Her green eyes looked at me with icy intimidation. The last time I saw that look was the Easter Sunday that Auntie Lena swore that she would never give me a bite of bread no matter how hungry I was. I felt a shiver go down my back. I stopped with my hand in mid-reach not being sure of what to do.
“It’s someone else’s turn to get frozen out there every morning,” Larysa said. She grabbed the long-handled wooden spoon from a rack on the wall, turned her back to me and began to stir the large pot.
“Larysa,” Nikolaiovna said. “You’d be a much better person if you could find a little kindness in your heart.”
Larysa glared back at her.
“Kindness? What’s that? And whoever shows any kindness to me?”
“You might make a friend or two if you tried. Life would be easier for you if you did.”
“I don’t need any friends.” Larysa frowned more deeply and continued to stir.
“I don’t know where the well is,” I said.
“Show her where the buckets are.” Nikolaiovna motioned to Gregory.
Without a word, Gregory started for the door. I followed his gaunt back to where the buckets were kept and out to the well. Once Gregory saw that I knew where things were, he disappeared back into the house like a shadow. And that’s how he was, quietly doing Nikolaiovna’s bidding. I never heard him utter a sound in the months that I lived at the orphanage.
The sky was still heavy with clouds and the November air was sharp with the coming winter. Despite the dampness, it felt good. I breathed in deeply, the way I had when I went out for water after the twins died and felt the same cleansing cold reviving me.
I could get water every day, I thought. It would probably be the only time that I would be alone. I could pray as I went to fill the buckets and no one would ever see me.
It didn’t take long for me to fall into the drudgery of the Children’s Home. I went to the well before breakfast each morning. We lined up for a small serving of porridge and a tin cupful of water. We were given enough to survive, but never enough to feel satisfied. On a rare morning there might also be a piece of bread as well. I remembered the pots at the market place in our village and always waited till the porridge was almost gone before I got my bowl filled. Mitya told me that the porridge was thicker towards the bottom of the pot than the top because it got heavier when it cooked.
After breakfast, the bigger girls put away the blankets, which got dirtier and more ragged every day, and set up the long table for our lessons. Our lessons were taught by a fat, old man with a red face who was a member of the Party. I don’t know if I ever heard his name. We called him Comrade Professor. Though his appearance was different from Asimov, his methods and demeanour were the same. The metre stick was often busy at the expense of a crying, hungry Child. There was arithmetic, Russian history and reading in the morning. Propaganda was saved for the afternoon.
“Father Stalin doesn’t want his Children to be ignorant,” the Comrade said.
Those who were relatively healthy were assigned to help with the chores of the house or caring for the sicker Children.
“You might as well learn that, even though Father Stalin considers each and every one of you to be his own, he expects you to earn your keep,” Ivanovna told us.
I always chose to do the chores that separated me from the others even those that might be more difficult or those that would take me out into the cold. I believe that being out in that cold killed much of the sickness that weakened the rest of the Children. If I was sweeping, drawing water or bringing in wood, I didn’t have to talk to anyone. I also learned that if I pasted a half-smile or absent look on my face, Nikolaiovna would leave me in peace and not try to convince me to be a better person the way she always tried with the sulky Larysa.
A second pot of porridge was made at seven each night and the bedtime routine of the first evening that I arrived was played over again. Occasionally, a Child would be carried out of the sick room and sent to the cemetery. Since I never made friends with any of them, I never knew who they were. They would disappear without an explanation or a prayer. We were never told what really happened to them in that room.
When new Children arrived, which they did regularly, I stayed away from them, especially the smaller ones. I learned to look through people and to turn off any feelings I had left inside. When I prayed, the words seemed to come of their own accord. I often wasn’t sure if God heard me, but I remembered my promise so I continued praying. When I thought of Auntie and the others, I choked the thoughts out of my mind as well as I could. When I wasn’t being ordered around by one or the other of the Comrades, I sat alone and stared out of the window.
Time had no meaning. Each day was like the one before with no future in sight. And so the endless days of the fall of 1932 blurred past my ninth birthday and into the particularly cold winter of 1933. One day as I returned with my full water buckets, I was surprised to see that Nikolaiovna and Larysa were covering the long table with newly laundered sheets. Where could those have come from? We hadn’t had any soap in the house since my arrival.
“Aren’t we having breakfast?” I asked Larysa as she smoothed the sheet at her end of the table.
“Don’t you know anything, you stupid girl?” she said. She stuck her thin nose in the air as if she knew something really important that I should know but obviously didn’t.
I shrugged my shoulders and walked away. Why should I listen to that viper? I saw that a pot of porridge was boiling on the stove. I put the water buckets into their customary place and headed for my secluded corner to wait for breakfast as usual. I had no energy to care about what was going on. I’d find out soon enough.
The time for lessons to begin passed. We still were not given breakfast. The little ones started to fuss as they were hungry.
“Marina Nikolaiovna, why can’t we have our breakfast?” one of the little boys asked.
“Because we are waiting for a special visitor. It’s a surprise.”
“What kind of surprise?”
“Don’t ask so many questions,” she said. “Suck your thumb till he gets here and you’ll feel better.”
It was almost noon when Comrade Professor arrived with two fur-covered Comrades from the city. They came bustling in with the falling snow, a big wooden box between them. The smaller Children moved in closer to have a good look, but Nikolaiovna shepherded them back.
“Let the Comrades in,” she said. “We’ll sit down for lunch and then you’ll see what the surprise is.”
Instead of lining up to get our bowls as usual, we were instructed to sit at the table like “civilized Children.” Nikolaiovna and Larysa brought each person his porridge, starting with the visitors, while Ivanovna dished it up. As we ate the visitors took turns talking about how fortunate we were to be in this home and how well we were being taken care of by Father Stalin, especially as most other Children whose parents died were left out in the world to fend for themselves. Comrades Ivanovna and Nikolaiovna took it all in with satisfied smiles.
“And just to show you how special you are, we brought you a present,” the taller of the city Comrades said.
The Children whispered excitedly around the table while the Comrades from the city opened their wooden crate and handed out the most beautiful orange fruit I had ever seen.
“What are these things and why do we get presents today?” one of the smaller boys asked.
“They’re oranges. You peel back the skin and eat each section one at a time,” Nikolaiovna said.
“In the Old World, it used to be Christmas Day on this day,” the shorter Comrade from the city said. “People used to believe in that religious fairy tale and they did things like praying to please a father God that doesn’t exist. Father Stalin wants to show you that we don’t need to pray or do those things any more. No one prays these days. Enlightened people know that Father Stalin will give them everything they need. Those old fairy tales are only good for western farmers whose food and cattle are sto
len from them by the capitalists. To show you that he is more important than God, he sent you a present.”
“But Comrade,” Larysa said from our end of the table, “I know someone who prays every day.”
“You do?” he answered. “It must be an older person who’s lost her mind and can’t see common sense any longer.”
“Oh, no, Comrade,” Larysa said. “It’s someone very young.” Her face lit up in a smirk of satisfaction.
“How can that be?” Both of the city Comrades looked curiously at Comrades Ivanovna and Nikolaiovna. “I didn’t think there were any believers in the home. You must get about town then.”
“No, Comrade,” Larysa said. “There’s someone right at this table. I see her praying by the well every day.”
Every eye in the room assaulted me. They all knew that I went for water and spent as much time as I could alone.
“Is this true?” Svetlana Ivanovna’s sharp eyes were trained on my face like a pair of guns ready to blast my head off.
When had Larysa seen me praying? I always checked around me before I knelt. If I suspected even a faint movement in the wind, I stood and prayed invisibly — so I thought. Had Larysa been following me out? Had she watched me through a window? How did she know? And why was she doing this? I had tried to avoid her. My chest cramped till it hurt to breathe.
“Yes, it is.” Larysa pounced on me like a cat that has finally captured her prey.
“Is it true?” Ivanovna said.
I nodded.
What followed amounted to a mock trial. I was questioned and badgered for hours till I admitted that I prayed by the well every day, that I believed in God and in Heaven, that I was going to see my dead family there some day, that my Auntie taught me to pray and that I could see my Mama’s face in the centre of the flame of a candle because that’s where one’s soul was seen if one believed.
Comrade Professor’s laugh was the loudest.
“Do you see a soul there?” the taller Comrade from the city asked.
They lit all of the candles they could find, looking for souls and laughed at me until one of the candles was knocked over in their merriment and almost set the house on fire. The Children were encouraged to denounce me in turn and some of the more aggressive ones even made up crude rhymes about my plight. In the end, I cried so hard that I fainted from exhaustion. They put me to sleep on a bench in a corner. I never said Auntie’s name or who my family was.
I don’t know how long I lay there. I woke up some time the next day with a head that felt as big as a pumpkin and red eyes that could rival those of a town drunk. My only consolation was that I never said the name of my family so I knew that, for now, I didn’t cause them more grief. Comrade Ivanovna gave me extra propaganda pamphlets to memorize and took away all of my duties that gave me the space I had enjoyed before. She assigned me to help her in the sick room where she could keep an eye on me.
Larysa walked around as proud as a peacock. But Comrade Nikolaiovna sent sympathetic looks my way whenever she could see that no one was looking. She saved my orange for me and gave it to me while Ivanovna was gone out on an errand.
“Eat it slowly,” she said. “It’s sweet and tangy at the same time. I even like to bite off little bits of the peel because they taste bitter like the sunshine. Try it and see for yourself.”
Ghosts in the Twilight
BEING RELEGATED TO the sick room changed my life as dramatically as if I had been sent to another country. A row of sleeping benches was lined up with their heads against the long wall of the room. They were so close together that I could hardly fit between them. It was my job to care for the Children who languished on these benches, especially when they had a fever.
“Try to make them drink as much water as they can,” Ivanovna said. “Give them a small sip at a time so that they can keep more of it down. And clean them up when they vomit.”
This was a very hard thing to do. Though the Children were underweight and small for their age, many of them were so weak that they couldn’t lift their limbs and were surprisingly heavy. I was worn out by trying to support their bodies as I helped them eat their tiny serving of porridge or drink their few sips of water.
“Take care that they are lying back to back or heads on opposite ends so that they don’t vomit all over each other,” she explained. “Two or three together under a blanket keeps each of them warmer for a longer time. Pull up the covers as soon as you notice that they throw them off ... nothing we can do about these lice though.” She scratched at her armpit trying to be discreet.
I shivered in sympathy and looked away.
“What is making us all itchy?” I asked. “I never was itchy before I came here.”
I wondered why we all scratched at our groins and armpits.
“No need for shame,” Ivanovna told me since we had no choice but to share beds, blankets and clothing with no soap to launder them, even the two Comrades suffered from body lice constantly.
“It’s one of the hazards of being assigned to one of these uncivilized outposts,” she complained.
I opted to keep my old sleeping spot with Larysa as it got me out of the Sick Room at least for a few hours each night. I fought with the memories of long winter nights snuggling under my Mama’s feather bed with Xenkovna’s arm around me and my face in her sweet-smelling hair. It didn’t matter now anyway—or did it? Would God protect me? Would he bring me back to Auntie or would I die here with these outcasts? Would Mama and Tahto still want me after I spent so much time in such a terrible place? Maybe God wouldn’t let me into Heaven after all. I was too filthy. I did Ivanovna’s bidding.
As the winter progressed and the cold intensified, only the sickest were put on the beds while the stronger ones were put onto extra dirty blankets on the floor at the foot of the benches. In the end, the blankets would be so full of waste or vomit that there was nothing to do but throw them into the fire. Ivanovna argued with the authorities for more supplies. Many were promised, but few were ever delivered.
“For a nine-year-old, she’s pretty strong and capable,” I heard Ivanovna say to Nikolaiovna after they thought I had fallen asleep. “I couldn’t manage without her. There’s too many of them getting this horrible thing. Not enough nourishment for them to really get strong enough to fight the sickness. And never enough medicine or food for these Christian degenerates. I can’t wait till this assignment is over so that I can go back to my decent hospital in Moscow.”
“Ivanovna,” Nikolaiovna said, “they’re Children. As innocent as our own. What do they know about the Party or the New Order?”
“What good is their nationalist fervour now? Look at them. You keep on bleeding for these lousy brats and see how far you get. It’s my politics that got me into this wasteland in the first place. Pay attention if you don’t want a worse fate. Their ignorant parents should know better by now. Father Stalin will break them no matter what they do. I won’t say that I heard you sympathizing with them, but don’t expect anyone else to stay quiet. If you don’t want trouble, I’m telling you to keep thoughts like that to yourself. Have you forgotten what the little witch Larysa did to Philipovna at Christmas?”
I shuddered at the memory.
The south window of the sick room which could have been letting in sunshine and light was covered with a sheet that once was white but was now a dirty yellow. I could tell whether the sun was out or not by the intensity of its dingy glow. I longed to be out in the bright sunlight on the other side of that sheet no matter how cold it got.
“The light will hurt their eyes and make them blind,” Ivanovna said when I tried to pull the sheet aside one day. “Sick people need to rest. Cold air will let in bad things from outside.”
“But it’s so dark in this room. And it smells bad. I can’t breathe in here.” I never got used to the smell of vomit and, even after all of this time, I still retched when I had to deal with it.
“Stop your whining. Breathe through your open mouth and not your nose. You�
��ll smell less of it that way.”
So I learned to breathe through my mouth.
“Now hold his head while I give him some medicine.”
I went to the bench where a boy who was about twelve lay. He had shrunk down to where he was smaller than me and was crumpled up into a shaking ball with stomach cramps, a common symptom of starvation. I grabbed his boney shoulders, holding him tight against me as Ivanovna pinched his nose with one hand and poured a spoonful of horrid smelling liquid down his crying mouth with the other.
“Don’t you dare spit that out,” she ordered as the boy gagged on the stuff.
I felt the tears wanting to squeeze themselves out from the corners of my eyes.
Ivanovna used the same spoon for giving all of the Children their medicine. Those were the days before we knew about sharing spoons and glasses with others when they had contagious diseases. But even if we had known about that, there weren’t enough to go around and no soap to wash them with.
“Let me cover you up now,” I said and patted the boy’s matted hair as I laid him back down onto the bench. I didn’t ask the sick Children what their names were. I learned to close my ears so that I wouldn’t hear them moan and I learned not to look into their eyes so that I didn’t have to see their pain. But we were all in pain— so much of it that if one didn’t learn to shut down her mind, one could not survive.
Some of the Children just went to sleep—they closed their eyes at night and didn’t wake up in the morning. No cramps; no sighs; just a quiet resignation, a quiet surrender like Viktor when he went out to die beneath our birch tree.
I learned to recognize it by the blank look on their faces. I was sure that I didn’t look much different myself, especially as I felt more and more tired after helping the Comrade each day. I wrapped the dead Children in the blanket they lay on and then the silent Gregory would come and put the body at the side of the house where someone took it away at night.
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