The
Dream-Heavy Land

Robert L. Fisher

2008

I

            In a way it was a resurrection — thawing out the corpses for the doctor. And these silent men were far better company than the well-fed career criminals and those walking dead, the political prisoners.
            For some reason the camp doctor likes me. Perhaps it was when he first pulled me from the work gang in the gold mines, when at six feet I weighed ninety pounds. He saved my life. Like my co-workers I was on the uneven road to death by starvation. The whole system of forced labor was designed to work a man to death on short rations. Once too weak to meet the work quota, one was no longer fed. Of course one reached this stage by having been given small amounts of food lacking nutrition, much of which was stolen by other prisoners, some of whom were organized psychopaths. As far as the administration of the forced labor camp is concerned, the mortality rate presents no difficulties — except how to dispose of the corpses — since like slavers in Brazil, a fresh supply of prisoners comes in a steady stream, not from Africa, but from our own Mother Russia.
            The doctor wants to perform autopsies on the deceased prisoners — I am not sure what he is looking for — but I presume it is something he will use to improve our lot, probably by promising the authorities that more work can be squeezed out of us. I no longer have the strength to speculate.
            I am only fed well enough to pull the sledge stacked with frozen corpses to the hut outside the camp — “outside” is an ironic term, when the Kolyma prison region is as large as Western Europe, and since guard towers and fences are unnecessary in a wilderness of impenetrable forests, rugged mountains and swift broad rivers.
            Timber is the natural metaphor that comes to mind, for the frozen corpses are stacked like logs, one could count them by the cord, one could make macabre rafts of them and float them downstream to terrify the populace, but there is no populace, just nomadic Yakuts with their reindeer herds, and downstream is the Arctic Ocean.
            I fire up the cast iron stove and after years of freezing day and night, I am at last warm. Over the course of the long, black night, in this hut whose single window glows in the wilderness like the red sun burning dully in the toxic atmosphere of the primeval earth, the corpses gradually thaw.
            I think of rusks baking in wood ovens in every village across Russia. I think of days when I kept myself alive by anticipating how I would snatch the heel from the loaf of bread at the mess, the pleasure of crunching it grainy, slightly burnt surface, the smell of evergreen in the bread, as if it had been spiced with pine needles. This texture, this aroma as palpable as a physical object — like water flowing across my face —  gave me the strength for sixteen hours in the mines to heft the maul, my feet nearly frostbitten in my rubber boots. But I also remember the heel was wrenched from hand by another prisoner, stronger and quicker, and how I cried like a child, whimpering in my rags, raging at my stiff blue fingers.
            The heat unknotted my muscles and their memory of pain left me, like a forgotten slight, and I fell fast asleep.
            The October sun was actually hot and burnt my skin like a beam of pure radiation, yet a few steps into the shade and the air had a bite and I hurried to pull my coat tight about me.
            Each step released a puff of autumnal smells — leaf mold from the golden and rust forest floor; the crushed pine cones as fragrant as snapped cinnamon sticks or pounded cloves; and from far off came the damp, sweet smell of chestnuts in a brazier. The sky was blue and as endless as an ocean. The trees held fewer birds, and now and then wedges of geese and swans honked low overhead, as if in warning of their passage.
            On my arm was a basket covered with a red cloth with gold borders, like an old woman’s babushka. Inside were the mushrooms I had collected so far that morning.
            I had no competition — the forest was like a dacha closed at the end of summer. I enjoyed the feeling that all this space was my personal estate, my land, my private property. For a morning I could be a count hunting grouse, instead of the minor functionary taking a sick day.
            The only thing on my mind that glorious morning was the recipe for the mushroom pastries. I’ll invite Taisiya. As soon as I open the door she’ll smell the pastry baking in the oven. Even before she says hello, she’ll say “Sloiki!” and run to the oven. She’ll see the special ramekins I found in the department store. She’ll smell the mushrooms and cheese and onions, and see the caraway decorations on top of the golden triangles. I traded butter and bacon with Misha for a bottle of decent French wine.
            For the hours we are together we can forget the world outside my little apartment. We can enjoy the candlelight and silence, the warmth and the aroma of a special dish.
            I was so engrossed in looking at the leaf-strewn ground that the voice startled me. Someone was calling me by name.
            Finally I located the source: a man in a long coat standing on a picturesque pedestrian bridge that spanned the stream. I could not make out his face because the sun was behind him. His voice was unfamiliar.
            “Sergei Antonovich!”
            I looked up and he continued without waiting for me to respond.
            “Don’t go to work Monday. Nor Tuesday, nor Wednesday. In fact, take a little vacation out of town.”
            Then he turned and walked out view, where the bridge led into the forest.
            I stood stock-still. The hand of terror had reached out of the blue sky and clutched my throat with its icy hand. I was as helpless as a fish landed on a river bank. Someone — it must be a person who had seen arrest warrants in some office — decided to warn me. But why? Maybe someone I had been kind to, or someone with a grudge against the police. I knew it wasn’t a trick.
            I should empty the basket of the mushrooms and hurry home to pack a few things, take some money. I could send a message to the office. My head swirled with plans. My heart beat with a sense of urgency, but at the same time relief.
            The sound of my rapid steps on the path was muffled by the leaves. The bridge was far behind me now, and I could see where the path rose up a slope, out of the forest into the light of the city.
            A terrible thud, then another and another awoke me. I was in the overheated hut in Siberia in the blackest hour of night. I was wearing rags.
            The corpses had softened and fallen away from the wall where I had leaned them. They lay half-thawed on the floor, in their rags. Each had a tag tied with a cord around his calf.
            I sobbed, sobbed so deeply I could barely catch my breath, and I wailed over and over, “Where are the spirits? Where are the spirits?”

                                                                       II

            The lone electric bulb during the course of the day brightens and dims according to the vagaries of the power supply, but clicks off at seven in the evening, leaving my isolation cell in a blackness like the dark side of the Moon. This is a hard-labor camp, Number 37-2, west of the Urals, but I am in this tile-covered cell for six months — sure to be renewed for another six — because I corresponded with colleagues in the West, not just about quantum theory, but also about the repression of human rights. They took away all my papers and correspondence.
            The cell is freezing most of the year, an added torment for making them look bad in the West. Why do they care? Except for some true believers in the universities, everyone knows what they are and what they do. I hope it’s because deep down inside their black hearts they know they have committed unspeakable atrocities.
            Except for the warmly clothed, well-fed guard who asks me every day if I have any letters to post, I might as well be in a capsule that has escaped earth orbit and is drifting beyond Pluto. Perhaps I will discover whether there is really a tenth planet.
            “Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care” in my crypt mends nothing, but often ravels what is left of reason and sanity. Once the bulb is doused it is far from clear what is wakefulness and what is sleep. Oblivion which once terrified me now looks inviting. Now I know the full meaning of the phrase “to rot in prison”.
            Is that the Abbé Faria scratching his way toward my wall? I imagine him white-haired in rags, like me, patiently excavating his tunnel with a spoon and tin plate. Despite his disappointment in finding another ragged freezing wretch instead of fresh air and the forests of the Urals, I would weep for joy to see another man, cultivated and humane, dignified and intelligent, emerge from the floor. My words would tumble out of my mouth faster than he could comprehend them, just as a man dying of thirst would gulp down water from a pool in an oasis. I would let the good Abbé speak, watch his eyes and lips, absorb every word as if it were rich in nutrients. I would bite my lip to keep from crying, because the sound of his voice and the kindness of his words go straight to my heart and relieve my loneliness, like a healing hand spreading balm on a tender bruise.
            My head swims. It is hard to concentrate with so many thoughts and feelings clamoring for expression.
            Finally my heart rate slows and my eyes focus on the Abbé’s refined face. The moment is delicious, because now I can reveal my secret, all the more precious for this is no dream but a reality. I can take as much pride in my accomplishment as the Abbé can in his clandestine tunnel.
            “Abbé, move your candle closer, use your tin plate as a reflector. There, that’s it! You must know of prisoners who have constructed out of birch bark and odd pieces of cord books of poetry, which they wrote from memory in ink made from soot. Well, I’ve done something even greater. They have been isolated from the world. But I have my own samizdat. I have used the one material left to me — cigarette papers! They are as light as onion skin. On them, in micrographic writing, in pencil, I have composed two scientific papers — and smuggled them out.
            “This collection of papers are pages of a new article. Since I have no access to equipment here I can only write papers on theoretical physics. This one is about the quantum mechanical constraints on decision making in the brain.”
            “That’s because the vesicles that contain neurotransmitters are so tiny that they follow the laws of quantum mechanics, and hence are subject to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.”
            “You shock me, Abbé, with your knowledge. What a pleasure to see your appreciation of this hypothesis!”
            “This prison, for all its barbed wire and thick walls, is nevertheless porous.”
            “Exactly, Abbé, exactly how my articles reached the West.”
            I showed the Abbé my illustrations of synapses and the pages of close writing.
            Prisons with their iron doors and squeaking hinges and shouting guards are noisy places. My door rattled, keys jingled, hinges screamed and a tray was set on the floor. For a moment the cell was lit as brilliantly as an operating theater. Scattered about me were my cigarette papers.
            The guard said over his shoulder, “Einstein’s got nothing on you, doc.”
            The door slammed shut, making my ears ring. The bulb came to life, weakly at first, but then the filament heated up, and by its yellow light I gathered my cigarette papers. Each paper had written on it in pencil, and in no particular order, one nicely printed letter of the alphabet: А, Ж, Л, Я, Ю…