“Can I ask, Yelena Georgiyevna, why you are here?”
“You mean, what did I do to be assigned this position in Vorkuta?”
Cilka nods slowly.
“Believe it or not, Cilka, I volunteered to be here.” She lowers her voice. “My family always believed in a … greater good.” She nods to the sky. It is forbidden to talk about religion, but Cilka understands what she is getting at. “My parents devoted their lives to helping others. In fact, my father died doing so, fighting a fire. I try to honor them by carrying on their mission.”
“That’s very good of you,” Cilka says. She feels overwhelmed.
“Although,” Yelena says, her brow creasing, “I must admit I did believe, broadly, in the project of the Soviet Union—the Motherland calling, and all that—but it is quite different to be here.”
Cilka sees her turn to look back at the people lying in the beds behind them.
“I’d best stop talking now,” she says, and pulls her face back into a smile.
“Thank you, Yelena Georgiyevna, for telling me. And I just hope the women in my hut can find better work, too. And soon.”
“I understand. I do too,” Yelena says. “See you tomorrow.”
Yelena takes her hand off Cilka’s shoulder, goes to leave. Cilka remains facing her.
“Is there something else, Cilka?”
“Josie—could Josie do my clerical job?”
Yelena thinks for a moment or two. “Not just yet. Maybe if we can use you full time as a nurse, we will bring Josie here. But will she be able to learn…?”
“I’ll teach her. She’ll be all right.” It is a risk, thinks Cilka. If Josie can’t pick up the tasks, the language, as quickly as Cilka, will she be punished? A punishment worse even than going back to outside labor?
“We’ll see,” Yelena says, and walks away.
CHAPTER 8
Long days and nights of darkness. The temperature drops to well below anything Cilka has ever experienced. She continues working in the hospital, never far from her guilt, trying to assuage it by smuggling back food for the women in the hut. Bread, vegetables, margarine. Real tea. Just enough for them to eat each evening, lest there is another raid by Klavdiya Arsenyevna. Antonina Karpovna gets a larger portion than Cilka’s hut-mates each night.
Over the next few months, Cilka absorbs all that she is shown and told at the hospital like a sponge. She becomes so good at giving injections that patients start requesting her. They will often wait, desperate, until she is free to tend to them. The fact she is minimizing pain rather than exacerbating it is a wonder for Cilka. She does still try to remember, as the ward overfills with desperate, frostbitten patients, that she cannot do more than she can do. And still, often, her mind goes blank and she runs on automatic, like an engine. Yelena notices, and tells her to take breaks, but if she could stay at the hospital twenty-four hours a day, she thinks she would.
Returning each night to her hut brings conflicting emotions. Not wanting to leave “her” patients; needing to see Josie and the other women to know they have made it through another day of carrying, stacking, lifting, picking, their eyes streaming tears from the icy wind onto the fabric wrapped across their faces. She leaves earlier than the women and comes back later, so she does not have to sit idly while they wrap and unwrap themselves, aching, head to foot.
And then there are the frequent nighttime visits by the men. Always outnumbered, the other women have very few “nights off,” the men coming into their hut changing often. Cilka and Josie’s protected status as the “camp wives” of Boris and Vadim keeps them from being brutalized by others, though not protected from the cries of their hut-mates. One evening Josie laments to Cilka that she is unhappy at Vadim’s failure to appear, finding herself jealous that he has other women he prefers to her. This is difficult for Cilka to hear. She does not want to tell Josie how to feel—she knows how this abuse can affect a woman, a girl, in many unforeseen ways. But she does say that if she were her, she would feel only relief when he stays away.
After a five-day absence, Boris and Vadim enter the hut. Josie jumps up, screaming at Vadim, accusing him of being unfaithful. Vadim slaps her hard in the face, before pushing her down on the bed. Cilka is shocked—is Josie losing her mind? She doesn’t want Josie to be killed. She wants to hit Vadim herself, feels that fire burning inside her, but instead, later, she simply cautions Josie to be careful. It feels wrong, and inadequate, but she doesn’t know what else to do. For the next few days Josie ostracizes her, making comments to the others about the easy life Cilka has in the hospital. The thaw in their relationship has frozen back over. Elena, one night, loudly tells Josie to grow up—they are all benefiting from the extra food Cilka smuggles to them from the hospital, the uneaten patient meals she has become expert at hiding in her clothing.
Indeed, each night she comes in and empties her pocket on the edge of her bed, quickly breaking up the food so no one else has to do it and be accused of uneven portions, then turns away as the women leap forward and snatch at it. If Antonina is not there, she tucks her portion back in her pocket, as it’s rude to leave the temptation out in front of starving eyes.
She turns away because it is so hard to see the women’s unwrapped, bony fingers snatching. Their chapped, sore-encrusted lips opening. Their veiny eyelids closing as they take as long as possible tasting and chewing the food.
Cilka gives Elena a small, surprised smile for having come to her defense. Though Josie’s words sting. Yes, Cilka is strangely lucky. But also cursed. If they knew of where she had been, for all those years, while they still had an abundance of food and drink and warmth. While they still had families and homes.
Elena remains a complex character for Cilka. Angry, often uncaring—yelling at the world and everyone in it—yet also showing compassion and tenderness on occasions when she is caught off-guard. She is just surviving, Cilka has often thought. There is no one way to do it.
Elena’s friend, Hannah, speaking again now she has recovered from her time in the hole, remains more antagonistic. The two women are close because, Cilka has found out, they fought in the resistance together—the Polish Home Army. Fighting both the Nazis and the Soviets. Cilka is intimidated by their bravery. And it makes her even more unwilling to share her past.
* * *
The next day, Josie hands Cilka two small spring flowers she has managed to pick on her way back from the mine. Brilliant purple petals with a red and black center. Wispy green fronds surround the delicate bloom. Cilka has seen them poking through the ice near the hospital, a sign spring is coming. The possibility of relief from the constant freezing, biting wind and snow gives a sense of hope that life might become a bit easier for all of them.
Cilka tries not to make too much of the gesture from Josie. Truth is, for the first time in here, she feels an aching in her throat like she is about to cry. She swallows. The flowers are placed in a chipped cup, now the pride of each woman in the hut. They have all learned the art of stealing anything not nailed down; smuggling mugs from the mess; a small table discarded from an officers’ hut with a broken leg propped up on random bits of timber; a battered kettle of permanently boiling water on the stove. Antonina, sharing in the uneaten food Cilka brings from the hospital, has chosen to ignore the “extras.” It seems that whatever contraband Klavdiya is looking for, it is not these items. The hut is taking on a cozy appearance. Olga, the embroiderer, who managed not to give the needles back on the first night, has been teaching several others her craft. Threads from the ends of sheets have been taken and turned into beautiful doilies which are strung about the hut. Cilka has continued to help herself to discarded bandages, cleaning them in boiling water and donating them to the embroidery group. Several of the scarves that cover the heads of the women have delicate embroidered edges.
On their monthly visits to the bath hut the women hand over their lace-edged scarves along with their other clothing for de-lousing while they quickly run a sliver of soap across t
heir bodies, and rinse off from a vat of thankfully hot water. Their pubic areas haven’t been shaved again, after the first time, and they are allowed to let their hair grow back, unless they are found to be infested with lice. Most of the women hack their hair short during the bathing sessions. Cilka lets hers grow a little longer. The clothes come back, warm and stiffly hung over a pole, and they have to grab them before they are unceremoniously dropped on the floor. Sometimes the stronger women elbow their way to a new scarf or warmer coat, and so the lace detailing begins to spread throughout the wider brigade.
* * *
Spring is sweet but too short. The snow that has covered the ground almost since Cilka arrived melts quickly as daytime temperatures increase. Now the sun is brilliant, reflecting off the nearby hills.
When summer arrives, darkness shrinks down until, one day, there is no night at all. There is no need for searchlights in the yard, unless it’s very overcast. Some of the women in the hut from further south in Europe react to this phenomenon with panic—it seems to go against nature. The men enter the hut and now the women have to see them clearly, up close. Several of the women do not hold back, telling them what ugly pigs they are, and are punished for daring to say so.
Sleep becomes difficult for some as they struggle to shut their eyes in light as bright as day. Tempers flare, and the harmony of the hut is shattered with both verbal and physical fights breaking out.
When Cilka is caught with a nodding head by Yelena, the doctor asks how she is coping with the white nights.
“The what?” Cilka asks.
“The white nights. We will be in daylight for twenty-four hours each day for a while. Everyone adjusts differently.”
“I can’t sleep, and when I do fall asleep it’s only for short bursts.”
“And others in your hut?”
“Some are fine, most aren’t. Fights seem to break out over nothing. How do you cope?” Though she imagines, in the staff quarters where Yelena sleeps, there may be adequate curtains.
“Your first summer will be your worst. Well, for many their worst. There are others who never adjust and struggle each year; some simply go mad. They can’t cope with the sleep deprivation, the change in their body rhythms—it does something to their head.”
She seems very casual about this, Cilka thinks. “Could that happen to me?”
“You will be fine, Cilka.” Cilka hasn’t gotten used to Yelena’s enduring faith in her. “You need to make a blindfold and cover your eyes and slowly let your body adjust. Tell the other women to do the same,” she says. “I’m sure if you look in the linen area you will find some old blankets that have been thrown out. Take a break, take a pair of scissors, go there and cut up enough strips for the women. All you can do is offer.”
Cilka doesn’t need to be told twice. In the linen room she experiments with blankets and other materials she finds until she is happy with the comfort level of having something wrapped around her head. Not too itchy, not too smelly. Twenty lengths are cut and stuffed throughout her clothing. It’s incredible to even be using scissors. In the hut, the women sometimes cut material by running a just-blown-out match along it.
That night, a Sunday when they have only had a half day of work, Cilka distributes the blindfolds, and the women start to settle in their beds, the hut still lit up by daylight. The sound of voices talking outside is heard. They wait for the men to arrive but the door stays closed. The voices continue. Several women get out of bed and cautiously poke their heads outside. Elena opens the door and the voices grow louder.
“What’s going on?” Cilka calls out.
“There are people just walking around and talking; it’s like a party out there!”
They all jump out of bed and rush to the door and windows. Everyone fights to get a look. Slowly, they all venture out.
“What’s happening?” Elena asks a group of women walking past, chatting away.
“Nothing. What do you mean?”
“Why are you outside in the middle of the night?” Elena asks.
“It’s not the middle of the night yet, and we’re outside because we can be. Is this your first summer?” one of the women asks.
“Yes,” Elena tells her. “Well, most of us arrived right at the end of the last one.”
“If you have the energy, you may as well enjoy being outside for a while without having someone standing over you forcing you to work.”
“I didn’t think it would be allowed.”
“Rubbish. You stay inside in winter because it’s too cold and too dark to come outside. I could read a book out here, if I had a book to read, so why not enjoy it? It won’t last for long.”
The women wander off.
“I thought…” Josie stammers.
“I guess this is something else our beloved Antonina Karpovna didn’t tell us,” says Elena. “Come on, let’s go for a walk and have a proper look at our prison.”
For the first time in a long while Cilka sees smiles on the faces of some of the women. Despite their exhaustion from the work week, they walk, several arm-in-arm, outside. Cilka supposes this will only happen on Sundays, when the half-day off allows them to be slightly less exhausted. The prisoners gaze at the sky; see the mountains of coal darkening the horizon. They breathe in the fresh air, their enemy in the winter when it sears their throats, burns their lungs. For the first time they see men milling around together in the central area where the men’s and women’s camps meet, not posing a threat to them. Some respond to their smiles with a girlish giggle. A sense of freedom comes over them.
“Come with me, Cilka. We have to find them,” an excited Josie squeals.
“Find who?”
Cilka is surprised by the first face that comes into her mind: the messenger she has seen on the odd occasion at the hospital, the brown-eyed man who had been polite when he accidentally ran into her. They haven’t spoken, though he has nodded hello a couple of times.
“Vadim and Boris. Let’s find them and walk with them. Won’t it be lovely to just walk and talk to them, get to know them, not just—”
“I don’t want to find Boris. Why can’t we just be together? We don’t need them, Josie.” Cilka has tried to be understanding of Josie’s naiveté, her need to think of this as a real connection, but it disturbs her greatly.
“But I want to see Vadim. Are you coming or am I going on my own?” a petulant Josie says.
“I’m not interested,” Cilka says coldly.
“Well, if that’s the way you feel…” Josie stomps off. Cilka watches her go, before wandering away on her own.
Cilka struggles with this freedom—it is so new to her. She keeps looking at the perimeter with its guard towers, looking for guards who could mow them down with their weapons. This is how on edge they felt in that other place. She doesn’t know the rules here yet. She is one of the first to go back to what is, to her, the safety of Hut 29. She waits patiently until they all return, particularly Josie, whom she regrets leaving alone, before going to sleep, making sure they are all back. Then she ties on her blindfold. The women continue to murmur happily as they settle, this small freedom giving them a moment of contentment.
* * *
For eight weeks, the sun never leaves the sky. Cilka begins to relax and properly join in on the Sunday evening strolls around the camp. She, along with the other women in her hut, explores the environment. They keep their whole bodies covered, and wrap scarves around their faces, to ward off the mosquitoes. She struggles to convince Josie she doesn’t need to find Vadim and be with him, that he is not her future.
One evening, Hannah begins to walk beside Cilka, pulling her away from Josie with a firm grip just above her elbow. Up close, Cilka can smell the stale sweat in her clothes, the grease in her hair.
“What do you want?” Cilka asks.
“You know, in the war, people like me and Elena worked to resist every oppressing force—the Nazis, the Soviets…”
“I know. You’re a hero.”
> “While some people just lay down and gave themselves over to them, even benefiting from this coupling while watching everyone around them die.” Her grip intensifies on Cilka’s arm. Cilka feels sick. Hannah keeps walking, forcing Cilka to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cilka says flatly.
“I’m not going to give away my source … but that’s a nasty little secret you’ve kept from us.”
Cilka swallows, feeling fear, rage. It must have been that woman from the train, who had also been in that other place.
“So, is it true what this woman was saying? She seemed desperate to tell someone. She didn’t seem long for this world.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
Cilka spares a thought for the woman who, like her, had survived that other place only to end up here. And worse, who might never leave.
“So it is true. You’re just a common whore who gets what she wants by sleeping with the scum of mankind. Well, well, well.”
“You can’t hurt me, Hannah. Don’t even try,” Cilka says, looking her in the eye.
“I bet you don’t want your friends to know. Do you want me to keep your secret?”
“I want you to go fuck yourself. I couldn’t care less what you do or say.” Cilka is bluffing to make the secret less appealing to Hannah. But she knows Hannah must be able to feel her shaking, under the tight clench of her hand.
“I can keep it secret, for a price…”
“How often do men come into our hut and rape you, Hannah?”
Hannah doesn’t answer. Keeps her brows furrowed, breathing heavily.
“I didn’t hear you,” Cilka says, her voice raised. “One man, several men … how many different men have raped you since we’ve been here?”
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