The woman-her name was Nadezhda Chukovskaya-pointed north. “On edge of Arctic Ocean. Lots of camps around Kolyma. All bad, some worser, some worstest. In winter, you know what they give you for punishment for not making norms?”
“Chto?” Luisa asked. What? was a handy question in any language.
“They put you in tent without heat.” The bitch mimed shivering. She was a pretty good mime-and she glanced at Luisa sidelong, to see the impression she was making. Luisa ignored that, wondering how much colder it would be up there than it was here.
“How do you keep from freezing?” She couldn’t imagine any way.
“Chekists kind people,” Nadezhda said. “They let you run around tent to stay warm. They don’t shoot you for doing.”
What really alarmed Luisa about that was how the Russian woman sounded as if she meant it. As far as she was concerned, the camp guards might have put people in those tents without giving them any chance at all not to die. Why not? Luisa thought. Hitler’s men did such things. Everyone knew it, even if nobody talked about it.
When the tree she and Trudl were felling started to sway, snow fell off a branch and hit her in the face. Brushing it out of her mouth and nose and eyes, she shouted, “Yob tvoyu mat’!”
Snow fell near Trudl, too, but didn’t get her the way it got Luisa. Gustav’s boss’ wife clucked. “Going native, are you?” she asked in German.
“It doesn’t seem quite so bad in Russian,” Luisa said sheepishly.
“I don’t know. If you ask me, it’s worse,” Trudl Bachman said. “All the Russians swear like sailors or whores. They swear so much, they don’t even notice they’re doing it. It’s nothing but the foulest language every minute of every day.”
It wasn’t as if she were wrong. Luisa had noticed the same thing. You couldn’t very well not notice it. She said, “I think it’s like it was in the Weimar inflation, when you needed a wheelbarrow full of marks to buy a paper or a can of beans.”
Trudl frowned. “What do you mean? I don’t follow.” Neither one of them stopped working as they talked, though they did slow down. The pine would crash to the ground soon enough to keep the guard quiet either way.
“When one mark isn’t worth anything, you need a stack of marks to get something,” Luisa said. “When you swear all the time, one cuss word doesn’t mean anything. You’ve got to string a bunch of them together to let off any steam at all.”
“Oh. Now I get you,” Trudl said. “Yes, you may be right. My Aunt Kathe was one of those people who went to church every Sunday and tithed for the poor and that kind of thing. The hardest word I ever heard her say was ‘Shucks,’ and she only said that a couple of times. But she got more from it when she did than Max would if he cussed for a week.”
“There you are.” Luisa nodded. “And here we are, too.” The tree tottered and started to come down. Both women shouted warnings to the others in the work gang and skipped out of the way. The pine dropped within a meter or so of where Luisa’d thought it would, kicking up a flying white veil of snow. Not without a certain pride, Luisa said, “We’re getting good at this.”
“We are, ja,” Trudl said as a hooded crow flapped away cawing in fright. “For as long as we live, though, is this all the Russians will let us get good at?”
Luisa had no answer to that. She couldn’t imagine any zek who did have an answer to it. If they made you do something over and over and over again, you could hardly help getting good at it. Practice would make you good whether you wanted it to or not.
And then you starve to death, and they throw you into a hole in the ground, and some other poor soul gets good at whatever it was you used to do, she thought.
Trudl’s mind wend down a different track, or perhaps not so different after all. “I think I’d kiss a pig to keep from going out here every day. This is death, nothing else.”
“If that’s how you feel, Lord knows you’ve got plenty of pigs to choose from,” Luisa said tartly.
As if to prove her point, one of the guards ambled over to the downed tree. He had a flat, Asiatic face, and didn’t speak a whole lot of Russian himself. What he did speak was even more full of obscenity than most people’s here. “You knock that fucker over, hey?”
“Da.” Luisa was still proud of how precisely the pine had fallen.
“Khorosho.” The guard hefted his submachine gun. “Now you cunts trim that prick. Got work norm to meet. Get your ugly asses walloped, you no meet him.”
“Da,” Luisa said again, this time on a lower note. How could you take pride in what you did if the people you did it for, the people who made you do it, wouldn’t let you?
She and Trudl went to work with one-man saws and hatchets, hacking the branches off the trunk. Then they cut the trunk into chunks small enough for two people to haul them. Luisa stopped caring how cold it was. She worked up a sweat under her quilted jacket and trousers. She’d be chilled and clammy when she eased up, but she couldn’t do anything about that now.
There was less than half as much daylight at this season as there was in high summer. The sadistic oafs who set norms did take that into account. Even if they couldn’t tell the difference between men and women, they could understand that guards had trouble stopping escapes if zeks disappeared into the darkness. As twilight lowered like a candle-snuffer, the work gang trudged through the snow back to the encampment.
Evening lineup was the usual botch. Luisa stood there and stood there, getting hungrier and hungrier, while the guards shouted at the zeks and at one another. At last they decided no one had run away. Supper was a stew of cabbage and salt fish and a brick of black bread. Luisa had had worse. She wouldn’t have believed that was possible when she first got here, but she knew better now. As in all things, there were degrees of misery.
There certainly were degrees of exhaustion. When Luisa tumbled into slumber, she hoped she wouldn’t come out.
16
“Rain, rain, rain!” Leon said happily from the back seat.
“Well, kiddo-shmiddo, you got that right.” Aaron Finch was less delighted than his son. He was driving, and Leon wasn’t. He was also more than two and a half. Rain to him wasn’t something exciting. It was a nuisance, and a dangerous nuisance at that.
It drummed down on the roof of the newly acquired Chevy and splashed from the windows and windshield. The Chevy’s wipers were lazier than Aaron would have liked. He hadn’t checked that when he bought the car, and grumbled to himself for not thinking of it. Next time, he told himself. When I buy my Rolls. That was ridiculous enough for him to stop giving himself a hard time.
The traffic light ahead changed. “It’s red, dear,” Ruth said.
“I know, dear,” Aaron said with heavy patience. He hit the brake. On the other side of the transmission hump, Ruth’s foot pressed down on an imaginary brake pedal. He thought that was funny…up to a point. As the Chevy smoothly stopped-he had checked the brakes-he glanced over at her and added, “This car drives from the left front seat only.”
“I’m not a backseat driver,” his wife said.
“Only ’cause you’re sitting in the front seat with me,” he answered. She made a face at him. He laughed. She didn’t drive at all, but she thought she could tell him how to do it. This wasn’t the first time he’d trotted out his left-front-seat maxim-nowhere close.
Anybody else who did that kind of thing would have driven him straight up the wall. That he could laugh about it when Ruth did it showed how much in love he was. Either that or it showed how many of his marbles had already dribbled out his ears. Senility didn’t run in his family, but maybe he’d prove an exception.