There had been a breakdown in the camp’s blood circulation system, whose erythrocytes were living people. Trucks stood idle, and the mines lengthened the prisoners’ workday. In the town itself the bakery was not able to keep up with orders. Every prisoner had to receive 500 grams (a little over a pound) of bread per day, and bread was even being baked in private apartments. The authorities were growing ever more bitter over the fact that the town was slowly filling up with convict ‘slag’ that had been thrown out by the mines in the taiga.
There were more than a thousand human beings in the warehouse to which Andreev had been brought and which bore the then-fashionable title of ‘section’. This multitude was not immediately noticeable. On the upper bunks people lay naked in the heat; the prisoners on and beneath the lower bunks wore padded coats, pea jackets and hats. No one will ever explain why a convict almost never sleeps on his side. Most of the men lay on their backs, and their bodies seemed like growths or bumps in the wood, like bent boards in the enormous shelves.
People were clustered in small groups either around storytellers – ‘novelists’ – or around incidents, and given such a concentration of people, incidents occurred nearly every minute. These men were being kept in the transit camp and had not been sent to work for more than a month. They were sent out only to the bathhouse to disinfect their clothing. Every day the camps lost twenty thousand workdays, one hundred and sixty thousand hours, perhaps even three hundred and twenty thousand hours; workdays vary. Or a thousand days of life were saved. Twenty thousand days of life. Statistics is a wily science, and figures can be read in different ways.
Everyone was in his place when food was handed out, distributed to ten prisoners at a time. There were so many people that no sooner had breakfast been distributed than it was time for lunch. As soon as lunch had been served, it was time for supper. Only bread and ‘tea’ (warm boiled water) and half a herring were distributed to each man in the morning. No more bread was issued for the rest of the day. Lunch consisted of soup, and only kasha was served for supper. Nevertheless, there was not sufficient time to serve even this quantity.
The assignment man showed Andreev his place and pointed to the second bunk. A grumble of protest came from the top bunk, but the assignment man cursed back at the grumblers. Andreev gripped the edge of the shelf with both hands and unsuccessfully attempted to bring up his right leg. The assignment man’s strong arm tossed him upward, and Andreev plunked down among the naked bodies. No one paid him any attention. The ‘registration’ and settlement procedure had been carried out.
Andreev slept. He awoke only when food was distributed, after which he would carefully and precisely lick his hands and fall asleep again. His sleep was not sound, however, since the lice refused to leave him in peace.
No one questioned him, even though there were many people here from the taiga, and the rest were destined to end up there. They all knew this, and for that very reason they wanted to know as little as possible about their inevitable fate. They were right, Andreev reasoned. They should not know everything that he had seen. Nothing could be avoided or foreseen. What use were extra fears? These were living people, and Andreev was a representative of the dead. His knowledge, a dead man’s knowledge, was of no use to them, the living.
Bathhouse time came two days later. Bathing and clothing disinfection were nothing but an annoyance, and all the prisoners prepared themselves reluctantly. Andreev, however, wanted to rid himself of lice. He had all the time in the world, and he examined the seams of his faded military shirt several times a day. But only the disinfection chamber held the promise of final victory. He went to the bathhouse willingly and, although they issued him no underwear and he had to pull his reddish military shirt over his naked body, he no longer felt the usual bites.
At the bathhouse, the usual portion of water was issued – one basin of hot water and one of cold – but Andreev managed to deceive the water man and get an extra basin. A tiny piece of soap was issued, but it was possible to gather discarded fragments from the floor and work up a good lather. This was his best bath in a year. So what if blood and pus seeped from the scurvy ulcers on his shins? So what if people in the bathhouse recoiled from him in horror? So what if they walked around him and his lousy clothing in disgust?
When clothing was returned from the disinfection chamber, the fur socks of Andreev’s neighbor Ognyov had shrunk so much that they looked like toys. Ognyov burst into tears, for the socks were his salvation in the north. Andreev, however, stared at him without sympathy. He had seen too many men cry for too many reasons. Some pretended, others were mentally disturbed, and still others had lost hope and were desperately bitter. Some cried from the cold. Andreev had never seen anyone cry from hunger.
When they returned through the silent city, the aluminum-hued puddles had cooled, and the fresh air had a smell of spring. After the session in the bathhouse, Andreev slept soundly. Ognyov, who had forgotten the incident in the bathhouse, said Andreev had ‘gotten his fill of sleep’.
No one was permitted to leave, but there was one job in the section for which a man could be allowed to cross through the ‘wire’. True, this had nothing to do with leaving the camp settlement and crossing the outer wire – a series of three fences, each with ten strands of barbed wire and a forbidden area beyond them circumscribed by another low fence. No one even dreamt of that. They could only contemplate the possibility of leaving the immediate yard. Beyond the barbed wire of the yard was a cafeteria, a kitchen, storehouses, a hospital – in a word, a very different life, one forbidden to Andreev. Only one person could pass through the fence – the sewage disposal man. And when he suddenly died (life is full of fortunate coincidences!), Ognyov accomplished miracles of energy and intuition. For two days he ate no bread. Then he traded the bread for a pressed-fiber suitcase.
‘I got it from Baron Mandel, Andreev!’
Baron Mandel! A descendant of Pushkin! Far below, Andreev could make out the long, narrow-shouldered figure of the Baron with his tiny bald skull, but he had never had an opportunity to make his acquaintance.
Since he had been in quarantine for only a few months, Ognyov still had a wool jacket left over from the ‘outside’. He presented the assignment man with the jacket and the suitcase and in exchange received the sewage disposal job. Two weeks later, Ognyov was nearly strangled to death in the dark by criminals. They took three thousand rubles from him. The ability to leave and enter quarantine evidently provided a number of business opportunities.
Andreev scarcely saw Ognyov during the heyday of his commercial career. Beaten and tormented, Ognyov made a confession to Andreev one night as he returned to his old place:
‘They cleaned me out today, but I’ll beat them in the end. They think they know cards, but I’ll get it all back!’
Ognyov never helped Andreev with bread or money, nor was this the custom in such instances. In terms of camp ethics, he was acting quite normally.
One day Andreev realized with amazement that he had survived. It was extremely difficult to get up from his bunk, but he was able to do it. The main thing was that he didn’t have to work and could simply lie prone. Even a pound of bread, three spoons of kasha and a bowl of watery soup were enough to resurrect a person so long as he didn’t have to work.