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The boys crowded around the instructor. “Dzavashvili has a condom,” Matytsyn said. “I saw.” “One?” Fidel asked. “Oh look, a scholar!” Volikov said, getting angry. “This one needs his own private condom! You’ll wait your turn.” “A lowly condom won’t help,” Matytsyn assured them. “I know these floozies. They’ve got as many gonococci down there as dogs. Now, if it were made of stainless steel…”
In normal cases, though, I am sure now that good and evil are arbitrary. The same people can display an equal ability for virtue or villainy.
Man is good! Man is base! Man is to man – a friend, a comrade, a brother… Man is to man a wolf… And so on.
In camp, scrupulously chosen speech means having an advantage on the same order as physical strength. A good storyteller in the logging sector means much more than a good writer in Moscow.
As surprising as it may be, there are very few obscenities in camp speech. A real criminal rarely condescends to use them. He spurns the unhygienic locution of obscenities. He prizes his speech and knows its value. He values quality and not decibels and prefers exactness to profusion. The disgusted “You belong by the piss bucket” is worth more than ten choice swear words. The wrathful “What are you selling yourself for now, bitch?” kills on the spot. The condescending “That’s a real dope, can’t steal and can’t stand guard” discredits someone absolutely.
In camp, people don’t swear on relatives and dear ones. You don’t hear oaths and verbose eastern protestations. Here they say, “I swear by freedom!”
Then I accidentally touched her hand, and for an instant my heart stopped, and I thought with fear of how unaccustomed I had grown to the things which made life worth living, of how much I had lost, of what had been taken from me, of how much happiness had swept by me on those nights full of hatred and fear, when the floorboards crack from the frost and dogs bay in the kennel and you sit in the isolator and listen to Anagi-Zadye clinking his manacles behind the wall and the miserable, frozen, unchanging days drag on outside the window, delaying the mail.
