Edward’s eyes widened, even as his lips remained all but frozen shut.
Seeing her husband still at a loss, Daria burst forward. “He accompanied the anti-proletariat opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk!”
The guard looked at her in confusion. Clearly, he hadn’t read Pravda’s January attack on Dimitri Shostakovich’s music, which prompted Comrade Stalin to walk out of a performance at the Bolshoi and denounce the production as a bourgeois muddle that eschewed simple, accessible musical language for quacks, hoots, pants, and gasps. It was banned immediately. Edward’s father went about for days mumbling what a fool Shostakovich was to take such a risk, not just with his professional future but with his life.
The guard, on the other hand, wasn’t about to be so foolish. Though he clearly had no idea what Daria was referring to, revealing his ignorance might well prove to be an equally deadly faux pas. How dare anyone not be aware of Comrade Stalin’s feelings on the matter? And so he deemed Daria’s confession on Edward’s behalf an adequate beginning.
“We will now vote,” he announced. “Despite your malicious attempts to undermine him, Comrade Stalin still offers a true ruling by the people. Even here. Even for you. A show of hands, to demonstrate who found this criminal’s samokritika sufficient and sincere?”
The newcomers shifted awkwardly, uncertain what was expected of them. Were they meant to agree that Daria’s confession on Edward’s part was adequate, since the guard seemed to initially deem it so, or were they meant to judge it insincere since neither had yet to offer remorse, merely acknowledgment? The wrong response could get one of them pulled to the front as another example. Or worse.
They exchanged nervous looks among themselves, unsure of what to do.
“Come now! This is a democracy! Vote! You are Soviet citizens, you know how. Raise your hands to agree!”
That seemed a bit clearer. A smattering of hands went up tentatively. When no punishment proved forthcoming, they were followed by a few more, then a rush not to be the last.
“One hundred percent agreement,” the guard praised. “The people have spoken. All voices heard, respected, and honored in the true spirit of Communism.”
After that, he lost interest in Edward and Daria and shouted for the prisoners to separate into two groups, men to the left, women to the right.
While the clothing exchange had been a haphazard affair, with more than one item of finer quality that Daria could see disappearing not into the designated sack but into the coat pocket or boot of a guard, job assignments proved brutally efficient. Men were directed deeper into the forest. Daria tried to catch Edward’s eye, to smile or wink in spite of her frozen face. She mouthed, “Just follow the rules,” the same way she had for the girls.
What had her husband uttered once regarding the arbitrary caprices of history, of life? “It’s like music, Papa. You have to let it flow where it wants. You can’t force it. All you can do is adjust the key and find your rightful rhythm within it.”
Would that be enough to keep him sane here? To keep him safe?
In the meantime, the women were led a kilometer west of the barracks, into an open and iced-over field. They were distributed shovels and seeds, directed to rows. They would be planting cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, and cabbage. Fresh vegetables! In Siberia! Who but Comrade Stalin would be visionary enough to think up such a progressive plan? They would be self-sufficient, grow the food they needed, reduce their reliance on imports, and free up transportation resources. If there wasn’t enough to eat, they’d have no one to blame but themselves—such was the unprecedented social justice of Communism.
Several of the women were farmers. Kulaks, Daria guessed. Landowners from before the Great October Socialist Revolution who’d refused to accept collectivization and thus caused the Holodomor, the famines. It was explained in that movie she’d watched with Edward and Mama. As punishment for their treason, Comrade Stalin had millions of kulaks relocated and their land handed over to those who would selflessly grow bread for the USSR. But Comrade Stalin was not a vengeful man. He was a leader who encouraged misguided transgressors to learn the errors of their ways. That’s why he was now allowing them to create new, communal lives and ply their trade for the good of all, sharing in the inevitable bounty, despite their earlier intransigence. Except the women were trying to explain to those overseeing the production that this was the wrong season and these were the wrong crops to plant in this sort of land at this depth. Based on how the guard reacted to Daria’s plea to keep her underclothes on, when this overseer raised his arm, Daria expected the woman who’d been the most vociferous objector to be slapped in the face. But he merely waved her in the direction of the field with a bored, “Do as you’re told.”
“Nothing will grow,” she protested. “We’ll starve.” In desperation, she added, “They’ll blame you.”
“I do what I’m told,” he repeated, suggesting, not unkindly, that it was in their best interests to follow his example.
So they dug. And they planted, the skin of their palms cracking from the cold and clogging with mud until the tiny seeds slipped through their numb fingers, falling in haphazard piles along the ground. The uneven gaps in between ensured that even if something did manage, against all odds, to sprout, it would be choked dead before full bloom. As she worked, Daria realized the toil was pointless. Its only purpose was to break her spirit. This was confirmed by one of the women who confided to Daria that, a few weeks earlier, she’d been assigned to dig a ditch “starting from the fence and going until dinnertime.”
They weren’t allowed to return to the barracks until after sundown. There, Alyssa and Anya came running into their mother’s arms, upper lips chapped bright red from the snot they’d kept wiping away with the backs of their wrists.
“I was a good girl, Mama,” Alyssa swore. “I watched Anya so she’d be a good girl, too. We followed all the new rules, so can we go home now?” She added the word that she’d been assured all her life possessed magical powers. “Please?”
The men were brought back even later. Daria had trouble picking Edward out of the mass that dragged themselves in, covered in identical rags, faces coated in sweat and grime and frost, until he collapsed on their bunk, curling up in a fetal position, forehead pressed against the wall. The other men around them groaned, cursed, whimpered. Edward did none of those things. Edward hummed.
Daria shooed the horrified girls away, promising she would take care of Papa. She crawled in next to Edward. She stroked his brow, his cheeks vibrating dully beneath her fingers. When he didn’t respond to her caress, continuing to lie deathly still, stubbornly humming a tune Daria didn’t recognize, she took Edward’s hands in hers, tenderly unwrapping the scraps of cloth he’d bound them in. Edward’s hands, his mesmerizing, enchanting hands—too valuable to so much as lift her suitcase on the day of their marriage—had been shredded nearly to the bone.
Chapter 7
This was their life now. Rising at dawn, women to the fields, men to logging, the children fending for themselves. Breakfast was a slice of hard bread, supper a watery broth that reminded Daria of what was left after you washed a pot that vegetables had been boiled in. Every morning, a crew came through the barracks to dispose of the dead. Every evening, a few workers failed to return. The children cried that they were hungry, then eventually stopped. The men raged and plotted revenge and threatened escape, then returned to the forest. At night, they drank moonshine that somehow still managed to materialize, even in the depths of the tundra. They played cards and they brawled over the outcomes. They remembered the lives they once had, the men they’d once been and, to hold on to what small vestiges of that they could, they loudly fucked their wives, their girlfriends, any woman they could get their hands on, their groans blending into the moans, the sobs, and the perennially howling winds.