THE NEW MAN

IOSIF DISAPPEARED A FEW months before Stalin’s death. In the camp, death was always the logical conclusion. But Kolia, who was in the habit of keeping his thoughts to himself, could not accept the terse official version. It had already been presented to him to explain the disappearance of his mother.

He approached a man he had seen several times in the company of Iosif. The next day, the man handed Kolia a large envelope and asked him to hide it — if he didn’t, they could both end up with problems.

“What kind of problems?”

The man didn’t answer. He shut his eyes tightly and a frown line formed between his eyebrows. When he opened them again, Kolia understood. He asked where Iosif was, but the man told him to hold his tongue, which was exactly what Kolia did most of the time. He patted Kolia on the shoulder and then walked back towards the administration building.

Stalin died in March 1953. Kruschev would be named First Secretary of the Communist Party in September. Amnesties were granted and Kolia found himself among one of the first groups of liberated prisoners. The new men that Stalin had wished to create emerged haggard and haunted. Kolia left the K Mountains at the beginning of autumn. He took with him his threadbare blanket, his louse-infested underwear, a pair of woollen pants that left red blotches on his calves and thighs, one shirt, a padded jacket full of holes, a hat, gloves, and the envelope containing Iosif’s papers along with his own. He also took a few rubles he had earned working. He was dropped off in Magadan — it could have been the middle of the jungle.

The coastal town of Magadan had been built almost entirely by convict labour. On the road that stretched between the camp and the town — a road whose innards concealed the bones of prisoners crushed to a fine powder — another man who had received a pardon began to wish aloud about taking the train back to Moscow, his native city.

“My son is twenty-five now; my wife, forty-five. She was beautiful. And she’s still beautiful, I’m sure of it — her mother was beautiful at that age.”

Kolia had stuck closely to this man for the entire journey, from the K Mountains to Magadan.

“If I could, I would follow you all the way to Moscow, Alyosha.”

“Well, come with me!” said the man. “Ask for a visa here. My wife makes the best soup. My God, the taste of that soup!”

“But are you sure you have everything you need to return home?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said the old man brandishing his papers, “I have everything, everything’s in order. As soon as I step foot inside my bedroom, I’m going to close the door, barricade it with a chair, and stuff my head between my wife’s breasts! Her name is Anna.”

He flashed a toothless smile at Kolia. He did in fact have one tooth left: a dubious grey molar that the tip of his thick tongue kept seeking out and whose shocking singularity aged him by a good twenty years; according to his documents, he was fifty. Everyone who left the camps returned much older.

After presenting himself to the authorities, Kolia decided to make the journey across Siberia as Alyosha had suggested — by train. This raised some eyebrows and provoked a few belly laughs before he was told that it was impossible. He was given authorization to take up residence in Khabarovsk, where the Amour and Oussouri rivers converge, less than fifty kilometres away from the border with China.

He arrived in Khabarovsk after a voyage that navigated the coasts of both the Okhotsk and Japan seas. When he stepped off the train, he was immediately struck by the symmetry of the architecture, the grey apartment buildings, the contour of the three hills on which the town had been built. One of the banks of the Amour River boasted sandy beaches, but Kolia couldn’t imagine baring his body in public to go swimming. The only world he knew was one populated by pine trees and the vegetation native to the K Mountains, the snow, the mountain peaks, the almost lunar horizon, and the long, numbing route which had brought him from the camp to this port town. In Magadan — freezing cold and bundled into himself — he had seen nothing, he had followed the others like an automaton.

Kolia had no idea what it was to live as a free man. A whole new language needed to be learned. He was offered a small pension, which allowed him to rest up for a short time before he was assigned a job. He began to develop a pain in his right hip that would crop up just before a storm. The life of a Soviet citizen offered barely more freedom than the life of a zek.

He still didn’t look quite like a man. In fact, it was difficult to determine Kolia’s age. He was thin, with thick hair and a boy’s beardless face that nonetheless betrayed his time in the camps; it was obvious by looking at him and his papers, and by the stink of his clothes, that he had just arrived. When the caretaker handed him the key to his room, she couldn’t look him in the eye; instead she dictated the building rules to his shoulder. Men who had been liberated were reputed to be liars, to distort the truth of life in the camps, and were regarded by most as simply crazy. Kolia knew absolutely nothing about society and its conventions and didn’t attach great importance to her apparent mistrust.

During the three months granted to Kolia for his recuperation, the only time he left his room was to buy food. The town scared him; he felt he was being watched everywhere he went. He spoke to no one. By the end of the third month, he had reconciled himself to the life that was being forced upon him: he was to return to work because he was young and clearly more robust than when he had arrived.

Kolia spent his days working on a road maintenance crew. During the winter of 1953/54, he shovelled snow and cleared the streets of his district, chopping through ice until he reached the gravel road beneath. A life of routine was nothing new to him, but his muscles, which he’d never really had before, started developing at an astonishing and painful rate. His arms were suddenly covered in wine-coloured stretch marks. He slept fitfully, longing to hear the sounds of other bodies around him, but the only sounds he brought home were the crunch of the shovel and the ringing of the pickaxe. The deep silence of his room was too much for him. In these moments, he would have preferred living in a hostel, surrounded by the warmth, the smells, and the violence of others. He couldn’t bring himself to use the shared toilet; instead he relieved himself in the chamber pot in his room and emptied it every morning before his neighbours rose. There were times when he thought things would be much simpler if he were dead.

Food was more plentiful than it was in the camp, but there wasn’t a lot of choice. Kolia didn’t cook. For months, he lived off dry bread, boiled cabbage, soup broth, and dried fish. He learned to make tea, which had him pissing like a little boy. And when he ran out of food, a cup of tea would fill his stomach. Slowly his tastes expanded to include strong black tea into which he would drop some cardamom seeds.

Kolia was officially “rehabilitated” in the spring of 1954 and was issued a document which granted him the right to travel anywhere on Russian soil. What he didn’t receive was any information regarding either his mother or his real father, whose existence remained unknown to him. Both his Russian nationality and his Soviet citizenship were clearly inscribed on the pages of his de facto passport.

In order to travel to Moscow and reside there, his papers had to be stamped with a propiska — a residency permit which allowed authorities to control the migration of the population and keep the big cities free from an influx of recently liberated criminals, as well as the children of dissidents.

Kolia wrote a letter to Iosif’s sister, Tanya. The letter would certainly be read by some nameless third party who would most likely censor it. He decided not to take any risks and wrote it in Russian, composing four rough drafts on the flaps of two cardboard boxes. In simple language, he described his pardon, his arrival in Magadan, and his daily life in Khabarovsk. He expressed how much he wanted to see Moscow and his strong desire to move there. He wrote of Iosif’s disappearance, but carefully avoided the word dead. Without mentioning the source, he quoted a Russian poet he didn’t particularly care for, simplifying the passage somewhat and working it into his letter as if the words were his own: I will cross my motherland, slipping through like the slanted rain of summer. Perhaps Tanya would understand. He wanted to impress her — if she agreed, the trip could be made that summer. He mailed the letter at the post office and began to count the days.

In his growing impatience, he started to daydream. He attempted to take stock of his country and to measure the scope of his time in it. He had been free for six months. He had lost the only person who had ever really mattered to him; now he clung to the photo of Tanya and the clipped French sentences of her letters.

It was a passport photo taken in Moscow in 1951. On the back, beside the date, was her name: Tanya Branch. Kolia had found it in the envelope containing Iosif’s documents. For months, he slept with the photograph in his hand as if it were a religious icon. She was the spitting image of her brother, without the wrinkled skin, and with hair that turned to curls at her shoulders. In the chaos of Khabarovsk, he found himself incapable of approaching women, in spite of his intense adolescent desire. He kept the photograph with him always.

Forty-two days later, Kolia found out that Tanya’s Russian sentences weren’t anywhere as concise as those she wrote in French, but full and graceful, almost sinuous: as if she were clearing a path towards meaning and truth, in order to unearth them.