Between Shades of Gray (11 page)

“Davai!” The young blond guard handed Mother a belted piece of canvas and marched our group away.

“Meet us back at the shack,” yelled Mother to Jonas. How would that be possible? Mother and I couldn’t even find our way back from the NKVD building. It was Jonas who showed us the way. We would surely be lost.

My stomach turned with hunger. My legs dragged. Mother and Mrs. Rimas whispered back and forth in Lithuanian behind the blond guard. After walking a few kilometers we arrived at a clearing in the woods. The guard grabbed the canvas from Mother and threw it on the ground. He yelled a command.

“He says, ‘dig,’” said Mother.

“Dig? Dig where?” asked Mrs. Rimas.

“Here, I guess,” said Mother. “He says if we want to eat, we must dig. Our ration depends on our progress.”

“What are we to dig with?” I asked.

Mother asked the blond guard. He kicked the heap of canvas. Mother unfolded it and found several rusty hand shovels, the kind used in a flower garden. The handles were missing.

Mother said something to the guard that prompted an irate “Davai” and the kicking of the shovels into our shins.

“Get out of my way,” said the grouchy woman. “I’m going to get this over with. I need to eat and so do my girls.” She got down on her hands and knees and started chipping away at the earth with the tiny shovel. We all followed. The guard sat under a tree and watched, smoking cigarettes.

“Where are the potatoes and the beets?” I asked Mother.

“Well, they are clearly punishing me,” said Mother.

“Punishing you?” asked Mrs. Rimas. Mother whispered in her ear about the commander’s offer to work for him.

“But Elena, you could have gotten preferential treatment,” said Mrs. Rimas. “And most likely, extra food.”

“A guilty conscience is not worth extra food,” said Mother. “Think of the demands that could be made of me in that office. And think of what could happen to people. I don’t need that on my soul. I’ll persevere like everyone else.”

“A woman said there’s a town five kilometers away. There’s a store, a post office, and a school,” said Mrs. Rimas.

“Perhaps we could walk there,” said Mother, “and send letters. Maybe someone has heard from the men.”

“Be careful, Elena. Sending letters may endanger the people back home,” said Mrs. Rimas. “Don’t put anything in writing, ever.”

I looked at my feet. I had been writing down everything and had already filled several pages with descriptions and drawings.

“No,” whispered Mother. She looked to the grouchy woman pounding the dirt and leaned toward Mrs. Rimas. “I have a contact.”

What did Mother mean, she had a “contact”? Who was her contact? And the war—now the Germans were in Lithuania. What was Hitler doing? I wondered what had happened to our house and everything we left behind. And why were we digging this stupid hole?

“Well, at least your housemate talks to you,” said Mother. “Ours is a beastly thing that grabbed Lina by the hair.”

“The villagers are not happy,” said Mrs. Rimas. “But they were expecting us. Apparently, several truckloads of Estonians were dumped in a nearby village a few days ago.”

Mother’s shovel paused. “Estonians?”

“Yes,” whispered Mrs. Rimas. “They’ve deported people from Estonia and Latvia, too.”

Mother sighed. “I feared that might happen. It’s madness. How many will they deport?”

“Elena, there will be hundreds of thousands,” said Mrs. Rimas.

“Quit your gossiping and get to work,” barked the grouchy woman. “I want to eat.”

WE HAD DUG a pit more than two feet deep when a truck brought a small bucket of water. The guard gave us a break. Blisters wept on my hands. Our fingers were caked with dirt. They wouldn’t give us a ladle or cup. We bent like dogs, each taking turns lapping out of the bucket while the blond guard drank leisurely from a large canteen. The water smelled fishy, but I didn’t care. My knees looked like raw meat, and my back ached from bending for hours.

We were digging in a small clearing, surrounded by woods. Mother asked permission to go to the bathroom and then pulled me, along with Mrs. Rimas, into the trees. We squatted, our dresses bunched around our waists, to relieve ourselves.

We faced each other, all on our haunches. “Elena, can you pass the talcum, please?” said Mrs. Rimas, wiping herself with a leaf.

We began to laugh. It was such a ridiculous sight, grabbing our knees in a circle. We actually laughed. Mother laughed so hard that her ringlets fell loose from the kerchief she had tied around her hair.

“Our sense of humor,” said Mother, her eyes pooled with laughing tears. “They can’t take that away from us, right?”

What did Joana know about the boys and their meeting that I didn’t?

The laughter had died. “Lina, let’s go, dear,” said Mother.

I looked back to the hole. What if we were digging our own grave?

I FOUND A STICK and snapped it in half. I sat down and used it to draw in a patch of hard dirt. I drew our house, garden, and the trees before it was time to return to work. I pushed small stones into the earth with my thumb, creating a pathway to our front door, and lined the roof with twigs.

“We must prepare,” said Mother. “The winter will be beyond anything we’ve experienced. Temperatures will be below freezing. There will be no food.”

“Winter?” I said, leaning back on my heels. “Are you joking? You think we’ll still be here when winter comes? Mother, no!” Winter was months away. I couldn’t bear the thought of living in that shack, digging holes for months, and trying to avoid the commander. I glanced over to the blond guard. He was looking at my drawing in the dirt.

“I hope not,” said Mother, lowering her voice. “But what if we are? If we’re not prepared, we’ll surely freeze or starve.” Mother had the grouchy woman’s attention.

“The snowstorms in Siberia are treacherous,” said Mrs. Rimas, nodding.

“I don’t know how the shacks withstand it,” said Mother.

“Why don’t we build our own building?” I asked. “We can build a log house like the kolkhoz office, with a chimney and a stove. We can all live together.”

“Stupid girl. They’ll never give us time to build something of our own, and if we did build something, they’d take it for themselves,” said the grouchy woman. “Keep digging.”

It began to rain. Water plopped on our heads and shoulders. We opened our mouths to drink.

“This is insanity,” said Mrs. Rimas.

Mother shouted over to the blond guard. The butt of his cigarette glowed under the shelter of the tree branches.

“He says we must dig faster,” said Mother, raising her voice as the rain poured down in sheets. “That the soil will be soft now.”

“Bastard,” said Mrs. Rimas.

I looked over and saw our house melting in the dirt. My drawing stick rolled away, propelled by the wind and rain.

I put my head down and dug. I jabbed the small shovel into the earth, harder and harder, pretending the soil was the commander. My fingers cramped and my arms shook with exhaustion. The hem of my dress was ripped, and my face and neck were sunburned from the morning sun.

When the rain stopped, we marched back to the camp, covered in mud up to our waists. My stomach convulsed with hunger. Mrs. Rimas slung the canvas over her shoulder and we dragged along, our hands cramped, still locked on to the shovel blades we had gripped for nearly twelve hours.

We entered the camp near the back. I recognized the bald man’s shack with its brown door and was able to direct Mother toward ours. Jonas was inside waiting for us. Every pot was brimming with water.

“You’re back!” he shouted. “I was worried you wouldn’t find the hut.”

Mother wrapped her arms around Jonas, kissing his hair.

“It was still raining when I got back,” explained Jonas. “I dragged the pots outside so we could have water.”

“Very smart, love. Have you had some to drink?” asked Mother.

“Plenty,” he said, looking at me in my bedraggled state. “You can have a nice bath.”

We drank from a large pot before washing our legs off. Mother insisted I drink more, even when I felt I couldn’t.

Jonas sat cross-legged on the boards. One of Mother’s scarves was spread out in front of him. In the center was a lonely piece of bread, with a small flower next to it.

Mother looked down at the bread and the wilted flower. “What sort of banquet do we have here?” she said.

“I received a ration coupon for my work today. I worked with two ladies making shoes,” said Jonas, smiling. “Are you hungry? You look tired.”

“I’m so hungry,” I said, staring at the solitary piece of bread. If Jonas received bread for working indoors on shoes, we must certainly be getting an entire turkey, I thought.

“We are each entitled to three hundred grams of bread for our work,” explained Jonas. “You have to collect your ration coupon at the kolkhoz office.”

“That’s ... that’s all?” asked Mother.

Jonas nodded.

Three hundred grams of dry bread. I couldn’t believe it. That’s all we got after digging for hours. They were starving us and would probably dump us into the holes we dug. “It’s not enough,” I said.

“We’ll find something more,” said Mother.

Fortunately, the commander wasn’t at the log building when we arrived. We were given our coupons without having to beg or dance. We followed the other workers into a nearby building. The bread was weighed and distributed to us. I could almost close my palm around the entire ration. On the way back, we saw Miss Grybas in back of her shack. She waved us over. Her arms and dress were filthy. She had been working in the beet fields all day. Her face twisted with revulsion when she saw us. “What are they doing to you?”