Sometime in the early aughts, I read a short story that, in recent months, I’ve been trying to remember. I think it was in The New Yorker or Harpers, though it could’ve been in The Atlantic or still some other magazine. The story was about a man sent to a Soviet prison camp, somewhere in the crushingly frigid north (Arkhangelsk?), where he had to handle toxic waste and do whatever he might to survive. There were brutal guards and even more deadly fellow prisoners and most of the other things that we expect from these stories. There was, I think, a visit to an infirmary, and a camp inmate who let out some unstoppable, frightening scream.
Most of the people at the camp die or succumb to insanity, which is another type of death.
The story is narrated by a Russian man living comfortably in New York. As the story ends, he feels an unrelenting guilt at what his friend went through (who may have died or may have been released when the Soviet Union crumbled). He stares out the window of his apartment, a hundred feet up in a high-rise building, and the sense of loss and regret is so deep and authentically felt; we readers know that this man is blameless, but we also understand his guilt, the guilt of a survivor.
This week, I’ve been searching for this story, typing keywords (gulag, Russia, Soviet Union, lager, prison camp, Murmansk, radiation, nuclear waste, Arkhangelsk) into magazine search engines and coming up with nothing. It’s probably written by a Russian emigre—a male, I’m sure. None of this remembrance may be accurate—the narrator in New York may have been the prisoner, telling his own story—nor may the actual thing be as moving as I remember, but I’d like to find it.
Notes