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Authors: Varlan Shalanov
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and bound the wound.
The foreman took us back to camp. Savelev was sent to the first-aid point and from there to Investigations to be tried on a charge of self-mutilation. Fedya and I returned to that same tent which we had left two weeks before with such hopes and expectations of happiness.
The upper berths were already occupied by others, but we didn’t care, since it was summer and even better to be lower down. There would be a lot of changes by winter.
I fell asleep quickly, but woke up in the middle of the night. I walked up to the table of the orderly on duty where Fedya was sitting with a sheet of paper in his hand. Over his shoulder I could read:
‘Mama,’ Fedya wrote, ‘Mama, I’m all right. Mama, I’m dressed appropriately for the season…’
The Injector
To: Comrade A. S. Korolyov,
Director of Mines
REPORT
In response to your order requesting an explanation of the six-hour period on the twelfth of November of the current year during which the convict work gang No. 4 under my supervision in the Golden Spring Mine stood idle, I report the following:
The air temperature in the morning was sixty degrees below zero. Our thermometer was broken by the on-duty overseer, as I reported to you earlier. Nevertheless, it was possible to determine the temperature, since spit froze in mid-air.
The work gang was brought to the site on time, but could not commence work, since the boiler injector serving our area and intended to thaw the frozen ground wouldn’t work.
I have already repeatedly brought the injector to the attention of the chief engineer. Nevertheless, no measures were taken, and the injector has now completely gone to pot. The chief engineer refuses to replace the injector just now. We have no place to warm up, and they won’t let us make a fire. Furthermore, the guards won’t permit the work gang to be sent back to the barracks.
I’ve written everywhere I could, but I can’t work with this injector any longer. The injector hardly works at all, and the plan for our area can’t be fulfilled. We can’t get anything done, but the chief engineer doesn’t pay any attention and just demands his cubic meters of soil.
Mine Engineer L. V. Kudinov,
Area Chief of the Golden Spring Mine
The following was written in neat longhand obliquely across the report:
1. For refusing to work for five days and thus interfering with the production schedule, Convict Injector is to be placed under arrest for three days without permission to return to work and is to be transferred to a work gang with a penal regimen.
2. I officially reprimand Chief Engineer Gorev for a lack of discipline in the production area. I suggest that Convict Injector be replaced with a civilian employee.
Alexander Korolyov,
Director of Mines
The Apostle Paul
When I slipped off the slick pole-ladder in the test pit and sprained my ankle, the director realized I would be limping for quite a while. Since the rules wouldn’t allow me just to sit around, I was sent as an assistant to Adam Frisorger, our carpenter. We were both quite pleased.
In his ‘first life’ Frisorger had been a pastor in some German village near Marxstadt on the Volga. * We had met in one of the enormous transit prisons during the typhoid quarantine and had arrived together at this coal-prospecting area. Like me, Frisorger had spent time in the taiga, had been on the brink of death, and had been sent half insane from a mine to the transit prison. We were sent to the coal-prospecting group as invalids, as ‘help’. All the working members of the prospecting group were civilians working on contract. True, they were yesterday’s convicts, but they had served their sentences. In camp the attitude toward them was condescending, even contemptuous. On one occasion, while we were still on the road, the forty of them hardly managed to scrape up two rubles to buy some home-grown tobacco. Even so, they were already different from us. We all understood that in two or
The foreman took us back to camp. Savelev was sent to the first-aid point and from there to Investigations to be tried on a charge of self-mutilation. Fedya and I returned to that same tent which we had left two weeks before with such hopes and expectations of happiness.
The upper berths were already occupied by others, but we didn’t care, since it was summer and even better to be lower down. There would be a lot of changes by winter.
I fell asleep quickly, but woke up in the middle of the night. I walked up to the table of the orderly on duty where Fedya was sitting with a sheet of paper in his hand. Over his shoulder I could read:
‘Mama,’ Fedya wrote, ‘Mama, I’m all right. Mama, I’m dressed appropriately for the season…’
The Injector
To: Comrade A. S. Korolyov,
Director of Mines
REPORT
In response to your order requesting an explanation of the six-hour period on the twelfth of November of the current year during which the convict work gang No. 4 under my supervision in the Golden Spring Mine stood idle, I report the following:
The air temperature in the morning was sixty degrees below zero. Our thermometer was broken by the on-duty overseer, as I reported to you earlier. Nevertheless, it was possible to determine the temperature, since spit froze in mid-air.
The work gang was brought to the site on time, but could not commence work, since the boiler injector serving our area and intended to thaw the frozen ground wouldn’t work.
I have already repeatedly brought the injector to the attention of the chief engineer. Nevertheless, no measures were taken, and the injector has now completely gone to pot. The chief engineer refuses to replace the injector just now. We have no place to warm up, and they won’t let us make a fire. Furthermore, the guards won’t permit the work gang to be sent back to the barracks.
I’ve written everywhere I could, but I can’t work with this injector any longer. The injector hardly works at all, and the plan for our area can’t be fulfilled. We can’t get anything done, but the chief engineer doesn’t pay any attention and just demands his cubic meters of soil.
Mine Engineer L. V. Kudinov,
Area Chief of the Golden Spring Mine
The following was written in neat longhand obliquely across the report:
1. For refusing to work for five days and thus interfering with the production schedule, Convict Injector is to be placed under arrest for three days without permission to return to work and is to be transferred to a work gang with a penal regimen.
2. I officially reprimand Chief Engineer Gorev for a lack of discipline in the production area. I suggest that Convict Injector be replaced with a civilian employee.
Alexander Korolyov,
Director of Mines
The Apostle Paul
When I slipped off the slick pole-ladder in the test pit and sprained my ankle, the director realized I would be limping for quite a while. Since the rules wouldn’t allow me just to sit around, I was sent as an assistant to Adam Frisorger, our carpenter. We were both quite pleased.
In his ‘first life’ Frisorger had been a pastor in some German village near Marxstadt on the Volga. * We had met in one of the enormous transit prisons during the typhoid quarantine and had arrived together at this coal-prospecting area. Like me, Frisorger had spent time in the taiga, had been on the brink of death, and had been sent half insane from a mine to the transit prison. We were sent to the coal-prospecting group as invalids, as ‘help’. All the working members of the prospecting group were civilians working on contract. True, they were yesterday’s convicts, but they had served their sentences. In camp the attitude toward them was condescending, even contemptuous. On one occasion, while we were still on the road, the forty of them hardly managed to scrape up two rubles to buy some home-grown tobacco. Even so, they were already different from us. We all understood that in two or
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