Siberia (7 page)

Rain didn’t look at anyone. When he was sentenced to thirty-six hours in the Box, his expression didn’t change. When he was told he would be given time to think it over, he went on gazing out over our heads. The guards brought him down, and led him through the gap between our ranks. He was walking on his own, his chin high: but I don’t think he saw us. His eyes were bruises. You could see bruises and weals on his white throat, and his arms too.

And we kept silent. Rose and I, Amur and Tottie, Ifrahim and Bird and Lavrenty and Miriam, and everyone else who might have spoken. We couldn’t have done anything to save Rain. He was going into the Box whether he talked or not: we knew that. But we could have shared his fate; and we didn’t. We hadn’t had a chance to talk to each other, but we all probably had the same idea. Obviously whoever had tipped off the guards had mentioned no names. Madam Principal was convinced that it must have been seniors who were stealing on such a large scale, and Rain had been just their errand boy. We knew that Rain had TB, and the Box might kill him. But Madam Principal knew that too, and she didn’t care. . . . If he didn’t break, and if we all kept our mouths shut, there was a
chance
that we’d get through this.

When the prisoner and his escort had passed, we faced about and waited our turn to march away. There was a moment when I was looking straight at Rose, across the space between Permanents and Termers, and I
knew
she was the one who had informed on us. Why had she done it? Maybe she’d seen that the racket couldn’t go on much longer: I don’t know. Rose was just like that.

Hail and farewell, Rose, I thought. I’ll never speak to you again. We could never speak to each other again, none of us. We’d taken care not to act like friends when we were running our empire: except in secret. It would be real now. Each of us was on our own.

Rain went into the Box. It was a cold, wet day when they put him in. When he came out he had to be carried, and they took him straight to the clinic. He died there, about two weeks later. Nobody told us, officially. One of the clinic Cats let it slip, and the news went round the school in a wildfire of whispers.

I don’t remember what I did, after I heard. It’s a gap in my life, like my baby years in the city, like the time after I found out that I had betrayed my mama. One day I got beaten up by the wardens on the dormitory, after I’d done something very cheeky: I didn’t remember what it was. . . . Yagin the guard found me, the evening after my beating, huddled in my favorite lurk by the main gates. He had a bottle of homemade vodka with him. It was raining, cold and small. The big man hunched himself down beside me—his rifle clattering, his uniformed bum in the mud.

“Drink up,” he told me. “It’s good for you.”

“It’s a rotten world,” I said. “We were desperate.”

“A little girl who takes a knife from the canteen, and tries to stab a night warden, must be desperate. You know, you didn’t even break her skin. You’re lucky they pitied you, and dealt with it themselves.”

So that’s what I did. “I’m a fool. I’ll sharpen it, next time.”

“I think you will, my chicken. Drink up.”

I was in deep trouble already, why not have a drink? I knocked back the liquor and soon the world went all swaying and vague. Maybe he’s drugging me, I thought. Maybe this is poison. But I hadn’t eaten anything that day, so I suppose it was easy to get me tipsy. My tree down the road, my little crooked tree, it had no leaves. . . . Yagin looked into my face with that creepy expression of love and pity in his eyes. He took my chin between his hard, dirty finger and his thumb.

“Seed corn must not be ground,” he murmured.

I blacked out.

I was found in one of the boys’ dorms, dead drunk. That’s not the kind of offense that gets a girl sent to the Box. That’s low and disgusting, and it gets you dumped out of the whole world.

I was expelled, of course.

I never considered trying to explain what Yagin had done. I couldn’t care less if I got expelled or not: I was too far gone even to be glad I was getting out of New Dawn. But I was disgusted with my so-called guardian. Why had he set me up? Why would anyone do something like that? What harm had I ever done to him? It was a while before I realized that Yagin and his vodka had probably saved my life.

* 5 *

The Settlements Commission had arranged for Nicolai to pick me up at the railway platform with his tractor. I don’t know what I’d have done otherwise, I suppose I’d have had to walk, even though it was about twenty miles. I parted, silently, from my last lot of guards, threw my knapsack into the cart, and climbed after it: very stiff and sore after the long, long journey. The snows hadn’t yet begun here and the road was horrible, a mess of mud and potholes. We left the platform behind; the guards still standing there, growing smaller in the distance. Our Brigade Chief looked over his shoulder. The glass in the back of the tractor’s cab had been broken for a long time.

“Your mother left you something?” he remarked, hopefully.

“No,” I said. “She had nothing to leave me.”

I thought of little Rosita in her cherry red coat. It must have been Nicolai who was driving the tractor that day too. I didn’t remember if he’d spoken to us. He grunted at my reply, and turned back to the road. Nothing more was said, until we reached the potato patches on the outskirts of the Settlement. The tractor stopped, and Nicolai got down. He pulled out my bag and dumped it in the mud.

“You get out here. I have work to do.”

The huts were still a mile or more away, and I was very tired. I could have pleaded my weak leg, or tried wheedling, but I couldn’t be bothered. I shrugged and got down. Nicolai stood rubbing the bristly stubble on his upper lip.

“Your mother
did
leave you something. Everybody knows.”

I was looking at him eye to eye. I had grown tall while I was away. Nicolai the Nail Collector, controller of our lives, feared by all, was a small, smelly man with shifty eyes, who was getting old and had bad teeth. That gave me a strange feeling.

“Everybody’s wrong. Mama left me nothing. She had nothing.”

He fished inside his layers of ripe clothing. “You’re a little girl, you must trust someone. What about the Mafia, eh?” (We called the ruling bandit families Mafia in the Settlements; from an old tradition.) “They’ll want their cut. You can’t bargain with them for yourself. You let old Kolya do the business for you, Kolya will see you right. Here, a little something.” He shoved a paper-wrapped jar into my hands, and clambered back into his cab. “When you remember what it is she left you, you tell me. I’ll look after everything.”

He had given me a small jar of berry jam.

The potato patches were stripped and bare. A few straw-colored, mildewed tomato vines straggled in the mud. There wasn’t a sloe left on the blackthorn hedge; yellow leaves rattled on the dwarf willows like teeth chattering. If I’d been a good girl at New Dawn College, I might have come back to this desolation—or somewhere like it—as a teacher. That was what they meant when they said they’d give you a chance in life. I could have become someone like Miss Malik, getting old and dried up and nasty: remembering the glory of learning and knowledge, but forever shut out. I thought of her life, how cruel I had been to her, how she must have hated us. At least I hadn’t lost much, by messing up my school career. I shouldered my knapsack, and trudged toward my old home.

Our hut was standing empty. I’d been told I could live in it and take on Mama’s nail-making quota. I was supposed to be grateful for this . . . and I was. I didn’t have any other ideas. It must have been empty since Mama had been taken, it was very damp and cold inside. Our furniture was long gone, of course: our table, our chairs, our kettle; everything we’d owned. Except the narrow-necked grain jar that had been Nivvy’s home, which lay on its side, empty, on the roof shelf. There were many boot prints trodden into the dirty concrete, and places where boards had been shifted, pulled away from the earth walls. The hut had been searched, but all the signs looked old, which was reassuring.

I had no food, nothing to cook with, no blankets. A very thin wad of start-up vouchers stood between me and starvation right now, and the coming winter was going to be a rough one. I stood just inside the door, thinking of my mother. How she must have felt, arriving here from the fabulous warmth and luxury of the city, with a tiny little girl. How brave she had been. . . . I opened the bed-cupboard, and there was still a mattress on the boards. I tried the water pump, it was working; and the stove had started to get warm. Kolya must have done that, when he knew I was on my way. It was almost like a welcome home. I sat on the floor with my back against the warmth, and ate berry jam with my fingers. If you only have one meal there’s no use in trying to ration it.

While I was waiting for dark someone tapped on the door. It was one of our neighbors, an herbalist called Katerina who had been friendly with me and Mama in the old days. She thrust a paper sack into my arms.

“For you, Maria’s daughter. We made a collection.”

The sack was full of food. There was a bag of fruit tea, another bag of herb medicines; dried tomatoes, dried peppers, dried mushrooms, a collection of bread ends, a kilo tin of con stew; and a big chunk of that hard, dry, white kind of con we called cheese, though it had nothing to do with a cow. There were a few sticky, dingy candles too, a slim jar of oil, and best of all, a pack of paper matches.

I knew you don’t give something for nothing. I knew my neighbors had hopes, like Kolya, of getting a share of my “legacy.” I still felt like crying.

“I’ll pay you back,” I promised. “As soon as I can.”

“It’s no matter,” she said. “Everyone had a good harvest. . . . It was a great comfort to us. No, it was an honor, to have your mama living here.”

I nodded, feeling puzzled: I didn’t remember us being honored. I remembered the other kids saying Mama was a peepee, and throwing stones at me. Katerina took a good look around, noticing how little I’d brought back with me, from my great chance. “What did you do, that you were sent home from the school?”

“I got drunk and I was with a boy.”

“Ah. Well, you are young. What do they expect? What good is too much book-learning anyway, it only corrupts the heart.”

“Who took her away? Where did they take her? What did they say?”

Katerina gave me a reproachful look, and shook her head.

“It was a long time ago now. No use in thinking about it.”

I was embarrassed.You don’t ask those kind of questions in the Settlements. When somebody is taken, it’s understood that
nobody knows anything, nobody saw anything.
It’s dangerous to get involved. I don’t think Katerina blamed me. She stayed awhile, talking to me kindly in the Settlement way: a few simple words, a lot of silence. She said she would come with me to the store, to help me spend my vouchers and see I didn’t get cheated.

When she had left I went into the workshop, where the red light still glowed from the wall like a one-eyed rat. I found a screw-top lid, a bent nail, and a hank of string, and made myself a makeshift oil lamp. I had to cut the string for my wick with my teeth, I didn’t have anything like a knife. I wasn’t afraid of the red eye. I was pretty sure it meant nothing at all: but I thought I’d better not take chances. I waited until it was fully dark, before I crawled back and groped under the bench.

Under the heap of empty nail boxes there was one that felt heavy. I opened it, groped through the crumpled paper inside, and touched the smooth, segmented dome of the Lindquists’ case. Whoever had searched our hut hadn’t looked in here. I could feel some canned food hidden under the bench too, but I left investigating that for later. Back in the other half of the hut, I knelt by the stove and lit my lamp. The white case was roughly wrapped in shabby brown corrugated paper; the packing from a batch of scrap metal for nail-making. When I unwrapped it, a folded paper slipped out, and something small with a round dial. I thought it was a watch, but it wasn’t. It was a compass, and the paper was a printed map.

I set the compass down on the concrete. The needle shivered and rocked, and settled pointing to the corner of our hut.

North.
What other direction could there be?

I had never seen a printed map before. They were absolutely forbidden in the Settlements. You could have a light-up globe, but not a map. Even at New Dawn, maps of our own country had been forbidden. Mama must’ve had hiding places I didn’t know about, because I’d never seen these things before. I unfolded the paper and peered at it, fascinated, tracing the fabled landmarks of my world, places I had mostly never seen: the fur farm, the forest, the railway line, all converted into symbols on paper.

I felt dizzy as I realized my mother must have left this map for me.

She had really meant for me to make that impossible journey.

There was no note. When I’d searched and found not a word from her, not one scrawled word, I cried, at last. I couldn’t stop myself from trying to picture what had happened. Did they come for her by night or by day? Did she have any warning, did she try to get away? Did she defend herself with brave, wise words? Did they hit her? I saw my mama tied up and put into something like the Box, before she was taken out and shot. Or they might have beaten her up, with heavy fists and leather straps. But Katerina was right: it was over, no use thinking about it. My mama had been taken from this hut before I was eleven. Now I was thirteen, and a different person. I’d been a thief, and betrayed my friend and let him die. . . . I’d turned into a person my mama would not even recognize.

I cried, and then I wiped my eyes. I could not undo what had happened at New Dawn, I could not know if Mama was alive or dead. All I had was the mysterious words of Yagin the guard, whom I didn’t trust at all. But I could find out, right now, whether the treasure I was supposed to guard still existed.

I opened the case, so that it unfolded like a flower, and set everything out neatly. I put on my gloves and mask, and the glimmering cloak of my mother’s magic wrapped itself around me. Before I began my work I
prayed,
some kind of prayer without words, to the spirit of life. I don’t know if I believed in this spirit, I was out of the habit of believing in anything: but I think she had my mother’s face. It was a short prayer, because I needed to move fast. My oil lamp’s reservoir wasn’t very deep: if I had to replenish the oil, I’d have to start all over again with fresh gloves. My mind was trembling, but my hands remembered everything. They took me, sure and swift, through the Lindquist process.

When I knew that the seed powders had begun to grow, I set the dishes safely in the magic nutshell, and sealed everything up. I hid the nail box in the locker under the cupboard-bed, and piled the food that Katerina had given me in front of it. Then I put out my lamp and lay down to rest, leaving the cupboard doors open. I wasn’t used to sleeping shut up, it made me think of the Box.

I had no blankets, nor pillow, but I was still wearing my school uniform. The wardens had let me keep it, as there was no way I could fit back into the clothes I’d worn when I was ten. I didn’t like the idea of going around dressed as an expelled schoolgirl, but I knew I’d soon be thankful for the thick, warm clothes. I just hoped I’d stopped growing. I kept my boots on for warmth, pulled my socks over my knees, and lay with my arms wrapped around my head, dormitory style.

It must have been neighbors who searched the hut, I thought. If it had been the people who came to take Mama, they’d have found everything. . . . Our neighbors had searched the hut, but they’d been afraid of the red light in the workshop. Now I was back they’d see I didn’t have anything extra, and they’d forget about my “legacy.” If Nicolai only lets me have our old vegetable plot, I thought, I’ll be all right. Then one day when I’m grown up, if she hasn’t come home, I will take the map and the compass and set off for the city where the sun always shines. . . . The old life folded round me: the old promise as distant as ever, a hope that I could live on for years. My sleeves smelled of cold and dust, and coal smoke, and dirt. I’d been traveling for five days, in frowsty train carriages. I closed my eyes. I was rocking on a “hard class” wooden seat again, falling asleep while the guards sat and watched me.

The bugs in the bed walls came out to bite, but I was too tired to notice them much. When I woke the room was dark and cold, but I could tell that the night was rising toward morning. I jumped off the bed. I’d left everything where I could find it by touch. As soon as I had my lamp alight I opened the locker, shoved everything aside, and hauled out the nail box. I lifted out the case, and opened it. I didn’t need gloves, the kits couldn’t be harmed by contamination now.

Maybe I should leave it for longer. But I had to find out.

If they had survived. If the seeds had not died. It was the difference between having nothing, and having a reason to live.

I ran my fingertips around the seam of the nutshell: it opened. The kits were alive. They looked up at me, through the clear shield, with their pinhead eyes.

I took the nut back into the bed-cupboard, set my lamp on the little shelf on the inner wall, and sat cross-legged in the warm hollow my sleeping body had made, staring at the living treasure. How
tiny
they were! Six identical miniature animals, each no bigger than my thumbnail. They scrambled over each other, trying to get a better look at me. How miraculous and strange, the way they grew from seed powder and new-treat, and tumbled about and seemed perfectly happy in their little home. I tried to look at them properly: checking them for signs of damage and deterioration. But they kept climbing over each other and confusing me. I’d have to take them out, and examine them one by one.

I was nervous about doing this. I knew how to handle the kits: but they were so
tiny
. I told myself there was plenty of the seed powder, so I could always start the process again. Mama had never had to do that, but she’d told me it would sometimes happen. Not all of the seed would be sound. . . . I opened the membrane by running my fingertips around it. But I hadn’t had enough practice at this part! While I was picking out one kit, the other five bubbled up, and they were free.

For a moment I panicked. I visualized them vanishing into the cracks in the walls, my big hand
crushing
them, breaking their tiny bones as I tried to catch them.