Free One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Page A

would look as if there were three of them, rather close to one another.

    "But when Der notices the felt on the windows he'll guess where it came from,"
    said Shukhov.

    "What's it got to do with us?" asked Kilgas, in surprise. "We'll say it was there before. Were we to pull it down or what?"

    That was true.

    Shukhov's fingers were numb with cold under his worn mittens. He'd lost all sense of touch. But his left boot was holding--that was the main thing. The numbness would go out of his fingers when he started to work.

    They crossed the stretch of virgin snow and reached a sled trail running from the tool store to the power station. Their men must have brought the cement along there.

    The power station stood on a rise at the edge of the site. No one had been near the place for weeks and the approaches to it lay under a smooth blanket of snow; the sled tracks, and the fresh trails that had been left by the deep footsteps of the 104th, stood out boldly. The men were already clearing away the snow from around the building with wooden shovels and making a road for the trucks to drive up on.

    It would have been good if the mechanical lift in the power station had been In order. But the motor had burned out, and no one had bothered to repair it. This meant that everything would have to be carried by hand to the second story--the mortar and the blocks.

    For two months the unfinished structure had stood in the snow like a gray skeleton, just as it had been left. And now the 104th had arrived. What was it that kept their spirits up? Empty bellies, fastened tight with belts of rope! A splitting frost! Not a warm corner, not a spark of fire! But the 104th had arrived--and life had come back to the building.

    Right at the entrance to the machine room the trough for mixing mortar fell apart.
    It was a makeshift affair, and Shukhov hadn't expected it to last the journey in one piece.
    Tiurin swore at his men just for form's sake, for he saw that no one was to blame. At that moment Kilgas and Shukhov turned up with their roll of roofing felt. Tiurin was delighted, and at once worked out a new arrangement: Shukhov was put to fixing the stovepipe, so that a fire could be quickly kindled; Kilgas was to repair the mixing trough, with the two Estonians to help him; and Senka was given an ax to chop long laths with--felt could then be tacked to them, two widths. for each window. Where were the laths to come from? Tiurin looked around. Everybody looked around. There was only one solution: to remove a couple of planks that served as a sort of handrail on the ramp leading up to the second story. You'd have to keep your eyes peeled going up and down; otherwise you'd be over the edge. But where else were the laths to come from?

    Why, you might wonder, should prisoners wear themselves out, working hard, ten years on end, in the camps? You'd think they'd say: No thank you, and that's that. We'll drag ourselves through the day till evening, and then the night is ours But that didn't work. To outsmart you they thought up work squads--but not squads like the ones outside the camps, where every man is paid his separate wage.
    Everything was so arranged in the camp that the prisoners egged one another on. It was like this: either you all got a bit extra or you all croaked. You're loafing, you bastard--do you think I'm willing to go hungry just because of you? Put your guts into it, slob.

    And if a situation like this one turned up there was all the more reason for resisting any temptation to slack. Regardless, you put your back into the work. For unless you could manage to provide yourself with the means of warming up, you and everyone else would give out on the spot.

    Pavlo brought the tools. Now use them. A few lengths of stovepipe, too. True, there were no tinsmith's tools, but there was a little hammer and a light ax. One could manage.

    Shukhov clapped his mittens together, joined up the lengths, and hammered the ends into the joints. He