During that second meeting, they talked with each thoroughly.
Artiom, of course, could have assumed that Vasilii Petrovich was continuing to keep up the acquaintance because he was waiting for the next package, but his instinct assiduously convinced him that things were quite different. Here, he thought, we have simple human fellowship. After all, why wouldn’t anyone treat Artiom well? He treated himself well enough.
“After all, we all have to live here,” Artiom concluded his reflections on the subject. “Is the intelligentsia supposed to be the first to die off?”
Later, Artiom was transferred from the quarantine brigade to the twelfth, and on that same day, the non-political prisoner who slept on the ledge above Vasilii Petrovich was released on early parole and Artiom took his empty bu
