Sapphire Skies (32 page)

‘Get up, bitch!’

Something sharp hit me in the side but I didn’t feel any pain. The brigadier’s red face came close to mine. He was screaming. ‘Get up, you lazy bitch! Get up!’ He pulled me up by my coat, shook me and slapped my face. But as soon as he let me go, I fell back into the snow.

I gazed up at the trees.
I’m sorry
, I told them.
You are so beautiful. I had no right to kill you.

I heard Katya laugh and smelled vodka on her breath when she bent down to look at me. ‘Let’s see how long it takes you to die, hey? Don’t linger now, you piece of shit!’

She looked warm in a deerskin coat and high boots, impervious to the cold that was killing me.

‘Let’s take her clothes,’ she said to the brigadier. ‘She’ll die quicker that way.’

‘No!’ said the brigadier. ‘I’ve lost too many prisoners to the cold. We’ll make it look like the tree fell on her.’ Even though our lack of food and adequate clothing was not his responsibility, he was supposed to notice if one of his charges was freezing to death.

From the corner of my eye I saw the brigadier move a short distance away from me. Then he ran towards me, leaped into the air and landed with his two feet on my chest. My heart stopped for a second and pain shot through every part of my body. Inwardly I was writhing in agony but I couldn’t move.

The brigadier stepped back, ready to jump on my chest again. I closed my eyes. Why couldn’t he let me die in peace? But this time I heard shouting and blows. Suddenly my body was lifted from the snow. Somebody had picked me up, but who? I tried to open my eyes but I couldn’t.

N
o one expected someone who had suffered a crushed chest as well as hypothermia and malnutrition to survive. My death certificate was filled out in the hospital file; all it required was the doctor’s signature and date and time of death. But while patients with lesser injuries died around me, I didn’t. When Doctor Polyakova, who had examined me when I first arrived in Kolyma, ordered me to be moved to the side of the ward where the patients who were expected to recover were situated, I asked her who had plucked me from the snow when I’d lost consciousness.

‘Another prisoner,’ she replied. ‘He’s been dropping off bread and sugar for you, but as you haven’t been able to eat it I’ve been giving it to the other patients.’

It was Nikita who had saved me. A few days later, he came to see me and handed me two books:
Anna Karenina
and
War and Peace
by Tolstoy. The books were stolen, of course, probably from another prisoner. He pulled up a stool and sat beside me, staring at my face intently. The nurse gave him a disapproving look but said nothing.

‘You know, you look how I imagine my little sister would if she’d reached your age.’

Now I understood the true reason for his interest in me.

‘What happened to her?’ I asked him.

‘She died of typhoid fever.’

Nikita’s rough outer appearance did not reflect the inner man at all. I sensed he was struggling to reconcile some pain in himself.

‘Was it during the famine?’ I asked, wondering if he had come from a peasant family.

Nikita shook his head. ‘No. My family was well off. My father was an engineer. He was arrested as a saboteur in 1929 and executed. My mother was thrown into prison and my sister and I were sent to an orphanage. That’s where she died.’

We had more in common than I’d realised. ‘Did your mother survive?’ I asked him.

Nikita knotted his fingers and stared at his hands. ‘Every day I waited for my mother to come and collect me. While the other children played, I sat by the gate watching for her. One of the women in the orphanage realised what I was doing and told me, “Your mother is an enemy of the people! You must forget her. If she comes back for you, you must chase her away and tell her that you won’t go with her.” Every day that bitch said the same thing to me. She brainwashed me. A year later, my mother did come back. She wasn’t young and pretty any more. She was thin with lines on her face. But she smiled at me with the same expression of love as always. “I’ve come to take you home, my darling,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. She must have known about my sister. “No!” I screamed, picking up a rock and throwing it at her. “I won’t go with you! I hate you! You’re an enemy of the people!”’

Nikita stopped and drew a breath. ‘I can never forget the look on my mother’s face when I told her that. It was as if something in her died. Later, when I was older and I tried to find her, I learned that she’d hanged herself. I’ve always felt that I killed her.’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ I told him. ‘The government did.’

We lapsed into silence. I expected Nikita to say more about his mother and sister but he didn’t. Instead he stood up.

‘I’m being transferred tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where.’

‘I hope somewhere better.’

He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

I looked at the books he had given me. Although I was happy to have them, I hoped their original owner was dead. I didn’t want to deprive someone of what might have been their only pleasure.

‘My two favourite stories,’ I said.

‘I told you I was good at understanding people,’ Nikita said.

As I watched my strange guardian angel leave the ward I sent him a blessing. A few days later, I learned from one of the nurses why Nikita was being sent to another camp. He’d had three years added to his sentence for killing the brigadier who had attacked me.

‘We have to find something for you to do,’ Doctor Polyakova told me. ‘Can you sew?’

I nodded. I knew she was trying to help me. I could no longer work in a lumber gang, and the review commission had decided I wasn’t sick enough to be released. If Doctor Polyakova couldn’t find work for me I would be sent out into the fields. I told her that I sewed well, and after that the nurses brought me sheets and prison robes that needed mending.

At the end of spring, a guard came to the ward and called out my number. ‘With things,’ he added.

I glanced at Doctor Polyakova, who rushed to find me a prison dress and some shoes. ‘With things’ was a command that could mean a number of scenarios, from being released to being shot.

In my case it meant being transferred to one of Kolyma’s few women-only camps near Magadan. On arrival, I was taken by a guard into a factory where about forty women sat at long tables and operated sewing machines. The forewoman introduced herself as Ustinya Pavlovna Kuklina.

‘Now,’ she said, leading me to a seat and plugging the sewing machine’s cord into a socket, ‘have you used a machine before?’

‘My mother’s,’ I told her. ‘A long time ago.’

Ustinya picked up a piece of fabric and placed it under the needle. ‘The machines here have bigger motors than domestic machines and sew faster, but the principles are the same. You’ll get the hang of it. Use this piece of fabric to practise on.’

She explained that the factory made uniforms for the prisoners and guards and also garments for the free population of Kolyma. My job was to sew the cuffs of the shirts and pants. As I got to work, a couple of the women nodded at me. It was clear that this camp had a better atmosphere than my previous one. No one looked like they were starving or sick.

When we stopped for our daytime meal, I thought there’d been a mistake when I was handed not one but two slices of bread. The woman sitting next to me, Radinka, smiled at my astonishment.

‘Ustinya is a free worker, not a prisoner,’ she told me, ‘so she’s not afraid of the camp commandant. She told him that the factory can only meet the quotas if she has healthy workers.’

Not only were the working conditions and food better, but the barracks were clean and free of lice and bedbugs. We each had a mattress and a pillow, and there were curtains on the windows. No doubt the better conditions were the reason why the prisoners were in good spirits and even had the energy to entertain each other in the evenings. Several of the women were excellent storytellers and another amused us with her mimes. No one spoke about their personal lives.

‘To talk about our families and children is pointless,’ Radinka explained to me. ‘To do so only creates despair. We understand each other. We’re all in the same situation.’

‘Zina, perform something for us,’ said a woman named Olesya to me one evening. Zina was the diminutive of Zinaida, which everybody in the factory, including Ustinya, used to address me. ‘Do you sing?’ she asked.

‘I can sing,’ I said. ‘But it’s a long time since I have done so.’

‘Well, get rid of the rust,’ she said with a kind smile.

The other women murmured their encouragement and so I cleared my throat and sang a song about the Dnieper River, which had been popular with my regiment. When I finished, the women clapped.

‘You should have gone to the Conservatory,’ another woman named Syuzanna said. ‘Your voice is beautiful.’

That night I lay on my bunk and thought of all the things I might have done if Stalin hadn’t signed my father’s death warrant. I clenched my hands into fists, trying to contain my anger. At the same time, I knew that I could be as angry as I wanted but it wouldn’t change a thing. I had been given an opportunity to survive and I must make the most of it.

Valentin’s face appeared before me. ‘Wait for me,’ I whispered as I fell asleep. ‘Wait for me and I’ll return.’

Life in the sewing factory had a monotonous rhythm to it but for a prisoner with a sentence as long as mine it was better that way. I still wasn’t allowed to correspond with anybody, and I coped best when I emptied my mind and refused to reflect. For seven years I lived that way — rising, washing, working, eating, sleeping, like a mechanical doll.

Then one day in the spring of 1953 a guard came to the factory and, with a grave expression on his face, handed Ustinya a piece of paper. I watched her eyes scan the note. Her cheeks paled.

‘Please stop the machines!’ she said and moved to the front of the workroom to address us.

The whirring of the sewing machines came to a halt. Ustinya’s hands trembled as she read the statement: ‘Dear comrades and friends. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union announces with profound sorrow to the Party and all workers of the Soviet Union that on the fifth of March at 9.50 pm Moscow time, after a grave illness, the Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, died.’

The announcement was met with silence. Everyone contained their response because of the guard. Yet the excitement was palpable. The monster was dead! Radinka rested her face on her arms and wept. It wasn’t grief for Stalin that made her cry. She was mourning her former life and the family she had lost. The rest of us began to weep too.

When the guard left, satisfied that we had reacted appropriately, we were able to express our true feelings. Syuzanna danced across the room. The rest of us cheered and embraced each other.

‘You are going to be freed, I’m sure of it!’ Ustinya said as she moved among us and kissed our cheeks. ‘The nightmare is over!’

Things changed dramatically in Kolyma in only a matter of weeks. Thousands of people were granted amnesty and released: the elderly; pregnant women; prisoners accused of economic crimes or with sentences of less than five years; and people under eighteen. Convoy after convoy passed by our camp on their way to the port.

Over the next two years, the releases continued in fits and starts. When it was announced that amnesty would be given to all servicemen and women charged with treason and collaborating with the Germans, I allowed myself to be hopeful. Officials came to the camp and prisoners were released, but I was not called to appear before them. Ustinya wrote letters on my behalf to the authorities, citing my good behaviour and work ethic, but I suspected there were special reasons why I wasn’t being released.

In 1956 Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s excesses and hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were released, yet I remained in Kolyma with a handful of other prisoners. Perhaps Khrushchev had been party to my arrest and releasing me might expose him. Then in 1960, as I was beginning to fear that I might be buried in Kolyma forever, the camp commandant summoned me to his office.

‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘Your case has been reviewed. You are free to go if you sign these two documents.’

After all these years of torturous waiting, I was free to go? I read the documents the commandant placed before me. One was my official release form. It had been signed and dated two years earlier. What had been the reason for the delay in summoning me? Perhaps nothing more than bureaucratic bungling had cost me two years of my life!

I studied the other form. It was an agreement that I would never reveal anything that had happened to me from the time of my arrest in Odessa to the last day of my imprisonment. If I broke the condition, I would be re-arrested and returned to prison.

I glanced at the camp commandant. Did he know I wasn’t Zinaida Rusakova? Whoever had worded the statement did. To sign the form meant that I would have to go on pretending to be someone else.

I hesitated but then thought: what does it matter what people call me? I am being allowed to return to Moscow, and nowhere in the statement does it forbid me from seeing my relatives or former acquaintances.

I was twenty-three years old when I came to Kolyma and I was now thirty-eight. I thought of my beloved Valentin and Mama. If pretending to be Zinaida meant I could go free, I would do it.

After the boat trip back across the sea from Magadan, I waited at the station for the train that would take me to Moscow. The other passengers on the platform were mostly free workers, but some were prisoners from the labour camps of Kolyma too. They still wore their prison jackets, with the numbers removed, and foot rags, and their shorn heads and spindly limbs were a sure indication of where they had been. Ustinya had insisted that I sew a dress for myself before leaving the factory. It was grey cotton and nowhere near as lovely as the outfit I would have liked to return home wearing, but it was better than a prison uniform or rags. My shoes were the clumpy lace-ups that Doctor Polyakova had given me when I’d left the hospital. They had holes in the bottoms now, so I’d made cardboard insoles to stop the stones piercing my feet.

Rain began to blow in from the sea and I, along with the other passengers, rushed into the waiting room to escape the weather. Inside there was a ceiling-to-floor-length mirror and the women gathered around it to fix their hair and straighten their clothes. I joined them and gave a start when I saw myself: a mousy-looking woman with frown lines on her forehead. I wanted to turn away but couldn’t. I wasn’t hideous. Frostbite hadn’t gouged out pieces of my face nor had scurvy deprived me of my teeth. Yet the lustre of my youth had vanished. I was like a tarnished wedding band. I wanted to cry. But then I remembered Mama and Valentin were waiting for me. It will be all right, I told myself. Love will restore you.

It took me a month to reach Moscow and I was as hungry on the journey as I had been on the way to Kolyma. I’d been given a ration of bread and a small amount of money when I’d left the camp, but it was barely enough to buy eggs and tomatoes from the peasant women at stations along the way. If Ustinya hadn’t given me a parcel of nuts, pickled cucumbers and salted fish I might not have survived.

I arrived at Moscow’s Yaroslavsky railway station in early June, worn out from the journey. When I emerged into Komsomolskaya Square, I was deafened by the onslaught of noise. The streets were full of cars and buses and the air was acrid with exhaust fumes. I found the congestion frightening, although the people around me seemed unaffected.