12

Ivan Grigoryevich had said very little during the last few days. He had hardly spoken to Anna Sergeyevna. But he had thought a lot about her and about Alyosha when he was at work, and he was always looking at the small pendulum clock on the wall: How much longer till he could go home?

And for some reason, during these days that he spent quietly thinking about life in the camps, what he found himself constantly dwelling on was the fate of the camp women...Never, it seemed, had he thought so much about women.

It is not universities and works of sociology that have affirmed women’s equality with men. It is not only factory work, space flight, and the fire of revolution that have proved this equality. In the history of Russia this equality has been established now and always, forever and ever, by the suffering of serfdom, the suffering undergone in prisons and transports, the suffering in the camps.

Before the face of centuries of serfdom, before the face of Kolyma, Norilsk, and Vorkuta, woman has become the equal of man.

The camps also confirmed a second truth, a truth as simple as one of the commandments: the lives of men and women cannot be separated.

There is satanic power in a prohibition, in a dam. The water of streams and rivers, blocked by a dam, reveals a dark, secret power. This power can be concealed for a while by melodious splashes, by the play of sunlight on water, by swaying water lilies—but all of a sudden the implacable fury of water is crushing stone or driving the blades of a turbine with insane speed.

When a barrier separates human beings from their daily bread, the power of hunger becomes no less pitiless. The natural and benign need for food turns into something cruel and bestial, a force that destroys millions of lives and compels mothers to eat their own children.

The prohibition that separates men and women in the camps warps their bodies and warps their souls.

A woman’s tenderness, her readiness to care for others, her sexual passion, her maternal instincts—all this constitutes the bread of life, the water of life. All this comes to be in a woman because there are husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers in the world. And that the world contains wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters fulfills the life of a man.

But then a prohibition appears. And everything simple and good—the bread of life and the water of life—suddenly becomes dark and evil.

Like some act of sorcery, a prohibition imposed by force invariably transforms what is good within a human being into something evil.

Between the camps for male and female common criminals there always lay a strip of bare earth, known as the “shooting zone.” The moment anyone appeared in this no-man’s-land, machine guns would open fire. Nevertheless, the male criminals would try to creep across on their bellies, they would dig tunnels, they would try to slip under or over the barbed wire; and those who were unlucky were left lying on the ground with broken legs and bullet holes in their heads. It was like the frantic, tragic struggle of spawning fish to make their way up a river that has been blocked by dams.

In some strict-regime camps the women had not seen a man’s face or heard a man’s voice for many years. There were occasions when carpenters, metalworkers, and drivers were sent into these sinister places—and torn apart, tortured to death. Even the male criminals were terrified of these camps—camps where it was considered a joy merely to touch the shoulder of a dead man with one hand. The criminals were scared to go there even under armed guard.

Dark, somber misery twisted and mutilated human beings, until they ceased to be human.

Women forced other women into concubinage. The camps created a new, absurd breed of woman: bull dykes with hoarse voices, women with bold gestures and long male strides, women who wore trousers that they tucked into soldiers’ tarpaulin boots. And at their side were their lost, pathetic chicks.

The bull dykes drank chifir and smoked makhorka. When they were drunk, they would beat up their frivolous, cheating girlfriends, but they also used their fists and their knives to protect these girlfriends from insult or from anyone else’s advances. Such was the nature of love in a labor camp—tragic and monstrous. Even among the criminals and murderers these relationships did not inspire laughter or dirty jokes—only fear and horror.

The frenzy that was labor-camp love did not recognize the vast distances of the taiga ; it ignored the barbed wire, the stone walls of the guardhouse, the locks of the disciplinary barracks; it flung itself against wolfhounds, against knife blades, against the guards’ rifles. It did indeed recall salmon coming up from the ocean to spawn—their backbones broken, their eyes half out of their sockets, yet still hurling themselves against the rocks and boulders of mountain rapids and waterfalls.

And at the same time men cherished the love of their wives and their mothers. And camp “correspondence brides,” who had never seen and never would see the camp “grooms” they had chosen, were prepared to undergo any suffering in order to remain faithful to their dispossessed chosen one, to remain faithful to illusions they had dreamed up.

A lot can be forgiven anyone who, in the filth and stench of camp violence, remains a human being.