I asked him, Why are you crying?

These were the first words I had addressed to him in ten or eleven months. By this time (January, 1953), Lev’s status in camp was on a par with the shiteaters – or lower still, for a while, because the shiteaters were merely pitied and then ignored, and Lev was ostracised. There were people who had a bit more respect for him now. Something to do with his size and shape – the little bent figure, the sloping shoulders under the crumpled face, and always alone, aloof, against. Chinless, of course, but the whole set of him as defiant as a barrel-jawed dwarf in a city street. He wouldn’t cross a picket line or walk away from a sit-down or anything like that. The offence he was giving was moral and passive and silent. He wouldn’t partake of the ambient esprit. He just wouldn’t come to the well. Lev, now, was twenty-four.