One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Read online

  He waited for the others to start talking again—they were arguing about the Korean War: would there be a world war now that the Chinese had joined in?—then bent his head toward the Latvian: “Any homegrown?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  The Latvian swung his feet down from the angle brace, lowered them to the gangway, and rose. A skinflint, this Latvian—frightened to death he might stuff one smoke too many into the tumbler.

  He showed Shukhov the pouch and snapped open the clasp.

  Shukhov took a pinch on his palm and saw that it was the same as last time—same cut, and dark brown. He raised it to his nose and sniffed—yes, it was the same. But what he said to the Latvian was “Doesn’t seem the same, somehow.”

  “It is! It is the same!” the Latvian said angrily. “I never have any other sort, it’s always the same.”

  “All right, all right,” Shukhov said agreeably. “Give me a good tumblerful and I’ll try a puff. Maybe I’ll take two lots.”

  He said, Give me a good tumblerful, because the Latvian always packed the tobacco loosely.

  The Latvian took another pouch fatter than the first from under his pillow and got a beaker from his locker. A plastic one, but Shukhov had measured it and knew it held the same as a glass tumbler.

  The Latvian shook tobacco into it.

  “Come on, press it down a bit,” Shukhov said, pushing his own finger into the beaker.

  “I don’t need your help.” The Latvian snatched the beaker away angrily and pressed the tobacco down himself, but less firmly. He shook in some more.

  In the meantime, Shukhov unbuttoned his jerkin and groped in the quilted lining for the bit of paper which only his fingers could feel. He used both hands to ease it gradually through the padding toward a little hole in quite a different part of the lining, loosely drawn together with two little stitches. When he had worked it as far as the hole, he pulled the stitches out with his fingernails, folded the piece of paper lengthwise yet again (it was already folded into a long, narrow strip), and drew it out. A two-ruble note. A well-worn one that didn’t crackle.

  Somebody in the room was bellowing: “Old Man Whiskers won’t ever let you go! He wouldn’t trust his own brother, let alone a bunch of cretins like you!”

  The good thing about hard-labor camps is that you have all the freedom in the world to sound off. In Ust-Izhma you’d only have to whisper that people couldn’t buy matches outside and they’d clap another ten on you. Here you could shout anything you liked from a top bunk and the stoolies wouldn’t report it, because the security officer couldn’t care less.

  But Shukhov couldn’t afford to hang around talking.

  “It’s still pretty loose,” he complained.

  “Here, then!” the other man said, adding an extra pinch.

  Shukhov took his pouch from his inside pocket and tipped the homegrown into it from the beaker.

  “Right,” he said. He didn’t want to rush off with his first sweet cigarette on the go. “Fill me another.”

  He haggled a bit more while the beaker was filled again, then handed his two rubles over, nodded to the Latvian, and went on his way.

  Once outside, he was in a great hurry to reach his own hut. He didn’t want to miss Tsezar when he got back with the parcel.

  But Tsezar was there already, sitting on his lower bunk, feasting his eyes. He had arranged what he had brought on the bunk and on the nightstand. Both were screened from the lamp overhead by Shukhov’s upper bunk, and it was pretty dark down there.

  Shukhov bent over, inserted himself between Tsezar’s bed space and the captain’s, and held his hand out.

  “Your bread, Tsezar Markovich.”

  He didn’t say, “You got it, then”—that would have been a hint that he was entitled to a share for keeping Tsezar’s place in the line. He knew his rights, of course. But even after eight years on general duties he was no scrounger, and as time went by, he was more and more determined not to be.

  He couldn’t control his eyes, though—the hawk eyes of an old camp hand. They skimmed over the contents of Tsezar’s parcel laid out on the bed and the nightstand. The wrappings had not all been removed, and some bags had not been opened at all, but a quick glance and a sniff to make sure told Shukhov that Tsezar had been sent sausage, condensed milk, a big smoked fish, some fatback, biscuits with a nice smell, cake with a different nice smell, at least two kilos of lump sugar, and maybe some butter, as well as cigarettes, pipe tobacco, and quite a few other things.

  He learned all this in the time it took to say: “Your bread, Tsezar Markovich.”

  Tsezar’s eyes were wild and his hair all tousled. He was drunk with excitement. (People who received parcels of groceries always got into that state.) He waved the bread away: “Keep it, Ivan Denisovich.”

  The skilly, and two hundred grams of bread as well—that was a full supper, worth quite as much as Shukhov’s share of Tsezar’s parcel.

  He immediately stopped expecting anything from the goodies on display. No good letting your belly get excited when there’s nothing to come.

  He’d got four hundred grams of bread, and another two hundred, and at least two hundred in his mattress. That was plenty. He could wolf down two hundred now, gobble up five hundred and fifty in the morning, and still have four hundred to take to work. He was really living it up! The bread in the mattress could stay there a bit. Good job he’d stitched the hole up in time. Somebody in Gang 75 had had things pinched from his nightstand. (Ask the Supreme Soviet to look into it!)

  Some people take the view that a man with a parcel is always a tightwad, you have to gouge what you can out of him. But when you think of it—it’s easy come, easy go. Even those lucky people are sometimes glad to earn an extra bowl of gruel between parcels. Or scrounge a butt. A bit for the warder, a bit for the team foreman, and you can’t leave out the trusty in the parcel room. If you do, he’ll mislay your parcel next time around and it’ll be there a week before it gets on the list. Then there’s the clerk in the storeroom, where all the groceries have to be handed in—Tsezar will be taking a bagful there before work parade next morning to be kept safe from thieves, and hut searches, and because the commandant has so ordered—if you don’t make the clerk a handsome gift, he’ll pinch a bit here and a bit there … He sits there all day behind a locked door with other men’s groceries, the rat, and there’s no way of checking up on him. Then there’s payment for services rendered (by Shukhov to Tsezar, for instance). Then there’ll be a little something for the bathhouse man, so he’ll pick you out a decent set of clean underwear. Then there’s the barber, who shaves you “with paper”—wiping the razor on a scrap of paper, not your bare knee—it may not amount to much, but you have to give him three or four cigarettes. Then there’ll be somebody in the CES—to make sure your letters are put aside separately and not lost. Then supposing you want to wangle a day off and rest up in the compound—you need to fix the doctor. You’re bound to give something to your neighbor who eats from the same nightstand, like the captain does with Tsezar. And counts every bite you take. The most shameless zek can’t hold out against that.

  So those who always think the other man’s radish is plumper than their own might feel envy, but Shukhov knew what was what and didn’t let his belly rumble for other people’s goodies.

  By now he’d pulled his boots off, climbed up on his bunk, taken the fragment of steel out of his mitten, examined it, and made up his mind to look for a good stone next day and hone himself a cobbler’s knife—work at it a bit morning and evening and in four days he’d have a great little knife with a sharp, curved blade.

  For the time being, the steel had to be hidden, even at night. He could wedge it between his bedboards and one of the crossbars. While the captain wasn’t there for the dust to fall in his face, Shukhov turned back his heavy mattress (stuffed with sawdust, not shavings) at the pillow end, and set about hiding the blade.

  His neighbors up top—Al
yoshka the Baptist and the two Estonian brothers on the next bunk across the gangway—could see him, but Shukhov knew he was safe with them.

  Fetyukov passed down the hut, sobbing. He was bent double. His lips were smeared with blood. He must have been beaten up again for licking out bowls. He walked past the whole team without looking at anybody, not trying to hide his tears, climbed onto his bunk, and buried his face in his mattress.

  You felt sorry for him, really. He wouldn’t see his time out. He didn’t know how to look after himself.

  At that point the captain appeared, looking happy, carrying specially brewed tea in a mess tin. There were two buckets of tea in the hut, if you could call it tea. Warm and tea-colored, all right, but like dishwater. And the bucket made it smell of moldy wood pulp. Tea for the common working man, that was. Buynovsky must have gotten a handful of real tea from Tsezar, popped it in the mess tin, and fetched hot water from the boiler. He settled down at his nightstand, mighty pleased with himself.

  “Nearly scalded my fingers under the tap,” he said, showing off.

  Down below there, Tsezar unfolded a sheet of paper and laid things out on it. Shukhov put his mattress back in place, so he wouldn’t see and get upset. But yet again they couldn’t manage without him. Tsezar rose to his full height in the gangway, so that his eyes were on a level with Shukhov’s, and winked: “Denisovich! Lend us your ten-day gadget.”

  The little folding knife, he meant. Shukhov had one hidden in his bed. Smaller than your finger crooked at the middle knuckle, but the devil would cut fatback five fingers thick. Shukhov had made a beautiful job of that knife and kept it well honed.

  He felt for the knife, drew it out, and handed it over. Tsezar gave him a nod and vanished again.

  The knife was another earner. Because you could land in the hole (ten days!) for keeping it. Only somebody with no conscience at all would say lend us your knife so we can cut our sausage, and don’t think you’re getting any.

  Tsezar had put himself in debt to Shukhov again.

  Now that he’d dealt with the bread and the knives, Shukhov fished out his pouch. He took from it a pinch exactly as big as that he had borrowed and held it out across the gangway to the Estonian, with a thank-you.

  The Estonian’s lips straightened into a smile of sorts, he muttered something to his brother, and they rolled a separate cigarette to sample Shukhov’s tobacco.

  Go ahead and try it, it’s no worse than yours! Shukhov would have tried it himself, but the clock in his guts said it was very close to roll call. Just the time for the warders to come prowling round the huts. If he wanted a smoke he’d have to go out in the corridor quick, and he fancied it was a bit warmer up on his top bunk. It wasn’t at all warm in the hut, and the ceiling was still patterned with hoarfrost. You’d get pretty chilly at night, but for the time being, it was just about bearable.

  All his little jobs done, Shukhov began breaking bits from his two hundred grams. He couldn’t help listening to the captain and Tsezar drinking tea and talking down below.

  “Help yourself, Captain, don’t be shy! Have some of this smoked fish. Have some sausage.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  “Butter yourself a piece of this loaf! It’s a real Moscow baton!”

  “Dear-oh-dear-oh-dear, I just can’t believe that somewhere or other batons are still being baked. This sudden abundance reminds me of something that once happened to me. It was at Sevastopol, before the Yalta Conference. The town was absolutely starving and we had to show an American admiral around. So they set up a shop specially, chockful of foodstuff, but it wasn’t to be opened until they saw us half a block away, so that the locals wouldn’t have time to crowd the place out. Even so, the shop was half full one minute after it opened. And you couldn’t ask for the wrong thing. ‘Look, butter!’ people were shouting, ‘Real butter! And white bread!’”

  Two hundred harsh voices were raising a din in their half of the hut, but Shukhov still thought he could make out the clanging on the rail. Nobody else heard, though. Shukhov also noticed that the warder they called Snub Nose—a short, red-faced young man—had appeared in the hut. He was holding a piece of paper, and this and his whole manner showed that he hadn’t come to catch people smoking or drive them outside for roll call, but was looking for somebody in particular.

  Snub Nose consulted his piece of paper and asked: “Where’s 104?”

  “Here,” they answered. The Estonians concealed their cigarettes and waved the smoke away.

  “Where’s the foreman?”

  “What do you want?” Tyurin spoke from his bed, swinging his legs over the edge so that his feet barely touched the floor.

  “Have the men who were told to submit written explanations got them ready?”

  “They’re doing it,” Tyurin said confidently.

  “They should have been in by now.”

  “Some of my men are more or less illiterate, it’s hard work for them.” (Tsezar and the captain, he was talking about. He was sharp, Tyurin. Never stuck for an answer.) “We’ve got no pens, or ink.”

  “Well, you should have.”

  “They keep confiscating it.”

  “Watch it, foreman, just mind what you’re saying, or I’ll have you in the cell block,” Snub Nose promised, mildly. “The explanatory notes will be in the warders’ barracks before work parade in the morning! And you will report that all prohibited articles have been handed in to the personal-property store. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  (“The captain’s in the clear!” Shukhov thought. The captain himself was purring over his sausage and didn’t hear a thing.)

  “Now, then,” said the warder. “Shcha-301—is he in your gang?”

  “I’ll have to look at the list,” the foreman said, pretending ignorance. “How can anybody be expected to remember these blasted numbers?” (If he could drag it out till roll call, he might save Buynovsky at least for the night.)

  “Buynovsky—is he here?”

  “Eh? That’s me!” the captain piped up from his hiding place under Shukhov’s top bunk.

  The quick louse is always first on the comb.

  “You, is it? Right then, Shcha-301. Get ready.”

  “To go where?”

  “You know where.”

  The captain only sighed and groaned. Taking a squadron of torpedo boats out into a stormy sea in the pitch dark must have been easier for him than leaving his friends’ company for the icy cell block.

  “How many days?” he asked in a faint voice.

  “Ten. Come along now, hurry it up!”

  Just then the orderlies began yelling, “Roll call! Everybody out for roll call!”

  The warder sent to call the roll must be in the hut already.

  The captain looked back, wondering whether to take his overcoat. If he did, though, they’d whip it off him and leave him just his jerkin. So better go as he was. The captain had hoped for a while that Volkovoy would forget—but Volkovoy never forgot or forgave—and had made no preparations, hadn’t even hidden himself a bit of tobacco in his jerkin. No good holding it in his hand—they’d take it off him the moment they frisked him.

  All the same, Tsezar slipped him a couple of cigarettes while he was putting his cap on.

  “Well, so long, chums,” the captain said with a miserable look, nodding to his teammates, and followed the warder out of the hut.

  Several voices called after him, “Keep smiling,” “Don’t let them get you down”—but there was nothing much you could say. Gang 104 had built the punishment block themselves and knew all about it: the walls were stone, the floor cement, there were no windows at all, the stove was kept just warm enough for the ice on the wall to melt and form puddles on the floor. You slept on bare boards, got three hundred grams of bread a day, skilly only every third day.

  Ten days! Ten days in that cell block, if they were strict about it and made you sit out the whole stint, meant your health was ruined for life. It meant tubercul
osis and the rest of your days in the hospital.

  Fifteen days in there and you’d be six feet under.

  Thank heaven for your cozy hut, and keep your nose clean.

  “Outside, I said—I’ll count to three,” the hut orderly shouted. “If anybody’s not outside when I get to three, I’ll take down his number and report him to the warder.”

  The hut orderly’s another arch-bastard. Imagine—they lock him in with us for the whole night and he isn’t afraid of anybody, because he’s got the camp brass behind him. It’s the other way around—everybody’s afraid of him. He’ll either betray you to the warders or punch you in the kisser. Disabled, supposed to be, because he lost a finger in a brawl, but he looks like a hood. And that’s just what he is—convicted as a common criminal, but they pinned a charge under Article 58, subsection 14* on him as well, which is why he landed in this camp.

  There was nothing to stop him jotting your name down, handing it to the warder, and it was two days in the hole, normal working hours. Men had been drifting toward the door, but now they all crowded out, those on the top bunks flopping down like bears to join the milling crowd, trying to push their way through the narrow opening.

  Shukhov sprang down nimbly, holding the cigarette he’d just rolled and had been wanting so long, thrust his feet into his boots and was ready to go—but he took pity on Tsezar. Not that he wanted to earn a bit more from Tsezar, he just pitied the man with all his heart: Tsezar might think a lot of himself, but he didn’t know the first thing about the facts of life. When you got a parcel, you didn’t sit gloating over it, you rushed it off to the storeroom before roll call. Eating could wait. But what could Tsezar do with his parcel now? If he turned out for roll call carrying that great big bag, what a laugh that would be—five hundred men would be roaring with laughter. If he left the stuff where it was, it would very likely be pinched by the first man back from roll call. (In Ust-Izhma the system was even tougher: the crooks would always be home from work first, and by the time the others got in, their nightstands would be cleaned out.)