Striking the Balance

As thezeks slogged out toward the forest, Nussboym thought of a riddle he’d heard one German guard in Lodz tell another, and translated it into a Soviet equivalent: “An airplane carrying Stalin, Molotov, and Beria crashes. No one lives. Who is saved?”

Ivan Fyodorov’s brow furrowed. “If no one lives, how can anybody be saved?”

“It’s a joke, fool,” one of the otherzeks hissed. He turned to Nussboym. “All right, Jew, I’ll bite. Who?”

“The Russian people,” Nussboym answered.

Fyodorov still didn’t get it. The other zek’s pinched, narrow face stretched to accommodate a grin. “Not bad,” he said, as if that were a major concession. “You want to watch your mouth, though. Tell that one where too many politicals can hear it and one of ’em’ll rat on you to the guards.”

Nussboym rolled his eyes. “I’m already here. What else can they do to me?”

“Ha!” The otherzek snorted laughter. “I like that.” After a moment’s thought, he stuck out his gloved hand. “Anton Mikhailov.” Like most prisoners in the camp, he didn’t bother with patronymics.

“David Aronovich Nussboym,” Nussboym answered, trying to stay polite. He’d been able to make himself prominent in the Lodz ghetto. Maybe he could manage the same magic here.

“Come on!” shouted Stepan Rudzutak, the gang boss. “We don’t make our quota, we starve even worse than usual.”

“Da,Stepan,” the prisoners chorused. They sounded resigned. They were resigned, the ones who’d been in thegulags since 1937 or even longer more so than new fish like Nussboym. Even the regular camp ration wasn’t enough to keep a man strong. If they cut it because you didn’t meet your norm, pretty soon they’d throw you in the snow, to keep till the ground got soft enough for them to bury you.

Anton Mikhailov grunted. “And if we work like a pack of Stakhanovites, we starve then, too.”

“Which ismeshuggeh,” Nussboym said. You did get your bread ration increased if you overfulfilled your quota; Mikhailov was right about that. But you didn’t come close to getting enough extra to make up for the labor you had to expend to achieve that overfulfillment. Coming close enough to quota to earn regular rations was hard enough. Six and a half cubic yards of wood per man per day. Wood had been something Nussboym took for granted when he was burning it. Producing it was something else again.

“You talk like azhid, zhid,” Mikhailov said. Above the face cloth he wore to keep his nose and mouth from freezing, his gray eyes twinkled. Nussboym shrugged. Like Fyodorov, Mikhailov spoke without much malice.

Snow drifted around treetrunks, high as a man’s chest. Nussboym and Mikhailov stomped it down with theirvalenki. Without the thick felt boots, Nussboym’s feet would have frozen off in short order. If you didn’t have decent boots, you couldn’t do anything. Even the NKVD guards understood that much. They didn’t want to kill you right away: they wanted to get work out of you first.

Once they got the snow down below their knees, they attacked the pine with their axes. Nussboym had never chopped down a tree in his life till he landed in Karelia; if he never chopped down another one, that would suit him fine. No one cared what he thought, of course. If he didn’t chop wood, they’d dispose of him without hesitation and without remorse.

He was still awkward at the work. The cotton-padded mittens he wore didn’t help with that, although, like thevalenki, they did keep him from freezing as he worked. Even without them, though, he feared the axe would still have turned every so often in his inexpert hands, so that he hit the trunk with the flat of the blade rather than the edge. Whenever he did it, it jolted him all the way up to the shoulder; the axe handle might have been possessed by a swarm of bees.

“Clumsy fool!” Mikhailov shouted at him from the far side of the pine. Then he did it himself and jumped up and down in the snow, howling curses. Nussboym was rude enough to laugh out loud.

The tree began to sway and groan as their cuts drew nearer each other. Then, all at once, it toppled. “Look out!” they both yelled, to warn the rest of the gang to get out of the way. If the pine fell on the guards, too damn bad, but they scattered, too. The thick snow muffled the noise of the pine’s fall, although several branches, heavy with ice, snapped off with reports like gunshots.

Mikhailov clapped his mittened hands together. Nussboym let out a whoop of glee. “Less work for us!” they exclaimed together. They’d have to trim the branches from the tree; any that broke off of their own accord made life easier. In thegulag, not much did that.

What they still had left to trim was quite bad enough. Finding where the branches were wasn’t easy in the snow, lopping them off wasn’t easy, dragging them through the soft powder to the pile where everybody was stacking branches was plenty to make your heart think it would burst.