khylov

~ The Gulag Archipelago ... ~


Next day, we were allowed to move into private lodgings. I found myself a henhouse to suit my pocket, with a single bleary window and such a low roof that even where it was highest, in the middle, I could not stand upright. "Give me a low-roofed cottage," I once wrote in prison, dreaming of exile. It was not very pleasant, all the same, not being able to raise my head. Still, it was a little house of my own! The floor was earthen. I put my padded camp vest on it, and there was my bed! But Zdanyukevich, an exiled engineer, who had formerly taught at the Bauman Institute, quickly lent me a couple of wooden boxes, on which I managed to make myself comfortable....


I had no oil lamp as yet - I had nothing!! an exile must select and buy every single thing he needs, as though he has just landed on this earth - but I did not feel the want of it... I simply lay on my boxes and enjoyed it!

What more could I desire?...

But the morning of March 6 surpassed anything that I could have wished for! Chadova, my elderly landlady, an exile from Novgorod, whispered - because she dared not say it out loud: "Go and listen to the radio. I'm afraid to repeat what I've just heard."


Something told me to do as she said: I went over to the central square. A crowd of perhaps two hundred people - a lot for Kok-Terek - huddled around the post under the loudspeaker and the sullen sky...


... There were many Kazakhs, most of them old men, among the crowd. Their bald heads were bare, and they held their red-brown muskrat-fur hats in their hands. They were grief-stricken. The younger people seemed less concerned. Two or three tractor drivers had not removed their caps. Nor, of course, would I. Before I could make out what the announcer was saying (he spoke with a histrionic catch in his voice), understanding dawned on me.

This was the moment my friends and I had looked forward to even in our student days. The moment for which every zek in Gulag (except the orthodox Communists) had prayed!...


...He's dead, the Asiatic dictator is dead! The villain has curled up and died! What unconcealed rejoicing there would be back home in the Special Camps!...


...But where I was, Russian girls, schoolteachers, stood sobbing their hearts out. "What is to become of us now?" They had lost a beloved parent... I wanted to yell at them across the square: "Nothing will become of you now! Your fathers will not be shot! Your husbands-to-be will not be jailed! And you will never be stigmatized as relatives of prisoners!"


I could have howled with joy there by the loudspeaker; I could even have danced a wild jig! But alas, the rivers of history flow slowly. My face, trained to meet all occasions, assumed a frown of mournful attention. For the present I must pretend, go on pretending as before...


All the same, my exile had begun with magnificent auguries!

.....

-Excerpt from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Part VI, Chapter 5 ("End of Sentence"), p. 420-422