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up there yet!”
    “For real,” Murashka said.
    “I’d give a tooth,” Chaly repeated.
    “The heavy shackles will fall!” Beluga shouted.
    “Life continues, even when in essence it doesn’t exist,” Adam observed philosophically.
    “You may laugh at this,” Leibovich said shyly, “but I’ll say it anyway. It seems to me that not everything is lost yet.”

    The helicopter rose above the ground. Its shadow became more and more transparent. And we watched it go until it disappeared behind the barracks.
    Mishchuk was released after three years, having served the full term. By that time, Pokryshev had died. The newspapers wrote about his death. Mishchuk was not permitted to work in an airport. His conviction prevented it.
    He worked as a mechanic at the Science Research Institute, married, and forgot prison slang. Played the mandolin, drank, grew old, and rarely thought about the future.
    And Dima Marconi crashed over Uglegorsk. Among the fragments of his plane they found a forty-pound canister of Beluga caviar.

February 23, 1982. New York
    Dear I.M.,
    Thank you for your letter of the 18th. I’m glad that you seem well disposed towards my notes. I’ve prepared a few more pages here. Write and tell me your impressions.
    To answer your questions:
    A “doll-maker” is camp slang for a con man. A “doll” is a swindle of some kind.
    A “jumper” means a burglar. A “jump” is a burglary. Well, it seems that’s it. Last time I stopped at the horrors of camp life. What happens around us is not important. What’s important is how we experience ourselves in the face of it. In so far as any of us really are what we sense ourselves to be.
    I felt better than could have been expected. I began to have a divided personality. Life was transformed into literary material.
    I remember very well how this happened. My consciousness emerged from its habitual cover. I began to think of myself in the third person.
    When I was beaten up near the Ropcha sawmill, my consciousness functioned almost imperturbably: “A man is being struck by boots. He shields his face and stomach. He is passive and tries not to arouse the mob’s savagery… But what revolting faces! You can see the lead fillings in that Tartar’s mouth.”
    Awful things happened around me. People reverted to an animal state. We lost our human aspect – being hungry, humiliated, tortured by fear.
    My physical constitution became weak. But my consciousness remained undisturbed. This was evidently a defence mechanism. Otherwise I would have died of fright.
    When a camp thief was strangled before my eyes outside of Ropcha, my consciousness did not fail to record every detail.
    Of course, there is a large measure of immorality in all this. The same goes for any activity that has a defence mechanism at its base.

    When I was beginning to freeze, my consciousness registered the fact. What’s more, in artistic form: “Birds froze in flight…”
    However much I suffered, however much I cursed that life, my consciousness functioned without fail.
    If I faced a cruel ordeal, my consciousness quietly rejoiced. New material would now be at its disposal.
    Flesh and spirit existed apart. The more dispirited the flesh, the more insolently the spirit romped.
    Even when I suffered physically, I felt fine. Hunger, pain, anguish – everything became material for my tireless consciousness.
    In fact, I was already writing. My writing became a complement to life. A complement without which life would have been completely obscene.
    What was left to do was to transfer all this to paper. I tried to find the words.

     
    T HE SIXTH CAMP SUBDIVISION was located far from the railway line, so getting to that cheerless place was not easy. You had to wait for a long time to hitch a ride from a passing log-carrier, then jolt over potholes while sitting inside an iron cabin, then walk for two hours on a narrow path that was always disappearing into the bushes. In short, you had to proceed as