Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [206]
I raise my glass to a road in the forest
To those who fall on their way
To those who can’t drag themselves farther
But are forced to drag on
To their bluish hard lips
To their identical faces
To their torn, frost-covered coats
To their hands without gloves
To the water they sip, from an old tin can
To the scurvy which sticks to their teeth.
To the teeth of fattened gray dogs
Which awake them in the morning
To the sullen sun,
Which regards them without interest
To the snow-white tombstones,
The work of clever snowstorms
To the ration of raw, sticky bread
Swallowed quickly
To the pale, too-high sky
To the Ayan-Yuryakh river!7
But the term dokhodyaga, as it was used in the Soviet camps, did not merely describe a physical state. The “goners,” as Sgovio has explained, were not just ill: they were prisoners who had reached a level of starvation so intense that they no longer looked after themselves. This deterioration usually progressed in stages, as prisoners stopped washing themselves, stopped controlling their bowels, stopped having normal human reactions to insults—until they became, quite literally, insane with hunger. Sgovio was deeply shocked the first time he met someone in this state, an American communist named Eisenstein, a man who had been an acquaintance in Moscow:
At first I did not recognize my friend. Eisenstein did not answer when I greeted him. His face wore the blank expression of the dokhodyaga. He looked through me as if I were not there. Eisenstein didn’t seem to see anyone. There was no expression at all in his eyes. Gathering the empty plates from the mess tables, he scanned each one of them for leftover food particles. He ran his fingers around the inside of the plates and then licked them.
Eisenstein, wrote Sgovio, had become like the other “wicks,” in that he had lost all sense of personal dignity:
They neglected themselves, did not wash—even when they had the opportunity to do so. Nor did the wicks bother to search for and kill the lice that sucked their blood. The dokhodyagi did not wipe the dribble off the ends of their noses with the sleeves of their bushlats . . . the wick was oblivious to blows. When set upon by fellow zeks , he would cover his head to ward off the punches. He would fall to the floor and when left alone, his condition permitting, he would get up and go off whimpering as if nothing had happened. After work the dokhodyaga could be seen hanging around the kitchen begging for scraps. For amusement, the cook would throw a dipperful of soup in his face. On such occasions, the poor soul would hurriedly pass his fingers over his wet whiskers and lick them . . . The wicks stood around the tables, waiting for someone to leave some soup or gruel. When that happened, the nearest lunged for the leavings. In the ensuing scramble they often spilled the soup. And then, on hands and knees, they fought and scraped until the last bit of precious food was stuffed into their mouths.8
A few prisoners who became dokhodyagi, and who recovered and survived, have tried to explain, not wholly successfully, what it felt like to be one of the living dead. Janusz Bardach remembered that after eight months in Kolyma, “I felt dizzy upon awakening, and my mind was foggy. It took more time and effort to pull myself together and go to the mess hall in the morning.”9 Yakov Éfrussi became a dokhodyaga after first having his glasses stolen—“to anyone near-sighted it will be perfectly clear what life is like without glasses, everything around you seems to be in a cloud”—and then losing the fingers of his left hand to frostbite. He described his feelings like this:
Constant hunger destroys the human psyche. It is impossible to stop thinking about food, you think about food all of the time. To your physical incapability is added moral weakness, as constant hunger removes your sense of self-respect, your sense