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Swimming Against the Kolyma River

Lena.Wooldridge · 2010-02-27T03:49:59Z

Hey I edited this quite a bit! If anyone is interested in reading. Thanks. The time in which a man is immersed in complete and utter darkness is the time in which he can see inside himself the best. In shadow, a man is not compelled to persist in the continuous opening of his eyes; if he were to open them, there would be nothing to see. And as he is not forced to glimpse upon the horrors of the world, he is left free of all worry, free to contemplate what beauty still exists in that world. When given the choice of viewing the horrors of the world or seeing nothing at all, every man will choose eternal darkness. As was the case in the small, crowded bunker I was riding in. There were no windows, not even a crack to peer from. If I were capable of gazing into the world beyond the bunker, all I would have seen was an endless tundra, stretching beyond what the eye can see. The prospect of never ending, snow-covered plains was bleak in itself, but the inside of the bunker was worse to behold. Although it was too dark to see, I could hear the moaning of around twenty others, griping in their own destitution, so weak that the only sounds they were capable of emitting were mere groans. An odor of human waste and sweat infiltrated the air, and as it rolled down my throat in suffocating clumps I resisted the urge to gag. the wooden floor was damp, saturated with urine and human feces. to every side of me I could feel the thin, shaking bodies of the other boys. I was glad that it was dark. Days that passes were irrelevant to me. time in general had ceased to exist. It was a mere idea, invented by men who did not suffer with the passing of time the way that men like myself did. Yet I wanted time to pass. I wished to live out that laborious life. There was never any hope for escape, so much futility that I never considered it any more. Instead, I contemplated death. Half of me yearned for it to fly upon swift wings and carry me to the land of Milk and Honey. My other half was more enlightened. I understood that, once a man dies, he loses to ability to change the world operates. He also forgoes the chance to see any possible beauty that lies in his future. It was that simple flame of hope that hindered my thoughts of death; I wished too see out my life to its fullest extent. At that point, my life was futile, and I desperately searched for some purpose in it all. As it stood, all the intangible days melted into one as I traveled along at a snail's pace across the lands of infinite bitter cold. Eventually the door to the bunker opened, revealing another bleak world of snow. As a sudden burst of freezing Northern wind came through the opening, I shivered and pulled my grey coat further up onto my neck. My ragged, thin work clothes were not suited for the extreme cold of the North, but I was thankful for every shred of fabric that rested upon my skin. Looking into the distance, I could see the camp in its entirety. I could see the barracks, the mines, the gravel pits, the yards, and the guard posts, all surrounded by a twenty foot wire fence. Some of the other men clambered out of bunker, blinking stupidly at the sudden profuse amounts of sunlight reflecting against the white snow. As some of them made their way through the snow, they collapsed into the Earth. And many of those men were never again to move. Some of the men did not even evacuate the bunker; they simply lay on the floor, forever decaying into the piss-sodden wood. It had been a long while since my last meal, and the thought of collapsing due to a lack of energy was a frightening one. The initial step out of the rail care was always the most difficult, it was the one that ended the journey of far too many young men. I took each step slowly so as not to trip and tumble into the snow, never to move again. The cautious man is always the best off. We were directed through the iron gate by a dozen or so guards, all heavily armed with handguns and clubs. But why? There was not an imprisoned man there who was capable of doing any harm to the robust guards. It was as though there were afraid of us, although we were among the weakest men of the world. A tall, mustache-clad guard with numerous badges decorating his chest bellowed at us, his voice reverberating across the camp. "Line up!" It was an exercise we were all familiar with: gathering in lines of five in the middle of the yard. We held our backs as still and straight as possible; the guards were notorious for shooting men on account of poor posture. In the row next to me, a boy keeled over into the snow and lay there, motionless. A guard walked over and kicked the boy squarely in the gut with the toe of his boot. The boy emitted a scarcely audible groan. the guard raised his pistol and sent a single shot into the center of the boy's back. The sound of the shot resonated across the plain, but it was an irrelevant sound to me. After one has heard a gunshot a multitude of times, it ceases to make him jump. Crimson blood trickled into the snow surrounding the boy, grouping together with the spilled blood of a thousand of his brothers deep within the heart of the Earth. The ground in this land will be soaked with blood until the end of time. When a guard finally came to me, I was careful to revert my eyes, staring at the ground. The guard was not only taller and thicker than I, but the pistol resting on his belt was extremely foreboding as well. I reached into the pocket of my coat and pulled out my papers, handing them to him. He read a couple of lines from them, his dark eyes flashing across the page. "Welcome to the Dalstoy construction facility, Comrade Pavel," he said, returning my papers to me and motioning me to another yard to the right side of camp. My name sounded different coming from the lips of the Devil himself. It is a plain name but perhaps, with that, is represents me perfectly. In the other yard, we stand at attention for another long while until we are finally shepherded to the barracks. The barracks themselves were quite similar to the ones in my old home at the Maloteki institution. They consisted of a large, open room with fifty or so rickety cots, each with a single fraying sheet. Stark, cold winds blew through the building, accentuating our already red, wind burnt faces. The men were lucky as they had their beads to shelter them from the icy breath of the North. We boys were forced to expose our bare faces to the cruel elements. Lying down on a cot, I wrapped myself in the thin sheet, shivering extensively. The cold was unbearable; it was even a higher degree of cold than that in my old home. I slept in my boots so as to prevent my feet from freezing over. The winds of the world blew about me, and I did nothing but ly in my cot, dreaming of tomorrow. Tomorrow would bring some amount of sunlight, which meant warmth. Tomorrow was always a fresh start. Tomorrow was all I had to live and hope for.