Altar of Bones (3 page)

“They didn’t have to kill him,” she said on a gush of bright red blood and one last drowning breath. “He never drank from the altar of bones. I got it back.”

Norilsk prison camp, Siberia, USSR
February 1937

L
ENA
O
RLOVA
saw the wolves. They lurked at the edge of the darkness just beyond the searchlights, tails slinking low along the snow. She walked faster, her felt boots slipping on the frozen ruts in the road. She could see her breath. She was cold, so cold, and any sudden movement seemed to make the air around her crackle like paper.

She didn’t notice the corpse until she nearly walked into it. It hung by its heels from the prison gatepost, naked, hands tied with wire behind its back, its head sunk to one side, eyes half-open. Above its bound feet, she saw, they’d nailed a board that said in bright red letters
THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM NORILSK
.

The door to the guardhouse slammed opened, and she whirled, her heart thudding in her chest.

Lena, you fool, quit acting so jumpy. Or they’re going to suspect you’re up to no good before you’ve even started
.

A man in the blue uniform of the NKVD came out of the guardhouse and held out his hand, snapping his fingers. “Papers.”

Lena fumbled in the pocket of her padded jacket for her identity card and travel permit. As she handed them over, a gust of wind rocked the body hanging on the post. Out in the dark the wolves began to howl.

The sentry held her papers up closer to the shaft of light spilling from the lamp that hung over the door. Every evening for the last 272 days she had walked from the staff barracks, through this gate, and to her post as the nurse on night duty in the prison camp’s infirmary, and every
evening this very same sentry asked to see her papers. He would take his sweet time looking them over, comparing her face to the photographs, checking seals and signatures and God alone knew what else, as if something about them were suddenly going to be different than it had been the time before.

It was so cold she could spit icicles. Lena thumped her arms with her fists and stamped her feet, which accomplished nothing except to dislodge the snow caked on her coat.

“Everything is in order,” the sentry said as he handed back her papers.

The identity card stated she was a free worker, allowing her to come and go through the gate without risk of being shot. That she was “free” only to work at a vocation the State had chosen for her, in this place the State had sent her to—and a prison camp, no less—was an irony only Lena seemed to appreciate. Her travel permit was another such joke. Her father, an enemy of the people, had been exiled here to live out his days. She, his daughter, was an exile as well. She could travel at will over this small corner of Siberia, the Taimyr Peninsula, but she was forbidden from putting one foot outside it.

The sentry must have thought the cold had frozen her solid, for he flapped his hand impatiently. “I said everything’s in order. You may pass.”

“Lucky me,” Lena said under her breath.

She didn’t look at the corpse again as she walked through the gate, but she felt its presence sitting like a vulture on her shoulder.
There is no escape from Norilsk. Well, so they think…
.

Because tonight she and Nikki would either prove them wrong, or the wolves would have two more to feed on.

L
ENA GENTLY CLOSED
the eyes of the prisoner who’d died sometime during the last hour. In the space next to
CAUSE OF DEATH
on his chart, she wrote
heart failure
because she was not allowed to write
starvation
.

She looked at her watch, and her heart skipped a beat. After eleven.

Mother of God, where was Sergeant Chirkov? He should have been here by now. At midnight she and Nikolai needed to be on the other side of the yard behind the latrines, ready to dash across no-man’s-land during the forty-five seconds or so the searchlights went dark and the guards on the watchtowers changed shifts. But they couldn’t leave the infirmary until the sergeant had done his nightly bed count.

Lena stared at her watch as the seconds ticked away. She had no choice, she would have to go on with her rounds. Pneumonia, dysentery, frostbite … The beds the patients lay on were little more than wooden trestles; they had only rough blankets to cover them. And it was always so cold, so cold. She strained to hear the sergeant’s heavy tread. Five more minutes passed by. Ten.

She moved to the next bed, to a boy who had tried to commit suicide by cutting the veins in his wrists with his teeth. He’d be dead by morning. And the old man next to him had taken an ax to his own foot—

The door opened with a scream of rusting hinges, and Lena nearly dropped a tray of sterile bandages.

Sergeant Chirkov entered with a blast of cold air, stamping the snow off his boots. A shy smile softened his ruddy face when he saw her. “So it’s you on duty tonight. I was hoping it would be … that is, I …” He flushed and looked away. “Comrade Orlova,” he finished with a stiff nod.

“Comrade Sergeant.” Lena set down the tray and sneaked a quick look at her watch. Eleven eighteen. They could still make it. The sergeant just had to do his count quickly and be gone.

He ambled over to the stove and lifted his overcoat to warm his backside. The stove—nothing more than a small iron coal pot, really—barely made a dent in the icebox chill of the long, narrow room.

“You heard about the excitement we had this morning?” he said.

“I saw the aftermath of it. Hanging on the front gate.”

“Well …” The sergeant shrugged as if to say,
What else can you expect?
He began to pull the makings of a cigarette out of his coat pocket, and Lena wanted to scream in frustration.

“That stupid
zek
,” the sergeant went on, as he tore off a piece of newspaper and poured some coarse tobacco on it. “Did he really think he could make it over the fence alive? And even if by some miracle he’d
managed it without getting shot full of holes—it’s Siberia waiting for him out there, not a stroll through Red Square.”

Lena looked up from the half-amputated foot she’d been washing. The sergeant had tilted his head away from her while he lit his cigarette. She had a terrible thought he knew what she planned and was giving her a warning. But when he looked around at her again, she could read nothing in his face.

“You’re right,” she said. “The prisoner didn’t stand a chance.”

“So why do they do it then? Can you tell me that? Why do they try to escape when they know it’s so hopeless?”

“I don’t know,” Lena lied.

She wound a fresh bandage around the raw stubs of missing toes. The man lay rigid on the cot, his eyes tightly shut, not making a sound even though he had to be in great pain. He had done this to himself. He had taken an ax and tried to chop off his foot to get out of the nickel mines. It had been an act of insane desperation, but Lena had no trouble understanding why.

The sergeant left the stove at last, but instead of doing his counting and leaving, he strolled to the window. She doubted he could see his own reflection with so much ice webbing the glass.

“There’s a
purga
coming later. You can feel it in the air. Don’t …” His voice trailed off. Lena was sure now he was trying to give her a warning.
Don’t do this thing you are planning, Lena Orlova. Don’t do it. Not tonight. Not ever
.

The silence dragged on, until Lena couldn’t bear it. “Don’t what?”

“Nothing. Only, you can lose your way in a blizzard just going from the kitchen door to the latrines. If you’d like some company walking back to the barracks after your shift is over …”

She managed a smile. “I would like that.”

The sergeant grinned, slapped his hands together. “All right then.”

Lena looked at her watch. Eleven twenty-seven.
Dear God
. “Sergeant, shouldn’t you …”

“I know, I know. Duty calls.” He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. “I see that we have a full house again tonight.”

It was a regulation that a prisoner had to be either crippled or running
a temperature of at least 101 to be admitted into the infirmary, and the beds were always full. With one glance the sergeant could look down the length of the room and see every bed was full, yet regulations said to count them, and so he counted.

While the sergeant walked down the rows of beds, matching the names on the charts to the ones on his list, Lena dumped the soiled bandages into a bucket and moved on to her next patient.

At last the sergeant was done with his counting. But instead of leaving, he came to stand beside her, watching as she bathed the ulcerous face of an old man near death from scurvy.

“Tell me, Comrade Orlova, how did you come to be in such a place as Norilsk?”

Lena tucked a stray hank of hair behind her ear, then made a note on the patient’s chart.
Just go
, she wanted to shout.
Just go, go, go
… “I was born here. Or rather near here, on the shores of the Ozero P’asino. And I work in this infirmary because the Revolution in its infinite wisdom says I must.”

The sergeant stifled a groan. “Aw, Lena. You shouldn’t say such things. And besides, do you think anyone asked me if I wanted to be guarding a bunch of pathetic
zeks
out on the frozen edge of nowhere? But the needs of the collective must always come before the wants of the individual.”

She’d known as soon the words left her mouth their flippancy could get her in trouble. He was probably thinking now of reporting her to the
politruk
—well, what did she care if he did? After tonight, she was gone, gone, gone.

A silence fell between them, lengthened, grew strained.

“But are you truly one of them?” he finally said, and she knew that by
them
he meant the Yakuts: reindeer herders with their dark, leathery skin, flat faces, and slits for eyes. “Because your eyes, they are like the sky back home right before a summer storm. And your hair …” A stand of it had come loose again, and he reached up to tuck it back behind her ear. “It’s the color of ripe wheat rippling in the wind.”

She started at his touch, stepping away from him. “I didn’t know you had so much of the poet in you, Comrade Sergeant. And you’re wrong.

My mother was indeed a Yak, and I am the image of her, as she was the image of her mother, and so on, bound by blood to the beginning of time.”

She snatched another quick look at her watch. Eleven thirty-eight. They were never going to make it now, it was too late. No, they still had to try. Tomorrow the commandant was moving her onto the day shift, where she could be stuck for months. By then it would be summer and she would be too …

She pressed her hand against her belly, still flat now and showing nothing, but not for long. It was tonight, or never.

She picked up a brimming bedpan. “Pardon me, Comrade Sergeant, but as you can see I’ve a lot of work to do.”

“Yes, of course. I should be going on about my rounds, but I’ll be seeing you later? Come morning?”

“Yes. See you later.”

She felt a pang of regret as she watched him walk away from her. He would be blamed for their escape, and for his punishment he could spend twenty years in this very prison camp he was now helping to guard.