One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Signet Books)

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn;Ralph Parker

  The 38th, naturally, wouldn't let any stranger near their stove. Their own men sat around it, drying their 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 onbr 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.

  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 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: "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 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 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 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.

  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 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 vapor. The sun was now some way above the horizon but it cast no rays, as in a fog. On each side of it rose pifiars 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 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 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 nwnbness 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 gray 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 expe
cted it to last the journey 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.