—
There were no thermometers in Perm’s Logging Camp ITSK-2. They weren’t needed. You knew the temperature by the density of the mist, which began to form at forty degrees below zero. It hung suspended like a new element, one you drew in with the pain of a thousand tiny needles and exhaled with a moist rasp. At such low temperatures there was always the threat of frostbite: Moisture on the tip of the nose froze as soon as it touched the atmosphere. One did not dare urinate in the snow. The trickle from Florence’s nose had been freezing over for a week now, and it was only November. She possessed no handkerchief or anything resembling one, and was forced to wipe it ceaselessly with the sleeve of her jacket while she steered her body behind the others along the now familiar four-kilometer path into the forest. Her regulation-issue rubber galoshes did nothing to protect her feet from the cold. Inside them, her toes were wrapped in rags tied with strips of other rags. The mug around her waist was a tin that had once contained Lend-Lease pork—SPAM—which the American allies had donated, along with grain and tractors, during the war. It had long lost its shape and been rubbed clean of the letters. It was her only possession and she guarded it fiercely.
Walking the packed-down snow, Florence hoped it might still be dark when they reached the clearing. Then they would be allowed to hold off sawing and go instead to gather dead branches for a bonfire, which would give her a chance to rest a bit and warm herself with a cup of hot melted snow. But the winter sun was already filling the space between the trees with its scarlet aura when they arrived.
As soon as she was in the woods with Inga, her partner, Florence again found her strength ebbing. The breakfast ration of watery porridge had sustained her only through the difficult walk. She tried not to think about the pain in her right foot, the ankle flesh swelling up against the rubber, blackening her vision with each step. It was like stepping on a bayonet with your heel.
Florence’s job was to hold the box saw steady while Inga did the sawing. But even this proved an impossible task, since it required her, if nothing else, to keep both feet planted firmly on the ground. Inga’s strength was at once a salvation and a malediction: it had kept Florence from slipping into the penal food category, but had forced her to keep up with Inga’s movements even as her own muscles trembled. Inga’s effort, diligent and tragic, reminded Florence of when she had first arrived in Perm and tried to work “honestly and conscientiously,” in order to be rewarded with an extra food ration. Before long she’d come to understand that it was working toward the extra ration that would kill you—help starve you quicker on an extra four hundred grams a day. She had only survived her first winter in Perm thanks to their brigade leader, an old kolkhoznitsa who knew all the tricks and let them gather old timber, cut the winter before, to add to their incomplete norms, and taught Florence to stack her wood in loose piles that looked full from the outside. She’d manipulated the books to show full quotas until some higher-ups got wise to it and assigned them a new gang leader indifferent to their fortunes.
“You’ll have to work faster than this,” Inga said.
Florence felt dizzy. The nausea of hunger had been assailing her earlier and earlier each day since the pain in her leg had started. She smiled. “Work isn’t a wolf. It won’t run off into the woods.” She’d heard this joke herself when she arrived, and now she repeated it. There was nothing new to say in this place.
Inga glared at her with her flat Estonian face, flushed with exasperated effort. None of the women in the brigade were “true” Russians, aside from a few who’d been ordered by the army to serve in the Nazi-occupied areas and, as a reward for their loyalty, were accused of being collaborators. They were referred to as “fascists,” as were all the politicals indicted under Article 58, including Florence.
“Keep it steady,” Inga warned.
Florence had come across only a handful of women who’d worked in the forests for more than two years—that was how long it took for the quotas to turn a convict into a corpse. This was Florence’s second winter. Fresh prisoners like Inga were shipped in seasonally to replenish the living corpses, and were themselves replaced the following winter. This knowledge slid across Florence’s consciousness like a worn proverb; she could not find in herself the will to be either outraged or consoled by it.
The pain in her boot continued to slice into the thin meat of her leg. It cut deeper still. It refused to be ignored.
“What is it now?” said Inga.
“My leg. I can’t move it.”
“Which one?”
“It’s probably the frostbite. But it’s swelling.”
“That don’t swell. Let’s see it.”
“It’s stuck in the boot.”
“What do you mean, ‘stuck’?” Inga glanced through the pine trunks toward the clearing, where a guard’s cigarette smoke hung in a dirty gray cloud above the snow. She pulled the boot off while Florence sat on a log. Florence’s torn footrags were caked with blood and pus from her frostbitten toe, but the pain was elsewhere. The middle-lower portion of her calf was purple.
“Holy mother!” She knew what it was before Inga said it. “That’s a scurvy ulcer, it is.”
For two weeks she had been touching the tenderness at night and praying it away. Now it was as hard as a winter apple. Florence pressed her finger into the bruised flesh. The white indentation remained and did not go away.
“You’ll need a raw onion,” said Inga.
“Where do I get that?”
“Put that thing back in the boot before you freeze.”
“It doesn’t fit. I told you. It’s too swollen.”
“Jesus. We’ll need to cut the boot.”
“My boot! I can’t! What with?”
Inga walked deeper into the forest and returned with a sharp rock. She threw her coat on Florence’s leg and split the rubber with the stone blade. It wasn’t hard to slice; these boots were summer footwear. “It’ll fit now. Then you can go to the infirmary.”
“I’ve gone, I’ve gone. You don’t get a bed unless you’ve got a ‘septic’ temperature.”
Inga placed her rough naked hand on Florence’s forehead and shook her head. “All you need is a raw onion. A raw potato will do fine. Drive off the scurvy.”
But Florence had not spoken the full truth, which was that the female doctor had all but spat on her and told her she was lucky they were feeding her at the state’s expense. The fifty-eighters didn’t get beds.