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Sergei Lebedev
before that, the exiles had
l ived on impor ted food
products and by hunting.
The authorities had set up
a cordon on the river to
over turn the raf ts—they
allowed them to cut down
trees but not to take away soil;
the reindeer herders even
wondered if the exiles ate
the soil, they were bringing
so much, and they couldn’t
understand what for, since
for nomads soil could not
give birth to anything but
reindeer moss. The villagers
might have given up on the
idea but most of them were
kulak peasants and they put
their entire organizing force,
their passion for life into a
calculated gathering of soil,
real soil, without pity for
themselves or others; they
called the local soil mud,
which it was, a runny liquid
of mud on ice.
Later, when the village stood
on fertile soil, some of the
exiles were taken to town,
that is, to the camp where
Grandfather II had once
been warden, where they
started a botanical garden,
planting flowers in heated
greenhouses to show how
new life was burgeoning in
the Far North, and in the
polar night prisoners in
the barracks could see the
glowing glass cubes behind
three layers of barbed wire.
The garden was part of the
camp economy, and the
locals hated it for devouring
heat and light, a garden for
baskets of red flowers to
greet official airplanes that
instantly turned to glass
in the frost; high-ranking
guards brought the flowers
home later, and anything left
over was taken to the statue
of Lenin.
A war ensued over the right
to work in the garden, in