Гарт Никс - Dislocation Space

“And hot tea,” said Aleksandra. She had to grit her teeth to stop them chattering. The shivers she could control better, though her knuckles gripping the blanket ends were blue.

“The babushka who tends the sauna will get you tea,” said Shargei dismissively. “You are off duty until tomorrow, Levchenko. You will be shown your quarters, and the mess hall. I do not think I need to remind you why you are here and the consequences of any… foolishness. But should you forget, I tell you now: there is nothing living, no refuge within sixty kilometres of this place and unlike the camps you know, we have dogs. German dogs, in fact. Very unpleasant dogs, they are still Nazis I think. We have a dozen of them in the kennels. You understand?”

Aleksandra nodded. She understood. Any attempt to escape would end in failure. At least any attempt by land. Perhaps if she could commandeer an aircraft, make the pilot fly south… but to where? And as always, her family would pay. She could not live if the price was their death.

Escape was not possible. Not for her.

“Sauna,” grunted Aleksandra.

On the way to the sauna, trudging between unmarked huts, Aleksandra asked the guard where the infirmary was located.

He did not answer, but his inadvertent glance indicated the direction.

“The infirmary?” prompted Aleksandra again.

The male guard who was carrying her clothes still did not reply. After ten or twenty seconds, the woman guard cleared her throat.

“We are not to talk to you unless necessary. What do you need? We will fetch it for you.”

“Aspirin,” said Aleksandra, though she didn’t actually need anything. The aches and pains were simply a reminder she was still alive.

The guard nodded.

They plodded on in silence, towards a large hut where gouts of steam emanating from one chimney and smoke from another indicated the sauna. The guards led her to the door, and handed her over to an unsmiling babushka, a crone with a decayed orchard of a face rather than the apple-cheeked, smiling grandam of the colourful children’s books of Aleksandra’s distant, now seemingly almost fantastical childhood.

The babushka accepted Aleksandra’s clothes and jerked her head.

“We will take you to your quarters afterwards,” said the woman guard. “Don’t wander around.”

“Vodka,” said Aleksandra. “Tea.”

“I will bring it. Go in,” muttered the babushka.

Three hours later, the guards carried an apparently completely drunk Aleksandra from the sauna to her assigned hut, wrapped in several thick off-white towels she refused to let go, along with the empty vodka bottle. They didn’t know most of its contents had gone down the drain. The babushka grumbled along behind carrying a bundle of Aleksandra’s clothes, both old and new.

Aleksandra counted the paces between the bathhouse and her own hut, and noted the direction from the sun and shadows. The guards put her down on a bed, a proper bed with a sprung mattress–and the hut was warm from the iron stove in the corner–flung some blankets over her and left, locking the door behind them.

Aleksandra opened her eyes after a while, inspected the room, and went to sleep. She had always been able to tell herself when to wake up, a skill honed during the war, so six hours later her eyes flashed open. It was dark in the hut, save for a thin band of light coming through the gap in the curtained window from the arc lights that illuminated the walkways between the buildings and the perimeter.

She let her eyes adjust for a minute, then crept out of the bed. There was a lidded chamberpot under it, which she used. Then she spent the next little while crawling around and examining the floorboards by touch. Finding several that were beginning to rot, she got out her saw-blade knife and worked at them, until she could lever up several boards and make a gap wide enough to slide through.

Cold air blew in viciously through the hole, but she ignored it, poking her head down and feeling the space under the hut. The building was raised up on four bricks, a sufficient space for her to slide under and get out.

She put the floorboards back and applied the knife to the white towels, cutting head holes in two of them. After a few minutes she had made a makeshift smock, and cut a number of strips to use as a belt and for head, foot and hand wrappings. In the snow outside, the makeshift white clothing would serve as camouflage.

Shortly thereafter, the Todesgeist of Stalingrad was loose in the camp.

As she’d expected given the lack of other prisoners, it was very quiet and there were no active patrols between the buildings, not even sentries pacing in frozen endurance outside any particular locations. She didn’t doubt the perimeter was guarded, and that the German dogs existed, but they were clearly not routinely let loose to roam. Only to pursue, when necessary.

It didn’t take her long to find the infirmary. It was the first large building in the direction the guard had glanced, and it was brightly lit. Aleksandra listened outside the door for a little while, then eased it open and crept into the vestibule. Crouched against the empty snow boot rack, she listened again, before easing open the inner door to look inside. A nurse was asleep in his chair, head down on the desk in front of him. Beyond the desk were six hospital beds in two rows of three.

Five beds were empty, the sixth was not.

Aleksandra crept close to the nurse, and sniffed. He smelt even more vodka-soaked than she did. One drawer in the desk was half open and, sure enough, there was a vodka bottle in it, with only a faint sheen of the spirit remaining inside.

She considered whether to kill him and stage it as an accident–maybe a drunken attempt to urinate outside in the snow gone wrong–but decided against it. She was a killer, sure enough, but only when it was absolutely necessary. For too long she had let the State determine whom she should kill, whether ordered by a superior officer or as at the last, by Stalin himself, the embodiment of all authority. Since she’d been in the camps Aleksandra had only killed when her survival depended upon it.

There was a slight movement in the sixth bed. She left the nurse and crossed the room, silent as ever. But not silent enough, it seemed. The heavily bandaged but curiously small figure in the bed spoke through the jagged hole of the cloth on its face, like some Egyptian mummy come to life. Aleksandra smelt burned flesh, the stench familiar from Stalingrad and many other places, the burned-out tanks of both sides in the long fight towards Berlin…

“Sashenka?”

The voice was a faint, cracked whisper, but Aleksandra knew who was in the bed.

“Yes, Vova,” she whispered, holding back a sob. She hadn’t cried for years, but now tears were close and had to be forced back. “How did you know—”

“I knew they’d bring you,” whispered Vladimir. “And who else would creep in here after midnight?”

In many ways, Vladimir had been Aleksandra’s second father. She had not seen him since a chance, brief meeting in East Prussia in late 1944.

“What have they done to you?”

The bandage-wrapped figure made a slight move, almost a shrug, and growled at the pain.

“This I did to myself,” he whispered. His voice rose and fell as he spoke through terrible pain. “Though I admit they gave me the opportunity. Listen.”

Aleksandra sat on the side of the bed, but was careful not to touch him or move the single gauze sheet that was laid across his bandaged body. His foreshortened body, because his legs had been amputated above the knee.

She knew the slightest touch would be agonizing for him, and turned her head aside so even her breath could not fall upon him.