One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Read Online Free PDF Page B

garden, laying paths, bringing soil to the flowerbeds, and, in wintertime, erecting snow barriers. Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any ifiness.

    You can overwork a horse to death. That the doctor ought to understand. If he'd been sweating blood laying blocks he'd quiet down, you could be sure of that.

    Vdovushkln went on with his writing. He was, indeed, doing some work "on the side," but it was something beyond Shukhov's understanding. He was making a fair copy of a long new poem that he'd finished the previous evening and had promised to show that day to Stepan Grigorych, the doctor who advocated work therapy.

    As can happen only in camps, Stepan Grigorych had advised Vdovushkin to describe himself as a medical assistant, and had taken him on at the infirmary and taught him to make intravenous injections on ignorant prisoners, to whose innocent minds it could never occur that Vdovushkin wasn't a medical assistant at all. Vdovushkin had been a university student of literature, arrested while still in his second year. The doctor wanted him to write when in prison what he'd been given no opportunity to write in freedom.

    The signal for the roll call was barely audible through the double-paned, frost-blurred windows. Shukhov heaved a sigh and stood up. He still had that feverish chill but evidently he wouldn't be able to skip work.

    Vdovushkin reached for the thermometer and read it.

    "H'm, neither one thing nor the other. Ninety-nine point two. If it had been a hundred it would have been clear to anyone. I can't exempt you. Stay behind at your own risk, If you like. The doctor will examine you. If he' considers you're ill, hell exempt you.
    If he finds you fit, he won't. Then you'll be locked up. You'd better go back to work."

    Shukhov said nothing. He didn't even nod. Pulling his hat over his eyes, he walked out.

    How can you expect a man who's warm to understand a man who's cold?

    The cold stung. A murky fog wrapped itself around Shukhov and made him cough painfully. The temperature out there was -17°; Shukhov's temperature was +99°. The fight was on.

    He ran at a jog trot to his barracks. The whole parade ground was deserted, the camp looked empty. It was that brief moment of relaxation when, although everything has been decided, everyone is pretending to himself that there will be no march to work.
    The sentries sit in warm quarters, their sleepy heads propped against their rifles--it's not all milk and honey for them either, lounging on the watchtowers in such cold. The guards at the main gate tossed coal into the stove. The camp guards in their room smoked a last cigarette before searching the barracks. And the prisoners, now clad in all their rags, a rope around their waists, their faces bound from chin to eyes with bits of cloth against the cold, lay on their bunks with their boots on and waited, eyes shut, hearts a quake, for their squad leader to yell: "Out you go."

    The 104th were with the rest in Barracks 7--all except Pavlo, the deputy squad leader, who moved his lips as he totted something up with a pencil, and Alyosha, Shukhov's clean and tidy neighbor, who was reading from a notebook in which he'd copied out half the New Testament. -

    Shukhov ran headlong, but without making any noise, straight to Pavlo's bunk.

    Pavlo looked up.

    "So they didn't put you in the guardhouse, Ivan Denisovich? All right?" he asked with a marked Ukrainian accent, rolling out the name and patronymic in the way West Ukrainians did even in prison.

    Picking up Shukhov's bread ration he handed it to him. A spoonful of granulated sugar lay in a small mound on top of the hunk. Shukhov had no time to spare but he answered properly (the deputy squad leader was also one of the authorities, and even more depended on him than on the camp commandant). And, though he was in a hurry, he sucked the sugar from the bread with his lips, licked it under his tongue as he put his foot on a support to climb up to make his bed,