One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Read online

  “Right, let’s sit down and have a warm,” Pavlo said to the two bricklayers. “You as well, Senka—you’ll be laying after dinner. Sit!”

  So they got to sit by the stove—this time lawfully. They couldn’t start laying before dinner anyway, and if they mixed the mortar too soon it would only freeze.

  The coal had begun to glow and was giving off a steady heat. But you could only feel it by the stove. The rest of the room was as cold as ever.

  All four of them took off their mittens and wagged their hands at the stove.

  But—a word to the wise—don’t ever put your feet near a fire when you’re wearing boots or shoes. If they’re leather shoes they’ll crack, and if they’re felt boots they’ll steam and get damp and you won’t be the least bit warmer. And if you hold them any nearer you’ll burn them. And you won’t get another pair, so you’ll be tramping around in leaky boots till next spring.

  “Shukhov’s all right, though,” Kildigs said, teasing him. “Know what, boys? He’s got one foot out of here already.”

  Somebody took up the joke.

  “Right, that foot, the bare one.” They all burst out laughing. (Shukhov had taken the burnt left boot off to warm his foot rag.)

  “Shukhov’s nearly done his time,” Kildigs said.

  Kildigs himself was serving twenty-five years. In happier days everybody got a flat ten. But in ’49 a new phase set in: everybody got twenty-five, regardless. Ten you could just about do without turning up your toes. But twenty-five?

  Shukhov enjoyed it. He liked people pointing at him—see that man? He’s nearly done his time—but he didn’t let himself get excited about it. Those who’d come to the end of their time during the war had all been kept in, “pending further orders”—till ’46. So those originally sentenced to three years did five altogether. They could twist the law any way they liked. When your ten years were up, they could say good, have another ten. Or pack you off to some godforsaken place of exile.

  Sometimes, though, you got thinking and your spirits soared: your sentence was running out, there wasn’t much thread left on the spool! Lord! Just to think of it! Walking free, on your own two legs!

  But it wouldn’t be nice to say such things out loud to one of the old inhabitants. So Shukhov said to Kildigs: “Don’t keep counting. Who knows whether you’ll be here twenty-five years or not? Guessing is like pitch-forking water. All I know for sure is I’ve done a good eight.”

  When you’re flat on your face there’s no time to wonder how you got in and when you’ll get out.

  According to his dossier, Shukhov was in for treason. He’d admitted it under investigation—yes, he had surrendered in order to betray his country, and returned from POW camp to carry out a mission for German intelligence. What the mission could be, neither Shukhov himself nor his interrogator could imagine. They left it at that—just “a mission.”

  The counterespionage boys had beaten the hell out of him. The choice was simple enough: don’t sign and dig your own grave, or sign and live a bit longer.

  He signed.

  What had really happened was this. In February 1942 the whole northwestern army was surrounded. No grub was being dropped by planes, and there were no planes, anyway. It got so bad that they were filing the hooves of dead horses, sousing the horny shavings in water, and eating them. They had no ammunition either. So the Germans rounded them up a few at a time in the forest. Shukhov was a prisoner in one such group for a couple of days, then he and four others escaped. They crawled about in the woods and marshes till they found themselves by some miracle among friends. True, a friendly tommy-gunner stretched two of them, and a third died from his wounds, so only two of them made it. If they’d had any sense they’d have said they’d got lost in the forest, and nothing would have happened to them. But they came out in the open: yes, we were taken prisoner, we’ve escaped from the Germans. Escaped prisoners, eh? Like hell you are! Nazi spies, more like! Behind bars is where you belong. Maybe if there’d still been five of them their statements would have been compared and believed. Just the two of them hadn’t a chance: these two bastards have obviously worked out this escape story of theirs together.

  Senka Klevshin made our through his deafness some talk about escaping and said loudly: “I’ve escaped three times and been caught three times.”

  The long-suffering Senka was mostly silent. Couldn’t hear and didn’t butt in. So nobody knew much about him except that he’d gone through Buchenwald, been in an underground organization there, and carried weapons into the compound for an uprising. And that the Germans had tied his hands behind his back, strung him up by his wrists, and thrashed him with canes.

  Kildigs felt like arguing.

  “So you’ve done eight, Vanya,” he said, “but what sort of camps were you in? Ordinary camps, sleeping with women. You didn’t wear numbers. You just try eight years’ hard labor. Nobody’s gone the distance yet.”

  “Women! Sleeping with logs, I was!”

  Shukhov stared into the flames and his seven years in the north came back to him. Three years hauling logs for crates and rail ties to the log slide. The campfire at the tree-felling site was just like this one—now you saw it, now you didn’t—and that was on night shift, not in the daytime. The big boss had laid down a law: any gang that didn’t fulfill its daily quota stayed on after dark.

  It would be past midnight when they dragged themselves back to camp, and they’d be off to the forest again next morning.

  “No, friends,” he lisped, “if you ask me, it’s more peaceful here. We knock off on time—that’s the law. Perhaps you’ve done your stint, perhaps you haven’t, but it’s back to the camp at quitting time. And the guaranteed ration is a hundred grams more. Life isn’t so bad here. All right—it’s a special camp. But why does wearing numbers bother you? They weigh nothing, number patches.”

  “More peaceful!” Fetyukov hissed. (It was getting near the dinner break, and they’d all found their way to the stove.) “People are getting their throats cut in bed. And he says it’s more peaceful!”

  Pavlo raised a threatening finger at Fetyukov. “Stoolies, not people!”

  It was true. Something new had started happening in the camp. Two known stool pigeons had had their throats slit at reveille. Then the same thing had happened to an innocent working prisoner—whoever did it must have gotten the wrong bed. One stoolie had run off to the stone jailhouse for safety, and the bosses had hidden him there. Strange goings-on. There’d never been anything like it in ordinary criminal camps. But then it never used to happen in this one.

  The power train’s whistle suddenly blared. Not at the top of its voice to begin with, but with a hoarse rasping noise as though clearing its throat.

  Midday! Down tools! Dinner-break!

  “Damn, we’ve missed our chance! Should have gone to the mess and lined up a while ago.”

  There were eleven gangs at the site, and the mess would only hold two at a time.

  The foreman still wasn’t back: Pavlo took a quick look around and made up his mind.

  “Shukhov and Gopchik—come with me. Kildigs—when I send Gopchik back, bring the team over right away.”

  Their places at the stove were grabbed immediately. Men hovered around the stove as though it was a woman they wanted to get their hands on.

  There were shouts of “Wake up, somebody! Time to light up!”

  They looked at each other to see who would get their cigarettes out. Nobody was going to. Either they had no tobacco or they were keeping it to themselves.

  Shukhov went outside with Pavlo. Gopchik hopped along behind like a little rabbit.

  “It’s warmed up a bit,” Shukhov decided. “Eighteen below, no more. Good weather for bricklaying.”

  They turned to look at the cinder blocks. The men had already dumped a lot of them on the scaffolding and hoisted some up to the planking on the second floor.

  Shukhov squinted into the sun, checking out what the captain had said about the decre
e.

  Out in the open, where the wind had plenty of room, it still nagged and nipped. Just in case they forgot it was January.

  The work-site kitchen was a little matchwood hovel tacked together around a stove and faced with rusty tinplate to hide the cracks. Inside, a partition divided it into kitchen and eating area. The floors in kitchen and mess room alike were bare earth, churned up by feet and frozen into holes and hillocks. The kitchen was just a square stove with a caldron cemented onto it.

  Two men operated the kitchen—a cook and a “hygienist.”* The cook was given a supply of meal in the big kitchen before leaving camp in the morning. Maybe fifty grams a head, a kilo for every gang, say a bit less than a pood for the whole site. The cook wasn’t going to carry a sack of meal that heavy for three kilometers, so he let his stooge do it. Better to give the stooge a bit extra out of the workers’ rations than to break your own back. There were other jobs the cook wouldn’t do for himself, like fetching water and firewood, and lighting the stove. These, too, were done by other people, workers or goners, and the cook gave each of them an extra portion, he didn’t grudge what wasn’t his own. Then again, men weren’t supposed to take food out of the mess. Bowls had to be brought from camp (you couldn’t leave them on the site overnight or the free workers would pinch them), and they brought only fifty, which had to be washed and passed on quickly. So the man who carried the bowls also had to be given an extra portion. Yet another stooge was posted at the door to see that bowls weren’t carried out. But, however watchful he was, people would distract his attention or talk their way past him. So somebody had to be sent around the site collecting dirty bowls and bringing them back to the kitchen. The man at the door got an extra portion. And so did the collector.

  All the cook had to do was sprinkle meal and salt into the caldron and divide the fat into two parts, one for the pot and one for himself. (Good fat never found its way to the workers, the bad stuff went straight into the pot. So the zeks were happier when the stores issued bad fat.) Next, he stirred the gruel as it thickened. The “hygienist” did even less—just sat and watched. When the gruel was cooked, he was the first to be served: eat all your belly can hold. The cook did likewise. Then the foreman on duty would come along—the foremen did it in turn, a day at a time—to sample the stuff as if to make sure that it was fit for the workers to eat. He got a double portion for his efforts. And would eat again with his gang.

  The whistle sounded. The work gangs arrived one after the other, and the cook passed bowls through his hatch. The bottom of each bowl was covered with watery gruel. No good asking or trying to weigh how much of your meal ration you were getting: there would be hell to pay if you opened your mouth.

  The wind whistles over the bare steppe—hot and dry in summer, freezing in winter. Nothing has ever been known to grow on that steppe, least of all between four barbed-wire fences. Wheat sprouts only in the bread-cutting room, oats put out ears only in the food store. Break your back working, grovel on the ground, you’ll never cudgel a scrap of food out of it. What the boss man doles out is all you will get. Only you won’t get even that, what with cooks and their stooges and trusties. There’s thieving on the site, there’s thieving in the camp, and there was thieving before the food ever left the store. And not one of these thieves wields a pickax himself. You do that, and take what you’re given. And move away from the serving hatch.

  It’s dog eat dog here.

  When Pavlo entered the mess with Shukhov and Gopchik, men were standing on one another’s feet—you couldn’t see the sawn-off tables and benches for them. Some ate sitting down, but most of them standing. Gang 82, which had been sinking holes for fence posts all morning without a warm, had grabbed the first places as soon as the whistle went. Now even those who’d finished eating wouldn’t move. They had nowhere to go. The others cursed them, but it was water off a duck’s back—anything is more fun than being out in the freezing cold.

  Pavlo and Shukhov elbowed their way through. They’d come at a good time. One gang was just being served, there was only one other in line. Their deputy foremen were standing at the hatch. So all the other gangs would be behind 104.

  “Bowls! Bowls!” the cook shouted from his hatch.

  Bowls were passed through. Shukhov collected a few himself and shoved them at him—not in the hope of getting more gruel, but just to speed things up.

  The stooges were washing bowls behind the screen—in return for more gruel.

  The deputy foreman in front of Pavlo was about to be served. Pavlo shouted over the heads around him.

  “Gopchik!”

  “Here!” The thin little voice like the bleat of a goat came from near the door.

  “Call the gang.”

  Gopchik ran off.

  The great news was that the gruel was good today, the very best, oatmeal gruel. You don’t often get that. It’s usually magara or grits twice a day. The mushy stuff around the grains of oatmeal is filling, it’s precious.

  Shukhov had fed any amount of oats to horses as a youngster and never thought that one day he’d be breaking his heart for a handful of the stuff.

  “Bowls! Bowls!” came a shout from the serving hatch.

  104’s turn was coming. The deputy foreman up front took a double foreman’s portion and stopped blocking the hatch.

  This was also at the workers’ expense—and yet again nobody quibbled. Every foreman got the same and could eat it himself or pass it on to his assistant. Tyurin gave his extra portion to Pavlo.

  Shukhov had his work cut out. He squeezed in at the table, shooed two goners away, asked one worker nicely, and made room for twelve bowls placed close together, with a second tier of six, and another two right on top. Then he had to take the bowls from Pavlo, check the count, and make sure no outsider rustled one from the table. Or jostled him and upset one. Meanwhile, other men were scrambling onto or off the bench, or sitting there eating. You had to keep an eye on your territory to make sure they were eating from their own bowls, not dipping into yours.

  “Two, four, six,” the cook counted behind his hatch. He handed two bowls at a time into two outstretched hands. One at a time might confuse him.

  “Two! Four! Six!” Pavlo echoed in a low voice on the other side of the hatch, quickly passing two bowls at a time to Shukhov, who placed them on the table. Shukhov said nothing out loud, but kept a closer count than either of them.

  “Eight, ten.”

  Where was Kildigs with the gang?

  “Twelve, fourteen…” the count went on.

  They’d run out of bowls in the kitchen. Shukhov saw, over Pavlo’s shoulder, the cook’s two hands put two bowls on the counter and pause as if in thought. He must have turned his head to curse the dishwashers. At that moment someone shoved a stack of emptied bowls through the hatch at him, and he took his hands off the bowls on the counter while he passed the empties back.

  Shukhov abandoned the stack of bowls already on the table, stepped nimbly over the bench, whisked the two bowls from the counter, and repeated, not very loudly, as though it was meant for Pavlo, not the cook: “Fourteen.”

  “Hold it! Where are you going with those?” the cook bellowed.

  “He’s my man, take it easy.”

  “All right, but don’t try to confuse the count.”

  “It’s fourteen,” said Pavlo with a shrug. He’d never swipe an odd bowl himself, as deputy foreman he had to uphold authority, but this time he was only repeating what Shukhov had said and could blame him.

  “I said fourteen before!” the cook said furiously.

  “So what?” Shukhov yelled. “You said fourteen but you didn’t hand ’em over, you never let go of ’em. Come and count if you don’t believe me. They’re all here on the table.”

  He could shout at the cook because he’d noticed the two Estonians pushing their way through to him, and shoved the two bowls into their hands as they came. He also managed to get back to the table and to do a quick count—yes, they were all there, the
neighbors hadn’t got around to pinching any, though there was nothing to stop them.

  The cook’s ugly red mug appeared in close-up through the hatch. “Where are the bowls?” he asked sternly.

  “Look for yourself,” Shukhov shouted. He gave somebody a push. “Out of the way, big boy, don’t block the view. Here’s two”—he raised the two second-story bowls an inch—“and there’s three rows of four, dead-right, count them.”

  “Your gang not here yet?” The cook was staring suspiciously through the small opening. The hatch had been made narrow so that people couldn’t peep through from the dining room and see how much was left in the caldron.

  Pavlo shook his head. “No, they’re not here yet.”

  “So what the hell do you mean by it, hogging bowls before the gang gets here?” The cook was beside himself with rage.

  “Here they come now!” Shukhov shouted.

  They could all hear the captain barking in the doorway as though he was still on the bridge of his ship: “Must you clutter up the place like this? Eat up, get out, and give somebody else a chance.”

  The cook growled a bit more. Then his face disappeared and his hands appeared at the hatch again.

  “Sixteen, eighteen…” and, as he poured the last portion, a double one, “twenty-three! That’s the lot! Next gang!”

  As the gang shoved their way through, Pavlo passed the bowls, some of them over the heads of men already seated, to a second table.

  In summer they could sit five to a bench, but now they were all wearing such bulky clothes there was hardly room for four, and even they had a job to use their spoons.

  Taking it for granted that one of the bowls he’d swiped would be his, Shukhov quickly set about the one he’d earned by the sweat of his brow. This meant drawing his right knee up to his belly, unsheathing his “Ust-Izhma 1944” spoon from the leg of his boot, removing his cap and tucking it under his left arm, and running his spoon around the rim of the bowl.

  This minute should have been devoted solely to the business of eating—spooning the thin layer of gruel from the bottom of the bowl, cautiously raising it to his mouth, and rolling it around with his tongue. But he had to hurry, so that Pavlo would see him finish and offer him the second portion. And then there was Fetyukov, who had arrived with the Estonians and had spotted him swiping the two bowls, and was now eating on his feet across the table from Pavlo, ogling the gang’s four unallotted portions. This was a hint that he, too, expected a half portion if not a full one.