from wall to wall, where women had hung their washed but stained socks and underthings. The building smelled of sweat and onions and warm bodies. It smelled of the living; a small comfort.
I placed the wool blanket I’d been given onto the top bunk, second from the back. I chose that bunk because a petite woman I’d noticed on the train took the one below it. I guessed her to be around my age, midthirties, with black hair and delicate hands, and I thought perhaps we could become friends. Her name was Ana.
I never made friends with Ana. Nor did I make friends with any of the other women in Barrack No. 11. At the end of each day, we were exhausted and needed to conserve our energy to get out of bed and do it again the next day.
That first night in Potma was quiet. All nights were like that, only the howls of the wind to soothe us to sleep. Sometimes we could hear the cry of a woman who’d succumbed to loneliness ring out across the camp like an air raid siren. The woman would be quickly quieted—how, we could only imagine. And although no one spoke of those cries, we all heard them, and we all silently joined in.
* * *
—
My first day in the fields, the earth was hard and frozen, and the pick too heavy for me to raise above my waist. My hands were blistered within half an hour. I used all my strength just to pierce the soil—just a chip, the width of a finger. The woman next to me was having better luck, having been given a shovel that she could step on, so that her weight would force its tip into the ground. But I had only a pick, and a few cubic meters of earth to be upturned before I’d be given my ration for the day.
That first day of my rehabilitation, I didn’t eat anything.
My second day of rehabilitation, I didn’t eat again.
On my third day, I still could make but a few dents in the earth, so was denied rations yet again. But a young nun broke off a piece of her bread and handed it to me as I passed her in line for the bathhouse. I was thankful, and for the first time since the men had taken me in my apartment in Moscow, I thought that maybe I should start praying.
* * *
—
The nuns of Potma fascinated me, Anatoli. They were a small group from Poland and tougher than the most hardened criminals. They refused to back down when they didn’t agree with a guard’s order. They prayed aloud during morning reveille, which infuriated the guards but gave me comfort, despite not being an overly religious woman myself. Sometimes the guards would make an example of their insolence by dragging one out of line by her smock and making her kneel in front of us. One nun was forced to kneel like that for an entire day, her bare knees pressed into the rocky soil. But she never gave in, never asked to stand—praying the whole time with the serene smile of a Holy Fool. They used their fingers to count beads on invisible rosaries, even as their faces burned under the unforgiving sun, even as urine trickled from their smocks and cut a path through the dirt.
Once or twice, the guards threw the whole lot of them into the punishment block—the first barrack built at the camp, where the roof had half caved in and the cold air rushed in, along with insects and rats.
It was hard not to be jealous of the nuns, even though their sentences far exceeded my own. They had one another, and no need for word from the outside world, something the rest of us craved. Even when they were separated, they never succumbed to the dark loneliness that plagued us all. They had the company of their God. My only faith was put into a man: my Borya, a mere mortal, a poet. And having been unable to contact him since the men took me from my apartment, I didn’t know whether he was dead or alive.
* * *
—
By the fourth day of my rehabilitation, a thick callus had developed on my once soft hands and I could finally grip the pick. I swung it overhead and into the earth with surprising force. By day’s end, I’d turned over my assigned piece of earth and