Can you ever feel sorry for a brutal little bigot like that colonel? Perhaps I’m pretending to myself.
There was nothing I could do. I stood there, fully dressed, while the colonel dragged up his breeches, pulled his jacket on with one hand while trying to button himself with the other. When the colonel’s lady entered the apartment he had one boot half on flapping like an expiring fish on the carpet.
She struck out at me as I ran past her, bloodying my nose, to the great amusement of the driver waiting in the street below.
Russians love a scene. All the way back to the camp he would break into bellows of laughter, causing the truck to swerve dangerously from side to side on the road until he succeeded in controlling himself.
It was late when Zoya arrived back at Panaka. The guard escorted her to the door of her hut and with another bellow of laughter locked her inside. She stood for a moment or two in the darkness listening to the even breathing of the hundred and twenty women around her. The Far Cape was a fearful prospect. Some of the women had been zeks in Stalin’s days and knew the East. From the stories they told, perhaps exaggerated with the perverse pride of old zeks, few returned whole in body, practically none in spirit.
She felt her way along the retaining timbers of the line of plank bunks until she reached the corner. Ducking under the blanket she felt free of the fetid air of the main hut, although the air in their small corner could smell no different.
Laryssa was awake immediately. With a gentle shake Zoya woke Anna. She desperately wanted to tell them the full story of the afternoon, but she concentrated only on the all-important details. First the news of the General Amnesty, then that to improve the conditions for the Penal Brigade Panaka One was to be taken over by them. The criminals and politicals, they themselves, were to be transferred to the East Cape. Unable to see anything but the gray outline of their faces, she still felt their horror in the grip of their hands on her arm. Quickly she explained that the day of departure at least could be delayed. And maybe for Anton and Bubo, too.
Laryssa rolled a few shreds of mahorka in a piece of paper and lit it. “Surely it’s madness to volunteer for the Penal Brigade’s camp?” she said. There was no lightness in her voice now.
She handed the cigarette to Anna. Zoya watched the glowing end warm her lips and chin. “I think Zoya’s right,” Anna whispered. “Anything that delays our transfer east, we should take.”
The three women sat in silence passing round the soggy roll of paper.
“If Bubo goes, I go,” Laryssa said finally.
“If Bubo goes it will be because Anton has decided to go,” Zoya said. “In that case, I go.”
Anna took the last draw on the cigarette and crushed it out on the plank of her bunk. “I don’t have a man to follow anymore,” she said. “So I’ll follow you.”
That night the three women slept together in one double bunk. During the night they all woke frequently and pressed each other’s hand and asked, “Are you all right?” Even in that short night, dawn was a long time coming.
At first light Zoya left for the medical hut where each morning she would wash and drink tea before the sick parade which took place immediately after roll call.
She had already arranged for Laryssa to tell Anton to report sick with a fever. It was the only excuse a zek could make which would not have the guards driving him with dog-whips to the work place. In their ignorance, all fevers could be typhus and typhus killed guards and zeks alike.
The line of prisoners outside the medical hut was no more than eight men when Anton joined them. Some were cases of festering wounds which were passed straight through to the “doctor.” Others were simulated fevers which Zoya treated with, at the most, an aspirin and a pass for two days’ excused work. At the end of the line Anton came in and stood awkwardly. “I’ve got a fever, Comrade Medical Assistant,” he grinned. “Or so you tell me,” he added in a whisper.
Zoya glanced toward the doctor’s room. Her door was shut. She was attending a man who had had his knee shattered by a falling log.
“I have to speak to you,” she said. “I’ve some information I got in Krasibirsk yesterday. They’re planning to move us from Panaka. We don’t have time to speak here.”
“My detail is in the woods at the river bend all day,” he said. “Can you come, there?”
“Do you know the old wooden jetty?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there as soon after midday as I can. Can you get Bubo to cover for you?”
“Of course.”
She stood looking at him, wanting to touch him. “At midday then,” she said.
During the long morning she faced the thought for the first time that Anton and Bubo would decide not to come. There was, after all, no guarantee of how long it would be before the General Amnesty was declared and they might all find themselves having delayed their departure for a month and then transported to East Cape among a totally new, and inevitably hostile, group of zeks.
As the hands of the medical room clock rose toward midday she prepared her excuses for the doctor who had been writing up reports in her office most of the morning.
Then at 11:40 she was called into the inner office.
The doctor sat behind her desk, her gray hair pulled back in a severe bun.
“Sit down, Zoya,” she said looking up.
Zoya sat.
The doctor continued writing for a few minutes, then threw the pen aside. Her lips were trembling with anger. “In a place like this,” she said, “do you consider one human being owes anything to another?”
Zoya looked at her fearfully. It was the sort of question she just could not imagine the doctor asking.
“I don’t understand, Comrade Doctor,” Zoya said respectfully.
“No,” the older woman shook her head bitterly. “No, you don’t understand.”
Zoya sat silently, watching her.
“This morning I received a telephone call from the camp commandant,” the doctor said. “He told me that the Kraslag had ordered an improvement in the Penal Brigades’ conditions.”
“Yes?” Zoya said with a cautiously interrogative lift to her voice.
“You know already,” the doctor said violently. “Panaka One is to be dispersed. Or at least transferred.”
“Yes,” Zoya said more firmly this time.
“I was ordered to remove from the transfer list the chronically sick. You’re to stay with them. I know what that means, Zoya. It means Panaka One is to be transported east, probably to the far east.” She was trembling. “To East Cape, you bitch, isn’t it?”
Zoya rose from her seat in fear. The doctor’s face was suffused with anger. She was standing behind her desk, plucking at a thick strand of gray hair which she had torn from the tape that held her bun.
“You offered yourself to him, didn’t you? You used the fact of a twenty-year-old body to cheat me of my own chance to live. I’m fifty-five,” she screamed. “I’ve another sixteen years to serve. Can I last sixteen years at East Cape? I’ve got a family, don’t you understand, children I haven’t seen for nearly ten years.” Suddenly she was pleading. “Please Zoyenka, please, I have every right to stay.”
Overcome with an uncontrollable trembling, Zoya watched the doctor standing before her, her face crumpled in supplication.
“You’re young, Zoya,” the doctor said more quickly now. “You’ll survive. You’ll hardly be into your thirties when your release is due. You can survive East Cape. Tell him that, Zoya,” she pleaded. “Tell him you’ll go. Let me stay, for God’s sake.”