CHAPTER TWENTY
The woman the others called Nasha brought to mind a vision of an obscenely fat toad. Stiff black hairs bristled from the warts on her multiple chins, her arms creased at the joints like columns of boneless brawn, and her piglike eyes darted constantly this way and that in their fleshy slits, pouring disapproval on everything they surveyed. “They’re not even half done yet,” she scolded as she waddled up to deposit another wire basket full of dirty crockery and cutlery on top of the one that Paula hadn’t had a chance to empty yet. An odor of stale perspiration accompanied her. “There’s more to come, and after that the floor needs doing. What’s the matter—haven’t you ever worked before in your life? I suppose you always had oppressed blacks to take care of you in America, eh? Well, here it’s different. Everyone works to eat.” She bustled away with a final remark in Russian that Paula didn’t catch.
Paula lifted a stack of plates from the basket into the sink full of hot, greasy water and poured in more detergent. The scum coated her arms, and her hair clung to her forehead in the clammy air. Her hands were sore, because the gloves they’d given her had holes in them. “There are no others available.” Couldn’t we get some? “That is impossible”—the eternal Russian answer to everything. They could build an artificial world in space with materials mined from the Moon, but they couldn’t make a dishwasher that worked. Why couldn’t the dishwasher be fixed? “That is impossible.” Why? “It is impossible.”
They had brought her to a place on the edge of the urban zone called Novyi Kazan—the women’s section of what was apparently a sizable detention facility located below the surface. After a degrading physical examination and search during the admission process, she had been issued a two-piece tunic of light gray and a few personal effects, and brought to a barred cell that held seven other women in addition to herself. They ate and slept there, and the few amenities they enjoyed were brought there. Life alternated between the cell and the workplace, which in Paula’s case meant the same hot, noisy kitchens for ten hours a day, and the drab-paneled corridors that she walked through from one to the other. She longed to be back in solitary. At least on her own she’d had time to think.
“What do you call this? Do you call this clean?” The toad was back again. “You have to press harder to wipe off the grease. Are people expected to eat off this? What’s the matter—are you worried your arms might ache?”
“The detergent is almost gone. It needs more detergent.”
“There is no more detergent.”
“Why can’t we get some more?”
“That is impossible.”
“Why?”
“It is impossible.”
She ate alone at one end of the cell’s single table, doing her best to ignore the taunts that the novelty of having an American among them provoked from the rest of the company.
“What is the matter with her this evening, do you think?”
“Her hands are chapped. Can’t you see her hands? Obviously she’s not used to working.”
“Why not? Doesn’t anyone work in America?”
“Well, of course somebody has to work. The blacks work, and the oppressed classes work, for their capitalist masters.”
“Then, she must be a capitalist.”
“A capitalist’s princess daughter—much better than the likes of us.”
“Sophisticated, you see.”
“Very noble and haughty.”
“It won’t do her much good here, though, will it?” Giggling.
“Hey, is that right, Princess? Is your father a capitalist? Did you grow up in a big mansion with silk sheets and servants to wipe your nose for you?”
“And her behind!” Shrieks of laughter.
“Now you know how much fun it was for your servants.”
“In Russia, everyone wipes their own nose.”
A small washroom containing two basins and a single, unscreened toilet bowl opened off the rear of the cell. Paula was attempting to clean off the day’s grease with lukewarm water and the gritty, seemingly unlatherable soap provided, with Katherine, a thinly built Byelorussian with long black hair and pale skin, came in. Katherine had a comparatively reserved disposition bordering on aloofness, and said little; but her eyes had a studied look as they took in the surroundings, and her words when she did speak were those of a person with a different background from most of the others. She hung her towel on one of the hooks behind the door and set down a plastic bag that she had been carrying. From it she took a piece of soap, a toothbrush, a tin of tooth powder, and a comb, and then turned on the faucet without saying anything. The faucet shuddered violently, hissed with the release of trapped air, and then began emitting a trickle of yellowish water. Water in the colony was supposed to be recycled through a closed ecological system. Sometimes Paula wondered.
The soap Katherine had laid out was whiter and creamier looking than the gray cake that Paula was holding. Paula looked at it, then she shifted her eyes to catch Katherine’s in the metal mirror and inclined her head. “Where did you get that?”
“It was issued.”
“I got this. Why is it different?”
“Oh . . . sometimes it varies. If the storewoman has preferences . . .”
“Some people are favored, you mean.”
“You have to be accepted.”
“And I take it I’m not.”
“She maybe has something against Americans.”
“But not just her.”
Katherine shrugged and hung her shirt and pants next to the towel. Paula carried on scrubbing her arms in silence for a while. Then she said, “Can I talk to you, Katherine?”
“I cannot prevent you from talking.”
“There’s something I don’t understand. Look, why do Russians believe all that propaganda? I mean, they’ve got eyes, haven’t they? They’ve got brains—they can think. Surely you people don’t believe everything they tell you about us. I mean . . .” Paula made a helpless gesture in the air. “After a hundred years of it, you must know . . . Our politicians tell us stupid things about Russians, too, but we know that’s just the way they are. We might not like everything the Soviet system stands for, but we don’t confuse that with the people. We don’t have anything against you as individuals.”
“You talk about having eyes and brains, and about people, but it is you who serve the system that crushes people.”
“But that’s not true. The things they tell you aren’t true. People are free under our system. It’s—”
“Then, that makes it even worse. If you had no choice because you were forced to be slaves, that would be oppression. But if you are free and choose to be slaves . . . And it is us who you say are propagandized?”
Paula shook her head wearily. “You really believe that every American is hostile to all Russians?”
“America is the heart of capitalism. It is inevitable that the capitalists must try to destroy progressive socialism before they themselves are swept away. Our priority has always been to defend ourselves against this. It had to be. Look how many times you have attacked us. . . . And you accuse us of hostility!”
Paula stared at her bemusedly. “We attacked? . . . I don’t understand. What are you talking about? No Western nation has ever attacked you—except Hitler, and then we were all on the same side. No Western democracy ever attacked Russia.”
“You see, they lie to you,” Katherine said. “In the very first year of the nation, in the summer of 1918, the capitalists sent their armies into Russia in an attempt to help treacherous counterrevolutionary forces destroy the new Soviet state. Is that not attacking us?”
History had never been one of Paula’s consuming passions. She shook her head. “I don’t know. . . .I guess I never really looked into that particular period.”
Katherine nodded. “There, you see. Yes, American, British, French, Japanese, they all came. You didn’t know? And even after Russia had been weakened by four years of war in Europe and then torn apart by the Revolution, still the people’s Red Army was invincible. And then you say Hitler was not one of you, because you are the democracies. But it was the so-called democracies that rearmed Germany and allowed Hitler to rise, so they could send him against Russia to fight the war for them that they were too cowardly to fight themselves. They tried to start a war that they would wriggle their way out of like worms, but they underestimated Stalin.”
“I’m not so sure about that. I—”
“Pah! What do you know? You know nothing. And then, when the tiger they had tried to ride about-turned, it was Russia that killed it and saved them. And then it was Russia that drove the Japanese invaders out of China and ended the war. Russia has always defended countries that were invaded. After the war, you Americans and your puppets tried to invade Korea. And you tried to invade the Middle East, you tried to invade Cuba, you tried to invade Vietnam.”
Paula stared. “You mean that’s what they teach?”
Katherine shook her head uncomprehendingly. “And you say we have never been attacked, that we are being paranoid. You think you are victimized, and wonder why. It is we who have always been attacked.”
Paula sighed. “I don’t know, your propaganda, our propaganda . . . Who’s to say what’s right? But neither one of us is responsible for whatever really goes on. Why should any of it affect us here, personally? In here of all places, I’d have thought we had enough in common to outweigh all that, whatever the real story is.”
Katherine looked at her coldly. “The reason I’m in here is that my loyalty is in question,” she said. “I used to have a husband. He went to London with a Soviet trade mission, and while he was there he met a reporter from a New York art magazine, and she seduced him. The Americans let him return with her, and now they are living down there somewhere with a family. So, you see, Princess, I do not exactly have strong reason to be fond of Americans, American women in particular, and especially American women journalists. Does that answer your question?”
Paula lay in the dark, clutching the coarse blanket around her and staring up into the black shadow of the bunk above. She was picturing teenage days of sailing among the islands in Puget Sound, the shining towers of downtown Seattle across the water, and the Olympic Mountains, green in the sunlight, rich with recent rain. As she thought back, she wondered what had become of the self-assurance and single-mindedness that she thought she had learned from her mother, Stephanie. With Paula’s father being so long away at sea, and having come from a naval family before that, Stephanie had always been in control of herself and her life. She’d socialized a lot and thrown lots of parties. There was always a stream of visitors calling at the house. Hence, for Paula, learning to assert herself with people around had been simply another part of growing up. One thing that had made an impression on her, she remembered, was her mother’s adroitness in handling the advances—usually tactful, but sometimes crude—that an attractive woman left on her own for long periods of time was subjected to by the men who came to the house. Ever since then she’d tended to regard men as polarizing into two groups: either they were strong, or they were weak; they were either smart, or stupid; worth getting to know, or not worth wasting time on. She could respect the ones who met her standards . . . but there weren’t many of them. When she was about fifteen, by which time they had moved to the East Coast, she remembered one of those intimate mother-daughter conversations, in which Stephanie had confided that, yes, sometimes she had gone along with those propositions when Paula was younger—with discretion, naturally. Intrigued, Paula had wanted to know which ones. Stephanie mentioned a couple of names, and Paula had found that she approved the choices. Instead of feeling indignation as she had half expected, she had found her mother to be a suddenly far more human and exciting person.
“Hello, American Princess,” a voice whispered from nearby. “Are you awake?”
Paula turned her head and made out a figure crouched by the bunk in the darkness. “Who is it?”
“It is I, Dagmar.” Dagmar was an East German girl, about the same age as Paula, auburn-haired, not unattractive, with a firm, shapely body and freckled face.
“What do you want?”
“To say hello—to be friends. Is not right they all mean to you like this. I think is not Princess’s fault if world can’t get along, yes? So I come, make good. We can be friends together, yes?”
Paula blinked sleepily—she had been farther gone than she’d realized. “Why not? . . . Maybe.”
She sensed the face coming closer in the darkness. There was alcohol on the other woman’s breath. “Yes, Dagmar and Princess can be good friends. No sense to fight . . .”
Paula felt the blanket being lifted and the hand sliding softly over her breast. “Fuck off!” She knocked the hand away sharply, pulled the blanket back around her neck, and turned away.
“Stuck-up bitch!” Dagmar’s voice hissed.
Paula heard her straighten up and stamp away to the far end of the cell. Peals of female laughter came through the darkness a moment later. “What, Dagmar, no luck? What did we tell you?”
“Der Seicherin! That’s it. She can rot for all I care now.”
“How much did we say you owe me, Dagmar? Or would you rather climb in here instead and call it quits?”
Paula pulled the blanket around her face and put everything out of her mind but sleep.