People like Vaska could pass through the village only two by two, with a guard. Neither the local military types nor the civilian non-convicts liked to see his kind walk alone on the village streets. His kind didn’t cause suspicion only when carrying firewood.
A small log was buried in the snow near the garage – next to the sixth telegraph pole from the corner, in the ditch. That had been done yesterday after work.
The driver slowed the truck, and, leaning over the edge of the bed, Vaska slid to the ground. He at once found the place where he had buried the log. The bluish snow was darker there and slightly packed down; you could see that in the early twilight. Vaska jumped into the ditch and kicked the snow aside. The log appeared – gray and flat like a large frozen fish. Vaska dragged the log out on to the road, stood it upright, tapped it to knock off the snow, and bent down to put his shoulder under it as he lifted it with his hands. He strode off to the village, changing shoulders from time to time. He was weak and exhausted, and he warmed up from the exercise right away, but the warmth didn’t last long. In spite of the weight of the log, Vaska could not stay warm. Twilight thickened into a white fog, and the village lit all its yellow electric lights. Vaska smiled, pleased with his calculation; in the white fog he would easily reach his goal unnoticed. There was the enormous broken larch tree and the stump, silver in the fog. That meant it was the next house.
Vaska threw the log down by the porch, brushed the snow from his felt boots with his mittens, and knocked at the door, which opened to admit him. An elderly bare-headed woman in an unbuttoned sheepskin coat stared at him anxiously as if awaiting an explanation.
‘I brought you some wood,’ Vaska said, struggling to spread the frozen skin of his face into the creases of a smile. ‘Could I speak to Ivan Petrovich?’
But Ivan Petrovich was already on the way out, holding the curtain up with his hand.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’
‘Outside,’ Vaska said.
‘Wait and we’ll saw it up. Let me get dressed.’ Ivan Petrovich took a long time hunting for his mittens. The two men went out on to the porch and cut the log in half without any saw-horses, holding it between their legs and raising it with their hands when necessary. The saw was dull and badly set.
‘You can come by some other time,’ Ivan Petrovich said, ‘and set the teeth. Here’s a splitting axe. Bring it right into the apartment when you’re done. Don’t leave it in the corridor.’
Vaska’s head was spinning from hunger, but he split the log into smaller pieces and carried them all into the house.
‘Well, that’s all,’ the woman said, coming out from behind the curtain. ‘That’s all.’
Vaska would not leave but stood shifting from one foot to the other. Ivan Petrovich appeared again.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any bread just now. We gave all the soup to the pigs, so I don’t have anything to give you. You can drop by next week…’
Vaska remained silent but would not leave.
Ivan Petrovich searched through his wallet.
‘Here’s three rubles for you. Just for you, for such good wood. As for tobacco, you know it’s really expensive nowadays.’
Vaska stuck the wrinkled three-ruble note inside his shirt and left. Three rubles wouldn’t buy even a pinch of tobacco.
Nauseous from hunger, he remained standing on the porch. The pigs had eaten Vaska’s bread and soup. Vaska took out the green three-ruble note and tore it into tiny shreds. For a long time shreds of paper, seized by the wind, blew along the shining, polished snow crust. And when the last fragments had disappeared in the white fog, Vaska stepped down from the porch. Swaying slightly from weakness, he walked – not home, but through the village. He kept walking and walking – past one-storied, two-storied, and three-storied palaces…
He walked up to the first porch and jerked the door handle. The door squeaked and gave way. Vaska walked into a dark corridor dimly lit by a dull electric bulb. He walked past the apartment doors. At the end of the corridor was a storage room, and Vaska leaned against the door, opened it, and stepped over the threshold. In the storeroom stood some sacks of onion, and perhaps salt. Vaska ripped open one of the sacks – barley. Angry and excited, he sank his shoulder into the sack and pushed it aside. Under the sack lay frozen hog carcasses. Vaska yelped with joy, but he was too weak to tear even a hunk from one of the carcasses. Farther back, under the sacks, lay frozen suckling pigs, and Vaska could see nothing else. He ripped free one of the frozen suckling pigs and, holding it in his arms like a baby, moved toward the door. But people were already coming out of the rooms, and white fog was filling the corridor. Someone shouted ‘Stop!’ and dived at his legs. Vaska jumped upward, clutching the piglet in his arms, and ran out into the street. The residents of the house ran after him. Someone shot at him, someone bellowed like a beast, but Vaska ran on, seeing nothing. In a few minutes he realized that his legs were taking him of their own accord to the only official building that he knew in the village – the headquarters for ‘vitamin’ expeditions, where Vaska had himself once worked as a gatherer of dwarf cedar, the needles of which were boiled for vitamin C.
The chase was close. Leaping up on to the porch, Vaska pushed the man on duty aside, and rushed down the corridor, the crowd hot on his heels. He ran to the office of the recreation officer and from there fled through a different door – to the lounge. There was no place else to run. Only then did Vaska realize that he had lost his hat. The frozen piglet was still in his hands. Vaska put the pig down, overturned the massive benches, and propped the door shut with them. Then he dragged the podium up against the doors as well. Someone shook the door handle, and silence ensued.
There and then Vaska sat down on the floor, took the raw piglet in both hands and started to gnaw.
When the guards arrived, the doors were opened, and the barricade was removed. Vaska had eaten half of the pig.
A Day Off
Two squirrels the color of the sky but with black faces and tails were totally absorbed by something going on beyond the silver larch trees. I walked nearly up to their tree before they noticed me. Their claws scratched at the bark, and their blue shadows scampered upward. Somewhere high above they fell silent, fragments of bark stopped falling on the snow, and I saw what they had been watching.
A man was praying in the forest clearing. His cloth hat lay at his feet, and the frost had already whitened his close-cropped head. There was an extraordinary expression on his face – the kind people have when they recollect something extremely precious, such as childhood. The man crossed himself with quick, broad gestures as if using his fingers to pull his head down. His expression so altered his features that I did not immediately recognize him. It was the convict Zamiatin, a priest who lived in the same barracks as I.
He had not yet seen me, and his lips, numb from the cold, were quietly and solemnly pronouncing the words that I had learned as a child. Zamiatin was saying mass in the silver forest.
Slowly he crossed himself, straightened up, and saw me. Solemnity and tranquility disappeared from his face, and the accustomed wrinkles returning to his forehead drew his eyebrows together. Zamiatin did not like mockery. He picked up his hat, shook it, and put it on.
‘You were saying the liturgy,’ I said.
‘No, no,’ Zamiatin said, smiling at my ignorance. ‘How could I say mass? I don’t have bread and wine or my stole. This is just a regulation-issue towel.’
He shifted the dirty ‘waffled’ rag that hung around his neck and really did create the impression of a priest’s stole. The cold had covered the towel with snowy crystals which glimmered joyously in the sun like the embroidery on a church vestment.