Kolyma Tales Read Online Free PDF

because to go for it meant a four-kilometer walk after work and everyone avoided the task. The upper berths were warmer, but even so everyone slept in his working clothes – hats, padded coats, pea jackets, felt pants. Even with the extra warmth, by the morning a man’s hair would be frozen to the pillow.
    Potashnikov felt his strength leaving him every day. A thirty-year-old man, he had difficulty in climbing on to an upper berth and even in getting down from it. His neighbor had died yesterday. The man simply didn’t wake up, and no one asked for the cause of death, as if there were only one cause that everyone knew. The orderly was happy that the man died in the morning, and not in the evening, since the orderly got the dead man’s ration for the day. Everyone realized this, and Potashnikov screwed up his courage to approach the orderly.
    ‘Break off a piece of the crust,’ he asked, but the orderly cursed him as only a man whose weakness lent him strength could. Potashnikov fell silent and walked away.
    He had to take some action, think of something with his weakened mind. Either that or die. Potashnikov had no fear of death, but he couldn’t rid himself of a passionate secret desire, a last stubbornness – to live. He didn’t want to die here in the frost under the boots of the guards, in the barracks with its swearing, dirt, and total indifference written on every face. He bore no grudge for people’s indifference, for he had long since comprehended the source of that spiritual dullness. The same frost that transformed a man’s spit into ice in mid-air also penetrated the soul. If bones could freeze, then the brain could also be dulled and the soul could freeze over. And the soul shuddered and froze – perhaps to remain frozen for ever. Potashnikov had lost everything except the desire to survive, to endure the cold and remain alive.
    Having gulped down his bowl of warm soup, Potashnikov was barely able to drag himself to the work area. The work gang stood at attention before beginning work, and a fat red-faced man in a deerskin hat and a white leather coat walked up and down the rows in Yakut deerskin boots. He peered into their exhausted dirty faces. The gang foreman walked up and respectfully spoke to the man in the deerskin hat.
    ‘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