Nina slid off her plank and came, wrapped in her blanket, to sit next to Alexia. “What was she like, your Mia?”
Alexia hesitated. Then she blurted out, “She’s lovely. An American who somehow ended up with us on the Eastern Front. Can you imagine? Someone who would give up a comfortable life in the West to fight beside us?”
“What happened to her?” Sonia asked.
“We were trying to return to America together, with some English diplomats, but the NKVD arrested me and pulled me off the plane. I suppose she continued on.”
“To America? Ooh. That sounds exciting.” Nina threw an arm across her back. “I bet she hasn’t forgotten, just like you haven’t. Look. I have a proposal, that I tell you all the wonderful things about my Timor, the man of my life, and you tell me all the things about Mia. Sonia can talk about her husband. I’m sure even grumpy old Olha has someone to talk about. Every night we’ll tell a little bit, and that way, it’s like they’re still with us.”
“Yes. I like that idea.”
The siren sounded, and they got to their feet to start the new workday.
Alexia stood shivering with the other women in the yard. They’d already had their miserable little portions of soup and root tea for breakfast, and now they were waiting for all the work crews to fall into their lines of five to be counted. If the count went well, it took only fifteen minutes. If the yard leader miscounted, or someone was missing, it could take an hour, and they still had the same work quota to meet.
At five thirty in the morning, the winter sky was still pitch-black but crystal clear and full of stars. Stamping back and forth to keep off the chill, Alexia gazed up at them. Idly, she wondered if she could spot the one constellation Mia had shown her how to recognize, that of Orion.
A shiver of pleasure went through her when she saw them, the three stars of Orion’s belt, and above and below them, the stars that made up his shoulders, feet, and shield.
She almost wept, as if recognizing an old friend who had looked down on her and Mia on Christmas night only a year ago. That night, that wondrous night, when Mia had rambled on about “millions of stars, millions and millions and millions” and then had kissed her. For a brief moment, she sensed a connection between herself and Mia, and the stars, proof of the existence only of themselves. They have no interest in comforting us, and yet we are comforted. As by the sunrise.
Through the month of January, it became clear to Alexia that the only ones who survived were those who had friends and could cheat the system with them. But even then, sheer luck or the lack of it could save or kill. As a “twenty-fiver” she was not allowed letters or packages from home, but perhaps to add to her torment, some invisible authority passed through a message letting her know her grandmother had died. No details, just that she was gone. Dear Babushka, with her forbidden icons and a celibate priest for a “husband.” Alexia’s fervent wish was that she died in peace, in her sleep, believing her grandchild still served at the front.
In February, the weather worsened radically. Merciful Soviet law required that work be suspended at temperatures below minus twenty-five degrees, and on the first such day, the brigades were exempted from labor. Instead, they were required to attend a lecture entitled “The Ideals of the People’s State” given by the district commissar of education.
While they waited outside the administration hut, which she had passed through upon arrival, she studied the newspaper posted on the wall. It was the only one available to the camp, since any others that arrived were quickly torn into cigarette papers. But this one was sacrosanct, and though it was a week old, it gave some news of the war. Budapest had been liberated, and even better, the Red Army had taken Warsaw and crossed into Germany.
She wondered whether Kalya and Klavdia were still alive. A smaller article mentioned that the Arctic convoys were now arriving without casualties, though their cargoes continued to show deficiencies at several destinations. Alexia snorted bitterly. Apparently Molotov and his cronies still had their hands in the supply line.
Finally her brigade and four others were called in, and in the warm air of the crowded room, she took off her ushanka and ran her hand over her head. Her fingers slid over the short, boyish growth that scarcely warmed her but made her feel like a person again. Without a mirror, she could only wonder what it looked like.
The lecture was hardly different from what she’d heard in her Komsomol days and in military training. The sheer repetition of the “heroic revolution of the working class” theme already rendered it boring, but now, to an audience of “enemies of the people” who labored until they died, it was absurd. She marveled that any of the prisoners could believe a single word of it.
The next day, the temperature warmed considerably, and the brigade returned to the taiga, though the team’s usual log-borrowing was temporarily thwarted by the lunchtime appearance of the commissar. Alexia thought at first he was there to inspect them, and shuddered at the thought, but was pleased to see that he merely wanted to hunt rabbits.
Alexia’s group had already slowly edged toward a desirable pile of previously cut logs when they heard the first gunshot. Alexia glanced up to see the commissar aiming at a rabbit. His cursing and the continued flight of the creature showed he’d missed.
He fired a second time, but the rifle jammed. He cursed again and raised the rifle to his shoulder as if to shoot a third time.
“Stop!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, startling him. He lowered the rifle and glanced toward her, clearly perturbed.
She dropped her ax and ran toward him, both hands held out in front of her. “The bullet’s jammed in the barrel. If you fire again, it’ll explode.”
“Oh,” he said, staring down at the rifle as if it were something alien. “Damn. I should have remembered that, but this isn’t the rifle I usually shoot. The commandant lent it to me, one of the old infantry rifles.”
“It’s a Mosin-Nagant, the kind we all used on the Front. Would the commissar like me to break it down and remove the jammed cartridge?”
“You can do that out here, without tools?”
“Yes, Comrade Commissar.” She took a chance calling him that. As an enemy of the people she was technically forbidden to call someone comrade. “But it must be in a sheltered place. Over there, perhaps, under the large fir.”
He nodded, and they hiked to the tree, which had a ring of soil at the base untouched by snow. Taking the gun from his hands, she first opened the bolt and pried out the cartridge shell that was in place behind the jam, then slid the whole bolt back off the body of the gun. “The beauty of the Mosin Nagant is that you can use the bayonet as a tool,” she said, clicking it off the end of the nozzle. She removed the two barrel bands and lifted the hand guard off the top of the barrel. Then she drew out the cleaning rod and laid it aside. Using the flat tip of the bayonet, she undid the screws at the front and the rear of the magazine chamber. Pressing out the magazine chamber allowed her to lift the entire barrel and slide in the cleaning rod to tap out the slug.
Triumphant, she held up the delinquent plug of metal. “It looks like the cartridge had almost no powder in it. Just enough to shove it halfway up the barrel.”
“Sabotage, I’m sure,” he muttered.
She ignored the accusation, which almost certainly was justified, and in as short a time as she had dismantled the rifle, she reassembled it. “Sorry it took so long, but it’s hard with gloves,” she said, handing it up to him.