For four years the board had lain beneath a floorboard in his barracks, in damp and darkness, among the cockroaches and the mouse nests. Sometimes, in rare minutes of relative quiet, he would take it out, touch something up, lay on a new coat of ground stone mixed with water and with his own blood from his cracked, forever festering hands. His style was a pitiful, powerless attempt at Rublev in hell. He tried intuitively, blindly, to find harmony in the lines, light in the patches of color, but what came out was only a mute, misshapen scream frozen in matter, repellent and honest in its absolute disharmony.
One night, during a sudden search led by Groshev in person (now chief of construction at Site No. 5), the board was found. The guard, a dull-witted hulking brute, pulled it out from under the bunk, looked it over with stupid, squeamish contempt, as at some strange and incomprehensible piece of rubbish, and handed it to his chief.
Groshev took the board. He looked at it as at a malfunction in the system. A violation of the regulations on the storage of personal effects. An unaccounted-for resource (one board) and a non-designated use of working time and materials.
“What is this?” he asked Andrei in a level, official tone, empty of all interest. Andrei said nothing, staring at the dirty floor, at Groshev’s boots.
“I am asking: what is this? Specifically.”
“An attempt,” Andrei forced out hoarsely, his voice creaking like a rusty spring.
“An attempt at what?”
“To understand,” Andrei said, quieter still, almost in a whisper.
The chapter goes on in the book.