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and the toe itself was fuller and softer than Glebov’s. They quickly tossed aside the remaining stones heaped over the body.
    ‘He’s a young one,’ Bagretsov said.
    Together the two of them dragged the corpse from the grave.
    ‘He’s so big and healthy,’ Glebov said, panting.
    ‘If he weren’t so fattened up,’ Bagretsov said, ‘they would have buried him the way they bury us, and there would have been no reason for us to come here today.’
    They straightened out the corpse and pulled off the shirt.
    ‘You know, the shorts are like new,’ Bagretsov said with satisfaction.
    Glebov hid the underwear under his jacket.
    ‘Better to wear it,’ Bagretsov said.
    ‘No, I don’t want to,’ Glebov muttered.
    They put the corpse back in the grave and heaped it over with rocks.
    The blue light of the rising moon fell on the rocks and the scant forest of the taiga, revealing each projecting rock, each tree in a peculiar fashion, different from the way they looked by day. Everything seemed real but different than in the daytime. It was as if the world had a second face, a nocturnal face.
    The dead man’s underwear was warm under Glebov’s jacket and no longer seemed alien.
    ‘I need a smoke,’ Glebov said in a dreamlike fashion.
    ‘Tomorrow you’ll get your smoke.’
    Bagretsov smiled. Tomorrow they would sell the underwear, trade it for bread, maybe even get some tobacco…

Carpenters
     
    For two days the white fog was so thick a man couldn’t be seen two paces away. But then there wasn’t much opportunity to take long walks alone. Somehow you could guess the direction of the mess hall, the hospital, the guardhouse – those few points we had to be able to find. That same sense of direction that animals possess perfectly also awakens in man under the right conditions.
    The men were not shown the thermometer, but that wasn’t necessary since they had to work in any weather. Besides, longtime residents of Kolyma could determine the weather precisely even without a thermometer: if there was frosty fog, that meant the temperature outside was forty degrees below zero; if you exhaled easily but in a rasping fashion, it was fifty degrees below zero; if there was a rasping and it was difficult to breathe, it was sixty degrees below; after sixty degrees below zero, spit froze in mid-air. Spit had been freezing in mid-air for two weeks.
    Potashnikov woke each morning with the hope that the cold had let up during the night. He knew from last winter’s experience that no matter how low the temperature was, a sharp change was necessary for a feeling of warmth. If the frost were to weaken its grip even to forty or fifty degrees below zero, it would be warm for two days, and there was no sense in planning more than two days ahead.
    But the cold kept up, and Potashnikov knew he couldn’t hold out any longer. Breakfast sustained his strength for no more than an hour of work, and then exhaustion ensued. Frost penetrated the body to the ‘marrow of the bone’ – the phrase was no metaphor. A man could wave his pick or shovel, jump up and down so as not to freeze – till dinner. Dinner was hot – a thin broth and two spoons of kasha that restored one’s strength only a little but nevertheless provided some warmth. And then there was strength to work for an hour, and after that Potashnikov again felt himself in the grip of the cold. The day would finally come to a close, and after supper all the workers would take their bread back to the barracks, where they would eat it, washing it down with a mug of hot water. Not a single man would eat his bread in the mess hall with his soup. After that Potashnikov would go to sleep.
    He slept, of course, on one of the upper berths, because the lower ones were like an ice cellar. Everyone who had a lower berth would stand half the night at the stove, taking turns with his neighbors in embracing it; the stove retained a slight remnant of warmth. There was never enough firewood,