She would have no choice but to carry them back herself, one at a time. Then maybe she could take them to the back in the barn, cover them with her body, rub their legs between her chapped and cracking palms.
She heaved the first sheep over her shoulders and began her staggered walk.
After the first hour, she could no longer feel her arms. After the second hour, she bawled along with the ewes.
The snowmelt could not come fast enough, and even if it brought mud and mosquitoes, at least it meant the sheep could carry themselves home again, and she could follow their heavy hoofed gait through the slop, looking for what the cold had concealed.
Bird cherry. Buttercup. Currant. Peony. Violet.
Then: could it really be winter again so quickly?
Out into the snow one more—there is no escape from it—this time to the forests, a slice of bread in her coat pocket for lunch; within minutes it would be frozen. Sometimes, if hunger’s nattering reached a particularly incessant pitch, she learned to snap off small pieces and then set them on her tongue to melt as she sawed. Otherwise, she would save it for the fire set later in the old metal barrel, where workers were allowed to come and stand for a few moments and unthaw their hands, release the shape of the saw’s grip. There she would hold the bread over the fire until her fingers whinged and smoked.
Those laboring alongside her were mostly women. All the men had been killed in the war or surrendered too many limbs to field surgeons’ saws to manage the most demanding assignments, like forestry duty. Mornings, before sunrise, she and the other women stomped deep into the taiga, where they were expected to spend the next ten hours felling pines or birch, then stacking the wood. Ausma could barely lift the axe they gave her; hungry, weak, she quickly fell behind. No work, no grain, the brigade captain scolded.
What would it be like to lie down and never get up again, to rest like the body at the edge of the rail tracks, slowly shedding all ties to the living. To let leaves fall, covering your eyes. Frost rime your skin. Surrendering to the thicket all traces of who you are and where you are from.
She had given up all hope of her own life to come here and care for her brother and mother, as she had done back at the farm. She had imagined, if she could endure that, this could not ask her to do anything harder than what she had already done. But already, this quickly, it was beyond her. And now, in her failure, she was certain she had sentenced the three of them to their deaths.
Oh, sister, her brother said, when she came home, unable to lift her arms higher than her waist. Don’t cry.
I can’t go back there, she said. But if I don’t, we’re all lost.
No, we’re not, he said. You can do this.
You make it sound so simple, she said.
It is, he said. You just need the right axe.
He might not be able to handle hard labor, but sensing that survival in the settlements was not just about what your body could endure, but also about forging connections, he had asked for a job that suited a one-legged man, and had been assigned to watch the horse barns at night. In this way he had made friends with the blacksmith.
I’ll take care of it, he said.
And he did, bringing her a modified axe that was lighter, easier to handle.
She kept up with the others after that, swung as cleanly as if splitting head from neck. She taught her body how to remain in one place, while her mind drifted to another.
Those on forest duty often worked in two-week shifts, and sometimes, at night, as the trees led them farther into the taiga, they boarded in abandoned settlements near its edges. The houses where they stayed were so empty their voices echoed.
Usually there was a stove, and someone who offered to stay awake in order to keep stoking it, but it was impossible for any of them to hold their eyes open long. It was too cold to wash, too cold to undress. After a few days, the smell warned them even before they could register the dancing at their jackets’ seams and along their collars—a building stench like leaves left in gutters to rot. When she finally came home at the end of her rotation, her mother would not let her through the door.
Not with all your friends, too, Alma said.
So Ausma stripped everything off in the yard, cold pricking her exposed skin like the touch of nettles’ leaves. She dropped her skirt and coat into a metal pail that her mother filled with water. Finally, they boiled everything for several hours on the makeshift stove they built outside from bricks of river mud, until tiny fawn-colored specks scummed the surface.
What they ate:
Slices of cold-blackened potatoes.
Tiny translucent fish, no more than a swallow, collected from the creek, using sheets as nets.
Nuts husked from the cones of the Siberian cedars, to be savored under the tongue like hard candy, smoky and resinous, like tasting the dregs of an old fire. Birch seeds, catkins.
They boiled grass and the leaves of black currants and drank it like tea.
In the early days, when they still lived with the Russian exile, the one who was sorry this had happened to them, she would set aside a shot of milk for Ausma, thin and green, but still, an extra portion. To help you saw faster, she said.
And when Ausma slopped scalding water over her foot, and had to miss several days’ work, the woman brought a bowl to her bed.
What is it? Ausma asked.
Something special, the woman said. To help you heal faster.
Potatoes, Ausma saw. Laced with cream. Not the usual thin filings of frozen milk, scraped from the top of the pails they kept out in the cold. Real cream. Thick like sap, pleasingly sour, like the first bite of a cherry. For years, Ausma would remember it as the best meal she had ever eaten.
THOSE WHO were sent to the settlements across the river and never came back—there were stories that toward the end they ate nettles, scraped the skin from birch trees with their teeth as if stripping meat from bones. And maybe it’s true they held rocks in their mouths, worrying them with their tongues. But did they really dig the ticks from their arms with their nails, snap their teeth at the circling midges, like dogs?
Nothing is impossible when nothing is possible.
Ausma knows this now.
But it is easier to believe that maybe, first, they ate the lice.
WHAT THEY wore:
Whatever they had time to pack.
Most of them had no time to pack.
In the earliest weeks, they wore whatever they were wearing when the soldiers came for them. Sometimes, the soldiers took pity on those who were too stunned to assemble a case and dumped the contents of drawers onto sheets, then pressed the bundles into reluctant hands. This is what they did for Ausma’s mother. She had stood, rooted, unmoving, because she imagined they would soon shoot her, so what was the point of doing anything at all.
One woman was said to have made her Siberian debut in a suit and heels. There are stories of children who came barefoot, in nightdresses.
Where once she dreamed of a jacket trimmed with a bit of fur, a hat with one winging feather like Livija wore when Ausma went to visit her in Riga, new items of desire emerge:
Telogreika jackets, turgid, ponderous things, unsentimental, gray as rat fur or green as spoiled meat, first tested by Red Army soldiers dug into the trenches around a starving Stalingrad, or gunning trucks across Lake Ladoga’s icy expanse, trying to outrace German bombers. Now the uniform of the stout aunties with their giant heaving bosoms cursing tractors through the Siberian muck.
Valenki boots, long the footwear of Russia’s unfortunates, and also a synonym for suffering, stupidity. Dumb as a valenki, the Russians said when they harbored particular vitriol for someone. For the exiles, valenkis meant their only defense against the creeping black of frostbite. They were made from nothing more than felt, wool, oily with lanolin, boiled and rolled into the shape of galoshes by hands red and blistered from the sulfuric acid dips that make the fibers shrink and mat. The boots were cumbersome, quick to suck up moisture, so that it seemed as
if you are walking with whole sheep strapped to your feet.
You could tell a valenki wearer from a distance simply by her gait: slow, sluggish, heavy-soled. When the wet boots dried, they shrank to the shape of the wearer’s foot. Like hinges rusted shut, they could not be budged. If you worked in valenkis, you would likely sleep in valenkis. More than a few were buried in valenkis.
LATE SUMMER, the time of harvest. She swung from the cab of a moving combine, intending to drop at a run, so that she could move to the next lane of mown hay. Instead, she landed on her back. She felt something slip, the pop of gristle. She didn’t tell anyone, simply removed the kerchief from her head and used it to bind her ribs and her back, to try to hold in the pain. No work, she told herself, no rations. But as she tried to fork the hay into piles, she felt her vision dip and flutter, then shrink to a pinprick. She wasn’t conscious when they brought her home in the back of one of the hay wagons.
Her brother found her, curled on her side in the corner of the kitchen where they lived.
If I told you you could have four hands and three legs, could you get up? he said. I can’t go very fast, but between us, until you heal, we can be almost one person.
So she grew four hands and three legs, though it hurt.
It hurt her to watch her brother struggling with the rake, his crutch slipping. It hurt her to watch him pitch and tumble.
She couldn’t decide if watching this hurt as much as the pain in her back, but she also knew she needed to make quota, so that they could eat, so she just let the hurts accumulate, like the piles of wild ryegrass and clover slowly rising in front of them, becoming something thick, repetitive, never-ending. Rick of hay, rick of hay.
TIME UNRAVELED, like the strands of the blanket that Ausma had thought to bring from what remained in the farmhouse.
Thread by thread, gray, green, yellow, brown, her mother unloosened the weave, then summoned from the new-old skeins sets of mittens.
Her needles coaxed patterns from memory, calling on what her mother had taught her, as her mother had taught her before that, the ancient symbols, a ledger of fates:
Moon. Morning star. Sun. Sun, who, it is said, among other things, keeps special watch over the unlucky.
They were still not allowed to leave the settlement. But a neighbor, who had received permission to travel to the market in Moscow to sell her own wares, offered to take the mittens and bring back whatever money they might make. Whether it was the help of the Sun, or the intricacy of Alma’s handwork, all the mittens sold, and the friend returned with money, enough money that they were able to negotiate the purchase of a piglet from one of their fellow kolkholzniks.
Really, it was not a pig they were buying, but the chance to believe they might have a life that was, as Ausma’s mother put it, half-human.
And yet it was a pig they bought, in the end.
Just not a sow.
Sows were acceptable for private use; hogs summoned a tax.
So it was not a pig they bought, but a penalty.
Two thousand rubles. Due now.
No more blanket to unravel, no more mittens to bring to market. Nothing left to trade to pay the fine.
How do you live less than half a life?
Will potato peelings buried deep enough eventually sprout? What does it mean when you open your mouth to speak and your words smell of bitter pith, fruit turning?
A letter, slipped in Alma’s hands, helped them change the answers they might have given.
I am writing to tell you that you are still owed money for milk that you delivered to the dairy cooperative in Gulbene before you had to go away. . . . I am sorry that it has taken me so long to find your new address. I have enclosed the amount you are due and will make a note in my ledger.
And now, one more entry for the ledger of fates:
Cow.
Even after they had settled the fine for owning the hog, they still had enough left over from what the head of the dairy back in their hometown had sent them to purchase their own heifer. Only one hundred rubles, because she was old and her teats were shriveled. But they spoke to her, told her how much she meant to them, sang her songs about sun and green fields. They named her Gauja, after one of the major rivers running through their region of Latvia. They fed her cedar nuts and shoots of grass they collected by hand, spooned her currant-leaf tea. Soon, she was singing, too, the milk from her teats sounding each morning in the tin that once held the old farm’s honey. Then they would pour the milk into bowls, and set the bowls outside to freeze. Then they would tip the frozen bowls into pillowcases, releasing the bricks of milk.
By then, they had received permission to travel as far as Tomsk, on day passes. And so, once they had set aside a little milk for themselves, Ausma began to haul the pillowcases to market. First, she registered with the settlement’s security office. Then, she walked to the nearest rail line, about five kilometers away. Sometimes she could catch a ride on one of the collective wagons, oxen already plodding that way. She had no money to buy a ticket, so when she found a departing train, she latched herself to its side. She rode this way for the thirty-kilometer journey to Tomsk, like a tick, her cheeks reddening, then blackening in the battering wind.
AFTER COW:
Then came little house.
Long abandoned, it sat at the edge of the river where they hunted the waters with their makeshift nets. Their Russian friend, the exile who had let them sleep in a corner in her kitchen, had told them about it. Now that you are making a little money, you should find a place of your own, she said. No one will mind if you use this old house, so long as you make all the repairs.
They redaubed the walls with mud gathered from the creek bed.
It didn’t take long with only one room.
Ausma and her mother shared the only bed; her brother made a nest of blankets on the floor, near the stove.
Collectively, the exiles were like fish trapped beneath the ice of the river in winter, suspended in this new half-life, caught between. They did not want to be here, but they were here. So what could they do but collect the seeds of wild geranium and cosmos from the woods and meadows, then plant them in window boxes, scatter them behind the outdoor stove so that at least while they cook they can see something beautiful. They played at picnics, putting blankets down beneath birch trees that looked so much like the ones they once knew. They said, Here, this is saffron bread, and everyone chewed the hard loaf made with flour doctored from the sawdust of birch bark or crushed dried clover, and laughed and pantomimed delight.
They bined wild hops, brewed beer, fermented foraged fruits. Boys, looped, took a bicycle from the collective equipment area, and nested it in the crook of a tree. It made no sense, which was exactly why it seemed so brilliant at the time. Dangling from the branches, they toasted first everything—To bicycles!—then everyone they could think of.
To Ausma!
She ignored the boys who shrilled at her, like birds. Kept her distance. She didn’t have time for that. She barely had time to sleep.
What she did for distraction:
Sometimes, at night, if she was not too exhausted, Ausma would practice embroidering scraps of fabric in the style her Russian friend had taught her: elaborate still lifes of tulips and lilacs; a composition of meadow clover, which, when viewed closely, rewarded the attentive with a secret single stem of four leaves.
Occasionally, she tried to read. When they were finally allowed to receive packages from home, her godmother sent her a novel, a sprawling retelling of the history of Riga. Still, there were nights when she could only bring herself to read a single word before she would shut the covers, unsure of how long she would need to make these pages last, if this was the only book she would ever have again.
Other exiles drew heated nails down scraps of larch to serve as headstones. They coaxed chess sets from bone, called instruments from shoe leather and strands of their own hair. They picked apart bandages to crochet shawls and decorative collars that lay on their sho
ulders, spotted with red.
For some, bark doubled as paper, unwound from the birch trunks with callused hands. On scraps the size of postcards, they nubbed messages to relatives in Latvia, never forgetting the censors’ eyes.
They wrote: Warm summer wishes!
They wrote: Remember your friends in faraway Siberia.
ONE NIGHT, Ausma went to see a movie in the collective’s community center. Here, they listened to poetry celebrating the proletariat, attended award ceremonies and medal presentations for those who exceeded their work quotas and so honored the state. Fastest Milker. Best Reaper. Honored Stacker of Wood. Some nights there were dances, work-battered bodies spinning through limping waltzes, the happy heat and stink of limbs given over to effort that no one else can claim. Other nights: old movies, screened for the appropriate narratives of individual sacrifice and collective redemption.
Dumb with fatigue, Ausma sat in the back with Stalin’s portrait, her legs numbing on a folding chair, and she stared at the images flickering on the wall in front of her.
She did not know how long she had been watching before it occurred to her that this was in fact a Latvian film, set in Latvia, and all the actors were speaking in Latvian.
Rather than stir something inside her, this realization saddened her.
How much did that old life really ever matter if she could forget it so quickly?
And then, one March, the month of their taking, now four years on, as the ice began to release its grip and the rivers and streams began to tremble, a sound so loud as to be mistaken for the vibration of train wheels rushing along tracks, it so happened, that at the same time, nearly four thousand kilometers away, in Moscow, the man who had engineered their taking, and so many other takings, all those trains in motion, fell to his bedroom floor, next to a copy of Pravda and his pocket watch.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 19