13

Dear, quiet little Mashenka...She is no longer wearing her fine stockings and her blue woolen cardigan. It’s hard to keep neat and tidy in a freight wagon. She keeps listening intently to the strange language—it hardly even seems like Russian—of the women thieves who are her neighbors on the bedboards. She looks with horror at the transport tsaritsa, the pale-lipped hysterical mistress of a famous Rostov thief.

Masha washes her handkerchief in a mug. Then she uses the last drops of water to clean her feet, spreads the kerchief out on her knees to dry, and peers out into the half dark.

The last few months are a blurred fog: little Yulia’s tears after eating too much on her third birthday; the faces of the men carrying out the search; clothes, technical drawings, dolls, and dishes strewn about the floor; the rubber plant, a wedding present from her mother, torn out of its pot; her husband’s smile as he stood in the doorway for the last time, a pathetic, pleading smile, imploring her to remain loyal, a smile she could not remember without crying out and clasping her head in her hands; then mad weeks when everything went on just the same, little Yulia’s saucepan of porridge coexisting with the glacial horror of the Lubyanka; the queues at the reception office of the internal prison, and a voice from the little window saying, “Your parcel is refused”; the scurrying around to see various relatives; learning their addresses by heart; the hurried, clumsy sale of a wardrobe with a mirror and a set of the fine volumes published by Academia; the pain she had felt when a bosom friend had stopped phoning her; more nighttime guests and a search that had gone on until dawn; saying goodbye to little Yulia, whom they had almost certainly taken to an orphanage rather than allowing her grandmother to take charge of her; a cell in the Butyrka where everyone spoke in whispers, and where matches and fish bones picked out of the gruel served as needles for doing one’s mending; the colorful sight of dozens of handkerchiefs, knickers, and bras all being waved in the air to dry; a nighttime interrogation during which, for the first time in her life, a man shook his fist at her, addressing her as Ty and calling her a whore and a prostitute. She was charged with failing to denounce her husband, who, for his part, had been sentenced to “ten years without right of correspondence” for failing to denounce “terrorists.”

Masha did not understand why she, and dozens like her, had been expected to denounce their husbands, why Andrey, and hundreds like him, had been expected to denounce their work colleagues and childhood friends. She was questioned by the investigator only once. This was followed by eight months of prison: day and night, night and day. Despair would give way to a dazed waiting for fate; now and again, as if by an ocean wave, she would be swept up by hope, by a certainty that she would soon see her husband and daughter.

Finally, the jailer handed her a thin slip of cigarette paper on which she read, “58–6–12.”

Even after this she kept hoping. Her sentence would be repealed—yes, her husband had been acquitted, Yulia was already back at home, and soon they would meet, never to be separated again. The thought of this meeting made her turn hot and cold with joy.

She was woken in the middle of the night: “Lyubimova, with your belongings—quick!” She was taken in a Black Maria not to the Krasnopresenskaya transit prison but straight to the freight terminus for the Yaroslavl line, to be put on a prisoners’ transport...

She remembered the morning after her husband’s arrest with particular clarity, as if that morning were still continuing. The main door to the building had slammed shut; there had been the sound of a car driving away, then silence. Terror had entered her soul. The telephone was ringing in the corridor; the lift was suddenly stopping on their floor; a neighbor was shuffling out of the kitchen, and then her shuffling unexpectedly stopped.

She wiped the books scattered about the floor with a cloth and put them back on their shelves. She tied the linen lying on the floor into a bundle. Really she would have liked to boil it—everything in the room seemed to have been fouled. She put the rubber plant back into its pot and stroked one of its leathery leaves. Andryusha had made fun of this plant, saying it was a symbol of philistinism, and deep down she had agreed with him. Nevertheless, she had always defended it and never allowed her husband to move it out into the kitchen. She did not want to hurt her poor mother who, already an old woman, had carried it all the way across Moscow and had even had to drag it up to the fourth floor, since the lift had been under repair at the time.

Everything was silent. But their neighbors were not asleep. They pitied her, they were afraid of her, and they were overjoyed that no one had come to their room with search and arrest warrants...Little Yulenka was asleep, and she was tidying the room. Ordinarily she did not worry so much about tidiness. By and large she was indifferent to things; she had never cared about chandeliers or beautiful china. Some people saw her as slovenly, a bad housewife. But Andrey liked Masha’s indifference to objects and the general disorder of their room. Now, though, she felt that if things regained their proper places, she would feel calmer and less oppressed.

She glanced in the mirror and looked around the room she had tidied. Gulliver’s Travels was back where it had been yesterday, before the search. The rubber plant was back on its little table. And Yulia, who had been weeping and clinging to her mother until four in the morning, was asleep. It was quiet in the corridor; their neighbors were not yet making a noise in the kitchen.

And in her now properly tidied little room Masha felt lacerated by despair. Her heart felt bright, glowing with love and tenderness for Andrey, but at the same time, in this domestic quiet, surrounded by familiar objects, she sensed as never before a merciless force that is capable of bending even the very axis of the earth. This force had attacked her; it had attacked Yulia and the little room about which she had said, “I don’t even want twenty square meters and a balcony, because I’m happy where I am.”

Yulia. Andryusha. She was being taken away from them. The clickety-clack of the wheels was drilling into her heart. She was moving ever farther from Yulia. Every hour was taking her closer to Siberia—to whatever had been given her in exchange for a life with those whom she loved.

Dear Mashenka was no longer wearing her check skirt. And the woman thief with the pale thin lips was combing her crackling, electric hair with Mashenka’s comb.

Only in the heart of a young woman can these two terrible torments live side by side: a mother’s desperate longing to save her helpless child—and a child’s helplessness before the fury of the State, a child’s wish to hide her face in her mother’s breast.

Her dirty, broken fingernails had once been manicured. Little Yulia had been intrigued by their color, and her father had once said to her, “Mummy’s fingernails are like the scales of a little fish.” There was no longer any trace of a wave in her hair. She had had her hair done a month before Andryusha’s arrest, when they were getting ready for the birthday party of the friend who no longer telephoned her.

Little Yulenka, dear shy, anxious little Yulenka—in an orphanage. Masha let out a quiet, plaintive groan and her eyes clouded over: How could she protect her little daughter from cruel orphanage attendants; from vicious children; from coarse, ragged orphanage clothing; from army blankets and prickly, straw-stuffed pillows? And the wagon kept creaking; there was no end to the clickety-clack of the wheels. Moscow and Yulia were ever farther away from her; Siberia was drawing closer and closer.

Good God, had her Moscow life ever really existed? But a moment later it was the present that seemed like a dream, like a nightmare: this stifling half dark, this aluminum bowl, the women thieves smoking their makhorka on the rough boards, her dirty underwear, her itching body, the anguish in her heart: “If only we stop soon—then at least the guards will protect us from the thieves!” And then, at each stop, the terror she felt as the guards cursed and waved the butts of their rifles about. All she could think was: “If only the train could get going again.” Even the thieves had said, “Those Vologda guards are worse than death.”

But Masha’s deepest pain had nothing to do with the creaking bedboards, or the frost that covered the walls the moment the stove went out, or even the brutality of the guards and the savagery of the thieves. Her deepest pain was that she was now emerging from the numbness that had cocooned her soul during her eight months in the prison cell.

This nine-thousand-kilometer descent into the deep grave of Siberia was something she sensed with her entire being.

There was no place in the transport for the senseless prison hope that the cell door would suddenly open and a guard would shout out, “Lyubimova, get your things! You’re free!” And that she would go out onto Novoslobodskaya Street, catch a bus home, and find Andrey and Yulia waiting for her there.

In a transport, there is neither the numbness of the prison cell nor the mindless exhaustion of the camps—only the ache of a battered heart.

And what if Yulia wet her knickers? Was she washing her hands? And her nose? Did it need blowing? And what about vegetables? She really needed her green vegetables. And she was always throwing off the bedclothes at night—often she ended up quite naked.

Mashenka was no longer wearing her own shoes; instead she had soldiers’ boots, one of which had a torn sole. Was this really her—Maria Konstantinovna, who used to read Blok, who had studied literature, who, without ever telling Andrey, had written poetry of her own? Masha, who used to rush to the Arbat to make an appointment with Ivan Afanasyevich, the hairdresser known as “Jean”? Masha, who had not only read books but who could also sew, make borsch, bake torte napoleon, and who had breast-fed a child? Masha, who had always been so full of admiration for Andrey, for his modesty and the energy he put into his work? Masha, who had won everyone’s admiration for her devotion to her husband and daughter? Masha, who knew how to weep, and who knew how to be witty, and who was good at looking after the pennies?

And the train continued on its way, and now Masha had the first stages of typhus. Her head felt clouded, dark, heavy. But no, it was not typhus, she was all right. And once again hope found a path to her heart. They would reach the camps, and someone would call out her name: “Lyubimova, step forward. There’s a telegram for you. You’re released.” And so on and so forth—and she would go by passenger train to Moscow...The city suburbs...Sofrino...Pushkino...The Yaroslavl station...And Andrey, holding Yulia in his arms.

And hope brought heartache. If only they could get to their destination sooner, if only she could get that telegram sooner...Yulia’s thin little legs were moving so quickly. The coach was slowing down now, and Yulia was running alongside it.

At last, after the thieves have stolen every last thing of hers, Masha gets off the train. Around her head she is wearing a dirty, shaggy towel, and she is hiding her freezing fingers in the sleeves of a greasy padded jacket. And squeaking glassily over the snow are the shoes of hundreds of Moscow women, all of them sentenced to ten years of hard labor for failing to denounce their own husbands.

Their legs are still in silk stockings; their high-heeled shoes keep stumbling. These women are envious of Masha. She traveled in a wagon with thieves and not with other wives. Her own clothes have all gone, but she has a padded jacket instead—and boots she can stuff with paper and rags to keep her feet warm.

These wives of enemies of the people stumble, hurry forward, fall to the ground. They quickly gather up their little bundles, which have scattered over the snow, but they are afraid to cry.

Masha looks around: behind her is the station shed, and a string of freight wagons that look like red beads against snow-white skin; in front of her slowly uncoils a long column of female prisoners, like a dark snake; all around are stacks of timber, powdered with snow. And there are the guards in their marvelously warm sheepskin coats—and the constantly barking guard dogs in their own warm, thick fur. The air, after two months in the transport, is intoxicatingly clean, but it feels sharper than a razor blade. The wind gets up; a dry, snowy cloud billows over the open ground, and the head of the column is lost in a white blur. The cold whips faces and legs. Masha’s head whirls.

And all of a sudden, through her exhaustion, through the fear of getting frostbite and gangrene, through dreams of finding herself somewhere warm, of being taken to a bathhouse to wash, through her confusion at the sight of a portly old woman in pince-nez glasses lying on the snow with a strange, stupidly capricious look on her face—through all of this, and through the snowy mist, twenty-six-year-old Masha glimpsed her camp future. Far behind her, thousands of miles away, she could see her Moscow past, in a building on Spasopeskovsky Lane, a life now closed up and sealed. But here, emerging out of the mist were watchtowers, guards in full-length sheepskin overcoats, wide-open gates. At this moment Masha saw both of her lives with equal clarity: a fate that had gone, and a fate that had come.

She runs, stumbles, blows on her icy fingers. She is still gripped by the madness of hope. Soon she’ll get to the camp—and they’ll tell her about her release. She runs fast; she gets out of breath.

How hard she had to work. How her stomach hurt, how the small of her back ached from the incredible weight—far beyond what was acceptable for a woman—of the great chunks of lime. Even when they were empty, the handbarrows felt as if they were made of cast iron. Everything was heavy: the spades, the crowbars, the boards, the logs, the vats of dirty water, the latrine barrels full of excrement, the piles of dirty laundry that weighed tens of kilos.

How hard it was to walk to work in the darkness before dawn. How hard it was to endure the inspections, standing in the slush or in freezing cold. How she longed for the nauseating maize swill with a scrap of tripe or with fish scales that stick to the roof of your mouth. How pitilessly the thieves stole. What sordid conversations she heard at night on the bedboards. What horrible fumblings, whisperings, and rustlings. How eternally she longed for the stale, slightly graying black bread.

Sixteen-year-old Lena Rudolf, Masha’s neighbor on the bedboards, began sleeping with Mukha, the criminal who looked after the boiler room. Lena caught syphilis from him. She lost her hair and her fingernails and was then transferred to a camp for the disabled. Lena’s mother, the kind, obliging, blue-eyed Susanna Karlovna, somehow still remained as elegant as ever. Even though her hair was now gray, she still went on working, doing exercises every morning before dawn, and rubbing herself down with snow.

Masha worked every day until dark, like a mare, like a she-donkey or a she-camel. It was a strict-regime camp, and she did not have the right to send or receive letters. She did not know whether her husband was still alive or whether he had been executed. She knew nothing about her little Yulia. Had she ended up in an orphanage, or had she simply got lost like some small animal with no name? Perhaps her mother had, after all, managed to find Yulia? But was her mother still alive? Was her brother Volodya still alive? She seemed to have got used to knowing nothing about her nearest and dearest. She seemed to have stopped dreaming about receiving a letter. All she wanted, it seemed, was easier work, a job in the hospital or the kitchen—anything so as not to have to go out into the taiga, amid the terrible cold or the clouds of mosquitoes.

But her longing for her husband and daughter was as strong as ever, and her hope had not died; it only seemed to have died. Hope was sleeping. And to Masha her hope was like a little child asleep in her arms; when hope awakened, her heart filled with happiness, light, and grief.

One day she would see Yulia and her husband again. Not today, of course, and not tomorrow. The years would pass, but she would see them again. “Your hair’s turned gray, Andrey...How sad your eyes look...” And Yulenka, dear little Yulenka. This pale, thin young woman was her daughter. But then came worrying thoughts: Would Yulia recognize her? Would she remember her, her camp mother? Or would she turn away from her?

Semisotov, one of the senior guards, forced her to sleep with him. He knocked out two of her teeth and struck her on the temple. This was during her first autumn in the camp. She tried to hang herself but failed; the rope was too weak. Some of the women, however, even felt envious. Then came a kind of pained indifference. Twice a week she dragged herself along, behind Semisotov, to a storeroom where there were bedboards covered with sheepskins. Semisotov was always sullen and silent and she would be out of her mind with fear. When he was drunk and furious, she would feel sick with terror. But once he gave her five candies and she thought, “If only I could send them to Yulia in her orphanage.” Instead of eating them, she hid them in her little straw mattress. They were stolen. Once Semisotov said to her, “You’re filthy, you slut. No peasant woman would ever let herself get so dirty.” Surprisingly, he always addressed her as Vy, even when he was dead drunk. Semisotov’s disgust gladdened her, but at the same time she thought, “If he ditches me, it’ll be back to carrying loads of quicklime.”

One evening Semisotov left the barrack and never appeared again. She learned later that he had been transferred to another camp. And she was glad to be able to sit on the bedboards in the evening—glad not to have to follow him, hanging her head, to the storeroom. But then she was thrown out of the office building where, in the days of Semisotov, she had cleaned floors and kept the stoves going. She had nothing to offer by way of a bribe, and so her place was taken by the thief who had stolen her woolen cardigan in the transport. Masha was glad that Semisotov had gone, but she also felt hurt. He had not said even a word of goodbye to her; he had treated her worse than a dog. And she was a woman who had once had a Moscow residence permit. She and her husband and Yulia had had a room of their own. She had washed in a bathroom; she had eaten from a plate.

And her work was very hard during the winter months. And it was hard in summer, and in spring, and it was hard in autumn, and now she no longer remembered the Arbat or Andrey but only how, in the days of Semisotov, she had cleaned floors in the office building. Had she really been blessed with such good fortune?

Nevertheless, hope was still there, living its secret life inside her: they would all see each other again. By then, of course, she would be an old woman. Her hair would be quite gray, and Yulia would have children of her own—but they would see each other again. They simply couldn’t not.

There were so many worries, so many things that needed attending to: a torn shirt; an outbreak of boils; a pain in her stomach—and she was refused permission to go to the doctor. One day the skin on her heels started tearing, and then she was limping, and her footcloths were black with blood. Then one of her felt boots was falling apart. Then she was desperate to wash herself and her things; she simply had to go to the bathhouse at once, even if it were only for a few minutes, without waiting for the day when it would be her turn. Then she had to find a way of drying her padded jacket, which had got soaked in the rains...And it was a struggle to get hold of every smallest thing: a tin of hot water; a length of darning thread; a needle she could rent; a spoon with an intact handle; a scrap of material to use as a patch. And how could she escape from the gnats? How could she protect her face and hands from the cold—a cold that was as vicious as the camp guards?

The prisoners’ cursing and swearing, their fights and quarrels were no easier to bear than the work.

Life in the barrack went on.

Auntie Tanya, who had once lived in Oryol and worked as a cleaner, used to whisper, “Grief to those who live on this earth!” She had a coarse face, more like that of a man; it looked cruel and frenzied. But there was not the least hint of cruelty or frenzy in Auntie Tanya, nothing but kindness. Why had this saint been sent to the camp? With an incomprehensible meekness, she was always ready to help out, to take someone else’s place washing floors or doing some other routine task in the barrack.

The two old nuns, Varvara and Ksenya, would exchange quick whispers the moment any sinner began to come near them. Then they would fall silent. They lived in a world apart. To sign any document was a sin; to utter their worldly name was a sin; to drink from the same mug as a woman of the world was a sin; to put on a camp jacket was a sin. They would die rather than do any of these things—so stubbornly did they cling to their holiness. Their holiness was visible in their clothes, in their white kerchiefs, in their pursed lips, but in their eyes there was only cold indifference—and contempt for the sins and sufferings of the camps. Their celibate souls were repelled by womanly passions and troubles, by the sufferings of mothers and wives; to them, all such things seemed unclean. What mattered was to preserve the cleanliness of your kerchief, of your cup, to purse your lips and keep your distance from the sinful life of the camp. The thieves hated them, and the “wives” disliked and avoided them too.

Wives, wives, wives, from Moscow and from Leningrad, from Kiev, Kharkov, and Rostov; sad women, down-to-earth women, and unworldly women; sinful, weak, meek, and spiteful women; women who laughed a lot; Russian and non-Russian women—and all of them wearing their camp jackets. The wives of doctors and engineers, of artists and agronomists; the wives of marshals of the Soviet Union and the wives of chemists; the wives of public prosecutors and of dispossessed small farmers; the wives of peasants who grew grain in Russia, the Ukraine, and Belorussia. All of them had been led by their husbands into the Scythian dark of the burial mounds known as camp barracks.

The more famous the “enemy of the people” who had perished, the wider the circle of women he dragged down: his wife, his ex-wife, his very first wife, his sisters, a secretary, a daughter, a close friend of his wife, a daughter from his first marriage.

Of some it was said, “She’s surprisingly modest and unassuming.” Of others: “Oh, she’s quite unbearable. So high and mighty—anyone would think she was still in possession of all her Kremlin privileges!” The latter had their toadies and dependents even here. Over them hung an aura of power and doom. People repeated in a whisper, “No, you can be sure they won’t get out of here alive.”

There were old women with calm, tired eyes who had first been imprisoned way back in Lenin’s day and who had served whole decades in the prisons and camps. Members of The People’s Will, Social Democrats, and Socialist Revolutionaries. These women were treated with respect by the guards, and even by the thieves. They did not get up from the bedboards even if the camp superintendent himself came into the barrack. People said that one of them, Olga Nikolaevna, a little old woman with gray hair, had been an anarchist before the Revolution; she had thrown a bomb at the carriage of the governor of Warsaw and had fired a shot at a police general. And now here she was—sitting on the bedboards, reading a book, and drinking a mug of hot water. One night Masha had come back from a visit to the storeroom with Semisotov and this old woman had come up to her, stroked her on the head, and said, “My poor girl!” How Masha had cried.

Susanna Karlovna Rudolf’s place on the bedboards was not far from Masha’s. She was still doing her exercises, still taking care always to breathe through her nose. Her Christian Socialist husband, a German American, had come to Soviet Russia with his family and taken Soviet citizenship. Professor Rudolf had been sentenced to “ten years without right of correspondence,” that is, he had been shot in the basement of the Lubyanka. Susanna Karlovna and her three daughters—Agnessa, Louisa, and Lena—had been sent to strict-regime labor camps. She knew nothing at all about her elder daughters, and it was now some time since Lena, the youngest, had been sent to the camp for the disabled. Susanna Karlovna no longer exchanged greetings with Olga Nikolaevna—not since Olga Nikolaevna had called Stalin a Fascist and Lenin the assassin of Russian freedom. Susanna Karlovna said that through her work she was helping to construct a new world and that this gave her the strength to endure the separation from her husband and daughters. When she was living in London, she had known H. G. Wells, and in Washington she had met President Roosevelt, who had enjoyed talking to her husband. She accepted everything; she understood everything. There was only one thing she did not quite understand: the man who had come to arrest her husband had pocketed a large and very rare gold coin; it was almost the size of a child’s hand and it was worth a hundred dollars. On it was a silhouette of a Red Indian with feathered headgear. The officer must, she thought, have taken it for his little son, not even realizing it was gold...

All of them—the pure and the fallen, the most robust and the most exhausted—lived in a world of hope. Hope sometimes slept, sometimes awoke, but it never left them.

Masha too had hope. Hope tormented her; but even as it tormented her, hope made it possible for her to breathe.

The Siberian winter, itself almost as long as a term in camp, was followed by a pale spring. Masha and two other women were sent to clear the road to the “socialist settlement” where the camp bosses and the free employees lived in log cottages.

What she saw from a distance was the silhouette of a rubber plant and her own Arbat curtains on the high windows. She saw a little girl with a school satchel climb up onto the porch and enter the house belonging to the officer in charge of the administration of the strict-regime labor camps.

Their guard said, “What d’you think you’re here for—to watch a movie?”

And on their way back in the last of the evening light, as they passed the timber store, they suddenly heard the sound of Radio Magadan.

Masha and the two other women dragging themselves along through the spring mud put their spades down and stopped.

Silhouetted against the pale sky were the camp watchtowers. The guards in their black coats were like huge motionless flies. As for the squat barracks, it was as if they had just come out of the earth and were now thinking better of it, wondering if they should sink down into it again.

It was not sad music but merry; it was dance music. Listening to it, Masha wept as she seemed never to have wept in all her life. And the two other women—one of them a kulak who had been deported during total collectivization, the other an elderly woman from Leningrad, wearing glasses with cracked lenses—wept beside her. Somehow it looked as if the cracks in the Leningrad woman’s glasses had been made by her tears.

The guard did not know what to do. It was only very rarely that the zeks wept; their hearts were like the tundra—gripped by permanent frost.

The guard kept prodding the women in the back and begging, “All right now, that’s enough now, you shits...I’m asking you politely, you whores...”

He kept looking around for something. It never entered his head that the women might be weeping because of the music.

Nor did Masha herself understand why her heart was suddenly overflowing with anguish and despair. It was as if everything that had ever happened had become one: her mother’s love; beautiful poems; the check woolen dress that so suited her; Andryusha; the grubby face of the interrogator; dawn over the suddenly gleaming light-blue sea at Kelasuri, not far from Sukhumi; little Yulenka’s chatter; Semisotov; the old nuns; the furious quarrels of the bull dykes; her anguish because her brigade leader had begun looking very intently at her, narrowing her eyes, just as Semisotov had done. Why had this merry dance music made Masha sense so acutely her filthy undershirt, the sour smell of her jacket, her damp boots that were as heavy as irons? Why, all of a sudden, this question that had cut like a razor blade through her heart: Why, why had all this happened to her? Why this terrible cold, this moral degradation, this new submissiveness to her camp fate?

And hope, which until then had always oppressed her heart with its living weight, now died.

As she listened to this merry dance music, Masha’s hope of seeing Yulia died. Yulia was lost forever in the great network of children’s centers and orphanages; she was lost in the vastness of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. In student hostels and clubs young people were dancing to merry music like this...And Masha understood that her husband was no more; he had been shot, and she would never see him again.

And she was left without hope, entirely alone...Never would she see Yulia—neither today, nor in the future, when she was an old woman with gray hair.

Lord, Lord, have pity on her. Pity her, Lord. Have mercy upon her.

A year later Masha left the camp. Before returning to freedom, she lay for a while on some pine planks in a freezing hut. No one tried to hurry her out to work, and no one abused her. The medical orderlies placed Masha Lyubimova in a rectangular box made from boards that the timber inspectors had rejected for any other use. This was the last time anyone looked at her face. On it was a sweet, childish expression of delight and confusion, the same look as when she had stood by the timber store and listened to the merry music, first with joy and then with the realization that all hope had gone.

And Ivan Grigoryevich thought that in the camps, in the labor camps of Kolyma, men were not equal to women. Men, really, had had it easier.