During the night Abarchuk had a fit of despair. Not just the usual sullen despair of the camps, but something fierce and burning like malaria, something that made him scream out loud, fall off the bedboards and beat his fists against his skull.

In the morning, when the prisoners were reluctantly but hurriedly getting ready for work, Abarchuk's long-legged neighbour, Nyeumo-limov, a gas foreman who had commanded a cavalry brigade during the Civil War, asked: 'What were you tossing about like that for during the night? Did you dream of a woman?'

'Don't you ever think of anything else?'

'I thought you were crying in your sleep. I wanted to wake you up,' said Monidze, another of Abarchuk's neighbours, who had once been on the Presidium of the Communist Youth International.

Another friend of Abarchuk's, Abrasha Rubin, a medical orderly, hadn't noticed anything. All he said, as they went outside into the dark and frost, was: 'Guess what? I dreamed Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin had come to visit us at the Institute of Red Professors. He was very bright and lively. Yenchman's theory created a tremendous stir.'

Abarchuk worked in the tool store. While his assistant, Barkhatov, a man who had once knifed a family of six during a robbery, was lighting the stove and stoking it with left-over cedar-logs, Abarchuk went through the tools in the drawers. The biting sharpness of the files and chisels, impregnated with the icy cold, seemed to embody the way he had felt during the night.

This day was exactly the same as every day that had gone before. The accountant had sent Abarchuk the requests from the distant sub-camps, already approved by the technical department. Now he had to get out the right tools and materials, pack them into boxes and draw up the accompanying documents. Some of the packages were incomplete; this necessitated the drawing up of special documents.

Barkhatov, as always, did nothing, and it was impossible to make him do anything. From the moment he arrived at the store, he concerned himself only with matters of nutrition; today he was boiling a small pot of cabbage and potato soup. A professor of Latin from the Kharkov Pharmaceutical Institute, now a messenger in the first section, rushed in for a moment to see him; with trembling red fingers he poured some dirty grains of millet onto the table. Barkhatov was evidently blackmailing him.

That afternoon Abarchuk was called to the accounts department; apparently his figures didn't tally. The deputy director shouted at him and threatened to report him to the director. Abarchuk felt sick. It was impossible for him to cope with the work by himself and he didn't dare complain about Barkhatov. He was tired, afraid of losing his job in the store, afraid of having to go out logging or being sent down the mines. His hair had already turned grey, he didn't have much strength left. Yes, that must be the reason for the despair he had felt during the night – his life had vanished beneath the ice of Siberia.

When he came back from the accounts department, he found Barkhatov asleep. His head was pillowed on a pair of felt boots he must have been given by one of the criminals. Beside it stood the empty cooking-pot; some of the millet was sticking to his cheek.

Abarchuk knew that Barkhatov sometimes stole tools from the store. He might, in fact, have bartered some for this very pair of felt boots. Once, Abarchuk had found three planes missing and had confronted his assistant.

'Stealing scarce metal during the War for the Fatherland! You should be ashamed of yourself!'

'Shut your mouth!' Barkhatov had retorted. 'Or else…'

Abarchuk did not dare wake Barkhatov directly; instead he coughed, banged the saws about and dropped a hammer on the floor. Barkhatov woke up. He gave Abarchuk a look of cool displeasure. After a while, he said very quietly: 'Someone from yesterday's transport told me that there are worse camps than these ones here in the lakes. The prisoners wear fetters and have their heads shaved. Surnames aren't used at all: they just have numbers sewn on their chest and their knees, and an ace of diamonds on their back.'

'Nonsense,' said Abarchuk.

'That's where you Fascist politicals should be sent,' Barkhatov continued thoughtfully. 'You first of all, you swine – so you can't wake me up.'

'Forgive me, citizen Barkhatov, for having disturbed your rest.' Although he was very frightened of Barkhatov, sometimes Abarchuk was unable to control his anger.

At the end of the shift, Nyeumolimov came in, black with coal-dust.

'Well,' asked Abarchuk, 'how's the work going? Are people entering into the spirit of competition?'

'Little by little. The coal's a military necessity – at least everyone understands that. Today the Culture and Education Section received some posters: "Let us help the Motherland with our shock labour!" '

Abarchuk sighed. 'You know what, someone ought to write a treatise on despair in the camps. There's a despair that crushes you, another that attacks you suddenly, another that stifles you and won't let you breathe. And then there's a special kind that doesn't do any of these things but somehow tears you to pieces from within – like a deep-sea creature brought suddenly up to the surface.'

Nyeumolimov smiled sadly. His rotten teeth were almost the same colour as the coal-dust on his face.

Barkhatov came up to them. Abarchuk looked round and complained: 'You walk so quietly you make me jump. All of a sudden I find you right beside me.'

A man of few smiles, Barkhatov said very seriously: 'You don't mind if I go to the food store?'

He left.

'During the night I remembered the son I had by my first wife,' Abarchuk said to his friend. 'He's probably at the front now.'

He leant towards Nyeumolimov.

'I want the lad to grow up a good Communist. I was thinking to myself that if I met him, I'd say: "Remember, your father's fate doesn't matter. That's just a detail. But the cause of the Party is something holy! Something that conforms in the highest degree to the Law of the Epoch!'"

'Does he have your surname?'

'No,' answered Abarchuk. 'I was afraid he'd grow up to be a bourgeois.'

All through the previous evening and during the night he had thought of Lyudmila. He wanted to see her. He had been looking at pages torn from the Moscow papers, expecting all of a sudden to read: 'Lieutenant Anatoly Abarchuk'. He would know then that his son had wanted to bear his father's surname.

For the first time in his life he wanted someone to feel sorry for him. He imagined himself walking up to his son, gasping, hardly able to breathe, pointing to his throat and saying: 'I can't talk.'

Tolya would embrace him. Abarchuk would put his head on his son's chest and burst out crying, bitterly and unashamedly. They would stand like that for a long time, his son a head taller.

Tolya was probably thinking about him all the time. He would have searched out his old comrades and learned about the part his father had played in the battle for the Revolution. 'Daddy, Daddy,' he would say, 'your hair's turned quite white. How thin and lined your neck looks. You've been struggling all these years. You've been carrying on a great struggle, all on your own.'

For three days during the investigation he had been given salty food without water. He had been beaten… He had realized that it wasn't simply a matter of wanting him to sign confessions of sabotage and espionage or to make accusations against people. Most of all, they wanted him to doubt the justice of the cause to which he had devoted his life. During the investigation itself, he thought he must have fallen into the hands of a bunch of gangsters. He thought that if he could only obtain an interview with the head of the department, he would be able to have his thug of an investigator arrested.