One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Shukhov still had quite a bit of time to do—a winter, a summer, another winter, another summer—but all the same, those carpets preyed on his mind. It could be just the job if he was deprived of rights or banished. So he asked his wife to tell him how he could be a dyer when he’d been no good at drawing from the day he was born? And, anyway, what was so wonderful about these carpets? What was on them? She wrote back that any fool could make them. All you did was put the stencil on the cloth and rub paint through the holes. There were three sorts. There was the “Troika”—three horses in beautiful harness pulling a hussar officer—the “Stag,” and one a bit like a Persian carpet. Those were the only patterns, but people all over the country jumped at the chance to buy them. Because a real carpet cost thousands of rubles, not fifty.

  He wished he could get a peek at them.

  In jail and in the camps Shukhov had lost the habit of scheming how he was going to feed his family from day to day or year to year. The bosses did all his thinking for him, and that somehow made life easier. But what would it be like when he got out?

  He knew from what free workers said—drivers and bulldozer operators on construction sites—that the straight and narrow was barred to ordinary people, but they didn’t let it get them down, they took a roundabout way and survived somehow.

  Shukhov might have to do the same. It was easy money, and you couldn’t miss. Besides, he’d feel pretty sore if others in the village got ahead of him. But still … in his heart of hearts Shukhov didn’t want to take up carpet-making. To do that sort of thing you had to be the free-and-easy type, you had to have plenty of cheek, and know when to grease a policeman’s palm. Shukhov had been knocking around for forty years, he’d lost half his teeth and was going bald, but he’d never given or taken a bribe outside and hadn’t picked up the habit in the camps.

  Easy money had no weight: you didn’t feel you’d earned it. What you get for a song you won’t have for long, the old folks used to say, and they were right. He still had a good pair of hands, hands that could turn to anything, so what was to stop him getting a proper job on the outside?

  Only—would they ever let him go? Maybe they’d slap another ten on him, just for fun?

  By then the column had arrived, and halted at the guardhouse outside the sprawling work site. Two guards in sheepskin coats had fallen out at one corner of the boundary fence and were trudging to their distant watchtowers. Nobody would be allowed onto the site until all the towers were manned. The escort commander made for the guardroom, with his weapon slung over his shoulder. Smoke was billowing out of the guardroom chimney: a free worker kept watch there all night to see that no one carried off planks and cement.

  Looking through the wire gate, across the building site and out through the wire fence on the far side, you could see the sun rising, big and red, as though in a fog. Alyoshka, standing next to Shukhov, gazed at the sun and a smile spread from his eyes to his lips. Alyoshka’s cheeks were hollow, he lived on his bare ration and never made anything on the side—what had he got to be happy about? He and the other Baptists spent their Sundays whispering to each other. Life in the camp was like water off a duck’s back to them. They’d been lumbered with twenty-five years apiece just for being Baptists. Fancy thinking that would cure them!

  The face cloth he’d worn on the march was wet through from his breath, and a thick crust of ice had formed where the frost had caught it. Shukhov pulled it down from his face to his neck and turned his back on the wind. The cold hadn’t really got through anywhere, only his hands felt the chill in those thin mittens, and the toes of his left foot were numb, because he’d burnt a hole in his felt boot and had to patch it twice.

  He couldn’t see himself doing much work with shooting pains in his midriff and all the way up his back.

  He turned around and found himself looking at the foreman. He’d been marching in the last rank of five. Hefty shoulders, the foreman had, and a beefy face to match. Always looked glum. Not one to share a joke with the men, but kept them pretty well fed, saw to it they got good rations. A true son of the Gulag. On his second sentence, and he knew the drill inside out.

  Your foreman matters more than anything else in a prison camp: a good one gives you a new lease of life, a bad one can land you six feet under. Shukhov had known Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin back in Ust-Izhma. He hadn’t worked under him there, but when all the “traitors” had been shunted from the ordinary penal camp to hard labor, Tyurin had singled him out. Shukhov had no dealings with the camp commandant, the Production Planning Section, the site managers, or the engineers: his foreman was always in there standing up for him: a chest of steel, Tyurin had. But if he twitched an eyebrow or lifted a finger—you ran and did whatever he wanted. Cheat anybody you liked as long as you didn’t cheat Tyurin, and you’d get by.

  Shukhov wanted to ask the foreman whether they’d be working at the same place as yesterday or moving somewhere else, but didn’t like to interrupt his lofty thoughts. Now he’d got Sotsgorodok off their backs, he’d be thinking about the rate for the job. The next five days’ ration depended on it.

  The foreman’s face was deeply pockmarked. He didn’t even squint as he stood looking into the wind. His skin was like the bark of an oak.

  The men in the column were clapping their hands and stamping their feet. It was a nasty little wind. The poll-parrots must all be up on their perches by now, but the guards still wouldn’t let the men in. They were overdoing the security.

  At last! The guard commander came out of the guardhouse with the checker. They took their stand on opposite sides of the entrance and opened the gates.

  “Sort yourselves out in fives! First five, second five.”

  The convicts marched off with something like a military step. Just let us in there, we’ll do the rest!

  Just past the guardhouse was the office shack. The site manager stood outside it, urging the foremen to get a move on. They hardly needed to be told. Der—the zek they’d made an overseer—went with them. A real bastard, that one, treated his fellow zeks worse than dogs.

  It was eight o’clock, no, five past eight already (that was the power-supply train whistling), and the bosses were afraid the zeks would scatter and waste time in warming sheds. A zek’s day is a long one, though, and he can find time for everything. Every man entering the compound stooped to pick up a wood chip or two. Do nicely for our stove. Then quick as a flash into their shelters.

  Tyurin ordered Pavlo, the deputy foreman, to go with him into the office. Tsezar turned in there after them. Tsezar was rich, got two parcels a month, gave all the right people a handout, so he was a trusty, working in the office helping the norm setter.

  The rest of Gang 104 scuttled out of sight.

  A dim red sun had risen over the deserted compound: over pre-fab panels half buried in snowdrifts, over the brickwork of a building abandoned as soon as the foundations were laid, over the broken crank handle of an earth-moving machine, a jug, a heap of scrap iron. There were drains, trenches, holes everywhere. There were automobile-repair shops in open-fronted sheds, and there, on a rise, stood the Power Station, its ground floor completed, its first floor just begun.

  Everybody had gone into hiding, except for the six sentries in their towers and the group buzzing outside the office. This moment was the zek’s very own! The senior site manager, so they said, was always threatening to give each gang its assignment the night before, but they could never make it work. Anything they decided at night would be stood on its head by morning.

  Yes—this moment was their very own! While the bosses were getting organized—snuggle up in the warm, sit there as long as you can, you’ll have a chance to break your back later, no need to hurry. The best thing was to get near a stove and rewrap your foot rags (warm them a little bit first) so your feet would be warm all day. But even without a stove it was still pretty good.

  Gang 104 went into the big auto-repair shop. Its windows had been installed in the autumn, and Gang 38 was working t
here, molding concrete slabs. Some slabs were still in the molds, some had been stood up on end, and there were piles of wire mesh lying around. The roof of the shop was high, and it had an earthen floor, so it would never be really warm, but still the big room was heated, and the bosses didn’t spare the coal—not, of course, to keep the men warm, but to help the slabs set. There was even a thermometer hanging there, and if for some reason the camp didn’t turn out to work on Sunday, a free worker kept the stoves going.

  Gang 38, of course, was blocking the stove, drying their foot rags, and wouldn’t let outsiders anywhere near it. Never mind, it’s not too bad up in the corner here.

  Shukhov rested the shiny seat of his quilted trousers on the edge of a wooden mold and propped himself against the wall. As he leaned back, his overcoat and jerkin tightened and he felt something hard pressing against the left side of his chest, near his heart. A corner of the crust in his inside pocket—the half of his morning ration he’d brought along for dinner. He always took that much to work and never touched it till dinnertime. But as a rule he ate the other half at breakfast, and this time he hadn’t. So he hadn’t really saved anything: he was dying to eat this portion right away while he was in the warm. It was five hours to dinnertime. A long haul.

  The ache in his back had moved down to his legs now, and they suddenly felt weak. If only he could get up to the stove!

  Shukhov placed his mittens on his knees, unbuttoned his jacket, untied his icy face cloth from around his neck, folded it a few times, and tucked it in his pocket. Then he took out the piece of bread in the white rag and, holding it under his coat so that not a crumb would be lost, began nibbling and chewing it bit by bit. He’d carried the bread under two layers of clothing, warming it with his body, so it wasn’t the least bit frozen.

  Since he’d been in the camps Shukhov had thought many a time of the food they used to eat in the village—whole frying pans full of potatoes, porridge by the caldron, and, in the days before the kolkhoz, great hefty lumps of meat. Milk they used to lap up till their bellies were bursting. But he knew better now that he’d been inside. He’d learned to keep his whole mind on the food he was eating. Like now he was taking tiny little nibbles of bread, softening it with his tongue, and drawing in his cheeks as he sucked it. Dry black bread it was, but like that nothing could be tastier. How much had he eaten in the last eight or nine years? Nothing. And how hard had he worked? Don’t ask.

  Shukhov, then, was busy with his two hundred grams, while the rest of Gang 104 made themselves comfortable at the same end of the shop.

  The two Estonians sat like two brothers on a low concrete slab, sharing half a cigarette in a holder. They were both tow-haired, both lanky, both skinny, they both had long noses and big eyes. They clung together as though neither would have air enough to breathe without the other. The foreman never separated them. They shared all their food and slept up top on the same bunk. On the march, on work parade, or going to bed at night, they never stopped talking to each other, in their slow, quiet way. Yet they weren’t brothers at all—they’d met for the first time in Gang 104. One of them, they explained, was a Baltic fisherman; the other had been taken off to Sweden by his parents when the Soviets were set up. When he grew up, he’d come back of his own free will, silly idiot, to finish his education in the land of his birth. He’d been pulled in the moment he arrived.

  People said nationality didn’t mean anything, that there were good and bad in every nation. Shukhov had seen lots of Estonians, and never came across a bad one.

  There they all were, sitting on slabs, on molds, on the bare ground. Tongues were too stiff for talk in the morning, so everybody withdrew into his own thoughts and kept quiet. Fetyukov the scavenger had picked up a lot of butts (he’d even tip them out of the spittoon, he wasn’t squeamish). Now he was taking them apart on his lap and sprinkling the half-burnt tobacco onto a single piece of paper. Fetyukov had three children on the outside, but when he was jailed they’d all turned their backs on him, and his wife had married somebody else, so he got no help from anywhere.

  Buynovsky kept looking sideways at him, and suddenly barked: “Why do you pick up all that foul stuff? You’ll get syphilis of the mouth before you know it! Chuck it out!”

  The captain was used to giving orders. He talked to everybody like that.

  But he had no hold over Fetyukov—he didn’t get any parcels either. The scavenger gave a nasty little snigger—half his teeth were missing—and said: “Just you wait, Captain, when you’ve been inside eight years, you’ll be doing the same yourself.”

  True enough, in its time the camp had seen off prouder people than Buynovsky.

  “Eh? What’s that?” Senka Klevshin hadn’t heard properly. He thought they’d been talking about how Buynovsky got burnt on work parade that morning. “You’d have been all right if you hadn’t flown off the handle,” he said, shaking his head pityingly.

  A quiet fellow, Senka Klevshin. One of the poor devil’s eardrums had burst back in ’41. Then he’d landed in a POW camp. Ran away three times. They’d caught up with him every time, and finally stuck him in Buchenwald. He’d escaped death by some miracle, and now he was serving his time quietly. Kick up a fuss, he said, and you’re done for.

  He was right there. Best to grin and bear it. Dig in your heels and they’ll break you in two.

  Alyoshka sat silent, with his face buried in his hands. Saying his prayers.

  Shukhov nibbled his bread till his teeth met his fingers, but left a bit of the rounded upper crust: a piece of bread is better than any spoon for cleaning out a porridge bowl. He wrapped the crust in the white rag again till dinnertime, stuffed it into the pocket inside his jerkin, and buttoned himself up against the cold. Right—I’m ready for work as soon as they like to send me. Be nice if they hang about a bit longer, though.

  Gang 38 got up and went their ways: some to the cement mixer, some to fetch water, some to collect wire mesh.

  But neither Tyurin nor his deputy, Pavlo, had rejoined 104. And though the men had been sitting around for scarcely twenty minutes, and the working day (shortened in winter) would not end till six o’clock, they felt as happy as if it was nearly over. Kildigs, the plump, red-faced Latvian, sighed. “Long time since we had a blizzard! Not a single one all winter. What sort of winter is that?”

  The gang all sighed for the blizzards they hadn’t had.

  When a blizzard blows up in those parts, the bosses are afraid to take the men out of their huts, let alone to work. You can get lost on the way from your hut to the mess hall unless you sling a rope between them. If a convict dies out in the snow, nobody gives a damn. But say he escapes. It has happened. In a blizzard the snow falls in tiny flakes, and the drifts are as firm as though packed by hand. Men have walked up such drifts straddling the wire and out of camp. Not that they ever got far.

  When you come to think of it, a blizzard is no use to anybody. The zeks sit under lock and key. Coal doesn’t arrive on time, and the wind blows the warmth out of the hut. If no flour is delivered to the camp, there’ll be no bread. And however long the blizzard blows, whether it’s three days or a week, every single day is counted as a day off, and the men are turned out to work Sunday after Sunday to make up for lost time.

  All the same, zeks love blizzards and pray for them. As soon as the wind freshens, they all throw their heads back and look at the sky: “Come on, let’s have the stuff! Let’s have the stuff, then!”

  Meaning snow.

  A ground wind never works itself up into a decent blizzard.

  A man tried to get warm at Gang 38’s stove and was shooed away.

  Then Tyurin came into the shop scowling. The team knew that there was work to be done and quickly.

  “Right, then.” Tyurin looked around. “All here, 104?”

  Without stopping to check or count, because nobody ever tried to give him the slip, he began giving each man his job. The two Estonians, together with Klevshin and Gopchik, were sent to fetch a big mixing
trough from nearby and carry it to the Power Station. This was enough to tell the gang that it was being switched to that building, which had been left half finished in late autumn. Two men were sent to the tool shop, where Pavlo was drawing the necessary tools. Four were assigned to snow clearance around the Power Station, at the entrance into the engine room itself, and on the catwalks. Another two were ordered to make a coal fire in the stove in the engine room—they’d have to pinch some boards and chop them up first. One man was to haul cement over on a sled. Two men would carry water, and two others sand. Another man would have to clear the snow away from the frozen sand and break it up with a crowbar.

  This left only Shukhov and Kildigs—the most skilled men in the gang—without jobs.

  The foreman called them aside, and said, “Listen, boys!” (He was no older than they were, but “boys” was a word he was always using.) “After dinner you’ll be starting where Gang 6 left off last autumn, walling the second story with cinder blocks. But right now we must get the engine room warm. It’s got three big windows, and your first job is to block them with something. I’ll give you some men to help, you just think what you can use to board them up. We’ll use the engine room for mixing, and to warm up in. If we don’t get some heat into the place, we’ll freeze to death like dogs. Got it?”

  He looked as if he had more to say, but Gopchik, a lad of about sixteen, as pink-cheeked as a piglet, came running to fetch him, complaining that another gang wouldn’t let him have the mixing trough and wanted to make a fight of it. So Tyurin shot off to deal with that.