But Artiom was moved from quarantine to the twelfth brigade.
This group was also not one of the easier ones, though the regimen was a little less severe than in the thirteenth. The twelfth also worked general jobs, often slaving away for hours at a time until they met their quota. They had no right to personally complain to those in charge, they could only complain through the group leaders. As for Vasilii Petrovich and his French, Eichmanis had spoken to him first in the forest.
Throughout June, the twelfth was given different jobs — logs, cleaning up garbage in the monastery itself, uprooting trees, scything hay, making bricks or helping out at the railroad. Those from the cities didn’t always know how to cut hay, while others were useless at unloading. Some people ended up in the infirmary, others in solitary. Work assignments were constantly being changed and mixed up.
Up until this point, Artiom had avoided the logs — the heaviest, dreariest and wettest work, but he had had his fill of the stumps. He could never have imagined how firmly, deeply and differently trees held on to the earth.
“If you don’t chop off the roots one by one, but try to pull out the whole stump at once, with incredible strength, then in its endless tails it would pull out a piece of earth as big as the cupola on the Dormition!” Afanasiev said in his picturesque way, either angry or exhilarated.
The quota per person was twenty-five stumps a day.
Competent inmates, specialists and masters were moved to other brigades, where the regimen was less severe. But Artiom couldn’t figure out where he, a student who hadn’t finished school, could be useful, or even what he was really capable of doing well. Anyway, deciding that was half the battle, you still had to be noticed and called out.
After the stumps, the whole body hurt, like it was shattered. In the morning, it felt like you didn’t have enough strength for another work day. Artiom visibly lost weight, began to dream about food, constantly sought the smell of edibles and experienced that smell intensely, but his youth still dragged him on without giving up.
Vasilii Petrovich seemed to have helped, having claimed to be an expert berry picker — well, clearly, he was that — and when he got the berry-picking brigade, he pulled Artiom along with him. But the lunch that they brought into the forest every day was cold and smaller than the allotted ration. Clearly, the convict-deliverymen ate to their heart’s content along the road. The last time, the berry-pickers were forgotten and not fed at all. The deliverymen protested that they had come but couldn’t find the pickers dispersed throughout the forest. Someone complained about the deliverymen and they each got three days of solitary, but Artiom didn’t get any more food.
Today’s dinner was buckwheat. Artiom had eaten it quickly since childhood. But here, having sat down on Vasilii Petrovich’s bunk, he didn’t even notice how the kasha disappeared. He wiped his spoon on the underside of his jacket, then passed it to his elder companion, who was sitting with his bowl on his knees and tactfully looking away.
“Thank you,” said Vasilii Petrovich quietly and firmly, scooping up the sodden, tasteless porridge boiled in snotty water.
“Uh-huh,” answered Artiom.
Having finished the boiling water, drunk from the tin can that he used as a mug, Artiom jumped up to his bed, risking breaking the bunks, took off his shirt, laid it under himself along with his foot wrapping to dry, put his arms in his overcoat, wrapped his head in a scarf and almost immediately fell asleep, only managing to hear how Vasilii Petrovich quietly spoke to the homeless boy, who had the habit of lightly pulling on the pants of those eating during mealtimes:
“I won’t feed you, are we clear? It’s you who stole my spoon, isn’t it?”
Considering that the homeless boy was under the bunks and Vasilii Petrovich was sitting on them, it might have seemed from the side that he was speaking with spirits, threatening them with hunger and looking forward with stern eyes.
Artiom had time to smile at the thought, but the smile slid off his lips when he fell asleep. After all, there was a full hour until the evening roll call, so why waste time?
Someone was fighting in the refectory; someone cursed; someone wept — Artiom didn’t care.
During that hour, he had time to dream about a boiled egg, a simple boiled egg. The yolk glowed from within, as though it were filled with the sun, streaming forth warmth and gentleness. Artiom touched it with his fingers reverently, and his fingers grew hot. He carefully broke apart the egg, it broke into two halves of egg whites, in one of which, shamelessly naked, alluring, almost pulsating, lay the yolk. Even without tasting it, you could tell that it was ineffably, head-spinningly sweet and soft. From somewhere in his dream, he got coarse salt and Artiom salted the egg, distinctly seeing how every salt crystal fell and how the egg yolk became more and more silvery — soft gold in the midst of silver. For some time, Artiom examined the broken egg, unable to decide what to start with — the whites or the yolk. Prayerfully, he bowed to the egg to carefully lick off the salt.
He woke up for a moment, realizing that he was licking his own salty hand.
In the twelfth brigade, you weren’t allowed to leave at night. The latrine was left inside until the morning. Artiom trained himself to get up between three and four in the morning. He walked with his eyes still shut, by memory, scratching off the lice in a sleepy frenzy… at least he didn’t share his business with anyone else.
As he walked back, he could hardly distinguish the people and the bunks.
The homeless boy slept right there on the floor. You could see his dirty foot, “… so, not dead yet…” thought Artiom in passing. Moisei Solomonovich snored in a singsong, multifarious manner. Vasilii Petrovich, Artiom noticed not for the first time, looked completely different while sleeping. He was frightening, even unpleasant, as though someone else, someone unknown, pushed out through the waking man.
As he lay down on the still-warm overcoat, Artiom looked, with half-drunk eyes, over the refectory with its one hundred and fifty sleeping inmates.
“It’s wild!” he thought, screwing up his eyes, afraid and wondering. “Here lies man, doing nothing, and it’s like this… for the greater part… of his life…”
On the other side of the refectory, a match flared. Someone, no longer able to bear it, wanted to squash at least one family of lice in the light. Even at night, the lice constantly crawled along the bars of the bunks, along the walls, falling from somewhere above.
Artiom opened his eyes at that small flare of the match and saw someone from the second group reaching into someone else’s bag. He met the thief’s gaze, screwed up his eye, turned over and forgot it forever.
Immediately, the morning five o’clock bell woke him up, then, after a few seconds, Afanasiev finished the job by yelling:
“Brigade, wake up!”
Today Artiom hated Afanasiev; yesterday a different man was on morning duty, yelling with a guttural voice; then, the hatred was for him.
In a minute, Moisei Solomonovich, barely visible in the repugnant half-murk, was already singing:
“Where are you now? Who kisses the tips of your fingers? Where has your Chinaman Lee gone?”
Artiom squinted at the Chinese man, who slept nearby, but he seemed not to hear the words of the song. He sat on his second level, stroking his neck and face, as though he were finding himself again under his hands, his body and his consciousness.