She got water and black bread-precious little of either. The guards yelled abuse at her and the other luckless women in the cells both day and night. She’d never been through anything like that before. It made ordinary camp life seem like a Kraft durch Freude cruise by comparison. In her maddest nightmares, she’d never imagined anything could do that.
When they opened the cell’s door to let her out, she had trouble crawling out. She had even more trouble standing up. The outside world was too big, too wide, too open.
Three doors down from her, Trudl Bachman also came forth. The two women from Fulda nodded to each other. Before her confinement, Luisa had hoped the escapees got away, but she hadn’t hoped they had. Now she did, with all her might. Let them be gone for good! She was sure Trudl felt the same way.
24
Vasili Yasevich ambled along the road, the track, whatever you wanted to call it, that connected Smidovich and Birobidzhan. He’d never been to the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region. Few people from Smidovich had. Birobidzhan held thirty-five or forty thousand souls. To the locals, that made it the big city.
It wasn’t the big city to Vasili. He was supposed to come from Khabarovsk, which had been quite a bit larger till the American A-bomb cut it down to size. And he really knew Harbin, which had been larger still. Of course, by China’s anthill standards, even Harbin was only a third- or at best a second-rate town.
Having grown up among Harbin’s teeming hundreds of thousands, Vasili was amazed at how much he enjoyed getting off by himself. When he went a few kilometers down the road, he might have been the only man in the world. All he could hear were birdcalls, the wind soughing through the pine branches, and his own footsteps. No, he could hear one thing more. He could hear himself think in a way he couldn’t in a crowd.
A squirrel gnawing on a pine cone paused to chatter at him. It sat on a branch fifteen meters up a tree. He couldn’t have hurt it if he tried. It told him off just the same. Then, with a flirt of its plumy tail, it was gone.
He wagged a finger at it. “Better be careful, Tovarishch. They’ll collectivize you and your pine cones if you don’t watch out.” He could make jokes like that so long as only a squirrel heard him. If anyone in Smidovich did, he’d find out all about what they did to people.
On he went. In a jacket pocket, wrapped in newspaper, he had a sandwich of rye bread and smoked salmon and onions. The people on this side of the Amur smeared creamy cheese on their bread when they made that kind of sandwich. He didn’t. He had the Chinese view of cheese: that it was nothing but rotten milk. If the locals noticed how he fixed his food, they might think he was odd. They wouldn’t make any more of it than that.
There was the fallen tree he remembered, with the orange and yellow lichens growing on the trunk. It was the perfect place to sit and eat and smoke and let his thoughts go where they would for as long as they felt like going there. Then he’d get up, take a leak against a sapling, and saunter back to Smidovich.
He’d taken two bites out of the sandwich when a noise from deeper in the woods made him turn his head away from the dirt road. Something good-sized was moving in there. People in Smidovich talked about wolves. Vasili had never seen one, or even seen tracks in the soft ground. He suspected all the talk was only that and no more.
But he might have been wrong. He set the sandwich on the colorful tree trunk and reached for the Tokarev automatic he’d taken from Grigory Papanin. It wasn’t accurate out much farther than he could piss, but the report ought to scare away a wolf.
Or a tiger. People in Smidovich talked about them, too. Vasili had more trouble taking that seriously. Still, his father had charged the Chinese in Harbin through the nose for medicines made from ground-up and dried tiger parts. He must have got them from somewhere.
What came out of the forest, though, wasn’t a wolf or a tiger. It was a human being, though a scrawny one with cropped hair and such cheap, shabby clothes that Vasili wondered for a moment. Then he saw that the jacket and trousers had a number written on them: Б711. He realized what kind of human being it must be-a zek, straight out of the gulag.
At the same time as he saw Б711, the zek saw the sandwich he’d just started and pointed at it. “Bitte? Uh, pozhalista?” the zek said. Only when Vasili heard the voice did he realize it was a women. The ragged, quilted jacket and baggy pants hid whatever curves she owned.
“Go ahead,” he said. She had to be starving. He wouldn’t waste away for want of a smoked-salmon sandwich. He waved in invitation, in case she had trouble with his Russian-it plainly wasn’t her first language.
“Danke schon! Bolshoye spasibo!” she said, and engulfed the sandwich like a snake engulfing a rabbit. When it was gone, her bony, filthy face lit up. “Ach, wunderbar!” She pointed at her own chest. “Ich heisse Maria Bauer.”
“I’m Vasili,” he said. She had to be speaking German. He’d picked up a few Yiddish phrases in Smidovich, but only a few. He asked, “How much Russian do you speak?”
She held her thumb and forefinger not far apart. “Little bit,” she said.
Vasili nodded. “Did you run away from the gulag?” he asked. Maria Bauer looked alarmed. He held up his hand. “Don’t worry. I won’t turn you in. Fuck the Chekists!”
That, she understood. “Fuck Chekists, da!” she said fiercely.
“How did you get away?” he asked.
She laughed. “I fuck Chekist. Five of us, we do. We go, we split up, they not maybe all catch. I here.” She paused. “Where here?”
“Near Smidovich,” Vasili said. Plainly, it meant nothing to Maria.
“What do you of me-to me-with me?” she asked. “You not give me Chekists, I you fuck, too.” With her rudimentary Russian, she couldn’t be anything but blunt.
Right this minute, he had no trouble shaking his head. She might clean up nicely, though. Feed her, let her hair grow out, and she wouldn’t be terrible. He couldn’t take her home with him any which way, not when he lived in a dormitory. All of a sudden, he started to laugh.
“Chto?” she asked, her voice full of animal wariness.
“I have a friend in town.” He spoke slowly and clearly, to make sure she could follow. “I will go see him. I think-I hope-he can take you in. I will come back tonight. I will bring food. I will take you to him if he says yes. If he says no, I will give you what I can to help you get away.”
“How I know you it?-it you?” she asked after he’d repeated himself and gestured several times.
He whistled a tune that had been popular in Harbin before the Russians drove the Japanese out of the city. “I’ll do that when I come,” he said.
Maria Bauer nodded. “Khorosho.”
Vasili went on whistling as he walked back to Smidovich. A couple of trucks passed him. He assumed Maria had had sense enough to hide from them. If she hadn’t, she was too dumb to deserve help.
He knocked on David Berman’s door, hoping the old Jew hadn’t gone anywhere. Sure enough, Berman was home. “Vasili Andreyevich!” he said, smiling in surprise. “What are you doing here?”
Looking inside the cabin, Vasili saw it was even grubbier than it had been the last time he visited. “How would you like a maid to help you straighten up this joint?” he asked.
Berman frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I met somebody in the woods….” Vasili told the whole story. If David Berman went to the MGB, he was history. But Berman didn’t seem that kind of man. Vasili was willing to take the chance.