At last the moon came up. I was afraid to go to a window to see it, but a moonbeam lit up some of the prone bodies. In this world, one did the best one could with what one had. I reverted to the time when I was younger and I spoke to the shaft of moonlight. I thanked God for making me a little girl who would not have to use dynamite in a mine or shovel gypsum. I thanked God for allowing me to work in a field. I thought it was very saintly of me to be so thankful in this terrible place and I fell asleep.
At about three o’clock in the morning, I heard a knock at the window near us. Father heard it too and sat up, remaining motionless. There was another knock and then, appearing at the window – and disappearing almost at once – was the face of a young girl. Father tip-toed to the window and leaned out. Two young girls from the village had stolen a watermelon and cut it up to give to the Polish slave labourers. They handed the slices up to Father and silently, silently, these were passed from person to person. The girls fled before Father could say thank you properly.
Those of us who were lucky enough to have had a slice of that watermelon that night – like me – must count it the most delectable food ever eaten anywhere by anyone.
‘Perhaps … perhaps … it will not be so terrible here after all,’ Father whispered before he went back to sleep.
The truth is that he was both right and wrong, very wrong.
The next morning a whistle blew. At six o’clock that morning it was like a whip that lashed everyone to his feet. Since no one had undressed that first night, toilets consisted of straightening a skirt, pulling a trouser belt, smoothing a dirty head of hair. Later, those who had brought sheets or comforters would use them as dressing rooms, squirming beneath them; those less fortunate would use coats – or the outhouse.
Popravka stamped into the room. In the early-morning light, he looked more hateful than ever, as if he had been brewing venom in his sleep.
‘Women dynamiters – right. Men miners – left. Men truckers – forward. Children and old women – back of me.’
In my view, we were all children, every last one of us. Who ever ordered grown-ups around this way? old grown-ups? civilian grown-ups?
We did as we were told: there were no rebels among us, not then, not later. Outside, the steppe was vast and silent – not even a bird was overheard that morning – and it became Popravka’s accomplice in reducing us to insects.
‘When the whistle blows again,’ Popravka informed us, ‘some hours from now, go to the director’s office. You will get bread there.’
I watched Mother go off to dynamite, Father to drive a cart, and Grandmother to shovel. There was not so much as a second to say goodbye. Until now, we had been together day and night for six weeks, been inseparable. Now suddenly I was alone. And desolate. I had been reared in the midst of a clan. I had had Miss Rachel as my constant companion. Under the best of circumstances, I was not a child who made friends easily. I felt dismembered.
Left behind, standing forlornly, we were about a dozen children – once again none of them my age – each more bedraggled and dirtier than the next. One little girl, still somewhat plump after six weeks of near starvation, began to howl; an older girl, obviously her sister, tried to comfort her without success. Just then the boy who had smiled when he brought us our water joined us. He looked over his shoulder before going up to the little girl. Pulling his lower lids down and poking his nose up, he made a pig face for her; he also grunted. It worked; she smiled through her tears, and we all felt better.
He led us to the potato patch and on the way he shed the role of happy-go-lucky, smiling young boy and became a serious and stern young man as he lectured us: We were to do our work well. No! That would not be good enough, we were to do our work to perfection. If we did not weed properly, there would be no potatoes next winter; if there were no potatoes, we would all starve. Did any among us enjoy starving? he inquired severely. ‘No!’ we cried out from the bottom of our empty bellies.
I knew that I would do well, thanks to Grandfather Solomon; he had taught all of us children to be good gardeners. ‘You must get your hands into the earth,’ he would tell us. But even covered with soil up to his elbows, he himself still managed to look immaculate in his gardening clothes, his elegant little beard snow-white in the sunlight. The squeamish among us soon learned to keep our distaste for worms to ourselves; while Grandfather did not absolutely insist that we love worms, he made it quite clear that he would not tolerate anything less than coexistence. But weeds he would not tolerate. ‘So, my grandchildren, what is it to be? a tangle or a garden?’ ‘A tangle, a tangle, a beautiful tangle,’ my cousin Salik would answer as he leaned against a tree, feigning exhaustion. Salik was my grandfather’s favourite, a marvellously merry and wild boy whom we all adored. Salik … I almost called his name aloud, the way Grandmother called to Grandfather. For a second, I had a fantasy that standing there close to the top of the world, with nothing to stop the sound, I could call out to my cousins, one by one, and to Miss Rachel, and that wherever they were they would hear me.
But I was a practical child; I followed the others to the potato patch. One look at it convinced me that we would indeed starve that winter. Instead of having the green leaves and the pretty white flowers of a healthy, bountiful potato crop, these plants were brown and parched. My stomach contracted with a hunger pain. What was needed was a magic wand in order to harvest a crop here. Didn’t they know that?
A barefoot woman wearing a babuska, a headscarf tied under her chin, came towards us and clapped her hands for attention. ‘Comrade children!’ Whether this salutation was meant to be only proper or sarcastic or humorous, it sounded funny. Neither then nor subsequently did she introduce herself, but very few people we were to meet did; 1941 was not the time and Siberia was not the place for introductions. For the most part, the native Siberians were the descendants of the early exiles – the criminals (crime under the tsars having constituted anything from neglecting to remove one’s cap in the presence of one’s superior to murdering him), the political prisoners, the escaped serfs, and the self-exiled who were adventurers or Cossacks in search of trade. Whoever and whatever their ancestors were, they had one thing in common, these native Siberyaki – their pride in being the descendants of early settlers. After the Revolution, in the twenties and thirties, came another great wave of exiles, the kulaks. And whenever my parents couldn’t decide who was who in Siberia, they would invariably guess ‘kulak’. Whether they were right or wrong, we never knew; in fact, our life was so circumscribed that most of the people around us were only figures on a lantern slide seen without narration.
All this did not unfold itself that morning. That morning potatoes took precedence over people, a condition that was to endure in Siberia.
The woman repeated the warning that if we did not do our work properly we would starve the coming winter. She plucked a thin blade of grass from the ground and held it up. ‘Weed! No good! Out!’ She pointed to a straggly little potato vine. ‘Potato. Very good. Belongs in. In! Do not pull potato with weed. Pull nicely. Pull with care. Pull to eat next winter.’
I knelt on the ground and began to weed with the peculiar knowledge that for once my life really did depend upon the quality of my performance.
Suddenly, to my horror, I saw that the boy ahead of me had pulled out some potato leaves.
‘Hey you –’ I whispered frantically. ‘Psst!’
‘What is it?’
I told him. I crawled up to him. I showed him once again what a weed was. ‘For God’s sake, be careful, you –’
‘All right, all right – you farmer, you!’
I promised not to tell on him if he promised to be more careful. He called me a pest, but yes, he could weed as well as any girl could.
We worked on and on. The sun got hotter and hotter. And we were not children used to working the land. However, I enjoyed it. It was the best morning I had had in weeks.
The whistle blew and we straightened up and waited. The woman tol
d us to go back to the schoolhouse and join our families there.
We didn’t run back – none of us felt free enough to do that – but we went as swiftly as possible. The grown-ups, our mothers and fathers, came from the mine, every one of them sweating heavily and even more dishevelled and distracted than they had been before. My mother’s hair was tumbling down and she was limping, and my father looked as if he had suffered sunstroke. Grandmother seemed close to collapse; her eyes sunken into her exhausted face were more bewildered than wounded. Whatever is everyone thinking of? they seemed to say.
Another whistle blew and Popravka told us to line up at Makrinin’s office. There we were each given thirty grams of bread, which was to be our standard daily ration, and a small piece of brinza, the sheep cheese which was kept in barrels of salt water. The door to the storeroom was open and I sidled towards it, hoping that I would see something in it besides bread and brinza. What I saw were bags of flour and a very large supply of huge bottles filled with a clear fluid. Creeping still closer, I saw that the bottles were labelled cologne. Cologne? Were we – this hungry, dirty crowd, crawling with lice – to be doused with cologne in lieu of a bath? How very refined, I thought.
Popravka ordered us to eat quickly – how long did he think it would take to swallow one piece of bread? my father inquired under his breath – and said that when the whistle blew again we were to return to work. We sat on the floor in our places in the schoolhouse. We cut our bread, which weighed more, for being underdone, and our cheese in half and ate it; the other half we wrapped in handkerchiefs, scarves, paper if anyone had any, whatever was at hand, and put away for supper. Brinza would now be added to the smells of the room. At what point, I wondered, would they dole out the cologne? And, being a stickler for these matters, I even wondered whether its scent would be pleasing.
The whistle blew before we even had had a chance to talk to each other. As we marched out, my father asked anxiously: ‘Are you all right, lalinka?’
‘Of course I am and besides I’m having fun too,’ I replied.
Father looked at me as if he thought that things were bad enough without having me go crazy too.
The afternoon would have been more fun if it had ended about an hour after lunch. But it didn’t. The rows became longer and longer as the afternoon dragged on. And the heat became more intense. I tried to push it away as hard as I could, but all I could think of was the river in front of our summer house and Musik and me racing to the float. Or Mama, who was a marvellous swimmer, teaching me to kick 1-2-3, kick 1-2-3, kick 1-2-3. ‘Keep your knees straight, Esther.’ If one kept one’s knees straight, one would grow up to be a great swimmer and beautiful like Mama.
The water of the river was cool and clear and one could see the silvery minnows scurrying away as Musik swam underneath like a beautiful silvery fish himself.
I tried not to think of the river.
‘A potato! You pulled a potato!’ the woman shrieked at someone. The woman too was getting tired and cranky under the broiling sun. ‘Dunce! We will starve. Dunce, do you want us all to starve?’
I bent my head closer to the vines; I didn’t want to see the dunce. But as a member of a collective dunce, I too called out, ‘No, no.’ We were not humanitarians; we were just hungry children who didn’t want to starve, and I think it likely that collectively we had it in us to stone the next child who pulled a potato.
Even in Siberia things came to an end; at last the whistle blew.
At the close of the day’s work, the exhausted people in our room had made one gain: they had achieved a reserved fellowship, a subtle something that said, ‘Well, here we are in a gypsum mine in Siberia, it is a fact that we are in it together, and together we have survived.’ They began to talk to each other – always guarded, in whispers, but to talk.
The women told how they had drilled holes, the jackhammers shaking the life out of them, blistering their hands. Mother, who had worked in sandals, winced when she took them off; her feet were a blistered mess. Dropping her voice, so that only we could hear, she said that she wished the women she supervised weren’t so hysterical because the next day they were going to use dynamite. My mother thought it highly likely that they would blow themselves up.
‘And what did you do, Tata?’ I asked quickly.
‘I was hoping someone would ask me that question.’ His face was gaunt and streaked with gypsum, his once blonde hair was an ugly brown and was plastered to his head with sweat and dirt, but his eyes were merry. ‘You see before you a great wagoner, a jehu.’ He bowed. ‘It was my job to harness the horse to the wagon, load it with gypsum, and drive it to a truck. So, I harnessed the horse to the wagon, yes? A simple matter, correct? Many fools have done it, why not this one? However, this being my first time and me being a conscientious man, it took me longer – maybe ten times as long as another fool. I worked hard, I did everything that was to be done. The horse, I might say, was very co-operative. A sympathetic animal, he stood absolutely still. At last it was done – he was harnessed. And we were both pleased, very pleased. Siberia or no Siberia, there is satisfaction in a job well done. Next, I heaved the gypsum on to the wagon. Gypsum, as we have all learned today, weighs more than a feather, but it was finally on the wagon, each and every ton of it.’ Father, who loved to tell stories, even in a voice just above a whisper, grunted and placed his hand on the small of his back. The other people, who had crowded close to listen, inadvertently grunted too. ‘I jumped up,’ he went on, ‘took the reins in my hand and said, “Giddy-up.” The horse, being also an obedient horse, obeyed the command and trotted off. There was only one thing wrong, a detail. He left me behind. Left me sitting there all by myself, while he trotted off. That, my friends, is a Siberian horse for you – treacherous.’
The laughter that followed was cracked from disuse, Siberian laughter. But it was laughter. Much that we would think funny in the days to come would scarcely have caused the shadow of a smile at home in Vilna but we needed to laugh as much as we needed bread.
‘And how did your day go, Mother?’ Father asked Grandmother.
‘How was it supposed to go? I shovelled that stuff. All day long I shovelled it.’
She began to riffle through her belongings, obviously searching for something vital.
‘I have the valerian,’ Mother said. Mother had packed valerian and powders for her migraine headaches; no other drugs. Valerian was used in our family for dizziness, faintness, stomach ache, and hurt feelings.
‘Who needs valerian?’ Grandmother muttered. Then she sighed; she found what she wanted. It was her little leather manicure kit. Sitting on the floor of a barren schoolroom in Siberia, covered with gypsum dust from head to toe, my tiny grandmother proceeded to push back her cuticles. Every night before she lay down to sleep she would continue to do this. She had exceptionally beautiful hands.
That night, as I lay on the floor, rows and rows of potato plants floated past my closed eyes. Baked potatoes. Stuffed potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Creamed potatoes. Fried potatoes. I ran out of ways to prepare potatoes, and I turned over on my stomach and made a pillow of my arms. I must have fallen asleep, because the whistle woke me.
The next morning, just as I was about to pull another weed, I heard the blast, felt the earth tremble under me. All of us children froze, and then started towards the mine; our mamas and our papas were in that mine.
‘Comrade children, get on with your work. You’ll get used to dynamiting.’
Not that morning. Every time there was a blast, I sickened with terror. When it was time for lunch and I saw my parents and grandmother with my own eyes, saw that they had survived, I gave each one of them a big hug – much to their embarrassment: we were not a demonstrative family. Later, I would occasionally watch my mother work with the jackhammer, but the woman whose guts seemed about to be shaken out of her, whose face was contorted to ugliness, would seem a stranger.
We got used to many things: the heat, the vermin, the scarcity of food, the hard wo
rk.
Other things. Like men who reeked of cologne and staggered as they walked. The first time I sidestepped one of these native Siberian men, I reported it to Mother, complete with a demonstration, but she was as baffled as I was. Were these men using cologne because they were dizzy or had they become dizzy from applying too much of it? Of course they had drunk it. It seemed that in that mine, where vodka was in short supply or non-existent, any alcohol would do, including that found in highly scented cologne.
My education was beginning. I was to learn many things in Siberia. And one of them was how not to wash one’s hair. One day when my dirty hair and the itching of my scalp had become unbearable, I asked Mother if I could wash my hair during the lunch period. She said that if I was under the impression that I could get my hair clean without soap, I had her permission to dump some water on my head. So, instead of lunch that day, I raced to the pump at the side of the schoolhouse, where we more or less sponged ourselves, with or without privacy – usually without. Today, since everyone was inside eating lunch – a grandiose word for a piece of bread – I had privacy. I filled a pail with water and thought it was silly of my mother to have forgotten that we had learned to wash our hands with clay the way the Siberian women did. The clay not only cleaned one’s hands, but left them smooth and slightly yellowish. Since I had always longed to be a blonde like my father, nothing would have pleased me more than if my brown hair was yellowed up a bit. I clawed the clay out of the ground and rubbed it into my scalp and hair generously. The result was a head baked in a crust. Not only did the clay resist my frantic attempts to wash it out, but as the afternoon progressed the broiling sun baked it on to my head. Even before the baking began, I had dreaded returning to the potato patch; even in Siberia a little girl doesn’t want to look like a freak.
The Endless Steppe Page 5
