Siberia (4 page)

My head was ringing. I managed to stand without crying, but my leg hurt very badly. But I wouldn’t beg. I tried to walk, with my head up.

“Stop favoring that leg, you little show-off.
March,
and be quick about it.”

I got myself across the yard and into the school. I remember seeing poor old Snory, a glowing image far away, standing by our miserable scuffed blackboard, shuffling a stub of chalk from hand to hand. Miss Malik fetched
the rule.

“Hold out your hands!”

I saw her furious face, looming down, and the loose skin on her throat all wrinkled like skin on porridge. I felt the first stroke, but not the second. I heard someone say
Rosita,
I don’t know who it was, and the world faded into nothing.

When I opened my eyes again I was in a bed.

My leg hurt, but everything was far, far away. There was a fat woman sitting by me, with a hard square face. She had a uniform, and a nurse’s cap on her head, so I knew I was in the hospital. “Mama?” I said. “Where’s my mama?”

“Yourmamawillbeallowedtovisityouatvisitingtime,” said the fat woman, in a grumbling, monotonous voice, all the words running together.

“When is visiting time?”

“Next week.”

I found out later that Mama had tried to rescue me. But I had been taken to the hospital from school, on Nicolai’s tractor, before she knew what had happened, and afterward she didn’t have a chance of getting me out. My kneebone was cracked, and my shinbone too. They weren’t bad breaks, they were what are called greenstick fractures: but the doctor didn’t treat them properly. He wrapped my whole leg in thick plaster, and made me stay in bed for weeks. He gave me medicine that made me sleepy and weak; and Mama had to increase her quota to pay toward my treatment.

Nobody trusted the Settlements Commission doctors, who traveled around the wilderness, visiting the useless Prison Settlements hospitals that were supposed to be a sign of how good the government was. Anyone who was really sick or hurt did their best to stay at home. There were women among the ordinary prisoners who knew about herbal medicines. In our Settlement there was also Mama, and Madame Imrat, and the proud gentleman who had been a surgeon: who would give good advice, at least. But I didn’t get any of that. I don’t expect the hospital doctor meant to cripple me. He just didn’t know much.

I was in a room with four beds called Children’s Orthopedic Ward. I could read the notice from my bed, and spent hours wondering about that strange long word. Most of the time I was alone. It was very cold, as winter came on, much colder than in the cupboard-bed I shared with my mama. I lay and watched the snow fall, and thought of the wilderness that stretched forever out there, like an endless dream. What about the great journey Mama had planned? How could I walk hundreds of miles? How could I cross the wilderness?

It would never happen now.

The end-of-winter blizzards were blowing when they let me go home. I could get about by then, though I had to use my ugly crutches. My right leg was like a thin white stick, with a strange bend in it. Mama helped me to practice, and soon I could walk fairly well. In March, on my birthday, I limped out to the potato patches on my own. It was tough, but I made it.

I sat among the dwarf willows, by the place where we had buried Nivvy. I thought about never being able to run, ever again. I was ten years old, but I felt a million years older. If only I had listened when Mama told me to let Rose get the high marks. If only I hadn’t been so proud. I saw my life stretching ahead of me, into the dim desert of being a big teenager, and I knew that Mama and I would never run away, that was just a daydream. I would live in the Settlement, in the dirt and cold, forever and ever. And now I was a cripple too.

The blackthorn hedge, that someone had planted out here for a windbreak, was half buried in spring snow: but there were flowers opening on some of the thorny twigs. Mama had told me that blackthorn is one of the trees that remember. It tries to live the way it did before the winters were so cold and so long. I thought of the sour little plums, called sloes, that people gathered to flavor their homemade liquor. That suits me, I thought. Stupid flowers that try to grow in winter. Bitter fruit.

I went back to school. My leg dragged, but nobody laughed at me as I limped to the seniors’ end. When I sat down, Storm reached across from the desk he shared with Soldier, and shoved a package of furry exercise-book paper into my hand. There was a piece of real chocolate inside; I don’t know where he’d got it from.

The smell was amazing.

“What do I have to do for this?” I asked, not looking at him.

“Nothing,” muttered Storm, not looking at me. “It’s . . . free.”

“I’m going to change my name,” I said, still not looking at him; or at Rose, silent on the other side of me. “You can tell the others, I’m going to call myself Sloe.”

I had no trouble in school after that. Not from Rose, or anyone else. I had become one of them, and they knew it. I had the same weight on my soul, the same hardness inside, that comes from living without hope.

Snory had sent my lessons to me, and visited me in the hospital when he was allowed, so I hadn’t fallen behind. I was always top of the class. Nobody minded after I came back with my crooked leg. Before the summer break that year, we seniors had to take a test. This was a new idea, nobody had tested Settlement children before. You had to stay in school until you were fourteen or fifteen, whether you were learning anything or not. Then if you were a girl you got a quota and started making nails, or you were sent to labor camp if you were a boy. That was the way it had been: but not anymore, apparently. No one told us what the test was about. Snory checked our papers before he sent them off to the Examining Board, and he got very excited. He said Rose and I were the best students he’d ever taught, and we were a credit to the Settlements Commission.

I wasn’t excited, but it hurt my feelings when Mama wasn’t proud of me for coming top. I heard her muttering about it with Madame Imrat, the old lady who had been an ambassador, who sometimes came to spend the evening with us. They were sighing as if I’d done something wrong, and looking at me with pity. But Mama didn’t say anything, and no one at school explained. The first thing I knew about what it meant was when Mama got a letter.

We hadn’t had a letter in six years. The outside world had been as if it didn’t exist (really the
inside
world. We were the ones outside, shut out from city comforts). I was with Mama when Nicolai, acting as Brigade Chief and not Nail Collector (he had several official positions), handed over the envelope. It was dirty and crumpled from traveling inside his clothes, but it had the Settlements Commission stamp on it. Mama’s face went completely white. Then she tore it open.

Dadda, I thought. My dadda—

I thought the letter would tell us that Dadda had died, in some other prison far away. . . . But it was about me. I had to go away to school, a
real
school, specially for the brightest and best of the Prison Settlements children. It was hundreds of miles away. I would have to leave my mama. I wouldn’t be allowed to come home, except for the long summer break.

* 3 *

One Warm, Still day
at the end of that summer, Mama made a picnic. We walked out beyond the potato patches, slowly because of my leg, into the marshy green plain which always looked wrong to me, as if snow and winter were the only clothes the wilderness should wear. Forest rimmed the edges of the sky, the sun was already lower than it had been. It was the farthest Mama had been from her workshop since the day we arrived. For six years her life had revolved entirely around our hut, the stores, and the potato patches.

Nicolai had graciously allowed Mama this holiday, because I was going away. I knew he’d also fined her many days’ pay (that’s what our Brigade Chief was like. He was quite kind in his own way, but if he did you a favor it cost you plenty). I tried to be happy, to make the expense worthwhile: I kept chatting about the birds and the flowers, and the sweet, fresh air. Mama was very quiet. We found some boulders, lost in the seeding grasses and rattling reeds, and settled there. There were midges, but we were used to that. She took out our picnic, I limped off looking for berries. When I came back she’d spread a napkin, and poured cold fruit tea into our beakers. I arranged cloudberries in a circle round the chunk of rye loaf, the pieces of concentrate “cheese,” the tomatoes, and the small, luxurious pot of jam. Far away in the distance a bird was calling, one note over and over, clear over the droning of insects.

“Does your leg hurt you?”

“No, it’s fine. It feels great.” (I was lying, a bit.) “Don’t worry, Mama. Kolya will put it on the records that you were allowed to have the day off. He wouldn’t take our scrip and then do nothing.” Kolya was short for Nicolai. . . . I didn’t
really
trust him, nobody official could be trusted. But I wanted to cheer Mama up.

Mama gazed around, opening her eyes wide, as if she was bathing them in the light and air. I saw that my beautiful mama looked older, and that hurt me. “It doesn’t matter, sweetheart. I won’t get into trouble. The red light is only there to keep us frightened. These days nobody cares if we make nails or not. . . . Our world is changing, Rosita. The supply trucks need more guards, and the supplies are getting very poor. Things nobody would have dared to say just a few years ago are being whispered: so that rumors even reach us here. I can’t tell if the changes will be good or bad, but maybe life won’t go on the same for much longer.”

Mama was the only person who called me Rosita now. I nodded. She’ll explain what she means later, I thought. When I’m older.

Then we ate our picnic, and talked as happily as we could about my new school, and how we’d get me the things I would need. “Underwear without holes in it,” said my mama, wistfully. “I wish I could send you away with underwear that didn’t have holes in it. . . .” I would have loved a new pencil sharpener. The light grew pearly and the air grew chill. We knew we should be getting back, but we lingered on, our cheerful talk falling into silence.

At last Mama said, “My sweetheart, do you understand that if I’m not here when you come back,
you are the guardian
?”

“I’m coming back next summer,” I whispered.

I had been getting excited, as the summer went by. I wanted to go to a real school, away from these mud huts, and have a chance in life. But oh, I didn’t want to leave her. I wanted never to leave her, I wanted my Nivvy back, I wanted everything. My eyes started stinging, my mouth trembled, I blundered into her arms. We sat there rocking each other, heartbroken.

“It won’t happen,” said Mama. “It
won’t. . . .
But if you come back and I’m not here, you must do exactly what I’ve taught you. Keep the Lindquists safe, grow them and harvest them, keep the seed refreshed, and live quietly in our hut until—”

“Until you come back?”

Mama went on hugging me. “Of course, yes. Until I come back to fetch you.”

“And then we’ll take the Lindquists to the city where the sun always shines?”

“They say it’s a wonderful place,” said Mama. “There are green parks and fountains, and indoor farms like beautiful gardens. We could be so happy there.”

I had forgotten my first home, and I’d stopped believing that cities were wonderful. I thought of a huge Settlement with a roof of some kind over it: full of people like Rose and Rose’s mother, living in luxury on their ill-gotten gains while the rest of us starved. It was Mama herself who’d made me realize that the way the privileged people “inside” behaved was wrong
. . . .
But I could hear the longing in her voice, so I said nothing. For Mama, getting back to the city still meant everything.

“But if by any chance I can’t come back,” persisted Mama, “I will try to send someone to help you, so you won’t have to make the journey alone. Remember, you have to travel in winter. No one can travel in the summer.”

“North,” I said. “Across the wilderness, through the forest to the sea.”

We packed up our meager picnic and walked back, each of us pretending hard to believe the fairy tale, each of us saying only the things the other wanted to hear.

Late that night we went into the workshop for my last magic lesson.

It was past time to grow the Lindquists again. Mama had planned to grow them the winter before, but I’d been ill in the hospital and then getting better at home. And then it had been spring and summer: which were the wrong seasons for sowing these strange seeds. My hands were bigger than they had been. I could put on the clinging, glimmery gloves that were folded up in the white envelopes; though they were still overlarge. I could put one of the gauze masks over my nose and mouth.

Mama watched carefully, as I prepared the dishes of new-treat all on my own, and added the seed powder. I watched for the signs of life, then I fitted the six tiny dishes into their places in the bottom half of the nutshell, and stretched the barrier my mama called the incubator membrane over them. When the shell was closed and sealed, we put everything away and I repeated my roll call, glowing inside because I knew I’d done everything exactly right. I repeated the strange names of the orders; I described the different kinds of animals
. . . .

“The nutshell will grow as the kits grow,” I said.

“Incubator,”
murmured my mama.

“I should look at them often, and I should handle them when I have learned to handle them safely. If you’re friendly to them that helps them to grow, and it will remind them that I am the guardian, so they’ll trust me. They get enough food from the new-treat to grow into kits, but if you’re growing a kit into a full-grown animal, you have to feed it extra. When the nut—er, incubator is about as big as an apple, the Lindquists will get sleepy. One day I’ll look inside and find they’ve shrunk and curled up in their dishes again, and turned into cocoons. They can’t make a mistake. They know which dish is theirs, because it has traces of them in it. Then I powder up the cocoons, and put them in fresh tubes, with the right colored caps. But I don’t throw the old tubes away until I’ve tested the new seed, by letting a Lindquist kit of each kind go through its full expression.”

There was a store of extra tubes in the base of the white case, with the packs of extra gloves and new-treat, and the cleaning powders.

“You can’t tell how long
. . . ,
” prompted my mama.

“You can’t tell how long it will take for the kits to live and die, or to go into second stage, which is a real wild animal like Nivvy. It depends on many factors.”

“When you test them to the second stage you must be careful—”

“Not to distress them, because if you do they will express everything. They have instructions packed inside them, although they are so small, for making lots of different kinds of animals. You ought to check that they’re all there, to make sure the Lindquist is working properly. But we can’t do it because we are in hiding. It wouldn’t be safe
. . . .
That’s why we didn’t distress Nivvy. He was always happy. Why wouldn’t it be safe, Mama?”

“Ah,” said Mama. “Well, strange things, marvelously strange things, happen to the Lindquists at full expression
. . . . Artiodactyla
is big, but Nivvy is a special case. Be
very
careful about distressing the
Carnivora
kit, should you ever second-stage him.”

“I’m not going to second-stage them,” I said, uneasily. “I’m going to school. Next summer I’ll come home, and you will be here, and you’ll teach me lots more.”

“Yes,” said Mama. “That’s how it’s going to be. But
suppose
I wasn’t here, you do understand everything, don’t you, Rosita? You know what the Lindquists are, and what you have to do, and why they are so important?”

“Of course I do.”

I said it to please her. My mind wasn’t really on the kits at all
. . . .
I was thinking about the heartbreak of leaving Mama, and the excitement of my new school. But I put everything away while she watched me, and I did it all exactly right. The next night we opened the nutshell, and six tiny creatures stared up at me, already clad in brown fur, with shining pinhead eyes and quivering almost-invisible whiskers. The delight came back to me then. I felt all-powerful, and full of love.

“Well done,” said Mama. “I’ll harvest them for you this time. Next time we grow them you’ll be a great big teenager, and do it all yourself.”

My Lindquists were still alive, sleek and playful in their miniature kingdom, when it was time for me to leave. Mama had tried to get a voucher for the tractor ride so she could come with me to the train platform: but Nicolai had told her it wasn’t allowed, because she was a
peepee
. I sat in the metal cart by myself, with the bag that held my clean and mended clothes, and as much extra food as Mama had been able to put together. I waved until she was out of sight: then I crouched there and stared, as Nicolai’s tractor jolted me through the ruts and the mud of summer’s end, until all sign of our Settlement had vanished over the horizon.

The New Dawn Rehabilitation College stood on the edge of a town that was just another Prison Settlement, much bigger than ours, and not so remote. I had traveled there over four days, with the guards who had been waiting for me at the train platform: sleeping in station huts and on hard railway carriage benches. I never found out what the town was like, I only glimpsed it on the way from the station.

New Dawn had formerly been a hospital. The buildings were low and gray, and surrounded by a very tall fence. The corridors smelled of disinfectant and the wardens, who were in charge of us except for lessons, wore nurses’ uniforms. Mama needn’t have worried about my underwear. Everything I’d brought with me, including my extra food, was taken away as soon as I arrived. I was scrubbed, deloused, had my hair cropped, and was given my junior school uniform: a dull red dress and a round cap, scratchy gray drawers to below my knees, gray socks, indoor shoes, outdoor shoes; gray underwear. Then I was taken to my dormitory by a white-coated warden, with a clanking chain of keys, who kept unlocking doors ahead, and locking them behind. I was given a bed, and I was told some of the most important rules, which all started
Don’t
, or
It is forbidden
.

Before the end of the first day I wished with all my heart that I had failed the stupid test, so I could have stayed with Mama. We weren’t allowed to use the word
prison
, or say we were at prison school. We were being rehabilitated now. But New Dawn felt more like a prison than the Settlement ever had.

The idea of having a school for Settlement children was quite new, but this wasn’t the first year of New Dawn. It was just that remote areas, like the place where Mama and I lived, had taken a while to catch up. There were already seniors who looked down on the juniors, and traditions and special words that you had to learn quickly, if you knew what was good for you. Juniors were Bugs, in red and gray. If you were over fourteen, you were a Rat and your uniform was brown. The teachers were Gulls, the guards were Dogs, and the wardens were Cats. I’d been afraid people would pick on me, because of my crooked leg, but about the only good thing I found out in the first few days was that lots of juniors—and seniors—had something wrong with them, and I was far from being the worst off. I was assigned to a physiotherapy class. They screwed a brace onto my leg, to straighten it where the front shinbone had knit badly (there was nothing they could do about my knee); and put me on vitamin pills, because I was undersized and my teeth wobbled. I also had to join the line for malt extract, a disgusting brew that the dormitory Cat spooned into us weakling girls, night and morning.

At mealtime hundreds of new Bugs with stick-thin gray legs poured into the junior canteen and sat down in roaring confusion, to eat the food that had been dumped on our plates by the dinner Cats. When I saw the fibrous brown stuff on my plate, I rammed it into my mouth without a thought: everyone else was doing it. Too late, I found my mouth was full of tough, slimy string. Or tree bark, mixed with glue. I chewed and I chewed, and nothing changed. I didn’t mind the taste (most food was nasty, in my experience; except for what you grew yourself). But I couldn’t swallow! The wardens were patrolling, and I knew you had to clear your plate or you were in serious trouble. My panic must have shown in my bulging face.

“It’s
meat,
” said the boy beside me, softly. “Stick it in your cheek, and bite off little lumps.That’s the way to do it.”

“It isn’t real,” I muttered, when I’d managed to reduce the wad. We weren’t supposed to talk at meals. “I’ve tasted meat, and it tastes nothing like this.”

“I’d never seen meat in my life,” said the boy. “Until I got here. What d’you mean, it isn’t real? It’s not imaginary.”

“I mean real meat, like from an animal.”

The boy laughed. “Eat up, joker girl. This is the best food you can have for getting strong, and you’ll need your muscle, with that crippled leg.”

I looked at him properly then. He was dead white in the face, his hair was furry-short and dark, and his eyes were rain colored, with thick black lashes. He was skinny as a string bean, and he looked about my age (he was a year older).