One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  The guards never ordered them to drop their firewood on the work site. The guards also needed firewood, and couldn’t carry it themselves. For one thing, their uniform forbade it, and for another, their hands were full with the automatic weapons they needed to shoot prisoners. But when they’d marched the column up to the camp, they’d give the order: “All those from row such-and-such to row such-and-such, drop your wood over here.” They weren’t heartless, though: they had to leave some wood for the warders, and some for the zeks themselves, otherwise nothing at all would be brought in.

  So the rule was that every zek carried some firewood every day. Sometimes you’d get it home, sometimes it would be taken from you. You never knew.

  While Shukhov’s eyes were combing the ground looking for chips to pick up, the foreman counted the gang and reported to the guard commander: “104—all present!”

  Including Tsezar, who had left the other office workers and joined his own gang. There was hoarfrost on his black mustache. He puffed hard at his pipe and the red glow warmed his face.

  “How are things, Captain?” he asked.

  Stupid question! If you’re warm yourself, you don’t know what it’s like freezing.

  The captain shrugged. “How do you think? I’ve worked so hard I can hardly stand up straight.”

  Meaning you might at least give me a smoke.

  Tsezar offered him a smoke. The captain was the only one in the gang he hobnobbed with. There was nobody else he could have a heart-to-heart talk with.

  “One missing in 32!” Everybody took up the cry.

  The deputy foreman of Gang 32 and another fellow peeled off to search the motor-repair shops.

  A buzz went through the crowd. Who was it? What was he up to? The word reached Shukhov that it was the little dark Moldavian. Which Moldavian was that? The one they said was a Romanian spy? A real spy, for once.

  There were five spies in every gang, but those were made-up spies, make-believe spies. Their papers had them down as spies, but they were just ex-prisoners of war. Shukhov was one of those himself.

  That Moldavian, though, was the real thing.

  The guard commander took one look at his list and went black in the face. He was in for it if a spy had escaped!

  The whole crowd, Shukhov as well, were furious. What sort of rotten creep, louse, filth, swine, murdering bastard was he? The sky was dark, what light there was must be coming from the moon, the forest was hardening for the night, and that mangy cur was missing! Hadn’t the dirtbag had his fill of work? Wasn’t the official working day, eleven hours of it from dawn to dusk, long enough for him? Just you wait! The Prosecutor will find you some extra time!

  Even Shukhov thought it weird—working and not noticing the signal.

  He’d quite forgotten that he’d just been doing it himself and had felt peeved when he saw them all crowding around the guardhouse too early. Now he was freezing with the rest, and fuming with the rest, and thinking that if that Moldavian kept them waiting another half hour, and the guards handed him over to the crowd, they’d tear him to pieces like wolves tearing a calf!

  Now the cold was really biting! Nobody could keep still—they were all stamping their feet, or taking two steps forward, two steps back.

  People were wondering whether the Moldavian could be trying to escape. If he’d run off earlier in the day, that was one thing, but if he was hiding and waiting for the guards to be brought down from the watchtowers, he’d wait in vain. If there were no tracks showing where he’d crawled under the wire, they’d keep the guards up there for three whole days while they searched the whole site. Or a week, if need be. Any old convict knows that’s what standing orders say. One way or another, the guards’ life isn’t worth living with somebody on the loose. They’re run off their feet, can’t stop to eat or sleep. Sometimes they get so furious that the runaway isn’t brought back alive. They shoot him down.

  Tsezar was working on the captain.

  “The pince-nez dangling from the rigging, for instance—remember?”*

  “Mm—yes.” The captain was busy smoking.

  “Or the baby carriage rolling and rolling down the Odessa steps?”

  “Yes. But, in that film, life on board ship is like a puppet show.”

  “Maybe modern film technique makes us expect too much.”

  “The officers are rotters to a man.”

  “That’s true to history!”

  “So who do you think led the men into battle? Then again, those maggots crawling on the meat look as big as earthworms. Surely there were never any maggots like that?”

  “The camera can’t show them any smaller!”

  “I tell you what, if they brought that meat to our camp today instead of the rotten fish we get and chucked it in the pot without washing or scraping it, I think we’d…”

  Cries came from the zeks. “Aaaah! Ooooh!”

  They’d seen three figures darting out of the auto-repair shop. Evidently the Moldavian had been found.

  The crowd by the gate howled. “Oo-oo-oo-ooh.”

  Then when the three got closer:

  “Filthy swine! Traitor! Rat! Dirty dog! Vomitface! Rotten bastard!”

  Shukhov joined in:

  “Filthy swine!”

  Well, it was no joke—he’d robbed five hundred men of more than half an hour of their time.

  The Moldavian hunched his shoulders and scurried along like a mouse.

  A guard shouted “Halt!” and took his number. “K-460. Where were you?”

  He walked up to the man as he spoke, turning his rifle butt end forward.

  There were shouts from the crowd: “Bastard!” “Dog’s vomit!” “Dirtbag!”

  But others quieted down as soon as the sergeant turned his rifle around.

  The Moldavian said nothing, just lowered his head and backed away from the sergeant. The deputy foreman of Gang 32 stepped forward.

  “The rotten bastard climbed up on the plasterers’ scaffolding to hide from me, managed to get warm up there, and fell asleep.”

  He gave the man a kidney punch. And a rabbit punch.

  That way he sent him staggering out of the sergeant’s reach.

  But as the man reeled back a Hungarian belonging to the same gang, 32, sprang forward, kicked his behind, and kicked it again. (Hungarians don’t like Romanians at the best of times.)

  A bit different from spying, eh? Any idiot can be a spy. Spies live in comfort, spies have fun. You won’t find a tenner on general duties in a hard-labor camp quite so easy.

  The sergeant lowered his rifle.

  “Get away from the gates! Form up in fives!” the guard commander yelled.

  Counting again, the bastards! Why now, when they’d cleared it all up? An ugly noise went through the ranks. All the hatred they’d felt for the Moldavian was switched to the guards. They kept up their din and made no effort to move away from the gates.

  “What’s this, then?” the guard commander bellowed. “Want me to sit you down on the snow? Don’t think I won’t. I’ll keep you here till morning!”

  He would, too. Nothing out of the ordinary. Prisoners had been made to sit down often enough before. Or even lie down. It would be: “Down! Guards—guns at the ready!” The zeks knew this sort of thing could happen. They started inching back from the gates.

  The guards urged them on with shouts of “Get back! Get back there!”

  Zeks in the rear shouted angrily at those in front. “What are you leaning on the gate for, anyway, you sons of bitches?” The mob was slowly forced backward.

  “Form up in fives! First five! Second! Third!”

  By now the moon was shining full-strength. The redness had gone and it had brightened up. It was a good quarter of the way up. The evening had gone to waste. Damn that Moldavian. Damn the guards. Damn this life of ours.

  The front ranks, once counted, turned and stood on tiptoe, trying to see whether there’d be two men or three left in the rear. That was now a matter of life and death.r />
  Shukhov thought for a moment there were going to be four. He felt weak with fright. One too many! Another recount! But it turned out that Fetyukov, the scavenger, had gone to scrounge the captain’s cigarette butt and hadn’t got back to his place in time, so it looked as though there was one man extra.

  The deputy guard commander lost his temper and punched Fetyukov in the neck.

  Serve him right!

  Now there were three in the rear rank. Got it right at last. Thank God for that!

  “Get away from the gates!” The guards forced them back again.

  This time the zeks didn’t grumble. They could see soldiers coming out of the guardhouse and cordoning off a space on the other side of the gate.

  Which meant that they would be allowed through.

  The free overseers were nowhere to be seen, nor the site manager. The men would be getting their wood out.

  The gates were flung wide. The guard commander and a checker were waiting once again by a log railing just outside.

  “First five! Second! Third!”

  If the numbers tallied this time, the sentries would be taken off the towers.

  They had quite a long way to trudge around the boundary fence from the farthest towers. Only when the last zek was led out of the compound and the count came out right would the towers get a telephone call telling the guards to come down. Not a minute before. If the guard commander had any sense, he’d move out right away! He knew the zeks couldn’t run for it, and he knew the men from the towers would catch up with the column. But a dim-witted commander might be afraid he wouldn’t have men enough to handle the zeks, so he’d wait around.

  Today’s commander was one of those fatheads. He decided to wait.

  The zeks had been out in the cold all day, almost frozen to death. And now they’d been standing freezing for a whole hour since quitting time. What really got them down, though, was not the cold but the maddening thought that their evening was ruined. There’d be no time for anything back in camp.

  “How do you come to know so much about life in the British Navy?” somebody in the next rank was asking.

  “Well, it’s like this, I spent nearly a month on a British cruiser, had my own cabin. I was liaison officer with one of their convoys.”

  “That explains everything. Quite enough for them to pin twenty-five on you.”

  “Sorry, I don’t go along with all that destructive liberal criticism. I think better of our legal system.”

  Bull, Shukhov said to himself (he didn’t want to get involved). Senka Klevshin had been with the Americans for two days and he got nailed for twenty-five. You were sitting pretty on that ship of theirs for a month—how long does that entitle you to?

  “Only, after the war the British admiral took it into his blasted head to send me a souvenir, a token of gratitude, he called it. What a nasty surprise, and how I cursed him for it!”

  It was strange when you came to think of it. The bare steppe, the deserted site, the snow sparkling in the moonlight. The guards spaced out ten paces from each other, guns at the ready. The black herd of zeks. One of them, in the same sort of jacket as the rest, Shch-311, had never known life without golden epaulettes, had been pals with a British admiral, and here he was hauling a handbarrow with Fetyukov.

  You can turn a man upside down, inside out, any way you like.

  The guards were all there now, and it was “Quick march! Speed it up!” Just like that. No “prayers” this time.

  Speed it up? The hell we will. No good hurrying now all the other work parties have gone on ahead. Without a word spoken, the zeks all had the same idea: you’ve held us up, now we’ll hold you up. We know you’re just as keen as we are to get in the warm.

  “Step on it!” the guard commander shouted. “Front marker—step on it!”

  Like hell we will!

  The zeks plodded on, heads down, like men going to a funeral. Nothing to lose now, we’re last back in camp anyway. You wouldn’t treat us like human beings, so bust a gut shouting.

  The shouts—”Step on it!”—went on for a while, till the guard commander realized that the zeks wouldn’t go any faster. Shooting was out of the question: they were walking in column, in ranks of five, in good order. There was nothing the guard commander could do to make them move more quickly. (In the morning the zeks’ only hope of salvation is ambling to work slowly. Move briskly and you’ll never finish your time—you’ll run out of steam and collapse.)

  They went on steadily, holding themselves back. Crunching through the snow. Some chatting quietly, some not bothering. Shukhov was trying to remember what he’d left undone in camp that morning. Oh, yes—the sick bay! Funny, that—he’d forgotten all about it while he was working.

  They’d be seeing patients in the sick bay right now. He might still be in time if he skipped supper. But he didn’t have much of an ache anymore. They wouldn’t even take his temperature. Just a waste of time. He’d got by without doctors so far. And that lot could doctor you right into your coffin.

  Supper, not the sick bay, was more attractive right now. How to manage a bit extra? The only hope was that Tsezar would get a parcel, it was high time he did.

  A change suddenly came over the column of zeks. It wavered, stumbled, shuddered, muttered, and all at once the fives at the rear, Shukhov among them, were running to keep pace with those in front.

  They would walk a few paces—and start running again.

  When the tail end reached the hilltop Shukhov saw to their right, some distance away on the steppe, another black column on the move. The others must have spotted this column and speeded up to cut across its path.

  It could only be the party from the engineering works—three hundred men. They, too, must have been unlucky enough to be kept behind. Shukhov wondered why. Sometimes they were kept back for work reasons—to finish repairing some machine or other. Didn’t matter a lot to them, they were in the warm all day.

  Now it was devil take the hindmost. The men were running, really running. The guards, too, broke into a trot, with the guard commander shouting: “Don’t get strung out too far! Close up at the back there! Close up!”

  Stop your yelping, God damn it! We are closing up, what do you think we’re doing?

  Whatever they’d been talking or thinking about was forgotten. The whole column had one thing and one thing only on its mind.

  “Get ahead of Ten! Beat them to it!”

  Things were all mixed up. No more sweet or sour. No more guard or zek. Guards and zeks were friends. The other column was the enemy.

  Their spirits rose. Their anger vanished.

  “Hurry it up! Get a move on!” the rear ranks shouted to those ahead.

  Shukhov’s column burst into the settlement and lost sight of the engineers beyond the houses. Now they were racing blind. Shukhov’s column had better footing, in the middle of the road. And the guards at the sides of the street stumbled less. Now, if ever, was the time to squeeze the others out!

  There was another good reason for getting in front of the engineers—it took longer to search them at the guardhouses. Since throat-cutting had broken out in the camp, the bosses reckoned that the knives must be made at the engineering works and smuggled in. So the engineers were frisked with extra care as they entered the camp. In late autumn, with the ground already chilly, the shout would go up: “Shoes off, engineers! Hold your shoes in your hands!”

  And they were frisked barefoot.

  Even now, frost or no frost, the guards would pick on somebody at random: “You there, off with your right boot! You over there—left one off!”

  The zek would simply have to hop on the other foot while one boot was turned upside down and the foot rag shaken to make sure there was no knife.

  Shukhov had heard—he didn’t know whether it was true or not—that the engineers had brought two volleyball posts into the camp that summer, with all the knives hidden inside them. Ten big knives in each. One or two had been found lying around.

&nb
sp; Half running, they passed the new recreation center, the free workers’ houses, the woodworking plant, and pushed on to the turn toward the guardhouse.

  “Hoo-oo-oo-oo-oo!” the column cried with a single voice.

  That road junction was their goal. The engineers, a hundred and fifty meters to the right, had fallen behind.

  They could take it easy now. The whole column rejoiced. Like rabbits finding that frogs, say, are afraid even of them.

  And there it was—the camp. Just as they had left it. Darkness, lights over the tight fence around the compound, a dense battery of lamps blazing in front of the guardhouse, the search area flooded with what could have been sunlight.

  But before they reached the guardhouse, the guard commander shouted, “Halt!”

  He handed his submachine gun to a soldier and ran over to the column (they’re told not to get too close together with their guns in hand).

  “Those on the right carrying wood—drop it on the right!”

  Those on the outside, where he could see them, didn’t try to hide their wood. One bundle flew through the air, a second, a third. Some tried to hide their wood inside the column, but their neighbors turned on them.

  “You’ll make them take everybody else’s! Chuck it down like a good boy!”

  Who is the convict’s worst enemy? Another convict. If zeks didn’t squabble among themselves, the bosses would have no power over them.

  “Quick—ma-arch!” the second-in-command shouted.