Katerina

20

I WAS TRANSFERRED TO the prison on Sunday. Bells rang, and an autumn sun flooded the streets. Two armed gendarmes led me, and from every side people pointed: the monster. I was empty and frozen, and no pain annoyed me. In fact, it seemed to me that at that pace, I could march for hours. For the first time I felt my mother within me, not the mother who used to beat me but the courageous mother, who had wanted to teach me courage all those years and didn’t know how. Now I strode with her, indivisible, like a single body.

Thus my new life began. The women in the prison knew everything, all the details, and they didn’t greet me. In time I learned that they didn’t greet other women with joy, either. A person who enters prison knows that here one doesn’t die, one falls apart. No thread will mend the tears. It wasn’t the walls that frightened me but the faces.

The trial had not been long. I admitted every detail of the accusation, and the old judge said that he had not met with such a horror to that day. If it hadn’t been the murder of a murderer, he would have ordered that my neck be placed in a hangman’s noose. There was no one in the courtroom. The defense attorney appointed by the court told me, “You can be content. As long as there’s life, there’s hope.” He was a Jewish lawyer, who scurried from place to place and seemed embarrassed by himself. He reminded me of Sammy for some reason, though there was no resemblance between them.

Life in prison was very orderly. We rose early and lights-out was at eight-thirty. Between rising and going to sleep—labor. One squad went to work outside in a textile factory, another worked in the field, and another maintained the prison. Once the legs of the women prisoners had been chained, but that practice had been abolished. Later they were tied together by a rope and led in groups of three. Each squad numbered thirty women. Some old women bore their punishment with contempt and a straight back. At the age of seventy, the prisoners were freed for life, but not always. There was one ninety-year-old woman in the prison.

I was attached to the maintenance squad. I was alert and did what I was supposed to, but my life was narrow, like that of a beast of burden. After ten hours of scouring floors, I would sink onto the cot. My sleep was cramped, like in a pressured corridor. When the bell rang, I would rise and report for work. I did my job thoroughly. The women guards didn’t beat me or torment me. My contact with my fellow prisoners was little. They sat for hours after work and talked. Sometimes, at twilight, I would hear their confessions, sounding to me like yearnings that no longer touched upon life.

Once, at lunch, one of the prisoners asked me, “Katerina, how did you have the courage?”

“I don’t know,” I answered her.

That was the truth. My life was truncated, as though it no longer belonged to me, but I myself, wonder of wonders, stood on my own feet.

The women prisoners didn’t abuse or mock me. One has to be wary of a woman capable of carving up a corpse into twenty-four pieces, I heard them whispering. Most of them were imprisoned, as I found out in the course of time, for poisoning or throwing acid. There were only two real murderesses, and I, it turned out, was one of them. The commandant summoned me and asked, “Do you have relatives?”

“I haven’t. My parents died, and I was an only daughter.”

“What are you laughing about?”

“The phrase ‘only daughter’ struck me as funny.”

“Did you have other relatives?”

“My father had some bastards, but I didn’t know them,” I said, and kept on laughing.

“People don’t laugh here. Get out of the room,” they ordered me, and I left.

I rued my laughter, but I couldn’t control myself. Before my eyes I saw my father’s two redheaded bastards on the narrow wagon, the way I had seen them many years ago.

Although everyone here is sentenced to many years of imprisonment, still they count the days, the months, and the years. I was so hollow that the whole matter of time didn’t concern me. I worked like a machine, and at the sound of the bell at night, I would put my tools down in the storeroom and report for roll call. After dinner they closed the sheds, and I would fall on my bunk like a sack.

The days passed, and one day was like the other. The women prisoners who worked outside used to talk of the summer sun and the harvests. Here, between the walls, it was very cold even when the sun shone. Everything absorbs the cold. But to me, to tell the truth, nothing was disturbing.

Once a month there were visits. Everyone looked forward to them, even putting on makeup. There was no one to visit me, and I was content that I didn’t have to undergo that embarrassment. The visits left a layer of oppression and sadness. After the visits, the prison would be stirred up all night long.

“What are you thinking about?” One of the women prisoners surprised me while I was scouring the floor.

“I’m not thinking, I’m tired.”

“It seemed to me that you were thinking.”

“What is there to think about?” I said, trying to end the conversation.

The woman, my age, told me that she had already been imprisoned in that jail for six years and she had another seventeen years before her.

“What were you sent to jail for?” I asked, and I regretted it immediately.

“For throwing acid,” she said, and smiled a strange smile.

Before getting married, she too had worked for Jews for many years. I immediately saw that she remembered her years with the Jews fondly, and like me, she had first worked for an observant family and then in the city for nonreligious Jews.

“They were my nicest years,” she said, and tears welled in her eyes.

That is how the friendship between us began. Her name was Sigi. In the winter, in the darkness and chill, we would bring up memories of Hanukkah and Purim; in the spring, of Passover and Shavuot. On Yom Kippur she would wrap herself in a shawl and fast. Had it not been for the boy who seduced her, had it not been for that cheat, she would have remained with the Jews forever.

Thus, miraculously, I found a secret tunnel to return to my loved ones. One evening I saw Henni. She knew what had happened to me and how I had landed there. I told her that there was no remorse in my heart. I was prepared for a long life in prison, without any illusions.

“Where do you get that faith?” Henni asked me.

“From my mother.” I didn’t hesitate.

“Strange,” said Henni. “You didn’t love your mother.”

“I didn’t know how to love her.”

“And now you love her?”

“Now she’s within me.”

Barely had I pronounced those words when darkness covered that clear vision, and I sank down into the abyss.