrade Sweet.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “A few more items. Did you know the zek in your barracks who killed himself the other night?”

  “No,” I said.

  He was referring to the man who’d bitten the veins on his wrist under his tattered, thin blanket. It had been a disgusting, blackish-red mess-of-an-image to wake up to.

  “Such suicides are common throughout the system. But, I must say, every camp across the Soviet Union is its own universe. Every camp has its own culture. Some have . . . they have . . . I am searching my mind for a Western phrase. Some have minimally compassionate bosses, a good term, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “But others have bosses who are sadists. My boss is a sadist. And then there’s Stalin. He still doesn’t understand that all of us officials are still just humans. Guards throughout the system are corrupt and rape women zeks. Camp bosses steal money and gold. Moscow officials could never know what goes on thousands of miles away. They come to inspect, and camp administrators make the camp appear perfect. But as soon as they leave, things return to reality. Can you tell I was educated in Norway?”

  “I was going to ask you where—”

  “I like talking to you because you’re a Negro. Maybe I’m ignorantly convincing myself that I’m getting to know my sister’s Negro husband better by imagining that you’re him. They have four children who I don’t know. I am an uncle. Maybe I see your boy as one of my unfamiliar nephews. Such impulses to consider such things are not under our control as humans.”

  “You sound like an extremely educated man,” I bravely decided to say. “You sound well-read.”

  He stood and approached the bookshelf to my right. “I shall give you this one to read by Bolesław Prus called Pharaoh.” He took it from the top shelf, then handed it to me before sitting back down. “Now you have something to read.”

  “Thank you, Commander.”

  “It is Stalin’s favorite. You should learn as much as you can about the preferences of Stalin. And it will make you look good when the commanders and guards see you carrying it. When you’re finished, have your boy read it.”

  “I will.”

  “I prefer philosophy books, a broad range of them. As such, maybe I am too philosophical for Stalin’s Soviet Union, too nostalgic for the Lenin days that saw the proletariat as actual human beings who mattered. Maybe I read the Communist Manifesto too often. Have you read it?”

  “Yes,” I lied, hoping he wouldn’t quiz me, and, at the same time, realizing I’d spent my entire adult life writing my own manifesto.

  “A few years back,” he said, “zeks in Kolyma were actually fed and clothed better, and even worked shorter hours. There was a belief that such would make the zek more productive. But then the numbers got too big, so many arrests. Stalin realized that Kolyma zeks were like river fish that could simply die and be replaced with fresh fish from a hatchery.”

  I watched him sit there and smoke for a moment. He was an introspective man, lost in what he perceived to be an ever-growing, unprincipled land. He appeared t
o be my age, which would have put him in his early twenties back during the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution. He hadn’t been able to shed those Lenin and Trotsky principles that were polar to Stalin’s wholly authoritarian edicts.

  “I want you to replace the floor in the northwest chamber of punishment isolator number three,” he finally said. “The slats of wood and joists are rotting from all of the blood and urine. That last chamber on the right is where we’ve kept the worst of the worst for the past year. Fifty shipped-in, murderous zeks have probably died in that single chamber over that period. I won’t go into details about the vicious beatings they endured. No?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I need the slats replaced by noon tomorrow. It is already four o’clock. You can work until late tonight. Then finish tomorrow. Have your boy help you remove the slats this evening. Then use Dima Avdeyev and Roma Galkin to help you two replace them in the morning. Those two work the fastest. You can go now.”

  * * *

  It was the best gift I’d been given in the five months I’d been imprisoned, my getting to work alone with James, at least for a day. With the claw ends of our hammers, the two of us stabbed at the bloodstained slats and began yanking the first two up. It was disgusting.

  Punishment isolator number three was where they kept the worst of the worst zeks. It was a barracks some one hundred yards west of the entire camp, made of thick logs, rectangular like all the others, but it had a long hallway down the middle and a small guard’s room at the end. There were ten windowless, eight-by-eight chambers with heavy wooded doors in the isolator, five along each side of the hallway. We were working in the chamber at the back on the right. There was a crazy zek in each of the others.

  “Make sure you don’t let that hammer slip and hit you in the eye, son,” I said, noticing the thick, dry blood that had settled on the sides of the slat I’d lifted. “Make sure the claw is dug in good before you pull. And the long nails on these boards are rusty and filthy. Don’t let ’em stick you.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “What’s the first thing you’re gonna do when we get back to Paris after we leave here soon? You should start working on your drawings again.”

  I could see his emotionless mood lift a bit at my mere suggestion.

  “I think I want to show Ginger how to play chess. She was always wanting to play with my friend Paul and me back in Moscow. We never let her.”

  “She’ll like that.”

  “Yeah.”

  I placed the board aside and looked at the grayish dirt ground underneath the four-inch-high joists. I reached down and picked up a handful. It felt like brittle clay, breaking apart easily in my hands. Fluids had managed to seep through the tight cracks and stain portions of it. It smelled awful, hence the reason Koskinen had said before I’d exited, “Take some shovels and wheel barrels and remove the top foot of dirt underneath. Then replace it with fresh soil before replacing the slats.” He’d been more than correct to suggest such.

  “Hey, son,” I said, “did Paul’s father ever tell him when they were going back to Seattle? I remember him constantly talking about his family planning to return soon.”

  “They probably left in December.”

  “Well, when we get to Paris I’ll track them down and we can plan to see them when we eventually move to Denver, Colorado.”

  “Really,” he said, almost trying to crack a smile for the first time since August. “Are we really gonna move to the United States, Dad?”

  “That’s my plan, son. As soon as Bobby gets us out of here and we rejoin your sister and mother in Paris, I’m going to contact some colleges there. Denver is a place I’ve always wanted to go.”

  We could hear the door behind us opening.

  “Bystreye!” said an isolator guard who’d obviously just arrived to replace the other guard who’d been outside in the cold guarding the front door to this point. “Work faster! I’m here now! It is my night shift now, zeks! You Negroes can’t be lazy anymore!”

  I kept my head down and continued working, trying to ignore the tall, thin man dressed in his gray uniform and visor cap, a rifle hanging from his shoulder.

  “You need to finish the entire job today!” he said, taking a wooden canteen from his coat pocket. “You need to finish tonight!”

  “Commander Koskinen said that two zeks, Dima Avdeyev and Roma Galkin, would be joining us tomorrow morning to help finish,” I calmly said in nervous Russian.

  He pulled the corked top off of his canteen and I could see the blood rushing to his white bony face. He took a big drink and wiped the moisture from his Stalin-like, dark mustache. He wasn’t drunk, but appeared as though he’d had a bit too much for an on-duty guard. He pressed the top back on his canteen and pocketed it.

  “Commander Koskinen is not my commander!” he said. “He is in charge of building shit for the Dalstroi. The only commander we listen to at this camp is the big boss, Commander Drugov. He’s in charge of zeks! I spit on your bourgeois Koskinen! You are no different than a fucking suki!”

  We kept working, our heads down, trying to ignore the word he’d used. It referred to a criminal zek who liked to collaborate with the Dalstroi officials.

  “You want to go tell your Koskinen who the lazy zeks are so he will be nice to you,” he continued. “I can tell you’re that kind of filth. Look at me, you fucking suki!”

  I slowly stopped working, both James and I still on our knees. I touched my son’s shoulder, signaling for him to stop pulling the wood. Then I looked up at the guard and waited.

  “You think because you are not a zek with a regular job that you are special, a pridurok?” he said. “You think this is so because your Commander Koskinen put you in charge of a brigade? You think that makes you a lucky, Negro pridurok?”

  “No,” I said, hearing this word for the first time. My ability to translate Russian still left me wondering what odd words like this meant. There were many within the camp that I was learning on a daily basis, and many had to remain Russian words, as translating them into English was difficult. The language of the camps was unique.

  “Stand up!” he said, removing his shouldered rifle and holding it at his left side, barrel to the floor. “And put the hammer down.”

  I did both, slowly, and with my heart rate increasing considerably. Positioned no more than three feet from him now, he reached out with his right hand and grabbed my collar, pulling me close, his breath smelling of whiskey, not vodka.

  “I don’t like you,” he said, his mouth an inch from mine. “And I don’t like your bourgeois son either, always walking so proper, picking at his bushy hair. Probably filled with lice! And your Commander Koskinen is a spy. This is easy to see. He will be shot and replaced soon enough. Do you understand me, Negro zek?”

  I didn’t answer, so he proceeded to grab my jaw and repeat himself with more force.

  “Do . . . you . . . understand . . . me . . . Negro zek?”

  Again I refused to answer, so he backhand slapped me across the face. Hard. I didn’t react. I just stood there, letting the sting dissipate. Using only his right, he took the canteen out again, pulling the top off with his teeth, and drank. Enraged, he threw it on the floor and rushed James, pulling him up by the arm and slugging him in the face, hard enough to drop him flat on the floor. It was a punch powerful enough to kill.

  At this point, all sense of rational thought exited my mind at once. Watching James lie there on the floor, perhaps unconscious, I transformed into complete, instinctive father mode. A man of my height and age had struck my child.

  As if he could sense the rage surfacing in me, he started to raise his rifle. I lunged forward and smashed him against the wall, the rifle falling to the floor. As he bounced off and tried to gather himself, I reached down to pick up my hammer. He came forward, trying to kick it away before I clutched it. But I already had the handle and his boot only clipped my wrist.

  I stood and he swung at me with a right, nipping my nose. As I ra
ised the hammer, he swung again and I stabbed his forearm with the claw, yanking it from his flesh as he cried out and stepped back. Seeing James in my periphery still lying there motionless, I raised the hammer again and rushed him. He tried to swing at me, but I kept coming forward, hitting him in the head with the face of the hammer. He fell to the floor and I straddled him, taking the hammer to his head repeatedly until I’d left him unrecognizable.

  I stayed there straddling him for a moment while I caught my breath. Then I rushed to James. He was still out.

  “Son!” I said, lifting and shaking him.

  I shook him a few more times and he began to come to. There was no blood on him, but as I touched all over his face and head, I could feel a knot on his left temple under his hair. He had turned just enough to avoid a square shot to the face. I realized the predicament I was in, so I slid him toward the wall and sat him up.

  “Rest here, son!” I said, looking over at the bloody guard.

  I stood and approached him, searching for his keys. Finding them in his coat pocket, I also pulled out his identification card and read the name. Returning it to his pocket, I took off his hat and shoved it in my crotch, then grabbed my bloody hammer from the floor and slid it up my coat sleeve, holding it there. I stood and exited the chamber, walking down the hallway to the front door. I peeked out at the dark evening and across the now-invisible, snow-covered land situated between the isolator and the main camp. It was well below zero out.

  I clutched his ring of keys, reentered the barracks, and headed for the guard’s room straight ahead at the end of the hallway. Using key after key, I found one that opened the door. Inside the closet-sized office were a toilet bucket, a small table, and a chair. On the table was a clipboard filled with papers, some stray bullets, a flashlight, a tin cup, and an almost-full bottle of whiskey. The top paper on the clipboard had “Punishment Isolator” typed along the top, and below it was a long list of names, some circled, as they were likely the current occupiers of the nine chambers. Typed under a line in the bottom left corner was “NKVD Guard,” and written above it was “Vladimir Divac.” It matched the name I’d seen on his ID card.