Ivan dreams about the luxurious possibility of being 'Just sick enough," for three weeks, not to have to work. But then he remembers the new prison doctor, whose therapy for any illness is work; clearly, this doctor does not care about the health of the prisoners at all. By the time the young poet-turned-medic tells Ivan that he has a temperature of just under ninety-nine degrees, Ivan is resigned to go to work, commenting that a person who is cold cannot expect any sympathy from a person who is warm.
In this episode, then, we see Ivan on his way to the hospital, considering changing his plan for getting on the sicklist in favor of buying some tobacco from a fellow prisoner. The reader learns that some lucky camp inmates receive packages from home, a fact of prison life which is investigated throughout the novel.
The person from whom Ivan wants to buy the tobacco (and later on, he does) is a Latvian — that is, he comes from one of the small Baltic countries which the Soviet Union annexed after World War II. The camp population is a cross section of the oppressed peoples of contemporary Russia, and most of the ethnic minority groups are represented. In addition to the Latvians, there are also Ukrainians and Estonians, as well as a Moldavian.
