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Later we returned along the same road, as usual not having met our quota, but not caring about it either. But somehow it didn’t seem as cold as usual.

We tried to work, but our lives were too distant from anything that could be expressed in figures, wheelbarrows, or percent of plan. The figures were a mockery. But for an hour, for one moment after that night’s dinner, we got our strength back.

And suddenly I realized that that night’s dinner had given the sectarian the strength he needed for his suicide. He needed that extra portion of kasha to make up his mind to die. There are times when a man has to hurry so as not to lose his will to die.

As usual, we encircled the stove. But today there was no one to sing any hymns. And I guess I was even happy that it was finally quiet.

Grishka Logun’s Thermometer

We were so exhausted that we collapsed in the snow beside the road before going home.

Instead of yesterday’s forty degrees below zero, today was only thirteen below and the day seemed summery.

Grishka Logun, the foreman of the work area next to ours, walked past in an unbuttoned sheepskin coat. He was carrying a pick handle in his hand. Grishka was young, hot-tempered, and had an amazingly red face. Very low on the camp’s administrative ladder, he was often unable to resist the temptation to put his own shoulder to a snowbound truck, to help pick up a log, or to break loose a box of earth frozen into the snow. All these were acts clearly beneath the dignity of a foreman, but he kept forgetting the loftiness of his position.

Vinogradov’s work gang was coming down the road toward us. They were no better a lot than we were: the same former mayors and party leaders, university professors, middle-rank military officers…

People crowded timidly to the edge of the road; they were returning from work and were letting Grishka Logun pass. But he stopped too. The gang had been working in his sector. Vinogradov, a talkative man who had been the director of a mechanized tractor station in the Ukraine, stepped forward.

Logun and Vinogradov were too far from where we were sitting for us to be able to hear what they were saying, but we could understand everything without the words. Vinogradov, waving his hands, was explaining something to Logun. Then Logun poked the pick handle into Vinogradov’s chest, and Vinogradov fell backward… Vinogradov didn’t get up, and Logun jumped on him and began to kick him, brandishing his pick handle all the while. None of the twenty men in his work gang made the slightest move to defend their leader. Logun picked up his hat, which had fallen in the snow, and walked on. Vinogradov got up as if nothing had happened. The rest of the group (the work gang was passing us) didn’t express the slightest sympathy or indignation. When he reached us, Vinogradov twisted his broken bleeding lips into a wry smile: ‘That Logun’s got a real thermometer,’ he said. ‘The thieves call kicking a man that way “dancing”,’ Vavilov said. ‘It’s a sort of Russian folk-dance.’

Vavilov was an acquaintance of mine. We had arrived together at the mine from the same Butyr Prison. ‘What do you think of that?’ I said. ‘We have to make some decision. No one beat us yesterday, but they might tomorrow. What would you do if Logun did to you what he just did to Vinogradov?’

‘I guess I’d take it,’ Vavilov answered quietly. And I understood that he had been contemplating the inevitability of a beating for a long time.

Later I realized that it was all a matter of physical superiority when gang leaders, overseers, orderlies, or any unarmed persons were concerned. As long as I was strong, no one struck me. As soon as I weakened, everyone would. I would be beaten by the orderly, the worker in the bathhouse, the barber, the cook, the foreman, the work-gang foreman, and even the weakest criminal. The guard’s strength was in his rifle.

The strength of the superior beating me was in the law, in the court, the tribunal, the guards, the troops. It was not hard for him to be stronger than I. The strength of the criminal element was in their numbers, the fact that they stuck together, that they could cut a man’s throat over a couple of words. (I saw that happen more than once.) But I was still strong. I could be beaten by the director, the guard, the thief, but the orderly, the foreman, and the barber still couldn’t beat me.

Poliansky, an erstwhile physical education teacher who now received a lot of food packages and never shared any of them with anyone, said to me in a tone of reproach that he simply could not comprehend how people could allow themselves to be reduced to such a condition. He was even indignant when I didn’t agree with him. Before the year was up, however, I again met Poliansky – already a real ‘goner’ picking up cigarette butts and eager to scratch the heels of any important thief in camp (a common ritual of servility that was thought to encourage relaxation).

Poliansky was honest. His secret torments were strong enough to break through ice, through death, through indifference and beatings, through hunger, sleeplessness, and fear.

Once we had a holiday; on holidays we were all placed under lock and key, and this was called ‘holiday isolation’. And there were people who met old friends, made new acquaintances, and confided in each other during this ‘isolation’. No matter how terrible or how degrading isolation was, it was, nevertheless, easier than work for political prisoners convicted under Article 58 of the criminal code. Isolation was, after all, an opportunity to relax – even for a minute, and who could say how much time it would take for us to return to our former bodies – a minute, a day, a year, or a century? No one could hope to return to his former soul. And, of course, no one did.

But to get back to Poliansky, my bunk neighbor on that ‘isolation day’, he was honest.

‘I’ve wanted to ask you something for a long time.’

‘What about?’

‘I used to watch you a few months ago – the way you walk, how you can’t step over a log any dog would jump over, how you drag your feet on the stones, and how the slightest bump on your path seems an impossible barrier and causes palpitations, heavy breathing, and requires long rest. I watched you and thought: what a bum, a loafer, an experienced bastard, an imposter.’

‘And now? Have you understood anything?’

‘I understood later. I did – when I got weak myself. When everyone began to push me and beat me. Man knows no sensation more pleasant than to realize that someone else is still weaker, still worse off than he.’

‘Why are “heroes of communist labor” always invited to production meetings? Why is physical strength a moral measure? “Physically stronger” means “better than me, morally superior to me”. How could it be otherwise? One man picks up a 400-pound boulder, and I’m bent over with a twenty-pound stone.’

‘I’ve realized all that now – I wanted to tell you.’

‘Thanks even for that.’

Not long after that Poliansky died. He fell in one of the test pits. The foreman struck him in the face with his fist. The foreman was not Grishka Logun, but one of us – Firsov, a military man convicted under Article 58.

I remember very well how I was struck the first time. It was the first of hundreds of blows that I experienced daily, nightly.

It’s impossible to remember all the blows one experiences, but I remember the first very well. I was even prepared for it by Grishka Logun’s behavior and Vavilov’s meekness.

In the cold, in the hunger of the fourteen-hour workday, of the frosty white cloud of the rocky gold-mine, happiness abruptly flitted my way, and an act of charity was thrust into my hand by a passer-by. This charity did not take the form of bread or medicine; it was in the form of time, an unscheduled relaxation.

The overseer of the ten men working in our sector was Zuev, then a free man, but he had once been a convict and knew what it was like to be in a convict’s hide.