Between Shades of Gray(22)

I gasped, along with everyone else. Andrius grabbed Jonas’s face and covered his eyes. Blood, the color of thick red wine, pooled under Ona’s head. Her leg splayed out in an unnatural, bent angle. One of her feet was missing a shoe.

“Lina,” said Andrius.

I turned my head to him, dazed.

“Don’t look,” he said.

My mouth opened, but nothing came out. I turned my head back. The young blond guard was staring at Ona’s body.

“Lina, look at me,” urged Andrius.

Mother slumped on her knees near the edge of the truck, looking down at Ona. I moved and sat down near my brother.

The engine rumbled and the truck began to roll. Mother sat down and put her face in her hands. Miss Grybas clucked her tongue, shaking her head.

Jonas pulled my head against his knees and patted my hair. “Please, don’t say anything to the guards. Don’t make them mad, Lina,” he whispered.

Ona’s body got smaller and smaller as we drove away. She lay dead in the dirt, murdered by the NKVD. Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, her daughter decomposed in the grass. How would her family ever know what happened to her? How would anyone know what was happening to us? I would continue to write and draw whenever I had the chance. I would draw the commander firing, Mother on her knees with her head in her hands, and our truck driving away, the tires spitting gravel onto Ona’s dead body.





28


WE DROVE INTO A LARGE collective farming area. Clusters of decrepit one-room cabins formed a shanty village. The warm sun was clearly temporary. Buildings pitched at a slant, their warped roofs warning of extreme weather.

The guards ordered us off the truck. Andrius hung his head, standing close to his mother. They began directing us to what I thought were our own shacks, but when Miss Grybas and Mrs. Rimas entered one, a woman ran out and began arguing with the guards.

“There are people living in the cabins,” whispered Jonas.

“Yes, we’ll most likely have to share,” said Mother, pulling us close.

Two women walked past us carrying large buckets of water. I didn’t recognize them from our train.

We were assigned to a dingy hut near the back of the settlement. The gray wood was bald, shaved by many seasons of wind and snow. The door had splits and cracks and sat crooked on the frame. A strong wind could whisk the shack up into the sky, scattering it in a burst of pieces. The blond guard pulled the door open, bellowed something in Russian and pushed us inside. A squat Altaian woman wrapped in layers ran to the door and began screaming after the guard. Mother moved us to the corner. The woman turned and began yelling at us. Her hair poked out of her kerchief like black straw. Wrinkles formed an atlas on her wide, weathered face.

“What’s she saying?” asked Jonas.

“She says she has no room for filthy criminals,” said Mother.

“We’re not criminals,” I said.

The woman continued her rant, throwing her arms in the air and spitting on the floor of the hut.

“Is she crazy?” asked Jonas.

“She says she barely has food enough for herself and she’s not about to share it with criminals like us.” Mother turned her back to the woman. “Well, now, we’ll just set our things in this corner. Jonas, put your suitcase down.”

The woman grabbed my hair and pulled it, yanking me toward the door to throw me out.

Mother yelled, blasting the woman in Russian. She ripped the woman’s hand from my head, slapped her, and pushed her away. Jonas kicked her in the shin. The Altaian woman stared at us with angled black eyes. Mother returned the stare. The woman let out a hearty laugh. She asked a question.

“We’re Lithuanian,” said Mother, first speaking in Lithuanian and then in Russian. The woman jibbered.

“What’s she saying?” I asked.

“She says feisty people make good workers and that we have to pay her rent.” Mother continued asking questions.

“Pay her? For what? To live in this hole in the middle of nowhere?” I said.

“We’re in Altai,” said Mother. “They are farming potatoes and beets.”

“So there are potatoes to eat?” asked Jonas.

“Food is rationed. She said the guards oversee the farm and the workers,” said Mother.

I remembered Papa talking about Stalin confiscating peasants’ land, tools, and animals. He told them what crops they would produce and how much they would be paid. I thought it was ridiculous. How could Stalin simply take something that didn’t belong to him, something that a farmer and his family had worked their whole lives for? “That’s communism, Lina,” Papa had said.

The woman yelled at Mother, wagging her finger and shaking her head. She left the hut.

We were on a kolkhoz, a collective farm, and I was to become a beet farmer.

I hated beets.





maps and snakes





29


THE SHACK WAS approximately ten feet by twelve feet. Lodged in the corner was a small stove surrounded by a couple of pots and dirty tins. A pallet of straw sat next to the wall near the stove. There was no pillow, only a worn quilted coverlet. Two tiny windows were created out of bits of glass that had been puttied together.

“There’s nothing here,” I said. “There isn’t a sink, a table, or a wardrobe. Is that where she sleeps?” I asked. “Where will we sleep? Where is the bathroom?”