The Endless Steppe

by Esther Hautzig

  I thought of Great-grandmother Reisa as I peered out through the hole of the cattle car.

  I was exhausted and numb, but I was glued to that hole. Before long, I would get to hate the tormenting slowness of this train, but now it provided me with a ribbon-like souvenir of my childhood, the scenes around Vilna – a last glimpse of Castle Hill, the woods where we picnicked, the Wilja where the willows really seemed to weep today, past the small towns, the small farms, the summer homes. The summer homes? In a minute, ours would appear. I strained my eyes to the point where I almost couldn’t see. There was the bend in the Wilja, there was the oak that was home free when we played tag, and there was the roof of our simple country house. I watched it disappear and then I buried my face in my hands.

  The people in the car began to weep. And on the bunk below, I heard Grandmother begin to weep again and my father try to comfort her. My mother lay next to me like a figure on a sarcophagus, her hands under her head, her eyes tightly shut. Drained of colour, her face – strong and beautiful – was more Spanish than ever, more like her grandmother Reisa’s. I watched her and knew that she would not weep, not Mother. She did not and I did not. But the strain of not weeping, the sound of other people weeping, and the movement of the train put me to sleep. Sleeping would become a way of life; in the next few weeks it would replace life.

  I slept from the middle of that June day into the night, and I didn’t wake up until early the next morning. When I awakened, I saw my mother sitting in the corner of the bunk staring at nothing. I asked her where we were and whether we had stopped any place during the night. She didn’t know where we were and she couldn’t remember what went on during the night. What difference did it make? But I needed reassurance and I climbed down to my father. He looked thoroughly exhausted; my grandmother was leaning against him as if she had spent the night in that position. Yesterday, in the midst of the terror, this frail little bird had left her house dressed as if she were off to lunch: she wore her customary silk, this time a delicate little print, and she had tilted over an eye one of her many tiny Garbo slouch hats, this one a soft black straw. She had not forgotten her gloves, white ones. During the night she had aged dreadfully. Her dress was crumpled and her gloves were streaked with dirt. She started to whimper weakly when she saw me, but she had no more tears in her. I didn’t want to see her this way and I turned my head. This was the time of day, morning, when my stylish little grandmother would have been making her daily rounds in the family house. Wearing her hat and gloves, presumably she came to say good morning; more likely it was to see what the cooks were doing in the kitchens. As I said before, Grandmother Anna ruled rather majestically. But she had been gay and no one had minded.

  Father assured me that he would try to find out where we were at the next stop, and he managed to smile at me. Father knew children; he knew they needed to know where they were. How else would they know where they were going? Even in a sealed cattle car, they needed this information. Even? Particularly in a sealed cattle car.

  His smile helped; I turned my attention to familiar everyday needs. I needed to use a toilet. I also wanted to get out of my rumpled clothes, to wash my face and brush my teeth.

  My mother might not know – or care – where we were, but she would surely know where the toilet was. I climbed back up to her. To my astonishment, she whispered that there was no toilet, that she would explain everything to me later. Later? I was horrified. Later could be too late.

  ‘Hush! I’ll comb your braids for you.’

  An inadequate substitute for a toilet, I thought.

  After Mother had combed my hair, she said: ‘Perhaps we will get some soap and water later on. In the meantime, you may freshen yourself with some perfume.’

  She handed me the little crystal and silver perfume vial that she always carried in her handbag. I dabbed at my ears and temples and wrists as I had seen her do. How grown-up I would have felt to have been allowed to use perfume at home! In a second, mingling with the stench and heat of this cattle car was the famous and seductive scent of Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleu. The irony of its name escaped me then.

  I felt better and, although my need for a toilet was becoming more urgent, I realized that I was frightfully hungry too. I had not eaten for more than twenty-four hours and my stomach was rumbling noisily.

  In the bunks opposite us, the peasants were eating. They had brought huge slabs of cheese and boiled ham in their shawls.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I whispered.

  My mother hushed me again and told me that we would get some food when the train stopped. Hearing this exchange, one of the women offered me a piece of ham and some cheese. My hand reached out, but to my distress my mother shook her head. ‘No, thank you,’ I was forced to say. ‘I’m not really hungry now.’ The woman seemed offended and I hastened to assure her that I appreciated her kindness – which I did indeed, much more than my mother’s sensibility. The woman shrugged her shoulders and continued eating, smacking her lips and wiping them on her sleeve.

  In what was to be the perpetual twilight of this car, I could see that all the peasants were eating. I looked to see if there were any other children, but the youngest among them were in their late teens. There was no more weeping, but no one was talking either. The only sounds were the smacking of lips, the creaking of the boards, the squealing of the wheels on the rails, and the chugging of the engine. Someone sneezed and never did a sneeze sound more human.

  Although it was early morning, the car was hot and the air had become still more foetid, impossible as that seemed. Forty human beings – many of them not recently bathed – were not improving the animal smells. The heat and the stink would become worse and worse.

  At last the train stopped. My heart beat violently. Were we there? Were we going to be let out of this inferno?

  The bolt was pushed back and the door slid open. Fresh air. Forty pairs of lungs sucked it in. I started to move from the bunk; the objective was the open door. But a soldier hopped on and the door was closed behind him. He carried a pail of water and a ladle. He told us that this water was for drinking and for rinsing our faces. He pointed to a V-shaped opening opposite the door. That was where we were to wash and that opening was our toilet. Our toilet? No wonder my poor mother had resisted suffering this most animal-like indignity. The soldier told us that we were to get some food. He opened the door and jumped down on to a muddy platform. We had stopped at a tiny rural station.

  Once again the door was closed and bolted.

  So we were not to be released. Soon I would give up all expectation of this ever happening.

  However, freedom was an abstraction; food was real and I became ravenous. When it arrived, it was nauseating. The soldier had returned with a rusty pail of soup; behind him another soldier carried wooden bowls and spoons. The steamy smell of cabbage soup was overpowering. I didn’t dare refuse, but as soon as the soldier’s back was turned, I put my bowl of soup down beside me, pinched my nose together, and turned to the window. Mother coaxed me to eat it; there would be no food for many hours, she warned, but nothing could make me eat that orange liquid where shrivelled bits of tomato, carrots, and cabbage floated like refuse.

  Now I concentrated on not vomiting. I lay down and turned my back. I heard my father ask the soldier where we were, but I no longer cared. Mother ate her soup and handed my uneaten portion to Father with the suggestion that either he or Grandmother should eat it. ‘We had better let her be,’ she said.

  A wise decision, I thought, still fighting my nausea. And not an easy one for Mother to make. Mother, along with the rest of our family, took a child’s refusal to eat hard.

  Mother leaned over and whispered that I could now go to the toilet. Why did she bother to whisper that piece of public information? I was not yet used to whispering as a way of life. My father, she said, had managed to fashion a flimsy screen out of one of the precious sheets we had brought with us. The nausea had submerged all other sensations and I had quite forgotten
about the toilet. But I went.

  That adventure over, I went back to the bunk and fell asleep, holding my nose to close out the smell of cabbage.

  And so we were on our journey – its route and its destination unknown. In the sinister twilight of that car, time too became an abstraction, but one the grown-ups clung to as if it were all that remained of sanity; they even squabbled over it. ‘Today must be the Sabbath. Isn’t that so?’ my grandmother would ask. My mother would disagree, which would upset my grandmother; my father would try to make peace. Everyone would remain uneasy. Was it or wasn’t it the Sabbath? No one could tell for sure. Day was grey and night was black, but which day? which night?

  Once a day, the soldiers brought the pail of soup and the pail of water; one wondered why they had gone to the trouble of adulterating water in order to call it soup, but even I began to accept it as something to eat some of the time. At other times, it was possible to buy fresh farm cheese and black bread at a rural station. Only barely possible: the prices were outrageously high and some gymnastics were involved. Mother or Father would poke a head through the hole, shout down to the shabbily dressed peasants who were running up and down the platform with their produce, and begin to bargain noisily and with desperate haste. Once the price was set, they threw the money down, and then the job of handing the food up began. Usually, a child standing on a peasant’s shoulders delivered the food to my parents’ straining arms. Sometimes even a jug of milk made this wobbly trip. The money was never thrown down without the food’s being sent up. The peasants of Poland and Russia may have been tough bargainers, but they were honest.

  We slept; endlessly, the people in that cattle car slept. There was very little conversation – a word about the rain pouring through the four holes or a heatwave that would bring us close to suffocation, an occasional sardonic ‘good morning’. We kept our fears to ourselves. What had become of Grandfather Solomon? Where was my beloved cousin Musik? My beloved Miss Rachel? At night sometimes when I looked through the hole, I saw the moon. When I was younger I had thought the moon was God. A rather too good child, I nevertheless used to make a list of my wrong-doings – an angry word to my mother, a fib to a playmate – and recite them to God when He appeared as the moon, and ask for His forgiveness. Now, when I saw the moon, I could only ask: What have I done wrong?

  The soldiers refused to answer any questions: Where are we? Where are we going? How much longer are we to be kept sealed up? We stopped asking them. But, from the accents of the peasants who sold us their produce, and the place names on the stations, Father was able to give us some notion of our general location. We were travelling through Byelorussia, the Ukraine, central Russia, chugging along about ten or twelve miles an hour, and sometimes staying for hours at a siding, perhaps to let another train go by, sometimes for no apparent reason at all unless it was to prolong our misery.

  One day in the third or fourth week of this journey, Father, who had been looking through the hole, called to me to come quickly. I scrambled up beside him and he moved away so I could look out. We were approaching a ridge of mountains. To me, viewing it from a cattle car, the snow-covered peaks, the untouched pine forests were so painfully beautiful I almost wept. Father said with wonder, that these must be the Urals, and that once we passed them we would be in Asia. Asia! I gasped. Asia! Well then, soon I would be seeing women in colourful costumes, bearded men in turbans, and the air would be heavy with the smell of spices. One still dreamed – in vain.

  On the other side of the Urals, in Asia, the people at the stations were even shabbier than before, and the soup still smelled of cabbage, not spices. The scenery along the tracks was wilder and more desolate and our stops were less frequent. The daily ration of soup and water was served more irregularly, and it became more difficult and much more expensive to buy bread and milk. On the rare occasions when food was offered at a station, I watched Mother dole out her money with an anxiety that made me pretend I wasn’t hungry. I could see that the money was already running out.

  I had developed a fever – very likely I wasn’t the only one who had – and between that, the heat, the stench and the lice, my body itched incessantly. My braids had become dirty and lifeless. Going to the toilet and changing one’s clothes – rotating the few unlaundered clothes one had – were major undertakings. The thought of a bath, a hair wash, and fresh clothes became an obsession.

  When I wasn’t sleeping feverishly, I would spend the days looking disconsolately through the hole and praying for this train to stop. Who cared what was at the end of this journey? Just let it end. I felt perpetually hungry, and with the hunger there was chronic fatigue. When the train stops moving and we get out, I’ll feel much better, I would assure myself.

  One day, after we had stopped at a town where the unpainted wooden station was a little larger, where the gingerbread under the eaves was more elaborate, where the water tower was more imposing, the soldier who usually brought us our food in total silence could not restrain himself: he whispered to Father that the Germans had invaded Russia on a huge front. Now Russia was at war too, along with the British! What, Mother wanted to know, did this mean for us, the captives of the Russians? My father shrugged: who knew?

  The soldier went back to his silent ways and we heard no more about the war.

  We had been travelling six weeks by my father’s count when the train stopped. We were used to long waits and no one thought anything of it. The train would move again; it always had. I heard some commotion and for some reason I thought that perhaps we had developed engine trouble, which would only prolong the journey.

  I sat up to look out and, to my amazement, I saw that at this little railway station there was a crowd milling around the train’s first cars. Our end was deserted, except for a few soldiers here and there.

  Then I saw the doors of the cars being opened, one by one, and people leaping out of them. I still couldn’t believe that we, in this car, would be released. I couldn’t believe it. But at last our door was opened too.

  No soup and water this time. Instead, a soldier read from a document that sounded very much like the one I had heard – was it centuries ago? – in Vilna.

  We had reached our destination. We were now in Rubtsovsk in the Altai Territory of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic of the great and mighty Soviet Union.

  There were no cheers in that car. Forty people gathered their belongings together, silently, in a near frenzy, as if there were some danger that the door would close again and leave them behind in that car.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The train had stopped moving, but not the earth; the muddy platform rocked under my feet. I had expected to be elated; instead I was numb. Like a little old woman – which, in some ways, I had become – I ached from head to toe and, crouching, as if it were a position my body had grown into, I sat down on my suitcase.

  After the weeks of twilight, daylight was too much – too strong, too strange.

  Around me, I felt more than I saw the presence of hundreds of people, a lumpish mass, all numb like me.

  Suddenly, there was a voice shouting at us. It must have come from a primitive loudspeaker and I strained to catch the indistinct words: we were to pick up our bundles; we were to march four abreast behind the soldiers into the village.

  What village? Where was it?

  I began to take notice. For weeks, the question had been where were we going? Now we were there. But where was there? This rural station was just like all the others we had passed on this side of the Urals – a small wooden building on a muddy platform, gingerbread carved under all the eaves.

  And beyond. Beyond was eternity. Flat, desolate, treeless world without end.

  ‘Tata!’

  ‘Lalinka.’

  My father held my hand for a second and then we fell into place, the four of us in one row.

  Hundreds of us trudged down a narrow, dusty road towards a barely visible cluster of buildings. Presumably, way off there on the horizon wa
s the village. Without a single tree to stop it, the July sun was like a torch on our heads. Surely every last one of us must have dreamed of the moment when we would once again breathe some fresh air. But this air, for all its vastness, was more hot than fresh.

  When the first old woman fainted, there was a murmur of fear from the marching people. Had the woman fainted or had she dropped dead? She had fainted and, whether she wished it or not, she was revived and continued to march. I looked apprehensively at Grandmother: her silk dress was stained with sweat, but the ridiculous little hat on her dirty grey hair was like a tattered banner, our personal standard, the symbol that we still stood together as a family. This tiny figure would survive this march: I willed her to do so. She did – without any help from me, having quite enough will of her own. But at least a dozen old women, and old men too, dropped on to the road, sending up little clouds of dust as they did so.

  Trudging this road that was like a hairline cut into a barren, greyish field of incredible size, I felt myself to be too little for anything so enormous. Once in a while, we would see a very small, single-roomed hut at the side of the road. These huts were square and made of mud and cow dung, as I was to learn from personal experience. Sometimes a shabbily dressed, barefoot woman of unknown age would stare at us curiously; sometimes she would be joined by rather solemn-faced children; but neither the women nor the children ever raised a hand in greeting.

  After we had marched about a mile in the broiling sun, the huts were closer together, and now we could see one or two log cabins with whitewashed stoops.

  In 1941, Rubtsovsk was nothing more than a village, all gazetteers to the contrary. That this speck in the middle of nowhere became a town of some industrial importance within some twenty years is a tribute to the people who made it possible, certainly not least among them were the hundreds who came there on that July day. They would make their contribution, indeed they would.