Everyone found it amusing – including my parents, after their initial shock at the sight of me – except me. Grandmother had to work at my hair strand by strand, pulling and yanking it, working with her fingers and then with a comb, until every bit of clay was gone.
CHAPTER FIVE
The first few weeks of life at the gypsum mine had passed and settled into a monotony that seemed as vast and endless as the steppe itself. Torn from sleep by the morning whistle, in the beginning I didn’t know where I was, what we were all doing sleeping on a floor with strangers. But soon that too passed and I would slip from sleep to wakefulness, barely noticing the difference. We did what we were told: we worked, we munched bread and cheese – once in a while, as a special treat, we had a bowl of soup with bits of meat in it – we slept. We barely talked.
The fever, or whatever it was I had had, flared up and I spent a few days alone in the room. Somewhere Father had found a straw mattress (perhaps with Makrinin’s help) and I lay on that – for one day. The next day, when I was in a feverish doze, it was unceremoniously yanked out from under me. Popravka had not learned to love us.
A few nights later, he came in and told us to assemble for a meeting. What now?
We gathered in front of Makrinin’s little building and waited. The air was very hot and still and the sky was darkening too quickly. Way off in the distance, there was a flash of light. The crowd stirred. Before long we would be in for it.
There are those who find a Siberian electrical storm very beautiful and exciting. And I imagine it is if one is not scared to death of it. I was, and so were most of the grown-ups in our midst, it seemed to me. In our Siberia, a summer storm was not a summer storm – it was the judgement of God, a God who would punish master and slave alike. The lightning would fork out like a malevolent claw in a frenzy to ground itself on the treeless steppe. The fear was that where there was not a tree in sight, nor a hill, it would ground itself in you if you were outdoors, and quite possibly if you were indoors too. There were times when the huge sky was streaked with lightning wherever you looked.
This sky could be highly dramatic even when there was no storm brewing. At night, I would stand at the window by the hour watching meteors race through the enormous blackness. And there were also those dancing, shifting, awesomely beautiful columns of light, the northern lights.
When Makrinin walked out, I hoped he would say his say quickly, before the storm struck. He did and, to my ten-year-old ears, what he had to say was so unexpectedly exciting that I almost forgot the approaching storm: every Sunday, six people would be allowed to go to the village. Permission would be granted by him, but must be requested well in advance.
Back in our corner of the room, I hastened to assure my parents, before they might have other ideas, that unless I were allowed to go to the village immediately, I would die – immediately. My poor mother, who was having one of her headaches and whose blistered feet had become so ulcerated that she had to work barefoot, muttered glumly that I was just like my father, always the optimist. Hadn’t I learned by now that it was not all that easy to die? My grandmother thought that was a dreadful thing to say to a child – as I did – at which moment the storm broke outside, just in time to interrupt the one that was brewing inside.
Father said that I could have his place and since Mother said that she could not possibly go with her bad feet, Grandmother hastily offered to go as my chaperone. My father suggested that Rubtsovsk was not worth her trudging twelve kilometres each way on a hot dusty road. Grandmother, who had flitted about so gaily in Vilna from dinner party to dinner party, to charity bazaars, theatre, and opera, ignored the insinuation that she too was starving for amusement: ‘What do I care about hot dusty roads? After all, what are grandmothers for?’
We received permission to go in two weeks. When we heard that Rubtsovsk had a market, a baracholka, where one could exchange goods for roubles and which was open on Sunday, it was agreed that Grandmother and I should do some trading. Roubles meant food – potatoes perhaps; anything but bread and brinza. We spent every night deciding which of our few belongings we were ready to sell. One of Mother’s lace-trimmed French silk slips went in and out of a bag a dozen times. ‘I really don’t need this for dynamiting gypsum,’ she said.
‘Nor do I need this,’ Father said, holding up a custom-made silk shirt, ‘for driving a wagon.’
Grandmother wasn’t so sure they wouldn’t need them, and she herself was most reluctant to part with a black silk umbrella with a slender silver handle. ‘If only we didn’t have such nice things …’ she murmured.
‘And what should I part with?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. You are a growing child,’ they chorused.
Indeed I was; in those two months – summer being growing time – my skirts already had become almost an inch shorter.
I thought that Sunday would never come. When it did, Grandmother and I set off down the dusty road before anyone else. Along with our wares – the slip, the shirt, and the umbrella, after all – we had wrapped some bread in one of my father’s handkerchiefs; the bread was to be our lunch.
It was shortly after six o’clock, the air was still cool and fresh, a hawk was soaring overhead, and, feeling oddly disloyal, I thought that the steppe was just a tiny bit beautiful that morning.
I glanced back over my shoulder. No one was coming after us to order us to return to the mine, but I quickened my pace and urged Grandmother to hurry. ‘Nonsense!’ she said. ‘We will drop dead if we walk too fast.’ But she too looked back over her shoulder.
When the mine was out of sight, when there was nothing but Grandmother and me and the steppe, nothing else, not even a hawk in the sky, I didn’t shout – I wouldn’t dare because of the way sound carried – I didn’t sing very loud, but I sang, and my funny little voice sounded strange to me. And I felt light, as if I could do a giant leap over the steppe.
‘Grandmother, do you know what?’
‘What?’
‘We are doing something we want to do. All by ourselves. We are fr-r-r-eeeee …’
‘Shh!’ Grandmother looked around. ‘Not so loud.’
She was dressed in her best dress, a rumpled blue silk that was also beginning to fade, and her little Garbo hat. In spite of her tininess, Grandmother had always been the grande dame; walking down the dusty road that day, she still was.
We walked for about three hours across the uninhabited steppe without meeting one other person. Before long, I had tied my sweater around my waist – my pleated school skirt and blouse had become my uniform – and Grandmother had opened her umbrella.
We saw a bump in the distance. This turned out to be the first of the widely scattered huts, which meant that before too long we would be in Rubtsovsk.
The village had appeared on the horizon like a mirage always receding from us, but we finally did reach it and it was real. Wonderfully real to my starved eyes.
Rubtsovsk, at that time, had an unused church with its onion top, a bank, a library, a pharmacy, a school – even a cinema and a park with a bandstand. But all I saw that day was a square alive with people and, only vaguely, a rather mean cluster of wooden buildings and huts.
We squeezed our way through the crowd – the men in peaked caps, here and there an old military cap, women in babushkas, friendly faces sometimes scarred from frostbite, friendly voices. And some Kazhaks; Asia at last! Colourful costumes, the women with their long pigtails encased in cloth and leather pouches, and, sad to see, men, women, and children all with rotting teeth. But Kazhaks!
Trading was going on all around us. There were the stalls around the square with produce from the collective farms – and the small farmers too – and there were the buildings with signs proclaiming them to be state-operated stores where one made purchases only if one had been issued ration books, which we had not been. In one corner, sunflower seeds were being roasted over an open fire. The smell was ravishing. ‘Come on, Grandmother.’ I nudged her. ‘Let’s begin to trade.’
&n
bsp; We made our way to the baracholka, where wooden trestles were set up all over the interior of the square and where piles of stuff were heaped on to blankets or on to the bare stones: old boots, jackets, babushkas, books, pots, pans – anything and everything.
We found a place to stand and, to my surprise, without feeling the least bit self-conscious I immediately held up my mother’s slip, the lacy pink silk blowing in the breeze. In a second, we were surrounded: Where were we from? Where did we live? What did Grandmother do? How old was I? They were exceedingly friendly and frankly inquisitive, these native Siberians. We answered the questions as fast as we could, with Grandmother doing most of the talking, since she knew Russian well and I hardly spoke it. We coaxed our potential customers to note the beauty of the lace, the fact that there were 16, sixteen, ribs in the umbrella. How much? Forty roubles. Forty roubles? There was a roar of laughter. All right, thirty-eight roubles … I caught Grandmother’s eye; we smiled at each other; we were born traders and we were having a marvellous time. It was, in fact, the happiest time I had had in a long, long time. The guns, the bombs of World War II were thousands of miles away, and at the marketplace so was the labour camp close by. All around me children were giggling over nothing, girls were showing off their dolls – what if they were made of rags? – and boys were wrestling. These children were just like the children in Vilna. Hunger, fatigue, sorrow, and fright were forgotten: haggling was a wonderfully engrossing game. Rough hands that had scrounged in the earth for potatoes, and been frostbitten more than once, fingered the silk, sometimes as if it were a rosary, sometimes as if it were sinful for anything to be that silky, more often to test it for durability. If an egg was around fifteen roubles, how much should a silk slip with hand-drawn lace be? Hand drawn, mule drawn, what difference if you couldn’t eat it? We all joined in the laughter. I don’t remember who bought Father’s shirt and Grandmother’s umbrella, but the slip was finally bought by a young woman with lots of orange rouge on her cheeks. She was so plump I wondered how she was going to squeeze into it, but that I decided, was her worry, not mine.
Feeling very proud of ourselves with our newly acquired roubles, we now became the customers. What to buy? We went to the stalls where the produce was – watermelons, cucumbers, potatoes, milk, flour, white bread – a great luxury – and meat. Everything was incredibly expensive and we walked back and forth from stall to stall, unable to make a decision. I stood perfectly still in front of the roasting sunflower seeds, ostentatiously breathing in and out. Grandmother counted the roubles we had. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘what are grandmothers for?’ The first purchase was a small glassful of sunflower seeds. I slit the shell between my teeth and extracted the tiny nut. I nursed it as if it were a piece of precious candy and it could not have tasted better. Siberians love sunflower seeds and I think ninety per cent of them bore a little notch in a front tooth to prove it.
After much deliberation and more bargaining, we bought a piece of meat and a bag of flour. There was a communal outdoor stove at the schoolhouse and we could boil the meat on it and, after mixing the flour with water, we could bake little cakes, the Siberian cakes of our Diaspora.
By that time, the sun had begun to set and Grandmother said we must start our long hike home. But I could tell that she was as reluctant to leave this carnival as I was. So, it seemed, was everyone else. The stalls were empty of their produce; like some kind of game, everyone had everyone else’s belongings, wrapped in blankets, coats, babushkas, old flour sacks. But having come together in this vast, lonely steppe, having joked and gossiped and even sung songs, no one wanted to leave.
However, as we began our long trudge back we were very gay, thinking only of the baracholka, not of the mine. Grandmother and I had this in common, we were ‘very’ people – either very sad or very gay, with nothing in between. Oh, if we could only live in the village and go to the baracholka every Sunday, Siberia would be bearable. I started to tick off the things I had to sell – three dresses, one blouse, a coat … Grandmother laughed. ‘Stop before you go naked in exchange for a glassful of sunflower seeds.’
No matter, I thought, whether I had something to sell or not, I would pray that one day we would be allowed to live in the village within sight and sound of the Sunday baracholka.
CHAPTER SIX
On the steppes of Siberia, autumn does not arrive with a great show of flaming leaves; it comes in with a great flowing wind. It came during the night in the early part of September and scared me out of my wits. I thought that all the wolves of Siberia had gathered there at the mine to devour us. When Father told me it was only the wind, I said, ‘What’s only about it?’ Nothing. It began that night and it would continue to blow day in and day out. The temperature began to drop rapidly, and so did our spirits. The prospects of a Siberian winter in this desolate gypsum mine was not a cheery one.
One day we were called to a meeting again. As always we were filled with apprehension as we gathered in front of Makrinin’s building. Poor Makrinin, our original judgement of him had been correct, he was a decent, gentle man stuck with an indecent job.
The sun had already set and people were leaning into the wind, pulling jackets and sweaters closer to their chilled and weary bodies. In the deepening twilight, we could not see Makrinin’s face, but he seemed unusually impatient – or excited – as he waved to stragglers to move more quickly into place.
Raising his voice over the wind he told us that as part of a pact made on the 30th of July between the Soviet Union and Poland, his government granted amnesty ‘to all Polish citizens now detained in Soviet territory either as prisoners of war or on other sufficient grounds …’
The crowd stirred as he continued.
The amnesty was given at the joint request of the Polish government in exile in London and the government of Great Britain, Russia’s ally now in the war against the Germans.
The crowd murmured. I didn’t know what an amnesty was, but I could feel the crowd smiling and I knew that at least something good had happened to us Polish deportees.
Makrinin went on to say that we did not have to stay on at the mine, that those of us who wished to could move to the village, where we would be assigned to jobs with a stipend – only a few roubles, to be sure, but nevertheless something.
The crowd sighed. Here and there a man and a woman surreptitiously made the sign of the cross. Someone had remembered us. Way off there in London at a certain hour on a certain day someone had remembered that there were people who were called Polish deportees, someone had remembered that they were people …
I hugged Father. ‘The village! The village!’ I said over and over again.
Those who wished to leave? Who in God’s name would wish to remain at the mine? Unbelievable as it seemed to us, there were three families who so wished. To some who are homeless, anything – a lean-to, a cave, a doorway – becomes home; what is known is more sheltering, safer, than the unknown. Among the three families who stayed on to endure a Siberian winter were some who did not survive. One young man, in his early twenties, lost his sense of direction in a snowstorm and froze to death only a few yards from the small cluster of buildings.
The rest of us lined up at Makrinin’s office. Our turn came and we were assigned to a cart that would leave in three days. We were told that we would live in barracks on the outskirts of the village. Outskirts? Not in? My face must have shown my distress. Makrinin put his hand on my head. ‘It will be within walking distance,’ he assured me.
I began to pack and repack my one suitcase immediately. I felt the toes of my beaten-up black school shoes. My feet were growing fast; I could feel that soon, alarmingly soon, my toes would be all curled up in them. This was the time of year when, home in Vilna, either Miss Rachel or Mother would go shopping with me for school clothes and the first item was always shoes. Would we be able to afford new shoes in Rubtsovsk? I dared not think about it and I decided not to worry my parents about it either.
For the next three days we w
atched the carts go off. It was like watching people get into lifeboats from a sinking ship. Would the carts come back for us? Would there be a place left for us? Would the amnesty be taken back?
‘Just what is an amnesty?’ I asked Father. When he told me it was a pardon for a past offence, I fervently hoped that all of us capitalists would be on our best behaviour from now on. I went so far as to smile hypocritically at the detestable Popravka. But Popravka had no amnesty in his heart; clearly, Popravka thought that the great and mighty Soviet Union had gone soft on capitalists. It was probably as close to a treasonous thought as he ever allowed himself.
Grandmother had her own question about the amnesty: it would bring Grandfather and her together again, wouldn’t it? She reasoned that if it permitted us to travel from the mine to Rubtsovsk, a matter of twelve kilometres, Grandfather with his great wisdom and power would find the way to Rubtsovsk. No one had the heart to suggest that this would call for a miracle. But Grandmother’s own faith in Grandfather’s ability to accomplish the impossible was such that she began to prepare for this reunion by fussing with her clothes, trying to press the wrinkles out of her dress with her hands, putting her suitcase on top of them and sitting on it, blowing on the little black hat to bring it back to life. Father looked the other way; Mother shook her head; but I too had faith in Grandfather.
Our turn finally came and the only thing that marred our departure from the mine was Boris weeping because he thought he was to be separated from Father. It was impossible to convince him that we would meet at the barracks in another day. His exhausted mother tried to comfort him, but he pushed her away. Father was the most important person in Boris’s life then.
As we rode away, Father told us that Makrinin had said goodbye to him, that he had wished us luck, and that he had particularly hoped that Mother would be able to get some good attention for her poor feet. We were all rather excessively grateful for a scrap of ordinary decency.
The Endless Steppe Page 6
