Limpy: The Lost Way of the Bible

Nihon Ongaku No Nagare

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ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. East Dane Designer Men's Fashion. Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Withoutabox Submit to Film Festivals. Amazon Renewed Refurbished products with a warranty. T he Russians don't even remember which hand you cross yourself with. I t's cold sitting in the mess hut. Most men eat with their caps on, but they take their time, angling for gluey scraps of rotten little fish under the leaves of frost-blackened cabbage, and spitting the bones onto the table.

When there's a mountain of them, somebody will sweep them off before the next gang sits down, and they will be crunched to powder underfoot. T here were two rows of pillars or stanchions, down the middle of the hut. Fetyukov, a workmate of Shukhov's, sat by one, looking after his breakfast for him. Outwardly, the gang all looked the same, all wearing identical black jackets with identical number patches, but underneath there were big differences. You'd never get Buynovsky to sit watching a bowl, and there were jobs that Shukhov left to those beneath him.

F etyukov caught sight of him and gave up his seat with a sigh. I nearly ate it for you, I thought you were in the hole. H e didn't wait around. He knew Shukhov would polish both bowls till they shone and leave nothing for him. S hukhov drew his spoon from his boot. That spoon was precious, it had traveled all over the north with him.

He'd cast it himself from aluminum wire in a sand mold and scratched on it: Could have been worse. Not ladled from the top of the caldron, but not the dregs either. T he best you can ever say for skilly is that it's hot, but this time Shukhov's was cold. He started eating slowly, savoring it, just the same. If the roof burst into flames, he still wouldn't hurry. Apart from sleep, an old lag can call his life his own only for ten minutes at breakfast time, five at lunchtime, and five more at suppertime.

T he skilly didn't change from day to day. What was in it depended on which vegetable was stockpiled for winter. This time around, it was black cabbage. June is when the zek eats best: The leanest time is July, when chopped nettles go into the pot. T here was nothing much left of the little fish, only bones: Shukhov left neither flesh nor scales on the brittle skeletons. He chomped and sucked them between his lips, then spat them out on the table. The others laughed at him for it. H e'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. T he second course was magara gruel. It had congealed into a solid bar. Shukhov broke bits off. 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: S hukhov licked his spoon clean and returned it to his boot, then put on his cap and made for sick bay. T he 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, 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.

I t 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. 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. S hukhov ducked around the corner of a hut: 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: 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. T he 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. V exed 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. I t 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. B ut 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.

S hukhov 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. V dovushkin raised large mild eyes from his work.

He was wearing a white cap, and white overalls with no number patches. 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. S hukhov knew all that.

He also knew that it was no easier to get off work in the evening. I just feel poorly all over. S hukhov 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. What's the good of coming right before work parade? 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. S hukhov 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. T he sick bay was in the most out-of-the-way corner of the camp, and no sound whatsoever reached it: The big boys tell the time for them.

S hukhov 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. 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.

H is 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. O nly 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.

Work, he reckoned, was the best medicine of all. W ork 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. I t 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 literature, 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. 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. T he 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.

H e 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! G ang 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.

S hukhov dashed in but without too much noise and went over to the deputy foreman's bed. P avlo raised his head. Still among the living? Even in the camps they speak to people politely. H e picked up Shukhov's portion of bread from the table and held it out. A little hillock of sugar had been scooped onto it. S hukhov 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. 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? A bout 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. S o, 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. 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: His fingers were wonderfully nimble, and his mind raced ahead, planning his next moves. T he 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. A lyoshka was a champion at one thing: W ith 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. T hat was when the foreman stood up and barked: Let's have you outside! E very 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. W hile the men tramped wordlessly one after another into the corridor, then through the entryway out onto the porch, and the foreman of No. S o 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.

I t was still dark, although a greenish light was brightening in the east. A thin, treacherous breeze was creeping in from the same direction. T here 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. T he junior work assignor was restlessly pacing the midway. Dragging your feet again, eh? S omebody like Shukhov might be afraid of the junior work assignor, 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: Some other lot, poorer and more stupid, would be shunted off to Sotsgorodok. He might not get parcels himself, but he never went short. Every man in the gang who did get a parcel gave him a present right away. W ho was missing? 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. N othing 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.

T he 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! T here 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.

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It was a thin knitted glove, and his hand would get too numb to trace the figures. T he artist renewed the Shcha 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: Shukhov didn't ask straight out, though. Just took his stand near Tsezar, half facing him and looking past him.

H e was gazing at something in the distance, trying to look uninterested, but seeing the cigarette grow shorter and the red tip creep closer to the holder every time Tsezar took an absentminded drag. T hat scavenger Fetyukov was there too, leeching onto Tsezar, standing right in front of him and staring hot-eyed at his mouth. S hukhov had not a shred of tobacco left, and couldn't see himself getting hold of any before evening. He was on tenterhooks. Right then he seemed to yearn for that butt more than for freedom itself, but he wouldn't lower himself like Fetyukov, wouldn't look at Tsezar's mouth.

T sezar was a mixture of all nationalities. No knowing whether he was Greek, Jew, or gypsy. He was still young. Used to make films, but they'd put him inside before he finished his first picture. He had a heavy black walrus mustache. They'd have shaved it off, only he was wearing it when they photographed him for the record. F etyukov couldn't stand it any longer. Tsezar raised his half-closed eyelids and turned his dark eyes on Fetyukov.

He didn't grudge them the tobacco, but he didn't like being interrupted when he was thinking. He smoked to set his mind racing in pursuit of some idea. But the moment he lit a cigarette he saw "Leave a puff for me! He turned to Shukhov and said, "Here you are, Ivan Denisovich. H is thumb eased the glowing butt out of the short amber holder. T hat was all Shukhov had been waiting for. He sprang into action and gratefully caught hold of the butt, keeping the other hand underneath for safety.

He wasn't offended that Tsezar was too fussy to let him finish the cigarette in the holder. Some mouths are clean, others are dirty, and anyway his horny fingers could hold the glowing tip without getting burned. The great thing was that he'd cut the scavenger Fetyukov out and was now inhaling smoke, with the hot ash beginning to burn his lips. The smoke seemed to reach every part of his hungry body, he felt it in his feet as well as in his head. B ut no sooner had this blissful feeling pervaded his body than Ivan Denisovich heard a rumble of protest: A zek's life was always the same.

Shukhov was used to it: W hat was this about undershirts? The camp commandant had issued them himself. No, it couldn't be right. T here were only two gangs ahead waiting to be searched, so everybody in got a good view: They had been frisking the men halfheartedly before Volkovoy appeared, but now they went mad, setting upon the prisoners like wild beasts, with the head warder yelling, "Unbutton your shirts! V olkovoy was dreaded not just by the zeks and the warders but, so it was said, by the camp commandant himself.

God had marked the scoundrel with a name to suit his wolfish looks. He was lanky, dark, beetle-browed, quick on his feet: At one time he'd carried a lash, a plaited leather thing as long as your forearm. They said he thrashed people with it in the camp jail. Or else, when zeks were huddled outside the door during the evening hut search, he would creep up and slash you across the neck with it: The whipped man would clutch his burning neck, wipe the blood away, and say nothing: I n frosty weather, body searches were usually less strict in the morning than in the evening; the prisoner simply undid his jacket and held its skirts away from his body.

Prisoners advanced five at a time, and five warders stood ready for them. They slapped the sides of each zek's belted jerkin, and tapped the one permitted pocket on his right knee. They would be wearing gloves themselves, and if they felt something strange they didn't immediately pull it out but lazily asked what it was.

W hat would you expect to find on a zek in the morning? They don't carry knives out, they bring them in. At one time they got so worried about the two hundred grams every zek took with him for dinner that each gang was ordered to make a wooden chest to hold the lot. Why the bastards thought that would do any good was a mystery. They were probably just out to make life more miserable, give the men something extra to worry about. You took a bite and looked hard at your bread before you put it in the chest.

But the pieces were still all alike, still just bread, so you couldn't help fretting all the way to work in case somebody switched rations. Men argued with each other and sometimes came to blows. Then one day three men helped themselves to a chest full of bread and escaped from a work site in a truck. The brass came to their senses, had the chests chopped up in the guardhouse, and let everybody carry his own ration again. A nother thing the searchers looked for in the morning: Never mind that everybody had been stripped of his civilian belongings long ago, and told that he'd get them back the day his sentence ended a day nobody in that camp had yet seen.

Only, if you searched everybody for letters, you'd be messing about till dinnertime. B ut Volkovoy only had to bawl out an order and the warders peeled off their gloves, made the prisoners unbelt the jerkins under which they were all hugging the warmth of the hut and unbutton their shirts, and set about feeling for anything hidden underneath contrary to regulations. That was the order from Volkovoy relayed from rank to rank.

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The teams that had gone past earlier were the lucky ones. Some of them were already through the gates, but for those left behind, it was "Open up! T hey made a start, but the result was confusion: S hukhov was wearing only camp issue anyway: You don't know Article 9 of the Criminal Code! B ut they did have. It's you, brother, who don't know anything yet! T he captain kept blazing away at them: V olkovoy didn't mind Article 9, but at this he looked as black as a thundercloud. T hey never like putting a man in the hole first thing in the morning: Let him sweat and strain all day, and sling him in the hole at night.

T he jailhouse stood nearby, to the left of the midway: It was an eighteen-cell jail and there were walled-off recesses for solitary confinement. The rest of the camp was built of wood, only the jail was of stone. N ow that the cold had been let in under their shirts, there was no getting rid of it. They had all muffled themselves up for nothing. And the dull pain in Shukhov's back would not go away. If only he could lie down there and then on a cot in sick bay and sleep. He had no other wish in the world.

Just a good heavy blanket. T he zeks stood near the gate buttoning and belting themselves, with the guards outside yelling, "Hurry it up! A nd the work assignor was also shoving them from behind and shouting, "Let's go! T hrough the first gate. Into the outer guarded area. Through the second gate. Between the railings by the guardhouse. Sort yourselves out in fives! B y now the darkness was lifting. The bonfire lit by the its teeth as though laughing at the zeks.

The convoy were all wearing short fur coats, except for half a dozen in sheepskins. O nce again the convoy mixed the teams together and re-counted the Power Station column by fives. T he captain was fond of explaining things. Ask him and he'd work out for you whether the moon would be new or old on whatever day in whichever year you liked. T he captain was going downhill while you watched. His cheeks were sunken. But he kept his spirits up. O utside camp the frost, with that nagging little wind blowing, nipped even Shukhov's case-hardened features painfully.

Realizing that it would be blowing in his face all the way to the Power Station, he decided to put his face cloth on. He and many of the others had a bit of rag with two long strings to tie on when they were marched into the wind. The zeks found that it helped. He buried his face in it up to his eyes, drew the strings around over the lobes of his ears, and tied them behind his head. Then he covered the back of his neck with the back flap of his cap and turned up his overcoat collar. Next he let down the front flap of his cap over his forehead. Seen from the front, he was nothing but eyes.

He drew the rope end tight around his jacket. Everything was fine now, except that his mittens were not much good and his hands were stiff with cold already. He rubbed them together and clapped them, knowing that any minute now he would have to put them behind his back and keep them there the whole way.

T he escort commander recited the convict's daily "prayer," of which they were all heartily sick:. Keep strictly to your column on the march! No spreading out, no running into the column in front, no moving from rank to rank, keep your eyes straight ahead, keep your hands behind your backs and nowhere else!

One step to the right or left will be considered an attempt to escape and the guards will open fire without warning! T he two foremost guards marched off along the road. The column in front wavered, shoulders began swaying, and the guards twenty paces to the right and left of the column, at intervals of ten paces, moved along, weapons at the ready. As they rounded the camp, the wind hit their faces from the side. Hands behind backs, heads lowered, the column moved off as if to a funeral. All you could see were the legs of the two or three men in front of you and the patch of trampled ground on which you were about to tread.

From time to time a guard would yell: The guards weren't allowed to tie rags around their faces, mind. Theirs wasn't much of a job, either. W hen it was a bit warmer, they all talked on the march, however much they were yelled at. But today they kept their heads down, every man trying to shelter behind the man in front, thinking his own thoughts. A convict's thoughts are no freer than he is: Will they poke around in my mattress and find my bread ration?

Can I get off work if I report sick tonight? Will the captain be put in the hole, or won't he? How did Tsezar get his hands on his warm vest? Must have greased somebody's palm in the storeroom, what else? B ecause he had eaten only cold food, and gone without his bread ration at breakfast, Shukhov felt emptier than usual. To stop his belly whining and begging for something to eat, he put the camp out of his mind and started thinking about the letter he was shortly going to write home. Not so much as a sapling to be seen out on the steppe, nothing but bare white snow to the left or right.

He had posted his last in July, and got an answer in October. But what was there to say? Shukhov hadn't written any more often than he did now. H e had left home on 23 June That Sunday, people had come back from Mass in Polomnya and said, "It's war. Shukhov knew from letters that nowadays there was piped radio jabbering away in every cottage. W riting letters now was like throwing stones into a bottomless pool. They sank without trace. No point in telling the family which gang you worked in and what your foreman, Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin, was like.

Nowadays you had more to say to Kildigs, the Latvian, than to the folks at home. T hey wrote twice a year as well, and there was no way in which he could understand how things were with them. Then there was the news that those not working the required number of days had had their private plots trimmed to fifteen-hundredths of a hectare, or sometimes right up to the very house. There was, his wife wrote, also a law that people could be tried and put in jail for not working the norm, but that law hadn't come into force for some reason.

O ne thing Shukhov couldn't take in at all was that, from what his wife wrote, not a single living soul had joined the kolkhoz since the war: Half of the men hadn't come back from the war, and those who had didn't want anything to do with the kolkhoz: The only men on the farm were the foreman Zakhar Vasilievich and the carpenter Tikhon, who was eighty-four but had married not long ago and had children.

The kolkhoz was kept going by the women who'd been herded into it back in When they collapsed, it would drop dead with them. T ry as he might, Shukhov couldn't understand the bit about people living at home and working on the side. He knew what it was to be a smallholder, and he knew what it was to be in a kolkhoz, but living in the village and not working in it was something he couldn't take in. Was it like when the men used to hire themselves out for seasonal work?

How did they manage with the haymaking? B ut his wife told him that they'd given up hiring themselves out ages ago. A demobbed soldier had brought some stencils home, and it had become all the rage. There were more of these master dyers all the time. They weren't on anybody's payroll, they had no regular job, they just put in a month on the farm, for haymaking and harvest, and got a certificate saying that kolkhoz member so-and-so had leave of absence for personal reasons and was not in arrears. So they went all around the country, they even flew in airplanes to save their precious time, and they raked the money in by the thousand, dyeing carpets all over the place.

They charged fifty rubles to make a carpet out of an old sheet that nobody wanted, and it only took about an hour to paint the pattern on. His wife's dearest hope was that when he got home he would keep clear of the kolkhoz and take up dyeing himself. That way they could get out of the poverty she was struggling against, send their children to trade schools, and build themselves a new cottage in place of their old tumble-down place.

All the dyers were building themselves new houses. Down by the railroad, houses now cost twenty-five thousand instead of the five thousand they cost before. It could be just the job if he was deprived of rights or banished. So he asked his wife to tell him how he could be a dyer when he'd been no good at drawing from the day he was born? And, anyway, what was so wonderful about these carpets? What was on them? She wrote back that any fool could make them.

All you did was put the stencil on the cloth and rub paint through the holes. There were three sorts. Those were the only patterns, but people all over the country jumped at the chance to buy them. Because a real carpet cost thousands of rubles, not fifty. I n jail and in the camps Shukhov had lost the habit of scheming how he was going to feed his family from day to day or year to year.

The bosses did all his thinking for him, and that somehow made life easier. But what would it be like when he got out? S hukhov might have to do the same. It was easy money, and you couldn't miss. Besides, he'd feel pretty sore if others in the village got ahead of him. To do that sort of thing you had to be the free-and-easy type, you had to have plenty of cheek, and know when to grease a policeman's palm. Shukhov had been knocking around for forty years, he'd lost half his teeth and was going bald, but he'd never given or taken a bribe outside and hadn't picked up the habit in the camps.

E asy money had no weight: What you get for a song you won't have for long, the old folks used to say, and they were right. He still had a good pair of hands, hands that could turn to anything, so what was to stop him getting a proper job on the outside? Maybe they'd slap another ten on him, just for fun? B y then the column had arrived, and halted at the guardhouse outside the sprawling work site.

Two guards in sheepskin coats had fallen out at one corner of the boundary fence and were trudging to their distant watchtowers. Nobody would be allowed onto the site until all the towers were manned. The escort commander made for the guardroom, with his weapon slung over his shoulder. Smoke was billowing out of the guardroom chimney: L ooking through the wire gate, across the building site and out through the wire fence on the far side, you could see the sun rising, big and red, as though in a fog.

Alyoshka, standing next to Shukhov, gazed at the sun and a smile spread from his eyes to his lips. He and the other Baptists spent their Sundays whispering to each other. Life in the camp was like water off a duck's back to them. They'd been lumbered with twenty-five years apiece just for being Baptists. Fancy thinking that would cure them! T he face cloth he'd worn on the march was wet through from his breath, and a thick crust of ice had formed where the frost had caught it.

Shukhov pulled it down from his face to his neck and turned his back on the wind. The cold hadn't really got through anywhere, only his hands felt the chill in those thin mittens, and the toes of his left foot were numb, because he'd burnt a hole in his felt boot and had to patch it twice.

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He couldn't see himself doing much work with shooting pains in his midriff and all the way up his back. H e turned around and found himself looking at the foreman. He'd been marching in the last rank of five. Hefty shoulders, the foreman had, and a beefy face to match. Not one to share a joke with the men, but kept them pretty well fed, saw to it they got good rations. A true son of the Gulag. On his second sentence, and he knew the drill inside out. Y our foreman matters more than anything else in a prison camp: He hadn't worked under him there, but when all the "traitors" had been shunted from the ordinary penal camp to hard labor, Tyurin had singled him out.

Shukhov had no dealings with the camp commandant, the Production Planning Section, the site managers, or the engineers: Cheat anybody you liked as long as you didn't cheat Tyurin, and you'd get by. S hukhov wanted to ask the foreman whether they'd be working at the same place as yesterday or moving somewhere else, but didn't like to interrupt his lofty thoughts. Now he'd got Sotsgorodok off their backs, he'd be thinking about the rate for the job. The next five days' ration depended on it. T he foreman's face was deeply pockmarked. He didn't even squint as he stood looking into the wind.

His skin was like the bark of an oak. T he men in the column were clapping their hands and stamping their feet. It was a nasty little wind. The pollparrots must all be up on their perches by now, but the guards still wouldn't let the men in. They were overdoing the security. The guard commander came out of the guardhouse with the checker. They took their stand on opposite sides of the entrance and opened the gates.

First five, second five. T he convicts marched off with something like a military step. Just let us in there, we'll do the rest! J ust past the guardhouse was the office shack. The site manager stood outside it, urging the foremen to get a move on. They hardly needed to be told. A real bastard, that one, treated his fellow zeks worse than dogs. I t was eight o'clock, no, five past eight already that was the power-supply train whistling , and the bosses were afraid the zeks would scatter and waste time in warming sheds. A zek's day is a long one, though, and he can find time for everything.

Every man entering the compound stooped to pick up a wood chip or two. Do nicely for our stove. Then quick as a flash into their shelters. T yurin ordered Pavlo, the deputy foreman, to go with him into the office. Tsezar turned in there after them. Tsezar was rich, got two parcels a month, gave all the right people a handout, so he was a trusty, working in the office helping the norm setter.

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A dim red sun had risen over the deserted compound: There were drains, trenches, holes everywhere. There were automobile-repair shops in open-fronted sheds, and there, on a rise, stood the Power Station, its ground floor completed, its first floor just begun. E verybody had gone into hiding, except for the six sentries in their towers and the group buzzing outside the office.

This moment was the zek's very own! The senior site manager, so they said, was always threatening to give each gang its assignment the night before, but they could never make it work. Anything they decided at night would be stood on its head by morning. The best thing was to get near a stove and rewrap your foot rags warm them a little bit first so your feet would be warm all day.

But even without a stove it was still pretty good. G ang went into the big auto-repair shop. Its windows had been installed in the autumn, and Gang 38 was working there, molding concrete slabs. Some slabs were still in the molds, some had been stood up on end, and there were piles of wire mesh lying around. There was even a thermometer hanging there, and if for some reason the camp didn't turn out to work on Sunday, a free worker kept the stoves going. G ang 38, of course, was blocking the stove, drying their foot rags, and wouldn't let outsiders anywhere near it.

Never mind, it's not too bad up in the corner here. S hukhov rested the shiny seat of his quilted trousers on the edge of a wooden mold and propped himself against the wall. As he leaned back, his overcoat and jerkin tightened and he felt something hard pressing against the left side of his chest, near his heart.

He always took that much to work and never touched it till dinnertime. But as a rule he ate the other half at breakfast, and this time he hadn't. So he hadn't really saved anything: It was five hours to dinnertime. T he ache in his back had moved down to his legs now, and they suddenly felt weak. If only he could get up to the stove! S hukhov placed his mittens on his knees, unbuttoned his jacket, untied his icy face cloth from around his neck, folded it a few times, and tucked it in his pocket.

Then he took out the piece of bread in the white rag and, holding it under his coat so that not a crumb would be lost, began nibbling and chewing it bit by bit. He'd carried the bread under two layers of clothing, warming it with his body, so it wasn't the least bit frozen. Milk they used to lap up till their bellies were bursting. But he knew better now that he'd been inside. He'd learned to keep his whole mind on the food he was eating.

Like now he was taking tiny little nibbles of bread, softening it with his tongue, and drawing in his cheeks as he sucked it. Dry black bread it was, but like that nothing could be tastier. How much had he eaten in the last eight or nine years? And how hard had he worked? S hukhov, then, was busy with his two hundred grams, while the rest of Gang made themselves comfortable at the same end of the shop. T he two Estonians sat like two brothers on a low concrete slab, sharing half a cigarette in a holder.

They were both tow-haired, both lanky, both skinny, they both had long noses and big eyes. They clung together as though neither would have air enough to breathe without the other. The foreman never separated them. They shared all their food and slept up top on the same bunk. On the march, on work parade, or going to bed at night, they never stopped talking to each other, in their slow, quiet way. One of them, they explained, was a Baltic fisherman; the other had been taken off to Sweden by his parents when the Soviets were set up.

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