CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Magadan, Siberia, April 1953

The two men were too exhausted to be able to enjoy a psychological, spiritual, or philosophical sense of being free men after eight years of enslavement in the harshest of all the world’s prisons. They were gaunt, sallow complexioned, and shrunken. After little more than an hour of cautiously savoring the novelty of being free from the homicidal confines of the Butugychag Tin Mine—the Soviet Siberian gulag on the Kolyma River camp for German POWs who were designated for “special treatment”—the novelty gave way to more primal concerns. Paramount of these concerns was the need for food. The two men were starving, just as they had been for the past eight years. And it was cold; they needed better clothing and some sort of shelter.

For all they knew, they had the dubious distinction of being the only members of their regiment still alive. They moved away from the other former prisoners, a natural grouping in which countrymen tended to find some similitude of camaraderie with their own. Hungarians, Serbs, Germans, and Baltics went their separate ways two-by-two. The two men—who looked like emaciated raggedy hoboes—were soon all lost among a milling populace of exceedingly poor and deprived Northern Russians who were just eking out a living in an unforgiving land. Most of those people had arrived during the recent war as displaced persons and were only a little better off than the newly released prisoners of the gulag. No one took an interest in anyone else. No one had the strength or resources to give help to another human being. Although it was somewhat better than the gulag, it was still a Hobbesian world.

Antoine and Michaele were used to hard work; the basic philosophy in the camp had been work or die. So, they set to work. They stole a grubbing hoe with a heavy iron head and an old shovel and dug themselves a rude pit in the side of an embankment which allowed at least some respite from the biting wind. They waited until darkness fell before daring to venture out to steal food. Both men were sure that the semi-starving wretches in the city and on the hardscrabble farms would guard their caches of food to the death. It was bitter cold and a starless dark night; both of those climatic conditions worked in their favor. They were accustomed to working in near darkness and to being cold. They knew from bitter experience that they had to keep moving, or they would die. They also knew that without food another day, they would weaken and become unable to forage or to defend themselves.

A light ahead alerted them to the possibility that they were seeing a farmhouse, and they began to hope for the possibility of food. They kept to the brushy areas along the road, and the going was slow. Antoine hand-signaled for Michaele to move to the rear of the rude hut while he moved slowly and quietly towards the front on the opposite side. He heard a woman singing a vesnyanky [song invoking the spring season] in an old scratchy voice. There was accompaniment by a Yat-kha [long zither similar to Korean gayageum]. Antoine had a brief moment of nostalgia. He had heard the local people living outside the Gulag prison occasionally singing folk music and playing on their very different string instruments. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. He and Michaele had work to do, not the sort of work that could allow any softness like nostalgia to intrude.

He peered in the window. It appeared that there were only two people in the room—old ones dressed in dirty ragged peasant tunics, not so different from his own. A woodstove was ablaze, and on it was an iron pot filled with a thick bubbling stew. The reaction in his salivary glands and stomach was so intense that it was painful. The reaction drove out every other thought than food. He moved to the back and signaled Michaele. His gesture pointed towards the interior of the hut. He returned to the front; and–when he was set–he gave two sharp shrill whistles.

Antoine smashed through the door; and Michaele pushed his way into the living quarters, passing through a pen containing pigs, sheep, and goats. The old lady fainted, and the old man put his zither vertically in front of himself in a reflex defensive move. He did not utter a sound. When Antoine swung his shovel at the old man’s head, the victim did not flinch or throw his forearms or hands up in defense. The sound of the shovel blade striking the peasant’s head was like a watermelon being struck. Michaele smashed the old lady’s head with the heavy iron blade of the grubbing hoe. From the time of entry into the hut until the couple was dead, less than three minutes had elapsed. The two former Gulag prisoners dragged the bodies out of the hut and up to the top of the low hill behind it. They shoveled out a shallow pit in the snow and chopped down a pile of birch tree branches to cover the bodies. The deaths of Karp and Marita Petrenko were not discovered for three years, two years after Antoine and Michaele were herded aboard busses and taken via the Kolyma Highway [known to the local populace as the “Road of Bones”] and loaded onto uncomfortable buses and troop trucks to Tommot where they were herded onto the Amur-Yakutia Mainline train for a fourteen-day starving trip all the way to Moscow.

The Petrenkos were among the limited number of survivors of mass deportees from all around Russia at the outset of the successful Bolshevik revolution. Their crime was that they were Kulaks—supposedly rich farmers, almost as antithetical to the communists as if they had been part of the bourgeoisie. Their records were lost, and anyone who knew of them back in Stalingrad where they were born would presume that they had long since perished in the barren frigidity of the far north.

The two starving men ate the entire cauldron of rich vegetable and mutton soup. It was savory and delicious and full of fresh vegetables. They engaged in a frenzy of devouring their first decent food in almost a decade. Antoine and Michaele ate too much and too fast for stomachs unused to being filled up, especially with cream and mutton fat-based broth. The two ex-POWs cursed and laughed as the rich meal exited both ends of their alimentary tracks in a night-long orgy of vomiting and diarrhea. Once they were cleaned out and able to be up and about again, they commenced a program of eating the year’s supply of food they discovered in the kitchen, the pantry, and the pens of their victims. Having vowed to exercise more prudence, they waited a day then slaughtered one of the goats and made another stew. It was as good as the mutton stew, and this time they were able to eat smaller portions and to savor the rich meat—something lacking in their diets for the past eight years.

At first Antoine and Michaele alternated guard duty in an around-the-clock vigil to defend themselves and their invaluable treasure of food and warm clothing. After a few months—and no one came to bother them—the two men relaxed and became Siberian farmers, tilling the fields, planting, and harvesting. They were none too good at farm work, however; and over the next several months, their efforts were not nearly as productive as the Petrenkos’ had been. When the harsh fall began to change to bitter winter, Antoine and Michaele finally had to admit that the idyllic peaceful and safe pastoral life they had envisioned for themselves was not going to persist. By late October, they were out of food. Both men had regained body weight, fat, and muscle, and could go for perhaps a month before they would begin to deteriorate seriously.

Having advanced their life’s condition to the point that they were genuinely healthy, neither man had any intention of returning to the condition they were in when they lived in the tin mine gulag. They decided to become hunters. The former prisoners knew they had to exercise great caution to avoid detection or capture—or even drawing attention toward themselves. They worked only at night and walked many miles away from their small home on the outskirts of Magadan. During the first week, they were able to steal two decent horses and enough provisions to last them a week. The horses gave them a wider latitude for their predations; and by mid-December, they had accumulated a food storage sufficient to keep them going for the next two months. They decided not to go out again until it was absolutely necessary, even if it meant having to kill and eat their horses.

The ground was still hard frozen down to the permafrost, and the nearly constant early March wind blew away patches of the accumulated snow, leaving stretches of bare ice. The cold was dreadful—falling as low as -45 to -65 degrees Fahrenheit most days. The early spring winds drove the effective temperature to fifteen degrees colder than that every night and until noon most mornings. Antoine and Michaele suffered from the cold, but considered it an advantage because no one but a mad man would venture out. Taking a breath at that level of cold would result in actual freezing of a man’s lungs.

They had not factored into their life’s equation the concept that others besides lunatics would venture out. There were also desperate men out there whose approaching starvation would drive them to attempt to take the two farmers’ food, even at the risk of being killed in the effort.

§§§§§§

In the very early morning hours of a bitterly cold night, Michaele awakened with a start. Antoine was snoring like a tank engine. Michaele gently placed his hand over his companion’s open mouth to silence him. Antoine became instantly awake. Michaele put his right index finger to his lips in the universal request for silence.

“What, mon frère?” Antoine whispered.

The two men listened so intently that they hardly breathed.

There it was again. The horses were restless and apparently rearing and kicking.

“Wolves?” Antoine asked.

Siberian Peasant Recipes

Pot Roast of Horse—Feeds 4

Ingredients

-2¾ boneless hindquarter roast, cut to fit pot. 2 tbsps oil-melted horse fat will do well; salt and pepper to taste.

-1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp beef boullion, 1 tsp crushed dried basil, ¾ lb new potatoes and or 2 med. sweet potatoes, 1 lb carrots or 6 medium parsnips, peeled, cut into 2 in. pieces, 2 onions, cut into wedges, 2 celery ribs cut into 1 in. pieces

^-1/4 cup flour

Preparation

-Trim fat from meat. Brown meat on all sides in hot oil in a 4– to 6–qt Dutch oven or pot. Drain fat.

-Mix 3/4 cup water, Worcestershire sauce, bouillon, basil and salt and pepper to taste; pour over roast and bring to boil. Reduce heat to simmer, covered, 1 hr.

-Quarter all new potatoes or peel and quarter sweet potatoes. Add potatoes, carrots, onions, and celery to pot. Return to boil. Reduce heat. Then simmer covered, until tender~45–60 mins. Add water as needed. Check for tenderness. May have to boil tough horse meat longer. Do not overcook vegetables.

-Transfer meat and vegetables to platter. Reserve juices.

-Prepare gravy: skim off fat, add juices and enough water to make cps. Return to oven.

In a small bowl, stir ½ cp water into flour. Stir into pan juices. Cook, stirring, on med heat until thickened, then 1 min. more. Season to taste. Serve with pot roast.

-After browning meat and adding liquid mixture to pan, bake, covered, for 1 hr at 325^° F.

-Add prepared potatoes and vegetables to meat. Bake, covered, until tender, another 45–60 mins. Add gravy.