Shukhov saw that Tsezar was in a panic—but he should have thought about it sooner. He was shoving the fatback and sausage under his shirt—if nothing else, he might be able to take them out to roll call and save them.
Shukhov took pity on him and told him how it was done:
“Sit tight, Tsezar Markovich—lie low, out of the light, and go out last. Don’t stir till the warder and the orderlies come around the beds looking in every nook and cranny—then you can go out. Tell ’em you aren’t well! And I’ll go out first and hop back in first. That’s the way to do it.”
And off he dashed.
He had to be pretty rough to start with, shoving his way through the crowd (taking good care, though, of the cigarette in his clenched hand). But there was no more shoving in the corridor shared by both halves of the hut and near the outer door. The crafty lot stuck like flies to the walls, leaving free passage for one at a time between the ranks: go out in the cold if you’re stupid enough, we’ll hang on here a bit! We’ve been freezing outside all day as it is, why freeze for an extra ten minutes now? We aren’t that stupid, you know. You croak today—I’ll wait till tomorrow!
Any other time, Shukhov would have propped himself up against the wall with the rest. But now he strode by, sneering.
“What are you afraid of, never seen a Siberian frost before? The wolves are out sunbathing—come and try it! Give us a light, old man!”
He lit up just inside the door and went out on the porch. “Wolf’s sunshine” was what they jokingly called the moonlight where Shukhov came from.
The moon had risen very high. As far again and it would be at its highest. Sky white with a greenish tinge, stars bright but far between. Snow sparkling white, barracks walls also white. Camp lights might as well not be there.
A crowd of black jackets was growing thicker outside the next hut. They were coming out to line up. And outside that other one. From hut to hut the buzz of conversation was almost drowned out by the crunch of snow under boots.
Five men went down the steps and lined up facing the door. Three others followed them. Shukhov took his place in the second rank with those three. After a munch of bread and with a cig in his mouth, it wasn’t too bad standing there. The Latvian hadn’t cheated him—it was really good tobacco, heady and sweet-smelling.
Men gradually trickled through the door, and by now there were two or three more ranks of five behind Shukhov. Those already out were in a foul temper. What did the lousy bastards think they were doing, hanging around in the corridor instead of coming outside? Leaving us to freeze.
No zek ever lays eyes on a clock or watch. What good would it do him, anyway? All a zek needs to know is—how soon is reveille? How long till work parade? Till dinnertime? Till lights-out?
Anyway, evening roll call is supposed to be at nine. But that’s not the end of it, because they can make you go through the whole rigmarole twice or three times over. You can’t get to sleep before ten. And reveille, they figure, is at five. Small wonder that the Moldavian fell asleep just now before quitting time. If a zek manages to get warm, he’s asleep right away. By the end of the week there’s so much lost sleep to make up for that if you aren’t bundled out to work on Sunday the hut is one great heap of sleeping bodies.
Aha—zeks were pouring down from the porch now—the warder and the hut orderly were kicking their behinds. Give it to them, the swine!
“What the hell are you playing at up there?” the front ranks yelled at them. “Skimming the cream from dung? If you’d come out sooner, they’d have finished counting long ago.”
The whole hut came tumbling out. Four hundred men—eighty ranks of five. They lined up—neat fives to begin with, then higgledy-piggledy.
“Sort yourselves out at the back there!” the hut orderly roared from the steps.
They don’t do it, the bastards.
Tsezar came out hunched up, acting the invalid, followed by two orderlies from the other half of the hut, two from Shukhov’s, and another man with a limp. These five became the front rank, so that Shukhov was now in the third. Tsezar was packed off to the rear.
After this, the warder came out onto the porch. “Form up in fives,” he shouted at the rear ranks. He had a good pair of tonsils.
“Form up in fives,” the hut orderly bellowed. His tonsils were even healthier.
Still they don’t move, damn their eyes.
The hut orderly shot down the steps, hurled himself at them, cursing and thumping backs.
He took care which backs he thumped, though. Only the meek were lambasted.
They finally lined up properly. He went back to his place, and shouted with the warder: “First five! Second! Third!”
Each five shot off into the hut as its number was called. Finished for the day.
Unless there’s a second roll call, that is. Any herdsman can count better than those good-for-nothings. He may not be able to read, but the whole time he’s driving his herd he knows whether all his calves are there or not. This lot are supposed to be trained, but it’s done them no good.
The winter before, there’d been no drying rooms in the camp and everybody kept his boots in the barracks overnight—so they’d chased everybody out for a second, a third, or even a fourth count. The men didn’t even dress, but rolled out wrapped in their blankets. Since then, drying rooms had been built—not for every hut, but each gang got a chance to dry its boots every third day. So now they’d started doing second counts inside the huts: driving the men from one half to the other.
Shukhov wasn’t first in, but he ran without taking his eyes off the one man in front. He hurried to Tsezar’s bed, sat on it, and tugged his boots off. Then he climbed up onto a handy bunk and stood his boots on the stove to dry. You just had to get in first. Then back to Tsezar’s bed. He sat with his legs tucked under him, one eye watching to see that Tsezar’s sack wasn’t whipped from under his pillow, the other on the lookout for anybody storming the stove and knocking his boots off their perch.
He had to shout at one man. “Hey! You there, Ginger! Want a boot in your ugly mug? Put your own boots up, but don’t touch other people’s!”
Zeks were pouring into the hut now. In Gang 20 there were shouts of “Hand over your boots!”
The men taking the boots to the drying room would be let out and the door locked behind them. They’d come running back, shouting: “Citizen warder! Let us in!”
Meanwhile, the warders would gather in the HQ hut with their boards to check their bookkeeping and see whether anyone had escaped.
None of that mattered to Shukhov at present. Ah—here comes Tsezar, diving between the bunks on his way home.
“Thanks, Ivan Denisovich.”
Shukhov nodded and scrambled up top like a squirrel. He could finish eating his two hundred grams, he could smoke a second cigarette, or he could just go to sleep.
Only, he was in such high spirits after such a good day he didn’t really feel much like sleeping.
Making his bed wasn’t much of a job: he just whisked off his blackish blanket, lay down on the mattress (he couldn’t have slept on a sheet since he’d left home in ’41—in fact, he couldn’t for the life of him see why women bothered with sheets, it just made extra washing), laid his head on the pillow stuffed with shavings, shoved his feet into his jerkin, spread his jacket over his blanket, and—
“Thank God, another day over!”
He was thankful that he wasn’t sleeping in the punishment cell. Here it was just about bearable.
Shukhov lay with his head toward the window, Alyoshka on the other half of the bunk with his head at the other end, where light from the bulb would reach him. He was reading his Testament again.
The lamp wasn’t all that far away. They could read or even sew.
Alyoshka heard Shukhov thank God out loud, and looked around.
“There you are, Ivan Denisovich, your soul is asking to be allowed to pray to God. Why not let it have its way, eh?”
Shukhov shot a glance
at him: the light in his eyes was like candle flame. Shukhov sighed.
“Because, Alyoshka, prayers are like petitions—either they don’t get through at all, or else it’s ‘complaint rejected.’”
Four sealed boxes stood in front of the staff hut, and were emptied once a month by someone delegated for that purpose. Many prisoners dropped petitions into those boxes, then waited, counting the days, expecting an answer in two months, one month …
There would be no answer. Or else—“complaint rejected.”
“That’s because you never prayed long enough or fervently enough, that’s why your prayers weren’t answered. Prayer must be persistent. And if you have faith and say to a mountain, ‘Make way,’ it will make way.”
Shukhov grinned, rolled himself another cigarette, and got a light from the Estonian.
“Don’t talk rot, Alyoshka. I never saw mountains going anywhere. Come to think of it I’ve never seen any mountains. But when you and your whole Baptist club did all that praying in the Caucasus, did one single mountain ever move over?”
Poor devils. What harm does their praying do anybody? Collected twenty-five years all around. That’s how things are nowadays: twenty-five is the only kind of sentence they hand out.
“We didn’t pray for anything like that, Denisych,” Alyoshka said earnestly. He moved around with his Testament until he was almost face to face with Shukhov. “The Lord’s behest was that we should pray for no earthly or transient thing except our daily bread. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’”
“Our ration, you mean?” Shukhov asked.
Alyoshka went on undeterred, exhorting Shukhov with his eyes more than his words, patting and stroking his hand.
“Ivan Denisovich! We shouldn’t pray for somebody to send us a parcel, or for an extra portion of skilly. What people prize highly is vile in the sight of God! We must pray for spiritual things, asking God to remove the scum of evil from our hearts.”
“No, you listen to me. There’s a priest at our church in Polomnya…”
“Don’t tell me about your priest!” Alyoshka begged, his brow creased with pain.
“No, you just listen.” Shukhov raised himself on his elbow. “In our parish, Polomnya, nobody was better off than the priest. If we got a roofing job, say, we charged other people thirty-five a day but we charged him a hundred. And there was never a peep out of him. He was paying alimony to three women in three different towns and living with his fourth family. The local bishop was under his thumb, our priest greased his palm well. If they sent any other priest along, ours would make his life hell, he wasn’t going to share with anybody.”
“Why are you telling me about this priest? The Orthodox Church has turned its back on the Gospels—they don’t get put inside, or else they get off with five years because their faith is not firm.”
Shukhov calmly observed Alyoshka’s agitation, puffing on his cigarette.
“Look, Alyoshka”—smoke got into the Baptist’s eyes as Shukhov pushed his outstretched hand aside—“I’m not against God, see. I’m quite ready to believe in God. But I just don’t believe in heaven and hell. Why do you think everybody deserves either heaven or hell? What sort of idiots do you take us for? That’s what I don’t like.”
Shukhov lay back again, after carefully dropping his ash into the space behind his head, between the bunk and the window, so as not to burn the captain’s belongings. Lost in thought, he no longer heard Alyoshka’s muttering.
“Anyway,” he concluded, “pray as much as you like, but they won’t knock anything off your sentence. You’ll serve your time from bell to bell whatever happens.”
Alyoshka was horrified. “That’s just the sort of thing you shouldn’t pray for! What good is freedom to you? If you’re free, your faith will soon be choked by thorns! Be glad you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul. Remember what the Apostle Paul says, ‘What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be imprisoned but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.’”*
Shukhov stared at the ceiling and said nothing. He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not. To begin with, he’d wanted it very much, and counted up every evening how many days he still had to serve. Then he’d got fed up with it. And still later it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not allowed to go home but were packed off into exile. And there was no knowing where the living was easier—here or there.
The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home.
But they wouldn’t let him go home.
Alyoshka wasn’t lying, though. You could tell from his voice and his eyes that he was glad to be in prison.
“Look, Alyoshka,” Shukhov explained, “it’s worked out pretty well for you. Christ told you to go to jail, and you did it, for Christ. But what am I here for? Because they weren’t ready for the war in ’41—is that the reason? Was that my fault?”
“No second roll call, by the look of it,” Kildigs growled from his bed. He yawned.
“Wonders never cease,” Shukhov said. “Maybe we can get some sleep.”
At that very minute, just as the hut was growing quiet, they heard the rattle of a bolt at the outer door of the hut. The two men who’d taken the boots to be dried dashed into the hut shouting, “Second roll call!”
A warder followed them, shouting, “Out into the other half!”
Some of them were already sleeping! They all began stirring, grumbling and groaning as they drew their boots on (very few of them were in their underpants—they mostly slept as they were, in their padded trousers—without them, your feet would be frozen stiff even under a blanket).
Shukhov swore loudly. “Damn them to hell!” But he wasn’t all that angry, because he hadn’t fallen asleep yet.
Tsezar’s hand reached up to place two biscuits, two lumps of sugar, and one round chunk of sausage on Shukhov’s bed.
“Thank you, Tsezar Markovich,” Shukhov said, lowering his head into the gangway between bunks. “Better give me your bag to put under my pillow for safety.” (A passing zek’s thieving hands wouldn’t find it so quickly up there—and anyway, who would expect Shukhov to have anything?)
Tsezar passed his tightly tied white bag up to Shukhov. Shukhov tucked it under his mattress and was going to wait a bit until more men had been herded out so that he wouldn’t have to stand barefoot on the corridor floor so long. But the warder snarled at him: “You over there! In the corner!”
So Shukhov sprang to the floor, landing lightly on his bare feet (his boots and foot rags were so cozy up there on the stove it would be a pity to move them). He had cobbled so many pairs of slippers—but always for others, never for himself. Still, he was used to it, and it wouldn’t be for long.
Slippers were confiscated if found in the daytime.
The gangs who’d handed in their boots for drying were all right now if they had slippers, but some had only foot rags tied around their feet, and others were barefoot.
“Get on with it! Get on with it!” the warder roared.
The hut orderly joined in: “Want a bit of the stick, you scum?”
Most of them were crammed into the other half of the hut, with the last few crowding into the corridor. Shukhov stood against the partition wall by the night bucket. The floor was damp to his feet, and an icy draft blew along it from the lobby.
Everybody was out now, but the warder and the hut orderly went to look yet again to see whether anybody was hiding, or curled up asleep in a dark spot. Too few or too many at the count meant trouble—yet another recheck. The two of them went around and around, then came back to the door.
One by one, but quickly now, they were allowed back in. Shukhov squeezed in eighteenth, dashed to his bunk, hoisted his foot onto a bracket, and—heave-ho!—up he went.
Great. Feet into his jerkin sleeve again, blanket on top, jacket over that, and we’re asleep! All the zeks in the other half of the barracks would now be herded into
our half—but that was their bad luck.
Tsezar came back. Shukhov lowered the bag to him.
Now Alyoshka was back. He had no sense at all, Alyoshka, never earned a thing, but did favors for everybody.
“Here you are, Alyoshka!” Shukhov handed him one biscuit.
Alyoshka was all smiles. “Thank you! You won’t have any for yourself!”
“Eat it!”
If we’re without, we can always earn something.
He himself took the lump of sausage—and popped it into his mouth. Get the teeth to it. Chew, chew, chew! Lovely meaty smell! Meat juice, the real thing. Down it went, into his belly.
End of sausage.
The other stuff he planned to eat before work parade.
He covered his head with the skimpy, grubby blanket and stopped listening to the zeks from the other half crowding in between the bunks to be counted.
* * *
Shukhov felt pleased with life as he went to sleep. A lot of good things had happened that day. He hadn’t been thrown in the hole. The gang hadn’t been dragged off to Sotsgorodok. He’d swiped the extra gruel at dinnertime. The foreman had got a good rate for the job. He’d enjoyed working on the wall. He hadn’t been caught with the blade at the search point. He’d earned a bit from Tsezar that evening. He’d bought his tobacco. And he hadn’t taken sick, had got over it.
The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one.
* * *
Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell.
The extra three were for leap years.
1959
BY ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
August 1914 [The Red Wheel / Knot I]
Cancer Ward
A Candle in the Wind
Détente: Prospects for Democracy and Dictatorship
East and West
The First Circle
The Gulag Archipelago
Letter to the Soviet Leaders
Lenin in Zurich
The Mortal Danger
Nobel Lecture
The Oak and the Calf
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Page 15