It is not really necessary to read the first part, but here is a link: topic59473.html
Brief Synopsis of first chapter: A boy gets of the train at a GULAG work camp called the Sevvotslag in Siberia. After typing this one into here, I strongly believe that the first passage is stronger. Oh well.
NOTE: Пошли на хуй -- Pashol Nahui -- Russian swear word, equivalent to **** you.
Заебал, бля -- Zaebal Blya -- Same definition.
I put the swear words into Russian so I could keep my rating down to 12+ I'm considering whether to keep it in Russian or to translate it into English for the actual copy.
That said, this is 12+ for mild language and violence.
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The work began the next day at midmorning. It was the heart of winter in the North so the days were short. To prevent us from freezing over entirely, we were only sent to work in the daylight hours. After we were woken, we were marshaled into the food lines for the cooking pots. At the front of the line, I held out my dented little tin, my arm quivering, and a wide-faced, frowning man spooned watery porridge into it. Fragments of fatty meat floated amongst the soggy grains. Around me, I could see the others inhaling theirs, literally drinking it like one would a glass of water, their emaciated bodies trembling with every swallow.
I took off the thin wool glove on my right hand and picked a piece of the meat out of my tin, holding it between my fingers, the slime of the meat rolling down my index finger. I slipped it in between my lips, and held it in my mouth as we walked out to our assigned quarry, sucking the diminutive slice of fat, absorbing every bit of flavor. The other men had already emptied their tins and put them in their coats, but I held mine in one hand, carrying it to the quarry with me, drawing out every last moment of tasteful pleasure.
We spent hours shoveling into the side of the quarry, filling carts with rocks, pushing the carts and dumping out the rocks in heap towards the entrance of the quarry, and repeating the entire process again. A typical man is not capable of this level of work. And as the result of some unknown, bizarre reasoning, we the sickly, dying men of the North, of whom were only fed two bowls of oats a day, were expected to do more work than the healthy men of the world. The question as to why I was the one who was forced to suffer haunted me every day. The fact was that we were all sent to that place to die. There was no other purpose in our lives than to work ourselves to death.
And each day I did my work as well as I could. I shoveled just as many rocks as all the others in my quarry. Perhaps I even shoveled more, but it did not matter. The focus of my life was not to finish the work, but simply to work. I was determined to make the most of every purpose I was given in life.
With each cartload, when I returned to my spot against the side of the quarry, I took another drink of the gruel. It was cold by that point, but it provided a flicker of hope within my stomach. The sip of the meal was enough to keep me walking. With every step, I could see spots in my vision and my head felt heavy. It was an effort in itself to remain standing. It would have been easier to simply fall over in the snow and rest for a moment. But, deep inside, I knew that if I fell I would never again stand.
Only twenty feet away from me, I heard the clang of a dropped shovel. Glancing over, I saw a boy lying face first in the snow, quivering. His hat lay upon the the ground next to him, revealing a thin patch of graying dark hair on his head. As a guard walked over to him, the boy rolled over and sat up, staring at the guard, his face filled with contempt.
"Pashol nahui," he said, not too loud, but I was capable of hearing him from my position. He repeated the phrase over and over again, the sonorousness of his voice elevated with every repetition. "Pashol nahui! Pashol nahui!" It was his last store of energy, and he chose to spend it throwing insults at the guard.
The guard held his pistol directly at the boys face, his own face twisted and contorted with enmity. Snow started to fall from the clouded, grey skies. The entire quarry was silent, staring at the scene, surprised by the obscenity of the boy's words.
"Zaebol blya." The guard said. His voice was quiet yet it echoed through the quarry, stretching all the way to its perimeters.
Their gazes bore into each other for another minutes or so, elevated above the real world with their mutual abhorrence of each other. The silence of the quarry was unnerving; the usual sound of clanging shovels and falling rocks was entirely absent.
The first shot thundered through the air and the boy fell backwards into the snow, his head a mere pit of dark blood. Then there was another shot and more blood spewed from his corpse. The guard shot two more times before kicking snow on the boys body and motioning at me.
"You! Get this body out of here."
I threw my shovel onto the ground and drank the rest of my meal. It was past midday, so the day was was beginning to become colder. Soon enough, the once-warm porridge would freeze over completely. I walked over to the boy and picked up his hat, sticking it into my coat pocket next to my papers and my tin.
The boy was smaller and lighter than me, but his limp, dead weight was difficult to carry across the snow-covered quarry. His face was completely devastated. All that remained was mangled, bloody meat. It did not look human at all. As I dragged him across the quarry a trail of bright red blood marked my path. Dark, red clumps of his innards were scattered along the trail. That same red blood was once the fuel of his life, but then it became part of the ground where the blood of ten thousand other boys' had already been spilled, in the same ground where those boys were rotting, forgotten under a layer of ice and snow.
There was a pit on the other side of the camp. I dragged the boy all the way to that pit. My heart was beating a hundred times faster than was normal. This sort of labor was infinitely more difficult than any other work I had ever been exposed to. As I looked at the boy's destroyed face, I could not help but imagine that it was my own. I knew that the boy and I would share the same fate, should I fail.
The worst sight of all was the pit itself. Throughout my life I had seen the darkest sights of the world. But this pit, I decided, was the most decrepit part of the entire world. To see the dead, rotting bodies of one's own brothers is not an easy sight to behold. I could see all of their innocent, expressionless faces. They were hardly even human anymore and were covered with an unsympathetic layer of ice and frost. Never again would their cold faces smile, never again would one of those boys stand up to face the world. They had lost their ability to do anything, and most of all to make change in this world.
Back at the quarry, I was gratified for every swing of the shovel, for every cart of rocks, and for every breath I took. Once can choose to complain of the situation they are in. Or one can choose to be thankful that they still remain in any sort of a situation at all, and with that make the most of their own life, however poignant that life is.
