‘Bistro! Quickly!’
Anna had cursed her axe. It was too small and too blunt, the useless blade had stuck fast in the wood.
‘Bistro! ’
Anna had knelt on the branch, widening the gap between it and the trunk, and yanked the blade free. Everything hurt: the muscles in her back; the skin on her knees; the blisters on her feet; the tendons in her wrists; even the teeth in her head. And now lesions were appearing on her face and they frightened her. She’d hacked again and again at the last two branches but each time an iron-hard knot in the wood resisted her blows. She began to panic.
Frantically she tore at the branch with her hands, aware of the other brigades moving off, but her gloves had ripped and pain stabbed into her finger. A hand, strong and muscular, pulled at her shoulder and pushed her roughly to one side before she could object. An axe swung in a wide arc a hand’s breadth from her cheek, a blue smear in the white air, its blade finely honed. It had sliced neatly through the branch, which flew off with a crack into the trampled snow, followed almost instantly by the second one. The tree was stripped and ready to be hauled.
Anna had studied the owner of the axe. She was a tall young woman, wearing the regulation rough camp dress swamped under a padded jacket with her prison number on front and back, and a wool cap with earflaps tied under her chin. Her legs were wrapped in layers of rags and on her feet were shoes cobbled together out of birch bark and old rubber tyres, held together by string.
‘Spasibo,’ Anna had said gratefully.
Axe blows meant using energy and energy was like gold dust round here, so you didn’t waste it on others. Anna’s rescuer looked back at her with large blue eyes, her skin as grey as the sky. But no lesions.
‘Spasibo,’ Anna said again.
‘Your chopping technique is all wrong,’ the other prisoner said. ‘Swing higher and the axe head gains momentum.’ She had shrugged and started to walk away.
‘My name’s Anna,’ Anna called to her retreating back.
The young woman turned, stared thoughtfully, eyes narrowed against the wind.
‘I am Sofia.’
That was in 1929, only four years ago, yet it felt like a lifetime. Back in the time when four hundred grams of stinking black bread a day had seemed like starvation. When it lay heavy as damp clay in the stomach while she strove to work harder in the forest, now that her technique with the axe had improved. The camp Commandant made clear the simple rule: the more you worked, the more you ate. But only when she and her brigade reached the full norm would she receive the full ration paiok of seven hundred grams.
‘For seven hundred grams of bread I would sell my soul.’
She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. But she’d noticed odd things happening to herself in those early days of shock at finding herself a prisoner: at night, when her dreams grew too painful, she was digging her nails into her thigh so fiercely that they left scarlet welts in her flesh; and she’d started speaking aloud the thoughts that were meant to stay in her head. That worried her. She was losing control. She’d glanced round the barrack hut to see who may have heard.
Most of the women were huddled at each end where the stoves gave out a trickle of heat, not enough to keep the ice off the inside of the grimy window panes but sufficient to give the illusion of warmth. Others lay silent on their beds. The hut contained ten three-storey bunk beds, nudged tight against each other down both sides of the room, with every bed made of a hard board that was meant for two people but was packed with five each night. At times it was impossible to turn over in bed or do anything but lie rigidly on one’s side – hip bones soon developed sores, and there was a pecking order that settled the strongest and the fittest on the top boards. This evening by lamplight some of the women were playing cards they’d made out of scraps of paper and one group was bickering loudly on a top bunk as they bargained with each other for makhorka and salt.
‘Your soul’s not worth seven hundred grams of chleb.’
Anna looked up, startled. The voice came from Sofia, the girl who had helped her. Anna was sitting on the edge of her bed board on the bottom bunk near the draughts of the door, attempting to mend a hole in her glove. The needle she’d created from a splinter of wood and the thread she’d unravelled from her blanket, and it was going well despite the dismal light from the kerosene lamps.
‘My soul,’ Anna said firmly, ‘is worth a good breakfast. And I don’t mean the filthy kasha slop we’re given every morning.’
The blue eyes of the tall young woman scrutinised her carefully, as though she were a newly discovered specimen under a microscope lens. Sofia was leaning against the upright of Anna’s bed and she looked tired, her shoulders wrapped in a dark brown blanket that made her silver-blonde hair look brighter by comparison. It was cropped short, as was all the women’s hair, the authority’s compulsory solution to the problem of head lice. Her skin possessed the grey ashy tinge of malnutrition, but she had no sores or lesions and her teeth were astonishingly white.
‘I mean,’ Anna continued, ‘a breakfast of three fried eggs, yolks yellow as suns on the plate and whites as fluffy as summer clouds, and a thick slice of pork, pink and succulent with a fine grain to it and a slender curve of yellow fat that melts on the tongue like…’
‘Go on, go on.’
It was the Ukrainian babushka who spoke, tapping a bony hand on Anna’s back. She was lying on her tiny bed space behind Anna, who had thought her asleep because for once she wasn’t coughing, but the mention of food had even broken through to her dreams.
‘The bread,’ the old woman whispered, ‘tell me about the bread to go with the eggs and the pork.’
‘The bread will be white, fresh from the oven, bread so light and moist that it soaks up the egg yolk like a sponge and tastes like heaven in the mouth.’
‘And the coffee? Will there be coffee as well?’
‘Ah yes.’ Anna closed her eyes and sighed with pleasure, letting it unfurl inside her like a delicate fan that she’d almost forgotten how to open. ‘The coffee will be so black and strong that just the aroma of it…’ she and the old woman both inhaled deeply in an attempt to catch its fragrance, ‘will make your-’
‘Stop it.’
Anna opened her eyes.
‘Stop it.’ It was Sofia. Her eyes were full of dark rage. ‘Why torture yourself?’
‘One day I’ll taste those eggs and that coffee again. I swear I will,’ Anna said fiercely.
‘Dura! You’re a fool,’ Sofia retorted and strode away to the far end of the hut.
Anna watched her. Saw her climb up on to her top bunk and pull the brown blanket over her head, burrowing deep into it like an animal into its nest.
The bony finger dug again into Anna. ‘And apples? Sliced up and sprinkled with cinnamon?’
‘Yes,’ Anna answered. ‘And a pot of damson jam, deep purple and glistening with syrup.’
‘You know, malishka, I’d honestly sell my God-fearing soul for a breakfast like that before I die.’
Anna swivelled round and smiled at the old woman, whose body was riddled with sores. She stroked the skin of the babushka’s hand, very gently because it was so paper-thin that the slightest touch could leave behind bruises like ink stains.
‘So would I,’ she whispered.
The woman struggled to sit up, her bird-like chest straining against the first rumblings of a coughing fit, and closed her eyes.
‘Hell couldn’t be any worse than this place,’ Anna murmured. ‘Could it?’
The next day one of the guards called out to her. ‘You! Come here.’
The evening ordeal was finally over. The poverka, the roll-call and counting of heads, was a process that dragged on and on sometimes for hours, even though the prisoners could barely stand after a hard day’s labour in the forest. It went on until the numbers that were lined up in rigid rows in the Zone tallied with the numbers on the lists in front of the Commandant. The procedure was repeated rigorously every morning and every night, and every morning and every night somebody died. The German Shepherd dogs on chain leashes watched with gaping jaws for any movement in the rows.