One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Read online

  It was hard starting a day’s work in such cold, but that was all you had to do, make a start, and the rest was easy.

  Shukhov and Kildigs looked at each other. They had worked as partners more than once before and the bricklayer and the carpenter respected each other’s skills. Getting hold of something in the bare snow to stop up the windows wasn’t going to be easy. But Kildigs said: “Listen, Vanya! I know a place over by the pre-fabs where there’s a big roll of tarred paper doing nothing. I tucked it away myself. Why don’t we pop over?”

  Though he was a Latvian, Kildigs spoke Russian like a native—the people in the village next to his were Russians, Old Believers, and he’d learned the language as a child. He’d been in the camps only two years, but he knew what was what: you get nothing by asking. Kildigs’s name was Jan, and Shukhov called him Vanya, too.

  They decided to go for the tarred paper. But Shukhov hurried off first to pick up his trowel in the half-built wing of the auto-repair shop. It’s very important to a bricklayer to have a trowel that’s light and comfortable to hold. But the rule on every building site was collect all your tools in the morning and hand them all back at night. And it was a matter of luck what sort of tools you’d get next day. So Shukhov had diddled the toolmaker out of a very good trowel one day. He hid it in a different place every time, and got it out in the morning if there was bricklaying to be done. Of course, if they’d been marched off to Sotsgorodok that morning, he’d have been without a trowel again. But now he only had to shift a few pebbles and thrust his hand into the crevice—and out it came.

  Shukhov and Kildigs left the auto-repair sheds and made for the pre-fabs. Their breath turned to dense steam as they walked. The sun was up now, but gave off a dull blurry light as if through fog, and to either side of the sun stood—fence posts? Shukhov drew Kildigs’s attention to them with a nod, but Kildigs dismissed it with a laugh.

  “Fence posts won’t bother us, as long as wire isn’t strung between them. That’s what you’ve got to look out for.”

  Every word from Kildigs was a joke. The whole gang loved him for it. And the Latvians all over the camp had tremendous respect for him. But then, of course, Kildigs could count on a square meal, he got two parcels every month, he had color in his cheeks and didn’t look like a convict at all. He could afford to see the funny side.

  Huge, their work site was, a country walk from one side to the other. They bumped into some lads from Gang 82 on the way. They’d been made to dig holes again. Not very big holes were needed—fifty centimeters by fifty, and fifty deep. But the ground was stone even in summer, and it would take some tearing up now that the frost had a good hold. The pickax would glance off it, sparks would fly, but not a crumb of earth would be loosened. The poor fellows stood over there, each in his own hole, looking around now and then to find shelter. No, there was nowhere to go for warmth, and anyway they’d been forbidden to leave the spot, so they got to work with their picks again. That was all the warmth they’d be getting.

  Shukhov saw a familiar face, a man from Vyatka, and offered him some advice. “Here. What you diggers ought to do is light a fire over every hole. That way the ground would thaw out.”

  “They won’t let us.” The Vyatka man sighed. “Won’t give us any firewood.”

  “So find some yourself.”

  Kildigs could only spit in disgust.

  “Come off it, Vanya, if the bosses had any brains, do you think they’d have people using pickaxes in weather like this?”

  He added a few mumbled oaths and shut up. Nobody’s very talkative when it’s that cold. On and on they went till they reached the place where the pre-fab panels were buried under the snow.

  Shukhov liked working with Kildigs, except for one thing—he didn’t smoke, and there was never any tobacco in his parcels.

  He had a sharp eye, though, Kildigs did: they helped each other to lift one board, then another, and underneath lay the roll of tarred paper.

  They pulled it clear. The question now was how to carry it. It wouldn’t matter if they were spotted from the watchtowers. The poll-parrots only worried about prisoners trying to run away. Inside the work area you could chop every last panel into splinters for all they cared. If a warder came by, that wouldn’t matter either: he’d be looking around for anything he could pick up himself. And no working convict gave a damn for those pre-fabs. Nor did the foremen. Only the site manager, a free employee, the zek supervisor, and that gangling Shkuropatenko cared about them. Shkuropatenko was a nobody, just a zek, but he had the soul of a screw. He’d been put on a daily wage just to guard the pre-fabs and see that the zeks didn’t make off with bits of them. Shkuropatenko was the one most likely to catch them out in the open there.

  Shukhov had an idea. “I tell you what, Vanya, we’d better not carry it flat. Let’s stand it on end, put an arm each around it, and just walk steadily with it hidden between us. If he’s not too close, he’ll be none the wiser.”

  It was a good idea. Getting an arm around the roll was awkward, though, so they just kept it pinned between them, like a third man, and moved off. From the side, all you could see was two men walking shoulder to shoulder.

  “The site manager will catch on anyway as soon as he sees tar paper in the windows,” Shukhov said.

  Kildigs looked surprised. “So what’s it got to do with us? When we turned up at the Power Station, there it was. Nobody could expect us to tear it down.”

  True enough.

  Shukhov’s fingers were frozen in those thin mittens, but his left boot was holding out. Boots were what mattered. Hands unstiffen once you start work.

  They passed over a field of untrampled snow and came out onto a sled track leading from the tool shed to the Power Station. The cement must have been hauled along it.

  The Power Station stood on a little hill, at the far end of the compound. Nobody had been near it for some time, and all the approaches were blanketed by a smooth layer of snow. The sled tracks, and a fresh trail of deep footprints, made by Gang 104, stood out all the more clearly. They were already at work with their wooden shovels, clearing a space around the plant and a path for the truck.

  It would have been all right if the hoist had been working. But the engine had overheated and had never been fixed since. So they’d have to lug everything up to the second story themselves. Not for the first time. Mortar. Cinder blocks. The lot.

  For two months the Power Station had stood abandoned, a gray skeleton out in the snow. But now Gang 104 had arrived. What kept body and soul together in these men was a mystery. Canvas belts were drawn tight around empty bellies. The frost was crackling merrily. Not a warm spot, not a spark of fire anywhere. All the same—Gang 104 had arrived, and life was beginning all over again.

  The mortar trough lay in ruins right by the entrance to the generating room. It was a ramshackle thing. Shukhov had never had much hope that they’d get it there in one piece. The foreman swore a bit for the sake of appearances, but knew that nobody was to blame. Just then Kildigs and Shukhov rolled in, carrying the tar paper between them. The foreman brightened up and redeployed his men: Shukhov would fix the chimney pipe to the stove so that they could light a fire quickly, Kildigs would mend the mortar trough, with the two Estonians to help him, Senka Klevshin would get busy with his ax: the tar paper was only half the width of a window, and they needed laths to mount it on. But where would they come from? The site manager wouldn’t issue boards to make a warm-up room. The foreman looked around, they all looked around. There was only one thing for it. Knock off some of the boards attached for safety to the ramps up to the second story. Nobody need fall off if he stepped warily. What else could they do?

  Why, you may wonder, will a zek put up with ten years of backbreaking work in a camp? Why not say no and dawdle through the day? The night’s his own.

  It can’t be done, though. The work gang was invented to take care of that. It isn’t like a work gang outside, where Ivan Ivanovich and Pyotr Petrovich each gets a wage o
f his own. In the camps things are arranged so that the zek is kept up to the mark not by his bosses but by the others in his gang. Either everybody gets a bonus or else they all die together. Am I supposed to starve because a louse like you won’t work? Come on, you rotten bastard, put your back into it!

  When a gang feels the pinch, as 104 did now, there’s never any slacking. They jump to it, willy-nilly. If they didn’t warm the place up in the next two hours, they’d all be done for, every last man.

  Pavlo had brought the tools and Shukhov could help himself. There were a few lengths of piping as well, no tinsmith’s tools, though. But there was a metalworker’s hammer and a hatchet. He’d manage somehow.

  Shukhov clapped his mittened hands together, then began fitting pipes by hammering the ends into shape. More hand-clapping. More hammering. (His trowel was hidden not far away. The other men in the gang were his friends, but they could easily take it and leave him another. Kildigs was no different from the rest.)

  Every other thought went clean out of his head. He had no memory, no concern for anything except how he was going to join the lengths of pipe and fix them so that the stove would not smoke. He sent Gopchik to look for wire, so that he could support the chimney where it stuck out through the window.

  There was another stove, a squat one with a brick flue, over in the corner. Its iron top got red-hot, and sand would thaw out and dry on it. This stove had already been lit, and the captain and Fetyukov were bringing in sand in a handbarrow. You don’t need brains to carry a handbarrow. That’s why the foreman had put these ex-bosses on the job. Fetyukov was supposed to have been a big boss in some office. Went around in a car.

  When they first worked together, Fetyukov had tried throwing his weight around and shouting at the captain. But the captain smacked him in the teeth, and they called it quits.

  Some of the men were sidling up to the stove with the sand on it, hoping for warmth, but the foreman warned them off.

  “I’ll warm one or two of you with my fist in a minute! Get the place fixed up first!”

  One look at the whip is enough for a beaten dog! The cold was fierce, but the foreman was fiercer. The men went back to their jobs.

  Shukhov heard the foreman speak quietly to Pavlo: “You hang on here and keep a tight hold on things. I’ve got to go and see about the percentages.”

  More depends on the percentages than the work itself. A foreman with any brains concentrates more on the percentages than on the work. It’s the percentage that feeds us. Make it look as if the work’s done, whether it is or not. If the rate for the job is low, wangle things so that it turns out higher. That’s what a foreman needs a big brain for. And an understanding with the norm setters. The norm setters have their hands out, too.

  Just think, though—who benefits from all this overfull-fillment of norms? The camp does. The camp rakes in thousands extra from a building job and awards prizes to its lieutenants. To Volkovoy, say, for that whip of his. All you’ll get is an extra two hundred grams of bread in the evening. But your life can depend on those two hundred grams. Two-hundred-gram portions built the Belomor Canal.*

  Two buckets of water had been brought in, but they’d iced over on the way. Pavlo decided that there was no point in fetching any more. Quicker to melt snow on the spot. They stood the buckets on the stove.

  Gopchik, who had pinched some new aluminum wire, the sort electricians use, had something to say: “Hey, Ivan Denisovich! Here’s some good wire for spoons. Will you show me how to mold one?”

  Ivan Denisovich was fond of Gopchik, the rascal (his own son had died when he was little, and he only had two grownup daughters at home). Gopchik had been jailed for taking milk to Ukrainian guerrillas hiding in the forest. They’d given him a grownup’s sentence. He fussed around the prisoners like a sloppy little calf. But he was crafty enough: kept his parcels to himself. You sometimes heard him munching in the middle of the night.

  Well, there wouldn’t have been enough to go around.

  They broke off enough wire for spoons and hid it in a corner. Shukhov rigged up a sort of ladder from two planks and sent Gopchik up to attach the chimney pipe. Gopchik was as light as a squirrel. He scrambled over the crossbeams, knocked in a nail, slung the wire over it, and looped it around the pipe. Shukhov had not been idle: he had finished the chimney with an elbow pipe pointing upwards. There was no wind, but there would be tomorrow, and he didn’t want the smoke to blow down. They were fixing this stove for themselves, remember.

  By then Senka Klevshin had split off some long strips of wood. They made Gopchik nail on the tarred paper. He scrambled up, the little imp, calling down to them as he went.

  The sun had hoisted itself higher and driven the mist away. The “posts” to either side of it were no longer visible, just the deep red glow between. They had gotten the stove going with stolen firewood. Made things a lot more cheerful.

  “In January the sun warmed the cow’s flanks,” Shukhov commented.

  Kildigs had finished knocking the mortar trough together. He gave a final tap with his ax and called out: “Hey, Pavlo, I want a hundred rubles from the foreman for this job, I won’t take a kopeck less.”

  “You might get a hundred grams,” Pavlo said, laughing.

  “With a bonus from the prosecutor,” Gopchik shouted from aloft.

  “Don’t touch it! Leave it alone,” yelled Shukhov suddenly. They were cutting the tarred paper the wrong way.

  He showed them how to do it.

  Men had flocked around the sheet-metal stove, but Pavlo chased them away. He gave Kildigs some helpers and told him to make hods—they’d need them to get the mortar aloft. He put a few extra men on to carry sand. Others were sent up above to clear snow from the scaffolding and the brickwork itself. Another man, inside the building, was told to take the hot sand from the stove and tip it into the mortar trough.

  An engine roared outside. They’d started bringing cinder blocks, and the truck was trying to get up close. Pavlo dashed out, waving his arms to show them where to dump the load.

  By now they’d nailed on one width of tarpaper, then a second. What sort of protection would it give, though? Tarred or not, it was still just paper. Still, it looked like some sort of solid screen. And made it darker inside so the stove looked like it burned brighter.

  Alyoshka had brought coal. “Throw it on!” some of them yelled, but others said, “Don’t! We’ll be warmer with just wood!” He stood still, wondering whom to obey.

  Fetyukov had settled down by the stove and was shoving his felt boots—the idiot!—almost into the fire. The captain yanked him up by the scruff of the neck and gave him a push in the direction of the handbarrow.

  “Go and fetch sand, you feeble bastard!”

  The captain saw no difference between work in a camp and work on shipboard. Orders were orders! He’d gotten very haggard in the last month, the captain had, but he was still a willing horse.

  Before too long, they had all three windows curtained with tar paper. The only light now came through the doors. And the cold came in with it. Pavlo ordered them to board up the upper part of the door space and leave the bottom so that a man could get in, stooping. The job was done.

  Meanwhile, three truckloads of cinder blocks had been delivered and dumped. The question now was how to get them up to the second story without a hoist.

  “Come on, men, let’s get on with it!” Pavlo called to the bricklayers.

  It was a job to take pride in. Shukhov and Kildigs went up after Pavlo. The ramp was narrow enough to begin with, and now that Senka had broken off the handrail, you had to hug the wall if you didn’t want to land on your head. Worse still, snow had frozen onto the slats and made them round, so that there was no good foothold. How were they going to get the mortar up?

  They took a look at the half-finished walls. Men were already shoveling snow from them, but would have to chip the ice from the old courses with hatchets and sweep it clear.

  They worked out where they wa
nted the cinder blocks handed up, then took a look down. That was it—they’d station four men below to heave them onto the lower scaffolding, another two there to pass them up, and another two on the second floor to feed the bricklayers. That would still be quicker than lugging the things up the ramp.

  On top the wind wasn’t strong, but it never let up. It’ll blow right through us, Shukhov thought, when we start laying. Still, if we shelter behind the part that’s done already it’ll be warmer, not too bad at all.

  He looked up at the sky and gasped: it had cleared and the sun was nearly high enough for dinnertime. Amazing how time flew when you were working. He’d often noticed that days in the camp rolled by before you knew it. Yet your sentence stood still, the time you had to serve never got any less.

  They went back down and found the rest all sitting around the stove, except for the captain and Fetyukov, who were still carrying sand. Pavlo lost his temper, chased eight men off to move cinder blocks, ordered two to pour cement into the mortar trough and dry-mix it with sand, sent one for water and another for coal. Kildigs turned to his detachment: “Right, boys, we’ve got to finish this handbarrow.”

  Shukhov was looking for work. “Should I give them a hand?” he asked.

  Pavlo nodded. “Do that.”

  A tub was brought in to melt snow for mortar. They heard somebody saying it was twelve o’clock already.

  “It’s sure to be twelve,” Shukhov announced. “The sun’s over the top already.”

  “If it is,” the captain retorted, “it’s one o’clock, not twelve.”

  “How do you make that out?” Shukhov asked in surprise. “The old folk say the sun is highest at dinnertime.”

  “Maybe it was in their day!” the captain snapped back. “Since then it’s been decreed that the sun is highest at one o’clock.”

  “Who decreed that?”

  “The Soviet government.”

  The captain took off with the handbarrow, but Shukhov wasn’t going to argue anyway. As if the sun would obey their decrees!

  A few more bangs, a few more taps, and they had knocked four hods together.