Kolia Read Online Free

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