Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [157]
Everything that had been put into the package: sugar, sausage, lard, candy, onions, garlic, cookies, crackers, cigarettes, chocolate, along with the wrapping paper in which each thing had been packed, during the three years of following me from address to address, had become mixed up, as if in a washing machine, turning finally into one hard mass with the sweet smell of decay, mold, tobacco, and the perfume of candy . . .
I went to the table, took a knife to a piece of it, and in front of everyone, almost not chewing, hastily gulped, not distinguishing taste or smell, fearing, in a word, that someone would interrupt or take it away from me . . .35
DOM SVIDANII: THE HOUSE OF MEETINGS
Letters and packages did not, however, evoke the greatest emotion, or the greatest agony, among prisoners. Far more wrenching were a prisoner’s actual meetings with his relatives, usually a spouse or mother. Only prisoners who had both fulfilled the norm and obediently followed the rules of the camp were allowed such meetings: official documents openly described them as a reward for “good, conscientious, and high-tempo work.”36 And the promise of a visit from a relative was indeed an extremely powerful motivation for good behavior.
Not all prisoners were in a position to receive visitors, of course. For one, their families had to be mentally courageous enough to maintain contact with their “enemy” relative. The journey to Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk, or Kazakhstan, even traveling as a free citizen, required physical bravery as well. Not only would a visitor have to suffer a long train journey to a distant, primitive city, but he would also then have to walk, or hitch a bumpy ride in the back of a truck, to the lagpunkt. After that, the visitor might have to wait for several days or longer, begging sneering camp commanders for permission to see their prisoner relative—permission which might well be refused, for no reason at all. Afterward, they faced another long journey home, by the same tedious route.
Leaving aside the physical hardships, the psychological strain of these meetings could be terrible too. The wives arriving to see their husbands, wrote Herling, “feel the boundless suffering of the prisoner, without fully understanding it, or being in any way able to help; the long years of separation have killed much of their feeling for their husbands . . . the camp, distant and barred off from the visitor, yet casts its shadowy menace upon them. They are not prisoners, but they are related to these enemies of the people...”37
Nor were wives alone in their mixed feelings. One prisoner tells the story of a woman who had brought her two-year-old daughter to see her father. Upon arrival, she told her to “go and kiss Daddy.” The girl ran up to the guard and kissed him on the neck.38 The daughter of the Soviet rocket scientist Sergei Korolev still remembers being taken to see her father while he was in a sharashka. She had been told he was away, fighting with the air force. Entering the prison, she was surprised at the small size of the prison yard. Where, she asked her mother, did Daddy’s plane land?39
In prisons—and in certain camps as well—such meetings were invariably brief, and usually took place in the presence of a guard, a rule which also created enormous strain. “I wanted to speak, to speak a great deal, to tell of everything that had happened that year,” remembered one prisoner of the single meeting he was granted with his mother. Not only was it hard to find words, but “if one did begin to speak, to describe something, the watchful guard would interrupt you: ‘Not allowed!’” 40
More tragic still is the story told by Bystroletov, who was