It was later, in hunting mice, crows, seagulls, and squirrels, that we learned the magic qualities of the earth. The flesh of any animal loses its particular odor if it is first buried in the ground.
We took every precaution to keep our fire from going out, since we had only a few matches that were kept by Ivan Ivanovich. He wrapped the precious matches in a piece of canvas and then in rags as carefully as possible.
Each evening we would lay two logs on the fire, and they would smoulder till morning without either flaming up or going out. Three logs would have burned up. Savelev and I had learned that truth at our school desks, but Ivan Ivanovich and Fedya had learned it as children at home. In the morning we would separate the logs. They would flare up with a yellow flame, and we would throw a heavy log on top.
I divided the grain into ten parts, but that was too alarming an operation. It was probably easier to feed ten thousand people with five loaves than for a convict to divide his ten-day ration into thirty parts. Ration cards were always based on a ten-day period. The ten-day system had long since died out on the ‘mainland’, but here it was maintained on a permanent basis. No one here saw any need for Sunday holidays or for the convicts to have ‘rest days’.
Unable to bear this torment, I mixed all the grain together and asked Ivan Ivanovich and Fedya to let me come in with them. I turned all my food into the common pot, and Savelev followed my example.
The four of us made a wise decision – to cook just twice a day. There simply weren’t enough provisions for three meals.
‘We’ll gather fruits and mushrooms,’ said Ivan Ivanovich. ‘We can catch mice and birds. And one or two days in every ten we can live on bread alone.’
‘But if we’re to go hungry for one or two days every time we expect a food delivery,’ said Savelev, ‘then how will we be able to resist overeating when the stuff is actually brought?’
We decided to make the food as watery as possible and to eat only twice a day – no matter what. After all, no one would steal from us. We had all received our supplies intact, and we had no drunken cooks, thieving quartermasters, greedy overseers, criminals to take the best pieces, or any of that endless horde of administrators who without fear or any trace of control or conscience were able to pick the convict clean.
We had received all our ‘fats’ in the form of a lump of watery fat, some sugar – less than the amount of gold that I was able to pan – and sticky bread created by the inimitable experts of the heavy thumb who fed the administrators of the bakery. There were twenty different kinds of grain that we had never heard of in the entire course of our lives. It was all too mysterious. And frightening.
The fish that was to take the place of meat according to the ‘replacement tables’ was half-spoiled herring intended to replenish our intensified expenditure of protein.
Alas, even the full ration we had received could not feed us or fill our bellies. We required three times, four times as much, for our bodies had gone hungry for too long. We did not understand this simple truth. We believed in the ‘norms’, and we had never heard the well-known remark made by all cooks – that it is easier to cook for twenty persons than for four. We understood one thing clearly: that we would not have enough food. This did not so much frighten as surprise us. We had to begin work and start cutting a road through the undergrowth and fallen trees.
Trees in the north die lying down – like people. Their enormous bared roots look like the claws of a monstrous predatory bird that has seized on to a rock. Downward from these gigantic claws to the permafrost stretch thousands of tiny tentacles, whitish shoots covered with warm brown bark. Each summer the permafrost retreats a little and each inch of thawed soil is immediately pierced by a root shoot that digs in with its fine tendrils. The first reach maturity in three hundred years, slowly hoisting their heavy, powerful bodies on these weak roots scattered flat over the stony soil. A strong wind easily topples these trees that stand on such frail feet. The trees fall on their backs, their heads pointed away from their feet, and die lying on a soft, thick layer of moss that is either bright green or crimson.
Only the shorter twisted trees, tormented from following a constantly shifting sun and warmth, manage to stand firm and distant from each other. They have kept up such an intense struggle for existence for so long that their tortured, gnarled wood is worthless. The short knotty trunk entwined with terrible growths like splints on broken bones could not be used for construction even in the north, which was not fussy about materials. These twisted trees could not be used even as firewood; so well did they resist the axe, they would have exhausted any worker. Thus did they take vengeance for their broken northern lives.
Our task was to clear a road, and we boldly set about our work. We sawed from sunrise to sundown, felled and stacked trees. Wanting to stay here as long as possible and fearing the gold-mines, we forgot about everything. The stacks grew slowly and by the end of the second difficult day it became evident that we had accomplished little, but were incapable of doing more. Ivan Ivanovich measured the distance from the tip of his thumb to the tip of his middle finger five times along a ten-year-old pine to make a one-meter measuring-stick.
In the evening the foreman came to measure our work with his notched staff and shook his head. We had accomplished 10 percent of the norm!
Ivan Ivanovich tried to make his point and justify our measurements, but the foreman was unyielding. He muttered something about ‘cubic meters’ and ‘density’. And although we were not familiar with the technical methods of measuring wood production, one thing was clear. We would be returned to the camp zone where we would again pass through the gates with their inscription: ‘Work is honorable, glorious, valiant, and heroic.’
In the camp we learned to hate physical labor and work in general.
But we were not afraid. More than that: the foreman’s assessment of our work and physical capacity as hopeless and worthless brought us a feeling of unheard-of relief and was not at all frightening.
We realized we were at the end of our rope, and we simply let matters take their course. Nothing bothered us any more, and we breathed freely in the fist of another man’s will. We didn’t even concern ourselves with staying alive, and ate and slept on the same schedule as in camp. Our spiritual calm, achieved by a dulling of the senses, was reminiscent of the ‘dungeon’s supreme freedom’ and Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil. Our spiritual calm was always guarded by our subordination to another’s will.
We had long since given up planning our lives more than a day in advance.
The foreman left and we remained to cut a road through the forest and erect new log stacks, but now we did so with greater peace of mind and indifference. We stopped quarrelling over who would take the heavy end when we stacked logs.
We rested more and paid more attention to the sun, the forest, and the pale-blue tall sky. We loafed.
In the morning Savelev and I somehow felled an enormous black pine that had miraculously survived both storm and forest fire. We tossed the saw into the grass. It rang out, striking a stone, and we sat down on the trunk of the fallen tree.
‘Just imagine,’ said Savelev. ‘We’ll survive, leave for the mainland, and quickly become sick old men. We’ll have heart pains and rheumatism, and all the sleepless nights, the hunger, and long hard work of our youth will leave their mark on us even if we remain alive. We’ll be sick without knowing why, groan and drag ourselves from one dispensary to another. This unbearable work will leave us with wounds that can’t be healed, and all our later years will lead to lives of physical and psychological pain. And that pain will be endless and assume many different forms. But even among those terrible future days there will be good ones when we’ll be almost healthy and we won’t think about our sufferings. And the number of those days will be exactly equal to the number of days each of us has been able to loaf in camp.’