The Endless Steppe

by Esther Hautzig

My face must have expressed my total anguish.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Lalinka, we must be brave. Come here –’

  ‘No! I don’t want to be brave. I’m sick and tired of being brave. Tata, please don’t go, please, Tata …’

  ‘You have grown up so much, my lalinka, you cook and you clean and you market, now will you grow up just a little bit more? A little bit? Enough to help your mother and grandmother through this?’

  ‘But we are all alone here in Siberia, Tata. And Grandfather …’

  ‘Shh! Where is your grandmother? Any second she may come in …’

  He knew where she was. We all pretended that Grandmother no longer went out to the fields to weep alone for Grandfather. Now would it be for Tata too?

  I ran to him and buried my face in his shoulder. He rocked me back and forth without saying a word.

  Mother wept. Tears did not come easily to my mother and when she wept upon hearing this news, my worst fears were confirmed: for us, this news was tragic.

  Now it was my turn. I tried to comfort Mother. I went over to her; she was sitting on the bed weeping and I put her head on my shoulder and stroked her hair. I told her that everything was going to be all right, that Father would not be gone long, that we would write to Father often and that he would write to us. I was playing at being grown-up, as if I were murmuring to a doll.

  Mother raised her head and looked at me, and Father came over and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Don’t worry, Raya,’ he said. ‘I will be all right and you will be all right. You are strong, Raya, strong. You will take care of our child. And of yourself. And my mother … You will see that she is all right also …’

  Mother nodded.

  We sat on the bed in a silent huddle, exhausted by the emotion both expressed and unexpressed.

  Grandmother came in and found us that way. She took the news as if there were no despair, no human degradation, no tragedy, personal or otherwise, that was beyond her ability to comprehend, to cope with. Beyond any question she had wept herself out in the fields that afternoon.

  Looking at me, she said: ‘All of this is not for children.’

  The next day Father went to the authorities to get further instructions. They told him that he would be sent to a work brigade on the front lines. However, first he would join a large group being trained in a big town in Siberia.

  Now Father the optimist took over: by the time he got to the front lines the war would be over; he would go directly from the front lines to Poland where he would send for us.

  Mother held her tongue but she looked at him as if he had taken leave of his senses.

  The day before Father left, Mother stayed home from her job. In the early morning they went off together to our potato patch to see if by any miracle there were any new potatoes or any that had been overlooked. It was a long walk to the patch and Mother, who had been suffering from sciatica, developed such a severe attack that she was unable to walk home and they slept on the earth beside the patch that night.

  Where husbands and fathers going off to war in other parts of the world might spend some of their last hours at home going over their affairs with their wives, deportees in Siberia had only one affair to discuss – food. In our case, the matter of food was extremely serious. There was scarcely enough in our cellar to last two months, let alone the whole winter.

  But the emptiness of our bellies would still be nothing compared to the emptiness of our hut without Father. The day Father left was the worst day of my whole life. I spent it weeping. I lay on my bed and wept incessantly. Not even Siberia had been able to extinguish my father’s love of life – his charm and his gaiety. In Siberia, I had warmed myself at this bright light time and time again.

  Mother saw Father off alone, without Grandmother or me. Grandmother went off to the fields and I stayed in the hut, still weeping.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  After Father left, life in the hut was indeed as desolate as we had thought it would be. Poor Mother, who way back there in that other time, that other world, had once been quick to laugh, to regard life with a sense of humour, even to relish its absurdity, tried to recall it for our benefit, Grandmother’s and mine, tried to stand in for Father, but she was too tired, too worried about food and how we were going to heat our hut. As the autumn winds blew colder and colder, the wood pile appeared to shrink before our eyes. Where would we get the roubles for wood? How would we cut it up? In order to stretch the supply of wood, we also burned dry manure, which did not smell as awful as one might imagine.

  There was this to be said about problems in Siberia: they were never in short supply, nor were they ever unique. At school I heard some of the children talking about the scarcity of fuel, how they would freeze to death except for …

  ‘Except for what?’ I asked, coming up to them.

  They made a big to-do about looking around slyly and closed ranks before whispering to me that if I joined them that night I would find out.

  ‘But can we trust her?’ one of them inquired, looking me up and down.

  Honour coming before prudence, I indignantly assured them I certainly was to be trusted before asking the question: with what?

  Thus it was that I found myself on a moonless night part of a small band of children, each equipped with a burlap bag, stealing little pieces of coal that had dropped on to the railway tracks. The other children seemed to be hardened criminals, even regarding this as a game, but if I had been robbing a bank I could not have felt more guilty or more frightened. With every sound I heard in the darkness, I felt the brutal arm of the law thrashing my fragile back. Stealing in Siberia? If Siberia was the place thieves were exiled to, was there an even worse place for Siberian thieves? And what about God? What would He do to me for breaking the commandment?

  But I kept right on filling up the bag.

  However, when our leader – a twelve-year-old boy with all the attributes of a boy scout – passed the word that we were to stop, my relief was enormous. But short-lived. We had only stopped stealing coal in order to leave room for stealing struchki. Struchki were wood shavings which we would steal from the lumberyard.

  ‘Oh, thank you very much but the coal will do nicely,’ I said, preparing to part company with my accomplices.

  ‘Oh, stop being such a coward. Come along.’ Creeping home through the dark village with my bag full of coal and struchki, I was still more concerned with the punishment than the crime. But I could also already feel my toes warming before the fires this haul would make.

  When Mother and Grandmother asked me where I had got the coal and struchki, I said: ‘Don’t ask.’

  They exchanged glances and a knowing smile, these two women whose code did not permit them to take so much as a crumb belonging to someone else. In Vilna that is.

  I soon discovered that not only bands of children, but grown-ups too, combed the tracks and yards for coal and struchki and I joined them time and time again. But I never enjoyed it; I always felt both guilty and scared.

  Moreover, stealing was not really to the taste of the one who still clings to pride. Mother reported that someone said that I walked around the village holding my head up high, as if I were the child of one of the chiefs, not like a poor little deportee at all. So? I reminded Mother that when she had to walk barefoot through the village she hid herself when she saw someone she knew coming towards her. She shrugged. ‘So we are both proud – for the time being –’

  During those first weeks after Father went away, nothing distracted me from my sense of loss – not even stealing. Every day I waited for a letter in vain; always inside me the same question: Will I ever see my father again?

  Mother came home one night looking even more haggard and worried than usual. Half a dozen people at work had been reported ill with what appeared to be ordinary grippe. Three of them were dead. Dead in three days. ‘Why do you come home with such terrible stories?’ Grandmother wanted to know, glancing my way out of the corner of her eye.
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  ‘Because I don’t want Esther – or you either – to die of the flu!’ Mother retorted. Mother went on to tell us that we were in the midst of a severe epidemic, that people were dying like flies, and that we were to take every possible precaution. Why, she wanted to know, hadn’t I been told about this at school? Been warned? The very next morning we learned that one child had lost both parents within twenty-four hours of each other.

  One does not become immune to terror. Now I became terrified that I might lose either Mother or Grandmother or both of them. They did not get it, but I did. When Mother saw that I was feverish – and like most mothers she knew the degree without the aid of a thermometer – she became as close to hysterical as I was ever to see her. The trembling, white-faced, wild-eyed, silent kind of hysteria. Fortunately, mine turned out not to be a dangerous case. The doctor came to see me once and we were shocked to see how tired and drawn she looked. The story of the difficulties of handling an epidemic of this magnitude without enough doctors or medicine was written on her face. However, she had been promised that with the influx of workers, she would soon have an infirmary that was better equipped and possibly another doctor or two. Soon? Perhaps not soon enough.

  Although I was not seriously ill, I still had to stay in bed for several weeks. And lying in bed, I listened for the postman. He never came.

  Life seemed utterly miserable and cheerless and I did little to conceal this view from Mother. One night she stared at me for a long time, as if to say, What am I going to do with this poor woebegone creature? Suddenly she decided what to do: ‘You’re going to have a birthday party, a real birthday party!’

  Ah, I thought, now Mama has gone crazy. A birthday party in Siberia? Here in this hut? I had almost forgotten that there were such days as birthdays.

  My birthday comes late in October on the same day as my parents’ wedding anniversary. At home it had always been a particularly gay occasion. Preparing for it was part of the excitement and fun. For weeks, Mother and the cook baked cakes and biscuits and made candy, filling the house with delicious smells of sugar and spices. And Miss Rachel and I made accordion-pleated clowns’ ruffs and hats out of gold paper; we cut and pasted sheets of tinted papers into all manners of decoration – place cards, little baskets for nuts and candies, flowers, what have you – each year making them a little more elaborately than the year before as my fingers became more deft. And every birthday, I was the Queen and my cousin Salik, whose birthday was the same day, was the King. As many as fifty children came to our party and the high spot of the afternoon was always the Charlie Chaplin film Father would have hired along with a projector.

  In the evening, Father and Mother had their party and, having been tucked into bed with the special kisses parents give children on their birthdays, I would fall asleep to the sound of their laughter, secure in the knowledge that mine was the best of all possible worlds.

  My twelfth birthday was celebrated in a dung hut in Siberia.

  Quite recklessly, Mother used up almost all the potatoes we had in the cellar (potatoes that we had expected to last at least another month), to make an enormous pot of potato goulash.

  Mrs Kaftal, Karl, and Anya came and so did Mrs Marshak and Boris. And there were one or two other people Mother had met at the baracholka and several friends who were from the Polish deportee community.

  They came with gifts: an apple, a piece of meat, a sweet beet, and a large bag of sunflower seeds; lovely gifts, deeply appreciated.

  Short of fuel, we sat with our coats on, sat on the beds. Short of bowls and spoons, we took turns eating the goulash. They sang a birthday greeting to me and the grown-ups gossiped, while I listened and Boris fell asleep.

  Everyone said it was a wonderful party, and it was.

  When it was over, Mother and Grandmother and I rehashed it the way people always do after a party. ‘Didn’t Anya look pretty?’ ‘I think they really enjoyed the goulash.’ ‘A trifle salty perhaps …’

  But later we were very quiet. Mother lay on her bed with her eyes closed, but she wasn’t asleep. Grandmother and I had each given her a kiss, wishing her well on her wedding anniversary.

  Where was Tata? Where were the rest of our family? If only we were all together here in Siberia. God alone knew what was happening to them in German-occupied territory, I had heard it whispered. At least we were alive.

  When Mother opened her eyes, as if she had read my thoughts, she said: ‘We laughed today. We were happy over an apple and a piece of meat … Life goes on. Someday it will be better. It will, Esther, it will.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Father had disappeared into an unknowable place with a strange address. For some reason – perhaps the same reason that makes one want to see the ship, the plane, or the train come in with the returning traveller one loves – I had so wanted to see the postman bring the first letter from Tata, watch him stop at our house for once, be the one to receive the letter into my own hands.

  This was not to be. The letter arrived when we were all out and the postman unceremoniously dropped it on the ground.

  The letter was one meant for the censor’s eyes as well as ours. It told us very little about Father, nothing about where he was or what he was doing except that he was not yet near the front. In his beautiful script, he assured us that everything was going to turn out all right, that if a new Deanna Durbin film came to the village, lalinka was to memorize all the songs and sing them to him when he came home, that we were not to worry, not to worry, not to worry … Father was trying to be gay and optimistic.

  It was many weeks before we heard from him again.

  I wanted to tear a page out of an old schoolbook that I was now using to do my homework in – writing between the printed lines as I would in newspapers too – and write to Father immediately, but Mother wisely reminded me of my teacher’s forbidding disposition and Grandmother thought it wasn’t seemly for Father to receive a letter from home on ragged paper. But one couldn’t buy any paper anywhere, even if one had the roubles, so we ended up writing to Father between the lines of some old newspaper. We wrote in script as tiny as we could make it.

  Mother and Grandmother picked up every scrap of war news they could get hold of, mostly on the baracholka. Our greatest wish was that the war would end before Father was sent close to the front. But the news from the front was very bad. Town after town in European Russia was being besieged by the Germans and the stories of their atrocities filtered down to our village.

  Mother and Grandmother no longer attempted to hide from me their deep concern about our family. We prayed for their well-being. But time and time again, Mother wished aloud – and countless times she must have done so silently – that she had told the Russian soldiers that morning in Vilna that the man who had knocked on the door was her brother. If she had, he would have been here now, safe, with us, she would say in anguish. Mother had begun at about this time, she told us later, to have her dreadful foreboding about the fate of my aunts and uncles and of my cousins too, a foreboding that made her cry out in her sleep and that she could not tolerate when awake.

  The potatoes in our cellar were down to one week’s supply and we had only one thirty-rouble note to carry us through the whole month.

  The monthly five roubles was due for my school lunch, which consisted of a slice of bread and a piece of cheese if and when it was available, and since there was no other way, Mother had to give me the thirty-rouble note to take with me. This she did, warning me to watch it for dear life – scarcely an exaggeration – and begging me to count the change carefully (for me, two and two did not always readily add up to four). ‘Remember,’ she reminded me needlessly, ‘that this money is all we have for the rest of the month.’ Then, as if it would prod me to heed her warnings, she said that along with our ration of bread, there might even be some sugar given out this time.

  It was bait that made my mouth water. My idea of heaven at that time was to have all the bread in the world that I could eat and all
the sugar that I could pile into my mouth. Fresh bread – preferably white – and sugar had become more appealing to me than cakes and biscuits and chocolate.

  I went off to school that morning clutching the thirty-rouble note in my hand, just as Mother had told me to do – for dear life. It only left my hand when I had to write and read; then it went into my pocket.

  When the time came for us to line up for lunch, I reached down into my pocket for the money. There was an emptiness there that I felt in the pit of my empty belly.

  I began to search. My desk. My books. Other people’s desks. Their books. I crawled on my hands and knees all over the classroom. This cannot be, I assured myself, I will find the money, we will not starve. I went up to everyone in school, including the teachers, and asked them if they had seen a thirty-rouble note.

  No one had seen it. The money was gone and with it our bread for the month.

  I not only felt sick with despair, but also frightened. Mother didn’t get angry with me often, but when she did, it was overwhelming. All of my past offences dwindled to minor infractions compared to losing this money. I simply did not want to go back to the hut and stalled as long as I could. I walked around the village trying to figure out some way of replacing the money … or getting the bread. I had some quite desperate fantasies. Having already discovered that I was not much good as a thief, I wondered whether I would fare any better as a beggar. Finally, there was no escape: I had to go home.

  It was very late and Mother was full of concern. Why was I so late? Had anything happened to me?

  ‘I won’t say. You can be as angry with me as you wish. I don’t know what to say. And I don’t know what happened. I don’t. I don’t.’ My voice began to quaver and my teeth to chatter. I didn’t cry; I just shivered from head to foot. It was not calculated; it was unavoidable.

  In a second both Mother and Grandmother were fussing over me: What in God’s name was the trouble? Was I sick? Surely nothing could have happened that was terrible enough to make me act this way?