One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Read online

  He’d been thrifty today. He hadn’t gone to the hut for his ration and was eating without bread. He could wolf it down by itself later on. More filling that way.

  The second course was magara gruel. It had congealed into a solid bar. Shukhov broke bits off. Magara is bad enough hot—tastes of nothing, leaves you feeling empty. Yellowish like millet, but just grass, really. Somebody’s bright idea, serving it instead of meal. Seemed they got it from the Chinese. Maybe three hundred grams, boiled weight. So make the best of it: call it what you like, it was all you were getting.

  Shukhov licked his spoon clean and returned it to his boot, then put on his cap and made for sick bay.

  The camp lights had chased the stars from the sky, and it was as dark as before. The broad beams from the corner towers were still quartering the compound. When they first set up this “special” camp,* the guards still had stacks of army surplus flares, and as soon as the light faded they would fill the air over the camp with white, green, and red fires. It was like a battlefield. Then they stopped throwing the things around. Probably cost too much.

  It was just as dark as at reveille, but an experienced eye could tell from all sorts of little signs that the signal for works parade would soon be sounded. Limpy’s assistant (Limpy, the mess orderly, was able to keep and feed a helper) went to call Hut No. 6—those too unfit to leave the compound—to breakfast. The old artist with the little beard ambled off to the Culture and Education Department for brush and ink to paint numbers. Yet again the Tartar strode rapidly across the midway toward the staff hut. The people had suddenly thinned out on the ground—they were all skulking inside, warming themselves in the few sweet minutes left.

  Shukhov ducked around the corner of a hut: if the Tartar spotted him, he’d give him hell again. You had to be wide awake all the time. Make sure a warder never saw you on your own, only as one of a crowd. He might be looking for somebody to do a job, or he might just want to take his spite out on you. They’d gone around every hut reading out the order: prisoners must take off their caps when they see a warder five paces away, and keep them off till they are two paces past him. Some warders wandered by blindly, but others made a meal of it. The hellhounds had hauled any number off to the cooler because of the “caps off” order. Better wait around the corner for a while.

  The Tartar went past, and Shukhov had made up his mind to go to sick bay, when it suddenly dawned on him that he had arranged with the lanky Latvian in Hut 7 to buy two tumblers full of homegrown tobacco that morning. With so much to do, it had gone clean out of his mind. The lanky Latvian had been given his parcel the night before, and by tomorrow there might be no tobacco left. It would be a month before he got another, and it was good stuff, just strong enough and sweet-smelling. A sort of reddish-brown, it was.

  Vexed with himself, Shukhov almost turned on his heel and went back to Hut 7. But sick bay was quite close and he made for its porch at a trot.

  The snow squeaked under his feet.

  It was always so clean in sick bay that you were afraid to tread on the floor. The walls were bright with white enamel paint, and all the fittings were white.

  But the doctors’ doors were all shut. Not out of bed yet, you could bet. The medical orderly on duty, a young fellow called Kolya Vdovushkin, was sitting in a crisp white gown at a clean desk, writing.

  There was nobody else around.

  Shukhov took off his cap as though to a superior officer. He had the old lag’s habit of letting his eyes wander where they shouldn’t, and he noticed that Kolya was writing lines of exactly the same length, leaving a margin and starting each one with a capital letter exactly below the beginning of the last. He knew right off, of course, that this wasn’t work but something on the side. None of his business, though.

  “It’s like this, Nikolai Semyonich, I feel sort of poorly.” There was embarrassment in his voice, as though he was asking for something that wasn’t rightfully his.

  Vdovushkin raised large mild eyes from his work. He was wearing a white cap, and white overalls with no number patches.

  “Why so late? Why didn’t you come last night? Don’t you know there’s no clinic in the morning? The sick list has gone over to PPS already.”

  Shukhov knew all that. He also knew that it was no easier to get off work in the evening.

  “Yes, but, Kolya, it didn’t start hurting last night, when it ought to have.”

  “What didn’t? Where’s the pain?”

  “Well, when I try to put my finger on it, I can’t say where it is. I just feel poorly all over.”

  Shukhov wasn’t one of those who haunted sick bay, and Vdovushkin knew it. But he was authorized to let off only two men in the morning. And there were already two names under the greenish glass on top of the desk. With a line drawn under them.

  “Well, you should have started worrying about it earlier. What’s the good of coming right before work parade? Here!”

  A number of thermometers had been inserted into a jar through a slit in its gauze cover. Vdovushkin drew one of them out, wiped off the solution, and gave it to Shukhov.

  Shukhov sat on the very edge of a bench by the wall, just far enough not to tip over with it. He had chosen this uncomfortable place unconsciously, intending to show that he wasn’t at home in sick bay and would make no great demands on it.

  Vdovushkin went on writing.

  The sick bay was in the most out-of-the-way corner of the camp, and no sound whatsoever reached it: there was not even the ticking of a clock—prisoners are not allowed clocks. The big boys tell the time for them. You couldn’t even hear mice scratching—they’d all been caught by the hospital cat, as was his duty.

  Shukhov felt strange sitting under a bright light doing nothing for five whole minutes in such deep silence in such a clean room. He inspected the walls and found nothing there. He inspected his jerkin—the number on his breast had been almost rubbed away, he’d have to get it touched up before they pounced on him. With his free hand he felt his face—his beard had come on fast in the last ten days. So what, it wasn’t in his way. It would be bath day again in three days’ time and he’d get a shave then. Why waste time waiting your turn at the barber’s? He had nobody to make himself pretty for.

  Looking at Vdovushkin’s snow-white cap, Shukhov remembered the field hospital on the River Lovat—he’d gone there with a damaged jaw, and gone back into the line of his own free will, stupid clod, when he could have had five days’ rest.

  His one dream now was to fall sick for two or three weeks. Not fatally, of course, and he didn’t want an operation. Just sick enough to be put in the hospital. He could see himself lying there for three weeks without stirring, being fed on clear beef broth. Suit him nicely, that would.

  Only now, he remembered, there was no way of getting any rest. A new doctor, Stepan Grigorich, had arrived with one of the recent batches. He was fast and furious, always on the boil himself, and he made sure the patients got no peace. One of his bright ideas was turning out the patients who could walk to work in the hospital precincts—putting up fences, laying paths, shoveling extra soil onto flower beds, and—in the winter—banking snow to keep the ground warm. Work, he reckoned, was the best medicine of all.

  Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that. If he ever had to bust a gut bricklaying, he’d soon quiet down.

  … Meanwhile, Vdovushkin went on with his writing. It was, in fact, “something on the side,” but nothing that Shukhov would have comprehended. He was copying out his long new poem. He had put the finishing touches to it the night before and had promised to show it to the new doctor, Stepan Grigorich, that morning.

  It was the sort of thing that happens only in camp: Stepan Grigorich had advised Vdovushkin to call himself a medical orderly and had given him the job. Vdovushkin was now practicing intravenous injections on ignorant prisoners and meek Lithuanians and Estonians, to whom it would never occur that a medical orderly could be nothing of the kind, but a former student of liter
ature, arrested in his second year of university. Stepan Grigorich wanted him to write in prison what he hadn’t had a chance to write outside.

  … The signal for work parade could barely be heard through double windows shuttered by white ice. Shukhov sighed and stood up. He still felt feverish, but he could see that he wasn’t going to get away with it. Vdovushkin reached for the thermometer and looked at it.

  “There you are—neither one thing nor the other. Thirty-seven point two. If it was thirty-eight,* nobody would argue. I can’t let you off, but you can stay if you feel like risking it. The doctor will look you over and let you off if he thinks you’re ill, but if he reckons you’re fit, you’ll be in the hole for malingering. I’d go to work if I were you.”

  Shukhov rammed on his hat and left without a word or a nod.

  Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?

  The frost was cruel. A stinging haze wrapped around him and set him coughing. The air temperature was twenty-seven below and Shukhov’s temperature was thirty-seven above. No holds barred!

  He trotted to the hut. The midway was empty right across. The whole camp looked empty. It was that last, short, painfully sweet moment when there was no escape but everybody still pretended that work parade would never come. The guards would still be sitting in their warm barracks, resting their sleepy heads on their rifle butts. Teetering on watchtowers in such a hard frost was no fun either. The sentries in the main guardhouse would be shoveling more coal into the stove. The warders would be smoking one last cigarette before the body search. And the zeks, dressed up in all their rags and tatters, girded with lengths of rope, muffled from chin to eyes in face rags to keep the frost out, would be lying boots and all on top of their blankets, eyes shut, lost to the world. Waiting for the foreman to yell, “We’re off!”

  Gang 104 dozed with the rest of Hut 9. Except for Pavlo, the deputy foreman, who was moving his lips as he added up something with a pencil, and Alyoshka, the well-washed Baptist, Shukhov’s neighbor, who was reading the notebook into which he had copied half the New Testament.

  Shukhov dashed in but without too much noise and went over to the deputy foreman’s bed.

  Pavlo raised his head. “Didn’t land in the hole, then, Ivan Denisovich? Still among the living?” (Western Ukrainians never learn. Even in the camps they speak to people politely.)

  He picked up Shukhov’s portion of bread from the table and held it out. A little hillock of sugar had been scooped onto it.

  Shukhov was in a great hurry, but still thanked him properly. (The deputy foreman was one of his bosses, and more important to Shukhov than the camp commandant.) Nor was he in too much of a hurry to dip his lips in the sugar and lick them, as he hoisted himself up with one foot on the bed bracket to straighten his bedding, or to view his bread ration from all angles and weigh it on his hand in mid-air, wondering whether it contained the regulation five hundred and fifty grams. Shukhov had drawn a few thousand bread rations in jails and prison camps, and though he’d never had the chance to weigh his portion on the scales, and anyway was too timid to kick up a fuss and demand his rights, he knew better than most prisoners that a bread cutter who gave full measure wouldn’t last long at the job. Every portion was underweight—the only question was by how much. Twice a day you looked at it and tried to set your mind at rest. Maybe they haven’t robbed me blind this time? Maybe it’s only a couple of grams short?

  About twenty grams light, Shukhov decided, and broke the bread in two. He shoved one half into a little white pocket stitched inside his jerkin (prison jerkins come from the factory without pockets). The other half, saved from breakfast, he thought of eating there and then, but food swallowed in a hurry is food wasted, you feel no fuller and it does nothing for you. He made as if to stow the half ration in his locker, but changed his mind when he remembered that the hut orderlies had been beaten up twice for stealing. A big hut is about as safe as an open yard.

  So, without letting go of the bread, Ivan Denisovich slipped out of his boots, deftly leaving spoon and foot rags in place, scrambled barefoot onto the top bunk, widened the hole in his mattress, and hid his half ration amid the sawdust. Then he tugged off his cap and unsheathed a threaded needle—also well hidden. (They’d feel your cap during the body search. A warder had once pricked himself and nearly smashed Shukhov’s skull in his rage.) Stitch, stitch, stitch and he’d tacked up the hole over the hidden half ration. By then the sugar had melted in his mouth. Every fiber in his body was tensed to the utmost: the work assigner would be bellowing at the door any moment now. His fingers were wonderfully nimble, and his mind raced ahead, planning his next moves.

  The Baptist was reading his Bible, not altogether silently, but sort of sighing out the words. This was meant perhaps for Shukhov. (A bit like political agitators, these Baptists. Loved spreading the word.)

  “But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or a wrongdoer, or a mischief-maker; yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but under that name let him glorify God.”*

  Alyoshka was a champion at one thing: wiggling that little book of his into a crack in the wall so neatly that it had never been found by searching warders.

  With the same rapid movements, Shukhov draped his overcoat over the end of his bed, pulled his mittens out from under the mattress, together with another pair of flimsy foot rags, a rope, and a rag with two tapes attached to it. He did a lovely job of smoothing down the bumps in the mattress (the sawdust was heavy and close-packed), tucked the blanket under all around, tossed the pillow into place, and, still barefoot, lowered himself and began putting on his boots—first, though, the good, new foot rags, with the worn ones over them.

  That was when the foreman stood up and barked: “Rise and shine, 104! Let’s have you outside!”

  Every man in the gang, nodding or not, rose to his feet, yawned, and made for the door. After nineteen years inside, the foreman wouldn’t hustle his men out a minute too early. When he said “Out,” you knew there was nothing else for it.

  While the men tramped wordlessly one after another into the corridor, then through the entryway out onto the porch, and the foreman of No. 20, taking his cue from Tyurin, called “All out” in turn, Shukhov had managed to pull his boots over the two layers of foot rags, put his overcoat on over his jerkin, and tie a length of rope tightly around his waist. (If you arrived in a special camp with a leather belt, it was taken away from you—not allowed.)

  So he was ready on time, and caught up with the last of his gang as their numbered backs were passing through the door onto the porch. In single file, making no effort to keep up with each other, every man looking bulky because he was muffled up in every piece of clothing he possessed, they trudged across to the midway with not a sound except for the crunch of snow underfoot.

  It was still dark, although a greenish light was brightening in the east. A thin, treacherous breeze was creeping in from the same direction.

  There is no worse moment than when you turn out for work parade in the morning. In the dark, in the freezing cold, with a hungry belly, and the whole day ahead of you. You lose the power of speech. You haven’t the slightest desire to talk to each other.

  The junior work assigner was restlessly pacing the midway. “Come on, Tyurin, how long have we got to wait for you? Dragging your feet again, eh?”

  Somebody like Shukhov might be afraid of the junior work assigner, but Tyurin wasn’t. Wouldn’t waste breath on him in that frost. Just tramped ahead without a word. And the whole gang tramped after him: stomp, stomp, crunch, crunch.

  Tyurin must have handed over the kilo of fatback, though—because, looking at the other teams, you could see that 104 was in its old position. Some other lot, poorer and more stupid, would be shunted off to Sotsgorodok. It would be murder out there—twenty-seven below, with a mean wind blowing, no shelter, and no hope of a warm!

  The foreman needed plenty of fatback—for the PPS, and to keep his own belly purring. He might no
t get parcels himself, but he never went short. Every man in the gang who did get a parcel gave him a present right away.

  It was that or perish.

  The senior work assigner was ticking off names on his board.

  “One sick, Tyurin, twenty-three on parade?”

  The foreman nodded. “Twenty-three.”

  Who was missing? Panteleyev. Who said he was sick, though?

  A whisper went around the gang. Panteleyev, that son of a bitch, had stayed behind in camp again. He wasn’t sick at all, the security officer had kept him back. He’d be squealing on somebody again.

  Nothing to stop them sending for him later in the day and keeping him for three hours if necessary. Nobody would be there to see or hear.

  They could pretend he was in sick bay.

  The whole midway was black with prison jackets as the gangs slowly jostled each other toward the checkpoint. Shukhov remembered that he’d meant to freshen up the number on his jerkin, and squeezed through the crowd to the other side of the road. Two or three zeks were lining up for the artist already. Shukhov stood behind them. Those numbers were the plague of a zek’s life. A warder could spot him a long way off. One of the guards might make a note of it. And if you didn’t get it touched up in time, you were in the hole for not looking after it!

  There were three artists in the camp. They painted pictures for the bosses, free, and also took turns painting numbers on work parade. This time it was the old man with the little gray beard. The way his brush moved as he painted a number on a cap made you think of a priest anointing a man’s forehead with holy oil. He would paint for a bit and then stop to breathe into his glove. It was a thin knitted glove, and his hand would get too numb to trace the figures.

  The artist renewed the Shcha-854 on Shukhov’s jerkin. He wasn’t far from the search point, so he didn’t bother to fasten his jacket but overtook the rest of the gang with his rope belt in his hand. He suddenly spotted a chance of scrounging a butt: one of the gang, Tsezar, was smoking a cigarette instead of his usual pipe. Shukhov didn’t ask straight out, though. Just took his stand near Tsezar, half facing him and looking past him.