“Get up!” the guards bellowed, ringing the triangle again. “Move!”
Emil forced himself into his pants and boots, still damp from the day before. Putting on the jacket and cap, he wondered how long the Russians thought they’d survive if they had to work in this kind of clothing in the middle of January.
They don’t care if we live or die, he thought as he climbed the stairs out of the basement and stepped through the doors into brilliant light. Frost covered all the machines and equipment around the museum, sparkling in the floodlights’ glare. With his clothes, socks, and boots still damp, Emil almost immediately started shivering and had to stamp his feet and swing his arms to stay warm while the basement emptied out behind him.
The burial detail was right on schedule. Two new prisoners led the pony pulling the death cart to the museum’s freight entrance. They disappeared into the basement and quickly returned with two bodies, the lowest count in days. The guards ordered Emil and the other prisoners to march to a new mess facility in the basement of the city hall. As they started, he glanced at the men on burial detail. In the past two months alone, he’d counted almost one hundred and seventy more dead. They were now down to fifteen hundred and eighty men to rebuild the city.
How long can we last? he asked himself yet again. How long can I last?
As they climbed downstairs into the basement, Emil decided that he could last for today. Beyond that, he had no idea. But he intended to live through the day and see another tomorrow. Or die trying.
Standing in line, he heard the cooks complaining about not having enough wood for fuel. He took a bowl of hot cabbage soup, his daily ration of bread, a hunk of stale cheese, and the piece of cold sausage that was the best thing he’d had to eat since he arrived in Poltava. As he lingered over the sausage and soup, he remembered the scraps of lumber all around the hospital site.
As he was leaving, he asked a cook how much she’d pay for an armful of wood for her stove. She told him one ruble. It was one ruble more than he had, so he told her he’d bring her wood in the evening. Then he girded himself for what lay ahead and went back outside, where it felt even colder than before.
The darkness began to lift. He watched the eastern horizon as it brightened and felt better as his crew set off toward the hospital site. Emil had always thought Adeline glowed like the dawn, and nearly six months into his imprisonment, he seemed to sense her most at sunrise; or at least he thought of her most then, of her smile, and her scent, and the glint in her eye when she was teasing him. These memories would make Emil smile and get him through the fourteen-hour workday, just as they had on all the other fourteen-hour workdays.
And the memories did help him that entire morning. The month before, Emil had figured out an easier way to make cement and then concrete in larger batches by mixing it in a large metal horse trough with a one-meter length of wood he’d cut and fashioned as a mixing paddle.
The easier horse-trough-and-paddle method had boosted his production. And he’d been able to maintain his strength and weight. Better, the foremen and the guards weren’t down his throat all the time. He was giving them what they wanted, and he was staying unnoticed.
So Emil was more than concerned when he saw someone much worse than a guard or a foreman coming toward his cement-block operation with a blueprint rolled up in his hand. It was the site superintendent, a big Russian named Ivanov, who had perpetual dark bags under his eyes and an endless series of cigarettes dangling, smoldering, yet somehow never falling from the left corner of his lips.
Emil had never actually spoken to Ivanov, but now the man in charge of rebuilding the hospital came in under the tin roof and right up to him. “You build my concrete blocks, yes?”
Emil was rattled by the big Russian’s presence but nodded.
“I need more,” he said. “Twice as many as you make for me now. No, three times. We are behind schedule. We have to close up a large part of the building before the snow flies. What do you need to triple your daily production?”
Emil did not expect to be asked and thought before he answered.
“Three men to help me,” he said. “Warmer clothes and boots for them and me. Three times the block forms. Three times the materials.”
Then he pointed to piles of lime stacked against the back wall of his work area. “I’ll need a much larger storage shelter for the materials with walls and a roof and a covered, walled workspace big enough for three horse troughs like this one. And three boat paddles. And as it gets colder, we’ll need a way to keep the concrete warm enough to set properly.”
Ivanov gave him a look of reappraisal. “Nothing else?”
Emil hesitated, but then said, “Twice the rations. We’ll need the extra food if you expect us to stay alive and working.”
The Russian lit another cigarette, put it in the left corner of his lips, took a drag, and blew it out the right side. “Two men. You will have the rest of what you need. And if you are not making three times the blocks at this time next week, you will be taken out and shot.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The superintendent was a man of his
