Katerina

23

IN APRIL THE DAYS WERE BRIGHT, the mornings very cold, but in the afternoons the sun would come down and warm us. We worked in open fields and we would return drunk with the pure air. Had it not been for a few escapes, the days would have passed uneventfully. After every escape came the beatings and the screaming. The chief guard, a sturdy, cruel woman, was responsible for the beatings; she beat with lust and devotion. She didn’t torment murderesses, but she wheedled them, “Why face trials? Solitary confinement is no Garden of Eden, believe me.”

Time vanished in the daily schedule. Your previous life grew ever more distant and vague, as though it wasn’t your own. A prisoner came back to the shed after a day’s work and sought nothing but her bunk. One woman remembered that she once had been held back a class in school, and her father, a senior official in the local council, wept from sheer embarrassment.

“My father,” she confessed to me, “was apparently a little Jewish. At any rate, there was something Jewish about him. Only Jews are capable of crying about something like that.”

“He didn’t beat you?”

“No, he just wept.”

“Do you have good memories of your father?”

“No. His weeping frightened me. He was a stranger to us all.”

“What makes you suspect him?”

“I don’t know. As a young man, he worked for Jews, and so did his mother, my grandmother—for many years she worked for Jews. Jewish manners clung to them.”

“But you loved him.”

“I didn’t know how to love him. He liked to sit in the garden for hours and gaze around. I was afraid of him. In truth, we were all afraid of him. The Jews had a bad influence on him.”

“Is he still living?”

“He died a year ago. I asked to attend the funeral, but they didn’t let me. It’s better they didn’t. Everyone would have looked at me with pity. I don’t like to be pitied. A person should suffer in silence.”

Thus, from the thick depths, little trills rose up. Those whispers were absorbed very well in the shed, but they had the power to move one for a moment.

“How much more time do you have left?”

“I don’t count. Anyway, I won’t live to be freed.”

I kept my secrets, and I didn’t reveal them. Only with my lawyer would I exchange a few sentences and be moved. Once a month, he came to visit and brought me fruits that were in season. He was fifty, but his tattered clothing made him look older. If I could have done it, I would have laundered his shirt, pressed his suit, and polished his shoes. His loyalty pained me.

“How are the Jews in the villages?” I asked, not in my own voice.

“Why are you asking?”

“Because I’m afraid.”

“A person should worry about himself. You have enough problems of your own.”

Everything that happened in the villages was well known here—a robbery or murder every month. Jewish clothes came in regularly, even a pair of candlesticks. If I had money, I would have bought the clothes from the women and put them on my bunk. At night I would breathe in the starch hidden in their fabrics. I missed the village Jews—their little stores that gave off an odor of sunflower oil, the children racing about in the courtyard, the silence of Sabbaths and holidays, the old Jews standing at street corners and looking about in wonderment. For a long while they would stand, and suddenly a smile would rise to their lips, then they picked up their feet and disappeared. For hours I would observe their birdlike way of walking. I always had the feeling that they were linked to blue and silent worlds.

But, even to myself, I didn’t reveal the great secret. My Benjamin had gone up to heaven and he was the true Jesus. Jesus in the churches has rosy cheeks, plump arms, and his whole look is annoyingly self-righteous. A kind of revolting spirituality. A fake angel. But my Jesus had been in my womb, and to this day he fills me. My Benjamin doesn’t look self-righteous like the icons in the church. My Benjamin used to bite. They were sharp but sweet bites, sealed into my flesh to this day. My Benjamin would stick out his tongue and tease me, and sometimes he hid under the table and called in a chirping voice, “Mommy’s a mouse. Mommy has a tail.” Benjamin was mischievous. Without his mischief, I wouldn’t have known how much light there was in him. Sometimes I said to myself, Where is my mischievous one? There were days when I saw him in the midst of a field or among the open containers, the ladles, and the coarse words. He was present everywhere. I don’t like it when people bow and scrape. After kneeling and bowing down, a person is capable of dreadful actions. On Sunday, after prayers, they used to behead animals for the big meals.

“Why are you so quiet, Katerina? What are you thinking about?” The chief guard spoke to me in a motherly tone.

“I’m not thinking.”

“But something seems to be disturbing you. You can tell me. We no longer punish people for thoughts.”

“I have no complaints.”

They were afraid of me. One of the prisoners refused to sleep next to me, and when they forced her, she wept like a child who had been spanked. The chief guard’s scoldings were no use. In the end, she sat next to her and spoke softly: “You have nothing to fear. Katerina won’t do you any harm. Murderers only murder once, and after that they’re quiet and pleasant. I have lots of experience. Quite a few murderesses have been jailed here.” Strangely, those words calmed her, and she brought in her belongings and made the bed beside me.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

At the sound of my question her shoulders tensed, and she stepped back, saying, “Sophia.”

“Why are you scared?”

“I’m not afraid, I’m just shivering.”

You have nothing to fear, I wanted to tell her, but I knew my words would make her tremble even more.

“It’s hard for me to stop shivering. My body shivers by itself.”

“We mustn’t be afraid of each other,” I said for some reason.

“I’m not afraid anymore, but it’s hard for me to stop shivering. What can I do?”

Her face was disheveled and wrinkled. You could see that she had been afraid all her life. First, she had been scared of her mother and father, later, of her husband. In her great fear, she had tried to murder her husband. Now she was in jail and afraid of her cellmates. The chief guard didn’t spare her. She beat her, but not hard. She tortured her, not for her sins but for her fears. “You mustn’t be afraid of people, you understand?”

“I’m not afraid anymore,” she assured me.

“Don’t tell me you’re not afraid. You’re all fear.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she finally admitted.

“You have to say to yourself, There is God in heaven and He is the king of kings. He knows every secret and only Him do I fear. All the rest is illusion. Do you understand me?”

Sophia’s behavior was exceptional. The women prisoners usually accepted blows in silence, sat in solitary confinement without screaming, but there were days when the chief guard went out of her mind, casting dread on everyone, and then screams rose up to heaven.