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‘I really haven’t got anyone like that, Alexander Yevgenievich. You’ll have to try Sobolev and the petty criminal element. These are all intellectuals, Alexander Yevgenievich. They’re a pain in the neck.’

The man in the deerskin hat stopped looking over the men and turned to the gang foreman.

‘The foremen don’t know their people, they don’t want to know, they don’t want to help us,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Have it your way, Alexander Yevgenievich.’

‘I’ll show you. What’s your name?’

‘My name’s Ivanov, Alexander Yevgenievich.’

‘Just watch. Hey, guys, attention!’ The man in the deerskin hat walked up to the work gang. ‘The camp administration needs carpenters to make boxes to haul dirt.’

Everyone was silent.

‘You see, Alexander Yevgenievich?’ the foreman whispered.

Potashnikov suddenly heard his own voice.

‘I’m a carpenter.’ And he stepped forward. Another man stepped forward on his right. Potashnikov knew him; it was Grigoriev.

‘Well,’ said the man in the deerskin hat, turning to the foreman, ‘are you an incompetent asshole or not? OK, fellows, follow me.’

Potashnikov and Grigoriev stumbled after the man in the deerskin hat. He stopped.

‘At this pace,’ he said hoarsely, ‘we won’t make it even by dinnertime. Here’s what. I’ll go ahead and you go to the shop and ask for the foreman, Sergeev. You know where the carpentry shop is?’

‘We know, we know,’ Grigoriev said in a loud voice. ‘Please, give us a smoke.’

‘I think I’ve heard that request before,’ the man in the deerskin hat muttered and pulled out two cigarettes without removing the pack from his pocket.

Potashnikov walked ahead and thought frantically. Today he would be in the warmth of the carpentry shop. He’d sharpen the axe and make a handle. And sharpen the saw. No sense hurrying. He could kill time till dinner signing out the tools and finding the quartermaster. By evening they’d realize he didn’t know how to make an axe handle or sharpen a saw, and they’d kick him out. Tomorrow he’d have to return to the work gang. But today he’d be warm. Maybe he could remain a carpenter tomorrow and the day after tomorrow – if Grigoriev was a carpenter. He’d be Grigoriev’s helper. Winter was nearly over. Somehow he’d survive the short summer.

Potashnikov stopped and waited for Grigoriev.

‘Do you know how… to be a carpenter?’ he asked, holding his breath in sudden hope.

‘Well, you see,’ said Grigoriev cheerfully, ‘I was a graduate student at the Moscow Philological Institute. I don’t see why anyone with a higher education, especially one in the humanities, can’t sharpen an axe and set the teeth on a saw. Particularly if he has to do it next to a hot stove.’

‘That means you can’t do it either…’

‘It doesn’t mean anything. We’ll fool them for two days, and what do you care what happens after that?’

‘We’ll fool them for one day, and tomorrow we’ll be back in the work gang…’

Together the two of them barely managed to open the frozen door. In the middle of the carpentry shop stood a red-hot cast-iron stove; five carpenters were working without coats and hats at their benches. The new arrivals knelt before the stove’s open door as if it were the god of fire, one of man’s first gods. They threw down their mittens and stretched their hands toward the warmth but were not able to feel it immediately since their hands were numb. In a minute Grigoriev and Potashnikov knelt, took off their hats, and unbuttoned their padded jackets.

‘What are you doing here?’ one of the carpenters asked with hostility.

‘We’re carpenters. We’re going to work here,’ Grigoriev said.

‘Alexander Yevgenievich said so,’ Potashnikov added hurriedly.

‘That means you’re the ones the foreman told us to give axes to?’ asked Arishtrem, an older man in charge of tools who was planing shovel handles in the corner.

‘That’s us, that’s us…’

‘Here they are,’ Arishtrem said, looking them over sceptically. ‘Two axes, a saw, and a tooth-setter. You’ll return the tooth-setter later. Here’s my axe; make yourself a handle with it.’

Arishtrem smiled.

‘You’ll have to do thirty handles a day,’ he said.

Grigoriev took the block of wood from Arishtrem’s hands and began to hack away at it. The dinner horn sounded, but Arishtrem kept staring silently at Grigoriev’s work.

‘Now you,’ he said to Potashnikov.

Potashnikov put the log on the stump, took the axe from Grigoriev’s hands, and began to trim the piece.

The carpenters had all left for dinner, and there was no one left in the shop except the three men.

‘Take my two axe handles,’ Arishtrem said, handing the two ready pieces to Grigoriev, ‘and mount the heads. Sharpen the saw. You can stay warm at the stove today and tomorrow. After that, go back where you came from. Here’s a piece of bread for dinner.’

They stayed warm at the stove those two days, and the following day it was only twenty degrees below zero. Winter was over.

An Individual Assignment

That evening the overseer rolled up his measuring-tape and said that Dugaev would get an individual assignment for the next day. The foreman, who had been standing beside them and asking the overseer to credit his work gang with ‘an extra ten cubic meters of earth till the day after tomorrow’, suddenly fell silent and stared at an evening star sparkling over the crest of the hill. Baranov, Dugaev’s ‘partner’, who had been helping the overseer measure the amount of work done, picked up his shovel and began to clean the already cleaned pit.

Dugaev was twenty-three years old, and everything that he saw and heard here amazed more than surprised him.

The work gang gathered for a head count, turned in its tools, and returned to the barracks in uneven convict formation. The difficult day was over. In the cafeteria Dugaev, still standing, drank his bowl of cold, watery barley soup. The day’s bread, issued in the morning, had long since been eaten. Dugaev wanted to smoke and looked around to consider who might give him a butt. Baranov was sitting on the window-sill, sprinkling some home-grown tobacco shreds from his tobacco pouch, which he had turned inside out. When he had carefully gathered them all up, he rolled a thin cigarette and handed it to Dugaev.

‘Go ahead,’ he said, ‘but leave me some.’

Dugaev was surprised, since he and Baranov had never been particularly friendly. Cold, hunger, and sleeplessness rendered any friendship impossible, and Dugaev – despite his youth – understood the falseness of the belief that friendship could be tempered by misery and tragedy. For friendship to be friendship, its foundation had to be laid before living conditions reached that last border beyond which no human emotion was left to a man – only mistrust, rage, and lies. Dugaev remembered well the northern proverb that listed the three commandments of prison life: ‘Don’t believe, don’t fear, don’t ask.’

Greedily Dugaev inhaled the sweet smoke of home-grown tobacco, and his head began to spin.

‘I’m getting weaker,’ he said.

Baranov said nothing.

Dugaev returned to the barracks, lay down, and closed his eyes. He had been sleeping badly of late, because he was hungry all the time. His dreams were particularly tormenting, loaves of bread, steaming greasy soup… Unconsciousness took a long time coming, but he opened his eyes half an hour before it was time to go to work anyway.

When the work gang arrived at its site, the group scattered among the assigned test pits.