Album 8
January 1946 - May 1947

Summary

Doctor Mardna persuaded Euphrosinia to take the job of a morgue anatomist. The morgue staff included its chief Nikishin, free with five-year deprivation of rights, clerk Dmohovsky (free), who kept records of autopsies, and two orderlies, bytoviki felons.

She liked many things there. For example, to study anatomy, to read books from a good medical library and to learn from doctor Nikishin. Working there Euphrosinia had done 1,640 autopsies. She wondered how it was possible to cope with. And answered: The horror one tends to feel when seeing a corpse is only possible if the corpse maintains human appearance. But prisoners being emaciated beyond limits mostly looked like the dead even in the lifetime.

Nikishin took her to Alexander Suvorov, a Russian general well-known for eating mush together with soldiers from their cauldron. The morgue staff, even though they got their food from different sources (the prisoners - from the TsBL zone mess hall, Dmohovsky - from eatery #1 in the opposite part of the city, Nikishin - from the eatery of the House of engineers and technicians) pooled it, went shares and dined together.

When doctors Gryazneva and Mardna procured Euphrosinia the job in the morgue they hoped that Frosya would catch on with that small team. With a noble purpose Mardna inspired her with ("Here the death might help the living") Frosia wanted to show a doctor all the pathological changes occurring in the body of a deceased as clear as possible. In a similar case, it would help them to apply more effective treatments. Euphrosinia insisted on including the doctors' errors in the autopsy records. But they complained. The morgue chief Nikishin being afraid of everything rewrote her autopsy records so that all the conclusions coincided with the doctors' opinions. Euphrosinia didn't enjoy that monkey business which inflicted moral suffering on her.

She resented the cynical attitude to the burying. On the orders of the prison camp bosses the dead men and women were thrown together into a special box, hearse, and transported from the morgue to the foot of the Shmitiha Mount where the mass graves - ditches for two hundred people - were.

By the spring of 1947 Euphrosinia lost her TsBL patrons. Mardna got free and left Norilsk, and Gryazneva was sacked from the job of the camp hospital chief and made a common doctor because she refused to renounce her husband, "a public enemy".

Then, Lyanders started hounding Euphrosinia out of the work.

The case was that everyone who got free from the TsBL (the camp Central Hospital) passed the nights in the morgue building sleeping on the tables where autopsies were made in the daytime. That happened because a former prisoner had no home in Norilsk and only after getting a job could find a place in a hostel or buy a trailer (balok). In 1947, Lyandres, the former chief of the TsBL pharmacy, because of the conflict with whom Euphrosinia had been previously transferred from the surgery unit to the internal medicine one, moved in the morgue only bed-sitter and demanded Euphrosinia to go to the zone before dinner (earlier all the staff had dined together) and stay in the zone on Sundays (even though the morgue worked on Sundays, too). Nikishin was afraid of Lyandres who was a known informer and asked not to contradict him.

Euphrosinia voluntarily went to the TsBL zone and found herself in a hole. The work in the hospital, her only chance for survival in Norilsk, had been lost, and going away to another zone most certainly meant getting the third prison term there. If there is no hope without which Euphrosinia cannot live there is mine which they in the camp thought to be worse than death and where it would be easier for her to give up life. In the end of May she asks to send her to the mine. In response to the refusal she goes on hunger strike. She decided when they call her to the prisoner transport to cut her wrists in a booth of the TsBL steam shop. But the encounter with Dmohovsky, the morgue clerk, on the way to the steam shop and a faint caused by hungry prevented her from performing the plan.

Again a new page of her life began with an attempt to give up the life as the meaning of the previous one was depleted.

In a truck they brought Euphrosinia to the camp of Nagorny in the Coal Valley. Her thought of death was replaced by the interest to know what that mysterious mine looked like.