Page 14 of Cilka's Journey
Elena scowls, snatching the needle.
Cilka sits on her bed, looking at Josie, who forlornly fiddles with her number patches. She seems to go from capable to overwhelmed in a matter of moments.
“Hand it over,” she says.
Josie looks pained.
“One day at a time,” Cilka says. “All right?”
Josie nods.
Cilka starts stripping threads from her sheet. When a needle is handed to her, she quickly sews the numbers on Josie’s and her own garments.
Each time she stabs the needle through the fabric she feels the pain of a needle stabbing into her left arm. Another number. Another place. She grimaces.
To have lost everything. To have had to endure what she has endured, and be punished for it. Suddenly the needle feels as heavy as a brick. How can she go on? How can she work for a new enemy? Live to see the women around her tire, starve, diminish, die. But she—shewilllive. She does not know why she has always been sure of that, why she feels she can persist—keep picking up this needle even though it’s as heavy as a brick, keep sewing, keep doing what she has to do—but she can. She starts to feel angry, furious. And the needle feels light again. Light and quick. It is this fire, then, that keeps her going. But it is also a curse. It makes her stand out, be singled out. She must contain it, control it, direct it.
To survive.
CHAPTER 4
Thefearsome clanging of a hammer on metal wakes the newest arrivals at Vorkuta Gulag at 6 a.m. Antonina was right—it is an unmissable wake-up call. The women have taken turns putting coal in the stove throughout the night, just enough to keep it burning. Though the sun still shines through most of the night, there had been frost on the ground when they walked back after their meager evening meal in the mess. They had all slept in the clothes they had been given the previous day.
The door opens, sending in a blast of cold air. Antonina Karpovna holds the door open, watching the women run to the feet of their beds, their eyes turned to her. She nods approval.
She walks up the hut inspecting the newly sewn numbers on the women’s coats. Pausing at Elena, she barks, “Do it again tonight. That’s the worst needlework I’ve ever seen.”
When she is back at the door, she turns to the two nearest girls. “Grab the buckets and I’ll show you where to empty them. Tomorrow, one of you take anotherzechkaand show her where to go and so on, you follow?”
The two girls scamper to the toilet buckets at the rear of the hut, directly opposite Cilka’s bed.
While Antonina and the two girls with the buckets disappear, the rest of the women stay standing, no one prepared to move. When the girls return, ashen-faced, Antonina tells them all to head to the mess for breakfast and be back by 7 a.m. for roll call.
Outside, the two girls who emptied the toilet buckets bend down and rub their hands across the frost in an attempt to wash the stench and urine away.
If this is the end of summer, Cilka thinks, as she walks with Josie over to the mess hut, and there is already light snow on the ground and air like ice, then none of them will be prepared for what is to come. Working outdoors will be unbearable.
Breakfast is a thick, tasteless gruel. Josie remembers to place her precious piece of bread up her sleeve. Like the day before, there are no vacancies at any of the tables. This time, the newcomers know what to do, and lean against the walls.
It is obvious the gruel cannot be drunk. The women look around. There are others using two fingers for a spoon. That will have to do for now.
Roll call. This is very familiar to Cilka. She only hopes with the twenty of them it will go quickly. That no one has gone missing in the night. She remembers a night standing out in the cold—all night—until an inmate was found. The ache in her knees, her anklebones. And that was not even the worst night in theother place. Not even close. Antonina Karpovna starts calling out names. Names.I’m not a number. And yet I have a number.Cilka looks at her covered-up left arm and the number now emblazoned on her brown, scratchy coat. I have a name. She answers loudly, “Yes,” when it is called. They are told to get into four rows of five.
Groups of women file past them, each headed by a brigadier. Groups of men are also coming from the other side of the camp. Cilka and her hut fall in with them as they march to the gates that lead out of the compound. From what Cilka observed on arrival, there was only one way in and one way out. A simple barbed-wire fence defines the boundary. Groups of men and women swarm forward.
They slow down, coming to a halt as they near the exit and see for the first time the ritual of going to work each day. As Antonina’s turn comes, Cilka observes her approaching a guard or administrator and showing him the list of names. Antonina then beckons for the first row of women to approach. The guard walks along the row, counting out five, roughly patting them down in a search, and then pushing them onward, before doing the same with the next three rows. He nods to Antonina, who goes along with the women, telling them to keep walking behind the others. They follow a train line, occasionally tripping over the rails, thinking it will be easier to walk on them than to pull their feet through the sucking mud that drains them of energy they know they will need for work.
Guards walk up and down the rows of men and women trudging to the large mine that looms ahead of them. It looks like a black mountain with an opening that disappears into hell. Piles of coal tower beside small ramshackle buildings. At the top of the mouth of the mine they can see the wheel that is drawing coal up from the depths below. Open train carts line the track as the women get closer.
As they reach the mine, those in front peel off, going to jobs and areas they are already familiar with. Antonina hands the new arrivals over to a guard before following some of the women from the other huts, who are also part of her brigade.
Walking among the women, the guard pushes several to one side, separating them out.
“Hey, Alexei,” he calls out, “come and get this lot. They look like they can swing a pick.”
Another guard comes over and indicates that the fifteen women should follow him. Cilka, Josie and Natalya remain behind. The guard looks at them.
“Couldn’t swing a bloody pick with all of ya hanging on to it. Follow me.”
