badges and pins with edelweiss and gentian, or airplanes and tanks, or various types of weapons. I collected and traded different types of insignia, learning the order of ranks by heart. My favorite was private first class. I thought it meant someone who was very good in private, because we had Dietrich from the Reich billeted in our house. My mother sunbathed on the roof of the shed, and Dietrich watched her through the skylight with a pair of binoculars. And my father watched him from the veranda, dragged him to the courtyard, took a hammer, and smashed his binoculars on the pavement next to the shed. My mother moved to my Aunt Fini’s for two days with a small bag of clothes under her arm. A week earlier, Dietrich had given my mother two coffee demitasses for her birthday. It was all my fault, I had told him she collected demitasses, and had gone with him to the porcelain store, where I pointed out two little cups my mother was bound to like. They were pale pink, like the most delicate cartilage, with a silver rim and a drop of silver on the top of the handle. My second favorite insignia was made of Bakelite and had an edelweiss coated with phosphorus that glowed in the dark like the alarm clock.
Our science teacher went off to fight and didn’t come back. Our Latin teacher came home on leave from the front and dropped by our school. He sat at the teacher’s desk and taught a Latin class. It was soon over, and things didn’t go as he had expected. One student who had often been decorated with rose hips said right at the beginning of class: Sir, tell us what it’s like at the front. The teacher bit his lips and said: It’s not what you think. Then his face went rigid and his hands started to shake. We’d never seen him like that before. It’s not what you think, he repeated. And then he laid his head on the table, let his arms droop next to his chair like a rag doll, and cried.
The Russian village is small. When you go begging you hope not to run into another beggar from the camp. Everyone begs with coal. If you’re a practiced beggar, you carry your chunk of coal wrapped in a rag, cradled in your arm like a sleeping child. You knock on a door, and if it opens, you lift the rag and show your wares. From May through September the prospects for the coal trade aren’t very good. But coal is all we have.
Going door-to-door, I saw petunias in someone’s garden: an entire bed full of pale-pink little cups with silver rims. As I walked on I closed my eyes and said, DEMITASSES, then counted the letters in my head: ten. Next I counted ten steps, then twenty, for both cups. But where I stopped there was no house. So I counted to one hundred for all ten demitasses my mother had in her china cabinet, and found myself three houses farther along. There were no petunias. I knocked on the door.
On the road
Riding somewhere was always a happy thing.
First of all: as long as you’re moving, you haven’t arrived. As long as you haven’t arrived, you don’t have to work. Riding in a truck gives you time to recover.
Second: when you ride, you come to some place that couldn’t care less about you. You can’t be yelled at or beaten by a tree. Under a tree, yes, but the tree can’t help that.
When we arrived at the camp, our only point of reference was NOVO-GORLOVKA, which could be the name of the camp or a town or the entire region. It couldn’t be the name of the factory, though, since we knew that was KOKSOKHIM-ZAVOD. I did find a cast-iron manhole cover beside the well in the camp yard, and used my school Greek to decipher the Cyrillic letters as DNEPROPETROVSK, but that could be a nearby city, or some foundry at the other end of Russia. Whenever you were able to leave the camp, you got to see more than letters—the wide steppe and the villages on the steppe. For that reason, too, riding somewhere was a happy thing.
Every morning, a transport crew was assigned to the vehicles in the garage behind the camp, mostly two men at a time. Karli Halmen and I wound up on a four-ton LANCIA from the 1930s. There