Striking the Balance

Thezeks who’d been up at thegulag near Petrozavodsk for a while described the weather as nine months of winter and three of bad skiing. And they were Russians, used to winters far worse than David Nussboym was.

He wondered if the sun ever came out. If the snow ever stopped falling.

Nights were bad. Even with a fire in the stove in the center of the barracks, it stayed bitterly cold. Nussboym was a new fish, a political prisoner as opposed to an ordinary thief, and a Jew to boot. That earned him a top-level bunk far away from the stove and right next to the poorly chinked wall, so that a frigid draft constantly played on his back or his chest. It also earned him the duty of getting up and feeding the stove coal dust in the middle of the night-and earned him a beating if he stayed asleep and let everyone else get as cold as he usually was.

“Shut your mouth, you damnedzhid, or you’ll be denied the right to correspondence,” one of theblatnye- the thieves-warned him when he groaned after a kick in the ribs.

“As if I have anyone to write to,” he said later to Ivan Fyodorov, who’d made the trip to the same camp and who, being without connections among theblatnye

himself, also had an unenviable bunk site.

Naive as the Russian was, though, he understood camp lingo far better than Nussboym did. “You are a dumbzhid,” he said, without the malice with which theblatnoy had loaded the word. “If you’re deprived of the right to correspond, that means you’re too dead to write to anybody anyhow.”

“Oh,” Nussboym said in a hollow voice. He hugged his ribs and thought about reporting to sick call. Brief consideration was plenty to make him discard that idea. If you tried to report sick and the powers that be weren’t convinced, you got a new beating to go with the one you’d just had. If they were convinced, the borscht andshchi in the infirmary were even thinner and more watery than the horrible slop they fed ordinary

zeks. Maybe the theory was that sick men couldn’t digest anything with actual nourishment in it. Whatever the theory. If you weren’t badly sick when you went into the infirmary, odds were you would be by the time you got out-if you got out alive.

He huddled in his clothes under the threadbare blanket and did his best to ignore both the pain in his ribs and the lice that swarmed over him. Everybody had lice. There was no point in getting upset about it-except that it disgusted him. He’d never thought of himself as particularly fastidious, but his standards, he was learning, differed from those of thegulag.

Eventually, he drifted down into a light, uneasy sleep. The horn that announced morning roll call made him jerk as if he’d grabbed hold of an electrflied fence-not that the camp near Petrozavodsk boasted any such luxury, barbed wire being reckoned plenty to contain the likes of him.

Coughing and grunting and grumbling under their breaths, thezeks

lined up so the guards could count them and make sure no one had vanished into thin air. It was still black as pitch outside, and cold as the devil’s wife, as the Russians said: Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Karelian Soviet Socialist Republic, lay well north of Leningrad. Some of the guards couldn’t count their fingers and get the same answer twice running, too. All that made roll call even longer and more miserable than it might have been otherwise. The guards didn’t much care. They had warm clothes, warm barracks, and plenty to eat. Why should they worry?

When it left the camp kitchen, theshchi Nussboym gulped down might have been hot. By the time it got ladled from the pot into his tin cup, it was tepid going on cold. In another fifteen minutes, it would be cabbage-flavored ice. He got a lump of hard, coarse black bread to go with it-the regulation ration: not enough. He ate some and stuck the rest in the knee pocket of his padded pants for later.

“Now I’m ready to go out and chop wood,” he declared in a ringing voice that would have sounded false even if he’d just feasted on all the beefsteak and eggs he could hold. Some of thezeks, those who understood his Polish, laughed. Itwas funny. It would have been even funnier if what he’d just eaten hadn’t been starvation rations even for a man who didn’t have to do hard physical labor.

“Work detail!” the guards bawled. They sounded as if they hated the prisoners they’d have to watch. Likely they did. Even if they didn’t have to work, they did have to go out into the cold forest instead of back to the barracks.

Along with the rest of the men in his gang, Nussboym shuffled over to get an axe: a big, clumsy one with a heavy handle and a dull blade. The Russians would have got more labor from thezeks had they given them better tools, but they didn’t seem to care about such things. If you had to work a little longer, you had to work a little longer. And if you lay down in the snow and died, another prisoner would take your place come morning.