The Matiushin Case by Andrew Bromfield, Oleg Pavlov Page A

and the lining was as good as new – he managed to find a piece of this non-transparent oil-cloth somewhere. He says that in minus forty Celsius they were forbidden to use the earflaps on their caps: supposedly that wasn’t cold enough for them to tie their caps shut. And that, says the Uzbek, means you’ll freeze your ears, they’ll suppurate and stick to your head. Oh, so cold, oh, so cold! The most terrible thing, he says, is what the winter does. He cut a little pair of wings out of his greatcoat where no one would notice, and sewed them to his cap on the inside, so that he could pull them down when he needed to and warm at least the tips of his ears, and no one spotted them. He says that when he was on mess detail, he was so hungry he used to grab food straight out of the boiling cauldron with his hand. If the cook’s attention wandered, he dipped into the cauldron, grabbed something, stuffed it in his mouth quickly and swallowed it, hid it in his stomach. Waited. Grabbed. Stuffed. Swallowed. The important thing was not to be afraid of swallowing a boiling-hot piece, because if you burped it up or took too long, the cook would look round, and then all the cooks would fling themselves on you and beat you to death with their ladles.
    That was the way he wanted to live, the way that he lived, Matiushin repeated over and over to himself, unable to understand: live so that no one notices you’re alive? But the Uzbek carried on talking. Even if someone asks you to bring them a mug of water, refuse, don’t do people any kindnesses. If someone falls, don’t help him up, let him lie there, that way they’ll bother you less. Think about how not to fall, not about how to interfere and be better than others. If you eat bread, think that you’re eating shit, and if you eat shit, think that you’re eating bread. Do the work you’re told to do with a good will, be patient, but don’t let them force you to do that work. Matiushin heard more and more fuzzily: don’t have a lot of things, spend all your money as soon as you get your hands on it, give it all away, so no one can take anything from you by force or make you give it away. Respect the strong, acknowledge them, let yourself be beaten. If you don’t respect them, they’ll make you wish you were dead, or kill you. You have to live, think about nothing but living day and night.
    Even though it seemed to Matiushin that in listening to the Uzbek, he had penetrated a secret that no one else in this carriage knew, all this still remained alien and unnecessary to him. He felt sorry for the Uzbek, but all he could do was say nothing, calm in the knowledge that everything would be different for him, the way he wanted it to be: it couldn’t be any other way.
    The vestibule and the berth emptied – lots of people were sleeping now. Those who weren’t asleep kept on waiting and waiting for something, although there’d been no point in waiting for ages already, no one had any inner strength left. That night the train crossed a multitude of bridges, trundling over rivers. Almost every hour there was that heart-stopping, airy rumble, as if they weren’t riding but flying high up into the sky.
    The next twenty-four hours of the journey were over strange land – across the steppe. After the wild, drunken night, the bewildered men in the carriage gazed out of the windows, not recognising this land. Grey bushes and clay hills, clay hills and grey bushes. The captain said nothing about when they would arrive and where, as if he were keeping an important secret. They guessed in riddles:
    â€˜We’ll get there when we need to … Wherever we’re going, that’s where we’ll get to …’
    Those who had saved some money started hanging on to it, and the implacable heat started driving everyone crazy. Men dropped on the spot without warning. The others poured water on them and they revived.