The Secrets We Kept(23)

A dozen female guards appeared and the men who’d marched us there turned and silently walked back into the snow. We were led into a long building with a cement floor and stove. There, the guards instructed us to strip. We stood naked, shivering while they ran their fingers through our hair, then across our bodies, lifting our arms and checking under our breasts. They made us spread our fingers, our toes, our legs. They stuck their fingers in our mouths. I began to warm up, but not from the wood stove. I burned with an anger I still have not yet begun to process. Have you felt such an anger, Anatoli? An anger burning somewhere inside you that you can’t pinpoint but that can overtake you like a match to petrol? Does it come for you at night, as it comes for me? Is that why you’re in the position you are in now? Is power, no matter the cost, the only cure?

After the search, we got in another line. There’s always another line in the Gulag, Anatoli. They handed us pieces of lye soap, just slivers, and turned on the showers. The water was cold but felt scalding hot on our frozen skin. We air-dried and were dusted with a powder to kill whatever we may have brought with us.

A Polish woman with beautiful wisps of flaxen hair framing her otherwise bald head sat at a table mending smocks the color of an overcast day. She looked us each over and pointed to either the stack of smocks on her right or the stack on her left: large and larger.

Then a woman with prominent ears and an even more prominent nose who didn’t even attempt to guess our right size gave us shoes. I stepped into the black leather shoes, and as I went to walk, my heels came out. It would take a month of saving up my sugar rations until I could barter with another prisoner—not for a new pair of shoes, which would have cost me at least five months of sugar, but for a ream of tape with which to fasten them to my feet.

The guards split the line into three and I followed my line into Barrack No. 11. I’d live there for the next three years, Anatoli, shuffling my feet so I didn’t lose a shoe.



* * *



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Barrack No. 11 was empty, its current residents still at work in the fields. A guard pointed to the empty bunks, three layered on top of each other, in the back of the room, farthest from the wood-burning stove. We ducked under the clothesline strung from wall to wall, where women had hung their washed but stained socks and underthings. The building smelled of sweat and onions and warm bodies. It smelled of the living; a small comfort.

I placed the wool blanket I’d been given onto the top bunk, second from the back. I chose that bunk because a petite woman I’d noticed on the train took the one below it. I guessed her to be around my age, midthirties, with black hair and delicate hands, and I thought perhaps we could become friends. Her name was Ana.

I never made friends with Ana. Nor did I make friends with any of the other women in Barrack No. 11. At the end of each day, we were exhausted and needed to conserve our energy to get out of bed and do it again the next day.

That first night in Potma was quiet. All nights were like that, only the howls of the wind to soothe us to sleep. Sometimes we could hear the cry of a woman who’d succumbed to loneliness ring out across the camp like an air raid siren. The woman would be quickly quieted—how, we could only imagine. And although no one spoke of those cries, we all heard them, and we all silently joined in.



* * *



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My first day in the fields, the earth was hard and frozen, and the pick too heavy for me to raise above my waist. My hands were blistered within half an hour. I used all my strength just to pierce the soil—just a chip, the width of a finger. The woman next to me was having better luck, having been given a shovel that she could step on, so that her weight would force its tip into the ground. But I had only a pick, and a few cubic meters of earth to be upturned before I’d be given my ration for the day.

That first day of my rehabilitation, I didn’t eat anything.

My second day of rehabilitation, I didn’t eat again.

On my third day, I still could make but a few dents in the earth, so was denied rations yet again. But a young nun broke off a piece of her bread and handed it to me as I passed her in line for the bathhouse. I was thankful, and for the first time since the men had taken me in my apartment in Moscow, I thought that maybe I should start praying.



* * *



—

The nuns of Potma fascinated me, Anatoli. They were a small group from Poland and tougher than the most hardened criminals. They refused to back down when they didn’t agree with a guard’s order. They prayed aloud during morning reveille, which infuriated the guards but gave me comfort, despite not being an overly religious woman myself. Sometimes the guards would make an example of their insolence by dragging one out of line by her smock and making her kneel in front of us. One nun was forced to kneel like that for an entire day, her bare knees pressed into the rocky soil. But she never gave in, never asked to stand—praying the whole time with the serene smile of a Holy Fool. They used their fingers to count beads on invisible rosaries, even as their faces burned under the unforgiving sun, even as urine trickled from their smocks and cut a path through the dirt.

Once or twice, the guards threw the whole lot of them into the punishment block—the first barrack built at the camp, where the roof had half caved in and the cold air rushed in, along with insects and rats.

It was hard not to be jealous of the nuns, even though their sentences far exceeded my own. They had one another, and no need for word from the outside world, something the rest of us craved. Even when they were separated, they never succumbed to the dark loneliness that plagued us all. They had the company of their God. My only faith was put into a man: my Borya, a mere mortal, a poet. And having been unable to contact him since the men took me from my apartment, I didn’t know whether he was dead or alive.