The Secrets We Kept(22)

You said I didn’t tell you everything during our nightly talks, that I left great holes in my “stories.” As an interrogator, you must know how unreliable memory can be. One’s mind can never get the entire story straight. But I will try.

I have this one sharpened pencil. It is smaller than my thumb, and my wrist already aches. But I will write until it wears down and turns to dust.

But where to start? Should I begin with this moment? How I spent my day, my eighty-sixth of the 1,825 days it will take to make me a rehabilitated woman? Or should I start with what has already transpired? Do you want to know about my six-hundred-kilometer journey to this place? Have you been on the trains that go to nowhere? Have you visited the windowless wooden boxes they kept us shivering in while we waited to be shuttled to the next location? Do you know what it’s like to live on the edge of the world, Anatoli? So far from Moscow, from your family, from every warm thing and every kindness?

Do you want to know that during the final stage of our journey, the guards forced us to walk? How it was so cold that when the woman walking next to me collapsed and they pried her boot from her foot, she left her smallest toe inside? Or how I shared a train compartment with a woman with two skinny braids that ran the length of her long back who claimed to have drowned her two small children in the bath? How when someone asked her why she did it, she replied that a voice that still won’t shut up had told her to? Should I tell you how she woke up screaming?

No, Anatoli, I won’t write to you of these worries. Really, for what you must know, these details would likely bore you, and I do not wish to bore you. What I wish is for you to keep reading.

Let me go back.

After Moscow, we arrived first to a transit camp, run by female guards—a slight improvement over the conditions where you and I met. The cells were clean and cement-floored, and they smelled of ammonia. Each woman in our cell, Cell No. 142, had her own mattress, and the guards turned the lights off at night and let us finally sleep.

But not for long.

Days after arriving, they came at night and emptied out Cell No. 142. They boarded us onto the trains and told us the next stop, the only stop, was Potma. The train was dark and smelled like rotting wood. Iron bars separated each compartment from the corridor, so the guards could see us at all times. There were two metal buckets in the corner—one our toilet, the other full of lye with which to cover our mess. I claimed a spot on an upper berth, where I could lie down and stretch my legs. And if I tilted my head just so, I could see a sliver of sky through the cracks in the ceiling. If it wasn’t for that tiny sky, I wouldn’t have known when it was day or night, or how many days and nights had passed since we boarded.

It was night when the train came to a stop.

It looked more like a manger than a train station. But instead of sheep or donkeys, men in worn army uniforms with dogs that resembled stout lions awaited us on the platform. The guards yelled for us to get out, and we looked at each other wildly. When no one got up, a guard grabbed a young woman with short red hair by the arm and told her to get in line. We followed in silence.

The guard at the front held up a hand and the march commenced. As we left the platform, we realized there would be no other train or truck to take us the rest of the way. I pulled the sleeves of my coat to cover my balled-up hands. They were warm then, but they wouldn’t be for long.

We cut a path through the virgin snow, following the train tracks until they stopped and disappeared into white. No one asked how long the march would be, but that’s all we could think about. Would it be two hours or two days? Or two weeks? Instead, I attempted to focus on the footsteps of the woman in front of me, whose name I never knew. I tried to fit my own footprints neatly inside the ones she’d left behind. I tried not to think of the way my toes and fingers had begun to tingle, how the snot in my nose dripped and froze in the dimple above my upper lip—the same dimple Borya often touched with a fingertip when teasing me.

It was something out of Doctor Zhivago. Yes, Anatoli, something out of the book you long to read. Our march felt as if it had sprung from Borya’s mind. The moon was full and illuminated the snow-covered road, casting a silvery glow on our footprints. It was a deathly beauty, and maybe if I’d had any sense left in me, I would’ve run out into the woods that lined the road, running and running until my body gave out, or until someone stopped me. I think I would’ve liked to die there, in that place that felt as if it were conjured from Borya’s dreams.



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First, the guard towers—each capped with a dull red star—peeked out from the tops of the tall pines in the distance. Then, as we got closer: the barbed wire fence, the barren yard, the lines of barracks, a thin plume of smoke connecting the gray sky to each building’s chimney. A malnourished rooster walked the fence’s perimeter, its beak cracked, its red comb mangled.

We’d arrived.

I cannot speak for all of us, but I’d spent every second, every minute, every hour, every day of our four-day march dreaming of warmth. And yet, when they herded us through the barbed wire fence and we were allowed to warm ourselves by the fires burning in tin drums in the courtyard, I’d never felt colder.

On the far side of the yard, forty or fifty women stood in a line, holding metal plates and mugs, awaiting dinner. They turned when we approached and appraised our pale faces, our full heads of hair, our hands: frostbitten, yes, but uncalloused. We looked at their jaundiced faces, their kerchiefed or shaved heads, their broad, hunched shoulders. Soon it would be like looking into a mirror. Soon it would be us standing in line for dinner while a new group of women began their rehabilitation.