Sapphire Skies

by Belinda Alexandra

  The women in my car were political prisoners like me. On the journey, I learned what their ‘crimes’ had been. A concert pianist who had studied in Paris was charged with ‘counter-revolutionary’ activity, as was a woman who had worked in a dress store in Moscow and had served the wife of a foreign diplomat. There was a ballerina who had accepted flowers from an American admirer, and a housewife who had been charged with anti-Soviet agitation for naming her puppy Winston after the British Prime Minister.

  ‘What did you do?’ asked the woman next to me, whose name was Agrafena. She was grey-haired with intelligent brown eyes and had once been a university professor.

  ‘I was a prisoner of war in Poland,’ I told her, which was as close to the truth as I could get now that I was supposed to be Zinaida Rusakova. ‘I’ve been charged as a terrorist.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, your crime was to have found yourself in a foreign country. Stalin is terrified that anyone who has been outside the Soviet Union will spread the truth that even in the midst of a war, they do live better in the West.’

  ‘And you?’ I asked her. ‘What’s your crime?’

  ‘I told a joke about Stalin.’

  ‘It must have been a bad one!’ I exclaimed.

  Agrafena shrugged and smiled wryly. ‘No, it was a good one. For a bad one I would have got five years. But my joke cost me ten.’

  To reach the various camps in Kolyma we were packed into the hold of a steamer and taken across the Sea of Okhotsk. Five days later, green-faced from seasickness and covered in each other’s vomit, we arrived in the port of Magadan. The wind blew so hard that we had to brace ourselves against it. It was heavy with salt, which stung our eyes and skin and formed strips of white lace on the shrubs and fences. A huge banner featuring Stalin’s face flapped in the breeze: Glory to Stalin, the father, the teacher and best friend of all Soviet people. The sight of it nearly destroyed the last shreds of strength I had left. I recognised it as one of the portraits my mother had painted. I understood now why her work wore her down so much: she must have known that Stalin was responsible for Papa’s death.

  We were made to kneel while the guards counted us. If there were any escapees, the guards would be arrested themselves so they counted and recounted us. They took so long that many people fainted, and those suffering from intestinal ailments had no choice but to soil themselves.

  After the roll call we were made to walk in rows of five past two guards. Having lost my boots in the Lubyanka, I’d had to fashion shoes out of rags. I felt every stone and pebble as we were marched up a steep hill into the town.

  More banners lined the main street: Glory to Stalin, the greatest genius of mankind; Glory to Stalin, the greatest military leader; More gold for our country, more gold for our glory! Welcome to Kolyma!

  ‘They don’t only destroy us,’ Agrafena muttered. ‘They expect us to be grateful for it!’

  When we reached the camp, we were sent to a bathhouse and made to strip in front of male guards. Each of us was issued with half a bucket of water to wash our filthy bodies. In the meantime, our clothes were taken away to be boiled and deloused, then piled in a damp heap on the floor. The underwear and dress I’d been given at Auschwitz were the only possessions I had, and I wanted to hold on to them. I found my slip first; the silk had puckered from the heat but at least it wasn’t torn. Then I saw my dress and was relieved to find it was still in one piece.

  A hand grabbed my arm. I turned to see a woman wearing only a bra and underpants staring at me. Her enormous breasts were tattooed, as were her shoulders and arms. A cigarette hung from her lip. She sneered at me, revealing her crooked teeth. ‘That’s my dress,’ she said with a pronounced lisp.

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s mine now,’ she growled, making a grab for it.

  I snatched the dress away and she lunged towards me.

  ‘Political scum!’ she hissed.

  Two other women joined in the taunts. ‘You piece of shit!’ one of them said. ‘You’re not even a Soviet citizen any more!’

  The other prisoners backed away, sensing there was going to be a fight. I didn’t care who these women were; they weren’t going to get my dress. Who knew what lay ahead? I might need to trade the dress for some necessity.

  ‘Give it to her,’ Agrafena whispered behind me. ‘It’s not worth your life.’

  One of the woman’s companions passed her a piece of glass. The woman made a slashing movement towards my face as if she intended to take out my eye. I ducked. The other women in the bathhouse screamed.

  The guards, who had been talking amongst themselves, looked up.

  ‘Settle down!’ one of them shouted. ‘Or there won’t be food for any of you tonight!’

  ‘Back off, Katya,’ another heavily tattooed woman told my attacker. ‘She’ll keep for later and I’m hungry.’

  Katya stared at me then turned away.

  Agrafena pulled me towards the wall and helped me into my dress. ‘Be careful of that one,’ she said. ‘She was in the same prison cell as me and she’s been sent here for a terrible crime.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘She used to entice children from the street and sell them to paedophiles. Some of those poor innocents were butchered.’

  I was horrified. ‘What’s her sentence?’

  ‘Three years.’

  I looked at the woman who had been arrested for naming her dog Winston. She was speaking with a machinist who had been condemned to Kolyma for being late for work. Both women had been given sentences of eight years.

  Stalin had turned the world on its head.

  After a period of quarantine we were examined by a doctor, a middle-aged woman with dark hair and pale skin. She checked my throat, ears and eyes and felt my skin to assess my muscle and body fat. She pinched my legs, then read my papers carefully before writing something on them. I prayed she would assign me to work in a kitchen or hospital, but knew that my sentence meant I was destined for one of the worst jobs.

  After the medical examination, our clothes were taken away from us and we were issued shapeless dresses and shoes with soles made of used tyre treads. I realised how futile the argument with Katya over my dress had been. We didn’t even have names any more; we were addressed by the numbers sewn onto our uniforms.

  When we were assigned to our barracks I was relieved that Katya and her gang were sent to different quarters. Agrafena and I remained together, but any reprieve I felt disappeared when we opened the door to the wooden building and saw what lay before us. Along the walls ran two tiers of plank beds with more bunks in the middle of the room. Most of them didn’t have pillows or mattresses. The floor was nothing more than stamped earth and the place reeked of mildew and sweat. But it was the four prisoners lying on their bunks that most upset us. It was obvious why they weren’t out on work assignments: their limbs were grotesquely swollen and their skin was covered in pus-infected boils. In Auschwitz such prisoners were called Muselmänner. In Kolyma I would soon learn that they were called dokhodyagi: the living dead.

  ‘Come on, move along!’ An old toothless woman entered the barracks and organised the newcomers with the enthusiasm of a summer camp leader. Her clothes were rags but she had a colourful scarf wrapped around her head.

  ‘You! Here!’ she said to me and indicated an upper bunk at the far end of the barrack. Agrafena was assigned the space next to me.

  That evening we were served soup made of spoiled cabbage leaves, potatoes and herring heads. The coarse black bread that came with it tasted as though it hadn’t been properly baked. There were no bowls or spoons provided. The seasoned prisoners brought their own, fashioned from old tins or pieces of wood. Agrafena traded a scarf for two sets and gave one to me.

  ‘Make sure you keep them with you at all times,’ a woman across the table warned us. ‘Otherwise they’ll be stolen.’

  When I lay in my bunk that night fighting off the mosquitoes, I thought of the dokhodyagi only
a short distance away, fouling the air with their foetid breath and rotting flesh. Would I end up that way too? Maybe it was better to find a way to kill myself now, while I still had the strength. But in the morning, my resolve to survive returned. With the cup of water allotted to me, I cleaned my teeth with the sleeve of my uniform and washed my face and neck with the tarry soap that had been distributed at the health inspection. I looked up to see Slava, the toothless woman who was in charge of our hut, smiling at me.

  ‘You shouldn’t use your soap all at once like that,’ she said. ‘Halve it and trade the other half for something else you might need.’

  ‘Thank you for your advice,’ I said to her. Perhaps surviving a war and surviving in a camp were two different things. The first involved not giving in to fear, and the second involved not giving in to despair. ‘Is there anything else I should know?’

  Slava grinned. ‘Plenty!’ She bent down and picked up a cigarette stub. ‘You see, a new prisoner discarded that. You can collect stubs like this around the camp and trade the tobacco. It doesn’t matter if you start with nothing. A smart person can turn nothing into something.’

  From her appearance Slava might have been a peasant in her former life, but her cunning made me wonder if she’d been a thief.

  ‘What did you get arrested for?’ I asked her.

  She adjusted her scarf. ‘I was once a governess in a noble family and after the Revolution that was enough of a reason to arrest me. I was released in 1932 but I had nowhere to go, so I stayed here. They pay me a small wage and the work isn’t difficult.’

  Breakfast was the same unappetising soup of the night before. On my way back to the barracks, I noticed a man sitting on a wooden fence staring at me. He had a crooked nose, hooded eyes and an unkempt beard. His biceps were as big as his thighs. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and every part of his torso was covered in tattoos. The way he looked at me made my skin crawl. I didn’t feel safe until the evening, when the guard locked us all into our barracks and I was surrounded by other women. I was soon to learn it was false security.

  I was woken by a bang as the door to the barracks was flung open. A beam from a flashlight searched the room. I lifted my head and saw faces leering in the doorway. At first I thought I was dreaming but then a scream pierced the air. Two men dragged a woman by her feet from her bunk and carried her out the door. The light disappeared and the woman’s cries became muffled. I could hear men grunting and wondered what was happening. Some sort of interrogation? I slipped from my bunk and moved towards the window.

  ‘Get back to bed!’ ordered Slava in a harsh whisper. ‘Do you want what is happening to her to happen to you?’

  I ignored her and made it to the window. By the light outside the barracks, I could see that the woman was pinned down by several men.

  ‘They’re raping her!’ I cried. ‘Get the guard!’

  I rushed to the door and banged on it. Suddenly I was knocked backwards. I felt a hand over my mouth and the weight of bodies holding me down. At first I thought the men had caught me too but then I realised it was my fellow prisoners who were restraining me.

  ‘The guard’s in on it, you stupid bitch!’ one of them said. ‘Now shut up or I’ll slit your throat!’

  The women sat on me until the grunts and jeers from outside stopped and the men dispersed. Agrafena came and helped me back to my bunk.

  I waited for the door to open and for the violated woman to return. But she didn’t return, not even in the morning when the bell rang for us to get up. I stared at the empty bunk and tried to think who she was. Then I remembered a young girl I had seen when I’d arrived at the camp and who occupied that bunk; she didn’t look any older than seventeen.

  When we marched to the washrooms in the dim morning light I reeled in horror. The girl was lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Her mouth was open as if in a silent scream and her eyes stared blankly. She was dead. I looked around to see the other women’s reactions, but only the recent arrivals showed any distress. The others averted their eyes and walked past the body as if it wasn’t there. When we returned from the bathhouse the girl was gone.

  The atmosphere at breakfast was subdued but nobody mentioned the girl. When we returned to our barracks that evening, the same guard as before locked us in. I lay awake the whole night trembling with fear, but nothing happened.

  ‘Did anyone report the murder to the administrators?’ I asked Slava the next morning. ‘Are those men going to be punished?’

  She stared at me, then sighed. ‘You have to learn to live and let live here. Some of the men are beasts, and what happened has happened before and will happen again. You can’t save anybody but yourself. You are young and pretty — you’d better get yourself a camp husband.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘One of the men,’ she explained. ‘Choose one and offer yourself to him. Not one of the politicals — that will only make you a greater target. One of the criminals. If the other men know that you belong to him, they won’t touch you. Nikita would be a good choice. I noticed him watching you the other day after breakfast.’

  I stared at her in disbelief. Was the only way to protect myself to become the whore of someone like the fierce-looking man with the tattoos?

  I saw Nikita again when I passed the repair workshop on my way back to the barracks. He and some other men were playing cards. For the criminals the camp appeared to be only a change of location: they did what they liked and went wherever they liked.

  ‘Hey, Rasputin!’ one of the men said, nudging Nikita. ‘There’s your girlfriend!’

  Nikita stared at me in that intense way again. I could see why the criminals called him Rasputin: he did bear a resemblance to Tsarina Alexandra’s disastrous monk.

  A gang of women marched past on their way to the fields. I stared at their lined faces and shorn heads. There was nothing womanly about them: starvation and hard work had robbed them of their breasts and hips. The men paid them no attention when they passed and an idea came to me. I rushed to the camp’s barber.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.

  I removed my scarf and let down my hair. Many of the women transported with me to Kolyma had been shaved all over, like the women in Auschwitz, but I’d managed to avoid that. I’d prevented my hair becoming matted by combing it every day with my fingers.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ he said, giving me a stool to sit on and picking up a pair of scissors. ‘Such a pity … but it’s better — the lice won’t trouble you so much.’

  I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again until the last strand of my hair lay on the floor around my feet.

  I was assigned work with a lumber gang. On the first day we assembled in the faint morning light near the camp gate, where our brigadier, a former train robber with a mouthful of gold teeth, took the roll. I was dismayed to see Katya in the group. She was wearing the dress that we had fought over in the bathhouse and paraded her victory before me.

  ‘Well, haven’t you changed in only a few days,’ she said, looking at my shorn head.

  I wondered how she was going to work in that dress or in the red leather shoes she wore with it.

  Another lumber gang assembled behind us and I was disconcerted to see Nikita there. He didn’t appear to recognise me and I was relieved. A piano accordionist and guitarist — prisoners also — played music while we collected our saws, axes, shovels and sacks. ‘Work is honourable, glorious, valiant and heroic!’ they sang.

  Because we were carrying tools that could be used as weapons, the guards were armed and vigilant. They kept their guns pointed at us as we marched past the gate.

  The head guard shouted, ‘Keep to your rank and look straight ahead! A step to the right or left will be regarded as an attempt to escape and we will shoot without warning!’

  We marched five kilometres to our worksite, where we were put into pairs. I was placed with another woman, much taller than I was. Luckily for me she knew how to fell trees — cutting from three sides to make
the trunk fall into an open space. We worked in rhythm to fulfil our norm. Our bread ration was dependent on achieving that quota. I was fortunate to be partnered with someone who was physically strong, even though I had to work hard to keep up with her. We spoke as little as possible, even during our meal break and on the way back to the camp: we couldn’t afford to waste one ounce of energy.

  While being in the forest was better than working in a mine, I didn’t like lumbering. It hurt me to cut down the majestic trees. I winced each time we hacked into the trunks with our saws and axes. But the trees got their revenge. One day my partner and I misjudged which way a cedar would fall. A thick branch struck her and crushed her skull. It was an awful way to die and yet all I could think about was my bread ration. What would happen to me now? When I came to my senses, my cold-bloodedness horrified me.

  My fellow prisoners had no such concerns. They acted quickly, stripping my fallen comrade of her shoes, pants and underwear before the brigadier had even been informed of her death.

  With everyone else paired up, the only person left for me to work with was Katya and she did nothing. The next day, as soon as we reached our worksite, she was busy in the bushes, pleasuring our brigadier or one of the guards. She told the brigadier that I could fulfil her norm as well as mine, but even he saw that it would be impossible. Instead I was to work on my own to fulfil a reduced norm. I only had to cut down the occasional tree then; most of the time I was sawing branches off felled trees or stacking the wood for hauling.

  As we settled into our routine, we were accompanied by fewer guards and sometimes none at all. The brigadier kept the gang in check; and where could a prisoner escape to in such a wilderness anyway? I felt secure in this arrangement until one day I struggled to keep up with my norm and returned to the camp later than the others. It was then that I crossed paths with Nikita. He looked as ferocious up close as he did at a distance, but he wasn’t as ugly as I’d first thought. His beard was misleading and I realised that we could even be the same age. He peered at me through the twilight and recognised me. I turned to walk in another direction but he grabbed my arm.