A Day Off
Two squirrels the color of the sky but with black faces and tails were totally absorbed by something going on beyond the silver larch trees. I walked nearly up to their tree before they noticed me. Their claws scratched at the bark, and their blue shadows scampered upward. Somewhere high above they fell silent, fragments of bark stopped falling on the snow, and I saw what they had been watching.
A man was praying in the forest clearing. His cloth hat lay at his feet, and the frost had already whitened his close-cropped head. There was an extraordinary expression on his face – the kind people have when they recollect something extremely precious, such as childhood. The man crossed himself with quick, broad gestures as if using his fingers to pull his head down. His expression so altered his features that I did not immediately recognize him. It was the convict Zamiatin, a priest who lived in the same barracks as I.
He had not yet seen me, and his lips, numb from the cold, were quietly and solemnly pronouncing the words that I had learned as a child. Zamiatin was saying mass in the silver forest.
Slowly he crossed himself, straightened up, and saw me. Solemnity and tranquility disappeared from his face, and the accustomed wrinkles returning to his forehead drew his eyebrows together. Zamiatin did not like mockery. He picked up his hat, shook it, and put it on.
‘You were saying the liturgy,’ I said.
‘No, no,’ Zamiatin said, smiling at my ignorance. ‘How could I say mass? I don’t have bread and wine or my stole. This is just a regulation-issue towel.’
He shifted the dirty ‘waffled’ rag that hung around his neck and really did create the impression of a priest’s stole. The cold had covered the towel with snowy crystals which glimmered joyously in the sun like the embroidery on a church vestment.
‘Besides, I’m ashamed. I don’t know which way is east. The sun rises for two hours and sets behind the same mountain where it rose in the morning. Where is the east?’
‘Is it all that important to know where the east is?’
‘No, of course not. Don’t leave. I tell you, I’m not saying mass, and I can’t say one. I’m simply repeating, remembering the Sunday service. I don’t even know if today is Sunday.’
‘It’s Thursday,’ I said. ‘The overseer said so this morning.’
‘There, you see? No, there is no way I can say mass. It’s just that it’s easier for me this way. And I forget I’m hungry.’ Zamiatin smiled.
I know that everyone has something that is most precious to him, the last thing that he has left, and it is that something which helps him to live, to hang on to the life of which we were being so insistently and stubbornly deprived. If for Zamiatin this was the liturgy of John the Baptist, then my last thing was verse – everything else had long since been forgotten, cast aside, driven from memory. Only poetry had not been crushed by exhaustion, frost, hunger, and endless humiliations.
The sun set and the sudden darkness of an early winter evening had already filled the space between the trees. I wandered off to our barracks – a long, low hut with small windows. It looked something like a miniature stable. I had already seized the heavy, icy door with both hands when I heard a rustle in the neighboring hut, which served as a tool-shed with saws, shovels, axes, crowbars, and picks. It was supposed to be locked on days off, but on that day the lock was missing. I stepped over the threshold of the tool-shed, and the heavy door almost crushed me. There were so many cracks in the walls that my eyes quickly became accustomed to the semi-darkness.
Two professional criminals were scratching a four-month-old German shepherd pup. The puppy lay on its back, squealing and waving its four paws in the air. The older man was holding it by the collar. Since we were from the same work gang, my arrival caused no consternation.
‘It’s you. Is there anyone else out there?’
‘No one,’ I answered.
‘All right, let’s get on with it,’ the older man said.
‘Let me warm up a little first,’ the younger man answered.
‘Look at him struggle.’ He felt the puppy’s warm side near the heart and tickled him.
The puppy squealed confidently and licked his hand.
‘So you like to lick… Well, you won’t be doing much of that any more. Semyon…’
Holding the pup by the collar with his left hand, Semyon pulled a hatchet from behind his back and struck the puppy on the head with a short quick swing. The puppy jerked, and blood spilled out on to the icy floor of the shed.
‘Hold him tight,’ Semyon shouted, raising the hatchet again.
‘What for? He’s not a rooster,’ the young man said.
‘Skin him while he’s still warm,’ Semyon said in the tone of a mentor. ‘And bury the hide in the snow.’
That evening no one in the barracks could sleep because of the smell of meat soup. The criminals would have eaten it all, but there weren’t enough of them in our barracks to eat an entire pup. There was still meat left in the pot.
Semyon crooked his finger in my direction.
‘Take it.’
‘I don’t want to,’ I said.
‘All right,’ Semyon said, and his eyes ran quickly over the rows of bunks. ‘In that case, we’ll give it to the preacher. Hey, Father! Have some mutton. Just wash out the pot when you’re done…’
Zamiatin came out of the darkness into the yellow light of the smoking kerosene lantern, took the pot, and disappeared. Five minutes later he returned with a washed pot.
‘So quick?’ Semyon asked with interest. ‘You gobbled things down quick as a seagull. That wasn’t mutton, preacher, but dog meat. Remember the dog “North” that used to visit you all the time?’
Zamiatin stared wordlessly at Semyon, turned around, and walked out. I followed him. Zamiatin was standing in the snow, just beyond the doors. He was vomiting. In the light of the moon his face seemed leaden. Sticky spittle was hanging from his blue lips. Zamiatin wiped his mouth with his sleeve and glared at me angrily.
‘They’re rotten,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ Zamiatin replied. ‘But the meat was delicious – no worse than mutton.’