Dancing Under the Red Star (24 page)

That evening I was allowed to spend ten very short minutes with her in the guardhouse, under the watchful eye of a guard. That didn’t matter to me in the slightest. I hadn’t seen Mama since the day of my arrest. It was incredible that she had traveled all this way and that we had found each other among the hundreds of prisoners in the camp. We hugged tightly, crying, and I buried my head in her shoulder. I felt her heart beating and the firm, loving grip of her arms around my back. I sobbed, “I love you, Mama” through the tears.

She closed her eyes and gently nodded her head in sad agreement, whispering, “I had to know you were all right, my Maidie. I had to let you know that I’m okay too and that I love you more than anything. I’ll wait for you. You can make it, Maidie; never forget that. You are strong. Trust in God and always look to him.”

After ten minutes the guard made her leave. She’d come all the way from Gorky just to see I was alive, and now she had to go back.

I returned to my bunk and collapsed. My emotions were nearly overwhelming. So much pain, so much joy, so much sadness, all in one day. My mind was too tired to think, and my body was sore. As I sat on the edge of my bunk with my head in my hands, weeping, I suddenly noticed someone sitting next to me. To my shock, it was the Blatnoi brute who just hours earlier had pulverized me with his punch. I thought,
Oh no, this is all I need. Not him again!
I was afraid he really wanted to hurt me this time. But to my surprise, he was contrite, sincerely apologizing for his earlier behavior.

“I’m very sorry, miss, for the way I acted earlier. I’m sorry for hurting you. It won’t happen again. Please forgive me,” he said. His tone and look seemed genuine and sincere. I really didn’t know what to think. Was he just conning me, or did he mean it?

His new behavior and unexpected demeanor puzzled me. I never understood it, but from that day on I had no trouble of any kind with Mikal. To the contrary, this Blatnoi, the guy I thought might kill me, became my friend and personal bodyguard. He became my protector against other potential rapists, and there were many in the camp. Something inside him changed, and Mikal was suddenly an entirely new man. He even looked different. His whole appearance took on an inner vibrancy and a life of some kind. His eyes changed, literally, noticeably, becoming clearer and brighter somehow.

Mikal was not unlike a starving man, so I trusted him and decided to help him. I actually began teaching him to read and write. He made tremendous progress, and for my willingness to help him, he was very grateful. Whether it was simply a case of his conscience or guilt, I don’t know, but something certainly transformed him, and it wasn’t me. What else or
who else
but God would have made Mikal feel such shame and then conviction for what he had done to me? All I know is that this man’s instant transformation was astonishing—miraculous. I had no doubt it was supernatural.

Soon I was ordered to move into the base camp in Burepolom. We were all assigned to various work brigades and then shown to our barracks. There we found wooden double-deck bunks with no blankets, pillows, or mattresses of any kind. We were each issued one small and one large cloth sack and a blanket. We were supposed to fill the sacks with wood shavings from the nearby sawmill and use them as the pillow and the mattress for our bunks. They were definitely not soft, but they were considerably better than the bare boards.

We slept in all our clothes, whatever we’d carried with us. In the mornings we were awakened at five o’clock and marched to the dining room, where we normally ate two meals a day. Each prisoner had a wooden bowl, a wooden spoon, and an aluminum cup. Breakfast consisted of about fourteen ounces of old and hard black bread—the entire day’s allotment—and a bowl of unshucked oatmeal, which we dubbed “chew and spit.” In the evenings, for weeks at a stretch, we would have only oatmeal, and then it would be peas—
forever peas
—morning and night. We never saw the slightest trace of meat or other vegetables.

My first task here was hauling large boxes of sawdust from the mill with the aid of a partner. Our normal routine was to work five hours, then take an hour off to eat whatever bread we had saved from breakfast and to nap on top of the huge warm pipes that lined the basement area of the sawmill. It was nearly impossible to rid ourselves of the thick sawdust in ours eyes, ears, mouths, and hair. This dust penetrated my pores, clothes, and every exposed and unexposed part of my body; there was no avoiding it. Then came another four hours of hauling those boxes, which seemed to grow heavier and heavier with each additional trip.

Eventually we’d return to the barracks, attempt to de-sawdust ourselves, and then wait impatiently until our brigade was called to the dining room. The worst thing about the dining room was watching the men. They received the same meager amount of food as the women, though most of them were taller and heavier. As the women ate, men would line up behind them, eagerly waiting to snatch their empty bowls so they could lick them. They would stand there like dogs panting through a fence, riveted on what they couldn’t get to. This inhuman treatment cut me to the heart. I thought,
Why is this so? How can this be? It doesn’t have to be like this. What did any of these people do to deserve this kind of treatment? What if my papa had to live like this?
I thought about my poor papa, and I cried.

I thought I had already seen the depths of human depravity But one day I realized I had not. In that same dining room, I witnessed a man beating another prisoner; he was allowed to pulverize another inmate to
death.
They were fighting over some scraps of food, equivalent to perhaps ten soggy cornflakes, left in a bowl. Seeing their desperation, watching the assault, looking at the bloody body on the floor, I screamed inside myself,
What kind of depravity, deprivation, and disregard for human life would make men act this way?
I was left numb from disbelief. I thought that surely more had to be going on than just a fight over food, but by the next day it was already
just another incident
, one of many. Human life held no value in Stalinist Russia. So life in the camp just went on, one backbreaking, mindless day at a time.

I grew to consider Burepolom “home,” if not in my heart, then at least in my head. Like it or not, this was where I lived, and I had to see it that way in order to make it through the next day and stay sane.

On rare occasions we inmates had a treat when the camp commander allowed us to watch a movie at the camp’s seldom-used, makeshift outdoor theater. This happened perhaps six or seven times a year, with absolutely no regularity, when and only when the commander was in an exceptionally good mood. We could never predict when we would be blessed like this, but it was always an extraordinary night, a minute and temporary sliver of escape from the harsh everyday realities of life in a labor camp. It usually didn’t matter what film or films they permitted us to see. The movies offered us a wonderful momentary means of departure from this ugly place, and our film nights, though random and unexpected, were the only times I actually looked forward to, especially during the earlier years of my sentence.

I’d been infatuated with film and dramatic acting ever since my early childhood in Detroit. Papa and Mama would take me to an old-fashioned theater near our home to see whatever was showing. My eyes would fix on the screen, and it was impossible to divert my attention from the picture. Except for sports and books, there was nothing I enjoyed more than the movies.

One particular evening at the camp’s outdoor movie, I noticed a young man sitting nearby. He looked strangely familiar, although I couldn’t place him. I couldn’t recall why or from where I might have known him. It turned out that I looked more familiar to him than he did to me. He soon came over and sat next to me.

“Don’t you remember me?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. Should I?” I pondered for moment, then said, “I think maybe I’ve seen you before, but I’m not sure where, or maybe you just look like someone else I used to know.”

Then he smiled and replied, “You should remember me. You know, from the streetcar that day.” Suddenly it hit me. I did remember him, and my heart froze and sank to my stomach.

Several years earlier, in Gorky, before my arrest, I had been riding in a streetcar on the way home after work. I was standing in the crowded aisle, crushed by the surrounding crowd, when I happened to glance across the car. I saw a pickpocket reach into the purse of a woman standing near him. I waved and warned her, so she shifted the purse to her other side. In the nick of time, I’d kept her from being victimized by this thief. The crook jumped off the streetcar at that precise moment, but just as he turned, his eyes met mine, and I caught a good look at his face. Now I clearly remembered him from that day. And he realized that I remembered him; my frightened eyes gave me away.

I continued speaking with him, though I grew increasingly worried. This was a criminal with a grudge against me. I wondered what he was thinking. He was contained and relaxed, but I knew my face was flushed, and I was in a state of near panic. I tried to reevaluate the occurrence in the streetcar that day, to try to figure out what he wanted, but I could not. My mind was racing, while his eyes looked calculating. He appeared to be deliberately taking his time, carefully considering what he wanted to say next and how he wanted to say it. Finally he spoke.

“You were very lucky that day we met in the streetcar, and I don’t know why. I don’t know what stopped me, but something I can’t explain stopped my hand from slicing off your nose. You see, I always carried a razor hidden between my fingers, which I used to quickly open purses or suitcases or whatever I wanted. I also used it to punish whoever might see me so that they would remember. And I was ready to cut your face that day when suddenly my arm could not move, and I did not know why. No one was holding me or saw what I was going to do, but I couldn’t move my arm. And I was not afraid to cut you, either. I had done it to others, many times.” Then he paused, reflecting. “I just thought I’d tell you that.”

I could hardly believe my ears. But the sincerity of this fellow’s words and the intensity of the look on his face confirmed every word he had just said. It was astonishing.
Why didn’t he cut my face that day? And what prevented him from doing so?
As I mulled over what he was saying, I felt an unexpected warmth throughout my entire body, like simple reassurance, I suppose, or even love, coming from somewhere else.

I don’t know what the pickpocket intended to do next, but I was staring at him, fascinated, when I suddenly heard a familiar voice behind me. “Is everything all right, Margaret? Are you okay? Is he bothering you?”

I was surprised and relieved to see that it was my Blatnoi friend, Mikal. What perfect timing! “No, Mikal, everything is just fine here,” I answered. “This is an old acquaintance of mine from Gorky. We were just talking.”

As if on cue, the man sitting next to me calmly stood up, nodded once to me, then to Mikal, and quietly strolled away. I never saw him again. But where had Mikal come from? The last thing I knew, he was far away at the transitional camp.

It was a powerful and perplexing moment.

My second job in Burepolom entailed working on a log-loading brigade. This was by far the most difficult labor I had ever done. Within the confines of the camp, a long train of Pullman cars stood on a loading track. These were the largest cars on the railway, and we had to load them by hand, only two girls per car. The logs were eight feet long, mostly birch and aspen, green timber, and very heavy. That was work! It took me an entire week to learn—the hard way—exactly how to do it. My shoulders were bloody sores, and I would awaken in the morning with my back and all of my muscles screaming from the pain of the previous days agonizing toil.

In time, I learned to improvise a bit, creating some pads for my shoulders from bits and pieces of discarded leather I had found. Soon the weather changed to constant rain, sleet, and snow, but the work continued regardless. There were weeks when we didn’t see the sun, only constant rain, gloom, and gray sky. None of us were properly dressed for the job or for the brutal weather we faced. We were not issued any special winter clothing. At times it was nearly unbearable, as the wretched cold and wetness—feeling like ice blades—seared my clothes and cut my skin like glass.