“Don’t, Priest,” Mikhail shouted.
He saw Stirkhov, alone now on the platform, deliberately push over the metal table so that it fell with a screech on the floor below. With no sign of haste the Raikom deputy drew a Mauser pistol from inside his leather jacket and pointed it straight at the ranting figure less than ten meters in front of him.
“Priest! Get down,” Mikhail bellowed and hurled himself toward the bench.
But it was the strange girl who saved him. “Aleksandr Stirkhov,” she called, loud and clear above the noise in the hall, and then let rip with a shrill whistle that tore at Mikhail’s eardrums and caught the deputy’s attention. The muzzle of the gun wavered as he turned his head. All she did was smile at him, but instantly the soft pink tip of Stirkhov’s tongue peeked out between his lips. Her smile widened, warm and distracting.
Time enough. For Mikhail to reach the exposed Priest, drag him down into the crowd, and push him along with the jostling flow to the door.
“Christe eleison,” Priest uttered solemnly. “Christ have mercy on us in this unbelieving world.”
Suddenly Pyotr’s worried face popped up at Mikhail’s elbow. He seized his son’s arm in one hand and the girl’s in the other and propelled them both through the door.
EIGHTEEN
Davinsky Camp
July 1933
ANNA stole half a potato from the camp kitchen. She was getting good at it. Or was it just that she was becoming invisible? That was more than possible.
When she looked at her own arms and legs, all she could see beneath the mosquito bites was a skeleton covered in an almost transparent gray film, so transparent that she could see the bones underneath. They peeked through with glimpses of white. She sometimes prodded them with her finger, to test how strong they were, she told herself, but really it was to make sure they were still there.
She didn’t want to steal the potato, any more than she’d wanted to steal the bread last week or the greasy strip of pork fat the week before that. Each time she knew she’d be caught, and each time she was. A shriek of protest from a kitchen worker, a firm grip dragging her to the floor. But too late. She’d already crammed the food into her mouth before they could wrench it back from her. She’d taken the punishment beatings and prayed that none of the white sticks under her skin would snap. So far they hadn’t. But they’d come close, and if she was caught stealing again they’d shoot her.
She felt the solid lump of boiled potato work its way, one millimeter at a time, down into her stomach, where it settled warm and comforting, like a friend. No, she patted the hollow cavity where she assumed her stomach still lay, no, not like a friend. Because of a friend. Because of Sofia.
Anna smiled and felt absurdly happy. She had achieved something positive, keeping herself alive for one more day, and it had been so simple this time, she couldn’t believe it.
“You!” a guard, the one without eyebrows, had yelled at her when she was left behind in the yard after roll call. “Get over here. Bistro!”
She had to concentrate when she moved, slide one foot forward, then the other, then the first one again. Like pushing logs uphill. She was slow and he was impatient, so he clipped her elbow with his rifle butt.
“Unload those boxes into the kitchen. And be careful, suka, you stupid bitch. They’re new.”
It was that easy. Shift boxes. Unload pans. Keep eyes on floor. Place each iron pot on shelf. Slip potato in pocket. No beating. No punishment cell.
“For you, Sofia,” she whispered, and again she rubbed the contented spot where the potato lay. She’d promised herself and she’d promised Sofia. But waiting was hard, and time and again she had to oust the thought that it would be much easier to lie down and die. With a raw gasp, she started to cough.
LISTEN!” Anna exclaimed, pausing from her task of stripping branches, ax in midair. "Listen to that.” The other prisoners hesitated.
It was birdsong. A pure silken note that rose and fell and filled the air with the sweet sound of freedom. It set up an ache in Anna’s heart.
“Get on with your work, if you’ve any sense,” growled the short Muscovite who had toiled all day beside Anna with the silent precision of a machine and never missed her norm.
“It’s beautiful,” Anna insisted.
“What good is beauty to me? I can’t eat it.”
Anna returned to lopping limbs off the tree. The tall graceful pine lay stiff as a fallen soldier at her feet, oozing its sticky sap. She had long ago passed the point where she felt any sorrow for the forest and the systematic massacre of thousands of trees that was taking place in it, because in a labor camp there was no room for such feelings. Nothing existed except work, sleep, and eat. Work. Sleep. Eat. Above all, eat. It frightened her sometimes to feel her humanity slipping away from her; she feared she was becoming no more than a forest animal, chewing on twigs and scrabbling in the earth for roots.
And then a small drab-brown bird opened its beak and the sound that poured forth brought her winging back to the human race. To the memory of a Chopin waltz and a young man’s arm sweeping her off her feet. The ache grew worse inside her.
“Yes,” she said to the bent back of the woman from Moscow. “You can feed on beauty.”
“Blyad!” the woman swore contemptuously. “You’ll be dead before the year is out.”
ANNA had no intention of dying. Not yet anyway.
Sofia, be quick.
She watched the forest each day for movement among the trees, for a shadow that shouldn’t be there. A thousand times her heart leaped when she believed she’d seen Sofia’s slight figure flit between the tall trunks or a sudden pale shape that looked like a face, but nothing materialized into reality.
She remembered well the first time she ever laid eyes on Sofia.
It was in the bitter winter of 1929 when Anna had not long been a prisoner in the camp and was as soft as the wood she was chopping into.
“Davay! Davay! Let’s go, scum of the earth.”
The guards had stamped their feet on the hard-packed snow, in a hurry to move the prisoner brigades on to the next timber haul a verst away.
“Bistro! Quickly!”
Anna had cursed her ax. It was too small and too blunt, the useless blade had stuck fast, trapped in the pale wood.
“Bistro!”
Anna had knelt on the branch, trying to widen the gap and release her ax. Everything hurt. The muscles in her back, the skin on her knees, the blisters on her feet, the tendons in her wrists, even the teeth in her head. And now lesions were appearing on her face, and they frightened her. She’d hacked again and again at the last two branches, but each time an iron-hard knot resisted her blows. She began to panic.
Frantically she tore at the branch with her hands, aware of the other brigades moving off, but her gloves had ripped and pain stabbed into her finger. A hand, strong and muscular, pulled at her shoulder and pushed her roughly to one side before she could object. An ax swung in a wide arc a hand’s breadth from her cheek, a blue smear in the white air, its blade well oiled and finely honed. It had sliced neatly through the branch, which flew off with a crack into the trampled snow, followed almost instantly by the second one. The tree was stripped and ready to be hauled.
Anna had studied the owner of the ax. She was a tall young woman and wore the regulation rough camp dress swamped under a padded jacket with her prison number on front and back, and a wool cap with earflaps tied under her chin. Her legs were wrapped in layers of rags, and on her feet were shoes cobbled together out of birch bark and old rubber tires held together by string.
“Spasibo,” Anna had said gratefully.
Ax blows meant using energy, and energy was like gold dust around here, so you didn’t waste it on others. Anna’s rescuer possessed large blue eyes sunk deep in her head, and skin as gray as the sky. But no lesions.
“Spasibo,” Anna said again.
“Your chopping technique is all wrong,” the other said. “Swing higher and the ax
head gains momentum.” She had shrugged and started to walk away.
“My name’s Anna,” Anna called to her retreating back.
The other prisoner turned and stared thoughtfully, eyes narrowed against the wind.
"I am Sofia,” she said.
THOSE were the early days in 1929, only four years ago, yet they felt like a lifetime away. Back in the time when four hundred grams a day of stinking black bread had seemed like starvation. When it lay heavy as damp clay in the stomach while she strove to work harder in the forest now that her technique with the ax had improved. The camp commandant made clear the simple rule: the more you worked, the more you ate. But only when she and her brigade reached the full norm would she receive the full paiok of seven hundred grams.
“For seven hundred grams of bread I would sell my soul.”
She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. But she’d noticed odd things happening to herself in those early days of shock at finding herself a prisoner. At night when her dreams grew too painful, she was digging her nails into her thigh so fiercely that they left scarlet welts in her flesh, and she’d started speaking aloud the thoughts that were meant to stay in her head. That worried her. She was losing control. She’d glanced around the barrack hut to see who might have heard.
Most of the women were huddled at each end, where the stoves gave out a trickle of heat, not enough to keep the ice off the inside of the grimy windowpanes but sufficient to give the illusion of warmth. Others lay silent on their beds. The hut contained ten three-story bunk beds, nudged tight against each other down both sides of the room, with every bed made of a hard board that was meant for two people but was packed with five each night, so that at times it was impossible to turn over in bed or do anything but lie rigidly on one’s side. Hip bones soon developed sores, and there was a pecking order that settled the strongest and the fittest on the top boards. This evening by lamplight, some were playing cards they’d made out of scraps of paper and one group was bickering loudly on a top bunk as they bargained with each other for makhorka and salt.
“Your soul’s not worth seven hundred grams of chleb.”
Anna looked up, startled. It was Sofia, the girl who had helped her. Anna sat on the edge of her bedboard on the bottom bunk near the drafts of the door, attempting to mend a hole in her glove. The needle she’d created from a splinter of wood and the thread she’d unraveled from her blanket, and it was going surprisingly well despite the dismal light from the kerosene lamps.
“My soul,” Anna said firmly, “is worth a good breakfast. And I don’t mean the filthy kasha slop we’re given every morning.”
The blue eyes of the tall young woman scrutinized her carefully, as though she were a newly discovered specimen under a microscope lens. She was leaning against the upright of Anna’s bed and looked tired, her shoulders wrapped in a dark brown blanket that made her silver-blond hair shine brighter by comparison. It was cropped short, as was all the women’s hair, the authority’s compulsory solution to the problem of head lice. Her skin possessed the gray ashy tinge of malnutrition, but she had no sores or lesions and her teeth were astonishingly white.
“I mean,” Anna continued, “a breakfast of three fried eggs, yellow as suns on the plate, with whites as fluffy as summer clouds and a thick slice of pork, pink and succulent with a fine grain to it and a slender curve of yellow fat that melts on the tongue . . .”
“Go on, go on.”
It was the Ukrainian babushka speaking and tapping a bony hand on Anna’s back. She was lying on her tiny bed space behind Anna, who had thought her asleep because for once she wasn’t coughing, but the mention of food had even penetrated her dreams.
“The bread,” the old woman whispered, “tell me about the bread to go with the eggs and pork.”
“The bread will be white, fresh from the oven, bread so light and moist that it soaks up the egg yolk like a sponge and tastes like heaven in the mouth.”
“And the coffee? Will there be coffee as well?”
“Ah, yes.” Anna closed her eyes and sighed with pleasure, unfurling it inside her like a delicate fan that she’d almost forgotten how to use. “The coffee will be so black and strong that just the aroma of it”—she and the old woman both inhaled deeply in an attempt to catch its fragrance—“will make your—”
“Stop it.”
Anna opened her eyes.
“Stop it.” It was Sofia. Her eyes were full of dark rage. “Why torture yourself?”
“One day I’ll taste those eggs and that coffee again. I swear I will,” Anna said fiercely.
“Dura! You’re a fool,” Sofia retorted, and she strode away to the far end of the hut.
Anna watched her climb up onto her top bunk and pull the brown blanket over her head, burrowing deep into it like an animal into its nest.
A bony finger dug into Anna. “And apples? Sliced up and sprinkled with cinnamon?”
“Yes,” Anna answered. “And a pot of damson jam, deep purple and glistening with syrup.”
“You know, malishka, I’d honestly sell my God-fearing soul for a breakfast like that before I die.”
Anna swiveled around and smiled at the old woman, whose body was riddled with sores. She stroked the skin of the babushka’s hand, very gently because it was so paper-thin that the slightest touch left bruises like ink stains on it.
“So would I,” she whispered.
The woman struggled to sit up, her birdlike chest straining against the first rumblings of a coughing fit, and closed her eyes.
“Hell couldn’t be any worse than this place,” Anna murmured. "Could it?”
THE next day one of the guards called out to her, "You. Come here.”
The evening ordeal was finally over. The poverka, the roll call and counting of heads, was a process that dragged on and on sometimes for hours, even though the prisoners could barely stand after a hard day’s labor in the forest, until the numbers that were lined up in rigid rows in the Zone tallied with the numbers on the lists in front of the commandant. The procedure was repeated rigorously every morning and every night, and every morning and every night someone died during it. The German shepherd dogs on chain leashes watched with gaping jaws for any movement in the rows.
“You. Number fourteen ninety-eight. Come here.”
Anna’s stomach dropped like a rock. When a guard chose to summon you out of the pack, it meant nothing but trouble. He was young. Barely shaving. She’d caught him watching her before, his gaze crawling greedily over her skin, worse than lice. He swaggered over to her across the icy ground, his rifle tucked snugly under his arm, its tip pointed straight at the spot between her legs to which his eyes kept sliding, even though it was bundled up under a skirt and a padded jacket.
“Number fourteen ninety-eight.”
“Yes.” She stared at the black patch of ground at his feet and linked her hands behind her back, as was required of prisoners when addressed by guards.
“I hear you are willing to sell your soul.”
Her heart thudded.
“Is that so?” he asked, a sly smile tilting his mouth.
“It was a joke, nothing more. I was hungry.”
Loathsome informers, the stukachs, like the yellow-toothed rats, they were everywhere. Swapping a scrap of information for a scrap of bread. No one could be trusted. Survival in the camp came at a high price.
He stroked the barrel of his rifle against her cheek, scraping one of the lesions and forcing her to turn her face aside while he poked the muzzle under the knot of her scarf at her throat. The metal was brutally cold on her skin. She could feel the pulse of her artery slowing at its touch.
“Are you hungry now?” he asked.
“No.”
“I think you are lying, prisoner fourteen ninety-eight.”
He smiled at her and licked his chapped lips. His back was to the nearest floodlight as it cut a yellow swathe through the darkness of the Zone, so that his eyes appeared as deep black holes in his head. Anna wanted to
stick her fingers in them.
“No,” she said.
“I don’t want your soul.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“So will you sell your body instead in exchange for a good breakfast? ”
From the depths of his greatcoat pocket he drew a package wrapped in brown greaseproof paper. Slinging his rifle over his shoulder, he unwrapped the packet and held it out to her. The wind tried to snatch it away, making the paper’s folds crackle and snap. It contained two speckled eggs and a thin sliver of pork. Anna’s eyes feasted lovingly on the sight of the eggs, on their plump brownness, on the delicacy of the speckles in grays and whites and liver browns, on the perfection of the curve of the shells. She didn’t even dare look at the meat.
“So will you?”
He had moved. He was standing beside her now, his breath coming fast and forming small dense clouds of eagerness in the moonlight. Saliva rushed into Anna’s mouth. There were women in the camp, she knew, who took favors from a guard, who sought one out for protection. Such women did not have lesions on their faces or death in their eyes, and they worked in the camp kitchen or in the camp laundry instead of in the killing fields of the forest. Was it so bad? To want to live.
Reluctantly she dragged her eyes from the beauty of the eggs and stared at the guard’s expression. Now she could see clearly the look of loneliness in his young face, the need for something that felt like love even if it wasn’t. He was trapped here the same as she was, about the same age as herself, cut off from all he knew and cared for. Russia had robbed them both, and he was desperate for something more. A little human contact. A stamping of self on a blank faceless world. It could help them both survive. Her famished body swayed imperceptibly toward his strong young frame.
“A good breakfast?” he whispered temptingly.
“Go fuck yourself,” she said and swept away into the darkness.
NINETEEN
The Red Scarf Page 12
