The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

68 Yagina 1944

The days were long. Marek, the forest animal, went out to see his furry friends and sometimes didn’t return until just before dark, more often than not with scratched, empty hands. I was left alone, recounting island stories to the butterflies and writing long, imaginary letters to my mother that always ended with the same words: ‘I hope we meet again after the war, you, Dad and I, and move to the Svefneyjar islands together and live with Grandma and all the other people who dwell there.’ Still it never occurred to me to leave. How was I to know what might await me in the next neck of the woods? I’d seen enough destruction and disasters to know that no news was probably the best news. Sometimes I just sat on the cabin step and marvelled at the arrangement of the forest.

One day a dark figure appeared from the east end of the woodlands and waddled straight towards our cabin. I was alone at home, sitting on the threshold, carving, and I watched the black hump transform itself into a vagabond woman in a wide coat with flappy red cheeks. She approached with heavy steps and, without any greeting, plonked herself on a pile of wood and gasped, saying something in Polish that seemed to mean: ‘Oh dear, what a day.’ As casually as if she’d just got home. Fatigue makes sisters of us all.

She was an elderly woman and I couldn’t stop staring at her legs: her calves were swollen and of the same width all the way down to her ankles, like a telegraph pole, but her feet were tiny and her shoes almost invisible. It was as if she had worn her feet away from walking and now travelled across pastures and plains on her two remaining stumps. Her face was virtually wrinkle-free, violet red with thick, black eyebrows and sun-yellow teeth. Her hair was raven black but singed with silver around the ears, which protruded like rocks in a waterfall. She had broad features with high cheek bones but a hollow face between them. She had beautiful teeth, even though they were as crooked as hell. It was as if the Creator had intended to mould a beautiful face with his clay, but run into trouble when he was trying to get the teeth inside her mouth, and finally overdid it, by pressing his thumb too hard against them, without realising that he had caused the middle of the face to cave in. As a result, the woman had a completely flat profile with her nose concealed by jutting cheek bones.

In fact, the woman had a slightly oriental look, although she wasn’t from the Tundra countries. She said her name was Yagina Ekhaterina Volonskaya and was from the Grodno region in Belarus. Like a true country woman she expected me to be fully familiar with the area and her beloved farm, Volkonskaya, which was renowned all over the country for the quality of its hens and hay, although it had recently suffered from the fluctuations of the frontline. In one year the frontline had moved four times through her farm, which had meant eight different army shifts.

She seemed to have told this story many times because, although her German was limited, she managed to tell it swiftly and efficiently, with the help of some sign language through her black fingerless mittens.

First the Russians had come charging in, she said, speaking of them as a foreign nation. They’d burned down her granary. Then the Germans came attacking. They shot the cows and boiled the meat in their helmets. Then the Germans again. Kaputt! And they had pounced on her, the bastards. ‘That was pretty rough, but they were satisfied I think.’ Then the Russians came again, all jolly and victorious. And took away her good-for-nothing husband, Evgenij, but he wasn’t with them when they came back, then they took the hens and sucked the eggs out of them as they fled, but not before they had blown up the farmhouse by way of goodbye. Then the Germans were back again but then there was nothing left but some cabbage in the garden. Then they returned once more, but this time Yagina had hidden herself in a nearby ditch and missed out on the krauts’ retreat – no rape this time. Shortly after that, the Russians came darting through on their motorbikes. But one of them stopped to piss in the ditch and Yagina asked him when the front would be coming back to Volkonskaya again? Never, he’d replied, shaking his pecker and zipping up his fly. Then the old one got bored with nothing left to do but watch the cabbage grow so she decided to leave.

‘I’m on my way to America,’ she said, blowing through both nostrils. ‘Zhivago, to be more precise. Is the sea far from here?’

‘Erm… yes. I think so.’

‘Yes, I expected as much,’ she said. ‘Is that Germany?’ She then asked as she looked around and peered into some tree bark.

‘I don’t know. The instructions in the cabin are in German but there is… someone has carved Polska into the wall.’

‘I see. Everything is German today. Our land was German for two weeks. I was hoping it might yield more that way but couldn’t see any difference. The last time they left, my neighbour Fedor came and wanted to drink a toast while we still could, toast to the independence of Belorussia. He’s such a dreamer, you know, one of those… with his long beard and wonky legs. But the independence didn’t last very long. We barely managed to finish our glasses and there they were again, the Russians. Do you know how it’s going in the West?’

‘The West? No.’

‘They launched an offensive at the beginning of June. You not heard? No? They’re retreating, the Germans. Now I just need to squeeze myself through the Western Front and get me aboard a ship.’

‘Yes? But… but how’s it going in the east?’

‘There was a hell of a racket, booms and bangs. But they’re slowly gathering ground now, the Russians.’

‘Are the Russians winning?’ I asked, surprised and anxious. I never expected Dad to be on the losing side.

‘Yes, they’re getting there, but slowly. I managed to overtake them, even though I’m no race horse.’

‘Is the war almost over then?’

‘No, it’s only just started. Soon Hitler will have to put his helmet on. Have you seen him?’

‘Hitler? No… well, yes, I’ve seen his arm.’

‘His arm?’

‘Yes, I was in Munich when he drove through town.’

‘Hey, have you heard anything about my Vasily? Vasily Volonsky?’

‘No.’

She followed this with a long story about one of the most famous deserters of the war, a history I didn’t understand at the time, but would read about years later. Vasily Volonsky was a pilot in the Russian Air Force. At the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, launched by the Germans, he was dispatched along with nine others to fight them in the air. But because of an engine hiccup he lagged behind his comrades and watched the battle from afar: he witnessed nine aircraft being shot down in ninety seconds. Instead of being the tenth man to go down, he veered towards the north and headed for the coast, over the Baltic Sea to Sweden, which he knew to be a neutral country. There he landed on a tiny airfield in the woods and ordered them to refill his tank at gunpoint and then flew off again, over Norway and out across the Atlantic ocean, then north of Iceland and finally landed on the western coast of Greenland where he refuelled and accepted a seal steak from a frosty Danish couple. Then he took off again and flew over the Greenland glacier and half of Canada until he landed on the frozen Hudson Bay, abandoned the Russian plane on the ice and walked to the town of Churchill, jumped on a train and reached Chicago in two days, whereupon he just vanished into the crowd with water-combed hair.

That was why Yagina wanted to go there. The famous deserter was her son. She pulled out a letter from him, stamped 4.3.43 by the General Post Office of Chicago and showed it to me. Had she been travelling for a year then?

‘No, it’s not long since I left. I didn’t leave until the war had eaten my house and I was in the ditch. It was so damn boring living there alone and henless.’

I made the fire and put on some water, wanted to give her some forest tea, but she pulled out her own supplies, bread and ham, luxuries I hadn’t seen for months. I now realised there were fifteen extra pockets sewn into her coat, full of all kinds of goods. In one she even kept a small lantern and in the other, her post.

‘Do you need to send a letter to America?’ she asked.

‘Huh? No, but…’ All of a sudden I had an idea. ‘Maybe your ship will stop off in Iceland?’

She lent me a pen and paper. ‘Dearest Grandma and Grandad. I’m alive. I live in a forest with a boy called Marek. We are fine. But I want to go home…’ I got no further because I had started to weep. The travelling woman stood up with great effort and gasps and approached me. There was a strangely good smell from her, even though she looked dirty, a mystical fragrance of apples. She pressed herself down on the doorstep, drew me into her arms and I disappeared into her Belorussian embrace, vast, warm and soft. Her coat was unbuttoned and I could feel her hot breasts and some very friendly sweaty odour rose from her lap. My tears dribbled down the black material of her coat but I noticed that they fell off it like raindrops from a horse’s fur. Oh my, how sweet it was to rest in a woman.

Marek came home before dark and greeted the guest with the same suspicion he had shown me on that first day. They had problems understanding each other and finally stopped trying. We sat alone in silence, staring into the fire like three shattered nations.

I offered her my sleeping space but she told me she was no longer able to sleep lying down; since moving into the ditch she’d grown accustomed to sleeping up against something, did I have a wall, a cupboard? Otherwise she could just as easily sleep outside, she was well used to it.

‘For three nights I slept on a coal barge and snored all the way down the Neman River, from Masty to Hrodna. We came under fire, the captain and I, and he didn’t come out of it too well, poor thing, and I couldn’t steer a barge. Besides, the body in the wheelhouse had started to stink so I just settled down in the prow and watched the landscape and cows float by. But rarely have I slept better as in a bear’s lair close to Bialystok. There I dreamt that I was Catherine the Great and throwing parties in big palaces in the Kremlin and elsewhere, surrounded by handsome young soldiers I allowed to rock me every night. It was so cosy I spent an extra night there, even though I had no time for it. I’m on my way to America. Zhivago to be precise.’

She left the following day. I should have followed her, of course. But I didn’t feel up to it. Something held me back in the cabin. While Marek was sleeping on his Polish ears I watched Yagina limping between the tree trunks into the daybreaking woods, without ever turning, with fifteen full pockets and a sack, heading for Berlin. How did she keep her course? ‘Oh, I just let the sun push me on in the mornings and drag me to itself at night.’

I was missing her already.