—
IN THE AFTERNOON THE prisoners built two bonfires, one for themselves and another for the guards. Like primitives they stared in silence into the fire. The dribble from their noses hissed as it fell into the cinders. From a pocket she’d sewn into her jacket, Florence removed the remains of her morning’s ration, forty grams of bread, frozen solid. She gnawed and sucked on the bread, then spat out a wad of bloody saliva on the snow. Her teeth were shaky in their gums. It was another sign. She didn’t know where she would get a raw onion, or a raw potato. A simple, terrifying thought came into her head: the descent toward death was an escarpment drop to which she had finally been delivered. In a matter of weeks she would be one of the disgraced—too weak to keep her cap from being stolen off her head, indifferent to the lice that sucked her blood, abused for the amusements of the criminals, eating penal rations and searching for rotten scraps in the frozen-over urine behind the mess hall. She would enter the ranks of the “wicks”—those who’d come to the end of life’s sorry candle.
In truth she had no desire to live, and yet she continued to go on living. She thought of nothing but food. According to an arithmetic only the mind of the starving has the will to pursue, she measured the distance to death in grams of black bread and pieces of herring floating in her soup. Once demonstrative and exuberant, she’d become a miser of movement, expending as little as possible of her energy, physical and mental. Living, Florence had come to understand, was only another habit. The most stubborn and difficult to break.
Animals survived because they possessed no memory. She too had made herself dead to the past. Here it was not hard to believe that her old life had never existed. If this sinister cold and weak fire was where all those previous lives had led her to, then they could not have been real, but only canceled dreams yearning for an expired god. Forgetting had always been her great talent. She had forgotten everything. Moscow. America. The voice of her thoughts was no longer English, for she no longer grappled with the sort of thoughts that required the tangle of language. From time to time she remembered that she had a son. This painful knowledge would burrow through the metastasized sheathing of her mind and settle there like a small hungry animal. Florence told herself that Yulik was being taken care of, well fed. She had been allowed to receive letters, in which he had written, “I am dressed appropriately for the season.” She believed this, for it was her only comfort. Other times, the idea that she had a son who was alive somewhere was as remote to her as the thought of spring.
To forget meant to discard the future as well as the past.
The Perm winter had sucked her dry of all affection, had poisoned her soul with overwhelming indifference. She was conscious of this and powerless to alter it. It was, in its own narcotic way, a kind of spiritual peace.
—
AT SUNSET THEY MARCHED back to the camp with their tools. Less than a mile out one of the women in the group collapsed in the snow. She was an old, frail Armenian who had been in the brigade for only a few months. For the past week she’d had difficulty making herself understood, not because of her Caucasian inflections but because of her swollen tongue and dementia. She was believed to be suffering from pellagra, a vitamin deficiency that the natsmen of the warmer climates always fell prey to first. Florence and another prisoner were given the ignoble but not difficult task of carrying the Armenian back to the zone. By the time they arrived, she had no pulse.
The woman had slept on a berth below Florence’s, and now Florence felt afflicted by the unfortunate circumstances of her death. Had the woman expired in the night in their barracks, Florence and the others would have contrived a way to arrange her body so that they could keep receiving her portion of bread for at least a day or two. The death had been a waste.
—
IN THE MORNING SHE was pulled out of roll call by the gang forewoman. “You’re to see Scherbakov,” she said in an amused tone that might have been sinister or congratulatory.
“Who’s Scherbakov?”
“Who’s Scherbakov? He’s the commander of the guards, you imbecile.” She pointed to the guard who was already there to escort her, his rifle barrel gleaming.
Fat Scherbakov sat at his desk when she arrived. With him was another man in uniform, slender and younger, whom he introduced as Lieutenant Something. (Florence’s sheer amazement and fear at being called in made her forget his name as soon as it was spoken.) “Name, statute, date of birth,” Scherbakov said, hardly looking at her. On the corner of his desk was a cup of tea in a saucer that held the rind of a slice of lemon. “Is she the one?” said the young lieutenant. He seemed disbelieving. The distaste on his face was more physical instinct than emotion, like pain or sleepiness. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and drew it to his nose. “I’m not taking her like this. Send her to the bathhouse. Commandant Kachak doesn’t like the smell of these convicts.”
The lieutenant was waiting when she came out of the bath hut, wearing the same clothes she’d had on before, only damp now from the disinfection chamber and no more deloused. “Get in the truck.” A guard threw back the canvas tarp from the pickup truck’s bed.
“Where are you taking me?”
The lieutenant gave no sign of hearing her.
—