Marek Huberath - Nest of Worlds

“That was a good kick. You must have broke his pecker, because he doesn’t say anything,” said Bennett.

“Be glad it wasn’t you, because such kicks come in pairs! When one comes, the second follows!” Crooks said through clenched teeth, and Bennett shrank back with fear. Crooks’s foot still hurt, apparently.

“All right, to work,” Crooks said, getting up and reaching for his clogs. He wasn’t sure yet whether he would use his fists or the wooden clogs.

Jaspers gripped the pipe. He wrapped it in a shirt, in order not to kill. For killing you got the rope.

With the agility of a bear, Crooks climbed the little ladder and stood on Jaspers’s bunk. Jaspers was calculating the swing of the gas pipe: a tight arc to crack the giant’s shins.

Exactly at that moment three guards entered the hall with someone in the outfit of a worker.

“Crooks!” shouted one of the guards, spreading his legs and smacking his palm with his stick. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Crooks scrambled down as quickly as he had climbed up and stood at attention, nervously straightening his gray pajamas. Beside him Jaspers also stood, taut as a wire. Before the guards, the two were equal.

“What was this about?” barked the guard.

“We, uh, we…,” Crooks began to stammer. Providing quick answers was not his forte.

“Mister Guard Lasaille, Worker Jaspers begs to report that Older Worker Crooks climbed up on his bunk to look at his damaged hand and give him medical assistance,” Jaspers sang out, and Crooks’s eyes grew rounder and rounder.

“That right, Crooks?” Lasaille gave him a stern look.

“Yes, sir,” said Crooks, finally answering correctly.

“Where is the hall elder?” Lasaille looked around. He was convinced that both men were lying.

“Hall Elder Lee reporting, sir.” The thin, small Lee was buttoning up his pajamas. He could hardly be seen alongside the bearlike Crooks and Jaspers, who was less massive than Crooks but no shorter.

“What happened? Speak, Lee.”

“Worker Jaspers said the truth,” Lee lied without blinking. “Worker Crooks went to give him medical assistance.”

“And why didn’t you? That’s the job of the most senior in the hall.”

“Worker Crooks wishes to develop his medical knowledge, and I am allowing him.”

“All right,” muttered Lasaille, seeing that he had lost. “Return to your bunks.”

When all three were again lying with their blankets pulled up to their chins, per regulations, and with their feet together and their eyes on the ceiling, Lasaille revealed the purpose of this unannounced visit:

“Here is Younger Worker Lepko, your new colleague. Make him feel at home. He’ll have the bunk above Jaspers, which is free.”

The new person always got the bunk at the top, so that more straw would fall on the others and aggravate them.

The guards turned off the main light and left. In the dimness, the new man stood uncertainly and trembled like a leaf. He was crying. In his hands he held a bag with his belongings. His fat belly shook in time to his sobs.

Jaspers noticed that Lepko had been given old slippers that were coming apart and needed sewing.

“They took my career card. How can they do that?” Lepko blubbered. “In Darah I was a bookkeeper, a good one.”

“They do that with everyone,” Jaspers whispered. “Climb up and go to sleep. Tomorrow you’ll start working early.”

The new worker continued to weep, his belly bobbing.

“Did you hear what my colleague said, you little turd?” boomed Crooks. “Get up there! Or I’ll give you such a kick in the ass, you won’t need a ladder!”

That he had called Jaspers a colleague meant that Jaspers had gone up a notch in his opinion, that he wouldn’t torment Jaspers now, until he forgot.

“You would kick an old person? I am almost fifty-two.”

“I guess I’ll have to put the poor bastard to sleep. Otherwise he’ll be boo-hooing all night…” Crooks began his usual preparations for assault. He evidently needed a little exercise.

Fortunately for himself, Lepko finally climbed the wobbly ladder to the bunk that was right under the ceiling.

Jaspers detested the morning exercises, done in the barracks courtyard—or, during the winter, on the cold parquet floor of the unheated gym, stinking of their sweat. Each man brought his mat, woven by himself out of hemp strings, which scratched their backs painfully through the thin cloth of their pajamas.

This early in the morning, the disk of the sun barely showed above the horizon. The thaw was recent, and the ground gave off a damp chill.

They finished their standing exercises, and now Jaspers had to lie on his back and move his legs like an idiot in time to the guard’s commands.

At one, you put your legs together, straightened them, and raised them fifteen centimeters; at two, the legs were lowered; at three, you sat up; at four, you lay back down.

“One, two, three, four…,” the guard counted. “Hm, hm, hm, eight…” The guard was tired of counting.

I too am tired of this, Jaspers thought.

“And!… And… twelve.” Lasaille was in charge of the exercises today.

Jaspers panted from exertion.

“Sixteen… twenty…” Lasaille gave up supplying consecutive numbers. He estimated the intervals instead.

“Twenty-six… thirty-one…”

He’s screwed up, Jaspers thought, and stood.

“What is it, Jaspers?”

“Mister Guard, sir. You made a mistake, sir.”

“What?”

“Twenty-six is not divisible by four, sir. Nor is thirty-one.”

Lasaille said nothing, tapping his palm with his stick.

An ugly gloat appeared on the face of Crooks, faded, and reappeared. He didn’t follow what Jaspers had said, but it was clear that Jaspers had just put his head in a noose. Meanwhile Lepko, red as a beet, gasped like a fish out of water. For him the exercises were a kind of mortal struggle, and this pause allowed his wildly pounding heart to slow down.

“Worker Jaspers,” Lasaille said through his teeth, and Jaspers snapped to attention.

“Yes, sir, Mister Guard,” he shouted.

“You will report, after exercises, to the bureau.”

The evil grin of satisfaction didn’t leave Crooks’s hideous face.

It was late when Jaspers returned from the barracks where the bureau of guards was located. All day long he had been given complicated mathematical tests and logic puzzles to solve. He was tired but happy. A cold March wind blew. Bent over from the cold, he pressed his wrapped treasure to his chest: a real book.

“Here, take this. It’s yours,” Lasaille had said. Jaspers could still hear those words. His promotion to Secretary of the barracks filled him with pride. It also meant that he would get two extra hours of sleep in the morning and have two less hours of work in the evening.

The lights were still on. Crooks was sitting on his bunk and soaking his hand in a pot of water. At the sight of Jaspers, he gave a twisted smile.

“Broke my hand,” he complained. “On a piece of shit, can you believe that?” He took his hand out and examined it with solicitude.

At the sink by the window, Trub stood and held Lepko, who was bent over and splashing water on his face. The water was pink. Lepko’s pajamas were wet, because he had also tried to wash the brown stains off them. He blew a black clot from his nose.