Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov Page B

doing more. Ivan Ivanovich measured the distance from the tip of his thumb to the tip of his middle finger five times along a ten-year-old pine to make a one-meter measuring-stick.
    In the evening the foreman came to measure our work with his notched staff and shook his head. We had accomplished 10 percent of the norm!
    Ivan Ivanovich tried to make his point and justify our measurements, but the foreman was unyielding. He muttered something about ‘cubic meters’ and ‘density’. And although we were not familiar with the technical methods of measuring wood production, one thing was clear. We would be returned to the camp zone where we would again pass through the gates with their inscription: ‘Work is honorable, glorious, valiant, and heroic.’
    In the camp we learned to hate physical labor and work in general.
    But we were not afraid. More than that: the foreman’s assessment of our work and physical capacity as hopeless and worthless brought us a feeling of unheard-of relief and was not at all frightening.
    We realized we were at the end of our rope, and we simply let matters take their course. Nothing bothered us any more, and we breathed freely in the fist of another man’s will. We didn’t even concern ourselves with staying alive, and ate and slept on the same schedule as in camp. Our spiritual calm, achieved by a dulling of the senses, was reminiscent of the ‘dungeon’s supreme freedom’ and Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil. Our spiritual calm was always guarded by our subordination to another’s will.
    We had long since given up planning our lives more than a day in advance.
    The foreman left and we remained to cut a road through the forest and erect new log stacks, but now we did so with greater peace of mind and indifference. We stopped quarrelling over who would take the heavy end when we stacked logs.
    We rested more and paid more attention to the sun, the forest, and the pale-blue tall sky. We loafed.
    In the morning Savelev and I somehow felled an enormous black pine that had miraculously survived both storm and forest fire. We tossed the saw into the grass. It rang out, striking a stone, and we sat down on the trunk of the fallen tree.
    ‘Just imagine,’ said Savelev. ‘We’ll survive, leave for the mainland, and quickly become sick old men. We’ll have heart pains and rheumatism, and all the sleepless nights, the hunger, and long hard work of our youth will leave their mark on us even if we remain alive. We’ll be sick without knowing why, groan and drag ourselves from one dispensary to another. This unbearable work will leave us with wounds that can’t be healed, and all our later years will lead to lives of physical and psychological pain. And that pain will be endless and assume many different forms. But even among those terrible future days there will be good ones when we’ll be almost healthy and we won’t think about our sufferings. And the number of those days will be exactly equal to the number of days each of us has been able to loaf in camp.’
    ‘But how about honest work?’ I asked.
    ‘The only ones who call for honest work are the bastards who beat and maim us, eat our food, and force us living skeletons to work to our very deaths. It’s profitable for them, but they believe in “honest work” even less than we do.’
    In the evening we sat around our precious stove, and Fedya Shapov listened attentively to Savelev’s hoarse voice:
    ‘Well, he refused to work. They made up a report, said he was dressed appropriately for the season…’
    ‘What does that mean – “appropriately for the season”?’ asked Fedya.
    ‘Well, they can’t list every piece of summer or winter clothing you have on. If it’s in the winter, they can’t write that you were sent to work without a coat or mittens. How often did you stay in camp because there were no mittens?’
    ‘Never,’ Fedya said timidly. ‘The boss made us stamp down the snow on the road. Or else they would have