THE K MOUNTAINS

IN THE ZONE HE WOULD TELL the other prisoners that he started stealing at an age when children learned to read. It was his way of neatly summing up the beginnings of his art.

His name was Nikolai, but everyone called him Kolia. In prison, after the implosion of the Soviet Union, he would discover that certain conditions inside the compounds endured unchanged. Men became beasts.

There are smells that lodge in the memory and linger on the skin. The stench of the camp shithouses and the foul odour of the dead bodies that were discovered in the spring trailed behind him into the free world. A body returning from the camps can never be clean.

Kolia came into the world in 1937 in a forced labour camp. He always preferred to withhold the full name of his birthplace, stating only that he had been born in the K Mountains of Siberia, which covers an expanse of roughly thirteen million square kilometres and is littered, here and there, with the cesspits of mass graves.

The use of hard labour as punishment dated back to the penal system of Imperial Russia, with its katorgas, or prison farms. Stalin’s camps picked up where these left off, as a means of isolating enemies of the state, populating an inhospitable territory and, so they would be seen as consistent with the socialist ideal, re-educating its non-compliant citizens. In the far north, the most common means of escape was death. The cold, the rations tied to productivity, the disease and frostbite which often meant the loss of a limb, and the aberrant sexuality of most of the young men defined the pale shadow of daily life in the village, an open prison composed of barracks.

Kolia knew little of the circumstances surrounding his birth in the camp infirmary. It is easy to imagine his mother crouched on her haunches, pulling him out of herself, covered in his own feces, to the indifference of the attending medical staff, themselves prisoners. She had not been allowed an abortion, even though the procedure was legal.

He bore the name Vladimirovich, which was given to him by a man who wasn’t really his father. His real father was a civil servant who had raped his mother, but he would never discover this. Kolia lived initially with her in the women’s barracks and then began the journey between their bed and the nursery. He was treated as unimportant but — because his mamka enjoyed certain privileges denied the others — he was given access to the essentials for his development. His “father” had been a schoolteacher and distrusted politics; his mother played piano and was a good singer. On the grounds of an anonymous denunciation, they had been deported first to a transit camp north of Moscow and then, still together, to the far east of the country. Together — that was luck. Her pregnancy and her musical talent meant that his mother was spared from heavy labour. Each week she would give a recital for the prison staff in the building that was home to the camp’s Department of Culture and Education. The apparatchiks may not have had their hearts in the right place, but on occasion, they showed good taste.

As a child, Kolia could often be found playing with a bowling ball that his mother had fashioned for him during the final month of the summer that preceded his birth. While she practised her singing and mended clothing belonging to the men that ran the camp, Kolia would study the ball and stroke its uneven surface, and came to know its every bump. He slept next to his mother and nursed as often as he could. Children born within the confines of the prison were to be separated from their mothers when they started walking — that is, if anybody bothered to teach them; otherwise they wound up crawling all the way to the pit of death that eventually awaited them. Kolia had the remarkable good fortune of remaining with his mother until she disappeared, which might explain how he learned to express himself with something other than primitive noises and to piss standing up like the men who lived around him.

A few weeks before his death in the camp at the age of forty, his father had weighed hardly more than the sum of his bones. Kolia was six years old and strong enough to carry the bowling ball in his arms. His father died of exhaustion, his mother had disappeared. A man who was neither his legal guardian, his biological parent or his nursery attendant told him the news. History has not retained his name, neither did Kolia. The man, who in no way resembled an apostle from the Bible, said only:

“Collect your things and follow me.”

Kolia was given an identification number but his status remained unclear — somewhere between a prisoner and a Soviet child. He was permitted to keep the bowling ball, his coarse blanket, as well as the one belonging to his mother, and the clothes he was wearing. The padded peacoat he was issued was two sizes too big for him, and though he rolled the sleeves up to his elbows, they would regularly fall into his soup. Between chores, he would suck at the hem of his sleeves to extract what little nourishment, or illusion of nourishment, they might conceal. He was transferred to a room in a barracks which he shared with other boys, none of whom had any hair. Prisoners were shaved with straight razors and black soap, and the hand that did the shaving always belonged to a fellow zek. A shaved head is never smooth; it exposes scars, a misshapen skull, and the coarse tips of regenerating hair.

As soon as he walked into the barracks, which also bore a number, Kolia began staring at all the shorn heads and the scars inscribed on them with a scrutiny that made the others uneasy. He was quickly shaved to look like them — his mane of hair and prepubescent body had made him look more like a girl. Kolia immediately felt the intense cold on his bare scalp, and, in the absence of any mirrors, he examined his new look with his fingertips. He began to worry about the skin rashes that their woollen hats often caused and, that night, he slid under the bed of one of his bunkmates and stole his cotton cap. Cotton was always soft against his skin. He wore the cap from that point on, hidden beneath his woolly hat, to protect himself from the cold of the nuclear winters and the searing heat of hell.

In theory, he should have been sent to an orphanage outside the camp, but the closest town was too far away. He was more useful to them as a worker, not to mention the fact that he might reveal a talent for singing, like his mother. But Kolia sang out of tune. He could expect his morning plate of kasha, a bowl of soup for lunch and dinner, a small loaf of bread and some water. Occasionally, he would receive a little fish and sometimes even some dried meat. Up until the age of ten, Kolia was entrusted only with scrubbing toilets and emptying buckets of shit. Some inmates resented him for having it easy, and he was forced to give up his mother’s blanket in exchange for some semblance of peace in the barracks. But Kolia was running out of luck — and in the camps, it was luck that took the place of God. The gang leader who had been threatening to beat him to death wanted more.

“Half your ration of bread.”

This declaration of war for his daily bread didn’t surprise Kolia — nothing did. He stood his ground.

“The blanket but not the bread.”

Kolia was small, thin like everyone else, but his capacity to withstand cruelty and the harshness of the elements was surprising for a child born into the human rot of the camp, and it played in his favour when it came to his dealings with the others. The tough guy with the rotten teeth left him alone: stealing bread from another zek was a crime punishable by death, a sentence which they carried out among themselves. And when this same individual was eventually shot by firing squad for attempting a mad dash across the security perimeter — an act that was just plain suicidal — it was Kolia who retrieved his worn-out clothing. He had reached puberty.

From time to time — mainly in the summer when the workday was longer — he was asked to clean the room belonging to the doctor, an urbane man who lived in the camp with his family. This gave Kolia access to the library of a civil servant. He was fascinated by the typefaces he saw and would run his fingers over the text, inhaling the intoxicating odours coming from deep inside the books. He had no idea what he was touching. No one in the camp had ever thought of teaching him to read.