Nussboym rolled his eyes. “I’m already here. What else can they do to me?”
“Ha!” The otherzek snorted laughter. “I like that.” After a moment’s thought, he stuck out his gloved hand. “Anton Mikhailov.” Like most prisoners in the camp, he didn’t bother with patronymics.
“David Aronovich Nussboym,” Nussboym answered, trying to stay polite. He’d been able to make himself prominent in the Lodz ghetto. Maybe he could manage the same magic here.
“Come on!” shouted Stepan Rudzutak, the gang boss. “We don’t make our quota, we starve even worse than usual.”
“Da,Stepan,” the prisoners chorused. They sounded resigned. They were resigned, the ones who’d been in thegulags since 1937 or even longer more so than new fish like Nussboym. Even the regular camp ration wasn’t enough to keep a man strong. If they cut it because you didn’t meet your norm, pretty soon they’d throw you in the snow, to keep till the ground got soft enough for them to bury you.
Anton Mikhailov grunted. “And if we work like a pack of Stakhanovites, we starve then, too.”
“Which ismeshuggeh,” Nussboym said. You did get your bread ration increased if you overfulfilled your quota; Mikhailov was right about that. But you didn’t come close to getting enough extra to make up for the labor you had to expend to achieve that overfulfillment. Coming close enough to quota to earn regular rations was hard enough. Six and a half cubic yards of wood per man per day. Wood had been something Nussboym took for granted when he was burning it. Producing it was something else again.
“You talk like azhid, zhid,” Mikhailov said. Above the face cloth he wore to keep his nose and mouth from freezing, his gray eyes twinkled. Nussboym shrugged. Like Fyodorov, Mikhailov spoke without much malice.
Snow drifted around treetrunks, high as a man’s chest. Nussboym and Mikhailov stomped it down with theirvalenki. Without the thick felt boots, Nussboym’s feet would have frozen off in short order. If you didn’t have decent boots, you couldn’t do anything. Even the NKVD guards understood that much. They didn’t want to kill you right away: they wanted to get work out of you first.
Once they got the snow down below their knees, they attacked the pine with their axes. Nussboym had never chopped down a tree in his life till he landed in Karelia; if he never chopped down another one, that would suit him fine. No one cared what he thought, of course. If he didn’t chop wood, they’d dispose of him without hesitation and without remorse.
He was still awkward at the work. The cotton-padded mittens he wore didn’t help with that, although, like thevalenki, they did keep him from freezing as he worked. Even without them, though, he feared the axe would still have turned every so often in his inexpert hands, so that he hit the trunk with the flat of the blade rather than the edge. Whenever he did it, it jolted him all the way up to the shoulder; the axe handle might have been possessed by a swarm of bees.
“Clumsy fool!” Mikhailov shouted at him from the far side of the pine. Then he did it himself and jumped up and down in the snow, howling curses. Nussboym was rude enough to laugh out loud.
The tree began to sway and groan as their cuts drew nearer each other. Then, all at once, it toppled. “Look out!” they both yelled, to warn the rest of the gang to get out of the way. If the pine fell on the guards, too damn bad, but they scattered, too. The thick snow muffled the noise of the pine’s fall, although several branches, heavy with ice, snapped off with reports like gunshots.
Mikhailov clapped his mittened hands together. Nussboym let out a whoop of glee. “Less work for us!” they exclaimed together. They’d have to trim the branches from the tree; any that broke off of their own accord made life easier. In thegulag, not much did that.
What they still had left to trim was quite bad enough. Finding where the branches were wasn’t easy in the snow, lopping them off wasn’t easy, dragging them through the soft powder to the pile where everybody was stacking branches was plenty to make your heart think it would burst.
“Good luck,” Nussboym said. The parts of him exposed to the air were frozen. Under his padded jacket and trousers, though, he was wet with sweat. He pointed to the snow still clinging to the green, sap-filled wood of the pine boughs. “How can you burn those in this weather?”
“Mostly you don’t,” the otherzek answered. “Used to be you’d just get them to smoke for a while so the guards would be happy and say you’d fulfilled your norm there. But the Lizards have a habit of bombing when they spot smoke, so now we don’t do that any more.”
Nussboym didn’t mind standing around and talking, but he didn’t want to stiffen up, either. “Come on, let’s get a saw,” he said. “The quicker we are, the better the chance for a good one.”
The best saw had red-painted handles. It was there for the taking, but Nussboym and Mikhailov left it alone. That was the saw Stepan Rudzutak and the assistant gang boss, a Kazakh named Usmanov, would use. Nussboym grabbed another one he remembered as being pretty good. Mikhailov nodded approval. They carried the saw over to the fallen tree.
Back and forth, back and forth, bend a little more as the cut got deeper, make sure you jerk your foot out of the way so the round of wood doesn’t mash your toe. Then move down the trunk a third of a meter and do it again. Then again, and again. After a while, you might as well be a piston in a machine. The work left you too busy and too worn for thought.
“Break for lunch!” Rudzutak shouted. Nussboym looked up in dull amazement. Was half the day gone already? The cooks’ helpers were grumbling at having to leave the nice warm kitchens and come out to feed the work gangs too far away to come in, and they were yelling at thezeks to hurry up and feed their ugly faces so these precious, delicate souls could get back in away from the chill.
Some of the men in the work gang screamed abuse at the cooks’ helpers. Nussboym watched Rudzutak roll his eyes. He was a new fish here, but he’d learned better than that in the Lodz ghetto. Turning to Mikhailov, he said, “Only a fool insults a man who’s going to feed him.”
“You’re not as dumb as you look after all,” the Russian answered. He ate his soup-it wasn’tshchi this time, but some vile brew of nettles and other weeds-in a hurry, to get whatever vestigial warmth remained, then took a couple of bites out of his chunk of bread and stuck the rest back in the pocket of his trousers.
Nussboym ate all his bread. When he got up to go back to his saw, he found he’d gone stiff. That happened every day, near enough. A few minutes at the saw cured it. Back and forth, back and forth, bend lower, jerk your foot, move down the trunk-His mind retreated. When Rudzutak yelled for the gang to knock off for the day, he had to look around to see how much wood he’d cut. Plenty to make quota for him and Mikhailov-and the rest of the gang had done fine, too. They loaded the wood onto sledges and dragged it back toward the camp. A couple of guards rode with the wood. Thezeks didn’t say a word. It would have been their necks if they had.
“Maybe they’ll mix some herring in with the kasha tonight,” Mikhailov said. Nussboym nodded as he trudged along. It was something to look forward to, anyhow.
Someone knocked on the door to Liu Han’s little chamber in the Peking roominghouse. Her heart leaped within her. Nieh Ho-T’ing had been out of the city for a long time, what with one thing and another. She knew he’d been dickering with the Japanese, which revolted her, but she hadn’t been able to argue him out of it before he left. He put what he thought of as military necessity before anything else, even her.
He was honest about it, at any rate. Given that, she could accept that he wouldn’t yield to her, and yet go on caring about him. Most men, from all she’d seen, would promise you they’d never do something, go ahead and do it anyway, and then either deny that they’d promised or that they’d done it or both.Usually both, she thought with a curl of her lip.