Bagretsov swore quietly. He had cut his finger and the blood was flowing. He sprinkled sand on the wound, ripped a piece of wadding from his jacket, and pressed it against the cut, but the blood wouldn’t stop.
‘Poor coagulation,’ Glebov said indifferently.
‘Are you a doctor?’ asked Bagretsov, sucking the wound.
Glebov remained silent. The time when he had been a doctor seemed very far away. Had it ever existed? Too often the world beyond the mountains and seas seemed unreal, like something out of a dream. Real were the minute, the hour, the day – from reveille to the end of work. He never guessed further, nor did he have the strength to guess. Nor did anyone else.
He didn’t know the past of the people who surrounded him and didn’t want to know. But then, if tomorrow Bagretsov were to declare himself a doctor of philosophy or a marshal of aviation, Glebov would believe him without a second thought. Had he himself really been a doctor? Not only the habit of judgment was lost, but even the habit of observation. Glebov watched Bagretsov suck the blood from his finger but said nothing. The circumstance slid across his consciousness, but he couldn’t find or even seek within himself the will to answer. The consciousness that remained to him – the consciousness that was perhaps no longer human – had too few facets and was now directed toward one goal only, that of removing the stones as quickly as possible.
‘Is it deep?’ Glebov asked when they stopped to rest.
‘How can it be deep?’ Bagretsov replied.
And Glebov realized his question was absurd, that of course the hole couldn’t be deep.
‘Here he is,’ Bagretsov said. He reached out to touch a human toe. The big toe peered out from under the rocks and was perfectly visible in the moonlight. The toe was different from Glebov’s and Bagretsov’s toes – but not in that it was lifeless and stiff; there was very little difference in this regard. The nail of the dead toe was clipped, and the toe itself was fuller and softer than Glebov’s. They quickly tossed aside the remaining stones heaped over the body.
‘He’s a young one,’ Bagretsov said.
Together the two of them dragged the corpse from the grave.
‘He’s so big and healthy,’ Glebov said, panting.
‘If he weren’t so fattened up,’ Bagretsov said, ‘they would have buried him the way they bury us, and there would have been no reason for us to come here today.’
They straightened out the corpse and pulled off the shirt.
‘You know, the shorts are like new,’ Bagretsov said with satisfaction.
Glebov hid the underwear under his jacket.
‘Better to wear it,’ Bagretsov said.
‘No, I don’t want to,’ Glebov muttered.
They put the corpse back in the grave and heaped it over with rocks.
The blue light of the rising moon fell on the rocks and the scant forest of the taiga, revealing each projecting rock, each tree in a peculiar fashion, different from the way they looked by day. Everything seemed real but different than in the daytime. It was as if the world had a second face, a nocturnal face.
The dead man’s underwear was warm under Glebov’s jacket and no longer seemed alien.
‘I need a smoke,’ Glebov said in a dreamlike fashion.
‘Tomorrow you’ll get your smoke.’
Bagretsov smiled. Tomorrow they would sell the underwear, trade it for bread, maybe even get some tobacco…
Carpenters
For two days the white fog was so thick a man couldn’t be seen two paces away. But then there wasn’t much opportunity to take long walks alone. Somehow you could guess the direction of the mess hall, the hospital, the guardhouse – those few points we had to be able to find. That same sense of direction that animals possess perfectly also awakens in man under the right conditions.
The men were not shown the thermometer, but that wasn’t necessary since they had to work in any weather. Besides, longtime residents of Kolyma could determine the weather precisely even without a thermometer: if there was frosty fog, that meant the temperature outside was forty degrees below zero; if you exhaled easily but in a rasping fashion, it was fifty degrees below zero; if there was a rasping and it was difficult to breathe, it was sixty degrees below; after sixty degrees below zero, spit froze in mid-air. Spit had been freezing in mid-air for two weeks.
Potashnikov woke each morning with the hope that the cold had let up during the night. He knew from last winter’s experience that no matter how low the temperature was, a sharp change was necessary for a feeling of warmth. If the frost were to weaken its grip even to forty or fifty degrees below zero, it would be warm for two days, and there was no sense in planning more than two days ahead.
But the cold kept up, and Potashnikov knew he couldn’t hold out any longer. Breakfast sustained his strength for no more than an hour of work, and then exhaustion ensued. Frost penetrated the body to the ‘marrow of the bone’ – the phrase was no metaphor. A man could wave his pick or shovel, jump up and down so as not to freeze – till dinner. Dinner was hot – a thin broth and two spoons of kasha that restored one’s strength only a little but nevertheless provided some warmth. And then there was strength to work for an hour, and after that Potashnikov again felt himself in the grip of the cold. The day would finally come to a close, and after supper all the workers would take their bread back to the barracks, where they would eat it, washing it down with a mug of hot water. Not a single man would eat his bread in the mess hall with his soup. After that Potashnikov would go to sleep.
He slept, of course, on one of the upper berths, because the lower ones were like an ice cellar. Everyone who had a lower berth would stand half the night at the stove, taking turns with his neighbors in embracing it; the stove retained a slight remnant of warmth. There was never enough firewood, because to go for it meant a four-kilometer walk after work and everyone avoided the task. The upper berths were warmer, but even so everyone slept in his working clothes – hats, padded coats, pea jackets, felt pants. Even with the extra warmth, by the morning a man’s hair would be frozen to the pillow.
Potashnikov felt his strength leaving him every day. A thirty-year-old man, he had difficulty in climbing on to an upper berth and even in getting down from it. His neighbor had died yesterday. The man simply didn’t wake up, and no one asked for the cause of death, as if there were only one cause that everyone knew. The orderly was happy that the man died in the morning, and not in the evening, since the orderly got the dead man’s ration for the day. Everyone realized this, and Potashnikov screwed up his courage to approach the orderly.
‘Break off a piece of the crust,’ he asked, but the orderly cursed him as only a man whose weakness lent him strength could. Potashnikov fell silent and walked away.
He had to take some action, think of something with his weakened mind. Either that or die. Potashnikov had no fear of death, but he couldn’t rid himself of a passionate secret desire, a last stubbornness – to live. He didn’t want to die here in the frost under the boots of the guards, in the barracks with its swearing, dirt, and total indifference written on every face. He bore no grudge for people’s indifference, for he had long since comprehended the source of that spiritual dullness. The same frost that transformed a man’s spit into ice in mid-air also penetrated the soul. If bones could freeze, then the brain could also be dulled and the soul could freeze over. And the soul shuddered and froze – perhaps to remain frozen for ever. Potashnikov had lost everything except the desire to survive, to endure the cold and remain alive.
Having gulped down his bowl of warm soup, Potashnikov was barely able to drag himself to the work area. The work gang stood at attention before beginning work, and a fat red-faced man in a deerskin hat and a white leather coat walked up and down the rows in Yakut deerskin boots. He peered into their exhausted dirty faces. The gang foreman walked up and respectfully spoke to the man in the deerskin hat.