Throughout the first week girls would come running into the hut after final work whistle and hurl themselves sobbing on their bunks. We got to know that it was best to leave them alone for a while. Only afterward would one of us ask who they had been chosen by — and it was of course always one of the thieves who ran the male huts. There weren’t enough young women to go round and in any case the thieves demanded not just first but second and third choices as well. As you can imagine it meant the doctor became very skilled at abortion.
It was seven or eight days after Christmas, sometime into the second week, that I was called to the workshop. One of the girls had trapped her hand in a grading machine and was screaming in terror by the time I got there. A big young zek with a blond beard had his arm round her shoulders trying to comfort her. Even in the panic of my inexperience I was struck by the first kindly act I had seen at this dreadful place. We released the girl’s hand, the blond zek and myself, and it was clear immediately that it was not badly damaged. The doctor arrived then and took the girl off to the medical hut while I picked up my accident bag and collected a few items that had spilt from it.
The blond zek was looking down at me, smiling. To this day I cannot explain how I had not recognized him before. The beard of course, and the strange dark-eyed face of every zek. My own nervousness, too, as we released the girl’s hand. All these things I suppose.
“So you’ve made the long journey, too, Zoya,” Anton Ovsenko said.
I stood up slowly. I knew I was trembling. I stretched out my hand, but with a minute movement he waved it aside. “Zeks don’t shake hands, Zoya. We’re all much more and much less to each other than that.”
I could see he had changed, and not just physically. He had learned things about human beings which are given to few people to learn.
I ached to tell him that he could trust me, that I already believed in my youth and innocence that I could surmount this place.
“We must be friends,” I said swallowing hard.
“Of course.” But his tone was distant. Perhaps he already knew what was about to happen next.
I turned sadly away and made for the door. Emerging from behind a machine a man stood in my path. He was of medium height, balding, with the easy smile of authority. Only his clothes showed he was a zek.
“One moment, Zoya,” he stopped me with a hand raised.
I made no effort to ask him how he knew my name. Perhaps already I had developed that sixth sense without which no zek survives.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I run hut 12. And 14. And any other hut you care to mention.”
I looked round wildly. Five or six men had gathered, among them Anton. “It’s true,” he said flatly. “Not much happens here that Uncle Vanya doesn’t give permission for.”
“You’re going to be mine,” Vanya said in his easy, matter-of-fact tone. “I’ll send someone over to collect you from your hut after lights out. Be ready.”
I looked again at Anton, somehow imagining he would spring to my defense. But that was an imagining from another world. His face was blank.
I turned back to Vanya. The words of our scrawny hut leader, Katka, were thundering in my head.
“No,” I said. “No, Vanya.”
“Don’t be a fool, girl.”
“When I take a man, I’ll choose him.”
“Don’t be a fool,” he repeated. But his lips now were twisted angrily.
I was shaking. But I held on tight to my bag. “You can send one of your men for me,” I said. “And I’ll come.”
“Good. That’s better.”
“But remember this,” I blurted. “The very first day you need treatment, medication, anything, I’ll feed you enough poison to kill a thousand Uncle Vanyas.”
His black eyes never left my face.
“Or imagine, Citizen,” I said, “imagine one day you catch your thumb in a machine, like this girl this afternoon, and you need a little operation under anesthetic. It won’t be just your thumb you’re missing when you come round!”
The surrounding men burst out laughing. It seemed minutes almost, then Vanya smiled. “Now that’s something I couldn’t risk,” I could see he was covering his fury. He grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me toward the door. “Get on your way, you big tart,” he said. “I can choose any woman in this camp. You, I can do without.”
I stumbled and tripped forward. Slowly I got up. Vanya was laughing, or trying to laugh. His thieves gathered round him, were taking their cue from their leader. Anton stood to one side, nodding toward me with surprise and, I think, approval.
Early in the second week of December Natalya Roginova disappeared. At functions and receptions for those foreign leaders who had stayed on in Moscow after the funeral, Kuba strutted prominently. But of Roginova there was no sign. The Western press was in speculative ferment, but only old former U.S. President Richard Nixon was right when he announced in a CBS interview that he saw no mystery at all. At a time like this, he said, a politician gets back to the grass roots to scatter promises of a bright future for anybody prepared to hitch to his wagon. Richard M. Nixon should know. Now, of course, it has been established that in a grueling hundred hours of visits that crisscrossed the country, Roginova saw the Party Secretaries of every one of the remaining fourteen republics in the Union (she herself was Secretary of the largest, the Russian Republic). What deals she made will never be precisely known.
In Soviet, as in international, politics she remained an enigma. Like Khrushchev during Stalin’s reign she had never been more than a loyal lieutenant to the leader and the Party. Only gradually did some begin to suspect that, again like Khrushchev, she might well have surprises in store for the Russian Empire and the world.
It was early evening but already dark. The old man sitting in Moscow’s Vossitaniya Square had no watch. From time to time he looked up at the vast skyscraper block opposite, watching the fall of snow across the lighted windows, worried that it would be too heavy for her to come. Heavily bundled in an old Army greatcoat and with a peaked leather cap with earmuffs protecting his head, he hardly felt the cold.
There were still plenty of people in the square, he was glad to see. Women returning from Moscow center with heavy shopping bags. Others joining the queue for the cinema in the skyscraper opposite. He strained his eyes to read the hoarding carrying details of the evening’s performance, but he knew it would mean nothing to him anyway. In the last years life had passed him by. He only looked across at the cinema queue to stop himself constantly peering through the falling snow in the direction she would come from.
He knew it must be getting late. He had arrived earlier than he should, but he couldn’t bear the thought of the wasted minutes if she got there first. It was a long journey of course. And even once she reached the Belorrussian station it was two or three stops to Barricadnaya Metro. Even while he thought of the journey he cast an almost furtive glance along the pavement. His eyes were certainly not what they were! And yet that small figure that seemed to appear and disappear in the crowd…? He stood up. Then sat down again. A militiaman passing showed no curiosity in the bundled figure sitting on the bench. Or in the old woman who joined him and clasped him in her arms. In his gray greatcoat and tall shapka the militiaman strode on through the crowd.