‘But how about honest work?’ I asked.
‘The only ones who call for honest work are the bastards who beat and maim us, eat our food, and force us living skeletons to work to our very deaths. It’s profitable for them, but they believe in “honest work” even less than we do.’
In the evening we sat around our precious stove, and Fedya Shapov listened attentively to Savelev’s hoarse voice:
‘Well, he refused to work. They made up a report, said he was dressed appropriately for the season…’
‘What does that mean – “appropriately for the season”?’ asked Fedya.
‘Well, they can’t list every piece of summer or winter clothing you have on. If it’s in the winter, they can’t write that you were sent to work without a coat or mittens. How often did you stay in camp because there were no mittens?’
‘Never,’ Fedya said timidly. ‘The boss made us stamp down the snow on the road. Or else they would have had to write that we stayed behind because we didn’t have anything to wear.’
‘There you have it.’
‘OK, tell me about the subway.’
And Savelev would tell Fedya about the Moscow subway. Ivan Ivanovich and I also liked to listen to Savelev, since he knew things that I had never guessed, although I had lived in Moscow.
‘Muslims, Fedya,’ said Savelev, delighted that he could still think clearly, ‘are called to worship by a muezzin from the minaret. Muhammed chose the human voice as a signal to prayer. Muhammed tried everything – trumpets, tambourines, signal fires; nothing pleased him… Fifteen hundred years later when they were choosing a signal to start the subway trains, it turned out that neither the whistle, nor the horn, nor the siren could be heard as easily by the train engineer’s ear – with the same precision – as the live voice of the dispatcher on duty shouting, “Ready!” ’
Fedya gasped with delight. He was better adapted than any of us to the forest, more experienced than any of us in spite of his youth. Fedya could do carpentry work, build a simple cabin in the taiga, fell a tree and use its branches to make a shelter. In addition, Fedya was a hunter; in his locality people were used to guns from childhood. But cold and hunger wiped out Fedya’s qualities, and the earth ignored his knowledge and abilities. Fedya did not envy city dwellers, but simply acknowledged their superiority and could listen endlessly to their stories of the wonders of science and the miracles of the city.
Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of ‘difficult’ conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends. Only real need can determine one’s spiritual and physical strength and set the limits of one’s physical endurance and moral courage.
We all understood that we could survive only through luck. Strangely enough, in my youth whenever I experienced failure I used to repeat the saying: ‘Well, at least we won’t die from hunger.’ It never crossed my mind to doubt the truth of this sentence. And at the age of thirty I found myself in a very real sense dying from hunger and literally fighting for a piece of bread. And this was a long time before the war.
When the four of us gathered at the spring ‘Duskania’, we all knew we had not gathered through friendship. We all knew that if we survived we would not want to meet again. It would be painful to remember the insane hunger, the unchecked gastronomic lies at the fire, our quarrels with each other and our identical dreams. All of us had the same dreams of loaves of rye bread that flew past us like meteors or angels.
A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good. There was nothing good at the spring ‘Duskania’, and nothing good was either expected in the future or remembered in the past by any of us. We had all been permanently poisoned by the north, and we knew it. Three of us stopped resisting fate, and only Ivan Ivanovich kept working with the same tragic diligence as before.
Savelev tried to reason with Ivan Ivanovich during one of the smoking breaks. For us it was just an ordinary rest period for non-smokers since we hadn’t had any home-made tobacco for a number of years. Still we held to the breaks. In the taiga, smokers would gather and dry blackcurrant leaves, and there were heated convict discussions as to whether cowberry leaves or currant leaves were better. Experts maintained that both were worthless, since the body demands the poison of nicotine, not smoke, and brain cells could not be tricked by such a simple method. But currant leaf served for our ‘smoking breaks’, since in camp the words ‘rest from work’ presented too glaring a contradiction with the basic principles of production ethics held in the far north. To rest every hour was both a challenge and a crime, and dried currant leaf was a natural camouflage.
‘Listen, Ivan,’ said Savelev. ‘I’ll tell you a story. In Bamlag, we were working on the side track and hauling sand in wheelbarrows. It was a long distance, and we had to put out twenty-five meters a day. If you didn’t fill your quota, your bread ration got cut to three hundred grams. Soup once a day. Whoever filled the quota got an extra kilo of bread and could buy a second kilo in the store if he had the cash. We worked in pairs. But the quotas were impossible. So here’s what we did: one day we’d work for you from your trench and fill the quota. We’d get two kilos of bread plus your three hundred grams. So we’d each get one kilo, one hundred and fifty grams. The next day we’d work for my quota. Then for yours. We did it for a month, and it wasn’t a bad life. Luckily for us the foreman was a decent sort, since he knew what was up. It worked out well even for him. His men kept up their strength and production didn’t drop. Then someone higher up figured things out, and our luck came to an end.’
‘How about trying it here?’ said Ivan Ivanovich.
‘I don’t want to, but we’ll help you out.’
‘How about you?’
‘We couldn’t care less, friend.’
‘I guess I don’t care either. Let’s just wait for the foreman to come.’
The foreman arrived in a few days, and our worst fears were realized.
‘OK, you’ve had your rest. Your time is up. Might as well give someone else a chance. This has been a bit like a sanatorium or maybe a health club for you,’ the foreman joked without cracking a smile.
‘I guess so,’ said Savelev:
First you go to the club
And then off to play;
Tie a tag to your toe
And jump in your grave.
We pretended to laugh, out of politeness.
‘When do we go back?’
‘Tomorrow.’
Ivan Ivanovich didn’t ask any more questions. He hanged himself that night ten paces from the cabin in the tree fork without even using a rope. I’d never seen that kind of suicide before. Savelev found him, saw him from the path and let out a yell. The foreman came running, ordered us not to take him down until the investigating group arrived, and hurried us off.
Fedya Shapov and I didn’t know what to do – Ivan Ivanovich had some good foot rags that weren’t torn. He also had some sacks, a calico shirt that he boiled to remove the lice, and some patched felt boots. His padded jacket lay on his bunk. We talked it over briefly and took the things for ourselves. Savelev didn’t take part in the division of the dead man’s clothing. He just kept walking around Ivan Ivanovich’s body. In the world of free men a body always and everywhere stimulates a vague interest, attracts like a magnet. This is not the case either in war or in the camps, where the everyday nature of death and the deadening of feeling kills any interest in a dead body. But Savelev was struck by Ivan Ivanovich’s death. It had stirred up and lit some dark corners of his soul, and forced him to make decisions of his own.