The Endless Steppe

by Esther Hautzig

  My first glimpse of Rubtsovsk was of a frontier village built around a large open square in straight lines, as if the muddy paths were laid out for noughts and crosses. Immediately surrounding the square were the market stalls, open wooden sheds. These were empty that day. Once again the loudspeaker crackled with authority; this time we were ordered to arrange ourselves in family groups in the square and await further instructions. Since families had clung to each other, this was done with dispatch.

  The square was even hotter than the road, the sun being reflected from its cobblestones of all sizes and shapes. I stepped closer to my mother.

  ‘Mama,’ I whispered, ‘doesn’t this remind you of the market in Uncle Tom’s Cabin?’

  She wiped the sweat from her face and tried to smile but couldn’t. ‘Perhaps it does … perhaps …’

  My father did manage a smile, a rueful one. ‘Don’t worry, lalinka, no one is going to buy us. Fortunately, they are short of ready cash …’

  Lalinka. I sighed. I was still Tata’s little darling; the square seemed less horrid and now I needed to go to the toilet. Poor Mama. In the midst of a cataclysm, she also had to contend repeatedly with a child’s bladder – or thirst; I was also thirsty. No, I couldn’t look for a bathroom and water in the market stalls.

  ‘But I’ve got to go …’

  ‘You’ve got to wait. I can’t lose sight of you. Do you want to get lost?’

  To take my mind off toilets – no easy task – I looked at the people around us. Peasants, city people like us, women, men, teenagers and children, a rumpled, dirty, haggard company well acquainted in misery. And unreal. The soldiers standing guard around the square were not real either. We were so quiet, so motionless, that standing there in that strange square, in that vastness, our eyes squinting in the cruel sun, we were like a crowd waiting for a gun to go off. Every once in a while a head would barely nod as eyes met in guarded recognition – was it safe to know each other from the past? – and the motion seemed excessive in the stillness.

  At last there was some movement at one side of the square. The soldiers made way for a group of men, about twenty of them, who marched into the square and separated as they moved into the crowd.

  I watched the one who was coming towards us, and I gripped my father’s hand tighter. He was a mean-looking man, tall and swarthy, with a pockmarked face full of hate.

  ‘You!’ He pointed a long-nailed dirty finger at Father. ‘What do you do? What’s your work?’

  ‘I’m an electrical engineer by training.’

  The man looked as if that was as boring a piece of information as he had ever heard. He asked Mother the same question and when she answered that she had once taught arts and crafts, but that now she was a housewife, he made a derisive noise, as if to say, What are we burdened with this time, a bunch of riffraff?

  ‘And what can you do?’ He leered at me as if I were his last hope.

  ‘Why, she’s nothing but a child,’ Mother said in panic. ‘A child. She goes to school.’

  Finished with his fun, he introduced himself as Popravka and told us that he was from the gypsum mine twelve kilometres outside the village. Before he walked away, he warned us not to dare to move until he came back. As if we would in this barren land where there was literally no place to hide.

  When Popravka returned, he announced that most of us were going to the gypsum mine with him, but that some would go to the collective farm. Farm? I had a picture of a lovely bucolic life with cows and chickens and hayrides. The mine sounded dreadful; one would be imprisoned in the bowels of the earth and one would die.

  ‘What’s gypsum, Tata?’ I whispered.

  But he was listening intently to Popravka as he ticked people off for the mine or farm. Farm, farm, farm, I prayed silently; to play safe, I also kept my fingers crossed.

  ‘Mine!’ Popravka pointed at Father, Mother, and me. ‘Farm!’ He pointed to Grandmother.

  My heart sank. Mine or farm, what did it matter? What mattered was that we be allowed to stay together; all we had in the whole world was each other.

  Grandmother began to plead again as she had at the railway station in Vilna. This time our prayers were heard.

  She was allowed to go with us, but she was warned that the work would be hard and that she would be expected to do her share. She drew herself up to her full four feet eleven inches, and assured him that she had the strength of a dozen young women. She was quietly convincing.

  However, there were others who were not as lucky as we. All around us were families begging to stay together. When this was denied, there would be the all too familiar wail; when the request was granted, an embrace.

  Popravka told us to pick up our suitcases, which, like us, were covered with dust, and to follow him. This was easier said than done; we were burdened with bags and hampers and bundles, and racing after one’s jailer does not come naturally. At the edge of the square, we came upon dozens and dozens of trucks, open trucks, some already filled with people. When we reached ours, my mother became excited: ‘Look who is here,’ she whispered. ‘Look! Mrs Marshak!’

  This time, Mother jumped up on to the truck by herself, and dropping her guard, openly embraced this friend from Vilna. Mrs Marshak, a woman noted for being austere, welcomed the embrace with tears of joy. It soon became clear that she had made the six-week journey in the cattle car without friend or family, except for Boris, her five-year-old boy. Boris, who had lost much of his chubbiness on the journey, had his almond-shaped green eyes fixed on my father. When Father held out his hand, he became, with that gesture, Boris’s father, hero, friend, and mentor.

  Propravka sat down beside the driver and we started down the road, raising great clouds of dust. Once, through the dust, I saw a patch of flowers next to a hut. I remembered what Grandfather Solomon had said about people who loved flowers, and I thought anyone who loved flowers enough to make them grow here must have more than a little good in him.

  The flatness of this land was awesome. There wasn’t a hill in sight; it was an enormous, unrippled sea of parched and lifeless grass.

  ‘Tata, why is the earth so flat here?’

  ‘These must be steppes, Esther.’

  ‘Steppes? But steppes are in Siberia.’

  ‘This is Siberia,’ he said quietly.

  If I had been told that I had been transported to the moon, I could not have been more stunned.

  ‘Siberia?’ My voice trembled. ‘But Siberia is full of snow.’

  ‘It will be,’ my father said.

  Siberia! Siberia was the end of the world, a point of no return. Siberia was for criminals and political enemies, where the punishment was unbelievably cruel, and where people died like flies. Summer or no summer – and who had ever talked about hot Siberia? – Siberia was the tundra and mountainous drifts of snow. Siberia was wolves.

  I had been careless. I had neglected to pray to God to save us from a gypsum mine in Siberia.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Gypsum, it turned out, was a greyish-white powder dug out of a desolate land by people in despair. It was mined to make plaster casts for wounded soldiers.

  The sight of this mine was bleak, so bleak that it made the village of Rubtsovsk attractive by comparison. Adjacent to the gouged earth, twelve mud huts stood in a straight line. They were flanked by a large wooden building and a small wooden building; no gingerbread here. And all around it was the unbroken, treeless steppe of Siberia, scorched by a blazing sun, without so much as a cloud to protect it. As far as the eye could see, there was no visible connection to the rest of the world.

  Four truckloads of people – about one hundred and fifty – had been assigned to this mine, and now we were sent to the larger of the two wooden buildings. Once inside, it was obvious that this building was a school that had been stripped of everything but its blackboards and four huge portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, and Engels. Six rooms opened off a main corridor and the twenty-six of us who had travelled on the same truck filed into o
ne of them.

  Popravka invited us to make ourselves at home. Our host was the only one who laughed – raucously – at his gallows humour. The room was completely bare of furniture – no chairs, no table, and most certainly no beds.

  Children persist in asking questions. ‘Where are we going to sleep, Tata? On the floor?’

  Even Father lost his patience. ‘No, Esther,’ he said sharply, ‘we will sleep on the ceiling like flies.’

  ‘It’s already occupied by them, so there won’t be any room for us,’ I retorted crossly. Indeed, the place was swarming with flies.

  ‘Go, Esther, go and get a drink of water, go to the bathroom … go …’

  Tata, as usual, was an incurable optimist.

  I found Popravka in the corridor. ‘Excuse me, Mr Popravka …’

  ‘Comrade Popravka,’ he shrieked. ‘Comrade, always comrade, from now on – do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Comrade,’ I said meekly. ‘Please, Comrade Popravka, where can I get a drink of water, Comrade, and where is the bathroom, please, Comrade?’

  ‘Not so many comrades,’ he shrieked even louder. ‘One or two is enough. And the bathroom is an outhouse’ – which, he implied, throwing back his shoulders, was another triumph over capitalism.

  I did not know what an outhouse was, but I was afraid to ask this comrade. In due course, I found out.

  We were one of four lucky groups: Father had found us living quarters in a corner of the room. In an utterly bare room, two walls to lean against, a corner to curl up into, were luxury. Mrs Marshak and Boris were across the room from us, and it was a comfort to see their familiar faces. However, the strangers around us were not quite so strange as the ones in the cattle car; except for one or two peasants, for the most part these were the faces from my past – the shopkeepers and middle-class professionals of Vilna. The only genuine capitalist, from a Soviet point of view, was my father, who, along with his family, had owned a very large business. It seemed to please everyone that Father, who had helped with their baggage, was a well-known citizen of Vilna.

  Once again there was no one of my own age here.

  Settled on the floor, we all used our belongings as back rests seats, pillows. And we waited. Even I, a child, had begun to feel oppressed. One had not the freedom to fetch so much as a glass of water by oneself. One waited to have water doled out. One waited. The flies buzzing around in the heat were free. I hated them, not for being flies, but for being free.

  Finally, the door opened. A boy appeared carrying a pail of water and one tin cup. He had a sunburned face and he was smiling. He was friendly. I could have hugged him.

  ‘Anyone want a drink?’ he asked.

  The boy was nearly mobbed.

  He dipped the cup into the pail and held it out. Dozens of hands reached for it. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, looking around. A boy with water also had authority. Then he came towards us and handed the cup to Grandmother, who took a sip. Refreshed by the water, but even more so by the boy’s deference, Grandmother lifted her head and became the matriarch – for this moment at least. ‘See that everyone has water,’ she said. The boy took it for granted that an old woman could issue orders; he nodded his head. Encouraged, Mother spoke up for herself, the first time in weeks. ‘Let the old people have first turn, then the children, and what’s left over we will drink.’ This became the procedure, with Grandmother deciding who was old and who was not. Waiting my turn my thirst had become so great that I nearly challenged Grandmother: she was picking some awfully young old people, it seemed to me. Would there be one drop of water left for me? No one, including of all people my fastidious mother, appeared to mind drinking out of one cup. When my turn came, I took such a huge sip that I was forced to blow my cheeks out to hold the water until I could swallow it in tiny, tiny gulps to make it last. Now it was camels I envied.

  The pail of water was finished and I was impressed with us as a group. There had been no fights, no one had pulled a knife, no one had done any of the things I had seen thirsty people do in the movies.

  Popravka came in and once again told us not to move, that we would be called to a meeting. Popravka’s concern that he would lose one of his prisoners bordered on the insane. We did not move; we waited. The old people dozed; some people stretched out and rested their heads on their clasped hands and stared into space. I put my head in my father’s lap and he twisted one of my braids around my nose. Mother, who normally would have objected that the dirty hair would make me sneeze, this time only looked sad.

  Had I changed as much as Mama, Tata, and Grandmother had? They looked so old, so bedraggled, so dirty. I held up my hand. It was black with grime. My hair smelled horrid around my nose and I pushed it away.

  Popravka came back and ordered us to march out and line up in front of the schoolhouse. We did so and again we waited. Were we now to be sent to the mine? Would we never again see the sun, which was hotter than before and boiling us alive?

  Presently, a man came out of the smaller building and stood in front of us. Popravka introduced him as Comrade Alexander Ivanovich Makrinin, director of the gypsum mine. Comrade Makrinin stood in front of us, for what seemed like ages, scanning the rows and rows of faces before him; then he looked down at the ground. My heart was beating fast and I imagined I could hear all the other hearts beating too.

  ‘Welcome … welcome to the mine,’ he said at last.

  The crowd stirred. Was this more of Popravka’s brand of malicious humour? But no, Makrinin had spoken gently, kindly; he meant to ease our pain. He kept on speaking gently in Russian. Even I, who knew little Russian, could tell it was more cultivated than Popravka’s, and it sounded like music after the harsh, demeaning bark of the soldiers and of Popravka. For the first time in weeks, someone was addressing us as if we were human beings. Not one person among the hundred and fifty who stood there wished to be welcomed to this mine, but a gentle voice in a jailer made us feel less imprisoned.

  Makrinin, a stocky man with a round, flat face, continued to speak gently and kindly, without anger or meanness, rather with regret that we were all in this dreadful business together. He told us to arrange ourselves in family groups; he would then come to us and assign us to our tasks, which would start in the morning. He assured us that if we needed assistance we were to go directly to his office in the small building. Also, it was there that we would be given our rations of bread; he hesitated before he added the words ‘… and other provisions.’ Tonight there would be pails of soup in each room; tomorrow there would be bread.

  When he came to our family, Makrinin greeted my father with a courteous ‘Zdrastvuytie’, hello in Russian. ‘I understand that you are an electrical engineer by profession. Here we have nothing like that for you to do. However … we are in need of someone to drive a horse and cart.’

  My father shrugged. ‘I have ridden horses, but I have never driven one, nor harnessed one. I will do my best.’

  ‘Yes, that is a good idea.’ He turned to my mother. ‘You … you will work with a group of women and you will be in charge of them –’

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘Dynamiting the mines.’

  ‘Dynamiting?’ Mother’s overheated face went white.

  Father broke in. ‘Oh – please – why can’t I do this? My wife could drive the buggy, that she could do I’m sure –’

  Makrinin flushed. ‘The orders are for the men to drive carts and work in the mine. The women will dynamite, the children will work in the fields, and the old people will shovel the gypsum.’ He was embarrassed. ‘Those are my orders,’ he said softly. ‘Now you may return to the school and rest if you wish.’ He turned away from us and went to the next group as quickly as he could.

  We walked back to the room silently. Huddled together in our corner, Father finally exploded: ‘Insanity! Insanity! Peasants are capitalists. Engineers drive horses. Women dynamite. What next? What next?’

  ‘Samuel! For God’s sake, don’t talk so loud. Someone will hear y
ou. Here the walls have ears. Remember that.’ She had been whispering of course, but now she whispered directly into my ear: ‘Remember that, Esther.’ Then, ‘It isn’t as bad as it could have been. At least we aren’t in a concentration camp –’

  ‘What did you say?’ Grandmother asked. ‘What did you say about a concentration camp?’

  ‘I said we should be thankful we’re not in one –’

  ‘Is Solomon in one? Are you keeping something from me?’

  My father scowled at Mother. ‘No, no.’ He put his arm around his mother. ‘Father is most certainly in another place like this – most certainly –’

  ‘Some blessing!’ Grandmother said sarcastically. ‘But if that is so, why aren’t we all here together? Why?’

  ‘Why? Because it is as I just said. Everything is insane, senseless –’ Mother pointed frantically to the walls, and he dropped his voice until it was barely audible. ‘The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.’

  Grandmother stretched out on the wooden floor and shielded her eyes with her arm. I saw her lips working: Solomon, Solomon …

  In our family, as in most European families of my childhood, old people were treated with special reverence. Now to see old men and old women sprawled on the bare floor without a tiny shred of comfort for their old bones seemed, particularly to a child, like a shocking breach of etiquette.

  That night the room was almost as hot as the cattle car. There was no light and, in the darkness, it seemed even more crowded, perhaps because of the vastness outside. Flies buzzed incessantly and, to make matters worse, they had been joined by midges. Twenty-six people tried to sleep, and their bodies, turning and twisting on the floor, made the boards creak and groan. Occasionally, someone who had fallen asleep would cry out in a nightmare, and each time this happened Boris howled with fright. His fear was a boon to me, making me feel quite grown-up by comparison and less afraid.