It didn’t take me long to realize that our little colonel had his eye on me. Three inspections of the medical hut in one week was enough to show something was brewing.
Laryssa, as you’d expect, encouraged me. “Go on,” she said, “he’s so small you’d hardly know he was there.”
And the truth is, for what I could have got out of it, I might have done it if it weren’t for the thought of Anton.
But that, I suppose, is what being in love’s all about. Not that I seemed to be getting very much response from the brute.
Of course Bubo knew what the brute was thinking all the time, but I’m sure he’d been forbidden by Anton ever to talk to Laryssa about it. Laryssa had never kept a secret in her life.
Well, that’s the way things were. I was chasing one man, and being chased by another. Because by now there was no doubt at all that our little colonel was hot in pursuit. Not only would he make over-frequent visits to the sick bay, but one day he stopped me in the narrow space between the ends of two huts.
I curtsied as you’re required to for a camp officer.
He was looking me over. “You’re a fine-looking girl, Zoya. I can see camp life suits you,” the fool said.
I curtsied again. “Thank you, Comrade Colonel.” I made to turn away, but he stopped me, holding the upper part of my arm and slapping his dog-whip against his boot as ever.
“How would you like to go into town, Zoya?” he asked, smiling like a fox.
It was nearly a year since I’d seen the outside of Panaka. My face must have given the answer.
“Good,” he said. “I want you to begin collecting the medical supplies yourself from now on. And while you’re there, I’ll give instructions to the guard to take you to my apartment. My wife has asked me to find a good, clean camp girl to do the heavy washing for her.”
He strode off well pleased with himself. For my part I was uncertain. The thought of seeing even dreary Krasibirsk for an afternoon was magical. And the heavy washing was a cheap price to pay for the privilege. But would his wife be there every time? Or would I find one afternoon our little colonel slipping back early from the office?
I longed to talk to Anton about it but I was afraid he would ask me what it had to do with him. So I put up with Laryssa’s rolling eyes and on a morning when the birch leaves were glinting gold in the sunlight I climbed up beside the driver of a camp truck and drove out of Panaka on the road to Krasibirsk.
Freedom is a far headier draught than vodka. I sang all the way to Krasibirsk. In Lenin Square the driver left me to go alone to the Medical Center and for ten delicious minutes I strolled through the streets looking at the girls of my own age, free even in this miserable town.
Of course I was soon seized with bitter resentment. I was sitting on a bench outside the Medical Center. Perhaps it was mostly the excitement of it all, but I watched those other girls and I sobbed my heart out.
A nice old man came along and gave me a Belomors, and sat by my side patting my back while I smoked it. He could tell by my camp clothes that I was a zek, but he said nothing except, just as he stood up to go, he looked down and smiled. “Remember one thing at least, girl,” he said. “You’re young.” I think I’m very lucky with my old men.
I collected the pathetic allocation of medical supplies and rejoined the driver in the square. His breath was smelling of kvas and I just hoped he hadn’t taken vodka with it. It was a long drive back to Panaka.
The colonel’s apartment was large but barely furnished; the colonel’s wife was small and overdressed. She had a thin slit of a mouth, a sharp nose and receding chin which contrived to make her look more foxlike than her husband. And she hated me on sight.
I tackled the washing in the copper tub with a will and was required afterward to scrub the bare board floors of the long hallway. It was made clear to me that I was not allowed into the kitchen unless she herself was present. She offered me no food, no tea.
I did not sing on the long drive back. I was the victim of the most acute depression I had felt since coming to Panaka. And I was sure that, in some curious way, that heartless woman in the apartment was as responsible as the afternoon’s reminder of my loss of freedom.
But Anton was at Panaka. And my friends.
It was at this point that Semyon Kuba decided that he was strong enough to dispose once and for all of the threat still posed by Natalya Roginova. Or perhaps he decided that he would never be strong enough until he had. One of the most interesting documents of that period was an account by Roginova of her single interview with Semyon Kuba during the period of her imprisonment.
I was taken from my own place of imprisonment to one of Kuba’s dachas on a pleasant soft autumn morning. Even through the darkened glass of my own car I remember the sunlight on the vast clumps of alders along the country lanes and the astonishment of the peasants in the villages as our convoy swept through. It was clear that Kuba had decided I was too dangerous to be exposed to the main highways.
Semyon Trofimovich greeted me at the door of his timber dacha looking like nothing so much as a benign country landowner of the last century. I was led into a small office with plain planked floors and two armchairs arranged facing each other.
I had not been too seriously deprived of information during my imprisonment. I was well aware of the principal developments of the Kubaschina, the vast increase in the labor camp population, bread rationing, fuel restrictions, the notorious Labor Direction Law which was now forcing young Transcaucasians and Central Asians to work in the factories of Russia and the Ukraine.
We sat in the two facing armchairs.
“The time has come,” Kuba said, filling his pipe, “to regularize your position.” He gave me a friendly, browned-toothed smile.
“You mean, to have me shot?”
The smile faded. “There are more than enough charges I could bring against you.”
“You don’t have enough support from the Party in the national republics or enough support from the younger Army generals to shoot me, Semyon Trofimovich,” I said, “or I would be dead already. You’re looking for a means of disposing of me other than by shooting. What are you proposing?”
He fiddled with his pipe, lit it, watched the cinder glow in the bowl and drew on it with an air of great satisfaction. To anybody who had known Stalin it was an old trick. But Kuba’s preoccupation was not with the functioning of his pipe.
“I’m proposing,” he said at length, “a statement of error. A statement made by you before the Central Committee in special session.”
“What form should the statement take?”
“It could be quite general,” Kuba said. “It should mention your failure to appreciate the demands of the national republics for greater protection against Western-inspired bourgeois nationalist movements.”
“What else?”
“It should state that you now see that the establishment of the national parade divisions in each republic was an insult to the conception of a Soviet Army.”
It was easy enough for me to see now in which direction Kuba’s worries lay.
“Is that all?” I asked him.
He began the long process with his pipe again. I waited for what was coming next.
“Your recantation,” he said, “should end with a call for a stronger leadership. It should end with a call to appoint me First Secretary of the Party.” He paused, “And President of the Soviet Union.”