One more Pershing went up in fire and smoke. The Yanks seemed to decide that, if they were going to move forward, they weren’t going to do it right here. Sullenly, competently, firing as they went, they pulled back.
“Urra! for the rodina! Urra! for the great Stalin!” Lieutenant Kosior shouted. “They shall not pass!”
“Urra!” Ihor said. He had schnapps in his canteen. He drank greedily.
Like vodka, schnapps was good for what ailed you. It might not fix anything, but making you not care worked just as well. Ihor wondered how the great Stalin would have done in one of these foxholes. Not so well, was his guess, even if he couldn’t tell anyone about it.
He’d solved the problem of peace! Put the leaders in the trenches and the war wouldn’t last five minutes! The only problem with that was, who could do it? But if you wanted to worry about every little detail…
–
Luisa Hozzel’s stomach growled. She was so worn by another day out among the pines, she was ready to fall over during the evening count. She wanted to eat. She wanted to go back to the barracks. She wanted to sleep. Since the Russians threw her into the gulag, her horizon had shrunk to that. Supper. Her bunk. They would both be bad, but bad was better than none.
The guards prowled up and down. They looked angry and jumpy. The count kept coming out wrong. Luisa hated days like this. Piling the stupid guards’ incompetence on top of all the other Schweinerei here just seemed like too much.
Beside her, Trudl Bachman murmured, “They should take off their boots so they can count with their toes.”
“No.” Luisa almost imperceptibly shook her head. “One of them will have got a toe shot off in the war, and that will mess things up worse than ever.”
Even though a nervous guard prowled past not three meters away from them, he didn’t turn his head or snarl at them to shut up. By now, practice and need had turned them both into fine ventriloquists. Give me a dummy-one of these guards, say-and I’ll go on stage, Luisa thought.
“I hate it when they have kittens over nothing,” Trudl said.
“I know. Doesn’t anybody here know how to count?” Luisa answered. They weren’t the only zeks grousing, either. As time wore on and the women still weren’t allowed in to eat, grumbles in both German and Russian grew more and more audible. Even the bitches were getting angry.
The two top guard sergeants put their heads together. At last, one of them slowly and unhappily clumped off to the administrative office, so it wasn’t over nothing after all.
The man came back with a lieutenant: a man who had a hook where his left hand should have been and whose eye patch didn’t come within kilometers of covering all the scars on the left side of his head. He looked fearsome enough when he wasn’t irked. When he was, as he was now, he would terrify children. He scared Luisa. She hadn’t seen many men in Germany more horribly mutilated. He was lucky to be alive, though she wasn’t so sure he would call it luck.
“We have had an escape,” he said. Something was wrong with his voice, too. It sounded more like the scraping of sandpaper on hard-wood than anything that should have come from a human throat. He went on, “The count is five short. You will be interrogated to discover who helped the criminals abscond with themselves. For now, go to your barracks at once.”
“What about supper?” Nadezhda Chukovskaya spoke for all the hungry, weary women. Since she was neither a political nor a German, she thought she could get away with the question.
“We have had an escape, you stupid, worthless cunt,” the mangled officer said in tones of cold fury. “I don’t give a fuck if all of you starve to death. Then we can count you, anyway. Dismissed to your barracks! Now, damn you!”
“I hope they get away,” Luisa said as they dejectedly did what the lieutenant ordered them to do.
Like her husband, Trudl Bachman was a very practical person. “I hope they weren’t from our work gang,” she said.
“Five? They couldn’t have been-could they?” Luisa said.
“I don’t think so. But would I swear?” Trudl shook her head. “I didn’t pay any attention on the way in tonight. I was so worn out, all I could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
“Same here,” Luisa agreed. “You’d think the guards would have noticed, though. That’s what they’re there for.”
“Maybe they were too stupid,” Trudl said. “Or maybe the women who escaped paid them off.”
With what? Luisa started to ask. She didn’t come out with the question. Not much in the way of cash or valuables circulated in the gulag. Most of what there was was in the hands of the bitches and the inside workers, the people with the least incentive to flee. But a woman who was desperate enough to do anything to get away always had a coin she could offer a man. All it would cost her was her self-respect. If losing that meant getting out of this horrible place, it might be a small price to pay.
She guessed she’d be too hungry to sleep. She wasn’t, as she hadn’t been too tired to eat a few times after tough days in the taiga. As soon as she lay down on her bunk, her eyes sagged shut. The next thing she knew, a guard was banging on the shell casing to summon the women for the morning count.
Then she realized how hungry she was. She did notice that two of the escapees came from her barracks: a German and a Russian political. They didn’t belong to her work gang.
Once the guards were satisfied no one else had flown the coop during the night, all the gangs except the one from which the five women had fled were allowed to go to breakfast. Luisa ate every scrap of the nasty fare set before her, and felt as hungry afterwards as she had before. The luckless members of that work gang who’d got kept out there had to be hungrier yet. The guards would be grilling them-and, no doubt, their comrades who’d taken more women out into the woods and brought fewer back.
No one went into the woods after the quick and noisome latrine call. The guards separated the women into their gangs, but they stayed on the flat ground where they lined up.
Some of the women from the first gang came out of the administrative building. Some didn’t, at least not where Luisa could see. She guessed they went straight to the punishment cells.
Her gang got summoned next. She drew the mutilated lieutenant as her interrogator. He started in Russian, but soon saw she didn’t have enough of the language to follow his questions. She also acted dumber than she was, which turned out not to help. He switched to rasping German: “Bauer and Nekrasova were from your barracks, nicht wahr?”
“If those were their names, sir,” Luisa answered. “I didn’t know either of them, really. They were just-faces.” That wasn’t altogether true, but the less she admitted, the better off she was.
Or so she thought. “Then you don’t need to worry about betraying them,” the lieutenant said. “Did you hear them conspiring to steal themselves from Soviet custody?”
Luisa thought that a peculiar way to put it, one more thing she didn’t say. She did say, truthfully, “No, sir. I paid no attention to either one of them.”
“Then you should have. Ignorance is no excuse,” he said, glowering at her with his surviving eye. “Five days in a punishment cell to remind you to respect the Soviet state and its regulations.” He raised his ruined voice: “Guard!”
The guard hustled her to the punishment block. The cells there were too low to stand up in and too small to lie down in. She had to fold herself up in a corner. There wasn’t even a bucket. When she needed to ease herself, she’d have to use a different corner. The stench in the cell said she wouldn’t be anywhere close to the first who had.