One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [antikvár]

At 5.00 a.m., as usual, reveille was sounded - a hammer banged against a rail just by the staff barracks. The iníermittent ringing came faintly through the windowpanes, two fingers thick with frost, and died away rapidly: it was cold, and the warder did not want to go on hanging for long. The nőise stopped, and outside the window it was pitch dark when Shukhov got up to go to the latrines; it was as dark as night. Then the yellow light from three lamps - two on the perimeter; one 'inside the camp - feli on the window. For somé reason nobody had come to open up the barracks; and there was no sound of the orderlies lifting up a latrina barrel onto poles in order to carry it > away. Shukhov never overslept reveille, but always got up at once - which gave him, until parade, about ninety minutes to himself, unordained, and anyone who knew camp life could always eam himself something - by sewing someone a cover for his mittens out of a piece of old linkig; by fetching somé affluent gang-leader his dry felt boots - right up to his bunk so that the fellow would not have to stumble about barefoot around the pile looking for his own; or by going around to the store-rooms where someone might be able to use Mm, sweeping or carrying something; by going to the messhall to pick up the bowls from the tables and take them in piles to the dish-washer - there was always a chance of getting something to eat, although there were too many others with the same idea - and, what's worse, if you found something left in a bowl, you couldn't resist starting to lick it out. And Shukhov had never forgottén the words of his first gang-leader, Kuzyomin - an old lag who had already been inside for twelve 7