The Nesting Dolls Read online

  Several of the women were farmers. Kulaks, Daria guessed. Landowners from before the Great October Socialist Revolution who’d refused to accept collectivization and thus caused the Holodomor, the famines. It was explained in that movie she’d watched with Edward and Mama. As punishment for their treason, Comrade Stalin had millions of kulaks relocated and their land handed over to those who would selflessly grow bread for the USSR. But Comrade Stalin was not a vengeful man. He was a leader who encouraged misguided transgressors to learn the errors of their ways. That’s why he was now allowing them to create new, communal lives and ply their trade for the good of all, sharing in the inevitable bounty, despite their earlier intransigence. Except the women were trying to explain to those overseeing the production that this was the wrong season and these were the wrong crops to plant in this sort of land at this depth. Based on how the guard reacted to Daria’s plea to keep her underclothes on, when this overseer raised his arm, Daria expected the woman who’d been the most vociferous objector to be slapped in the face. But he merely waved her in the direction of the field with a bored, “Do as you’re told.”

  “Nothing will grow,” she protested. “We’ll starve.” In desperation, she added, “They’ll blame you.”

  “I do what I’m told,” he repeated, suggesting, not unkindly, that it was in their best interests to follow his example.

  So they dug. And they planted, the skin of their palms cracking from the cold and clogging with mud until the tiny seeds slipped through their numb fingers, falling in haphazard piles along the ground. The uneven gaps in between ensured that even if something did manage, against all odds, to sprout, it would be choked dead before full bloom. As she worked, Daria realized the toil was pointless. Its only purpose was to break her spirit. This was confirmed by one of the women who confided to Daria that, a few weeks earlier, she’d been assigned to dig a ditch “starting from the fence and going until dinnertime.”

  They weren’t allowed to return to the barracks until after sundown. There, Alyssa and Anya came running into their mother’s arms, upper lips chapped bright red from the snot they’d kept wiping away with the backs of their wrists.

  “I was a good girl, Mama,” Alyssa swore. “I watched Anya so she’d be a good girl, too. We followed all the new rules, so can we go home now?” She added the word that she’d been assured all her life possessed magical powers. “Please?”

  The men were brought back even later. Daria had trouble picking Edward out of the mass that dragged themselves in, covered in identical rags, faces coated in sweat and grime and frost, until he collapsed on their bunk, curling up in a fetal position, forehead pressed against the wall. The other men around them groaned, cursed, whimpered. Edward did none of those things. Edward hummed.

  Daria shooed the horrified girls away, promising she would take care of Papa. She crawled in next to Edward. She stroked his brow, his cheeks vibrating dully beneath her fingers. When he didn’t respond to her caress, continuing to lie deathly still, stubbornly humming a tune Daria didn’t recognize, she took Edward’s hands in hers, tenderly unwrapping the scraps of cloth he’d bound them in. Edward’s hands, his mesmerizing, enchanting hands—too valuable to so much as lift her suitcase on the day of their marriage—had been shredded nearly to the bone.

  Chapter 7

  This was their life now. Rising at dawn, women to the fields, men to logging, the children fending for themselves. Breakfast was a slice of hard bread, supper a watery broth that reminded Daria of what was left after you washed a pot that vegetables had been boiled in. Every morning, a crew came through the barracks to dispose of the dead. Every evening, a few workers failed to return. The children cried that they were hungry, then eventually stopped. The men raged and plotted revenge and threatened escape, then returned to the forest. At night, they drank moonshine that somehow still managed to materialize, even in the depths of the tundra. They played cards and they brawled over the outcomes. They remembered the lives they once had, the men they’d once been and, to hold on to what small vestiges of that they could, they loudly fucked their wives, their girlfriends, any woman they could get their hands on, their groans blending into the moans, the sobs, and the perennially howling winds.

  Except for the mandatory work detail, Edward declined to join in their activities. Daria soon wished he would. Even a raging, drunk, brutish Edward would be better than one who shuffled from one narrow end of their barracks to the other. The one who sat on the edge of their bunk, eyes on the ground, humming quietly to himself. Daria attempted to engage him in conversation, if nothing else. Her own days were spent in near silence. Even if Daria weren’t too bone-weary to exchange a few words with the women farming alongside her, opening her chapped lips or shifting her cracked cheeks was agony, to be risked only under the most dire of circumstances. She doubted they’d be able to hear her over the wind, anyway.

  The surfeit of words congested inside Daria. She arrived back at the barracks each night bursting with them, in a frenzy finally to vomit out everything she’d kept to herself during the day, starved for human contact and connection. Daria tried to make her stories amusing for the girls, turning what had been a bitter incident into a funny one, filtering through the ugly moments to dredge up even a second of beauty, of kindness, of hope. She didn’t want to upset Alyssa and Anya any further than they already were, and she didn’t want them to worry about her while she was away. So instead of talking about the guard who’d ruined days of their labor by kicking up the rows they’d planted “by accident,” Daria focused on the one who, at risk to himself, smuggled in a thermos of lukewarm tea he shared with his workers. When Daria relayed the story to Alyssa and Anya, she made it sound like they’d had themselves a regular tea party!

  After they’d gone to sleep, though, Daria yearned to confess the darker aspect of her day to Edward. She wanted to vent. She wanted to complain. She wanted to whine, damn it. Was it too much to desire a modicum of sympathy? Daria would have been happy to do the same for Edward. Unfortunately, all it took was one look at her husband, and the words withered to sawdust in her throat. Every sound prompted Edward to startle. Loud noises made him shudder, and unexpected ones drove him deeper into the darkness of their bunk. Daria imagined if she opened her mouth and let loose with the stream of words she’d pent up for days, weeks, months, it would be akin to pummeling him with a barrage of freshly sharpened arrows.

  So Daria kept her thoughts and her feelings to herself, stockpiling them the way she and the other women stockpiled rations for their children. While the men fought loudly—and impotently—the women quietly and efficiently traded clothes among themselves. They stole bones from the once-in-a-blue-moon scraps of dried fish they were accorded and fashioned them into needles they used to unravel a moth-ravaged muffler, repurposing its yarn to knit into socks, a hat. They scavenged for roots and berries, brewing folk remedies for the sick, forcing them down swollen throats, smearing them on wheezing chests.

  But when it was Anya’s turn to be treated, Daria and Edward’s three-year-old remained delirious with fever, her breath coming in painful, desperate gasps after interminable periods of deathly silence. For the first few days of her illness, she’d managed to smile in between the hacking coughs as Edward, rousing himself from his stupor, wrapped their daughter in his arms to rub some warmth into her skin-and-bone limbs. Just like in the cattle car, Edward spent multiple nights distracting Anya with stories of magic flutes and a fiery Spanish temptress torn between a reckless officer and a dashing bullfighter. But soon, even the promise of another exotic tale from Papa wasn’t enough to rouse her.

  “Pneumonia,” a woman from two barracks over diagnosed by putting her ear to Anya’s chest and listening to her struggling, fluid-filled lungs. She was a doctor who’d been banished after her husband, a geology professor at a Leningrad university, shared with his class a piece of shale he’d received from a colleague in Australia. Contact with foreign entities was always suspect.

  “What
can we do?” Daria asked, knowing they had no equipment or medicine. Edward sat next to her, holding Anya.

  “Antipneumococcal antiserum.” The doctor uttered both words in the same fashion she might have said a fairy-tale goldfish that grants wishes.

  Edward raised his head, the shell-shocked, submissive expression he now wore at all times, save when distracting Anya or humming to himself, cracking long enough for him to meekly suggest to his wife, “We could ask . . . Adam.”

  Though he’d arrived in Kyril the same five months ago, Adam’s experience took a sharp turn. He’d been dispatched to the forest along with the rest of the men. Daria had been too preoccupied with Edward, pouring watery gruel down his throat as he gagged, rubbing homemade salve into his hands to stave off frostbite. She’d had no time or interest to gauge how Adam was adjusting. Until she noticed that he was gone. Prisoners—no, sorry, settlers—disappeared for two reasons. They were dead or—

  “He’s been reassigned,” the man who’d slept below Adam, and scurried up to claim the abandoned bunk, told Daria. “Office staff.”

  A settlement of Kyril’s size required massive amounts of paperwork. There were crop and logging output reports sorted by day, month, and season; supply requisitions; payroll for the local staff; and, of course, resource distribution, which included everything from the tiny seeds Daria planted uselessly to the ongoing construction of housing. Prisoners were utilized for administrative tasks, but they had to earn the privilege. Five months seemed a short time for Adam to move up the ranks. A transfer from the fields was merited by good behavior. Most frequently, though, it came about as a result of bribes. It didn’t take Daria long to figure out that many of the women she worked with were squirreling seeds in the folds of their ragged clothes in order to trade with those who’d already been liberated from the barracks and allowed to build their own homes, no more than glorified lean-tos, from whatever wood they could scavenge. These families would use the seeds to grow their own secret plots of food. Even some of the highest-ranking Party officials got in on the act. Though they were allowed more sturdy housing—doors, windows, roofs, floors, and other such luxuries—their diets were also limited to what Moscow shipped out to their employees, when they remembered. And when it didn’t rot on the way. As a result, their superiors either tried growing their own stash or, failing at it, traded with those who’d somehow succeeded in coaxing a crop from the frozen tundra.

  But Adam hadn’t been in Kyril long enough to accumulate valuables to trade, had he? Daria wondered, as not only had Adam been excused from the most backbreaking work, he’d been issued one of the largest houses, built with prison labor, which he didn’t even have to share.

  “Whose mother do you think he turned in this time?” Daria drawled to Edward when they’d first learned the news.

  But now, her husband was suggesting maybe their former dvornik had somehow procured enough influence to get them the medicine Anya required.

  “Write down what I need,” Daria urged the doctor. “I will go ask him.”

  She was forced to wait until total darkness. Although, as they kept being reminded, they were not in prison, they could leave anytime they wished—if they were up for facing the brutal elements that stretched in every direction rather than taking advantage of Comrade Stalin’s generosity—unsanctioned movement was always a risk. Especially for women alone. Bored guards, restless townspeople, vengeful fellow exiles . . . anything could happen. It didn’t stop some women. Seeds and food weren’t the exclusive items traded.

  But Daria wasn’t ready to be taken for one of those. Yet. She crept around the outskirts of the settlement, hiding in shadow, taking the long way from their barracks to the one-story construction Adam claimed as his own. She spied a sliver of light coming from the inside and quickly, before she could change her mind, knocked on the door. He opened it so briskly, she nearly fell in over the threshold.

  They’d all lost weight since arriving. Edward was so skeletal, Daria could see where his hip bones met his legs. Even Adam was thinner. His collarbone was more prominent, his cheeks beneath the ruddy beard a bit more sunken. But the change in proportion made him even more towering. He reminded Daria of the children’s book character Stepan Stepanov, a giant nicknamed “Fire Tower” due to his height. Uncle Styopa tromped about the Soviet Union performing charitable deeds. He rescued drowning boys, saved pigeons from a burning building, and joined the navy, as an inspiration to his fellow citizens. Except Uncle Styopa was “all kids’ best friend.” While Adam was terrifying.

  Daria’s first impulse was to shrink back, the way Edward now did at everything. But then her past resolve kicked in, and she looked Adam in the eye, needing to crane her neck. Sounding as imperious as if he still worked for her—not that it was ever true—she informed him, “I need to speak with you.” She walked in without being invited and closed the door behind them.

  Adam’s home consisted of three sections, not counting the tiny entry where Daria was now standing. To her left was a sleeping area, housing a bed, the sheets worn and institutional but neatly made. The largest section in the middle held a desk, the legs different colors, suggesting each had been replaced over the years, and, of all things, a piano, its top missing so that the strings, not all of which were present, lay exposed to the elements. Daria guessed this had been the home of an administrator’s family, before they’d either moved up, away, or . . . well, no use thinking about any other possibilities—and Adam had inherited the house, furnishings included. It was the room to the right that explained how he’d managed to do it. The room on the right stood bare. Except for the trio of homemade vodka stills chugging away in the center.

  “Oh,” Daria said. Now everything made perfect sense.

  Adam had yet to say anything.

  She asked him, “How much are you managing to produce a day?”

  “Enough.”

  “No wonder you’re so popular.”

  “Enough,” he repeated.

  “You can get anything you want from them. A house, clothes, food.”

  “What do you want?” Adam emphasized the third word, under no illusion about why Daria was there.

  “This.” She showed him the scrap of paper with the names and amounts of medication needed.

  Adam’s brow furrowed. “Are you trying to resuscitate a corpse?”

  “My daughter, Anya. The little one. You remember her? The doctor says it’s pneumonia. We’ve tried everything. She thinks this is the thing that might help. Please.” Daria took a step closer to him, so close, too close, dangerously close. “Please, help me, Adam Semyonovitch.”

  Chapter 8

  She expected him to ask how. She expected him to ask why he should. She expected him to demand something in return. She was prepared for all of it.

  She was not prepared for Adam taking another long look at her list of medications, then folding the paper into quarters and stuffing it in his shirt pocket before escorting Daria to the door, closing it soundly behind her.

  She didn’t know what had happened. She didn’t know what they’d agreed upon or what Adam intended to do. All she knew was that the next evening, as Daria and Edward lay in their bunk with Anya between them, trying to keep her warm, watching her struggle so hard for every breath that her face first turned bright red, then a deadly white that faded to near blue before the process started over again, the doctor crept in beside them and showed Daria and Edward the satchel she’d been slipped by . . . she’d rather not say. Comrade Stalin had taught them: The less you know, the sounder you sleep. But it was for Anya.

  They gave her the first dose immediately. The second at midnight. The five of them were the only ones still awake, Alyssa sitting in the corner, pulling on tufts of hair and sticking the thinning strands in her mouth, chewing and swallowing. No one tried to stop her anymore, not even the doctor who’d initially attempted to explain the dangers, that she could clog up her intestines. But everyone understood how hungry Alyssa was, and if this helpe
d, even for a little while, then long-term consequences be damned.

  They tried a third dose during that devil’s hour of four a.m. There was enough left for a fourth at dawn, before the guards would come to gather them for work. But Anya was dead by then.

  It wasn’t dramatic. It was barely noticeable. The intervals between breaths stretched longer and longer, until there simply wasn’t another. For a few minutes afterward, Daria and Edward might even have convinced themselves that Anya had turned a corner, that she was no longer struggling, that she was getting some rest.

  Glancing through the slats in the walls, Daria glimpsed the sun on its way up. Briskly, she peeled off Anya’s clothes and passed them to Alyssa. “Put them on. They can’t help her anymore.”

  The shirt was too small. Alyssa nonetheless forced herself into it, ripping the seams of one sleeve. Anya’s hat she pulled over her own head, the socks she used for mittens. They were still warm from her sister’s skin.

  Daria took off the shawl she’d acquired a week earlier in exchange for a handful of wheat seeds, and began wrapping Anya in it, wrenching her out of Edward’s arms to do so. He’d been stroking his daughter’s face, closing her eyelids, smoothing back her hair.

  “We have to bury her before they come.”

  “Mama.” Alyssa pointed to the shawl. “You’ll be cold.” She stood in front of Daria in Anya’s too small clothes, a reminder that nothing should go to waste.