Gulag Tales

[xoxoxoBruce]

Gulag Tales

Once, I was known as Kulyaba Andrey Nicholayevich. Now only the patronymic survives and I am called Nicholayevich. What’s left of me is sick, a 56 year old man who looks 65. Yet they say a man is not judged by his looks but by how he feels. If that’s true, then I am older. I feel 70.

Just eight years ago I was a professor of philosophy. I helped a colleague’s son get a job at the university. In return I got a bottle of cognac, a few candy bars, and a 14 year sentence for bribery.

Sometimes, I wonder if any of my students wondered what happened to their teacher. Where is that cheerful, quick-tempered, fireball Kulyaba, the one who, one day, fell off the earth and was never heard from again. I don't know. I've never gotten a letter. I was confident I had a personal rapport with my students, but now I see I had nothing. I was just a little man stuffed with knowledge, an ordinary book worm, and my disappearance was no great loss for the temple of learning.

At an early age I could argue the theories of Hegel and Kant till the morning light. I soared throughout time and universes. I threw open doors to other dimensions with my learned mind. I never knew then there was a dark dimension nearby where people lived like zombies. I didn't know how easy it was to stumble and slide into a parallel dimension where the library was where criminals played cards; where a university professor is forced to write homework for his guard’s kids, being sure to make a few mistakes so the homework would look believable.

I wish, my students could see me. It would teach them more than all of my lectures added together. Just let them see me as I am, a shadow who can’t catch up to the others, who goes to the mess hall alone, who begs for a second helping of gruel, and then drags himself to his cell with a few small pieces of bread hidden in his pockets.

One of the purposes of philosophy is to prepare man to understand and deal with reality. Yet somehow I appear to be the least prepared one here. Everyone else here knows how to survive. Where to get cigarettes, tea and warm clothes. I still don't understand where to get these things. Hegel never mentioned it.

Another purpose of philosophy is to prepare man to face death and that angers me because I cannot accept it. I refuse to leave this place through the crematorium’s chimney. I refuse to die in a nightmare. I am one hundred percent positive that one sunny morning I will step out of jail and walk far away, walk far away through the fields and rivers. I can see this day in my mind.

Interesting. Did you also see the site of the woman who collected those stories re history of the Ukraine? Her English is pretty good, and the pictures slowly add up to a very somber weight. Lots of stuff I never knew before - little tidbits like: In the old WWII battlefields, there are cemetaries with markers giving the name of each dead German soldier because the Germans, like our military, wore metal "dog tags." The Russians had little plastic capsules that they were supposed to insert with a slip of paper on which their names were written. Most didn't or else the paper was found to be ash when the tube was opened, so the Russian war dead, in contrast to the German, are buried in mass graves. She talks of a battle where most of the Russian soldeirs had no weapons - just the ones in front. As they died, the ones behind would pick up their guns, and so on.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yeah, I spent most of an evening checking out her various sites. Fastening stuff, to me.