I didn’t contradict him. I only thought to myself: If you’ve spent half the night under a black-lacquered sky, waiting to be shot, the name isn’t a lie at all.
Handkerchief and mice
In the camp there were many kinds of cloth. Life moved from one cloth to the next. From the footwrap to the hand towel, to the bread cloth, the orach pillowcase, the door-to-door begging cloth, and even to a handkerchief, if you happened to have one.
The Russians in the camp had no need of handkerchiefs. They pressed one nostril shut with their index finger and blew the snot out through the second like dough, right onto the ground. Then they shut the cleaned nostril and the snot sprayed out the other. I practiced this but without success. No one in the camp used a handkerchief to wipe his nose. Whoever had one used it for sugar and salt, and when it was all in tatters, as toilet paper.
One time a Russian woman gave me a handkerchief as a present. It was after work, very cold. Hunger had driven me back to the Russian village. I went door-to-door with a piece of anthracite coal, which people used for heating. I knocked at one dwelling. An old Russian woman answered, took my coal, and let me in. The room was low, the window set in the wall at the level of my knee. Two scrawny, gray-white spotted chickens were perched on a stool. One of them had a comb hanging over its eyes. It flipped its head like a person without hands whose hair has fallen into his face.
The old woman spoke for some time. I only understood a word here and there but could sense what it was about. She was afraid of her neighbors, she’d been living all alone for a long time with just her two chickens, yet she’d rather talk to them than to her neighbors. She had a son my age named Boris who was as far from home as I was, but in the opposite direction, in a camp in Siberia, a penal battalion, because a neighbor had denounced him. Perhaps you and my son Boris will be lucky, she said, and you’ll be able to go home soon. She pointed to the chair, and I sat down at the end of the table. She took the cap off my head and laid it on the table. She set a wooden spoon next to the cap. Then she went to the stove and ladled potato soup out of a pot into a tin bowl. She must have given me a whole liter. I spooned away; she stood over my shoulder and watched.
The soup was hot, I slurped it down, watching her out of the corner of my eye. And she nodded. I wanted to eat slowly, because I wanted the soup to last. But my hunger crouched in front of the bowl like a ravenous dog. The two chickens had fluffed out their feathers, pulled in their feet, and were asleep. The soup heated me down to my toes. My nose was dripping. Podozhdi, wait, said the Russian woman, then went into the next room and came back with a snow-white handkerchief. She placed it in my hand and closed my fingers around it as a sign I should keep it. It was a gift. But I didn’t dare blow my nose. What happened in that moment went beyond going door-to-door, beyond me and her and a handkerchief. It was about her son. And it made me feel good and it didn’t, because she or I or both of us had gone slightly too far. She had to do something for her son because I was there, and because he was as far away from home as I was. I felt bad that I was there, that I wasn’t him. And I was embarrassed that she felt the same way but couldn’t show it because she could no longer bear worrying about him. And I could no longer bear being two people at once, two people who had been deported—that was too much for me. That wasn’t as simple as two chickens roosting next to each other on a stool. I was already one burden too many for myself.
Afterward, back on the street, I used my coarse, dirty coal cloth as a handkerchief. After blowing my nose I wrapped it around my neck, it became my scarf. As I went on, I