One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  But Pavlo went on calmly eating his own double portion, and there was no knowing from the look on his swarthy young face whether he was aware of Fetyukov and remembered the two extra portions.

  Shukhov had finished his gruel. Because he’d primed his stomach for two portions at once, it felt less full than usual after oatmeal. He reached into his inside pocket, took his unfrozen piece of round crust out of the rag, and carefully mopped the last remains of the oatmeal smear from the bottom and sides of the bowl. When he had collected enough, he licked the gruel from the crust and mopped up as much again. In the end the bowl was as clean as if it had been washed, except for a faint film. He passed it over his shoulder to the collector and sat a minute longer with his hat off.

  It was Shukhov who had swiped the extra bowls, but the deputy foreman could do what he liked with them.

  Pavlo tantalized him a bit longer while he finished his gruel, licked his spoon clean (but not the bowl), put it away safely, and crossed himself. Then he gave two of the four bowls a bit of a push—he was hemmed in too tightly to pass them—surrendering them to Shukhov.

  “One for you, Ivan Denisovich, and one for Tsezar.”

  Shukhov hadn’t forgotten that he would have to take one bowl to the office for Tsezar, who never lowered himself by coming to the mess, either on the site or in camp. But when Pavlo touched the two bowls at once his heart stood still: was he giving them both to Tsezar? Now his pulse was normal again.

  He crouched over his lawful booty and are thoughtfully, taking no notice of the newly arrived gangs shoving past behind him. His one worry was that Fetyukov might get a second bowl. Fetyukov hadn’t the nerve to swipe anything for himself but he was a champion scrounger.

  … Buynovsky was sitting a little way along the table. He had finished his gruel some time ago, didn’t know that 104 had extra portions, and hadn’t looked to see how many the deputy foreman had left. He had grown sluggish as he warmed up, and hadn’t the strength to rise and go out into the cold air or to the chilly “warming shed” that warmed nobody. Now he was behaving like those he had tried to drive away with his metallic voice five minutes ago—taking up space to which he was not entitled and getting in the way of the gangs just arriving. He was new to camp life and to general duties. Moments like this, though he didn’t know it, were very important to him: they were turning the loud and domineering naval officer into a slow-moving and circumspect zek: only this economy of effort would enable him to endure the twenty-five years of imprisonment doled out to him.

  … People were pushing him from behind and yelling at him to give up his seat.

  Pavlo spoke to him. “Captain! You there, Captain?”

  Buynovsky started as if waking from a doze and looked around.

  Pavlo held out the bowl of gruel without asking whether he wanted it.

  Buynovsky’s eyebrows rose, and he stared at the gruel as though it was an unheard-of miracle.

  “Go on, take it,” Pavlo said reassuringly, then picked up the last bowl and carried it off to the foreman.

  A guilty smile parted the captain’s chapped lips. He had sailed all around Europe and across the Great Northern Sea Route, but now he bowed his head happily over less than a ladleful of thin gruel with no fat in it at all, just oats and water.

  Fetyukov gave Shukhov and the captain an evil look and went out.

  Shukhov himself thought it only right that the captain should get the spare portion. He might learn to look after himself someday, but so far, he had no idea.

  Shukhov also had some faint hope that Tsezar would hand over his gruel. Though he had no call to, because he hadn’t had a parcel for two weeks.

  After his second portion Shukhov mopped the bottom and sides of the bowl, sucking his crust each time, as before, then finished off the crust itself. After which he picked up Tsezar’s stone-cold gruel and left the mess.

  “For the office,” he said, pushing aside the stooge on the door, who didn’t want to let him out with a bowl.

  The office was a log cabin near the guardhouse. Smoke was still pouring from its chimney, as it had all morning. An orderly who also acted as their messenger kept the fire going. He was paid by the hour. The office was allowed any amount of kindling and firewood.

  Shukhov opened a creaking door into a little lobby, then another door padded with oakum, and entered with a rush of frosty air, pulling the door to before anybody could shout “Shut it, clod!”

  The office seemed to him as hot as a bathhouse. From the top of the Power Station the sun had looked cold and unfriendly: here it sparkled cheerfully through windows from which the ice was melting. Clouds of smoke from Tsezar’s pipe floated in the sunlight like incense in church. The whole stove was aglow—the blockheads had gotten it red-hot. The chimney pipe was red-hot, too.

  Sit down for a minute in that heat and you’d be fast asleep.

  The office had two rooms. The door to the second, the site manager’s room, was slightly ajar, and he was thundering:

  “We’re overspent on wages and we’re overspent on building materials. Prisoners chop up expensive boards, and I don’t mean just prefab panels, for firewood to burn in their shelters, and you turn a blind eye. The other day some prisoners were unloading cement outside the stores in a high wind and carrying it as much as ten meters on handbarrows, so the whole area around the stores was ankle-deep in the stuff and the workers left the site in gray instead of black. It’s waste, waste, waste all the time!”

  The manager was evidently in conference. With the overseers, no doubt.

  A stupefied orderly was sitting on a stool in a corner by the entrance. Beyond him, Shkuropatenko, prisoner B-219, a crooked beanpole of a man, was staring through the window with his walleye, still trying to make out whether anybody was pinching his pre-fabs. The old fool had seen the last of his tar paper anyway.

  Two bookkeepers, also zeks, were toasting bread on the stove. They’d rigged up a sort of wire griddle to keep it from burning.

  Tsezar was lolling at his desk, smoking his pipe. He had his back to Shukhov and didn’t see him.

  Opposite him sat Kh-123, a wiry old man doing twenty years’ hard. He was eating gruel.

  “You’re wrong, old man,” Tsezar was saying, good-naturedly. “Objectively, you will have to admit that Eisenstein is a genius. Surely you can’t deny that Ivan the Terrible is a work of genius? The dance of the masked oprichniki!* The scene in the cathedral!”

  Kh-123’s spoon stopped short of his mouth.

  “Bogus,” he said angrily. “So much art in it that it ceases to be art. Pepper and poppy seed instead of good honest bread. And the political motive behind it is utterly loathsome—an attempt to justify a tyrannical individual. An insult to the memory of three generations of the Russian intelligentsia!” (He was eating his gruel without savoring it. It wouldn’t do him any good.)

  “But would it have got past the censor if he’d handled it differently?”

  “Oh well, if that’s what matters … Only don’t call him a genius—call him a toady, a dog carrying out his master’s orders. A genius doesn’t adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant’s taste.”

  “Ahem!” Shukhov cleared his throat. He felt awkward, interrupting this educated conversation, but he couldn’t just go on standing there.

  Tsezar turned around and held his hand out for the bowl, without even looking at Shukhov—the gruel might have traveled through the air unaided—then went back to his argument.

  “Yes, but art isn’t what you do, it’s how you do it.”

  Kh-123 reared up and chopped at the table with his hand.

  “I don’t give a damn how you do it if it doesn’t awaken good feelings in me!”

  Shukhov stood there just as long as he decently could after handing over the gruel, hoping Tsezar would treat him to a cigarette. But Tsezar had entirely forgotten that Shukhov was behind him.

  So he turned on his heel and left quietly.

  Never mind, it wasn’t all that cold outs
ide. A great day for bricklaying.

  Walking down the path, he spotted a bit of steel broken off a hacksaw blade lying in the snow. He had no special use for it right then, but you never knew what you might need later. So he picked it up and slipped it into his trouser pocket. Have to hide it in the Power Station. Thrift beats riches.

  The first thing he did when he got back to the Power Station was find his trowel and shove it under the rope around his waist. Then he ducked into the mortar-mixing room.

  Coming in from the sun, he found it quite dark, and no warmer than outside. The air was, if anything, rawer.

  Men huddled next to the round stove rigged up by Shukhov, and the other stove on which thawing sand was steaming. While those who couldn’t get close sat on the edge of the mixing trough. The foreman sat right by the fire, eating the last of his gruel. Pavlo had warmed it up for him on the stove.

  A lot of whispering was going on, and the men were looking more cheerful. Somebody quietly gave Ivan Denisovich the news: the foreman had gotten a good rate for the job and had come back all smiles.

  What work he could point to so far, only he knew. Half the day was gone and they’d done nothing. They wouldn’t be paid for rigging up a stove and making themselves a warm shelter: that was work they did for themselves, not for the site. Something would have to be entered on the work sheet. Maybe Tsezar would slip in a few extras to oblige the foreman. The foreman treated Tsezar with respect, and he must have some reason for it.

  “A good rate for the job” meant good rations for five days. Well, four days more likely: the bosses would appropriate one day’s rations and hand out the standard minimum for every gang in the camp, good or bad. Fair shares all around, they called it—fair to everybody, but they were saving at the expense of the zek’s belly. True enough, a zek’s stomach can put up with anything: if today’s no good, we’ll stuff ourselves tomorrow. That was the dream the whole camp went to bed with on minimum-ration days.

  Just think, though—it was five days’ work and four days’ eats.

  The gang made little noise. Those who had tobacco took a few sly drags. Stared at the fire, huddled together in the half dark. Like a big family. That’s what a work gang is—a family. They could hear the foreman yarning to two or three others near the stove. He never wasted words. If he was telling the tale, he must be in a good mood.

  Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin, the foreman, was another who hadn’t learned to eat with his cap on. Without it, his head was an old man’s. It was close-cropped, like everyone else’s, and you could see in the firelight a sprinkling of white hairs among the gray.

  “… I was scared even of the battalion commander, and this was the CO. ‘Private Tyurin, reporting for orders,’ I say. He fixes me with a stare from under his shaggy eyebrows and says, ‘Name and patronymic?’ I tell him. ‘Year of birth?’ I tell him. Well, what was I in 1930, I was all of twenty-two, just a pup. ‘And who are you here to serve, Tyurin?’ ‘I serve the toiling people.’ He boils over and bangs the desk with both hands. ‘The toiling people! and what do you call yourself, you wretch?’ It was like I’d swallowed something scalding. ‘Machine-gunner, first-class,’ I say. ‘Passed with distinction in military and political subjects.’ ‘First-class, you vermin. Your father’s a kulak!* See this document—it’s just come in from Kamen. You made yourself scarce because your father’s a kulak. They’ve been after you for two years.’ I turned pale and said nothing. I hadn’t been writing home for a year in case they picked up the trail. I didn’t know whether the family were alive or dead and they knew no more about me. ‘Where’s your conscience,’ he roared, and the four bars on his shoulders were shaking, ‘trying to deceive the workers’ and peasants’ government?’ I thought he was going to beat me up. He didn’t, though. He signed an order—gave me six hours to get out. It was November. They stripped me of my winter uniform and gave me a summer outfit, secondhand, socks that had done three tours of duty, a shortarsed greatcoat. I was a young fool; I didn’t know I could have refused to turn the stuff in and sent them to hell. And I’d gotten this deadly entry in my papers: ‘Discharged—son of a kulak.’ Try and get a job with that in your record! I was four days from home by train, but they wouldn’t issue me a travel pass, or a single day’s rations. They just gave me one last dinner and booted me out of the depot.

  “Incidentally, I met my old platoon commander in the Kotlas transit prison in ’38, they’d slapped a tenner on him as well, and he told me the CO and the political commissar had both been shot in ’37. Proletarians or kulaks, it made no difference in ’37. Or whether or not they had a conscience … I crossed myself and said, ‘So you’re up there in heaven after all, Lord. You are slow to anger, but you hit hard.’”

  After his two bowls of gruel, Shukhov was dying for a smoke. Telling himself that he would repay it when he bought the two tumblers of homegrown from the Latvian in Hut 7, he spoke quietly to the Estonian fisherman: “Listen, Eino, lend me enough for a cigarette till tomorrow. You know I won’t let you down.”

  Eino looked Shukhov straight in the eye, then unhurriedly shifted his gaze to his so-called brother. They went halves in everything, and neither of them would lay out a shred of tobacco without asking the other. They muttered together, then Eino got out a pouch embroidered with pink thread. He took from it a pinch of factory-cut tobacco, put it on Shukhov’s palm, sized it up, and added a few wisps. Just enough for rolling one cigarette, not a scrap more.

  Shukhov had newspaper of his own. He tore a bit off, rolled his cigarette, picked up a hot ember that had landed between the foreman’s feet, took a long drag, another long drag, and felt a sort of dizziness all over his body, as though drink had gone to his head and his legs.

  The moment he lit up, green eyes glinted from the other side of the mixing room. Shukhov might have taken pity on Fetyukov and given him a drag, but he’d seen the scrounger score once that morning. Better to leave the butt for Senka Klevshin. The poor devil couldn’t hear what the foreman was saying, he just sat with his head on one side, looking into the fire.

  Firelight fell on Tyurin’s pockmarked face. He told his story without self-pity. He could have been talking about somebody else.

  “I sold what odds and ends I had to a secondhand dealer for a quarter of what it was worth, I bought a couple of loaves from under the counter—bread was rationed by then. I thought I could make my way home by jumping freight trains, but they’d strict laws against that as well—you could get shot trying it. And you couldn’t get tickets, remember, even if you had money, and I hadn’t. The streets around the station were chockablock with peasants in sheepskins. Some never got away, they died of hunger on the spot. All the tickets went to you-know-who—the OGPU, the army, people traveling on official business. You couldn’t get on the platform either: there were militiamen at the doors, and security police footing it up and down the tracks on either side of the station. The sun was going down, it was cold, the puddles were icing over. Where could I spend the night? I somehow got a grip on the smooth stone wall, swung myself over with my loaves, and went into the station lavatory. I stood there a bit—nobody was after me. I walked out, trying to look like a passenger, just another soldier. And there on the tracks stood the Vladivostok–Moscow train. There was a crush around the hot-water boiler, people were passing their kettles over each other’s heads. A girl in a dark blue blouse was hovering around with a two-liter kettle, afraid to get too close to the boiler. She had short little legs, and she was afraid she’d get scalded or trodden on. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘hold my loaves and I’ll get your hot water.’ While I was filling up, the train started moving. She was holding my loaves, crying, she didn’t know what to do with them. She didn’t care about the kettle. ‘Run,’ I said, ‘run for it, I’m right behind you!’ She went ahead and I followed. I caught up with her, lifted her on the train with one hand—it was tearing along by then. I hoisted myself onto the step. The conductor didn’t rap my fingers or punch me in the chest. There were other soldi
ers in the carriage and he mistook me for one of them.”

  Shukhov gave Senka a nudge, meaning finish this, poor devil. He even handed it over complete with his wooden holder—let him have a suck, it can’t hurt me. Senka was a comic: he put one hand to his heart and bowed like an actor. He might be deaf, but he did his best.

  The foreman went on with his story.

  “There were some girls, six of them, traveling in a closed compartment. Leningrad students coming back from practical work. They’d got butter and I don’t know what on the table, coats dancing away on hangers, suitcases in cloth covers. They didn’t know they were living—they’d had green lights all the way. We got talking and joking and drinking tea together. Which carriage are you in? they asked. I sighed and came clean. ‘It’s a carriage to you, it could be a hearse to me,’ I told them.”

  It was silent in the mixing room—just the stove crackling.

  “They oohed and ahed, they had to talk it over … But they ended up hiding me under some coats on the top bunk. The conductors had OGPU men riding with them in those days. It wasn’t just your ticket they wanted—it could be your skin. The girls kept me hidden and got me as far as Novosibirsk … Would you believe it, I had a chance later on to thank one of those girls. On Pechora. She’d caught it in the Kirov wave in ’35,* she was on general duty, going down the drain fast, and I got her fixed up in the tailor’s shop.”

  “Think we ought to make some mortar?” Pavlo asked in a whisper.

  The foreman didn’t hear him.

  “I got to our house through the back gardens after dark. They’d whipped my father off already, and my mother and the little ones were waiting to be deported. A telegram had got there before me, and the village soviet was on the lookout. We were in a panic, we put the light out and sat on the floor against the wall—there were activists wandering around the village looking in at windows. That same night I grabbed my little brother and took him off somewhere warmer, to Frunze. There was nothing to eat, for him or me. I saw some young riffraff sitting around a tar boiler. I sat down by them and said, ‘Listen, my bare-arsed friends, take my little brother as an apprentice, teach him how to live!’ They took him … I now wish I’d joined the band of thieves myself.”