How could logs be cut to fit the stove? The thin ones could be stamped on and broken, but the thicker ones had to be stuffed into the mouth of the stove – thin end first so they would gradually burn down. During the night there would always be someone to stuff them farther in. The light from the open stove door was the only light in our house. Drafts would sweep through the wall until the first snowfall, but then we shoveled snow all around the house and poured water over the snow, and our winter home was ready. The door opening was hung with a piece of tarpaulin.
It was here in this shed that I found Roman Romanovich. He didn’t recognize me. The criminal camp has a very descriptive phrase to describe the way he was dressed – ‘like fire’. Shreds of cotton wool protruded from his quilted jacket, his pants, his hat. Evidently Roman Romanovich often had occasion to run for a ‘light’ for the cigarette of this or that criminal… There was a hungry gleam in his eyes, but his cheeks were as rosy as before, except that now they didn’t remind one of two balloons but clung rather tightly to his cheekbones. Roman Romanovich lay in the corner, wheezing loudly. His chin rose and fell.
‘He’s finished,’ said Denisov, his neighbor. ‘His foot rags are in good shape.’ Agilely, Denisov pulled the boots off the dying man’s feet and unwrapped the green footcloths that were still quite wearable. ‘That’s how it’s done,’ he said, peering at me in a threatening fashion. But I didn’t care.
Romanov’s corpse was carried out while we were lining up to be sent to work. He didn’t have a hat either. The bottom of his coat dragged the ground.
Volodya Dobrovoltsev, the pointman, died. What is that – a job or a nationality? It was a job that was the envy of every ‘fifty-eighter’ in the barracks. (Separate barracks for the ‘politicals’ in a camp for petty criminals and regular thugs were, of course, a legal mockery. Such arrangements protected no one from attacks or bloody settling of accounts by the criminals.)
The ‘point’ was an iron pipe with hot steam which was used to heat the stone and coarse frozen gravel. From time to time a worker would shovel out the heated stone with a ten-foot-long shovel that had a blade the size of a man’s palm.
This was considered a skilled job, since the pointman had to open and shut the valves which regulated hot steam that traveled along pipes from a primitive boiler in the shed. It was even better to be a pointman than a boilerman. Not every mechanical engineer could hope for that kind of work. And it wasn’t because any special skills were required. As far as Volodya was concerned, it was sheer chance that he got the job, but it transformed him totally. He no longer had to concern himself with the eternal preoccupation of how to keep warm. The icy cold did not penetrate his entire being, didn’t keep his mind from functioning. The hot pipe saved him. That was why everyone envied Dobrovoltsev.
There was talk that he didn’t get the job of pointman for nothing, that it was sure proof that he was an informer, a spy… Of course, the criminals would maintain that anyone who had worked as a camp orderly had drunk the working man’s blood, but people knew just how much such gossip was worth; envy is a poor adviser. Somehow Volodya’s stature increased immeasurably in our eyes. It was as if a remarkable violinist had appeared among us. Dobrovoltsev would leave camp alone – the conditions required that. He would leave through the guard’s booth, opening the tiny window and shouting his number – ‘twenty-five’ – in a joyous, loud voice. It had been a long time since we had heard anything like that.
Sometimes he would work near our work site, and we would make use of our acquaintance and would alternate running to the pipe to get warm. The pipe was an inch and a half in diameter, and you could wrap your fingers around it, squeeze them into a fist and feel the heat flow from your hands to your body so that it was impossible to tear yourself away to return to the mine face and the frost…
Volodya didn’t chase us away as the other pointmen did. He never said a word to us, although I know for a fact that pointmen were forbidden to let the likes of us warm up by the pipe. He stood, surrounded by clouds of thick white steam. His clothing became icy, and the nap of his coat gleamed like crystal needles. He never talked to us – the job was too valuable to risk just for that.
On Christmas night that year we were all sitting around the stove. In honor of the holiday, its iron sides were redder than usual. We could sense the difference in temperature immediately. All of us sitting around the stove were in a sleepy, lyrical mood.
‘You know, fellows, it would be a good thing to go home. After all, miracles do happen…’ It was Glebov, the horse-driver, speaking. He used to be a professor of philosophy and was famous in our barracks for having forgotten his wife’s name a month earlier. ‘I guess I should knock on wood, but I really mean to go home.’
‘Home?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll tell you the truth,’ I answered. ‘I’d rather go back to prison. I’m not joking. I wouldn’t want to go back to my family now. They wouldn’t understand me, they couldn’t. The things that seem important to them I know to be trivial. And the things that are important to me – the little that is left to me – would be incomprehensible to them. I would bring them a new fear, add one more fear to the thousands of fears that already fill their lives. No man should see or know the things that I have seen and known.
‘Prison is another matter altogether. Prison is freedom. It’s the only place I have ever known where people spoke their minds without being afraid. Their souls were at rest there. And their bodies rested too, because they didn’t have to work. There, every hour of our being had meaning.’
‘What a lot of rot,’ the former professor of philosophy said. ‘That’s only because they didn’t beat you during the investigation. Anyone who experienced that method would be of an entirely different opinion.’
‘How about you, Peter Ivanovich, what do you say to that?’ Peter Ivanovich Timofeev, the former director of Ural Trust, smiled and winked at Glebov.
‘I’d go home to my wife. I’d buy some rye bread – a whole loaf! I’d cook up a bucketful of kasha. And some soup with dumplings – a bucket of that too! And I’d eat it all. And I’d be full for the first time in my life. And whatever was left over I’d make my wife eat.’
‘How about you?’ Glebov asked Zvonkov, the pickman in our work gang, who had been a peasant from either Yaroslavl or Kostroma in his earlier life.
‘I’d go home,’ Zvonkov answered seriously, without the slightest trace of a smile.
‘I think if I could go home, I’d never be more than a step away from my wife. Wherever she’d go, I’d be right on her heels. The only thing is that they’ve taught me how to hate work here. I’ve lost my love for the land. But I’d find something…’
‘And how about you?’ Glebov touched the knees of our orderly.
‘First thing I’d go to Party Headquarters. I’ll never forget all the cigarette butts they had on the floor there.’
‘Stop joking.’
‘I’m dead serious.’
Suddenly I realized that there was only one person left who had not yet answered. And that person was Volodya Dobrovoltsev. He raised his head, not waiting for the question. From the open stove door the light of the glowing coals gleamed in his lively, deep-set eyes.