“Comrade Brigadier,” she said, turning to the leader whose name she did not yet know. “I see the other women have gloves, but none were issued to me.”
“Gloves are special. You have to buy them.”
“Buy them with what, Comrade Brigadier?”
He leered at her, and she took a step back, horrified at the implication. To her relief, Nina stepped forward. “I paid you in tobacco, Ivan. Why can’t she do the same?”
Ivan wrinkled his nose at missing an opportunity and conceded. “Yeah, sure. Twenty grams of tobacco.” He produced a pair of tattered gloves from the pouch he carried and held them up. “Now, where’s the tobacco?”
“Come on, Ivan. You know she won’t get her ration until the end of the week. I’ll give you ten grams tonight, the last of my supply, and she’ll give you the other ten when she gets it.”
He spat to the side. “All right. Fine. Now stop gabbing and start working. We have to make the quota or no one gets full rations, and if you get me in trouble, someone will have to pay.” He handed out the axes and dragging chains and indicated the trees to be cut.
They worked in two-woman teams, and Alexia saw immediately that most were experienced at bringing down a tree efficiently. First the lower notch, in the direction the tree would fall, then the higher cut on the opposite side. Nina showed her how to chop at a forty-five-degree angle and leave enough uncut wood for the tree to stand until they could step out of the way. After thirty minutes of hard swinging, they stepped back as the tree leaned forward, groaned, and finally crashed. It was satisfying, but by then, Alexia’s arms and shoulders ached.
The felling was only part of the task. They also had to strip away the limbs, which required another half an hour of small chops, and then it took an equal amount of time to drag the trunk chained to hooks over their shoulders to a pile in a central area. Alexia did the calculation. If each tree took roughly an hour and a half to finish, and they made up only four teams, they would need some eleven and a half hours of hard, unbroken labor to reach their quota of thirty trees. It was possible only if they were willing to kill themselves doing it, and it would be impossible to do a second time.
After Alexia and Nina had felled, stripped, and stacked their third tree, and it seemed she could no longer walk or stand up straight, she dropped to her knees. “I can’t keep up this pace, and I don’t think anyone can. I don’t understand how you manage your quota each day.”
Nina clapped sawdust and snow from her gloves. “In the camps, you can either reach your quota or give the illusion of reaching it. Wait until twelve o’clock, when Ivan reports back to administration and we’re allowed to rest for fifteen minutes.”
“If you say so,” Alexia said, limping awkwardly toward the next tree.
At noon, as promised, Ivan disappeared, obviously confident that his brigade would continue working. “All right… NOW,” Sonia ordered. At that moment, she and the other women sprinted to the other side of the gully, where several piles of logs already lay from previous jobs. In teams of two, they hauled five cut logs over to their side, trimmed off the ends to make the cuts appear fresh, and loaded them onto their own pile for that day’s quota. Now, instead of the thirteen trunks they’d finished since early in the morning, they had eighteen. That meant they had another twelve to do, and at four every hour and a half—every two hours, given breathing time between each one—they’d finish by sunset.
The women’s energy flagged as the day wore on, but they still managed to drag the last log in by twilight. They marched back to the camp in darkness, and having met their quota, they were entitled to full rations. This consisted of a bowl of balanda, a watery soup made from spoiled cabbage, potatoes, and fish heads, and 700 grams of black bread.
Alexia devoured her food, again spoonless. It tasted dreadful, but she didn’t care and would gladly have eaten more. Instead, the siren sounded again for final roll call, and they lined up in their rows of five to be counted. Olha was right. After that, the plank bed and lice-ridden blanket in their hole in the ground seemed a relief.
“That trick of stealing those logs, if you do that every day, I can’t believe Ivan doesn’t catch on,” she said to Sonia, who stood at the stove with her blanket.
Sonia picked off a couple of lice from the blanket and crushed them between her nails. “We don’t take so many that it’s obvious. And there must be eight or ten piles lying around the forest. Once the trees are piled up and counted, no one bothers to count again. Even if Ivan figured out what we do, all he really cares is that he can report at the end of the day that his brigade made its quota. And we always do.”
“Doesn’t anyone at the top of the chain count them at the end and realize they’re far short of what the camp says it has?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But each person at every level lies to his supervisor, who then lies to his supervisor, and so it goes. As long as it looks right on the books, the whole system moves along.”
Alexia rolled up in her blanket and thought of Mia, who had investigated exactly that kind of fraud and almost been murdered for it. What would she think of the economy of the Gulag?
“Mia,” she murmured to herself as she slipped off into unconsciousness, “don’t forget me.”
Alexia endured four weeks of the woodcutting regime, paid her tobacco debt to both Ivan and Nina, but could feel herself weakening. She had always been trim, but now she was wiry, and soon, she feared, she would look like Olha.
She learned the tricks of survivaclass="underline" to save a scrap of bread from supper to eat just before going to bed, since it was hard to fall asleep hungry, to sleep with her hat pulled low and covering her ears, to trade tobacco for essential items as soon as possible.
With her fourth issue of tobacco, she “bought” a crudely carved wooden spoon and, with the next four rations after that, a wooden bowl. The latter meant she no longer had to wait for one to be handed in and rinsed. But the food, whether kasha or balanda, seemed to make no dent in her constant hunger.
After a few weeks of working, stealing, and sleeping alongside the other women, she began to see them as family. And then she woke up one morning to a cluster of green branches, from one of their cut trees, on the one rickety table in the dugout. On its top a length of wire had been bent into something vaguely resembling a star.
“What’s this?” she asked. “Don’t you get enough of trees on the job every day?”
Sonia sat up on her bed plank and wrapped her blanket around her shoulders. “You haven’t been paying attention to the calendar, my dear. It’s Christmas.”
“Christmas! We’re celebrating Christmas?” Alexia laughed.
Nina laughed with her. “I know no one believes in that nonsense anymore. I certainly don’t. And of course we have nothing to make the ‘holy supper’ with. But I love the rituals, the singing, the specialness of it. I like to have a day when we’re supposed to show our love for people.”
Sonia grew somber. “The last time I saw my husband and daughter was at Christmas four years ago. For my mother, who never gave up the faith, we had a special festive dinner at home. My husband was so kind. He brought a fur hat for my mother and a snow-maiden doll for our daughter, and we were all so happy. Two days later he was arrested, and two months after that, I was, too. My family has no idea where I am.”
Alexia took her hand. “Yes, I spent a lot of nice Christmases with my babushka and Father Zosima. And… the best one of all with my dearest friend, Mia. We went to a Mass together, two nonbelievers, but being there in that beautiful place with her… well, that made it holy for me.”