Рута Шепетис - Ashes in the Snow [aka Between Shades of Gray]

“No kidding. Did your ghost doll tell you we’d be here?” demanded the bald man. He pointed to a sign, crisped and faded from the weather.

Trofimovsk. The very top of the Arctic Circle, near the North Pole.

WE HUDDLED TOGETHER and pulled our coats tight for warmth. I longed for the labor camp, for Ulyushka’s hut, for Andrius. The steamer’s whistle shrieked and pulled the barges back down the Lena. Were they going to pick up more people?

“How will you mail letters to Papa from here?” asked Jonas.

“There has to be a village close by,” said Mother.

I thought of the piece of wood, handed off in Tcheremchov. Something had to have made its way to Papa by now.

“So this is their plan,” said the bald man, looking around. “This is how Stalin will end us? He’ll let us freeze to death. He’ll let the foxes eat us.”

“Foxes?” said Mrs. Rimas. Janina’s mother snapped a glance at the bald man.

“If there are foxes, we can eat them,” said Jonas.

“Have you ever caught a fox, boy?” asked the bald man.

“No, but I’m sure it can be done,” said Jonas.

“He said we have to build a factory for them,” I said.

“This can’t be our destination,” said Mother. “Surely they’re going to transport us somewhere else.”

“Don’t be so sure, Elena,” said the man who wound his watch. “To the Soviets, there is no more Lithuania, Latvia, or Estonia. Stalin must completely get rid of us to see his vision unlittered.”

Litter. Is that what we were to Stalin?

“It’s nearly September,” said the man who wound his watch. “Soon the polar night will be upon us.”

Nearly September. We were freezing. We had learned about the polar night in school. In the polar region, the sun falls below the horizon for 180 days. Darkness for nearly half a year. I hadn’t paid much attention to the lecture in school. I had sketched the sun sinking over the horizon. Now my heart sank into my stomach where the bile began to chew it.

“We haven’t much time,” continued the man who wound his watch. “I think—”

“STOP IT! Stop talking!” shrieked Janina’s mother.

“What’s wrong, dear?” asked Mother.

“Shh… Don’t draw the attention of the guards,” said Mrs. Rimas.

“Mama, what’s wrong?” asked Janina. Her mother continued shrieking.

The woman had barely spoken during the entire voyage and suddenly we couldn’t make her stop.

“I can’t do this! I won’t die here. I will not let a fox eat us!” Suddenly the woman grabbed Janina by the throat. A thick gurgle came from Janina’s windpipe.

Mother threw herself on Janina’s mother and pried her fingers from her daughter’s neck. Janina caught her breath and began to sob.

“I’m so sorry,” cried her mother. She turned her back to us, placed her hands on her own throat, and tried to strangle herself.

Mrs. Rimas slapped the woman across the face. The man who wound his watch restrained her arms.

“What’s wrong with you? If you want to kill yourself, do it in private,” said the bald man.

“It’s your fault,” I said. “You told her she’d be eaten by a fox.”

“Stop it, Lina,” said Jonas.

“Mama,” sobbed Janina.

“She already talks to her dead doll. Do we really want to hear about her dead mother?” said the bald man.

“Mama!” shrieked Janina.

“You’re going to be fine,” said Mother, stroking the woman’s filthy hair. “We’re all going to be fine. We mustn’t lose our senses. It’s going to be all right. Really.”

AT DAYBREAK, the NKVD shouted at us to get to work. My neck hurt from sleeping on my suitcase. Jonas and Mother had slept under a fishing boat to protect themselves from the wind. I had slept only a few hours. After everyone was asleep, I drew by moonlight. I sketched Janina’s mother, her hands squeezing tight around her daughter’s neck, Janina’s eyes bulging. I wrote a letter to Andrius, telling him we were in Trofimovsk. How would I ever mail the letter? Would Andrius think I had forgotten about him? I’ll find you , he had said. How could he ever find us here? Papa , I thought. You’re coming for us. Hurry .

The NKVD divided us into twenty-five groups, fifteen people per group. We were group number eleven. They took the men with any strength and sent them to work finishing the NKVD barracks. The boys were sent to fish in the Laptev Sea. The remainder of the women and elderly were instructed to build a jurta, a hut, for their group. We could not, however, use any of the bricks or wood near the NKVD building. Those were reserved for the NKVD barracks. After all, winter was coming and the NKVD needed warm housing, said Ivanov, the brown-toothed guard. We could use scraps or pieces of logs that might have floated ashore.

“Before we even think of building something, we’ll need supplies,” said Mrs. Rimas. “Hurry, scatter and pick up anything and everything you can find before the others take it all. Bring it back here.”

I picked up large stones, sticks, and chips of brick. Were we really going to build a house from sticks and stones? Mother and Mrs. Rimas found logs that had washed ashore. They dragged them all the way back to our site and went back for more. I saw a woman digging up moss with her hands and using it as mortar between the rocks. Janina and I ripped up pieces of moss and piled it near our supplies. My stomach churned with hunger. I couldn’t wait for Jonas to return with the fish.

He returned, wet and shivering. His hands were empty.

“Where are the fish?” I asked. My teeth chattered.

“The guards say we’re not allowed fish. All of the fish we catch is stored for the NKVD.”

“What will we eat?” I asked.

“Bread rations,” he replied.

It took us a week to collect enough logs to create a framework for our jurta. The men discussed the design. I drew the sketches.

“These logs don’t look very strong,” commented Jonas. “They’re just driftwood.”

“It’s all we have,” said the man who wound his watch. “We must hurry. We must finish before the first snow comes. If we don’t, we won’t survive.”

“Hurry. Hurry,” said the repeater.

I dug deep notches in the hard dirt with a flat stone. The ground was frozen. As I dug deeper, I had to hack at ice. Mother, Mrs. Rimas and I stood the logs vertically in the notches. We packed dirt around them.

“It doesn’t look big enough for fifteen people,” I said, looking at the framing. The wind whipped, stinging my face.

“We’ll be warmer if we’re close together,” said Mother.

Ivanov approached with Kretzsky. I understood most of the conversation.

“The slowest pigs in Trofimovsk!” said Ivanov through his rotten teeth.

“You need a roof,” said Kretzsky, motioning with his cigarette.

“Yes, I know. And heat?” I said. We had enough logs for a roof, but what would we do for heat?

“We’ll need a stove,” Mother said in Russian.

Ivanov found that particularly funny. “You’d like a stove? What else? A hot bath? A glass of cognac? Shut up and get to work.” He walked away.

Mother looked at Kretzsky.

He looked down and then walked off.

“See, he won’t help,” I said.

We worked for another week, building from scratch. It wasn’t a house. It was a dung heap, a bunch of logs covered in mud, sand, and moss. It looked like something a child would make in the dirt. And we had to live in it.

The men finished building the barracks and a bakery for the NKVD. They were proper brick buildings with stoves or fireplaces in each room. The man who wound his watch said it was well outfitted. And we were expected to endure an arctic winter in a mud hut? No, they expected us not to endure at all.