The Monastery

Book I-2

“Artiom, they’ve stolen my spoon again, can you imagine?”

Artiom immediately checked for his own — yes, it was in its place, as was his bowl. He squashed a louse while he rummaged through his things. They had already stolen his bowl once. Then he had taken a loan of twenty-two pennies of the local prison currency from Vasilii Petrovich and bought a bowl in the prison commissary, after which he had scratched out “A” on the bottom, so that, if they did steal it, he could find it. At the same time, he understood full well that there was no point in the etching — the bowl would go into a different brigade, and they’d hardly let him see where it was or find who had stolen it.

He squashed another louse.

“Can you imagine, Artiom?” repeated Vasilii Petrovich, not expecting an answer and once against digging through his bed roll.

Artiom mumbled something incoherent.

“What?” asked Vasilii Petrovich.

“I’ve imagined it,” answered Artiom, and added, to console his friend, “Buy one in the commissary. For now, we’ll share mine.”

Artiom really didn’t need to sniff out dinner. It was always preceded by the singing of Moisei Solomonovich. He had an amazing nose for food and always began to wail a few minutes before the prisoners on kitchen duty brought in the vat with kasha or soup.

He sang everything with equal gusto — romances, operettas, Jewish and Ukrainian songs, even trying out the little French he knew (he didn’t know much, judging by Vasilii Petrovich’s exaggerated grimaces).

“All hail freedom, the Soviet government, the will of the workers and farmers!” sang Moisei Solomonovich quietly, but distinctly and without, it would seem, any sarcasm. He had an elongated skull; black, curly hair; bulging, surprised eyes; a big mouth with an obvious tongue. As he sang, he helped himself with his hands, as though catching the words of the song as they floated by him on the air and building a little tower out of them.

Afanasiev and the Chechen, scurrying with their feet, brought in the zinc vat on sticks, then a second one.

The prisoners came up to dinner in groups; it always took no less than an hour. Artiom and Vasilii Petrovich’s group was run by another inmate, a former policeman named Krapin. He was a quiet, severe man with attached earlobes. The skin on his face was forever flushed, as though boiled, and his prominent forehead was sharp, somehow impressive to look at, immediately reminding one of long-ago viewed pages from either a textbook on zoology or a medical guide.

In their group, in addition to Moisei Solomonovich and Afanasiev, there were various felons and career criminals, such as a Cossack from Terek named Lazhechnikov, three Chechens, an old Polack, a young Chinese man, a thug from Ukraine who had managed to fight for ten different Cossack hetmans during the Civil War and for the Reds in the interim, an officer of Kolchak’s army, a general’s batman nicknamed “Samovar”, a dozen muzhiks from Chernozem and a satirist from Leningrad named Grakov, who for some reason avoided his fellow countryman Afanasiev.

Under the bunks, amid the utter darkness of the garbage there, the heaps of rags and rubbish, a homeless kid had settled himself there two days ago. Either he had run away from solitary confinement or from the eighth brigade, which is where most of his kind lived. Artiom had fed him cabbage once, but no more; still, the kid slept closer to their group.

“How can he know, Artiom, that we won’t turn him in?” asked Vasilii Petrovich rhetorically, with the lightest self-deprecation. “Do we really have such a good-for-nothing look? I once heard that a grown man incapable of villainy, or at least murder, looks boring. What do you think?”

Artiom remained silent so he didn’t have to answer and demean his manly worth.

He came to the camp two and a half months ago, having received the first designation of four possible workers’ designations, which meant that he would get heavy work everywhere he was sent, no matter what the weather. Until June, he had remained in the thirteenth brigade — the quarantine — having worked for a month unloading at the docks. Artiom had tried out working as a stevedore in Moscow from the age fourteen and was adept at this kind of work, something that the foremen and the work-assignment clerks had immediately noted. If only they had fed him a little more and given him just a little more sleep, it would have been OK.

But Artiom was moved from quarantine to the twelfth brigade.

This group was also not one of the easier ones, though the regimen was a little less severe than in the thirteenth. The twelfth also worked general jobs, often slaving away for hours at a time until they met their quota. They had no right to personally complain to those in charge, they could only complain through the group leaders. As for Vasilii Petrovich and his French, Eichmanis had spoken to him first in the forest.

Throughout June, the twelfth was given different jobs — logs, cleaning up garbage in the monastery itself, uprooting trees, scything hay, making bricks or helping out at the railroad. Those from the cities didn’t always know how to cut hay, while others were useless at unloading. Some people ended up in the infirmary, others in solitary. Work assignments were constantly being changed and mixed up.

Up until this point, Artiom had avoided the logs — the heaviest, dreariest and wettest work, but he had had his fill of the stumps. He could never have imagined how firmly, deeply and differently trees held on to the earth.

“If you don’t chop off the roots one by one, but try to pull out the whole stump at once, with incredible strength, then in its endless tails it would pull out a piece of earth as big as the cupola on the Dormition!” Afanasiev said in his picturesque way, either angry or exhilarated.

The quota per person was twenty-five stumps a day.

Competent inmates, specialists and masters were moved to other brigades, where the regimen was less severe. But Artiom couldn’t figure out where he, a student who hadn’t finished school, could be useful, or even what he was really capable of doing well. Anyway, deciding that was half the battle, you still had to be noticed and called out.

After the stumps, the whole body hurt, like it was shattered. In the morning, it felt like you didn’t have enough strength for another work day. Artiom visibly lost weight, began to dream about food, constantly sought the smell of edibles and experienced that smell intensely, but his youth still dragged him on without giving up.

Vasilii Petrovich seemed to have helped, having claimed to be an expert berry picker — well, clearly, he was that — and when he got the berry-picking brigade, he pulled Artiom along with him. But the lunch that they brought into the forest every day was cold and smaller than the allotted ration. Clearly, the convict-deliverymen ate to their heart’s content along the road. The last time, the berry-pickers were forgotten and not fed at all. The deliverymen protested that they had come but couldn’t find the pickers dispersed throughout the forest. Someone complained about the deliverymen and they each got three days of solitary, but Artiom didn’t get any more food.

Today’s dinner was buckwheat. Artiom had eaten it quickly since childhood. But here, having sat down on Vasilii Petrovich’s bunk, he didn’t even notice how the kasha disappeared. He wiped his spoon on the underside of his jacket, then passed it to his elder companion, who was sitting with his bowl on his knees and tactfully looking away.

“Thank you,” said Vasilii Petrovich quietly and firmly, scooping up the sodden, tasteless porridge boiled in snotty water.

“Uh-huh,” answered Artiom.

Having finished the boiling water, drunk from the tin can that he used as a mug, Artiom jumped up to his bed, risking breaking the bunks, took off his shirt, laid it under himself along with his foot wrapping to dry, put his arms in his overcoat, wrapped his head in a scarf and almost immediately fell asleep, only managing to hear how Vasilii Petrovich quietly spoke to the homeless boy, who had the habit of lightly pulling on the pants of those eating during mealtimes:

“I won’t feed you, are we clear? It’s you who stole my spoon, isn’t it?”

Considering that the homeless boy was under the bunks and Vasilii Petrovich was sitting on them, it might have seemed from the side that he was speaking with spirits, threatening them with hunger and looking forward with stern eyes.

Artiom had time to smile at the thought, but the smile slid off his lips when he fell asleep. After all, there was a full hour until the evening roll call, so why waste time?

Someone was fighting in the refectory; someone cursed; someone wept — Artiom didn’t care.

During that hour, he had time to dream about a boiled egg, a simple boiled egg. The yolk glowed from within, as though it were filled with the sun, streaming forth warmth and gentleness. Artiom touched it with his fingers reverently, and his fingers grew hot. He carefully broke apart the egg, it broke into two halves of egg whites, in one of which, shamelessly naked, alluring, almost pulsating, lay the yolk. Even without tasting it, you could tell that it was ineffably, head-spinningly sweet and soft. From somewhere in his dream, he got coarse salt and Artiom salted the egg, distinctly seeing how every salt crystal fell and how the egg yolk became more and more silvery — soft gold in the midst of silver. For some time, Artiom examined the broken egg, unable to decide what to start with — the whites or the yolk. Prayerfully, he bowed to the egg to carefully lick off the salt.

He woke up for a moment, realizing that he was licking his own salty hand.

In the twelfth brigade, you weren’t allowed to leave at night. The latrine was left inside until the morning. Artiom trained himself to get up between three and four in the morning. He walked with his eyes still shut, by memory, scratching off the lice in a sleepy frenzy… at least he didn’t share his business with anyone else.

As he walked back, he could hardly distinguish the people and the bunks.

The homeless boy slept right there on the floor. You could see his dirty foot, “… so, not dead yet…” thought Artiom in passing. Moisei Solomonovich snored in a singsong, multifarious manner. Vasilii Petrovich, Artiom noticed not for the first time, looked completely different while sleeping. He was frightening, even unpleasant, as though someone else, someone unknown, pushed out through the waking man.

As he lay down on the still-warm overcoat, Artiom looked, with half-drunk eyes, over the refectory with its one hundred and fifty sleeping inmates.

“It’s wild!” he thought, screwing up his eyes, afraid and wondering. “Here lies man, doing nothing, and it’s like this… for the greater part… of his life…”

On the other side of the refectory, a match flared. Someone, no longer able to bear it, wanted to squash at least one family of lice in the light. Even at night, the lice constantly crawled along the bars of the bunks, along the walls, falling from somewhere above.

Artiom opened his eyes at that small flare of the match and saw someone from the second group reaching into someone else’s bag. He met the thief’s gaze, screwed up his eye, turned over and forgot it forever.

Immediately, the morning five o’clock bell woke him up, then, after a few seconds, Afanasiev finished the job by yelling:

“Brigade, wake up!”

Today Artiom hated Afanasiev; yesterday a different man was on morning duty, yelling with a guttural voice; then, the hatred was for him.

In a minute, Moisei Solomonovich, barely visible in the repugnant half-murk, was already singing: