The Secrets We Kept(24)
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By the fourth day of my rehabilitation, a thick callus had developed on my once soft hands and I could finally grip the pick. I swung it overhead and into the earth with surprising force. By day’s end, I’d turned over my assigned piece of earth and was finally given rations, of which I could eat only a few bites. My body had adapted faster than my mind. Isn’t that the way it always works, Anatoli?
Those first few terrible days, then weeks, then months, then years, passed—not in days on a calendar but in holes dug, number of lice picked from my hair. They passed in blisters cracked and calluses made from shoveling, in cockroaches killed under our bunks, in the number of visible ribs. And there were only two seasons: summer and winter; each as punishing as the other.
I learned what human bodies need to survive, how very little we require. I could survive on eight hundred grams of bread, two cubes of sugar, and soup so thin it was hard to tell whether it was actual food or seawater.
But the mind takes so much more to survive, and Borya was never far from mine. I used to think I could feel it when he thought of me—that the tingle I felt whispering across the back of my neck or down the length of my arms was him. I felt it for months. Then one year passed without that feeling, that tingle, then another. Did that mean he was dead? If they sent me to the Gulag, surely what they did to him must’ve been even worse.
Anatoli, I can tell you now that my five-year sentence was a blessing and a curse. Only bourgeois Muscovites had such pitiful sentences, a fact I was reminded of again and again by our barrack brigade leader—a Ukrainian woman named Buinaya, who was sentenced to ten years for stealing a sack of flour from her collective farm. She was strong and severe and everything I was not. Over time, I grew stronger in the fields, but I was still one of the slowest workers, and Buinaya made a point of making me the primary recipient of her sharp tongue.
Once, after coming in from the fields, I was too tired to bathe and went directly to my bunk, so exhausted I didn’t even remove my dirt-encrusted smock. Just as I shut my eyes, I heard Buinaya’s unmistakable voice. “Number 3478!” she called out like a magpie with a cough, using my prison number as the guards did.
I didn’t stir. But she called out my number again, and Ana tapped the underside of my bed. When I didn’t respond, she kicked it. “Answer her or there’ll be trouble,” she whispered.
I sat up. “Yes?”
“I thought you Muscovites were a cleanly people. You smell like shit.”
A ripple of laughter erupted across Barrack No. 11 and I felt the burn of embarrassment spread across my chest and up my neck to my cheeks. I did smell, although there were women in the barracks who smelled far worse.
“I was born in a dugout,” she continued, “and even I was taught to wash my crotch at least once a week. No wonder only traitor poets will go near yours. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
The laughter rose as I swung my legs over the edge of the bunk and got down. My legs shook so hard I was sure they were vibrating the floorboards. I could feel every eye on me, awaiting my response. But I hesitated, and turned to face the wall, which made Buinaya, then the rest, laugh even harder. She picked up a small pile of her dirty underthings and marched down the middle of the barracks until she reached my bunk. “Here,” she said, dumping the clothes on the floor. “While you’re cleaning your filthy body, you don’t mind washing some of my things as well? Of course not.”
Anatoli, I’d like to report that I turned away from the wall and threw Buinaya’s dirty things back in her face. That I stood my ground and slapped her, which provoked a fight that left me bruised the next day. That although I’d lost the fight, I’d gained Buinaya’s respect.
But I didn’t. I took her dirty things to the wash basin and scrubbed them with my lye ration, then carefully hung them to dry in the best spot next to the wood-burning stove. Then I stripped and washed myself in the cold, cloudy water. Then I slept. Then it happened again the next day.
If I were to give you now what you’d asked for during our late-night chats in Lubyanka, Anatoli, would it do me any good? Would my sentence be lessened if I cooperated now? If I were to confess to every last charge, could I leave this place? If I took the sharp end of my pick and used all my force, could I end things for good?
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One might think winter would be worse, but the summers are what wore us down most. As we worked the fields, digging or pulling or hauling, sweat pooled under our gray smocks. We called those smocks “devil’s skins” as they didn’t allow our skin to breathe. We developed sores and rashes and attracted black flies with vicious bites. To shield us from the sun, we stretched gauze over rusted wire to fashion hats that resembled a beekeeper’s. Other women, their hide already tanned from a decade or more in the fields, laughed at our hats, at our precious porcelain Muscovite skin. They were thirty or forty but looked sixty or seventy. They knew it would be only a matter of time before we’d give up trying to block the sun—before we’d turn our faces up and let the rays take from us the last remainder of the people we were before coming to Potma.
We were in the fields twelve hours at a time, Anatoli. I’d pass those hours reciting Borya’s poems in my head—timing the rhythm of each line, each break, with the clang of my shovel.