Under a Blood Red Sky

18

Davinsky Camp July 1933

Anna stole half a potato from the camp kitchen. She was getting good at it. Or was it just that she was becoming invisible? It was more than possible.

When she looked at her arms and legs all she could see beneath the mosquito bites was a skeleton covered in an almost transparent grey film, so transparent that she could see the bones underneath. They peered through in glimpses of white. She sometimes prodded them with her finger – to test how strong they were, she told herself, but really it was to make sure they were still there.

She didn’t want to steal the potato, any more than she’d wanted to steal the bread last week or the greasy strip of pork fat the week before that. Each time she knew she’d be caught, and each time she was. A shriek of protest from a kitchen worker; a firm grip dragging her to the floor. But always too late. She’d already crammed the food into her mouth before they could wrench it back from her. She’d taken the punishment beatings and prayed that the white sticks under her skin wouldn’t snap. So far they hadn’t, but they’d come close. If she was caught stealing again they’d shoot her.

She felt the solid lump of boiled potato work its way, one millimetre at a time, down into her stomach where it settled warm and comforting, like a friend. She patted the hollow cavity where she assumed her stomach still lay. No, not like a friend. Because of a friend. Because of Sofia.

Anna smiled and felt absurdly happy. She had achieved something positive, keeping herself alive for one more day, and it had been so simple this time, she couldn’t believe it.

‘You!’ a guard, the one with scabs on his eyebrows, had yelled at her when she was left behind in the yard after roll-call. ‘Get over here. Bistro!’

She had to concentrate when she moved, was conscious of sliding one foot forward, then the other, then the first one again. Like pushing logs uphill. She was slow and he was impatient, so he clipped her elbow with his rifle butt.

‘Unload those boxes into the kitchen. And be careful, suka, you stupid bitch. They’re new.’

It was that easy. Shift boxes. Unload pans. Keep eyes on floor. Place each iron pot on shelf. Slip potato in pocket. No beating. No punishment cell.

‘For you, Sofia,’ she whispered and again rubbed the contented spot where the potato lay. She’d promised herself and she’d promised Sofia. But waiting was hard and time after time she had to oust the thought that it would be much easier to lie down and die. With a raw gasp, she started to cough.

Are you coming, Sofia? Or is life out there too good?

‘Listen!’ Anna exclaimed. She paused from her task of stripping branches, axe in mid-air. ‘Listen to that.’ The other prisoners hesitated.

It was birdsong. A pure silken note that rose and fell and filled the air with the sweet sound of freedom. It set up an ache in Anna’s heart.

‘Get on with your work, if you’ve any sense,’ growled the short Muscovite who had toiled all day beside Anna with the silent precision of a machine and never missed her norm.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Anna insisted.

‘What good is beauty to me? I can’t eat it.’

Anna returned to lopping limbs off the tree. The tall graceful pine lay stiff as a fallen soldier at her feet, oozing its sticky sap. She had long ago passed the point where she felt any sorrow for the forest and the systematic massacre of thousands of trees taking place within it, because in a labour camp there was no room for such feelings. Nothing existed except work, sleep and food. Work. Sleep. Eat. Above all, eat. It frightened her sometimes to feel that her humanity was slipping away from her and she feared she was becoming no more than a forest animal, chewing on twigs and scrabbling in the earth for roots.

And then a small drab-brown bird opened its beak and the sound that poured forth brought her winging back to the human race. To the memory of a Chopin waltz and a young man’s arm sweeping her off her feet. The ache grew worse inside her.

‘Yes,’ she said to the bent back of the woman from Moscow. ‘You can feed on beauty.’

‘Blyad! ’ the woman swore contemptuously. ‘You’ll be dead before the year is out.’

Anna had no intention of dying. Not yet anyway.

She sank her axe into the scented white wood with determination, sweeping away the last tangle of feathery branches and moving on to the next trunk in the row. Around her, for as far as she could see, bent figures chopped and hacked and cursed their way through the thousands of felled pines, preparing them for their rafting trek downriver. Anna slapped a hand on the insects that settled greedily on her sweat-soaked skin. The mosquitoes were even worse than usual today. The sun burned above her, heating up this water-logged landscape so that the marshes hummed with newly-winged life. The insects drove everyone mad. But she’d promised Sofia that she would hold on.

Sofia, be quick.

She wouldn’t let herself think of the possibility that Sofia might be dead. It was too agonising a thought, too black and too huge to fit inside her head. Instead she watched the forest each day for movement among the trees, for a shadow that shouldn’t be there. She remembered clearly the first time she ever laid eyes on Sofia. It was back in the bitter winter of 1929 when Anna had not long been a prisoner in the camp and was as green and as soft as the wood she was chopping into.

‘Davay! Davay! Let’s go, scum of the earth!’

The guards had stamped their feet on the hard packed snow, in a hurry to move the prisoner brigades on to the next timber haul a verst away.

‘Bistro! Quickly!’

Anna had cursed her axe. It was too small and too blunt, the useless blade had stuck fast in the wood.

‘Bistro! ’

Anna had knelt on the branch, widening the gap between it and the trunk, and yanked the blade free. Everything hurt: the muscles in her back; the skin on her knees; the blisters on her feet; the tendons in her wrists; even the teeth in her head. And now lesions were appearing on her face and they frightened her. She’d hacked again and again at the last two branches but each time an iron-hard knot in the wood resisted her blows. She began to panic.

Frantically she tore at the branch with her hands, aware of the other brigades moving off, but her gloves had ripped and pain stabbed into her finger. A hand, strong and muscular, pulled at her shoulder and pushed her roughly to one side before she could object. An axe swung in a wide arc a hand’s breadth from her cheek, a blue smear in the white air, its blade finely honed. It had sliced neatly through the branch, which flew off with a crack into the trampled snow, followed almost instantly by the second one. The tree was stripped and ready to be hauled.

Anna had studied the owner of the axe. She was a tall young woman, wearing the regulation rough camp dress swamped under a padded jacket with her prison number on front and back, and a wool cap with earflaps tied under her chin. Her legs were wrapped in layers of rags and on her feet were shoes cobbled together out of birch bark and old rubber tyres, held together by string.

‘Spasibo,’ Anna had said gratefully.

Axe blows meant using energy and energy was like gold dust round here, so you didn’t waste it on others. Anna’s rescuer looked back at her with large blue eyes, her skin as grey as the sky. But no lesions.

‘Spasibo,’ Anna said again.

‘Your chopping technique is all wrong,’ the other prisoner said. ‘Swing higher and the axe head gains momentum.’ She had shrugged and started to walk away.

‘My name’s Anna,’ Anna called to her retreating back.

The young woman turned, stared thoughtfully, eyes narrowed against the wind.

‘I am Sofia.’

That was in 1929, only four years ago, yet it felt like a lifetime. Back in the time when four hundred grams of stinking black bread a day had seemed like starvation. When it lay heavy as damp clay in the stomach while she strove to work harder in the forest, now that her technique with the axe had improved. The camp Commandant made clear the simple rule: the more you worked, the more you ate. But only when she and her brigade reached the full norm would she receive the full ration paiok of seven hundred grams.

‘For seven hundred grams of bread I would sell my soul.’

She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. But she’d noticed odd things happening to herself in those early days of shock at finding herself a prisoner: at night, when her dreams grew too painful, she was digging her nails into her thigh so fiercely that they left scarlet welts in her flesh; and she’d started speaking aloud the thoughts that were meant to stay in her head. That worried her. She was losing control. She’d glanced round the barrack hut to see who may have heard.

Most of the women were huddled at each end where the stoves gave out a trickle of heat, not enough to keep the ice off the inside of the grimy window panes but sufficient to give the illusion of warmth. Others lay silent on their beds. The hut contained ten three-storey bunk beds, nudged tight against each other down both sides of the room, with every bed made of a hard board that was meant for two people but was packed with five each night. At times it was impossible to turn over in bed or do anything but lie rigidly on one’s side – hip bones soon developed sores, and there was a pecking order that settled the strongest and the fittest on the top boards. This evening by lamplight some of the women were playing cards they’d made out of scraps of paper and one group was bickering loudly on a top bunk as they bargained with each other for makhorka and salt.

‘Your soul’s not worth seven hundred grams of chleb.’

Anna looked up, startled. The voice came from Sofia, the girl who had helped her. Anna was sitting on the edge of her bed board on the bottom bunk near the draughts of the door, attempting to mend a hole in her glove. The needle she’d created from a splinter of wood and the thread she’d unravelled from her blanket, and it was going well despite the dismal light from the kerosene lamps.

‘My soul,’ Anna said firmly, ‘is worth a good breakfast. And I don’t mean the filthy kasha slop we’re given every morning.’

The blue eyes of the tall young woman scrutinised her carefully, as though she were a newly discovered specimen under a microscope lens. Sofia was leaning against the upright of Anna’s bed and she looked tired, her shoulders wrapped in a dark brown blanket that made her silver-blonde hair look brighter by comparison. It was cropped short, as was all the women’s hair, the authority’s compulsory solution to the problem of head lice. Her skin possessed the grey ashy tinge of malnutrition, but she had no sores or lesions and her teeth were astonishingly white.

‘I mean,’ Anna continued, ‘a breakfast of three fried eggs, yolks yellow as suns on the plate and whites as fluffy as summer clouds, and a thick slice of pork, pink and succulent with a fine grain to it and a slender curve of yellow fat that melts on the tongue like…’

‘Go on, go on.’

It was the Ukrainian babushka who spoke, tapping a bony hand on Anna’s back. She was lying on her tiny bed space behind Anna, who had thought her asleep because for once she wasn’t coughing, but the mention of food had even broken through to her dreams.

‘The bread,’ the old woman whispered, ‘tell me about the bread to go with the eggs and the pork.’

‘The bread will be white, fresh from the oven, bread so light and moist that it soaks up the egg yolk like a sponge and tastes like heaven in the mouth.’

‘And the coffee? Will there be coffee as well?’

‘Ah yes.’ Anna closed her eyes and sighed with pleasure, letting it unfurl inside her like a delicate fan that she’d almost forgotten how to open. ‘The coffee will be so black and strong that just the aroma of it…’ she and the old woman both inhaled deeply in an attempt to catch its fragrance, ‘will make your-’

‘Stop it.’

Anna opened her eyes.

‘Stop it.’ It was Sofia. Her eyes were full of dark rage. ‘Why torture yourself?’

‘One day I’ll taste those eggs and that coffee again. I swear I will,’ Anna said fiercely.

‘Dura! You’re a fool,’ Sofia retorted and strode away to the far end of the hut.

Anna watched her. Saw her climb up on to her top bunk and pull the brown blanket over her head, burrowing deep into it like an animal into its nest.

The bony finger dug again into Anna. ‘And apples? Sliced up and sprinkled with cinnamon?’

‘Yes,’ Anna answered. ‘And a pot of damson jam, deep purple and glistening with syrup.’

‘You know, malishka, I’d honestly sell my God-fearing soul for a breakfast like that before I die.’

Anna swivelled round and smiled at the old woman, whose body was riddled with sores. She stroked the skin of the babushka’s hand, very gently because it was so paper-thin that the slightest touch could leave behind bruises like ink stains.

‘So would I,’ she whispered.

The woman struggled to sit up, her bird-like chest straining against the first rumblings of a coughing fit, and closed her eyes.

‘Hell couldn’t be any worse than this place,’ Anna murmured. ‘Could it?’

The next day one of the guards called out to her. ‘You! Come here.’

The evening ordeal was finally over. The poverka, the roll-call and counting of heads, was a process that dragged on and on sometimes for hours, even though the prisoners could barely stand after a hard day’s labour in the forest. It went on until the numbers that were lined up in rigid rows in the Zone tallied with the numbers on the lists in front of the Commandant. The procedure was repeated rigorously every morning and every night, and every morning and every night somebody died. The German Shepherd dogs on chain leashes watched with gaping jaws for any movement in the rows.

‘You.’ The guard called to her now. ‘Number 1498. Come here.’

When a guard chose to summon you out of the pack, it meant nothing but trouble. Anna tugged her scarf tighter round her ears to shut out the sound of his arrogant command and concentrated on keeping moving. She folded herself into the back of a group of prisoners as they shuffled their way at last towards the shelter of the huts, out of the biting wind that froze the breath on their lungs. The night sky was a vast velvety cat-black expanse overhead, spangled with stars and lit by a full moon that painted the faces beneath it with ugly colourless shadows. It transformed the long huts into coffins.

Anna heard the rattle of a rifle as a bullet was loaded into the breach. She swung round and faced the guard. He was young. Barely shaving. She’d caught him watching her before, his gaze crawling greedily over her skin, worse than the lice. He swaggered over to her across the icy ground, his rifle tucked snugly under his arm, its tip pointed straight at the spot between her legs to which his eyes kept sliding, even though she was bundled up under a skirt and a padded jacket.

‘Number 1498.’

‘Yes.’ She stared at the black patch of ground at his feet and linked her hands behind her back, as was required of prisoners when addressed by guards.

‘I hear you are willing to sell your soul.’

Her heart thudded. Her eyes leapt to his face.

‘Is that so?’ he asked, a sly smile tilting his mouth.

‘It was a joke, nothing more. I was hungry.’

Loathsome informers, the stukachs. Like the yellow-toothed rats, they were everywhere, swapping a scrap of information for a scrap of bread. No one could be trusted. Survival in the camp came at a high price.

The guard stroked the barrel of his rifle against her cheek, scraping one of the lesions and forcing her to turn her face aside while he pressed the muzzle under the knot of her scarf at her throat. The metal was brutally cold on her skin. She could feel her pulse slowing at its touch.

‘Are you hungry now?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘I think you are lying, prisoner 1498.’

He smiled at her and licked his chapped lips. His back was to the nearest floodlight, which cut a yellow swathe through the darkness of the Zone so that his eyes appeared as deep black holes in his head. Anna wanted to push her fingers into them.

‘No,’ she said.

‘I don’t want your soul.’

‘I didn’t think you did.’

‘So will you sell your body instead, in exchange for a good breakfast?’

From the depths of his greatcoat pocket he drew a package wrapped in brown greaseproof paper. Slinging his rifle over his shoulder, he unwrapped the packet and held it out to her. The wind tried to snatch it away, making the paper’s folds crackle and snap. It contained two speckled eggs and a thin sliver of pork. Anna almost sobbed with desire. Her eyes feasted lovingly on the sight of the eggs, on their plump brownness, on the delicacy of the speckles in greys and whites and liver-browns, on the perfection of the curve of the shells. She didn’t even dare look at the meat.

‘So will you?’

He had moved. He was standing beside her now, his breath coming fast and forming small dense clouds of desire in the moonlight. Saliva rushed into Anna’s mouth. There were women in the camp, she knew, who took favours from a guard, who sought one out for protection. Such women did not have lesions on their face or death in their eyes and they worked in the camp kitchen or in the camp laundry, instead of in the killing fields of the forest. Was it so bad? To want to live?

Reluctantly she dragged her eyes from the beauty of the eggs and stared at the guard’s expression. Now she could see clearly the look of loneliness in his young face, the need for something that felt like love even if it wasn’t. He was trapped here the same as she was, about the same age as herself, cut off from all he knew and cared for. Russia had robbed them both and he was desperate for something more. A little human contact. A stamping of self on a blank faceless world. It could help them both survive. Her famished body swayed imperceptibly towards his strong young frame.

‘A good breakfast?’ he whispered temptingly.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ she snapped and swept away into the darkness.