Striking the Balance

His fellowzek stared at him in pity. “Then you’re a fool, aren’t you? They go and run up these new barracks. They put enough barbed wire between them and the ones we sleep in to keep the Nazis from crossing the border, and I hear we’re supposed to get a trainload of ‘special prisoners’ before long. Do I have to draw you a picture, chum?”

“I hadn’t heard about the special prisoners coming in,” Nussboym said. He knew a lot of the gossip on the camp grapevine went right by him because his Russian really wasn’t very good.

“Well, they are,” Mikhailov said. “We’ll be lucky even to catch a glimpse of ’em. The guards, though, they’ll get fucked and sucked till they can’t stand up straight, the stinking sons of bitches. The cooks, too, and the clerks-anybody with pull. You’re just a regularzek, though, forget it.”

Nussboym hadn’t thought about women since he ended up in Soviet hands. No, that wasn’t true: he hadn’t thought about them in any concrete way, simply because he figured he wouldn’t see any for a long, long time. NowNow he said, “Even for women, these bunks are awfully small and awfully close together.”

“So the guards climb in and do it sideways instead of on top,” Mikhailov said. “So what? It doesn’t matter to them, they don’t care what the broads think, and you’re a stubborn kike, you know that?”

“I know that,” Nussboym said; by the other’s tone, it was almost a compliment. “All right, we’ll get it done the way they tell us to. And if there are women here, we don’t have to admit we made this stuff for them.”

“Now you’re talking,” the otherzek said.

The work gang met its norms for the day, which meant it got fed-not extravagantly, but almost enough to keep body and soul together. After his bread and soup, Nussboym stopped worrying about his belly for a little while. It had enough in it that it was no longer sounding an internal air-raid siren. He knew that klaxon would start up again all too soon, but had learned in Lodz to cherish these brief moments of satiety.

A lot of the otherzeks had that same feeling. They sat around on their bunks, waiting for the order to blow out the lamps. When that came, they would fall at once into a deep, exhausted sleep. Meanwhile, they gossiped or read the propaganda sheets the camp muckymucks sometimes passed out (those generated plenty of new gossip, most of it sardonic or ribald) or repaired trousers and jackets, their heads bent close to the work so they could see what they were doing in the dim light.

Somewhere off in the distance, a train whistle howled, low and mournful. Nussboym barely noticed it. A few minutes later, it came again, this time unmistakably closer.

Anton Mikhailov sprang to his feet. Everybody stared at this unwonted display of energy. “The special prisoners!” thezek exclaimed.

Instantly, the barracks were in an uproar. Many of the prisoners hadn’t seen a woman in years, let alone been close to one. The odds that they would be close to one now were slim. The barest possibility, though, was plenty to remind them they were men.

Going outside between supper and lights-out wasn’t forbidden, though the weather was still chilly enough that it had been an uncommon practice. Now dozens ofzeks trooped out of the barracks, Nussboym among them. The other buildings were emptying, too. Guards yelled, trying to keep the prisoners in some kind of order.

They had little luck. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, the men made a beeline for the wire that separated their encampment from the new one. The barracks there were only half done, as no one knew better than Nussboym, but that, from everything he’d heard, was a typical piece of Soviet inefficiency.

“Look!” someone said with a reverent sigh. “They’ve put up a canopy to keep the poor darlings from getting the sun on their faces.”

“And then they have them come in at night,” somebody else added. “If that isn’t thegulag,

I don’t know what is.”

The train pulled to a stop a few minutes later, iron wheels screaming as they slid along the track. NKVD men with submachine guns and lanterns hurried up to the Stolypin cars that had carried the prisoners. When the doors opened, the first people off the cars were more guards.

“The hell with them,” Mikhailov said. “We don’t want to see their ugly mugs. We know all about what those bastards look like. Where are the broads?”

The way the guards were shouting and screaming at the prisoners to come out and hurry up about it set thezeks laughing fit to burst among themselves. “Better be careful, dears, or they’ll send you to the front, and then you’ll really be sorry,” someone called in shrill falsetto.

A head appeared at the doorway to one of the Stolypin cars. The prisoners’ breath went out in one long, anticipatory sigh. Then what was left of it went out again, this time in dozens of gasps of astonishment. A Lizard jumped out of the car and skittered toward the barracks, then another and another and another.