The Star of Kazan

‘Your number is 127 – remember that. Everything you own or wear must have that number. Now try the uniform.’

Annika had already seen the uniform on the girls walking with bent heads and folded arms down the long stone corridor. It was black with thick green stripes, worn with a starched black collar and a black apron.

She slipped it over her head and the seamstress pulled it straight.

‘But it’s been worn,’ said Annika. ‘There’s a dress preserver under the arms.’

‘Of course it’s been worn,’ said the seamstress. ‘You didn’t expect a new one, surely. When you outgrow it, it will go to another girl. “Thrift and Discipline” is our motto. Now come here and let me do your hair.’

‘I’ve just brushed it.’

‘It can’t stay like that. It’s got to be pinned back.’ She took out a bundle of hairpins and began to jab them into Annika’s hair and neck. ‘Stand still.’

Annika stood still. She felt at that moment as though she would never move again.

‘Now these are your night clothes and your underwear. Everything you brought with you has to be handed in. Books, money, letters . . . You can keep your hairbrush and the Bible. And remember you are number 127. Your number is the most important thing about you.’

There was a mirror against one wall of the room. Annika, turning to go, saw a kind of female convict, a girl in stripes who could be picked off by a bullet from a warder if she tried to escape. Prisoner 127.

A pale, dark-eyed girl called Olga von Seefeld was put in charge of Annika. She explained the rules. No talking in the corridors, no running ever, only the back stairs to be used by the pupils; the main stairs were for the staff. A full curtsy whenever she met one of the teachers, a half-curtsy for older girls.

‘Can we write letters?’ asked Annika. ‘Would they let us have stamps?’

‘We’re allowed one letter a month, but the teachers have to read them first. If we put anything in about being homesick or the food being bad or anything like that, it isn’t sent and we get punished. You can’t write the first one till you’ve been here a month, and you can’t get any letters till then either. It’s so you settle down.’

‘Do you . . . are you happy here?’ Annika plucked up the courage to ask the question.

Olga’s dark eyes rested for a moment on Annika’s face.

‘It is a privilege to be here and learn to be a credit to the Fatherland,’ she said in a flat voice.

She took Annika to join the line of girls waiting to go in to supper. A bell shrilled and they shuffled forward into a bare, vaulted room with green linoleum on the tables. In front of each girl was a plate of stew, mostly consisting of potatoes, but the girl standing opposite Annika was looking down at something different: a bowl of congealed rice speckled with a few pieces of dried mushroom.

‘That’s Minna,’ Olga whispered. ‘She didn’t finish her food at lunch – she can’t bear mushrooms – so she has to eat it now for supper. And if she doesn’t eat it for supper she gets it again at breakfast. It’s the rule, food mustn’t be wasted.’

The bell shrilled again and the girls said grace and sat down. As Annika swallowed her tasteless stew, she smiled at Minna. But Minna did not smile back. She had picked up her spoon and two huge tears were rolling down her cheeks.

‘Once a girl had her breakfast served up for two whole days,’ Olga went on. ‘She was sick over it in the end – they had to stop then.’

After supper there were prayers in the hall, then another bell summoning them to their dormitories. In Annika’s were thirty iron beds, each covered in a single grey blanket. There were no curtains between the beds, only bare lockers. A bell rang, and the girls filed in wearing their regulation-flannel nightdresses, and knelt down. Another bell, and they rose and got between the scratchy sheets.

The light went out.

It was the old Princess Mettenburg who had turned Grossenfluss into a school, but she no longer lived in the palace herself. Once a month she came to inspect both the pupils and the staff. Once a fortnight she sent some of her musicians to give concerts of patriotic music to the pupils. It was the headmistress, Fräulein von Donner, who ran the school.

No one who met Fräulein von Donner was surprised that she was the only woman in Germany with the Order of the Closed Fist. She was a terrifying figure with a moustache, grey hair pulled relentlessly into a bun and rimless pince-nez on a metal chain. One of her hips had been displaced as a child and she walked with the aid of a stick. The thump, thump, thump of this stick along the stone passages was like the bell of the old plague bearers announcing another death.

Annika was taken to see her on the second day.

The headmistress was sitting at her desk. Behind her hovered her assistant, Mademoiselle Vincent, a thin white-faced woman who moved like an eel, gliding along in a wave-like motion, her head thrust forward.

‘You know our motto, “Thrift and Discipline”?’

‘Yes, Fräulein von Donner.’