Shulga had been in prison for more than five years. In his free time he read compulsively, devouring anything and everything in order to occupy his mind. His fear had diminished somewhat and at moments of inner calm or in the peace of the night he often thought about what it was that had turned him, a good-natured and timid man, into a murderer. His reminiscences led him to that little book with the dirty grey binding that had perished in the fire.
Shulga found Gromov’s short novel Fly On, Happiness! in the prison-camp library. It was a completely different book, not the one that he had read, but he still remembered the author’s name. On Sunday evening, with his typical thoroughness, Shulga read the whole of the Book of Power. At a specific moment he sensed the inner transformation that had come over him, and his mind was suddenly filled with a pulsating awareness of his own importance. Shulga liked this new sensation very much and, even more importantly, he realized why it had happened and where it had come from.
Shulga observed that, thanks to the Book, he was capable of influencing people around him and imposing his will on them. Naturally, it wasn’t the world outside that had changed, but the man who had read the Book. A mysterious force temporarily transformed Shulga’s facial expressions, the look in his eyes and his bearing, operating on his opponent through his gestures, tone of voice and the words that he spoke. You could say that the Book helped Shulga to recruit the souls of those who were part of his social circle—the “scum”, “skivvies”, “gofers”, “stooges” and “lowlifes” (the downtrodden and sexually abused)—all the untouchables of the criminal world.
Meanwhile in the camp the old thieves’ elite was gradually supplanted by a generation of young bandits who no longer honoured the unwritten code of previous times that forbade the humiliation of anybody at all for no particular reason. The school of excess that had been born in the low-security camps invaded the relatively smooth-running strict-regime environment. Life became much more bitter for the lower castes. Downtrodden convicts were humiliated and even sexually abused for mere amusement, out of boredom. The reason for it could be anything at all—a cute appearance, weakness, excessive intellectual refinement.
One day an absolutely outrageous incident occurred in the camp when the lowlife Timur Kovrov “hit on” a young, promising criminal boss—Kovrov flung himself on the other man and started licking him. The high-status thief beat the lowlife almost to death, but he forfeited his previous authority for ever; even worse, now tainted himself, he joined the ranks of the outcasts and soon afterwards was found hanged by his own hand. Kovrov recovered in hospital and rumour has it that his sentence was reduced because of his serious injuries.
Probably no one even noticed that two days before this strange attack Shulga had a talk with Kovrov and urged him to commit the act. This Kovrov had been reduced to the status of a lowlife through trickery—as a novice he had been sat on the “sod’s seat” in the camp cinema. And certainly no one remembered that previously the young criminal boss had openly mocked and bullied Shulga, threatening to “shaft the four-eyed brainy scumbag up the back entrance”.
In this way Shulga invented his own means of defence against the criminal world—employing the inarticulate, filthy, tormented creatures with holed plates as badges of their humiliation and alienation, whose lot in life was merely to open their mouths and assume the pose.
In the space of a month several respected criminal bosses were hit on—all the ones who had ever molested Shulga. It should be noted that high-ranking thieves reduced to low status by a “kamikaze lowlife” didn’t live long afterwards; they slashed their veins and hanged themselves, otherwise their former victims would have raped and abused them with highly inventive cruelty…
Shulga read the Book regularly and every day it lent him an artificial, but nonetheless effective, charisma. Even seasoned convicts, quite unable to understand what was happening to them, couldn’t stand up to Shulga.
Word that he was inciting the lowlifes against the brothers reached the big boss himself—there were informers among the outcasts. The big boss was puzzled by how a worthless scumbag like that could suddenly have started radiating such psychic power. He had a gut feeling that Shulga was cheating in some incomprehensible fashion—and after pondering for a long time, he drew the right conclusion. That night the Book was stolen from Shulga. The big boss never figured out its secret, but essentially he guessed correctly about the source of the mysterious spell.
In the morning Shulga discovered his loss. And the barracks-hut skivvy passed on the message that the elders had summoned the Head Teacher for a parley. Shulga guessed how the meeting would end, but repeated experience of the sensation of power had turned him into a quite exceptional individual.
The showdown took place in the forestry plot. It was February and darkness came early. The big boss was not expecting any resistance. He only had one fighter from his immediate entourage with him, plus a “bull”, a man who had gambled away his life and become a “torpedo”—he was the one who was supposed to take out the upstart Head Teacher. But the big boss wasn’t expecting things to get that far. He intended to suggest that Shulga hang himself, so that the “bull” wouldn’t have to take the sin on his own soul. The noose had already been set up on a convenient branch.
Shulga looked so limp and jaded that no one even thought of checking to see if he had a weapon. But they should have. Hidden up his sleeve he had a heavy section of steel pipe, stuffed with sand to give it extra weight.
Gratified to note that the Head Teacher was no longer pulsating with self-confidence, the big boss was convinced yet again that he was dealing here with a faker who pulled off his trickery by using some kind of unusual hypnosis.
After hearing his sentence pronounced, Shulga merely asked where the Book was now, promising to reveal its fantastic secret. Intrigued, the big boss took the Book out.
Without hurrying, Shulga scooped up a handful of snow and waited for it to thaw into water, then shook his sleeve so that the pipe slid down into his hand and froze solid to his wet palm. He crashed the first blow down onto the head of the “torpedo”. The two thieves drew their knives, but the crushing weapon demonstrated its superiority. Shulga sustained serious damage too. He had just enough strength left to pick up the Book before he passed out.
There was a secret witness to the duel—the prisoner Savely Vorontsov, who had been under Shulga’s magical influence for a long time. Sensing that something was wrong, he had decided to follow Shulga, and had been proved right. Vorontsov’s help could not have been timelier for the librarian, who was bleeding to death. Prising the length of pipe out of Shulga’s hand, Vorontsov flung it over to the dead “torpedo” and raised the alarm.
After some stage-setting the scene looked different: the “bull”, who had lost at cards, had taken violent revenge on the criminal elite and Shulga had been injured when he tried to intervene.
The camp authorities didn’t really believe in this fairy tale, but they accepted it as their primary scenario, especially since there were only two witnesses—Vorontsov and the injured Shulga—and they both said the same thing. Shulga spent a month in a hospital bed and then returned to the camp.
Shulga was able to thwart a second attempt on his life by preventative measures. The thief who was preparing to attack that night was “tainted” that same day by the lowlife Volkov, who died from knife wounds on the spot, but saved his master.