“Here we are, home again,” said Mogilchuk, shoving her into her cell. “Rest up. We’ll talk in the morning.” Sashenka sank heavily onto the bottom bunk in her cell. “Oh—and did you recognize your uncle Mendel? I think it was him—at least what was left of him.”
37
That night they moved her to a new cell with bright lights—but they refused to dim them. The pipes in her cell shook, groaned and started to heat even though it was high summer. In the cells, the air was already stifling.
Sashenka banged on her door.
“Sit on your bed, prisoner.” The locks rasped open. Two guards stood in the doorway.
“I wish to complain to Narkom Beria, to the Central Committee. The heating’s come on and it’s summer. And please turn my lights down. They are so bright they’re keeping me awake.”
The guards looked at each other. “We’ll report your complaints to our superiors.”
The doors slammed. The heat increased. Sashenka was sweating. She could hardly breathe, and she was tortured by thirst. She took off her dress and lay on the bunk in her underwear. The lights were so bright, so hot, she could not sleep, however tightly she closed her eyes. If she buried her face in the mattress, they shook her.
When she finally slept fitfully, the Judas port creaked open. “Wake up, prisoner!”
“I’m sleeping, it’s nighttime.”
She fell asleep again.
“Wake up, prisoner. Move your hands where we can see them.”
When these shouts were not enough to keep her awake, they dropped her on the floor, kicking her, slapping her face.
Now she understood. This was what her Party had come to. One night without sleep was fine but by the second night she felt she was beginning to disintegrate. She was nauseous all the time; sweat poured off her and she was not sure if she was ill or just worn to the bone. She fell asleep on her feet; the guards found her asleep on the lavatory but even there they woke her. Worst of all, her fears enveloped her, growing on her like fungus: what if Vanya was an Enemy all along? The children were lost and they were crying for her, or they were dead.
Hours and days crept by. No exercise. No washing. She was fed thrice daily via a tray passed through the hatch, but she was always hungry, always thirsty. Alone in the cell, woken every few minutes, she heard Snowy and Carlo’s voices. She must not break. For them. But their faces and smell overwhelmed her. They were lost already, she told herself. Satinov’s plan would never work: they were in one of those orphanages, raped, tortured, beaten, abused, and when they were old enough, shot. She should confess to any lies, anything rather than this. Just to sleep in a cool cell. The children were dead already. Dead to her, dead in fact. They were no longer hers. They were lost forever.
She was no more in the land of the living.
38
Far to the south of Moscow, the Volga German woman in the floral scarf and the plain summer dress knocked again on the door of the stationmaster of Rostov-on-Don. Again she dragged in her three suitcases and her two children, a small blond girl and a brown-haired boy, who clung to her arms, their sunken eyes already sad and hollow.
The stationmaster’s office was next to the furious chaos of the ticket office, where hundreds waited all day and where so many were disappointed. With its armchairs and portraits of Lenin and Stalin, the office was an oasis of calm and civilization. Even though the Volga German woman had come here every morning for four days and found no telegram, no signal, no friend, she still came in, appearing to enjoy her minute in this clean, quiet eye of the storm. The stationmaster and his assistant looked at each other and rolled their eyes. The nanny, with her three suitcases and two children, was just one of the desperate, grey multitudes who came in every morning hoping for some sign from above, some telegram from nonexistent relatives, some lost luggage that would never be found, some tickets for a train that would never leave.
“Comrade Stepanian,” she greeted the stationmaster on the fourth day, “good morning. I wondered if there was any news? A telegram perhaps?”
The stationmaster reached wearily into a wooden in-tray and, clicking his tongue like the clipclop of a horse, began to work his way through the thick yellow paper of Soviet officialdom, moving his lips as he read each telegram.
On the first day, Stepanian had checked the papers of this Volga German woman and these two well-dressed children who were being transported to an orphanage near Tiflis. Each day they returned, looking hungrier, filthier, more forlorn. The angular and wan nanny herself was haggard with exhaustion.
“I’d like to help. Are the young ones OK?” Stepanian smiled at the children. “Are you all right, you two? What’s that you’ve got there?”
“A cushion,” said the little girl, forlornly.
“Do you sleep on it?”
“We can’t sleep well here. We’re beside the canteen but we want to go home. The cushion is my friend.”
“We want our mummy,” said the little boy, who already had the anxious eyes of a station child.
The words seemed to upset the Volga German woman. Stepanian glanced at her and she shook her head, immediately beginning to collect the bags in order to return to the platform where an Azeri family was keeping their place under the shelter just outside the canteen. She was trying to hide her anxiety but the stationmaster was a connoisseur of misery and uncertainty.
“Thank you, comrade,” the woman said very politely. “I’ll check in again tomorrow.”
Stepanian got up and held open the door for them. “Sorry, I can’t help,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.”
“Is she a fantasist? Maybe there’s no telegram?” his assistant asked when they’d left.
“Who knows?” Stepanian shrugged, dismissing them, and returned to his desk with a click of his tongue. He had an important job to do.
Outside the office, the bedraggled threesome walked slowly back to the platforms. Rostov-on-Don station boomed with the thunder of shunting carriages while the air sang with the whistle and puffing of locomotives. Even though the turmoil of collectivization and the Terror was over, the regional stations were still mangy bedlams of confused humanity. Families camped around their suitcases, some well-to-do, some in rags, some in city clothes, some in peasant boots and smocks. Trains were overbooked and never left on time; tickets were hard to buy; the militia checked and rechecked passes and passport stamps, removing those who lacked the correct papers or the energy to dodge their sudden descents.
It was lucky it was a warm summer because the platforms resembled an encampment, crowded with soldiers, workers, peasants and children, hungry ragged children, well-fed lost children, children sitting on handsome leather suitcases, urchins with the faces of old men, little girls with painted lips and short skirts smoking cigarettes and looking for customers.
The canteen in the station offered snacks for those with rubles. An old Tatar ran a kiosk selling newspapers and candies, and behind the Moscow platform was a rusty spigot where the station’s inhabitants lined up all day for water. The lavatories, down the steps under the station, were awash with a foamy stinking waste yet there were constant lines; children sobbed and wet themselves and adults fought to get to the front faster.
Carolina was more than worried now. She did not know what had happened to Sashenka and presumed the worst. She was a deeply practical woman but the stress of caring for two children in the station was eating at her. She prided herself on her cleanliness, but by now all three of them were dirty, the children’s clothes stained with
