Otherwise, everybody would have croaked long ago. They all knew that.
Shukhov wiped the floorboards with a damp rag so that no dry patches remained, tossed the rag behind the stove without wringing it out, pulled on his valenki near the door, threw out the rest of the water onto the path used by the camp authorities, and, taking short cuts, made a dash past the bathhouse and the dark, cold club to the mess hall.
He still had to fit in a visit to the dispensary. He ached all over. And there was that guard outside the mess hall to be dodged--the camp commandant had issued strict orders that prisoners on their own were to be picked up and thrown into the guardhouse.
That morning--a stroke of luck--there was no crowd, no lines, outside the mess.
Walk in.
The air was as thick as in a Turkish bath. An icy wave blew in through the door and met the steam rising from the stew. The squads sat at tables or crowded the aisles in between, waiting for places to be freed. Shouting to each other through the crush, two or three men from each squad carried bowls of stew and oatmeal on wooden trays and tried to find room for them on the tables. Look at that damn stiff-necked fool. He doesn't hear, he's bumped a tray. Splash, splash! You've a hand free, bit him on the back of the neck.
That's the way. Don't stand there blocking the aisle, looking for something to swipe!
There at the table, before dipping his spoon in, a young man crossed himself. A West Ukrainian, that meant, and a new arrival, too.
As for the Russians, they'd forgotten which hand to cross themselves with.
They sat in the cold mess hall, most of them eating with their hats on, eating slowly, picking out putrid little fish from under leaves of boiled black cabbage and spitting the bones out on the table. When the bones formed a heap and it was the turn of another squad, someone would sweep them off and they'd be trodden into a mush on the floor. But it was considered bad maimers to spit the fishbones straight out on the floor.
Two rows of trestles ran down the middle of the hall and near one of them sat Fetiukov of the 104th. It was he who was keeping Shukhov's breakfast for him. Fetiukov had the last place in his squad, lower than Shukhov's. From the outside, everyone in the squad looked the same--their numbered black coats were identical--but within the squad there were great distinctions. Everyone had his grade. Buinovsky, for instance, was not the sort to sit keeping another zek's *[* Abbreviation of Russian for prisoner.] bowl for him. And Shukhov wouldn't take on any old job either. There were others lower than him.
Fetiukov caught sight of Shukhov and with a sigh surrendered his place.
"It's all cold. I was just going to eat your helping. Thought you were in the guardhouse."
He didn't hang around--no hope for any leftovers to scrape out of Shukhov's bowl.
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 Thne 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.
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
"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.D, *[* Culture and Education Department.] 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 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, grayish-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--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."
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 unfamifiar 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 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 wasi--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 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.
"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 -17°; Shukhov's temperature was +99°. 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, 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 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.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Signet Books) Page 3