The train driver had to be feeling benevolent, I decided, because I filled my pail, and the moment I left the station building, I heard the whoosh of steam and the shrill whistle. Crowds surged. I threw my bread into the pail of water, and with adrenalin pushing me along the platform I jumped over those corpses still in my path, the boiling water sloshing against my legs. People were shouting, screaming, jumping on board.
The train jerked and began moving as I reached the opening to our wagon. I threw the pail onto the floor, and grabbed hold of the protruding handle, as the momentum swept me off my feet. I was half running, half being dragged along, aware someone was clutching my free arm, pulling me inside.
I landed on the floor, the now half-empty pail beside me, and rested for a moment to catch a breath.
The arm, which hauled me in belonged to Oleszkiewicz. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Hmm. Next time, perhaps you’ll listen.’
32
I thought my mother would relish the bread. Softened with water, and squeezed out, it was easy to eat, but she refused it. For days she kept complaining of stomach pains, needing to empty her bowels, yet what remained inside her to purge? At my wits end, I searched out nurse Irena, busy somewhere in the wagon with people needing her help.
She came right away.
‘How can Mama not eat?’ I wailed. ‘She hasn’t had a crumb since we left Permilovo.’
‘Marishu, we have dysentery in the wagon and she may have caught it. Get her to drink as much as possible.’
When Irena patted my arm, I felt even more helpless. I wanted to ask if people recovered from dysentery, but didn’t want to hear the truth.
Midway between Danilov and our next stop, our transport pulled into a siding to allow another train to pass on the main line. Apart from drinking what remained in the pail, my mother was maddening me by refusing food, and I ended up eating all the soggy bread and sunflower seeds myself.
Needing more and more water, I worried how we would survive if stuck in a siding when all the snow had melted – as it would – the further south we travelled. As my darling father said, ‘We were heading for the sun’.
With the signs of wakefulness all around me now, I slid open the door and jumped out of the wagon with my pail. Packing it with snow, I paused for a moment to take in deep lungsful of crisp dawn air, aware the landscape was less wooded now, but the hamlets no less decrepit. Yet I couldn’t quell my mounting anxiety. What was this dysentery? It was so contagious that it was scaring me.
In the wagon, people were defecating where they lay, and the stench was gagging. Many were vomiting blood. Less than two weeks into our journey, the conditions on board were much worse than those on the way out.
I remained outside for as long as I could, before returning, but saw only Mother’s pillow, and her rumpled eiderdown. She was heading yet again for the hole in the corner. Beside her, Oleszkiewicz’s little boy lay crying. ‘How is he today, I asked?’
Stasia shook her head. ‘Look at him; he’s just skin and bone.’
‘Mama’s no better either. I feel so useless; I don’t know what else to do to help her.’
‘What can you do? What can anyone do?’ Stasia was washing away her son’s bloodied diarrhoea, trying to keep him clean, but it was impossible.
I fluffed up Tatta’s and Karol’s flattened eiderdowns on which Mother had been lying to cushion her bones from the hard shelf beneath, and folded them into a comfy mattress.
She returned and lay down, exhausted. ‘You folded the eiderdowns. Thank you, child, thank you.’
‘Mama, I am so worried about you. I wish you would eat.’
Ignoring my comment, she pulled her eiderdown closer. ‘I’m cold.’
I felt her forehead, but her temperature seemed normal. Perhaps she didn’t have dysentery after all; maybe it was something else. I covered her with Karol’s shearling and sat watching to see if her condition improved.
After a while, I heard her moan and checked on her again. Her eyes were still closed, but I couldn’t tell whether she was sleeping. ‘Mama,’ I whispered, but receiving no answer, assumed she was happier in her little world with her eyes shut.
I took myself off to sit on the floor by the door, my legs dangling over the edge of the wagon. A freight train was lumbering towards us from my right, while youths loitered outside our transport, watching.
They moved towards the tracks as it drew closer, then as quick as mice, they grabbed the handles and clambered onto the roof. Their hands began jimmying the oilcloth from its anchor, yanking, gouging, leaving the freed tarpaulin flapping in the wind. One of them fell off, but the remaining looters kept working, throwing the spoils overboard. Some sacks and crates burst and splintered, spilling their contents. Vigilant passengers jumped out of their wagons with their pans and pails, limping, walking, some running, and cleared up the food.
Mustering latent energy, I joined them. It was exhilarating! Grabbing a bag of what I thought was flour, I reached for some dried potatoes, but another passenger snatched it first. Within moments of the heist, every scrap of food had disappeared into our transport, leaving nothing but brown patches of spelt staining the snow.
Watching us was our Russian train driver, who threatened reprisals at the next station, but I couldn’t care less; my bag contained not flour, but sugar cubes. I offered some to Mother, thinking she wouldn’t refuse sugar, but to my dismay she turned away. With both Tatta and Karol gone, it was as if she had given up, and if she wouldn’t eat – oh God – the enormity of the potential chasm of loneliness, hit me like a felling punch.
‘Come on Mama, please – one sugar cube – please, for me, please.’ But she pushed my hand away from her lips, while my eyes welled with tears.
‘I’m not hungry,’ she said again. ‘I have no appetite. You eat them, kohanie.’
One of the other passengers offered some dried potatoes, and I gave him some of my sugar cubes in exchange.
Even well soaked, Mother still refused to eat the potatoes, and I realised with a shocking jolt that she was ensuring her one remaining child survived. In the filth and the gloom of the wagon, I knelt on the floor beside her, stroking her hair from her forehead, her bones pushing up under pale skin. Her limbs seemed swollen, and to me, she appeared like some dreadful caricature of a human being.
‘Mama, if you ate a bit of potato I’m sure you’d feel better.’
She stretched out her arm and placed her hand on mine. Her voice was only breath when she slipped off her wedding ring. ‘Here, child, take this.’ She wrapped my fingers around it and gave them a gentle squeeze.
I opened my hand and stared at the gold band. I didn’t know what to say. My parents had loved each other so much that I felt almost like an intruder gazing at what they meant to one another.
‘Keep it safe,’ Mother closed my hand around it once more.
‘Only if you eat some potatoes.’
‘You eat them, child, you eat them.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, but Mama didn’t reply. I stared at the sliver of potato for a long time, then put it into my mouth, but it was almost impossible to swallow. When I looked at her again, I thought I detected the smallest of smiles. The smile faded, and after a while, I detected no life at all.
Morning brought our transport to a stop at Penza Station, southeast of Moscow.
I awoke, and there were three or four seconds when I forgot it had happened, then I remembered. My Mama was dead. Tatta and Karol were dead. Disbelief followed emptiness and the terrible, dawning realisation I would have to let my mother go. What was happening to me? I glanced at poor Jan and Stasia Oleszkiewicz, and knew it was about to happen to them too.