Vasili maintained a prudent silence. Prices in Smidovich were cheap compared to what he’d been used to in Harbin. China had too many people clamoring after not enough stuff. As soon as you crossed the Amur, all of that changed. There wasn’t much stuff here, either, but there was hardly anybody around to go after it.
“Oh, and the next time you tangle with Grigory Papanin, hit him harder, why don’t you?” the babushka said.
So much for making like I’m innocent, Vasili thought. “If I hit him any harder than I did before, I’ll kill him.”
“No loss.” She might be a Russian, but no Chinese could have sounded more callous.
12
As she had to do, Luisa Hozzel picked up bits of Russian: a word here, a clause there, a verb phrase somewhere else. One or two of the guards who took the women out to chop down trees had scraps of German. That made Luisa wonder what they’d done-and to whom they’d done it-during the last war, but she didn’t ask. They might tell her. Or they might shoot her. Sometimes not knowing was better. They weren’t even supposed to use their Deutsch, but they did. It let them get across what they wanted from the women.
One phrase the guards with some German all had down was “More work, cunts!” They yelled it at any excuse or none. They yelled it in Russian, too, which built Luisa’s vocabulary.
She didn’t need long to realize the Russian she was learning was filthy. If she’d used that kind of German, people would have stared at her, or possibly locked her up. But everybody in the gulag, guards and zeks alike, talked this way. Obscenity here was small change, not a big bill. When people really got mad, they could curse for ten minutes without repeating themselves once.
And the guards had other ways to make their prisoners unhappy. A flat-faced Tatar-looking fellow with a wispy black mustache pointed at Luisa and asked, “How you likes being in Jew country, bitch?”
“What do you mean, please, sir?” Luisa asked cautiously. She wasn’t sure she’d understood. He hissed like a snake when he spoke. And what would he know about Jews?
But he did. “You German, ja? You Germans kill Jews last war, ja?” He waited for Luisa to respond.
“I never killed any Jews. I never hurt any, either,” she said, which was true. True or not, it made the guard scowl and heft his machine pistol. Quickly, Luisa added, “I know that Germany killed Jews, though.”
The guard nodded. “Germans kill Jews, ja. And now you in Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Region. How you like that?”
Her first thought was that, if Jews lived in this godforsaken stretch of Siberia, they were as much exiles as she was herself, whether or not they lived inside the barbed wire like her. Her second thought was that the guard-Uzbek? Tajik? Kalmuk? Mongol?-would clout her if she came out with her first thought. All she said was, “I’m here. I have to get through it if I can.”
“Maybe you not so dumb, even if you is German,” the guard said.
Luisa laughed bitterly. “If I’m so smart, what am I doing here?”
“Don’t gots to be stupids to end up here. I seen that plenty,” the Asiatic said. And he was bound to be right. Then he realized he’d been chinning with a zek. Guards weren’t supposed to act human around prisoners; Luisa had seen as much. His face hardened. “Get to workings back. Plenties of branches to chopping.”
Back to work, or even workings, Luisa got. The guards didn’t push the zeks too hard. If you stayed anywhere close to the pace they demanded, chances were you’d stay out of trouble. Luisa had seen the same pace from Poles and Russians brought to Germany in the last war. She hadn’t recognized it for what it was then. She’d just thought they were a pack of lazy foreigners. Untermenschen, if you wanted to get right down to it.
Now the shoe was on the other foot: her foot. She found out all the places it pinched. Here she was in a country where she didn’t want to be, thousands of kilometers from home, doing work she didn’t want to do because they’d rape her or kill her or rape her and then kill her if she didn’t.
No wonder those Poles and Russians had moved in slow motion! She moved in slow motion herself, as slow as she could get away with. She picked up a little when the guards growled at her. When they turned and growled at somebody else, she slowed down again.
Yes, now she recognized the rhythm this unwanted labor called forth from the people who had to do it. It was a rhythm as ancient as the Pyramids and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It was the rhythm of the slave.
From things the bitches said, most Russians, even the ones who weren’t in one gulag or another, worked at this pace whenever they could get by with it. Luisa hacked at a branch. She was better with a hatchet than she had been when she got here. She hacked again, then paused. Why not? The guard who might have ridden with Genghis Khan had gone off to shout at some other women. They worked harder…till he turned his back.
And no wonder even those Russians in what they called freedom worked like this. Wasn’t the whole Soviet Union stuck behind barbed wire? It looked that way to Luisa. Stalin’s tyranny might be grayer than Hitler’s, but the only real difference between the MGB and the Gestapo was the name.
Stalin and his commissars recognized their problem. A couple of the first Russian phrases Luisa had learned were shock worker and Stakhanovite. As the Nazis had, the Communists tried to get people to work harder. By the gales of laughter the bitches went into whenever they heard those phrases, Soviet propaganda didn’t work any better than its German equivalent had. It might have worked worse.
In Germany, someone who worked hard might possibly get rich doing it. In the workers’ paradise, though? Here, they preached equality and the classless society at the top of their lungs. The idea of getting rich was like picking your nose and eating it or looking at filthy pictures in public.
The guard turned so he could see Luisa again. Down came the axe. The branch fell away from the trunk of the pine. Snow spurted up as it hit the ground. Luisa moved on a couple of paces and started on the next branch. Satisfied, the guard reached into a trouser pocket for his cigarettes.
Luisa laughed again, even less happily than before. Not even the gulag was a classless society, or anything close to it. The socially friendly bitches lorded it over the politicals and the Germans, who counted as political, too. The guards backed them up when they did it. You couldn’t win.
For that matter, what would winning mean? If you won, you wouldn’t be a zek any more. That, Luisa could see. But what would you be instead? If you weren’t a prisoner here, wouldn’t you be something a lot like a guard? What other choice was there?
She nodded to herself. That was what Russia was like, all right. (And it was also what the Third Reich had been like, even if she didn’t care so much to remember that.) Either you were a tasty sheep or a sheep-eating wolf. There was no middle ground.
There had been, in the Weimar Republic she remembered with a girl’s memories. There was starting to be again, in the Federal Republic that was growing up from the ruins of the dead Reich like new, hopeful grass after a harsh winter. But the Ivans were taking care of that, not just for her and the others in the gulag, but also for those still in the west but now under Stalin’s heavy yoke.
“Workings!” the flat-faced guard said. Luisa worked. It seemed to take less effort than thinking.
Along with the other women in the work gang, she trudged back to the camp when the sun drew near the trees. They gave up their tools outside. The guards counted saws and axes as carefully as they counted zeks. A prisoner with a weapon meant trouble.