13 Solzhenitsyn-OneDayintheLifeofIvanDenisovitch pp.16-112

4 Abbreviation of Russian for prisoner

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Shukhov pulled his spoon out of his boot. His little baby. It had been with him his whole time in the North, he’d cast it with his own hands in sand out of aluminum wire, and it was embossed with the words “Ust-Izhma 1944.”

Then he removed his hat from his clean-shaven head-

-however cold it might be, he could never bring himself to eat with his hat on–and stirred the cold stew, taking a quick look to see what kind of helping they’d given him.

An average one. They hadn’t ladled it from the top of the kettle, but they hadn’t ladled it from the bottom either. Fetiukov was the sort who when he was looking after someone else’s bowl took the potatoes from it.

The only good thing about stew was that it was hot, but Shukhov’s portion had grown quite cold. However, he ate it with his usual slow concentration. No need to huriy, not even for a house on fire. Apart from sleep, the only time a prisoner lives for himself is ten minutes in the morning at breakfast, five minutes over dinner, and five at supper.

The stew was the same every day. Its composition depended on the kind of vegetable provided that winter.

Nothing but salted carrots last year, which meant that from September to June the stew was plain carrot This year it was black cabbage. The most nourishing time of the year was June; then all vegetables came to an end and were replaced by grits. The worst time was July–

then they shredded nettles into the pot.

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The little fish were more bone than flesh; ‘the flesh had been boiled off the bone and had disintegrated, leaving a few remnants on head and tail. Without neglecting a single fish scale or particle of flesh on the brittle skeleton, Shukhov went on chomping his teeth and sucking the bones, spitting the remains on the table.

He ate everything–the gills, the tail, the eyes when they were still in their sockets but not when they’d been boiled out and floated in the bowl separately–big fish-eyes. Not then. The others laughed at him for that.

This morning Shukhov economized. Since he hadn’t returned to the barracks he hadn’t drawn his rations, so he ate his breakfast without bread. He’d eat the bread later. Might be even better that way.

After the vegetable stew there was _magara_, that damned “Chinese” oatmeal. It had grown cold too, and had set into a solid lump. Shukhov broke it up into pieces. It wasn’t only that the oatmeal was cold–it was tasteless even when hot, and left you no sense of having filled your belly. Just grass, except that it was yellow, and looked like cereal. They’d got the idea of serving it instead of cereals from the Chinese, it was said. When boiled, a bowlful of it weighed nearly a pound. Not much of an oatmeal but that was what it passed for.

Licking his spoon and tucking it back into his boot, Shukhov put on his hat and went to the dispensary.

The sky was still quite dark. The camp lights drove away the stars. The broad beams of the two searchlights were still sweeping the zone. When this camp, this 18 | P a g e

“special” (forced-labor) camp, had been organized, the security forces had a lot of flares left over from the war, and whenever there was a power failure they shot up flares over the zone–white, green, and red–just like real war. Later they stopped using them. To save money, maybe.

It seemed just as dark as at reveille but the experienced eye could easily distinguish, by various small signs, that soon the order to go to work would be given. Khromoi’s assistant (Khromoi, the mess orderly, had an assistant whom he fed) went off to summon Barracks 6 to breakfast This was the building occupied by the infirm, who did not leave the zone. An old, bearded artist shuffled off to the C.E.D5, for the brush and paint he needed to touch up the numbers on the prisoners’ uniforms. The Tartar was there again, cutting across the parade ground with long, rapid strides in the direction of the staff quarters. In general there were fewer people about, which meant that everyone had gone off to some corner or other to get warm during those last precious minutes.

Shukhov was smart enough to hide from The Tartar around a corner of the barracks–the guard would stick to him if he caught him again. Anyway, you should never be conspicuous. The main thing was never to be seen by a campguard on your own, only in a group.

Who knows whether the guy wasn’t looking for someone to saddle with a job, or wouldn’t jump on a 5 Culture and Education Department.

19 | P a g e

man just for spite? Hadn’t they been around the barracks and read them that new regulation? You bad to take ofi your hat to a guard five paces before passing him, and replace it two paces after. There were guards who slopped past as if blind, not caring a damn, but for others the new rule was a godsend. How many prisoners had been thrown in the guardhouse because of that hat business? Oh no, better to stand around the corner.

The Tartar passed by, and now Shukhov finally decided to go to the dispensary. But suddenly he remembered that the tall Lett in Barracks 7 had told him to come and buy a couple of glasses of home-grown tobacco that morning before they went out to work, something Shukhov bad clean forgotten in all the excitement. The Lett had received a parcel the previous evening, and who knew but that by tomorrow none of the tobacco would be left, and then he’d have to wait a month for another parcel. The Lett’s tobacco was good stuff, strong and fragrant, greyish-brown.

Shukhov stamped his feet in vexation. Should he turn back and go to the Lett? But it was such a short distance to the dispensary and he jogged on. The snow creaked audibly underfoot as he approached the door.

Inside, the corridor was, as usual, so clean that he felt quite scared to step on the floor. And the ‘walls were painted with white enamel. And all the furniture was white.

The surgery doors were all shut. The doctors must still be in bed. The man on duty was a medical assistant-20 | P a g e

-a young man called Kolya Vdovushkin. He was seated at a clean little table, wearing a small white cap and a snow-white smock. Writing something.

There was no one else in sight.

Shukhov took off his hat as if in the presence of one of the authorities and, letting his eyes shift, in the camp manner, where they had no business to shift, he noticed that Kolya was writing in even, neatly spaced lines and that each line, starting a little way from the edge of the page, began with a capital letter. He realized at once, of course, that Kolya was not doing official work but something on the side. But that was none of his business.

“Well, Nikolai Semyonich, it’s like this. . . . I’m feeling sort of . . . rotten . . . ,” said Shukhov shamefacedly, as if coveting something that didn’t belong to him.

Kolya Vdovushkin raised his big placid eyes from his work. His number was covered up by his smock;

“Why’ve you come so late? Why didn’t you report sick last night? You know very well there’s no sick call in the morning. The sick list has already been sent to the planning department.”

Shukhov knew all this. He knew too that it was even harder to get on the sick list in the evening.

“But after all, Kolya . . . You see, when I should have come . . . last night . . . it didn’t ache.”

“And now it does? And what is it?”

“Well, if you stop to think of it, nothing aches, but I feel ill all over.”

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Shukhov was not one of those who hung around the dispensary. Vdovushkin knew this. But in the morning he had the right to exempt from work two men only, and he’d already exempted them–their names were written down under the glass–it was greenish–on his desk, and he’d drawn a line across the page.

“Well, you ought to have considered that earlier.

What are you thinking about? Reporting sick just before roll call. Come on, take this.”

He pulled a thermometer out of one of the jars where they stood in holes cut in pieces of gauze, wiped it dry, and handed it to Shukhov, who put it in his armpit.

Shukhov sat on a bench near the wall, right at the very end, so that be nearly tipped it up. He sat in that uncomfortable way, involuntarily emphasizing that he was unfamiliar with the place and that he’d come there on some minor matter.

Vdovushkin went on writing.

The dispensary lay in the most remote and deserted corner of the zone, where no sounds of. any sort reached it. No clocks or watches ticked there–prisoners were not allowed to carry watches; the authorities knew the time for them. Even mice didn’t scratch there; they’d all been dealt with by the hospital cat, placed there for the purpose.

For Shukhov it was a strange experience to sit in that spick-and-span room, in such quietness, to sit under the bright lamps for five long minutes doing nothing. He 22 | P a g e

cast his eyes around the wails and found them empty.

He looked at his jacket–the number on the chest was almost rubbed off. That might be noticed. He ought to have it touched up. He ran his free hand over his chin and felt the stubble. His beard had grown fast since his last bath, over ten days back. But that didn’t worry him.

Next bath day was about three days off and he’d have a shave then. What was the sense in lining up at the barber’s? Who did he have to doll himself up for?

Then as he eyed Vdovuahkin’s snow-white cap he remembered the hospital on the banks of the River Lovat where he’d been taken with a smashed jaw, and then–what a dope he was!–volunteered for the front again, though he could have lain there in bed for five days.

And now here he was dreaming of being ill for two or three weeks, not dangerously ill, of course, not so bad that they’d have to operate, yet bad enough to go to the hospital and lie in bed for three weeks without stirring; and let them feed him on nothing but that clear soup of theirs, he wouldn’t mind.

But, he recalled, now they didn’t let you lie in bed even in the camp infirmary. A new doctor had arrived with one of the latest replacements–Stepan Grigorych, a fussy, loud-voiced fellow who gave neither himself nor his patients any peace. He invented jobs in and around the infirmary for all the patients who could stand on their feet–fencing the garden, laying paths, bringing soil to the flowerbeds, and, in wintertime, erecting snow 23 | P a g e

barriers. Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any ifiness.

You can overwork a horse to death. That the doctor ought to understand. If he’d been sweating blood laying blocks he’d quiet down, you could be sure of that.

Vdovushkln went on with his writing. He was, indeed, doing some work “on the side,” but it was something beyond Shukhov’s understanding. He was making a fair copy of a long new poem that he’d finished the previous evening and had promised to show that day to Stepan Grigorych, the doctor who advocated work therapy.

As can happen only in camps, Stepan Grigorych had advised Vdovushkin to describe himself as a medical assistant, and had taken him on at the infirmary and taught him to make intravenous injections on ignorant prisoners, to whose innocent minds it could never occur that Vdovushkin wasn’t a medical assistant at all.

Vdovushkin had been a university student of literature, arrested while still in his second year. The doctor wanted him to write when in prison what he’d been given no opportunity to write in freedom.

The signal for the roll call was barely audible through the double-paned, frost-blurred windows. Shukhov heaved a sigh and stood up. He still had that feverish chill but evidently he wouldn’t be able to skip work.

Vdovushkin reached for the thermometer and read it.

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“H’m, neither one thing nor the other. Ninety-nine point two. If it had been a hundred it would have been clear to anyone. I can’t exempt you. Stay behind at your own risk, If you like. The doctor will examine you. If he’ considers you’re ill, hell exempt you. If he finds you fit, he won’t. Then you’ll be locked up. You’d better go back to work.”

Shukhov said nothing. He didn’t even nod. Pulling his hat over his eyes, he walked out.

How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?

The cold stung. A murky fog wrapped itself around Shukhov and made him cough painfully. The temperature out there was -27˚; Shukhov’s temperature was +37˚. The fight was on.

He ran at a jog trot to his barracks. The whole parade ground was deserted, the camp looked empty. It was that brief moment of relaxation when, although everything has been decided, everyone is pretending to himself that there will be no march to work. The sentries sit in warm quarters, their sleepy heads propped against their rifles–it’s not all milk and honey for them either, lounging on the watchtowers in such cold. The guards at the main gate tossed coal into the stove. The campguards in their room smoked a last cigarette before searching the barracks. And the prisoners, now clad in all their rags, a rope around their waists, their faces bound from chin to eyes with bits of cloth against the cold, lay on their bunks with their boots on and waited, 25 | P a g e

eyes shut, hearts aquake, for their squad leader to yell:

“Out you go.”

The 104th were with the rest in Barracks 7–all except Pavlo, the deputy squad leader, who moved his lips as he totted something up with a pencil, and Alyosha, Shukhov’s clean and tidy neighbor, who was reading from a notebook in which he’d copied out half the New Testament.

Shukhov ran headlong, but without making any noise, straight to Pavlo’s bunk.

Pavlo looked up.

“So they didn’t put you in the guardhouse, Ivan Denisovich? All right?” he asked with a marked Ukrainian accent, rolling out the name and patronymic in the way West Ukrainians did even in prison.

Picking up Shukhov’s bread ration he handed it to him. A spoonful of granulated sugar lay in a small mound on top of the hunk. Shukhov had no time to spare but he answered properly (the deputy squad leader was also one of the authorities, and even more depended on him than on the camp commandant). And, though he was in a hurry, he sucked the sugar from the bread with his lips, licked it under his tongue as he put his foot on a support to climb up to make his bed, and took a look at his ration, weighing it in his hand and hastily calculating whether it reached the regulation sixteen ounces. He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he’d neverhad an opportunity to weigh them on scales, and although, being a man of 26 | P a g e

timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration.

The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul–today, maybe, they haven’t snitched any.

He decided he was half an ounce short as he broke the bread in two. One half he stuck into a little clean pocket he’d specially sewn under his jacket (at the factory they make jackets for prisoners without pockets). The other half, which he’d saved by going without at breakfast, he considered eating on the spot.

But food gulped down is no food at all; it’s wasted; it gives you no feeling of fullness. He started to put the bread into his locker but again thought better of it–he recalled that two barrack orderlies had been beaten up for stealing. The barracks was a big place, like a public yard.

And so, still clutching the hunk of bread, he drew his feet out of his valenki, deftly leaving inside them his foot rags and spoon, crawled barefoot up to his bunk, widened a little hole in the mattress, and there, amidst the sawdust, concealed his half-ration. He pulled off his hat, drew out of it a needle and thread (hidden deeply, for they fingered the hats when they frisked you; once a guard had pricked his finger and almost broken Shukhov’s skull in his rage). Stitch, stitch, stitch, and the little tear in the mattress was mended, with the bread 27 | P a g e

concealed under it. Meanwhile the sugar in his mouth had melted. Every nerve was strained to breaking point.

At any moment the roster guard would begin shouting at the door. Shukhov’s fingers worked fast but his mind, planning the next move, worked faster.

Alyosha the Baptist was reading the Testament under his breath (perhaps especially for Shukhov–those fellows were fond of recruiting):

“If you suffer, it must not be for murder, theft, or sorcery, nor for infringing the rights of others. But if anyone suffers as a Christian, he should feel it no disgrace, but confess that name to the honor of God.”

Alyosha was smart: he’d made a chink in the wall and hidden the little book in it, and it had survived every search.

With the same rapid movements as before, Shukhov hung up his coat on a crossbeam and pulled what he wanted from under the mattress: a pair of mittens, a second pair of old foot rags, a length of rope, and a piece of cloth with tapes at each end. He smoothed the sawdust in the mattress (it was lumpy and dense), tucked in the blanket, arranged the pillow, and slid down onto his bare feet and started binding them with the rags, first with the good ones, thea, on top, with the torn.

Just then Tiurin stood up and barked:

“Sleep’s over, One hundred and fourth! Out you go.”

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And at once the entire squad, drowsing or not, got up, yawned, and went to the dcor. Tiurin had been in for nineteen years and never turned his men out for the roll call a moment too soon. When he said, “Out you go,” it meant you’d better.

And while the men with heavy tread and tight lips walked into the corridor one by one and then onto the porch, and the leader of the 20th, following Tiurin’s example, called in turn “Out you go,” Shukhov drew his valenki over the double thickness of foot rags, slipped his coat over his wadded jacket, and fastened a rope tightly around him (leather belts had been removed from zeks who had them–leather belts weren’t allowed in “special” camps).

So Shukhov managed to get everything done and to catch up with the last of his companions, lust as their numbered backs were passing through the door onto the porch. Looking rather bulky, for they had wrapped themselves up in every garment they possessed, the men shuffled diagonally toward the parade ground in single file, making no attempt to overtake one another. The only sound was the crunch of their heavy tread on the snow.

It was still dark, though in the east the sky was beginning to glow with a greenish tint. A light but piercing breeze came to meet them from the rising sun.

There is nothing as bitter as this moment when you go out to the morning roll call–in the dark, in the cold, 29 | P a g e

with a hungry belly, to face a whole day of work. You lose your tongue. You lose all desire to speak to anyone.

A junior guard was rushing around the parade ground.

“Well, Tiurin, how long do we have to wait for you?

Late again?”

Maybe Shukhov might get scared of him but not Tiurin, oh no. He wouldn’t waste breath on him in the cold. Just stomped on in silence.

And the squad followed him through the snow.

Shuffle, shuffle, squeak, squeak.

Tiurin must have greased them with that pound of salt pork, for the 104th had gone back to its old place in the column–that could be seen from the neighboring squads. So one of the poorer and stupider squads was being sent to the “Socialist Way of Life” settlement. Oh, it’d be cruel there today: seventeen degrees below zero, and windy. No shelter. No fire.

A squad leader needs a lot of salt pork–to take to the planning department, and to satisfy his own belly too.

Tiurin received no parcels but he didn’t go short of pork. No one in the squad who received any lost a moment in taking him some as a gift.

Otherwise you’d never survive.

The senior roster guard glanced at a small piece of board.

“You have one away on sick leave today, Tiurin.

Twenty-three present?”

“Twenty-three,” said Tiurin with a nod.

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Who was missing? Panteleyev wasn’t there. But surely he wasn’t ill.

And at once a whisper ran through the squad: Panteleyev, that son of a bitch, was staying behind again.

Oh no, he wasn’t ill, the security boys were keeping him back. He’d be squealing on someone.

They would send for him during the day, on the quiet, and keep him two or three hours. No one would see, no one would hear.

And they’d fix it all up with the medical authorities.

The whole parade ground was black with coats as the squads drifted forward to be searched. Shukhov remembered he wanted to have the numbers on his jacket touched up, and elbowed his way through the crowd to the side. Two or three prisoners stood waiting their turn with the artist. He joined them. They spelled nothing but trouble, those numbers: if they were distinct the guards could identify you from any distance, but if you neglected to have them repainted in time you’d be sure to land in the guardhouse for not taking care of your number.

There were three artists in the camp. They painted pictures for the authorities free of charge, and in addition took turns appearing at roll call to touch up the numbers. Today it was the turn of an old man with a gray beard.. When he painted the number on your hat with his brush it was just like a priest anointing your brow.

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The old man painted on and on, blowing from time to time into his glove. It was a thin, knitted glove. His hand grew stiff with cold. He only just managed to paint the numbers.

He touched up the S 854 on Shukhov’s jacket, and Shukhov, holding his rope belt in his hand and without bothering to pull his coat around him–very soon he’d be frisked–caught up with the squad. At once he noticed that his fellow squad member Tsezar was smoking, and smoking a cigarette, not a pipe. That meant he might be able to cadge a smoke. But he didn’t ask straight away; he stood quite close up to Tsezar and, half turning, looked past him.

He looked past him and seemed indifferent, but he noticed that after each puff (Tsezar inhaled at rare intervals, thoughtfully) a thin ring of glowing ash crept down the cigarette, reducing its length as it moved stealthily to the cigarette bolder.

Fetiukov, that jackal, had come up closer too and now stood opposite Tsezar, watching his mouth with blazing eyes.

Shukhov had finished his last pinch of tobacco and saw no prospects of acquiring any more before evening.

Every nerve in his body was taut, all his longing was concentrated in that cigarette butt–which meant more to him now, it seemed, than freedom itself–but he would never lower himself like that Fetiukov, he would never look at a man’s mouth.

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Tsezar was a hodgepodge of nationalities: Greek, Jew, Gypsy–you couldn’t make out which. He was still young. He’d made films. But he hadn’t finished his first when they arrested him. He wore a dark, thick, tangled mustache. They hadn’t shaved it off in the camp because that was the way he looked in the photograph in his dossier.

“Tsezar Markovich,” slobbered Fetiukov, unable to restrain himself. “Give us a puff.”

His face twitched with greedy desire.

Tsezar slightly raised the lids that drooped low over his black eyes and looked at Fetiukov. It was because he didn’t want to be interrupted while smoking and asked for a puff that he had taken up a pipe. He didn’t begrudge the tobacco; he resented the interruption in his chain of thought. He smoked to stimulate his mind and to set his ideas flowing. But the moment he lighted a cigarette he read in several pairs of eyes an unspoken plea for the butt.

Tsezar turned to Shukhov and said:

“Take it, Ivan Denisovich.”

And with his thumb he pushed the smoldering cigarette butt out of the short amber holder.

Shukhov started (though it was exactly what he had expected of Tsezar) and gratefully hurried to take the butt with one hand, while slipping the other hand under it to prevent it from dropping. He didn’t resent the fact that Tsezar felt squeamish about letting him finish the cigarette in the holder (some had clean mouths, some 33 | P a g e

had foul) and he didn’t burn his hardened fingers as they touched the glowing end. The main thing was, he had cut out that jackal Fetiukov, and now could go on drawing in smoke until his lips were scorched. Mmm.

The smoke crept and flowed through his whole hungry body, making his head and feet respond to it.

Just at that blissful moment he heard a shout:

“They’re stripping our undershirts off us.”

Such was a prisoner’s life. Shukhov had grown accustomed to it. All you could do was to look out they.

didn’t leap at your throat.

But why the undershirts? The camp commandant himself had issued them. No, something was wrong.

There were still squads ahead of them before it was their turn to be frisked. Everyone in the 104th looked about. They saw Lieutenant Volkovoi, the security chief, stride out of the staff quarters and shout something to the guards. And the guards who, when Volkovoi wasn’t around, carried out the frisking perfunctorily, now flung themselves into their work with savage zeal.

“Unbutton your shirts,” the sergeant shouted.

Volkovoi was as unpopular with the prisoners as with the guards–even the camp commandant was said to be afraid of him. God had named the bastard appropriately.6 He was a wolf indeed, and looked it. He was dark, tall, with a scowl, very quick in his movements. He’d turn up from behind a barracks with a 6 Volk means wolf in Russian.

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“What’s going on here?” There was no hiding from him.

At first, in ’49, he’d been in the habit of carrying a whip of plaited leather, as thick as his forearm. He was said to have used it for flogging in the cells. Or when the prisoners would be standing in a group near a barracks at the evening count, he’d slink up from behind and lash out at someone’s neck with a “Why aren’t you standing in line, slobs?” The men would dash away in a wave.

Stung by the blow, his victim would put a hand to his neck and wipe away the blood, but he’d hold his tongue, for fear of the cells.

Now, for some reason, Volkovoi had stopped carrying his whip.

When the weather was cold the guards were fairly lenient in the morning, though not in the evening. The prisoners untied their belts, and flung their coats wide open. They advanced five abreast, and five guards stood waiting to frisk them. The guards slapped their bands down the belted jackets, ran over the right pants pocket, the only one permitted by regulation, and, reluctant to pull off their gloves, felt any object that puzzled them, asking lazily: “What’s that?”

What was there to look for on a prisoner at the morning roll call? A knife? But knives weren’t taken out of the camp, they were brought into it. In the mornlag they had to make certain a prisoner wasn’t taking six pounds of bread with him, meaning to escape with it.

There was a time when they were so scared of the quarter-pound hunks the prisoners took to eat with their 35 | P a g e

dinner that each of the squads had to make a wooden case for carrying the whole ration, after collecting it, piece by piece, from the men. What they reckoned to gain by this stupidity was beyond imagining. More likely it was just another way of tormenting people, giving them something extra to worry about. It meant taking a nibble at your hunk, making your mark on it, so to speak, and then putting it in the case; but anyway the pieces were as alike as two peas–they were all off the same loaf. During the march it preyed on your mind: you tortured yourself by imagining that somebody else’s bit of the ration might be substituted for yours. Why, good friends quarrelled about it, even to the point of fighting! But one day three prisoners escaped in a truck from the work site and took one of those cases of bread with them. That brought the authorities to their senses–

they chopped up all the boxes in the guardroom.

Everyone carry his own hunk, they said.

At this first search they also had to make sure that no one was wearing civvies under the camp outfit. But, after all, every prisoner had had his civvies removed from him down to the very last garment, and they wouldn’t be returned, they were told, until they’d served their terms. No one had served his term in this camp.

Sometimes the guards frisked you for letters that might have been sent through civilians. But if they were going to search every prisoner for letters they’d be fussing around till dinnertime.

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Volkovoi, however, had shouted that they were to search for something and so the guards peeled off their gloves, ordered everyone to pull up his jacket (where every little bit of barrack-room warmth was treasured) and unbutton his shirt. Then they strode up to run their paws over the zeks and find out whether any of them might have slipped on something against the rules. A prisoner was allowed to wear a shirt and an undershirt–

he was to be stripped of anything else: such were Volkovoi’s instructions, passed down the ranks by the prisoners. The squads that had been frisked earlier were in luck. Some of them had already been passed through the gates. But the rest had to bare their chests. And anyone who had slipped on an extra garment had to take it off on the spot, out there in the cold.

That’s how it started, but it resulted in a fine mix-np-

-a gap formed in the column, and at the gates the escort began shouting, “Get a move on, get a move on.” So when it was the turn of the 104th to be frisked they bad to ease up a bit: Volkovoi told the guards to take the name of anyone who might be wearing extra garments–

the culprits were to surrender them in person to personal property that evening with a written explanation of how and why they had hidden the garments.

Shukhov was in regulation dress. Come on, paw me as hard as you like. There’s nothing but my soul in my chest. But they made a note that Tsezar was wearing a flannel vest and that Buinovsky, it seemed, had put on a 37 | P a g e

vest or a cummerbund or something. Buinovsky protested–he’d been in the camp less than three months, a former Navy commander who still couldn’t get his destroyer out of his system.

“You’ve no right to strip men in the cold. You don’t know Article Nine of the Criminal Code.”

But they did have the right. They knew the code.

You, friend, are the one who doesn’t know it.

“You’re not behaving like Soviet people,” Buinovsky went on saying. “You’re not behaving like communists.”

Volkovoi had put up with the reference to the criminal code but this made him wince and, like black lightning, he flashed:

“Ten days in the guardhouse.”

And aside to the sergeant:

“Starting from this evening.”

They didn’t like putting a man in the cells in the morning–it meant the loss of his work for a whole day.

Let him sweat blood in the meantime and be put in the cells in the evening.

The prison lay just over there, to the left of the parade ground. A brick building with two wings. The second wing had been added that autumn–there wasn’t room enough in the first. The prison had eighteen cells besides those for solitary confinement, which were fenced off. The entire camp was log-built except for that brick prison.

The cold had got under the men’s shirts and now it was there to stay. All that wrapping-up had been in vain.

38 | P a g e

Shukhov’s back was giving him hell. How he longed to be in bed in the infirmary, fast asleep! He wanted nothing else. Under the heaviest of blankets.

The zeks stood in front of the gates, buttoning their coats, tying a rope around their bellies. And from outside the escort shouted:

“Come on. Come on.”

And from behind, the guard urged them on:

“Move along. Move along.”

The first gate. The border zone. The second gate.

Railings along each side near the gatehouse.

“Halt!” shouted a sentry. Like a flock of sheep.

“Form fives.”

It was growing light. The escort’s fire was burning itself out behind the gatehouse. They always lit a fire before the prisoners were sent out to work–to keep themselves warm and be able to see more clearly while counting.

One of the gate guards counted in a loud brisk voice:

“First. Second. Third . . .”

And the prisoners, in ranks of five, separated from the rest and marched ahead, so that they could be watched from front and behind: five heads, five backs, ten legs.

A second gate guard–a checker–stood at the next rail in silence verifying the count.

And, in addition, a lieutenant stood watching.

That was from the camp side.

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A man is worth more than gold. If there was one head short when they got past the barbed wire you had to replace it with your own.

Once more the squad came together. And now it was the turn of the sergeant of the escort to count.

“First. Second. Third.”

And each rank of five drew away and marched forward separately.

And on the other side of the wire the assistant head guard verified the count.

And another lieutenant stood by and watched. That was from the side of the escort.

No one dared make a mistake. If you signed for one head too many, you filled the gap with your own.

There were escort guards all over the place. They flung a semicircle around the column on its way to the power station, their machine guns sticking out and pointing right at your face. And there were guards with gray dogs. One dog bared its fangs as if laughing at the prisoners. The escorts all wore short sheepskins, except for a half a. dozen whose coats trailed the ground. The long sheepskins were interchangeable: they were worn by anyone whose turn bad come to man the watchtowers .

And once again as they brought the squads together the escort recounted the entire power-station column by fives.

“You always get the sharpest frost at sunrise,” said Buinovsky. “You see, it’s the coldest point of the night.”

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Captain Buinowky was fond of explaining things. The state of the moon–whether it was old or young– he could calculate it for any day of the year.

He was fading away under your very eyes, the captain, his cheeks were falling in. But he had guts.

Out beyond the camp boundary the intense cold, accompanied by a head wind, stung even Shukhov’s face, which was used to every kind of unpleasantness.

Realizing that he would have the wind in his face all the way to the power station, he decided to make use of his bit of rag. To meet the contingency of a headwind he, like many other prisoners, had got himself a cloth with a long tape at each end. The prisoners admitted that these helped a bit. Shukhov covered his face up to the eyes, brought the tapes around below his ears, and fastened the ends together at the back of his neck. Then he covered his nape with the flap of his bat and raised his coat collar. The next thing was to pull the front flap of the hat down onto his brow. Thus in front only his eyes remained unprotected. He fixed his coat tightly at the waist with the rope. Now everything was in order except for his hands, which were already stiff with cold (his mittens were worthless). He rubbed them, ho clapped them together, for he knew that in a moment he’d have to put them behind his back and keep them there for the entire march.

The chief of the escort guard recited the “morning prayer,” which every prisoner was heartily sick of: 41 | P a g e

“Attention, prisoners. Marching orders must be strictly obeyed. Keep to your ranks. No hurrying, keep a steady pace. No talking. Keep your eyes fixed ahead and your hands behind your backs. A step to right or left is considered an attempt to escape and the escort has orders to shoot without warning. Leading guards, on the double.”

The two guards in the lead of the escort must have set out along the road. The column heaved forward, shoulders swaying, and the escorts, some twenty paces to the right and left of the column, each man at a distance of ten paces from the next, machine guns held at the ready, set off too.

It hadn’t snowed for a week and the road was worn hard and smooth. They skirted the camp and the wind caught their faces sideways. Hands clasped behind their backs, heads lowered, the column of prisoners moved on, as though at a funeral. All you saw was the feet of two or three men ahead of you and the patch of trodden ground where your own feet were stepping. From time to time one of the escorts would cry: “U 48. Hands behind back,” or “B 502. Keep up.” But they shouted less and less; the slashing wind made it difficult to see.

The guards weren’t allowed to tie cloth over their faces.

Theirs was not much of a job either.

In warmer weather everybody in the column talked, no matter how much the escort might shout at them.

But today every prisoner hunched his shoulders, hid 42 | P a g e

behind the back of the man in front of him, and plunged into his own thoughts.

The thoughts of a prisoner–they’re not free either.

They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he have any luck at the dispensary that evening? Would they put Buinovsky in the cells? And how did Tsezar get his hands on that warm vest? He’d probably greased a palm or two in the warehouse for peoples private belongings. How else?

Because he had breakfasted without bread and eaten his food cold, Shukhov’s belly felt unsatisfied that morning. And to prevent it complaining and begging for food, he stopped thinking about the camp and let his mind dwell on the letter he’d soon be writing home.

The column passed the wood-processing factory, built by prison labor, the workers’ settlement (the huts had been assembled by prisoners too, but the inhabitants were civilians), the new club (convict-built in entirety, from the foundations to the mural decorations–but it wasn’t they who saw the films there), and then moved out into the steppe, straight into the wind heading for the reddening dawn. Bare white snow stretched to the horizon, to the left, to the right, and not a single tree could be seen on the whole expanse of steppe.

A new year, 1951, had begun, and Shukhov had the right to two letters that year. He had sent his last letter in July and got an answer to it in October. At Ust-Izhma the rules had been different: you could write once a 43 | P a g e

month. But what was the sense of writing? He’d written no more often then than now.

Ivan Shukhov had left home on June 23, 1941. On the previous Sunday the people who’d been to Polomnya to attend Mass had said: War! At Polomnya they’d learned it at the post office but at Temnenovo no one had a radio in those days. Now, they wrote, the radio roared in every cottage–it was piped in. There was little sense in writing. Writing now was like dropping stones in some deep, bottomless pool. They drop; they sink–

but there is no answer. You couldn’t write and describe the squad you were working with and what kind of squad leader Andrei Prokofievich was. Just now he had a good deal more to talk about with Kilgas the Lett than with his family at home.

Neither did the two letters a year they sent him throw much light on the way they were living. The kolkhoz had a new chairman–as if that hadn’t happened regularly! It’d been amalgamated with neighboring farms– that’d happened before, too, but afterward they’d reduced it to its former condition. And what else?

The faimers were failing to fulfill their quota of work days–or the individual plots had been cut down to one-third acre, and some people’s right back to the cottage walls.

What he couldn’t take in was the fact that, as his wife wrote, the number of people in the kolkhoz hadn’t grown by a single soul since the war. All the young men and women, without exception, had managed to get 44 | P a g e

away to work in factories or in the peat-processing works. Half the men hadn’t come back from the war at all and, among those who had, were some who cold-shouldered the kolkhoz. They lived in the village and worked on the side. The only men on the farm were Zakhar Vasilych, the manager, and Tikhon, the carpenter, who was turned eighty-four, had married recently, and already had children. The kolkhoz was kept going by the women who’d been there since 1930.

There was something about this that Shukhov couldn’t understand–“living in the village and working on the side.” He’d seen life in the days of private farming and in the days of the kolkhozes too, but that men weren’t working in their own villages–this he couldn’t swallow. Sort of seasonal workers, were they? Going out travelling? But then how did the village manage with the haymaking?

They’d given up seasonal work a long time back, his wife had replied. They didn’t go out carpentering, for which that part of the country was famous; they didn’t make osier baskets, for no one wanted them these days.

But they did have a craft, a wonderful new craft–carpet painting. Someone had brought stencils back from the war and from that time it had become so popular that the number of those carpet painters grew and grew.

They had no steady jobs, they didn’t work anywhere, they helped the kolkhoz for a month or so, just at the haymaking or the harvesting, and for that the kolkhoz gave them a chit saying that so-and-so, a member of the 45 | P a g e

kolkhoz, had been released to carry on his work and that the kolkhoz had no claim on him. And they traveled all over the country, they even flew in airplanes to save time, and they piled up rubles by the thousand and painted carpets all over the place. Fifty rubles a carpet made out of any old sheet you could spare–and it didn’t seem to take them more than an hour to make a carpet of it. And Shukhov’s wife nursed the strong hope that when Ivan returned he too would become one of those painters. Then they’d raise themselves out of the poverty in which she was living and they’d send the children to a technical school and build a new cottage instead of the old broken-down one. All the carpet painters were building new cottages and now, near the railway station, the cottages had gone up in price from five thousand to all of twenty-five.

Then Shukhov asked his wife to explain to him how he, who’d never been able to draw in his life, was going to become a painter. And what were those beautiful carpets like? What did they have on them? His wife answered that you’d have to be an utter fool not to be able to paint the patterns; all you had to do was to put the stencil on and paint through the little holes with a brush. There were three sorts of carpets, she wrote: the

“Troika,” an officer of the hussars driving a beautiful troika; the “Reindeer”; and a third with a Persian-style pattern. They had no other designs, but people all over the country were glad to get these and snatch them out 46 | P a g e

of the painters’ hands. Because a real carpet cost not fifty but thousands of roubles.

How Shukhov longed to see just one of those carpets!

During his years in prisons and camps he’d lost the habit of planning for the next day, for a year ahead, for supporting his family. The authorities did his thinking for him about everything–it was somehow easier that way. He still had another two winters, another two summers to serve. But those carpets preyed on his mind. . . .

There was easy money to be made, you see, and made fast. And somehow it seemed a pity to lag behind his fellow villagers. . . . But, frankly, he didn’t want to turn carpet painter. For that a man needed to be free and easy with people, to be brash, to know how to grease a palm or two. And although Shukhov had trodden the earth for forty years, though he’d lost half his teeth and his head was growing bald, he’d never either given or taken a bribe, nor had he learned to do so in camp.

Easy money weighs light in the hand and doesn’t give you the feeling you’ve earned it. There was truth in the old saying: pay short money and get short value. He still had a good pair of hands, capable hands. Surely, when he was out, he’d find work as a plumber, a carpenter, or a repairman.

Only if they deprived him of his civil rights and he couldn’t be taken on anywhere, or if they wouldn’t let him go home, would he turn to those carpets for a spell.

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Meanwhile the column had come to a halt before the gatehouse of the sprawling site on which the power station stood. While the column was still on the move, two of the escort, clad in ankle-length sheepskins, had left their places and wandered across open country to their distant watchtowers. Until all the towers were manned the site was forbidden territory. The head guard, a machine gun slung over his shoulder, advanced to the gatehouse. Smoke, a great cloud of it, belched from its chimney–a civilian watchman sat there all night to prevent anyone stealing lumber or cement.

Far in the distance, on the other side of the site, the sun, red and enormous, was rising in haze, its beams cutting obliquely through the gates, the whole building site, and the fence. Alyosha, who was standing next to Shukhov, gazed at the sun and looked happy, a smile on his lips. What had he to be happy about? His cheeks were sunken, he lived strictly on his rations, he earned nothing. He spent all his Sundays muttering with the other Baptists. They shed the hardships of camp life like water off a duck’s back.

During the march, Shukhov’s face cloth had grown quite wet from his breath. In some spots the frost had caught it and formed an icy crust. He drew it down from his face to his neck and stood with his back to the wind. He’d managed to keep the cold out in most places though his hands were numb in his warn mittens. The toes of his left foot were numb too–that left boot was badly worn. The sole bad been repaired twice.

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The small of his back ached, and so did the rest of it, all the way up to his shoulders. Ached and throbbed.

How could he work?

He looked around, and his eyes fell on the face of the squad leader, who had marched among the last five.

Tiurin was a broad-shouldered man, broad in the face too. He looked morose as he stood there. He had no jokes or smiles for his squad, but he took pains to see they got better rations. He was serving his second term; he was a true son of the GULAG7 and knew camp ways through and through.

In camp the squad leader is everything: a good one will give you a second life; a bad one will put you in your coffin. Shukhov had known Andrei Tiurin since the time they met at Ust-Izhma, though he hadn’t been in his squad then. And when the prisoners who were in under Article 588 were transferred from general camps to

“special” ones, Tiurin had immediately picked him out for his squad. Shukhov had no dealings with the camp commandant or the P.P.D., with foremen or engineers-

-that was the squad leader’s job: he’d protect him with his own chest of steel. In return, Tiurin had only to lift an eyebrow or beckon with a finger–and you ran and did what he wanted. You can cheat anyone you like in camp, but not your squad leader. Then you’ll live.

Shukhov would have liked to ask Tiurin whether they were to work at the same place as the day before or go 7 Central Camp Administration: here used to mean camps in general.

8 For political crimes.

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somewhere else, but he was afraid to interrupt his lofty thoughts. He’d only just averted the danger of the squad being sent to work at the Socialist Way of Life settlement, and now he was probably deiberating over the “percentage”9 on which the squad’s rations for the next five days depended.

Tiurin was heavily pockmarked. He was facing the wind but not a muscle moved–his skin was as tough as the bark of an oak.

In the column the prisoners were clapping their bands and stamping their feet. The wind was nasty. It looked now as if the sentries, known to the prisoners as

“parrots,” were perched in all six watchtowers, but still they weren’t letting the column in. They tormented the life out of you with their vigilance.

Here they are. The head guard came out of the gatehouse with the work checker. They posted themselves on each side of the gate. The gates swung wide open.

“Form fives. First Second. Third . . .” .

The prisoners marched as though on parade, almost in step. To get inside, that was all they wanted– there no one had to teach them what to do.

Just beyond the gatehouse was the office; near it stood the work superintendent, beckoning the squad leaders to turn in there, not that they didn’t bead that way anyway. Der, too, was there, a convict himself but, 9 A paper stating the amount of work done and the percentage of the plan it amounts to.

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a foreman, the swine, who treated his fellow prisoners worse than dogs.

Eight o’clock. Five minutes past (the whistle had just sounded the hour). The authorities were afraid that the prisoners might waste time and scatter into warm corners–and the prisoners had a long day ahead of them, there was time enough for everything. Everyone who steps onto the building site bends to pick up a scrap of firewood here and there–fuel for the stove. And they hoard it away in nooks and crannies.

Tiurin ordered Pavlo to go with him to the office.

Tsezar turned in there too. Tsezar was well off. Two parcels a month. He greased every palm that had to be greased, and worked in the office in a cushy job, as assistant to the rate inspector.

The rest of the squad at once turned off to the side and vanished.

The sun rose red and hazy over the deserted area. At one place the panels of the prefabs lay under the snow; at another a start had been made on the brickwork, and abandoned when no higher than the foundations. Here lay a broken steam shovel, there a dredge, farther on a pile of scrap metal. A network of ditches and trenches crisscrossed the site with a hole or two here and there.

The building of the automobile repair shop was ready for roofing. On a rise stood the power station itself, built up to the second story.

Now there was not a soul in sight. Only the six sentries on their watchtowers were visible-and some 51 | P a g e

people bustling around the office. That moment belonged to the prisoners. The senior work superintendent, it was said, had long been threatening to save time by giving the squads their work assignments the evening before, but for all his efforts they never got around to it–because between the evening and the following morning all their plans turned upside down.

So that moment still belonged to the prisoners.

While the authorities were sorting things out you stuck to the warmest place you could find. Sit down, take a rest, you’ll have time enough to sweat blood. Good if you can get near a stove. Unwrap your foot-rags and warm them a little. Then your feet will keep warm all day. And even without a stove it’s good to sit down.

The 104th went into a big room in the repair shop where the windows had been glazed during the autumn and the 38th were pouring slabs of concrete. Some of the slabs lay in wooden forms, others, with mesh reinforcement, were stood up on end. The ceiling was high, the floor was of bare earth: a cold place it would’ve been if they hadn’t heated it with lots of coal–

not for the sake of the men working there, of course.

but to help the slabs set faster. There was even a thermometer, and on Sundays, if for some reason or other no one was sent from the camp to work there, a civilian kept the stove going.

The 38th, naturally, wouldn’t let any stranger near their stove. Their own men sat around it, drying their 52 | P a g e

footrags. Never mind, we’ll sit here in the corner, it’s not so bad.

Shukhov found a place for the seat of his wadded trousers–where hadn’t they sat?–on the edge of a wooden form, and leaned against the wall. When he did so his coat and jacket tightened, and he felt something sharp pressing against the left side of his chest, near his heart. It was the edge of the hunk of bread in his little inner pocket–that half of his morning ration which he’d taken with him for dinner. He always brought the same amount with him to work and never touched it till dinnertime. But usually he ate the other half at breakfast. This time he hadn’t. But he realized he had gained nothing by economizing–his belly called out to him to eat the bread at once, in the warmth. Dinner was five hours off–and time dragged.

And that nagging pain had now moved down to his legs, which felt quite weak. Oh, if he could only get to the stove!

He laid his mittens on his knees, unbuttoned his coat, untied the tapes of his face cloth, stiff with cold, folded it several times over, and put it away in his pants pocket.

Then he reached for the hunk of bread, wrapped in a piece of clean cloth, and, holding the cloth at chest level so that not a crumb should fall to the ground, began to nibble and chew at the bread. The bread, which he had carried under two garments, had been warmed by his body. The frost hadn’t caught it at all.

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More than once during his life in the camps, Shukhov had recalled the way they used to eat in his village: whole pots full of potatoes, pans of oatmeal, and, in the early days, big chunks of meat And milk enough to bust their guts. That wasn’t the way to eat, he learned in camp. You had to eat with all your mind on the food–

like now, nibbling the bread bit by bit, working the crumbs up into a paste with your tongue and sucking it into your cheeks. And how good it tasted–that soggy black bread! What had he eaten for eight, no, more than eight years? Next to nothing. But how much work had be done? Ah!

So he sat there, occupying himself with his hunk of bread, while near him on the same side of the room sat the rest of the 104th.

Two Estonians, close as brothers, sat on a fiat concrete slab taking turns smoking half a cigarette from the same holder. These Estonians were equally fair, equally tall, equally lean, and had equally long noses and big eyes. They hung onto each other so closely that you’d think one would suffocate unless he breathed the same air as the other. Tiurin never separated them.

They shared their food, they slept in adjacent bunks in the top row. And when they stood in the column, waiting for work to start, or turned in for the night, they went on talking to each other in their quiet, deliberate manner. In fact they weren’t brothers at all.

They first met here in the 104th. One of them, they explained, had been a fisherman on the coast; the other 54 | P a g e

had been taken as a child to Sweden by his parents when the Soviets were established in Estonia. But he’d grown up with a mind of his own and returned to Estonia to complete his education.

Well, it’s said that nationality doesn’t mean anything and that every nation has its bad eggs. But among all the Estonians Shukhov had known he’d never met a bad one.

The prisoners sat around, some on the slabs, some on forms, some straight on the ground. A tongue doesn’t wag in the morning; everyone sat silent, locked in thought. Fetiukov, the jackal, had been collecting cigarette butts (he even fished them out of the spitoons, he wasn’t fussy), and now he was breaking them up and filtering the unsmoked tobacco onto a piece of paper.

Fetiukov had three children at home but when he was sentenced they’d disclaimed him and his wife had married again. So he got no help from anywhere.

Buinovsky, who kept stealing glances at him, finally barked:

“Hey, you, what do you think you’re doing? Picking up all kinds of diseases? You’ll get a syphilitic lip that way. Stop it.”

The captain was used to giving orders. He spoke to everyone as if in command.

But Fetiukov didn’t give a damn for him–the captain got no parcels either. And with a malicious grin on his drooling lips he replied:

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“You wait, captain. When you’ve been in for eight years you’ll be picking them up yourself. We’ve seen bigger men than you in the camp. . . .”

Fetiukov was judging by his own standards. Perhaps the captain would stand up to camp life.

“What? What?” asked Senka Klevshin, missing the point. Senka was deaf and thought they were talking about Buinovsky’s bad luck during the frisking. “You shouldn’t have shown your pride so much,” he said, shaking his head in commiseration. “It could all have blown over.”

Senka was a quiet, luckless fellow. One of his eardrums bad been smashed in ’41. Then he was captured; he escaped, was recaptured, and was sent to Buchenwald. There he evaded death by a miracle and now he was serving his time here quietly. If you show your pride too much, he said, you’re lost.

There was truth in that. Better to growl and submit.

If you were stubborn they broke you.

Alyosha sat silent, his face buried in his hands.

Praying.

Shukhov ate his bread down to his very fingers, keeping only a little bit of bare crust, the half-moon-shaped top of the loaf–because no spoon is as good for scraping a bowl of cereal clean as a bread crust. He wrapped the crust In his cloth again and slipped it into his inside pocket for dinner, buttoned himself up against the cold, and prepared for work. Let them send him out 56 | P a g e

now! Though, of course, it would be better if they’d wait a bit longer.

The 38th stood up and scattered–some to the concrete mixer, some to fetch water, some to the mesh reinforcements.

But neither Pavlo nor Tiurin came back to their squad. And although the 104th had been sitting there barely twenty minutes and the working day–curtailed because it was winter–didn’t end till six, everyone felt already they’d had a rare stroke of luck–now evening didn’t seem so far off.

“Damn it, it’s a long time since we had a snow storm,” said Kilgas, a plump, red-faced Lett, gesturing.

“Not one snowstorm all winter. What sort of winter do you call this?”

“Yes . . . .. a snowstorm . . . . . a snowstorm,” the squad sighed in response.

When there was a snowstorm in those parts no one was taken out to work–they were afraid of letting the prisoners leave the barracks. They could get lost between the barrack room and the mess hall if you didn’t put up a guide rope. No one would care if a prisoner froze to death, but what if he tried to escape?

There had been instances. During the storms the snow was as fine as dust but the drifts were as firm as ice.

Prisoners had escaped over them when they topped the barbed wire. True, they hadn’t got far.

Come to think of it, a snowstorm was no use to anyone. The prisoners sat locked in; the coal was 57 | P a g e

delivered late and all the warmth was blown out of the barracks. Flour didn’t reach the camp, so there was no bread; and more often than not there was no hot food either. And as long as the storm lasted–three days, four days, even a week–those days were counted as holidays and had to be made up for by work on Sunday.

All the same, the prisoners loved snowstorms and prayed for them. Whenever the wind rose a little, every face was turned up to the sky. Let the stuff come! The more the merrier.

Snow, they meant. With only a ground wind, it never really got going.

Someone edged up to the stove of the 38th, only to be ousted.

Just then Tiurin walked in. He looked gloomy. His squad understood that there was something to be done, and quickly.

“H’m,” said Tiurin, looking around. “All present, hundred and fourth?”

He didn’t verify or count them because none of Tiurin’s men could have gone anywhere. Without wasting time he gave his men their assignments. The two Estonians, Senka, and Gopchik were sent to pick up a big wooden box for mixing mortar nearby and carry it to the power station. They all immediately knew that they were being transferred to the half-completed building where work had been halted in late autumn.

The other men were sent with Pavlo to get tools. Four were ordered to shovel snow near the power station and 58 | P a g e

the entrance to the machine room, and inside and on the ramps; A couple of men were sent to light the stove in the machine room, using coal and such lumber as they could swipe and chop up. Another was to drag cement there on a sled. Two were sent to fetch water, two for sand, and yet another to sweep the snow off the sand and break it up with a crowbar.

The only two left without assignments were Shukhov and Kilgas, the leading workers of the squad. Calling them over, Tiurin said:

“Well, look here, boys–” he was no older than they were but he had the habit of addressing them like that–

“after dinner you’ll be laying cement blocks on the second-story walls, over there where the sixth stopped work last autumn. Now we have to figure how to make the machine room warmer. It has three big windows and the first thing to do is to board them up somehow. I’ll give you people to help, but you must figure out what to board them up with. We’re going to use the machine room for mixing the mortar, and for warming ourselves too. Unless we keep warm we’ll freeze like dogs, understand?”

He’d have said more, maybe, but up came Gopchik, a Ukrainian lad, pink as a suckling pig, to complain that the other squad wouldn’t give them the box. There was a scrap going on over it. So off went Tiurin.

Difficult as it was to start working in such cold, the important thing was to get going.

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Shukhov and Kilgas exchanged looks. They’d worked as a team more than once as carpenter and mason, and had come to respect one another.

It was no easy matter to find something to board up those windows with in the bare expanse of snow. But Kilgas said:

“Vanya, I know a little place over there where those prefabs are going up, with a fine roil of roofing felt. I put it aside with my own hands. Let’s go and scrounge it.”

Kilgas was a Lett but he spoke Russian like a native.

There’d been a settlement of Old Believers near his village and he’d learned Russian from childhood. He’d been in the camp only two years but already he understood everything: if you don’t use your teeth you get nothing. His name was Johann and Shukhov called him Vanya.

They decided to go for the roll, but first Shukhov ran over to where a new wing of the repair shops was under construction. He had to get his trowel. For a mason a trowel is a serious matter–if it’s light and easy to handle.

But there was a rule that wherever you worked you had to turn in every evening the tools you’d been issued that morning; and which tool you got the next day was a matter of chance. One evening, though, Shukhov had fooled the man in the tool store and pocketed the best trowel; and now he kept it hidden in a different place every evening, and every morning, if he was put to laying blocks, he recovered it. If the 104th had been sent 60 | P a g e

to the ‘Socialist Way of Life’ settlement that morning, Shukhov would of course have been without a trowel again. But now he had only to push aside a brick, dig his fingers into the chink–and presto! there it was.

Shukhov and Kilgas left the repair shops and walked over toward the prefabs. Their breath formed thick clouds of vapour. The sun was now some way above the horizon but it cast no rays, as in a fog. On each side of it rose pillars of light.

“Like poles, eh?” Shukhov said with a nod.

“It’s not poles we have to worry about,” said Kilgas casually, “so long as they don’t put any barbed wire between them.”

He never spoke without making a joke, that Kilgas, and was popular with the whole squad for it. And what a reputation he had already won for himself among the Letts in the camp! Of course, it was true he ate properly–he received two food parcels a month–and looked as ruddy as if he wasn’t in camp at all. You’d make jokes if you were in his shoes!

This construction site covered an immense area. It took quite a long time to cross it. On their way they ran into men from the 82nd. Again they’d been given the job of chopping out holes in the ground. The holes were small enough–one-and-a-half feet by one-and-a-half feet and about the same in depth–but the ground, stone-hard even in summer, was now in the grip of frost. Just try and gnaw it! They went for it with picks–the picks slipped, scattering showers of sparks, but not a bit of 61 | P a g e

earth was dislodged. The men stood there, one to a hole, and looked about them–nowhere to warm up, they were forbidden to budge a step–so back to the pick. The only way to keep warm.

Shukhov recognized one of them, a fellow from Viatka.

“Listen,” he advised him. “You’d do better to light a fire over each hole. The ground would thaw out then.”

“It’s forbidden,” said the man. “They don’t give us any firewood.”

“Scrounge some then.”

Kilgas merely spat.

“How do you figure it, Vanya? If the authorities had any guts do you think they’d have men pounding away at the ground with pickaxes in a frost like this?”

He muttered a few indistinguishable oaths and fell silent. You don’t talk much in such cold. They walked on and on till they reached the spot where the panels of the pref abs lay buried under snow.

Shukhov liked to work with Kilgas. The only bad thing about him was that he didn’t smoke and there was never any tobacco in his parcels.

Kilgas was right: together they lifted a couple of planks and there lay the roll of roofing felt.

They lugged it out. Now, how were they going to carry it? They’d be spotted from the watchtowers, but that didn’t matter: the “parrot’s” only concern was that the prisoners shouldn’t escape. Inside, you could chop up all those panels into firewood for all they cared. Nor 62 | P a g e

would it matter if they happened to meet one of the guards. He’d be looking about like the others to see what he could scrounge. As for the prisoners, they didn’t give a damn for those prefabs, and neither did the squad leaders. The only people who kept an eye on them were the superintendent, who was a civilian, that bastard Der, and the lanky Shkuropatenko, a mere goose egg, a trusty who’d been given the temporary job of guarding the pref abs from any stealing by the prisoners.

Yes, it was Shkuropatenko who was most likely to spot them on the open ground.

“Look here, Vanya,” said Shukhov, “‘we mustn’t carry it lengthwise. Let’s take it up on end with our arms around it. It’ll be easy to carry and our bodies will hide it. They won’t spot it from a distance.”

It was a good idea. To carry the roll lengthwise would have been awkward, so they held it upright. In between them and set off. From a distance it would look as if there were three of them, rather close to one another.

“But when Der notices the felt on the windows he’ll guess where it came from,” said Shukhov.

“What’s it got to do with us?” asked Kilgas, in surprise. “We’ll say it was there before. Were we to pull it down or what?”

That was true.

Shukhov’s fingers were numb with cold under his worn mittens. He’d lost all sense of touch. But his left boot was holding–that was the main thing. The 63 | P a g e

numbness would go out of his fingers when he started to work.

They crossed the stretch of virgin snow and reached a sled trail running from the tool store to the power station. Their men must have brought the cement along there.

The power station stood on a rise at the edge of the site. No one had been near the place for weeks and the approaches to it lay under a smooth blanket of snow; the sled tracks, and the fresh trails that had been left by the deep footsteps of the 104th, stood out boldly. The men were already clearing away the snow from around the building with wooden shovels and making a road for the trucks to drive up on.

It would have been good if the mechanical lift in the power station had been. In order. But the motor had burned out, and no one had bothered to repair it. This meant that everything would have to be carried by hand to the second story–the mortar and the blocks.

For two months the unfinished structure had stood in the snow like a grey skeleton, just as it had been left.

And now the 104th had arrived. What was it that kept their spirits up? Empty bellies, fastened tight with belts of rope! A splitting frost! Not a warm corner, not a spark of fire! But the 104th had arrived–and life had come back to the building.

Right at the entrance to the machine room the trough for mixing mortar fell apart. It was a makeshift affair, and Shukhov hadn’t expected it to last the journey 64 | P a g e

in one piece. Tiurin swore at his men just for form’s sake, for he saw that no one was to blame. At that moment Kilgas and Shukhov turned up with their roll of roofing felt. Tiurin was delighted, and at once worked out a new arrangement: Shukhov was put to fixing the stovepipe, so that a fire could be quickly kindled; Kilgas was to repair the mixing trough, with the two Estonians to help him; and Senka was given an ax to chop long laths with–felt could then be tacked to them, two widths for each window. Where were the laths to come from? Tiurin looked around. Everybody looked around.

There was only one solution: to remove a couple of planks that served as a sort of handrail on the ramp leading up to the second story. You’d have to keep your eyes peeled going up and down; otherwise you’d be over the edge. But where else were the laths to come from?

Why, you might wonder, should prisoners wear themselves out, working hard, ten years on end, in the camps? You’d think they’d say: No thank you, and that’s that. We’ll drag ourselves through the day till evening, and then the night is ours.

But that didn’t work. To outsmart you they thought up work squads–but not squads like the ones outside the camps, where every man is paid his separate wage.

Everything was so arranged in the camp that the prisoners egged one another on. It was like this: either you all got a bit extra or you all croaked. You’re loafing, you bastard–do you think I’m willing to go hungry just because of you? Put your guts into it, slob.

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And if a situation like this one turned up there was all the more reason for resisting any temptation to slack.

Regardless, you put your back into the work. For unless you could manage to provide yourself with the means of warming up, you and everyone else would give out on the spot.

Pavlo brought the tools. Now use them. A few lengths of stovepipe, too. True, there were no tinsmith’s tools, but there was a little hammer and a light axe. One could manage.

Shukhov clapped his mittens together, joined up the lengths, and hammered the ends into the joints. He clapped his hands together again and repeated his hammering. (He’d hidden his trowel in a nearby crack in the wall. Although he was among his own men, one of them might swap it for his own. That applied to Kilgas too.)

And then every thought was swept out of his head.

All his memories and worries faded. He had only one idea–to fix the bend in the stovepipe and hang it up to prevent it smoking, He sent Gopchik for a length of wire–hang up the pipe near the window with it; that would be best.

In the corner there was another stove, a squat one with a brick chimney. It had an iron plate on top that grew red-hot, and sand was to be thawed and dried on it. This stove had already been lit, and the captain and Fetiukov were bringing up barrows of sand. You don’t have to be very bright to carry a handbarrow. So the 66 | P a g e

squad leader gave such work to people who’d been in positions of authority. Fetiukov had been a bigshot in some office, with a car at his disposal.

At first Fetiukov had spat on the captain, bawled at him. But one punch on the jaw was enough. They got on all right after that.

The men bringing in the sand were edging over to the stove to warm up, but Tiurin drove them off.

“Look out, one of you is going to catch it in a hurry.

Wait till we’ve got the place fixed up.”

You’ve only to show a whip to a beaten dog. The frost was severe, but not as severe as the squad leader.

The men scattered and went back to their jobs.

And Shukhov heard Tiurin say to Pavlo:

“Stay here and keep them at it. I’m going to hand in the work report.”

More depended on the work report than on the work itself. A clever squad leader was one who concentrated on the work report. That was what kept the men fed.

He had to prove that work which hadn’t been done had been done, to turn jobs that were rated low into ones that were rated high. For this a squad leader had to have his head screwed on, and to be on the right side of the inspectors. Their palms had to be greased, too. But who benefited, then, from all those work reports? Let’s be clear about it. The camp. The camp got thousands of extra rubles from the building organization and so could give higher bonuses to its guard-lieutenants, such as to Volkovoi for using his whip. And you? You got an extra 67 | P a g e

six ounces of bread for your supper. A couple of ounces ruled your life.

Two buckets of water were carried in, but they had frozen on the way. Palvo decided that there was no sense in doing it like this. Quicker to melt snow. They stood the buckets on the stove.

Gopchik brought along some new aluminum wire, used for electric leads.

“Ivan Denisovich,” he said, as be turned it over to Shukhov, “It’s good for making spoons. Teach me how to cast them.”

Shukhov was fond of the kid. His own son had died young, and the two daughters he had left at home were grown up. Gopchik had been arrested for taking milk to the forest for Bendera’s men10, and had been given an adult’s term of imprisonment. He was like a puppy and he fawned on everyone. But he’d already learned cunning: he ate the contents of his food packages alone, sometimes during the night.

After all, you couldn’t feed everyone.

They broke off a length of wire for the spoons and hid it in a corner. Shukhov knocked together a couple of planks into a stepladder and sent Gopchik up to hang the stovepipe. The boy, as nimble as a squirrel, climbed up into the beams, pounded in a nail or two, slipped the wire around them, and passed it under the pipe.

Shukhov didn’t begrudge him his energy; he made another bend in the pipe close to the end. Though there 10 General in the Soviet Army who betrayed his country in World War II.

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was little wind that day, there might be plenty tomorrow, and this bend would prevent the pipe from smoking. They mustn’t forget that it was for themselves that they were fixing the stove.

Meanwhile, Senka had finished making the laths, and Gopchik was again given the job of nailing them up. The little devil crawled about up there, shouting down to the men.

The sun had risen higher, dispersing the haze. The two bright columns had gone. It was reddish inside the room. And now someone had got the stove going with the stolen wood. Made you feel a bit more cheerful.

“In January the sun warmed the flanks of the cow,”

Shukhov chanted.

Kilgas finished nailing the mortar trough together and, giving it an extra smash with his axe, shouted:

“Listen, Pavlo, I won’t take less than a hundred roubles from Tiurin for this job.”

“You get three ounces,” said Pavlo with a laugh.

“The prosecutor will make up the difference,”

shouted Gopchik from above.

“Stop that,” Shukhov shouted, “stop.” That wasn’t the way to cut the roofing felt.

He showed them how to do it.

The men crept up to the stove, only to be chased away by Pavlo. He gave Kilgas some wood to make hods, for carrying the mortar up to the second story. He put on a couple more men to bring up the sand, others to sweep the snow off the scaffolding where the blocks 69 | P a g e

were to be put, and another to take the hot sand off the top of the stove and throw it into the mortar trough.

A truck engine snorted outside. They were beginning to deliver the blocks. The first truck had got through.

Pavlo hurried out and waved on the driver to where the blocks were to be dumped.

They put up one thickness of roofing felt, then a second. What protection could you expect from it? It was paper, just paper. All the same, it looked like a kind of solid wall. The room became darker, and this brightened the stove up.

Alyosha brought in some coal. Some of them shouted to tip it onto the stove, others not to. They wanted to warm up with the flames. Alyosha hesitated, not knowing whom to obey.

Fetiukov had found himself a cozy corner near the stove and, the fool, was holding his boots right up to the flames. The captain took him by the scruff of the neck and lugged him off to the barrow.

“You haul sand, you bastard.”

The captain might still have been on board ship–if you were told to do something you did it. He had grown haggard during the past month, but he kept his bearing.

In the end, all three windows were covered. Now the only light came through the door. And with it came the cold. So Pavlo had the upper half of the doorway boarded up but the lower left free, so that the men, by stooping, could get through it.

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Meanwhile three trucks had driven up and dumped their loads of blocks. Now the problem was how to get the blocks up without the mechanical lift.

“Masons, let’s go and look around,” Pavlo called.

It was a job to be respected. Shukhov and Kilgas went up with Pavlo. The ramp was narrow enough anyhow, but now that Senka had robbed it of its rails you had to make sure you pressed close to the wall if you weren’t going to fall off it. And still worse–the snow had frozen to the treads and rounded them; they offered no grip to your feet. How would they bring up the mortar?

They looked all around to find where the blocks should be laid. The men Pavlo had sent up were shovelling the snow from the top of the wails. Here was the place. You had to take an axe to the ice on the old workings, and then sweep them clean.

They figured out how best to bring up the blocks.

They looked down. They decided that, rather than carry them up the ramp, four men would be posted down below to heave the blocks up to that platform over there, that another couple would move them on, and that two more would hand them up to the second story.

That would be quicker than carrying them up the ramp.

The wind wasn’t strong but you felt it. It would pierce them all right when they started laying. They’d have to keep behind the bit of wall that the old crew had begun on; it would give them some shelter. Not too bad–it’d be warmer that way.

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Shukhov looked up at the sky and gasped–the sun had climbed almost to the dinner hour. Wonder of wonders! How time flew when you were working! That was something he’d often noticed. The days rolled by in the camp–they were over before you could say “knife.”

But the years, they never rolled by; they never moved by a second.

When they went down, they found that everyone had settled around the stove except the captain and Fetiukov, who were still hauling sand. Pavlo flew into a rage and sent eight men out at once to move blocks, two to pour cement into the box and mix it with sand, another for water, another for coal. But Kilgas gave his own orders:

“Well, men, we must finish with the barrows.”

“Shall I give ’em a hand?” Shukhov volunteered.

“Yes, help them out,” said Pavlo with a nod.

Just then they brought in a tank for melting snow.

Someone had told the men that it was already noon.

Shukhov confirmed this.

“The sun’s already reached its peak,” he announced.

“If it’s reached its peak,” said the captain reflectively,

“it’s one o’clock, not noon.”

“What do you mean?” Shukhov demurred. “Every old-timer knows that the sun stands highest at dinnertime.”

“Old-timers, maybe,” snapped the captain. “But since their day a new decree has been passed, and now the sun stands highest at one.”

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“Who passed that decree?”

“Soviet power.”

The captain went out with a barrow. Anyway, Shukhov wouldn’t have argued with him. Mean to say that the sun up in the sky must bow down to decrees, too?

The sound of hammering continued as the men knocked together four hods.

“All right, sit down awhile and warm yourselves,”

said Pavlo to the two masons. “And you too, Senka. You can join them up there after dinner. Sit down.”

So now they had a right to sit by the stove. Anyway they couldn’t start laying the blocks before dinner and there was no point in carrying the mortar up there–it would freeze.

The coals were gradually glowing red-hot and throwing out a steady heat. But you felt it only when you were near them–everywhere else the shop was as cold as ever.

They took off their mittens. All four men held their hands up to the stove.

But you never put your feet near the flame if you’re wearing boots. You have to remember that If they’re leather boots the leather cracks, and if they’re valenki the felt becomes sodden and begins to steam and you don’t feel any warmer. And if you hold them still nearer the flame then they scorch, and you’ll have to drag along till the spring with a hole in your boot–getting another pair can’t be counted on.

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“What does Shukhov care?” Kilgas said. “Shukhov has one foot almost home.”

“The bare one,” said someone. They laughed (Shukhov had taken his mended boot off and was warming his footrags).

“Shukhov’s term’s nearly up.”

They’d given Kilgas twenty-five years. Earlier there’d been a spell when people were lucky: everyone to a man got ten years. But from ’49 onward the standard sentence was twenty-five, Irrespective. A man can survive ten years–but twenty-five, who can get through alive?

Shukhov rather enjoyed having everybody poke a finger at him as if to say: Look at him, his term’s nearly up. But he had his doubts about it. Those zeks who finished their time during the war had all been “retained pending special instructions” and had been released only in ’46. Even those serving three-year sentences were kept for another five. The law can be stood on its head.

When your ten years are up they can say, “Here’s another ten for you.” Or exile you.

Yet there were times when you thought about it and you almost choked with excitement. Yes, your term really _is_ coming to an end; the spool is unwinding. . .

. Good God! To step out to freedom, just walk out on your own two feet.

But it wasn’t right for an old-timer to talk about it aloud, and Shukhov said to Kilgas:

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“Don’t you worry about those twenty-five years of yours. It’s not a fact you’ll be in all that time. But that I’ve been in eight full years–now that is a fact.”

Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there’s no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you’re going to get out.

According to his dossier, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov had been sentenced for high treason. He had testified to it himself. Yes, he’d surrendered to the Germans with the intention of betraying his country and he’d returned from captivity to carry out a mission for German intelligence. What sort of mission neither Shukhov nor the interrogator could say. So it had been left at that–a mission.

Shukhov had figured it all out. If he didn’t sign he’d be shot If he signed he’d still get a chance to live. So he signed.

But what really happened was this. In February 1942

their whole army was surrounded on the northwest front No food was parachuted to them. There were no planes. Things got so bad that they were scraping the hooves of dead horses–the horn could be soaked In water and eaten. Their ammunition was gone. So the Germans rounded them up in the forest, a few at a time.

Shukhov was In one of these groups, and remained in German captivity for a day or two. Then five of them managed to escape. They stole through the forest and marshes again, and, by a miracle, reached their own lines. A machine gunner shot two of them on the spot, a 75 | P a g e

third died of his wounds, but two got through. Had they been wiser they’d have said they’d been wandering in the forest, and then nothing would have happened. But they told the truth: they said they were escaped POW’s.

POW’s, you fuckers! If all five of them had got through, their statements could have been found to tally and they might have been believed. But with two it was hopeless.

You’ve put your damned heads together and cooked up that escape story, they were told.

Deaf though he was, Senka caught on that they were talking about escaping from the Germans, and said in a loud voice:

“Three times I escaped, and three times they caught me.”

Senka, who had suffered so much, was usually silent: he didn’t hear what people said and didn’t mix in their conversation. Little was known about him–only that he’d been in Buchenwald, where he’d worked with the underground and smuggled in arms for the mutiny; and how the Germans had punished him by tying his wrists behind his back, hanging him up by them, and whipping him.

“You’ve been in for eight years, Vanya,” Kilgas argued. “But what camps? Not ‘specials’. You had broads to sleep with. You didn’t wear numbers. But try and spend eight years in a ‘special’–doing hard labor. No one’s come out of a ‘special’ alive.”

“Broads! Boards you mean, not broads.”

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Shukhov stared at the coals in the stove and remeinbered his seven years in the North. And how he worked for three years hauling logs–for packing cases and railroad ties.

The flames in the campfires had danced up there, too–at timber-felling during the night. Their chief made it a rule that any squad that had failed to meet its quota had to stay. In the forest after dark.

They’d dragged themselves back to the camp in the early hours but had to be in the forest again next morning.

“N-no, brothers, . . . I think we have a quieter life here,” he said with his lisp. “Here, when the shift’s over, we go back to the camp whether our job’s done or not.

That’s a law. And bread–three ounces more, at least, than up there. Here a man can live. All right, it’s a

‘special’ camp. So what? Does it bother you to wear a number? They don’t weigh anything, those numbers.”

“A quieter life, do you call it?” Fetiukov hissed (the dinner break was getting near and everyone was huddling around the stove). “Men having their throats cut, in their bunks! And you call it quieter!”

“Not men–squealers.” Pavlo raised a threatening finger at Fetiukov.

True enough, something new had started up. Two men, known to be squealers, had been found in their bunks one morning with their throats cut; and, a few days later, the same thing had happened to an innocent zek–someone must have gone to the wrong bunk. And 77 | P a g e

one squealer had run off on his own to the head of the guardhouse and they’d put him inside for safety.

Amazing. . . . Nothing like that had happened in the ordinary camps. Nor here, either, up till then.

Suddenly the whistle blew. It never began at full blast. It started hoarsely, as though clearing its throat.

Midday. Lay down tools. The dinner break.

Damn it, they’d waited too long. They should have gone off to the canteen long ago and taken their places in the line. There were eleven squads at work at the power station and there was room in the canteen for only two at a time.

Tiurin was still missing. Pavlo cast a rapid glance around the shop and said:

“Shukhov and Gopchik, you come with me. Kilgas, as soon as I send Gopchik to you, bring the whole squad along.”

Others took their places at the stove the moment any were vacated. The men surrounded it as though it was a pretty broad. They all crept up to embrace it.

“Come on, don’t spend all night with her!” others shouted. “Let’s smoke.”

They looked at one another to see who was going to light up. No one did. Either they had no tobacco or they were holding onto it, unwilling to let it be seen.

Shukhov went out with Pavlo. Gopchik loped behind like a hare.

“It’s gotten warmer,” Shukhov said at once. “Zero, no lower. Fine for laying the blocks.”

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They stole a glance at those blocks. The men had already thrown a lot of them up to the platform and quite a number had been shifted to the floor above.

Screwing up his eyes at the sun, Shukhov checked its position. He was thinking of the captain’s “decree.”

Out in the open the wind was still having its way and the cold was still fierce. Don’t forget, it was telling them, this is January.

The zeks’ canteen was no more than a shanty made of boards nailed together around a stove, with some rusty metal strips over the cracks. Inside, it was partitioned into a kitchen and an eating room. In neither was there a wood floor; it was pitted with the lumps and hollows that the men’s feet had trodden into it. All that the kitchen consisted of was a square stove with a soup kettle stuck on top.

The kitchen was run by two men–a cook and a sanitation inspector. Every morning as he left the camp the cook drew an issue of grits from the main kitchen: about one-and-a-half ounces a head, probably. That made two pounds a squad, a little less than a pood11 for the whole column. The cook didn’t much like carrying the sack of grits the two miles himself, so he got a

“helper” to carry it for him–better to give the “helper”

an extra portion at the zeks’ expense than burden his own back. There was water to be carried, too, and firewood for the stove, and these were jobs the cook didn’t much like either; so he found zeks to do them 11 Thirty-six pounds.

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instead, for extra helpings at others’ expense. What did it matter to him?

Then there was a rule that food must be eaten in the canteen; but the bowls couldn’t be left there overnight, they’d have been swiped by civilians, so about fifty, not more, had to be brought in, and quickly washed after use and turned over to the next diners (an extra helping for the man who carried the bowls). To make sure that no one took bowls from the canteen, a man had to be posted at the door; but however careful he might be people took them just the same, either by distracting his attention or talking him into it. So someone else had to go over the whole site to collect the dirty bowls and bring them back to the kitchen. And he got an extra helping. And many others got one too.

All the cook himself did was this: he poured the grits Into the pot, adding salt; he divided the fat between the pot and himself (good fat didn’t reach the zeks, and the rancid all went into the soup kettle, so when there was an issue of rancid fat from the warehouse, the zeks welcomed it as an extra). Another thing he did: he stirred the kasha *[* Oatmeal.] when it was boiling.

The sanitation inspector had even less to do–he sat and watched: but when the oatmeal was ready he got his helping, as much as his belly would hold. And the cook too. Then the duty-squad leader arrived–the squad was changed every day–to have a taste and decide whether the stuff was good enough for the workers. He received a double portion.

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The whistle sounded again. The squad leaders at once lined up, and the cook handed them bowls through the serving window. In the bottom of the bowls lay some oatmeal, how much you didn’t ask, or try to judge by the weight. All you got if you opened your mouth was a bunch of swearwords.

The steppe was barren and windswept, with a dry wind in the summer and a freezing one in winter.

Nothing could ever grow in that steppe, less than nothing behind four bathers of barbed wire. Bread comes only from the bread cutter; oats are threshed only in the warehouse. And however much blood you sweat at work, however much you grovel on your belly, you’ll force no food out of that earth; you’ll get no more than the damned authorities give you. And you don’t even get that–because of the cook and the “help” and all the other trusties in soft jobs. They rob you here, they rob you In camp, they rob you even earlier–in the warehouse. And those who do the robbing don’t swing picks. But you–you swing a pick and take what they give you. And get away from the serving window!

Pavlo and Shukhov, with Gopchik bringing up the rear, walked into the canteen. The men stood there so close to one another that you couldn’t see either tables or benches. Some ate sitting down but most stood. The men of the 82nd, who’d been digging those holes half a day without a chance of getting warm, had been the first to get in after the whistle; now even after they’d finished eating they didn’t leave. Where else could they warm 81 | P a g e

up? The swearing fell off them like water off a duck’s back–it was so much more comfortable here than inthe cold. Pavlo and Shukhov elbowed their way in. They’d arrived at a good moment: one squad was being served, another was awaiting its turn, and there was only one deputy squad leader near the window. So, they were well ahead of the rest.

“Bowls, bowls,” the cook shouted through the window and people huthedly handed them over.

Shukhov was collecting another lot and turning them in, not to get extra oatmeal but to get what was coming to him quicker.

Behind the partition some “helpers” were already washing bowls–for extra oatmeal.

The cook began to serve the deputy squad leaders who stood ahead of Pavlo in the line.

“Gopchik,” Pavlo shouted, over the heads of the men behind him.

“Here I am,” came Gopchik’s thin goatlike bleat from the door.

“Call the squad.”

Off he went.

The main thing today was that the oatmeal was good-

-real oatmeal, the best sort. It wasn’t often they had it.

More often they got _magara_ twice a day. But real oatmeal is filling, it’s good.

How often had Shukhov in his youth fed oats to horses! Never had it occurred to him that there’d come a 82 | P a g e

time when his whole soul would yearn for a handful of them.

“Bowls, bowls,” shouted the cook.

Now the 104th was in line. That squad leader’s deputy, up ahead, got his double helping and bounced away from the window.

This extra helping, too, was at the zeks’ expense–but no one objected. The cook gave double helpings to all the squad leaders, and they either ate the extra helping themselves or gave it to their deputies. Tiurin gave his to Pavlo.

Shukhov’s job now was to wedge himself in behind a table, oust two loafers, politely ask another prisoner to move, and clear a little space in front of him–for twelve bowls (to stand close together), with a second row of six, and two more on top. Next he had to take the bowls from Pavlo, repeating the number as he did so and keeping his eyes peeled–in case some outsider should grab a bowl from the table. And he had to see he wasn’t bumped by someone’s elbow so as to upset a bowl–right beside him people were leaving the table, stepping over the benches or squeezing in to eat. Yes, you had to keep your eyes peeled–was that fellow eating out of his own bowl? Or had he wormed his way up to one of the 104th’s?

“Two, four, six,” the cook counted at the window.

He handed out the bowls two at a time–it was easier for him that way; otherwise he might count wrong.

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“Two, four, six,” Pavlo repeated quietly to himself, there at the window, in Ukrainian, and at once gave the bowls, in pairs, to Shukhov, who put them on the table.

Shukhov didn’t repeat the numbers aloud–but he counted more sharply than anyone.

“Eight, ten.”

Why wasn’t Gopchik bringing in the squad?

“Twelve, fourteen,” the counting continued.

The kitchen ran out of bowls. Shukhov had a clear view through the window past Pavlo’s head and shoulders. The cook put two bowls down on the counter and, keeping his hands on them, paused as though thinking. Must be bawling out the dishwashers.

But just then another bunch of dirty bowls was pushed onto the counter. The cook let go of the two clean ones he’d filled and pushed back the pile of dirty ones.

Shukhov left the fourteen bowls he’d already stacked on the table, straddled a bench, took the two filled ones from the counter, and said quietly to Pavlo rather than to the cook:

“Fourteen.”

“Stop! Where are you taking those bowls?” shouted the cook.

“He’s from our squad,” Pavlo confirmed.

“ “Our squad”, but he’s mixed up the count.”

“Fourteen,” Pavlo said with a shrug. Himself, he wouldn’t have swiped the extra bowls, for as deputy squad leader he had to maintain his dignity; but now he 84 | P a g e

was simply repeating what Shukhov had said–he could always blame him for the mistake.

“I’ve already counted fourteen,” the cook expostulated.

“So you did, but you didn’t pass them out. You kept your hands on them,” Shukhov shouted. “Come and count for yourself if you don’t believe us. Look, they’re all here on the table.”

As he spoke he’d noticed the two Estonians pushing through to him, and he shoved the two bowls into their hands as they passed. And he’d managed to get back to the table to see that all the bowls were in place–the next table hadn’t swiped any, though they’d had plenty of opportunity to do so.

The cook’s red face loomed large in the window.

“Where are those bowls?” he asked sternly.

“Here they are, at your service,” yelled Shukhov.

“Move along. scum, you’re spoiling his view,” he said to someone, giving him a shove. “Here they are, the pair of them.” He picked up two bowls from the second row.

“Here we have three rows of four, all nice and neat.

Count them.”

“Hasn’t your squad come?” the cook asked, looking suspiciously around the small segment of the canteen he could see through the window–it had been kept narrow to prevent anyone looking into the kitchen and seeing how much was left in the kettle.

“No, none of ’em are here yet,” said Pavlo, shaking his head.

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“Then why the hell are you taking bowls when the squad’s not here?”

“Here they come,” yelled Shukhov.

And everyone heard the peremptory shouts of the captain at the door: “Why are you hanging around here?

he yelled, in his best quarter-deck voice. “If you’ve eaten, beat it and let others in.”

The cook muttered something through the serving window. Then he drew himself up, and his hands could again be seen giving out the bowls:

“Sixteen, eighteen.”

Then he ladled the last portion, a double helping:

“Twenty-three. That’s all. Next squad.”

The men of the 104th pushed through. Pavlo handed them bowls, passing them over the heads of the prisoners sitting at the second table.

In summer five could have sat on a bench, but now, as everyone was wearing thick clothes, four could barely fit in, and even they found it awkward to move their spoons.

Figuring that of the two bowls of oatmeal that had been swiped one at least would be his, Shukhov lost no time in applying himself to his first bowl. He drew his right knee up to his stomach, pulled his spoon (“Ust-Izhma, 1944”) from under his boot top, removed his hat, put it in his left armpit, and ran his spoon under the edge of the kasha.

This is a moment that demands complete concentration, as you remove some of the scanty kasha 86 | P a g e

from the bottom of the bowl, put it carefully into your mouth, and swirl it around there with your tongue. But Shukhov had to hurry, to show Pavlo he’d already finished and was waiting to be offered a second bowl.

And there was Fetiukov to be dealt with. He had come into the canteen with the two Estonians and had witnessed the whole affair of the two extra bowls. Now he stood there, straight in front of Pavlo, eying the four undistributed helpings as if to say that he ought to be given at least half a helping too.

Young swarthy Pavlo, however, went calmly on with his double portion, and there was no way of telling whether he noticed anyone standing there, or even remembered those extra bowls at all.

Shukhov finished his kasha. He had promised his belly two helpings, so one wasn’t enough now to give him the full feeling he normally got from real oatmeal kasha.

He groped in his inside pocket for the scrap of clean rag, found the unfrozen crescent of crust, and meticulously used it to wipe off the last remnant of mush from the bottom of the bowl and any that still clung to the brim. Then he licked the crust clean; then repeated the whole process. The bowl looked now as if it had been washed, with a dull film, nothing more, on the inside surface. He handed it over his shoulder to one of the dish-collectors and sat on, without replacing his hat.

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Though it was Shukhov who had swindled the extra bowls, it was for Pavlo to distribute them.

Pavlo prolonged the agony a little longer while emptying his own bowl. He didn’t lick it clean; he merely gave a lick to his spoon, tucked it away, and crossed himself. And then, very lightly, he touched–

there wasn’t room to move–two of the remaining four bowls. It meant he was giving them to Shukhov.

“Ivan Denisovich, take one for yourself and give the other to Tsezar.”

Shukhov knew one of the bowls bad to be taken to the office of Tsezar, who would never lower himself by going to the canteen or, for that matter, to the mess hall in camp. He knew it, but, all the same, when Pavlo touched the bowls his heart contracted. Could Pavlo be giving him both? And now, as Pavlo spoke, his heartbeat went back to normal.

Without losing any time be leaned over his lawful spoil and began to eat with deliberation, Insensitive to the thumps on his back that the zeks in the next squad were dealing him. The only thing that vexed him was that the second bowl might still go to Fetiukov.

Fetiukov was a past master at cadging, but he lacked the courage to swipe anything.

Near by sat Captain Buinovsky. He had long finished his kasha. He didn’t know the squad had two extra portions to dispose of. He didn’t look around to see how much Pavlo still had left to hand out. He was simply relaxing, warming up. He was not strong enough to rise 88 | P a g e

to his feet and go out into the cold or into that icy warming-up spot. He, like the very people he had. Just bounded out of the canteen with his rasping voice, was occupying a place he had no right to and getting in the way of the next squad. He was a newcomer. He was unused to the hard life of the zeks. Though he didn’t know it, moments like this were particularly important to him, for they were transforming him from an eager, confident naval officer with a ringing voice into an inert, though wary, zek. And only in that inertness lay the chance of surviving the twenty-five years of imprisonment he’d been sentenced to.

People were already shouting at him and nudging him in the back to make him give up his place.

“Captain!” said Pavlo. “Hey, captain.”

Buinovsky shuddered as though he was being jerked out of a dream. He looked around.

Pavlo handed him a bowl of kasha. He didn’t ask him whether he wanted it.

The captain’s eyebrows shot up. He looked at the bowl as at something miraculous.

“Take it, take it,” said Pavlo reassuringly, and picking up the last bowl–for the squad leader–went out.

An apologetic smile flitted over the captain’s chapped lips. And this man, who had sailed around Europe and navigated the Great Northern Route, leaned happily over half a ladleful of thin oatmeal kasha, cooked entirely without fat–just oats and water.

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Fetiukov cast angry looks at Shukhov and the captain and left the canteen.

But Shukhov thought Pavlo had been right. In time the captain would learn the ropes. Meanwhile, he didn’t know how to live.

Shukhov still nursed a faint hope that Tsezar would give him his bowl of kasha. But it seemed unlikely, for more than two weeks had passed since Tsezar had received his last package.

After scraping the bottom and rim of the second bowl. In the same way as the first, then licking the crust, Shukhov finally ate the crust itself. Then he picked up Tsezar’s bowl of cold kasha and went out.

“It’s for the office,” he said, as he pushed past the man at the door who tried to stop him taking the bowl out.

The office was in a log cabin near the sentry house.

As in the morning, smoke was curling out of the chimney. The stove was kept going by an orderly who worked as an errand boy too, picking up a few kopecks here and there. They didn’t begrudge him shavings or even logs for the office stove.

The outer door creaked as Shukhov opened it. Then came another door, calked with oakum. Bringing with him a cloud of frosty vapor, he went in and quickly pulled the door shut (so that they wouldn’t yell at him:

“Hey, you bastard, shut the door”).

The office was as hot as a Turkish bath, it seemed to Shukhov. The sun, coming in through the icy 90 | P a g e

windowpanes, played gaily in the room, not angrily as it did at the power station; and, spreading across the broad sunbeam, the smoke of Tsezar’s pipe looked like incense in church. The stove glowed red right through. How they piled it on, the devils! Even the stovepipe was red-hot.

In an oven like that you only have to sit down a minute and you’re fast asleep.

The office had two rooms. The door into the second one, occupied by the superintendent, was not quite closed, and through it the superintendents voice was thundering:

“There’s an overdraft on the expenses for labour and building materials. Right under your noses prisoners are chopping up valuable lumber, not to mention prefabricated panels, and using them for firewood at their warming-up spots. The other day the prisoners unloaded cement near the warehouse in a high wind.

What’s more, they carried it up to ten yards on barrows.

As a result the whole area around the warehouse is ankle-deep in cement and the men are smothered in it.

Just figure the waste!”

Obviously a conference was going on in there. With the foremen.

In a corner near the door an orderly sat lazing on a stool. Beyond him, like a bent pole, stooped Shkuropatenko–B 219. That fathead–staring out of the window, trying to see, even now, whether anyone was 91 | P a g e

pinching some of his precious prefabs! You didn’t spot us _that_ time, you snoop!

The bookkeepers, also zeks, were toasting bread at the stove. To prevent it from burning they’d fixed up a grill out of wire.

Tsezar was sprawling over his desk, smoking a pipe.

His back was to Shukhov and he didn’t notice him come in.

Opposite him sat X 123, a stringy old man who was serving a twenty-year sentence. He was eating kasha.

“No, my friend,” Tsezar was saying in a gentle, casual way. “If one is to be objective one must acknowledge that Eisenstein is a genius. _Ivan the Terrible_, isn’t that a work of genius? The dance of Ivan’s guards, the masked _oprichniki!_ The scene in the cathedral!”

“Ham,” said X 123 angrily stopping his spoon in front of his lips. “It’s all so arty there’s no art left in it.

Spice and poppy-seed instead of everyday bread and butter! And then, the vicious political idea–the justification of personal tyranny. A mockery of the memory of three generations of Russian intelligentsia.”

He ate as if his lips were made of wood. The kasha would do him no good.

“But what other interpretation could he have gotten away with?”

“Gotten away with? Ugh! Then don’t call him a genius! Call him an ass-kisser, obeying a vicious dog’s 92 | P a g e

order. Geniuses don’t adjust their interpretations to suit the taste of tyrants!”

“Hm, hm!” Shukhov cleared his throat. He hadn’t the nerve to interrupt such a learned conversation. But there wasn’t any sense in standing there, either.

Tsezar swung around and held out his hand for the bowl, not even looking at Shukhov, as though the kasha had materialized out of thin air.

“But listen,” he resumed. “Art isn’t a matter of _what_ but of _how_.”

X 123 struck the table angrily with the edge of his hand.

“To hell with your ‘how’ if it doesn’t arouse any worthwhile feeling in me.”

Shukhov stood there just as long as was decent for a man who had brought a bowl of kasha. After all, Tsezar might offer him a smoke. But Tsezar had quite forgotten his presence.

So Shukhov turned on his heel and went quietly out.

The cold was bearable, he decided. The block-laying wouldn’t go too badly.

As he walked along the path he caught sight in the snow of a short length of steel–a bit of a hacksaw blade.

He could conceive of no immediate use for it, but then you can never tell what you might need in the future. So he picked it up and slipped it into his pants pocket. He’d hide it at the power station. Waste not, want not.

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The first thing he did on reaching the power station was to take his trowel out of its hiding place and slip it under the length of rope he wore around his waist. Then he took off for the machine shop.

After the sunlight the shop seemed quite dark and no warmer than outside. Sort of clammy.

All the men had crowded near the round iron stove that Shukhov had fixed, or near the one where the sand was steaming as it dried. Those who could find no room around the stoves sat on the edge of the mortar trough.

Tiurin was seated against the stove, finishing the kasha that Pavlo had warmed up for him on it. The men were whispering to one another. They were in high spirits.

One of them passed the news on to Shukhov: the squad leader had been successful in fixing the work report.

He’d come back in a good mood.

What sort of work he’d found and how it had been rated was Tiurin’s own business. What in fact had the squad done that first half of the day? Not a thing. They weren’t paid for fixing the stoves, they weren’t paid for arranging a place to warm up in–they bad done that for themselves, not for the building site. But something had to be written in the report. Perhaps Tsezar was helping the squad leader to fix it up properly. It wasn’t for nothing that Tiurin looked up to him. A cleverly fixed work report meant good rations for five days. Well, say four. Out of the five the authorities would wangle one for themselves by putting the whole camp onto the guaranteed minimum–the same for all, the best and the 94 | P a g e

worst. Seems to be fair enough: equal rations for all. But it’s an economy at the expense of our bellies. Well, a zek’s belly can stand anything. Scrape through today somehow and hope for tomorrow.

This was the hope they all went to sleep with on the days they got only the guaranteed minimum.

But when you thought about it, it was five days’ work for four days’ food.

The shop was quiet. Zeks who had tobacco were smoking. The light was dim, and the men sat gazing into the fire. Like a big family. It was a family, the squad.

They were listening to Tiurin as he talked to two or three of the men by the stove. Tiurin never wasted his words, and if he permitted himself to talk, then he was in a good humour.

He too hadn’t learned to eat with his hat on, and when his head was bared he looked old. He was close-cropped like all of them, but in the light of the flames you could see how many white hairs he had.

“I’d be shaking in my boots before a battalion commander and here was the regimental commander himself. ‘Red Army man Tiurin at your service,’ I reported. The commander looked at me hard from under his beetle brows as he asked me my full name. I told him. Year of birth. I told him. It was in the thirties and I was, let’s see, just twenty-two then, just a kid.

Well, Tiunn, how are you serving? ‘I serve the working people,’ I replied, with a salute. He blew up and banged both fists on the desk, bang! ‘You’re serving the working 95 | P a g e

people, you bastard, but what are you yourself? I froze Inside but I kept a grip on myself. ‘Machine-gunner, first-class. Excellent marks in military training and polit.

. . .’ ‘First-class! What are you talking about, you shit?

Your father’s a kulak. Look, this document has come from Kamen. Your father’s a kulak and you’ve been hiding. They’ve been looking for you for two years.’ I turned pale and kept my mouth shut. I hadn’t written a line home for a year, to keep them from tracing me. I had no idea how they were living at home, and they knew nothing about me. Where’s your conscience?’ he shouted at me, all four bars on his collar shaking. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for deceiving the Soviet Power?’ I thought he was going to bit me. But he didn’t.

He wrote out an order. To have me thrown out of the army at six o’clock that very day. It was November.

They stripped me of my winter uniform and issued me a summer one, a third-hand one it must’ve been, and a short, tight jacket. I didn’t know at the time that I didn’t have to give up my winter uniform, just send it to them.

… So they packed me off with a slip of paper:

‘Discharged from the ranks … as a kulak’s son.’ A fine reference for a job! I had a four-day train journey ahead of me to get home. They didn’t give me a free pass, they didn’t provide me with even one day’s rations. Just gave me dinner for the last time and threw me off the post.

“Incidentally, in thirty-eight, at the Koltas deportation point, I met my former squadron commander. He’d been given ten years too. I learned 96 | P a g e

from him that the regimental commander and the commissar were both shot in thirty-seven, no matter whether they were of proletarian or kulak stock, whether they had a conscience or not. So I crossed myself and said: ‘So, after all, Creator, You do exist up there in heaven. Your patience is long-suffering but you strike hard.'”

After two bowls of kasha Shukhov so longed to smoke he felt he’d die if he didn’t. And, reckoning he could buy those two glassfuls of home-grown tobacco from the Left in Barracks 7, he said in a low voice to the Estonian fisherman:

“Listen, Eino, lend me some for a cigarette till tomorrow. You know I won’t let you down.”

Eino gave him a hard look and then slowly turned his eyes to his “brother.” They shared everything–one of them wouldn’t spend even a pinch of tobacco without consulting the other. They muttered something together and Eino reached for his pink-embroidered pouch. Out of it he extracted a pinch of tobacco, factory-cut, placed it in Shukhov’s palm, measured it with his eye, and added a few more strands. Just enough for one cigarette, no more.

Shukhov had a piece of newspaper ready. He tore off a scrap, rolled the cigarette, picked up a glowing coal from where it lay at Tiurin’s feet–and drew and drew. A sweet dizziness went all through his body, to his head, to his feet, as if he had downed a glass of vodka.

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The moment he began to smoke he felt, blazing at him from across the length of the shop, a pair of green eyes–Fetiukov’s. He might have relented and given him a drag, the jackal, but he’d seen him pulling one of his fast ones already that day. No–better leave something for Senka instead. Senka hadn’t heard the squad leader’s tale and sat in front of the fire, poor guy, his head on one aide.

Tiurin’s pockmarked face was lit up by the flames.

He spoke calmly, as if he were telling someone else’s story:

“What rags I had, I sold for a quarter of their value. I bought a couple of loaves from under the counter–

they’d already started bread rationing. Fd thought of hopping onto a freight train, but they’d just introduced some stiff penalties for that. And, if you remember, you couldn’t buy tickets even if you had the money, you had to produce special little books or show travel documents. There was no getting onto the platform either–militiamen at the barrier, and guards wandering up and down the lines at both ends of the station. It was a cold sunset and the puddles were freezing over.

Where was I going to spend the night? I straddled a brick wall, jumped over with my two loaves, and slipped into the public toilet I waited in there for a while. No one was after me. I came out as though I were a soldier-passenger. The Vladivostok-Moscow was standing in the station. There was a crowd around the hot-water faucet, people banging each other’s heads with 98 | P a g e

their teakettles. On the edge of the crowd I noticed a girl in a blue jersey–her kettle was a big one. She was scared of pushing through to the faucet. Didn’t want her little feet stepped on or scalded. ‘Look,’ I said to her,

‘hang onto these loaves and I’ll get your kettle filled fast.’

While I was doing so, off went the train. She was holding the loaves. She burst into tears. What was she going to do with them? She didn’t mind losing the kettle. ‘Run,’ I called to her. ‘I’ll follow you.’ Off she went, with me at her heels. I caught up with her and hoisted her onto the train with one arm. The train was going quite fast. I had a foot on it too. The conductor didn’t slash at my fingers or shove me in the chest–there were other soldiers in the carriage and he took me for one of them.”

Shukhov nudged Senka in the ribs–come on, finish this, you poor slob. He handed him the cigarette in his wooden holder. Let him take a drag, he’s all right.

Senka, the chump, accepted it like an actor, pressed one hand to his heart, and bowed his head. But, after all, he was deaf.

Tiurin went on:

“There were six, all girls, in a compartment to themselves–Leningrad students travelling back from technical courses. A lovely spread on their little table; raincoats swinging from coat hangers; expensive suitcases. They were going through life happily. All clear ahead for them. We talked and joked and drank tea together.

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“They asked me what coach I was in. I sighed and told them the truth. ‘I’m in a special coach, girls, heading straight for death.'”

There was silence in the shop. All you could hear was the stove roaring.

“Well, they gasped and moaned and put their heads together. And the result was they covered me with their raincoats on the top berth. They hid me all the way to Novosibirsk. By the way, I was able to show my gratitude to one of them later–she was swept up by the Kirov wave in thirty-five. She had just about had it, working in a hard-labor team, and I got her fixed up in the tailoring shop,”

“Shall we mix the mortar?” Pavlo asked Tiurin in a whisper.

Tiurin didn’t hear him.

“I came up to our house at night, through the back garden. I left the same night. I took my little brother with me, took him to warmer parts, to Frunze. I’d nothing to give him to eat, and nothing for myself either. In Frunze some road-workers were boiling asphalt in a pot, with all kinds of bums and stray kids sitting around. I sat down among them and said: ‘Hey, you guys, take on my little brother as a learner. Teach him how to live.’ They took him. Fm only sorry I didn’t join the crooks myself.”

“And you never saw your brother again?” asked the captain.

Tiurin yawned.

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“Never again.”

He yawned once more.

“Well, don’t let it get you down, men,” he said.

“We’ll live through it, even in this power station. Get going, mortar mixers. Don’t wait for the whistle.”

That’s what a squad is. A guard can’t get people to budge even in working hours, but a squad leader can tell his men to get on with the job even during the break, and they’ll do it. Because he’s the one who feeds them.

And he’d never make them work for nothing.

If they were going to start mixing the mortar only when the whistle blew, then the masons would have to hang around waiting for it.

Shukhov drew a deep breath and got to his feet.

“I’ll go up and chip the ice off.”

He took with him a small hatchet and a brush and, for the laying, a mason’s hammer, a levelling rod, a plumb, and a length of string.

Kilgas looked at him, a wry expression on his ruddy-cheeked face. Why should he jump up before his squad leader told him to? But after all, thought Shukhov, Kilgas didn’t have to worry about feeding the squad. It was all the same to him if he got a couple of ounces less-

-he’d manage on his parcels.

Even so, Kilgas stirred himself–you can’t keep the squad waiting, he understood, just because of you.

“Wait a minute, Vanya, I’m coming too,” he said.

“There you go, fathead. If you’d been working for yourself you’d have been on your feet in a hurry.”

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(There was another reason why Shukhov hurried– he wanted to lay his bands on that plumb before Kilgas.

They’d drawn only one from the tool store.)

“Sure three are enough for the block-laying?” Pavlo asked Tiurin. “Shouldn’t we send another man up? Or won’t there be enough mortar?”

Tiurin knitted his brows and thought.

“I’ll be the fourth man myself, Pavio. You work here on the mortar. It’s a big box, we’ll put six on the job.

Work like this–take the mortar out from one end when it’s ready and use the other for mixing some more. And see there’s a steady supply. Not a moment’s break.”

“Ugh!” Pavlo sprang to his feet. He was young, his blood was fresh, camp life hadn’t as yet worn him out.

His face had been fattened on Ukrainian dumplings. “If you’re going to lay blocks, I’ll make the mortar for you myself. We’ll see who’s working hardest. Hey, where’s the longest spade?”

That’s what a squad leader is too. Pavlo had been a forest sniper, he’d even been on night raids. Try and make _him_ break his back in a camp! But to work for the squad leader–that was different.

Shukhov and Kilgas came out onto the second story.

They heard Senka creaking up the ramp behind them. So poor deaf Senka had guessed where they would be.

Only a start had been made with laying the blocks on the second-story walls. Three rows all around, a bit higher here and there. That was when the laying went 102 | P a g e

fastest. From the knee to the chest, without the help of a scaffold.

All the platforms and trestles that had been there had been swiped by the zeks–some had been carried off to other buildings, some had been burned. Anything to prevent another squad getting them. But now everything had to be done right. Tomorrow they’d have to nail some trestles together; otherwise the work would be held up.

You could see a long way from up there–the whole snowclad, deserted expanse of the site (the zeks were hidden away, warming up before the dinner break ended), the dark watchtowers and the sharp-tipped poles for the barbed wire. You couldn’t see the barbed wire itself except when you looked into the sun. The sun was very bright; it made you blink.

And also, not far away, you could see the portable generator smoking away, blackening the sky. And wheezing, too. It always made that hoarse, sickly noise before it whistled. There it went. So they hadn’t, after all, cut too much off the dinner break.

“Hey, stakhanovite! Hurry up with that plumb,”

Kilgas shouted.

“Look how much ice you’ve got left on your wall!

See if you can chip it off before evening,” Shukhov said derisively. ” You didn’t have to bring your trowel up with you!”

They’d intended to start with the walls they’d been allocated before dinner, but Tiurin called from below: 103 | P a g e

“Hey, men! We’ll work in pairs, so that the mortar doesn’t freeze in the hods. You take Senka with you on your wall, and I’ll work with Kilgas. But to start with, you stand in for me, Gopchik, and clean up Kilgas’s wall.”

Shukhov and Kilgas looked at one another. Correct.

Quicker that way.

They grabbed their axes.

And now Shukhov was no longer seeing that distant view where sun gleamed on snow. He was no longer seeing the prisoners as they wandered from the warming-up places all over the Site, some to hack away at the holes they hadn’t finished that morning, some to fix the mesh reinforcement, some to put up beams in the workshops. Shukhov was seeing only his wall–from the junction at the left where the blocks rose. In steps, higher than his waist, to the right to the corner where it met Kilgas’s. He showed Senka where to remove ice and chopped at it energetically himself with the back and blade of his axe, so that splinters of ice flew all about and into his face. He worked with drive, but his thoughts were elsewhere. His thoughts and his eyes were feeling their way under the ice to the wall itself, the outer façade of the power station, two blocks thick.

At the spot he was working on, the wall had previously been laid by some mason who was either Incompetent or had stunk up the job. But now Shukhov tackled the wall as if it was his own handiwork. There, he saw, was a cavity that couldn’t be levelled up in one row; he’d 104 | P a g e

have to do it in three, adding a little more mortar each time. And here the outer wall bellied a bit–it would take two rows to straighten that. He divided the wall mentally into the place where he would lay blocks, starting at the point where they rose in steps, and the place where Senka was working, on the right, up to Kilgas’s section. There in the corner, he figured, Kilgas wouldn’t hold back; he would lay a few blocks for Senka, to make things easier for him. And, while they were puttering around in the corner, Shukhov would forge ahead and have half the wall built, so that his pair wouldn’t be behindhand. He noted how many blocks he’d require for each of the places. And the moment the carriers brought the blocks up he shouted at Alyosha:

“Bring ’em to me. Put ’em here. And here.”

Senka had finished chipping off the ice, and Shukhov picked up a wire brush, gripped it in both hands, and went, along the wall swishing it–to and fro, to and fro–

cleaning up the top row, especially the joints, till only a snowy film was left on it.

Tiurin climbed up and, while Shukhov was still busy with his brush, fixed up a leveling rod in the corner.

Shukhov and Kilgas had already placed theirs on the edges of their walls.

“Hey,” called Pavlo from below. “Anyone alive up there? Take the mortar.”

Shukhov broke into a sweat–he hadn’t stretched his string over the blocks yet. He was rushing. He decided to stretch it for three rows at once, and make the 105 | P a g e

necessary allowance. He decided also to take over a little of the outer wall from Senka and give him some of the inside instead; things would be easier for him that way.

Stretching his string along the top edge, he explained to Senka, with mouthings and gestures, where be was to work. Senka understood, for all his deafness. He bit his lips and glanced aside with a nod at Tiurin’s wall. “Shall we make it hot for him?” his look said. We won’t fall behind. He laughed.

Now the mortar was being brought up the ramp.

Tiurin decided not to have any of it dumped beside the masons–it would only freeze while being shifted onto the hods. The men were to put down their barrows; the masons would take the mortar straight from them and get on with the laying. Meanwhile the carriers, not to waste time, would bring on the blocks that other prisoners were heaving up from below. As soon as the mortar had been scooped up from one pair of barrows, another pair would be coming and the first would go down. At the stove in the machine room, the carriers would thaw out any mortar that had frozen to their barrows–and themselves too, while they were at it.

The barrows came up two at a time–one for Kilgas’s wall, one for Shukhov’s. The mortar steamed in the frost but held no real warmth in it. You slapped it on the wall with your trowel and if you slowed down it would freeze, and then you’d have to hit it with the side of a hammer–you couldn’t scrape it off with a trowel. And if 106 | P a g e

you laid a block a bit out of true, it would immediately freeze too and set crooked; then you’d need the back of your axe to knock it off and chip away the mortar.

But Shukhov made no mistakes. The blocks varied. If any had chipped corners or broken edges or lumps on their sides, he noticed it at once and saw which Way up to lay them and where they would fit best on the wall.

Here was one. Shukhov took up some of the steaming mortar on his trowel and slapped it into the appropriate place, with his mind on the joint below (this would have to come right in the middle of the block he was going to lay). He slapped on just enough mortar to go under the one block. He snatched it from the pile–

carefully, though, so as not to tear his mittens, for with cement blocks you can do that in no time. He smoothed the mortar with his trowel and then–down with the block! And without losing a moment he levelled it, patting it with the side of the trowel–it wasn’t lying exactly right–so that the wall would be truly in line and the block lie level both length-wise and across. The mortar was already freezing.

Now if some mortar had oozed out to the side, you had to chop it off as quickly as possible with the edge of your trowel and fling it over the wall (in summer it would go under the next brick, but now that was impossible). Next you took another look at the joint below, for there were times when the block was not completely intact but had partially crumbled. In that event, you slapped in some extra mortar where the 107 | P a g e

defect was, and you didn’t lay the block flat–you slid it from side to side, squeezing out the extra mortar between it and its neighbour. An eye on the plumb. An eye on the surface. Set. Next.

The work went with a rhythm. Once two rows were laid and the old faults levelled up it would go quite smoothly. But now was the time to keep your eyes peeled.

Shukhov forged ahead; he pressed along the outside wall to meet Senka. Senka had parted with Tiurin in the corner and was now working along the wall to meet him.

Shukhov winked at the mortar carriers. Bring it up, bring it up. Steady. That’s the ticket. He was working so fast he had no time to wipe his nose.

He and Senka met and began to scoop out of the same mortar hod. It didn’t take them long to scrape it to the bottom.

“Mortar!” Shukhov shouted over the wall.

“Coming up!” shouted Pavla.

Another load arrived. They emptied that one too–all the liquid mortar in it, anyhow. The rest had already frozen to the sides. Scrape it off yourselves! If you don’t, you’re the one who’ll be taking it up and down again.

Get going! Next!

And now Shukhov and the other masons Mt the cold no longer. Thanks to the urgent work, the first wave of heat had come over them–when you feel wet under your coat, under your jacket, under your shirt and your 108 | P a g e

vest. But they didn’t stop for a moment; they hurried on with the laying. And after about an hour they had their second flush of heat, the one that dries up the sweat.

Their feet didn’t feel cold, that was the main thing.

Nothing else mattered. Even the breeze, light but piercing, couldn’t distract them from the work. Only Senka stamped his feet–he had enormous ones, poor slob, and they’d given him a pair of valenki too tight for him.

From time to time Tiurin would shout “Mo-o-rtar,”

and Shukhov would shout “Mo-o-rtar”–he was shouting to his own men. When you’re working all out, you’re a sort of squad leader to your neighbours yourself. It was up to Shukhov to keep up with the other pair. Now, he’d have made his own brother sweat to hurry up with the mortar.

At first, after dinner, Buinovsky had carried mortar with Fetiukov. But the ramp was steep and dangerous, and the captain dragged his feet to begin with. Shukboy urged him on gently:

“Quicker, captain. Blocks, captain.”

Every time Buinovsky came up he worked faster.

Fetlukov, on the other hand, grew lazier and lazier.

He’d tilt the barrow as he came up, the lousy bastard, so that the mortar would slop out of it and then it’d be lighter to carry.

Shukhov poked him in the back:

“Hey, you damn bastard. When you were an overseer I’ll bet you made your men sweat.”

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Buinovsky appealed to the squad leader:

“Give me a man to work with. I won’t go on working with this shit.”

Tiurin agreed. He sent Fetiukov to heave up blocks from below; and made him work, on top of that, where the number of blocks he handled was counted separately. He told Alyosha to work with the captain.

Alyosha was a quiet man; anyone could order him about.

“It’s all hands on deck, sailor,” the captain urged.

“See how fast they’re laying blocks?”

Alyosha smiled meekly:

“If we have to work faster then let’s work faster.

Anything you say.”

And tramped down for the next load.

Thank God for the man who does his job and keeps his mouth shut!

Tiurin shouted to someone down below. Another truckload of blocks had apparently arrived. Not one had been brought here for six months; now they were pouring in. You could work really fast as long as the trucks brought blocks. But this wouldn’t go on. Later there’d be a hold-up in the delivery and then you’d stand idle yourself.

Tiurin was bawling out someone else down below.

Something about the lift. Shukhov would have liked to know what was up but he’d no time to find out–he was levelling his wall. The carriers came up and told him: a mechanic had come to repair the motor of the lift, and 110 | P a g e

the superintendent of electrical repairs, a civilian, was with him. The mechanic was tinkering with the motor; the superintendent watched.

That was according to the rules: one man works, one man watches.

Good if they fixed the lift now. It could be used for both blocks and mortar.

Shukhov was laying his third row (Kilgas too was on his third), when up the ramp came yet another snoop, another chief–building-foreman Der. A Muscovite.

Used to work in some ministry, so they said.

Shukhov was standing close to Kilgas, and drew his attention to Der.

“Pfah!” said Kilgas contemptuously. “I don’t usually have anything to do with the bigshots. But you call me if he falls off the ramp.”

And now Der took up his post behind the masons and watched them work. Shukhov hated these snoops like poison. Trying to make himself into an engineer, the fathead! Once he’d shown Shukhov how to lay bricks–and given him a belly laugh. A man should build a house with his own hands before he calls himself an engineer.

At Shukhov’s village of Temgenovo there were no brick houses. All the cottages were built of wood. The school too was a wooden building, made from six-foot logs. But the camp needed masons and Shukhov, glad to oblige, became a mason. A man with two trades to his credit can easily learn another ten.

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No, Der didn’t fail off the ramp, though once he stumbled. He came up almost on the double.

“Tiu-u-urin,” he shouted, his eyes popping out of his head. “Tiu-u-urin.”

At his heels came Pavlo. He was carrying the spade he’d been working with.

Der was wearing a regulation camp coat but it was new and clean. His hat was stylish, made of leather, though, like everyone else’s, it bore a number–B 731.

“Well?” Tiurin went up to him trowel in hand, his hat tilted over one eye.

Something out of the ordinary was brewing.

Something not to be missed. Yet the mortar was growing cold in the barrows. Shukhov went on working–working and listening.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Der spluttered.

“This isn’t a matter for the guardhouse. This is a criminal offense, Tiurin. You’ll get a third term for this.”

Only then did Shukhov catch on to what was up. He glanced at Kilgas. He’d understood, too. The roofing felt. Der had spotted it on the windows.

Shukhov feared nothing for himself. His squad leader would never give him away. He was afraid for Tiurin.

To the squad Tiurin was a father, for them he was a pawn. Up in the North they readily gave squad, leaders a second term for a thing like this.

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Ugh, what a face Tiurin made. He threw down his trowel and took a step toward Der. Der looked around.

Pavlo lifted his spade.

He hadn’t grabbed it for nothing.

And Senka, for all his deafness, had understood. He came up, hands on hips. And Senka was built solid.

Der blinked, gave a sort of twitch, and looked around for a way of escape.

Tiurin leaned up against him and said quite softly, though distinctly enough for everyone to hear:

“Your time for giving terms has passed, you bastard.

If you say one word, you blood-sucker, it’ll be your last day on earth. Remember that.”

Tiurin shook, shook uncontrollably.

Hatchet-faced Pavlo looked Der straight in the eyes.

A look as sharp as a razor.

“Now, men, take it easy.” Der turned pale and edged away from the ramp.

Without another word Tiurin straightened his hat, picked up his trowel, and walked back to his wall.

Pavlo, very slowly, went down the ramp with his spade.