Before I could reply, a dozen more police wagons pulled up nearby. The woman staggered towards them, craning her neck, searching for her husband among the deportees spilling from the doors.
‘This is madness.’ Olga’s mouth was pursed. ‘Madness,’ she said again, her gaze sweeping the thousands of people waiting to be herded into cattle cars. More trains waited in the sidings, half-hidden in the shadows. The noise was terrible; worried mutterings, the howls of children who could not be pacified, the rough scrape of shoes on gravel as the deportees shuffled forward to be assigned a train carriage. Then there were the noisy sobs of those who had come to bid goodbye to their families; some men, but mostly women in shawls, mothers and grandmothers who had not yet been ordered to leave but risked the displeasure of the Soviet authorities by following to say farewell. Olga hugged the bear coat closer around her even though the breeze that blew along the platform was warm and the press of bodies around us made sweat gather on my lip. ‘How do you hope to find one woman, amid all this?’
‘We’ll find her,’ I vowed, although my heart was already sinking. Etti’s arm was tucked into my own. It felt limp, as if the bones in it had been removed. When I dared to glance at her, her mouth was turned down. She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears.
Olga was right. Finding one woman amid this chaos would be impossible.
Unless.
I scanned the crowd again, trying to separate the grey uniformed men from the sea of deportees. When I spotted him, he turned his head, as if even from such a distance he could smell my fear. I fought the urge to fling myself behind Etti, behind Olga, and disappear into the crowd. But our gazes connected. I saw his eyes widen and then narrow. As much as I wanted to, I did not look away. I let the harsh light from the flood lamps illuminate my features. I even moved apart from the others, letting go of Etti’s arm, finding a little space of my own so that the cluster of women would not shield me. The breeze lifted my hair off my neck, teasing the tendrils that had worked free of their pins.
I saw him pause. He said something to the officer beside him, shoved the clipboard at his colleague and began to wade through the crowd towards us. There was a curious, hungry expression on his face, the same one he had worn earlier. Only now, amid this weeping, shifting mass of human misery, it seemed even more out of place. He brushed past an elderly couple, careless of the way the woman stumbled over her suitcase and had to clutch at her husband for support.
Could he hear my heart thudding against my ribs as I waited for him to reach me?
‘Lydia Volkova. You don’t take advice easily.’ His face shone in the floodlights. ‘Aren’t you afraid to be here? Someone might mistake you for a resistance sympathiser.’
I tried to speak, but my throat was painfully dry. ‘I need your help,’ I said.
‘My help? The Partorg’s daughter wants my help?’ He drew back, placing a hand on his chest, but the look of wolfish shrewdness didn’t leave his face. ‘I’m surprised! You seem more than capable of doing things for yourself. I know your father is a clever man, but I’d not expected his daughter to be so independent. And here I thought you would be tucked safely away. No need for you to witness all this.’
He waved his hand, as if his fellow officers were dividing up livestock instead of people. People jostled around us. I saw men being shoved towards the waiting carriage at the end of the train, while women were pushed together, many of them holding children tightly to save them from being crushed. I caught the flash of a man’s clear spectacles, the bright green of a headscarf, the bright burgundy of a child’s woollen jacket as people drew together and broke apart.
A woman appeared next to me suddenly, as if she’d caught sight of Lieutenant Lubov’s uniform and had been working her way towards him. She wore a frightened expression and carried a screaming toddler on her hip. The toddler’s face was brick red and blotchy, his nose leaking greenish mucus.
‘Please help me!’ she said, her voice hoarse, desperate. ‘My child is sick! He has the measles. My husband is a doctor.’ She nodded towards the end of the platform where men were being loaded into a carriage. ‘Please let us stay together!’
Lieutenant Lubov grimaced as the child shrieked. The woman tried to quieten him, but he only screamed louder. ‘There!’ the woman cried, her face lighting up with hope. ‘There is Andrus!’ I looked to where the woman was pointing. Far down the end of the train, a man was struggling against the surge of the crowd. He had a brown doctor’s bag in his hands. As we watched, he raised it above the crowd and tried to push towards us. A guard blocked his path.
Lieutenant Lubov shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘Men and children separate.’
The woman’s face crinkled in confusion. ‘But my child—’ She cast a look at the wailing toddler, heaved him higher up her hip. ‘I cannot look after him myself. He needs medicine!’
A man’s voice shouted. ‘Kaarin!’
The woman’s husband was holding out the bag, dangling it over the shoulder of the guard blocking his path. The guard pushed him with the butt of his rifle. The man stumbled back. The bag flew from his hands to land in the dirt at the soldier’s feet.
‘Please!’ the woman cried. ‘Please let me see him for just a moment!’
She reached out and grabbed at Lieutenant Lubov’s arm, almost dropping the toddler, who slid down her waist and wailed louder. Lieutenant Lubov’s face darkened. Wrenching his arm free, he shook his head in disgust and pushed the woman away. He seized my hand and began to drag me away from the heaving, jostling crowd towards the edge of the station where the bright haze from the floodlights was blocked by the corner of the waiting room. I caught a glimpse of the woman’s desperate face before it was swallowed up by the rest of the flock.
A curdling horror bubbled inside me. The air was charged. It would take only a moment’s panic for a stampede to occur. Forced together in these circumstances, these people were more like animals than humans. They had not been given a choice to be otherwise. This was how Stalin saw the world, I realised. And by closing my eyes, by ignoring what was right before me, I was complicit, too. Was this what Joachim had seen, experienced: this wave of terror and desperation? What cruel indignities had he been forced to participate in on his journey north?
I tried to slow my breath and my pounding pulse. ‘There is a woman,’ I said. ‘A friend. I need to know where she is. If – if she has already gone. Or if she might be in one of the carriages here. Her name is Juudit Koppel. She was wrongfully arrested earlier this evening.’
I tried to ignore the way Lieutenant Lubov’s eyebrows formed an unbroken line over his eyes. ‘Do you think you can find out?’ I said, my voice rising. ‘Can you help me?’
He continued to stare.
‘Please,’ I added, reminded of the woman with the shrieking child.
He took his time answering, straightening out the sleeve of his uniform, which was, I noticed with a sharp stab of horror, speckled with dark brown stains. Finally, he looked up. ‘I’d like to help you. Really, I would. But I’m very busy, Lida. May I call you Lida?’
His words took me off guard. I nodded, unnerved. ‘Yes. Fine.’
He flashed me a small smile. ‘Lida, then. Your father gave explicit instructions that the operation is to be completed by daybreak, if possible. How will it look if I’m searching for one woman among so many others? What will your father think of me?’ He swung his head around to gaze at the mass of people. ‘So, if I help you, Lida, what can you do for me? What do you have to offer?’
I dreaded the softness of his voice and worse, the slow tick of his smile. It froze my thoughts and dried up all the words on my tongue. I tried to speak but even my stammering came out as nothing but a hoarse squeak. Narrowing his gaze, he leaned forward until our bodies were almost touching, his head tilted to one side as if he were concentrating hard on listening to me above the clamour of noise on the station. After a long moment, he shrugged and straightened up.