Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov Read Free Book Online

to gather the precious raw material. I had gotten so weak that I was transferred from the gold-mine to needle-picking.
    ‘I’ll put you on dwarf cedar for a while,’ the job assigner told me in the morning. ‘It’ll be a pushover job for a few days.’
    ‘Needle-picking’ was considered not just an easy job, but the easiest of all. Moreover, it didn’t require the presence of a guard.
    After many months of work in the icy mines where every sparklingly frozen stone burned the hands, after the clicks of rifle bolts, the barking of dogs, the swearing of the overseers behind our backs, needle-gathering was an enormous pleasure, physically felt with every exhausted muscle. Needle-gatherers were sent out after the others, while it was still dark.
    It was a marvelous feeling to warm your hand against the can with the smouldering logs and slowly set out for the seemingly unattainable peaks, to climb higher and higher, constantly aware of your own solitariness and the deep winter silence of the mountains. It was as if everything evil in the world had been snuffed out and only you and your companion existed on this narrow, dark, endless path in the snow, leading upward into the mountains.
    My companion watched my slow motions disapprovingly. He had been gathering cedar needles for a long time and correctly surmised in me a weak, clumsy partner. Work was done in pairs, and the ‘wage’ was a joint one, divided fifty-fifty.
    ‘I’ll chop and you pick,’ he said. ‘And get a move on, or we won’t fill our quota. I don’t want to have to go back to the mines.’
    He chopped down a few branches and dragged an enormous pile of green paws to the fire. I broke off the smaller branches and, starting with the top of each branch, pulled off the needles together with the bark. They looked like green fringe.
    ‘You’ll have to work faster,’ said my companion, returning with a new armload.
    I could see that the work was not going well, but I couldn’t work faster. There was a ringing in my ears, and my fingers, frostbitten at the beginning of winter, ached with a familiar dull pain. I yanked at the needles, broke entire branches into smaller pieces without stripping the bark, and stuffed the product into the sack. The sack wouldn’t fill. Before the fire rose a mountain of stripped branches that looked like washed bones, but the sack kept swelling and swelling and accepting new armfuls of needles.
    My companion sat down next to me, and the work went faster.
    ‘It’s time to go,’ he said suddenly. ‘Or else we’ll miss supper. We haven’t got enough here for the quota.’ He took from the ashes of the fire a large stone and shoved it into the sack.
    ‘They don’t untie them there,’ he said frowning. ‘Now we’ve met our quota.’
    I stood up, scattered the burning branches, and kicked snow on to the red coals. The fire hissed and went out, and it immediately became cold. It was clear that evening was close. My companion helped me heave the sack on to my back. I staggered under its weight.
    ‘Try dragging it,’ my companion said. ‘After all, we’re going downhill, not up.’
    We barely arrived in time to get our soup. No meat or vegetables were given for such light work.

Dry Rations
     
    When the four of us reached the mountain spring ‘Duskania’, we were so happy we virtually stopped talking to each other. We feared that our trip here was someone’s joke or mistake and that we would be returned to plod through the icy waters at the gold-mine’s stone face. Our feet had been frostbitten a number of times, and our regulation-issue galoshes couldn’t protect them from the cold.
    We followed the tractor prints as if we were hunting some enormous prehistoric beast, but the tractor road came to an end and we continued along an old, barely distinguishable footpath. We reached a small log cabin with two windows and a door hanging on a hinge that was cut from an automobile tire and nailed to the doorway. The small