The Sniper's Kiss

Chapter Twenty-seven

November 1944

Alexia stepped down from the prison train at the Vyatlag station and stood with the other new prisoners. Numb and docile, she still had not come to terms with her conviction for treason and the court’s sentence of death. It had scarcely made a difference when the leader of the troika had “by the generosity of the state” commuted the sentence to twenty-five years at hard labor.

Treason. Twenty-five years. Enemy of the people. She struggled to understand the downward spiral that had begun with a decision to leave the honor guard and fight actively for the homeland. Was Father Zosima right, that violence begets violence?

Vyatlag, colony 14, was assigned to forestry, and learning that, she was at first relieved. But now she saw she should not have been. It was bitter cold, and the colony where she would be put to work consisted of a row of wooden buildings, too few buildings to house all the prisoners. Where were they? And what were the strange-looking mounds in the field behind the buildings?

Soldiers led her to the nearest building, and she hoped it would be their barracks. But it was merely an administrative center where she had to wait to be registered. Then she followed the line leading to another large room, where male guards ordered her to strip. They sniggered at the naked women as they handed them the bundle of their prison clothing: underwear, padded trousers and jacket, and felt boots. In the room beyond, they were allowed to dress.

As she slowly warmed in her padded clothing, rough hands shoved her toward one of a row of chairs. Men with razors and buckets of water stood behind them and shaved the newly arrived prisoners completely. “To keep away lice,” someone said, dragging the razor along her scalp. Afterward, someone handed her a ushanka for her bare head, similar to the one she’d worn at the front. But on this one, the flap across the forehead displayed the same number that was painted on her jacket, G 235.

The entry procedure ended in a double lineup, with women on one side and men on the other. A guard counted off twenty and led them onto the field with the strange hillocks. Smoke wafted from most of them through a narrow pipe at the center, and she realized with horror they were in fact hovels, covered holes in the ground where people lived.

“This is your zemlyanka,” the guard said, shoving Alexia toward one of them. The canvas door opened, and a bony woman drew her into the dark interior and urged her onto a wide wooden plank. When her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light of a kerosene lantern, she could see the walls were packed soil with narrow logs pressed against it to keep it from falling in. Overhead, a mass of saplings, branches and twigs, made up the roof, with dirt and snow packed into it to create a solid mass. Off to one side was a barrel of what she presumed to be water, and at the center, with a metal pipe leading through the roof, was an iron stove. She could see it was burning, but in the frigid November air, she felt none of the heat where she sat. In spite of the cold, the entire hovel stank of mold, urine, and sweat.

“Didn’t expect that, did you?” the woman who had guided her in said. “Well, you better get used to it. You’re a zek now, and every place else you’ll be is going to be worse.” She took off her winter hat and scratched her scalp. Her head was covered with short, oily brown hair, obviously several weeks of growth after a head-shave.

“A ‘zek’? What’s that?” Alexia asked.

“Short for zaklyuchennyi, prisoner,” a second woman explained. She had slightly longer hair, jet-black, and a flat Asiatic face. “By the way, I’m Nina. That’s Olha.” She pointed with her chin. “And this one here is Sophia.” She poked her neighbor with her elbow.

Alexia managed a weak smile at all three women. “This is where I’m supposed to sleep?” She patted the plank they sat on.

“Yeah, and this is your blanket.” Olha poked something filthy and brown rolled up against the wall. “It’s got lice.

“We’ve all got lice,” she added more cheerfully, “but at least they let us bathe once a week and they wash our clothes. It’s important to stay clean and not let yourself go. Do you smoke?”

“Uh, no,” Alexia replied, puzzled.

“Good. Most of us don’t. But we still get a tobacco ration. Not much, less than the men, but if you save it, you can exchange it with someone for the things you’ll need.”

“What am I going to need?” Looking around, she realized it was a stupid question.

Nina said the obvious. “Everything.” Then, “So, what’s your name? What were you before?”

“Alexia, from Arkhangelsk. I was a soldier. Rifleman.” She saw no reason to elaborate.

“Ah. I was a farm girl in Kurgan,” Nina said. “The wife of a kulak.”

“Me, a seamstress in Smolensk,” Sophia added.

Eyes turned to Olha, who simply said, “None of your business.”

“So what happens next?” Alexia asked, facing the others.

“You learn the rules next.” Sophia sat down beside her. “Don’t go near the barbed wire. The guards on the watchtowers are allowed to shoot you then. Do your share of the work so your brigade gets done on time, but learn the ways to not work too hard. Don’t go out to the latrine alone. A good way to get raped.”

A siren rang in the cold air, startling Alexia. “What’s that?”

“Supper,” one of the women at the back of the dugout called out, rushing toward the canvas door.

“C’mon. We want to make sure we get there while the food’s still hot.” Nina nudged Alexia by the elbow out of the dugout, and they jogged together toward the mess yard.

They lined up before a low window where a hand shoved forward a bowl of something thick. It was kasha, though of a cruder sort than Alexia had eaten at the front. She gave her number and was also handed a slice of black bread in the dimensions for which she qualified. As a new arrival, that was for only 500 grams.

She moved quickly away to stand with two of the women whose names she knew. Both ate with spoons, though she had none. “How do I eat this?” she asked.

“For now, just drink it or use your fingers. You’ll have to buy a spoon from someone, and a bowl, too, if you can. They don’t have enough, so sometimes you have to wait until someone finishes eating and turns in their bowl. If you have your own bowl, you’re served first.”

Alexia ate, observing the others, calculating how to survive. Spoons, bowls, lice. At least the trivia of daily existence let her forget for a moment the greater tragedy. They finished in silence, and Alexia handed in her bowl, for which later arriving prisoners already waited.

Another siren sounded, and they lined up in the mess yard to be counted. The November day had been short, and it was already dark when they returned to their earthen shelter. Someone added the last log to the inadequate stove, extinguished the single smoky kerosene lantern, and the dugout was dark, save for the dull orange visible in the stove vents. She dropped back onto her bed plank and rolled up in her filthy blanket. Oh, Mia. I could endure all of this if you were here. But Mia was at home in the US now. How long before she would forget her Russian sniper and their kiss? She was too weak and tired to cry, and dropped into sleep as into a bottomless pit.

The now-familiar siren awakened her. They’d slept in their work clothes so needed only to stand up, use the latrine, and report for roll call. It was still full night outside. Another lineup for what was obviously the same kasha reheated for breakfast, and then they fell in for work assignments.

The system appeared straightforward. Each task required a brigade, and since almost no paper was available, a wide wooden plank on the wall of the dining hut displayed the list of brigades, their members—shown by numbers, and their tasks. Alexia was on woodcutting brigade three. Fortunately, Nina, Sophia, and the five other women from her dugout were its members. The brigadier who led them was a man who, according to Nina, lived in a wooden hut rather than a dugout. The obvious question was, how did he manage that?

The zeks lined up in rows of five, and at the next siren, the gate opened and they began the daily march out. It had begun to snow lightly, and Alexia was glad for the felt valenki she wore in place of shoes. Only her hands were red with the cold, and she blew on them. It was already well below zero. Could she make it through the day without frostbite?

When they reached the work site, the brigade leader pointed out the stand of slender trees at the bottom of a gully that had to be felled and trimmed for transport. The quota for the brigade that day was thirty trees. She was aghast. She saw no sign of chainsaws. Nor could she see any motor vehicle to collect or transport logs. Ten women were going to have to do it all by hand, and she had no gloves.

“Comrade Brigadier,” she said, turning to the leader whose name she did not yet know. “I see the other women have gloves, but none were issued to me.”

“Gloves are special. You have to buy them.”

“Buy them with what, Comrade Brigadier?”

He leered at her, and she took a step back, horrified at the implication. To her relief, Nina stepped forward. “I paid you in tobacco, Ivan. Why can’t she do the same?”

Ivan wrinkled his nose at missing an opportunity and conceded. “Yeah, sure. Twenty grams of tobacco.” He produced a pair of tattered gloves from the pouch he carried and held them up. “Now, where’s the tobacco?”

“Come on, Ivan. You know she won’t get her ration until the end of the week. I’ll give you ten grams tonight, the last of my supply, and she’ll give you the other ten when she gets it.”

He spat to the side. “All right. Fine. Now stop gabbing and start working. We have to make the quota or no one gets full rations, and if you get me in trouble, someone will have to pay.” He handed out the axes and dragging chains and indicated the trees to be cut.

They worked in two-woman teams, and Alexia saw immediately that most were experienced at bringing down a tree efficiently. First the lower notch, in the direction the tree would fall, then the higher cut on the opposite side. Nina showed her how to chop at a forty-five-degree angle and leave enough uncut wood for the tree to stand until they could step out of the way. After thirty minutes of hard swinging, they stepped back as the tree leaned forward, groaned, and finally crashed. It was satisfying, but by then, Alexia’s arms and shoulders ached.

The felling was only part of the task. They also had to strip away the limbs, which required another half an hour of small chops, and then it took an equal amount of time to drag the trunk chained to hooks over their shoulders to a pile in a central area. Alexia did the calculation. If each tree took roughly an hour and a half to finish, and they made up only four teams, they would need some eleven and a half hours of hard, unbroken labor to reach their quota of thirty trees. It was possible only if they were willing to kill themselves doing it, and it would be impossible to do a second time.

After Alexia and Nina had felled, stripped, and stacked their third tree, and it seemed she could no longer walk or stand up straight, she dropped to her knees. “I can’t keep up this pace, and I don’t think anyone can. I don’t understand how you manage your quota each day.”

Nina clapped sawdust and snow from her gloves. “In the camps, you can either reach your quota or give the illusion of reaching it. Wait until twelve o’clock, when Ivan reports back to administration and we’re allowed to rest for fifteen minutes.”

“If you say so,” Alexia said, limping awkwardly toward the next tree.

At noon, as promised, Ivan disappeared, obviously confident that his brigade would continue working. “All right… NOW,” Sonia ordered. At that moment, she and the other women sprinted to the other side of the gully, where several piles of logs already lay from previous jobs. In teams of two, they hauled five cut logs over to their side, trimmed off the ends to make the cuts appear fresh, and loaded them onto their own pile for that day’s quota. Now, instead of the thirteen trunks they’d finished since early in the morning, they had eighteen. That meant they had another twelve to do, and at four every hour and a half—every two hours, given breathing time between each one—they’d finish by sunset.

The women’s energy flagged as the day wore on, but they still managed to drag the last log in by twilight. They marched back to the camp in darkness, and having met their quota, they were entitled to full rations. This consisted of a bowl of balanda, a watery soup made from spoiled cabbage, potatoes, and fish heads, and 700 grams of black bread.

Alexia devoured her food, again spoonless. It tasted dreadful, but she didn’t care and would gladly have eaten more. Instead, the siren sounded again for final roll call, and they lined up in their rows of five to be counted. Olha was right. After that, the plank bed and lice-ridden blanket in their hole in the ground seemed a relief.

“That trick of stealing those logs, if you do that every day, I can’t believe Ivan doesn’t catch on,” she said to Sonia, who stood at the stove with her blanket.

Sonia picked off a couple of lice from the blanket and crushed them between her nails. “We don’t take so many that it’s obvious. And there must be eight or ten piles lying around the forest. Once the trees are piled up and counted, no one bothers to count again. Even if Ivan figured out what we do, all he really cares is that he can report at the end of the day that his brigade made its quota. And we always do.”

“Doesn’t anyone at the top of the chain count them at the end and realize they’re far short of what the camp says it has?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But each person at every level lies to his supervisor, who then lies to his supervisor, and so it goes. As long as it looks right on the books, the whole system moves along.”

Alexia rolled up in her blanket and thought of Mia, who had investigated exactly that kind of fraud and almost been murdered for it. What would she think of the economy of the Gulag?

“Mia,” she murmured to herself as she slipped off into unconsciousness, “don’t forget me.”

Alexia endured four weeks of the woodcutting regime, paid her tobacco debt to both Ivan and Nina, but could feel herself weakening. She had always been trim, but now she was wiry, and soon, she feared, she would look like Olha.

She learned the tricks of survival: to save a scrap of bread from supper to eat just before going to bed, since it was hard to fall asleep hungry, to sleep with her hat pulled low and covering her ears, to trade tobacco for essential items as soon as possible.

With her fourth issue of tobacco, she “bought” a crudely carved wooden spoon and, with the next four rations after that, a wooden bowl. The latter meant she no longer had to wait for one to be handed in and rinsed. But the food, whether kasha or balanda, seemed to make no dent in her constant hunger.

After a few weeks of working, stealing, and sleeping alongside the other women, she began to see them as family. And then she woke up one morning to a cluster of green branches, from one of their cut trees, on the one rickety table in the dugout. On its top a length of wire had been bent into something vaguely resembling a star.

“What’s this?” she asked. “Don’t you get enough of trees on the job every day?”

Sonia sat up on her bed plank and wrapped her blanket around her shoulders. “You haven’t been paying attention to the calendar, my dear. It’s Christmas.”

“Christmas! We’re celebrating Christmas?” Alexia laughed.

Nina laughed with her. “I know no one believes in that nonsense anymore. I certainly don’t. And of course we have nothing to make the ‘holy supper’ with. But I love the rituals, the singing, the specialness of it. I like to have a day when we’re supposed to show our love for people.”

Sonia grew somber. “The last time I saw my husband and daughter was at Christmas four years ago. For my mother, who never gave up the faith, we had a special festive dinner at home. My husband was so kind. He brought a fur hat for my mother and a snow-maiden doll for our daughter, and we were all so happy. Two days later he was arrested, and two months after that, I was, too. My family has no idea where I am.”

Alexia took her hand. “Yes, I spent a lot of nice Christmases with my babushka and Father Zosima. And… the best one of all with my dearest friend, Mia. We went to a Mass together, two nonbelievers, but being there in that beautiful place with her… well, that made it holy for me.”

Nina slid off her plank and came, wrapped in her blanket, to sit next to Alexia. “What was she like, your Mia?”

Alexia hesitated. Then she blurted out, “She’s lovely. An American who somehow ended up with us on the Eastern Front. Can you imagine? Someone who would give up a comfortable life in the West to fight beside us?”

“What happened to her?” Sonia asked.

“We were trying to return to America together, with some English diplomats, but the NKVD arrested me and pulled me off the plane. I suppose she continued on.”

“To America? Ooh. That sounds exciting.” Nina threw an arm across her back. “I bet she hasn’t forgotten, just like you haven’t. Look. I have a proposal, that I tell you all the wonderful things about my Timor, the man of my life, and you tell me all the things about Mia. Sonia can talk about her husband. I’m sure even grumpy old Olha has someone to talk about. Every night we’ll tell a little bit, and that way, it’s like they’re still with us.”

“Yes. I like that idea.”

The siren sounded, and they got to their feet to start the new workday.

Alexia stood shivering with the other women in the yard. They’d already had their miserable little portions of soup and root tea for breakfast, and now they were waiting for all the work crews to fall into their lines of five to be counted. If the count went well, it took only fifteen minutes. If the yard leader miscounted, or someone was missing, it could take an hour, and they still had the same work quota to meet.

At five thirty in the morning, the winter sky was still pitch-black but crystal clear and full of stars. Stamping back and forth to keep off the chill, Alexia gazed up at them. Idly, she wondered if she could spot the one constellation Mia had shown her how to recognize, that of Orion.

A shiver of pleasure went through her when she saw them, the three stars of Orion’s belt, and above and below them, the stars that made up his shoulders, feet, and shield.

She almost wept, as if recognizing an old friend who had looked down on her and Mia on Christmas night only a year ago. That night, that wondrous night, when Mia had rambled on about “millions of stars, millions and millions and millions” and then had kissed her. For a brief moment, she sensed a connection between herself and Mia, and the stars, proof of the existence only of themselves. They have no interest in comforting us, and yet we are comforted. As by the sunrise.

Through the month of January, it became clear to Alexia that the only ones who survived were those who had friends and could cheat the system with them. But even then, sheer luck or the lack of it could save or kill. As a “twenty-fiver” she was not allowed letters or packages from home, but perhaps to add to her torment, some invisible authority passed through a message letting her know her grandmother had died. No details, just that she was gone. Dear Babushka, with her forbidden icons and a celibate priest for a “husband.” Alexia’s fervent wish was that she died in peace, in her sleep, believing her grandchild still served at the front.

In February, the weather worsened radically. Merciful Soviet law required that work be suspended at temperatures below minus twenty-five degrees, and on the first such day, the brigades were exempted from labor. Instead, they were required to attend a lecture entitled “The Ideals of the People’s State” given by the district commissar of education.

While they waited outside the administration hut, which she had passed through upon arrival, she studied the newspaper posted on the wall. It was the only one available to the camp, since any others that arrived were quickly torn into cigarette papers. But this one was sacrosanct, and though it was a week old, it gave some news of the war. Budapest had been liberated, and even better, the Red Army had taken Warsaw and crossed into Germany.

She wondered whether Kalya and Klavdia were still alive. A smaller article mentioned that the Arctic convoys were now arriving without casualties, though their cargoes continued to show deficiencies at several destinations. Alexia snorted bitterly. Apparently Molotov and his cronies still had their hands in the supply line.

Finally her brigade and four others were called in, and in the warm air of the crowded room, she took off her ushanka and ran her hand over her head. Her fingers slid over the short, boyish growth that scarcely warmed her but made her feel like a person again. Without a mirror, she could only wonder what it looked like.

The lecture was hardly different from what she’d heard in her Komsomol days and in military training. The sheer repetition of the “heroic revolution of the working class” theme already rendered it boring, but now, to an audience of “enemies of the people” who labored until they died, it was absurd. She marveled that any of the prisoners could believe a single word of it.

The next day, the temperature warmed considerably, and the brigade returned to the taiga, though the team’s usual log-borrowing was temporarily thwarted by the lunchtime appearance of the commissar. Alexia thought at first he was there to inspect them, and shuddered at the thought, but was pleased to see that he merely wanted to hunt rabbits.

Alexia’s group had already slowly edged toward a desirable pile of previously cut logs when they heard the first gunshot. Alexia glanced up to see the commissar aiming at a rabbit. His cursing and the continued flight of the creature showed he’d missed.

He fired a second time, but the rifle jammed. He cursed again and raised the rifle to his shoulder as if to shoot a third time.

“Stop!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, startling him. He lowered the rifle and glanced toward her, clearly perturbed.

She dropped her ax and ran toward him, both hands held out in front of her. “The bullet’s jammed in the barrel. If you fire again, it’ll explode.”

“Oh,” he said, staring down at the rifle as if it were something alien. “Damn. I should have remembered that, but this isn’t the rifle I usually shoot. The commandant lent it to me, one of the old infantry rifles.”

“It’s a Mosin-Nagant, the kind we all used on the Front. Would the commissar like me to break it down and remove the jammed cartridge?”

“You can do that out here, without tools?”

“Yes, Comrade Commissar.” She took a chance calling him that. As an enemy of the people she was technically forbidden to call someone comrade. “But it must be in a sheltered place. Over there, perhaps, under the large fir.”

He nodded, and they hiked to the tree, which had a ring of soil at the base untouched by snow. Taking the gun from his hands, she first opened the bolt and pried out the cartridge shell that was in place behind the jam, then slid the whole bolt back off the body of the gun. “The beauty of the Mosin Nagant is that you can use the bayonet as a tool,” she said, clicking it off the end of the nozzle. She removed the two barrel bands and lifted the hand guard off the top of the barrel. Then she drew out the cleaning rod and laid it aside. Using the flat tip of the bayonet, she undid the screws at the front and the rear of the magazine chamber. Pressing out the magazine chamber allowed her to lift the entire barrel and slide in the cleaning rod to tap out the slug.

Triumphant, she held up the delinquent plug of metal. “It looks like the cartridge had almost no powder in it. Just enough to shove it halfway up the barrel.”

“Sabotage, I’m sure,” he muttered.

She ignored the accusation, which almost certainly was justified, and in as short a time as she had dismantled the rifle, she reassembled it. “Sorry it took so long, but it’s hard with gloves,” she said, handing it up to him.

The commissar hefted the gun, as if it now weighed less. “How do you know so much about this rifle? You were a soldier?”

“Yes, Comrade Commissar. A sniper in the 109th Rifle Division. Thirty-two recorded kills.”

“Oh, well done. Does the commandant know he has a sharpshooter in his camp?”

“I’m certain he doesn’t, Comrade Commissar.”

“Well, well,” he said, ambiguously. “Thank you for… uh… saving my head. Now you’d better get back to work.” He ambled away, his newly cleaned Mosin-Nagant cradled in his arms.

Fortuitously, Ivan joined him, and they marched back to camp together for the midday report. As soon as they were out of sight, Alexia called out, “Now,” and the women scrambled toward the nearest log pile to transfer the logs that would allow them to make their quota and earn their full ration one more day.

At supper, while Alexia wiped out her bowl with the last of her bread, one of the guards called out her number. “To the commandant’s office,” he ordered. With an anxious glance at her friends, she followed him.

Upon entering the commandant’s office, however, she saw the commissar was present also, and the recalcitrant Mosin-Nagant lay across the commandant’s desk.

“So, I hear you’re a hotshot marksman with thirty-two dead Germans under your belt,” the commandant said, snickering. “And that you can dismantle one of these things in the blink of an eye.”

“Yes, Commandant.”

“A shame it’s a skill you can’t use in a labor camp. What did you do before you learned to shoot?”

“I was a teacher, Commandant. In Arkhangelsk.”

“In Arkhangelsk?” He seemed astonished. “What school?”

“Primary school number 12. Unfortunately, it was destroyed in an air raid in September of last year.”

The commandant shook his head in disbelief. “I know that school. My son went there the year before.” His face softened and lost the harsh authority of his office.

For a moment, Alexia forgot too she was a prisoner. “I was probably one of his teachers. What was his name?”

“Mikhail Ivanovitch.”

“I remember him. A shy boy who liked to draw horses.”

“Yes. That was him.” The commandant seemed deeply touched, as if recognizing for the first time that his prisoners were his countrymen and neighbors. He scratched his jaw.

“Well, I think the camp can find a better job for a schoolteacher than felling trees. How good are you at typing?”

“Superb, sir. Almost as good as shooting.”

“All right, then. I can’t do anything about your housing. The barracks are full to bursting with criminals, and putting a political in there would cause you more grief than comfort. But at least I can put you to work where you’ll be indoors for the rest of the winter. Report to the administration tomorrow after the morning count.”

Thus was Alexia saved from starvation. The hours as an administration typist were just as long, her food ration slightly less than before, but she labored sitting, in a warm room, while the others marched out into the icy forest every morning. She felt guilty returning each night to the dugout to face the other physically depleted women, but on the rare occasions when extra bread appeared mysteriously on her desk from some benefactor, she took it back to her comrades. It was the least she could do.

Nina and Sonia had become expert at shifting logs from one pile to another wherever they were assigned and always exceeded their quota. The brigadier Ivan was either very stupid, or very kind, for he never said a word.

And every ten days, their turn came for the bathhouse, a noisy, poorly heated shed that offered little comfort other than a brief respite from the lice. The camp issue of soap was small, evil-smelling, and had to be used for hair and body. Fortunately, they could dump their lice-ridden rags into a pile to be boiled and disinfected by the laundry workers. Then for fifteen minutes, they huddled together in the tepid warmth of the washroom, scrubbing each other’s backs and hair, and joked that now at least the lice would be clean.

March and April passed, and the sub-zero temperatures gave way to warm, drenching rains, but there were no deaths among the women. Life in the underground zemlyanka continued to be squalid, and now the mildew smell was permanent, but Alexia lost no more weight, only her previous convictions. Over the months of her sentence, political doubt had hardened into cold cynicism. And after living intimately with her friends in a hole in the ground, she sensed they felt the same.

One night, they even dared to talk, to say things that on the outside would have gotten them a doubled sentence.

Nina began the treasonous discussion. “Did you see the new banners in the camp? Patriots working for the glory of Communism.” She laughed. “I wish they’d make up their minds. Either we’re patriot brothers and sisters, celebrating the victory of Leninism, or we’re enemies being brutalized for not celebrating it. You can’t be celebrating and at the same time have a gun to your head.”

A vague idea that had haunted Alexia now coalesced in her mind. “That’s true not just of the Gulag, but of Soviet society in general.”

It was a vast leap in thought, and Sonia and Nina, and the others within earshot, waited for her to elaborate.

“Even on the outside, how can we celebrate the glory if, even in our own homes and jobs, we live in fear? And what exactly are we supposed to glorify? Our shops are empty, and not just because of the war. The collective farms don’t produce enough food, factory workers labor fourteen hours a day on patched-up machinery, and everyone at every level, even in the Kremlin, is corrupt.” Her voice dropped in volume, as if she spoke only to herself, but the words were incendiary.

“I’ve begun to think sometimes the entire Soviet experiment has failed and no one has the courage to admit it.”

“That’s treason you’re talking,” a small voice said from the other side of the dugout. It was Olha. Ominously, no one contradicted her.

In the deadly silence that followed, one of the women extinguished the kerosene lantern. Alexia knew she’d sealed her fate. But what more could they do to her? She already faced twenty-five years at labor, and the one person she desperately loved was lost to her forever.

She rolled up in her blanket and stared into the darkness. Let them execute her now for treason. She no longer cared.

The next morning, she awoke full of regret. She had said reckless things the night before and realized, in fact, she did care. Not especially for herself—since twenty-five years was as good as life—but for her mates. If any one of the women denounced her, the other women would be held guilty, too, for agreeing with her. Even if their sentences were not doubled, at the very least, the group would be broken up and the prisoners sent to other camps or colonies. Everyone would have to start over, building a new support network to trick the system and survive.

She reported for work in the administration office but was nervous all day. And at the end of her ten-hour shift, her worse fears were realized. Prisoner G 235 was summoned to the commandant.

She cursed Olha, who had obviously denounced her.

Calming herself, she tried to formulate some sort of half lie to protect the innocent ones. Something about having a fever and saying deranged things she should not be held responsible for, and that the others had only humored her out of kindness. Would he believe it?

She knocked, and at his reply, she stepped inside, her ushanka in her hand. She saluted unnecessarily—her imprisonment was not military—but she wanted to remind him she’d been a good soldier.

“I have no idea what’s going on here, but it’s my duty to follow orders,” he said.

“Yes, Commandant,” she replied, dry-mouthed. He was about to pass sentence, all because she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She rocked slightly, almost physically sick, and her hands began to tremble.

“Orders have come to transfer you to Moscow. Leave behind whatever possessions you might have. You won’t need them. A truck will pick you up after supper.”