Ice Trilogy (81 page)

The iron machine flies across the night sky, chasing the night. It flies west. During the night it must circle the entire planet Earth, manage to do it in one night. All the brothers and sisters are sleeping now. While they are immobile. While they are
visible
. While millions of meat machines are asleep. While millions of meat machines are immobilized. While they can be picked out.

Shining
are two hearts above;
shining
are thousands below.

Khram and Gorn
see
.

They
see
EVERYONE.

They
recognize
each one.

The head of the flying machine works. It remembers. The machine flies west. The countries of meat machines float under it. And the hearts of sleeping brothers and sisters flare like points of fire. Those who have remained in the violent and ruthless world of the Earth. Whose hearts are sleeping. Who must still be saved, torn out of the meat of earthly life. Returned to the world of Eternal Light. Acquired for the Great Transformation. For the Great Victory. For the Great Return to the Primordial Light.

The iron machine flies through the night sky. It flies around the entire Earth from east to west. It hurries after the night. It carries a glass sphere across the sky. The Earth of meat machines sleeps. And knows not what awaits it.

Olga’s
workmate cut the 1,128th strap from dog hide with crude iron scissors. It slid across the metal table and Olga caught it, used her left hand to press the rib spur down, and began to clean off the black fur stuck to the skin. Her co-worker, a blue-eyed, broad-shouldered Norwegian named Kristina, stole a glance at the clock.

“It’s already five of.”

Olga didn’t want to look at the clock: after a week of work in the Friends of Dead Bitches Society, she had lost any sense of time. In her head time either stretched out and crawled like a snail along the stone banister of Mama’s house in Newark, or raced ahead like the train from Newark to New York, where Olga had first gotten her degree in economics, then an MBA, then lived in NoHo in a small loft near the university, a cozy loft with two windows facing south and two facing north, a loft on the sixth floor, a loft where there were books, little statues, knickknacks, Papa’s Arab and European pictures, Mama’s music collection, a large stuffed tiger she slept with, and the parrot Fima who could say “lo-co-mo-tive,” and whom she would never, ever hear agai
n...

“Begone!”

Having cleaned the strap, she swept the fur into a garbage bag and placed the finished strips in a transparent box. Each box like this could hold five hundred strips. In one day she and her co-worker were supposed to fill two of these boxes. For two days now Olga and Kristina had exceeded the quota, for which they were to receive a bonus. Having finished cutting the strips, Kristina placed the dog hide in a special bag and set about wiping the scissors, which were crusty with dog blood, with a rag. Olga sealed the transparent box of strips, walked over to the wall, and pressed a button; a white niche opened up. Olga put the box in it and pressed the button again. The niche closed. Returning to her work station, Olga took off the canvas apron and hung it on a hook. She sprayed disinfectant on the metal table and began wiping it clean with a paper towel.

The bell signaling the end of the working day sounded.

Olga glanced over at the other end of the shop: Bjorn was wiping his table and talking to his neighbor. Both were smiling.

“He has the energy for humor.” Olga sighed, and tossed the paper towel into the trash.

Kristina put the scissors and knife away in the table’s metal drawer, rose, and, taking off her gloves, stretched and groaned with relief.

“Blessed Virgi
n...
that’s it!”

“The end of a rotten business,” Olga muttered, throwing her gloves into the bin.

“The day is over, thank God,” a plump Danish peasant girl with a fabulous blond braid who worked at the next table said to them with a tired smile.

“Yeah, yeah,” yawned her co-worker, a rough, masculine Polish woman. “If only all their damned ice would melt tomorro
w...
melt!”

“Do you mean the company or the ice?” Olga asked, as she rubbed her neck.

“The one the other!” the Polish woman answered in her awkward English.

They all laughed in exhaustion and strolled toward the women’s showers, while the men, talking to one another, wandered off to shower too. The guards let them all stream out into the hallway, opened the doors to the showers, admitted them, and locked the doors behind them. One hundred and eighty-nine people worked in the Friends of Dead Bitches Society. There were more women — a hundred and four. As an old-timer of the bunker, the Australian, Sally, explained to Olga, this was because after the blows from the ice hammers women survived more often than men. Sally was number 8. She had spent four years in the bunker and was the senior female. The head of the men was the stooped Horst, who wore glasses and had been abducted by the Brotherhood back in East Berlin. He had been brought to the bunker six years ago. According to him, nine people worked there at the time.

Olga found her hook with the number 189, the last in the long dressing room, took off her clothes, which smelled of dog, pulled off her socks and underwear, and walked across the warm tiles to enter the showers with the crowd of naked women. A light steam filled the room, and ten lines formed around ten showers. Everyone took a turn under the shower. Olga got in line behind a small, plain girl with dark-blond, tousled hair. The girl stood, her lackluster, slightly bulging blue eyes vacantly staring at the nape of the woman ahead of her who was laughing, telling a joke to two other women in an unknown language.

“Albanian? Moldavian?” Olga thought without energy. “Are there really three of them? There aren’t any Russian women here at all. Nine Americans. Fourteen Germans. Ten French, it seemed. Swedes — twenty-five in all. I’m the only Jew. Russians and Jews the weakest women? Forgotten how to survive? It’s strang
e..
.”

On the other hand, in the men’s section, there were seven Russians. And they were all fairly nice guys. One of them was a former athlete, another a chef, the third a professional thief, the fourth some kind of bureaucrat. And all of them cheerful. Olga thought of them with warmth: she liked to sit with these guys after her shower and talk in the forgotten language of her childhood.

“
Dozhdik dozhdik, kap, kap, kap
.” Rain, rain, drip drop, drip drop, she muttered in Russian, and licked her lips nervously: she really wanted to smoke. But that was possible only in the bunker.

“Are you American?” the woman standing behind her asked in an unusually muffled voice.

“Why, do I look like one?” Olga turned around and saw a swarthy, svelte woman of about forty-five with a terribly deformed chest.

An intricate purple-white cavity yawned in the area of her breastbone; the right breast was missing; the collarbone, broken in two place, had grown back bent into a half circle. Nevertheless, the woman was truly beautiful: a well-proportioned, stately figure, Indian cheekbones, light-chestnut hair with gold highlights, and dark-blue, deep-set eyes.

“Wow! They really gave it to you.” Olga stared at the cavity.

“Nineteen blows,” the woman said in a flat voice.

Her breathing was fast and shallow, and her narrow nostrils flared. The cavity moved in time with her breath, as though she were breathing in the humid steam of the shower room.

“Liz Cunnigan, Memphis,” said the woman, holding out her dark hand.

“Olga Drobot, New York.” Olga shook her hand.

“Olga? Are you Polish?”

“A Russian Jew.”

“Are you brand new?”

“Well, not entirely. I’ve been here a week. And you?”

“My sixth month.”

“Yikes. Are you used to it?” Olga kept glancing at the moving cavity, the edge of which was covered in drops of sweat.

“People get used to everything.” Liz’s eyes looked at her calmly. “Do you play with anyone?”

“Yes. And you?”

“I’m with the Swedes.” Liz smiled slightly. “Come over to our Swedish corner. It’s nice there.”

“The Americans aren’t bad, either.” Olga stood under an available shower, remembering that she had never seen Liz at the American corner. “I’ll come over sometime. Thanks.”

The hot water embraced her body pleasantly. Olga moaned with pleasure, leaning back her head and putting her face under the stream of water. But she had to wash up quickly. Letting the water flow over her, she bent her head under a plastic faucet, and pulled down on a small handle. A silvery drop of shampoo dripped on her head like snot. She squeezed out a second on her palm, rubbing the shampoo between her legs, under her arms, and over her breasts. Then, turning to face the queue, she let the stream run down her back and washed her hair. For the first few days, she always looked at the wall when she showered, turning away from the line, not wanting to share this short-lived pleasure, not even a glance, with anyone. Now she liked to look at the naked women waiting their turn. They were all waiting. And in this waiting there was something helpless and inexpressibly intimate and dear. They all had marks on their chests, they had all tasted the ice hammer, they had all survived, they had all been lured here, under the ICE, and they were all like her. The estrangement of the first days had passed. Olga stopped feeling shy and wild. She had already grown accustomed to it.

Olga put her soapy head under the shower and washed the foam off her hair. She put her thigh under the water and began to wash it with her hands.

“Any dog fur grown in yet?” Liz asked and the Norwegians standing in the nearby line laughed.

“It’s more likely bitch tits will grow in.” Olga grinned, washing her crotch and glancing at Liz’s one neat nipple. “The only problem is who to nurse?”

“What do you mean who? The Chinese!” said a Norwegian, laughing.

“There’s not enough milk for all of them,” Liz objected calmly.

Everyone roared with laughter. There was a certain comfort and freedom in this laughter. A certain oblivion. Olga liked standing under the streams of warm water and listening to the laughter. It allowed her to forget about everything for a moment. She closed her eyes.

“Sweetie, speed up!” others in line shouted.

Olga came to. It was time to hand over her place of
natural
oblivion. She left the water, shook herself off, and headed for the exit. A Czech girl slapped her rear end and whistled at her. Kristina winked and poked a finger at her wet stomach. Olga, laughing, shook a fist at them as she walked by. Leaving the showers for the changing room, she took a thin but clean towel from her hook, rubbed her hair, then her body. Leaving her gray working clothes on the upper hook, she took down the “inside” outfit, a sand-colored pair of pajamas with the number 189 on the shoulders, and put it on. She took a short brush from the breast pocket and brushed her dyed hair while looking in a round mirror attached to the wall between the hooks. She observed that her natural reddish hair was already quite noticeable at the roots. Sticking her socks and underwear in a pocket, she put on her slippers and went into the cafeteria through an adjoining door.

The spacious, calm, light-green cafeteria contained all of the prisoners in the bunkers. It smelled like boiled vegetables, and the same light classical music played. Men and women, coming out of the showers, lined up together for food. Olga looked for Bjorn in the crowd but couldn’t find him: he was probably still washing. However, she immediately noticed the Russians, who had a lively conversation going. She walked over to them.

“Ah, here’s our Stakhanovite!” said Sergei, a tall guy with a white-toothed smile and a shock of smoky-blond hair.

“What’s a Stakhanovite?” asked Olga.

“It’s a worker who massively exceeds quotas,” explained Lyosha, a chubby fellow with a round child’s face and lively, dark-blue eyes.

“Forgotten Russian in that America of yours, have you?” grinned Boris, a homely, thin man. “Go on, get in ahead of us.”

“I don’t remember all the words,” said Olga, getting in line in front of them.

“Well, that’s as it should be,” said the unsmiling Igor, gloomily scratching his unshaved cheek. “There’s all kinds of bullshit in Russia
n..
.”

“Now, you blockhead, don’t go insulting Russia,” said the earthy, fiery-red-haired Pyotr, poking him in the stomach. “I’ll friggin’ lay you flat, don’t you worry!” he said in a comically threatening voice.

“Get lost, Azazello,” said Igor, shoving him in reply.

“Gentlemen, don’t quarrel. We’re on enemy territory,” said Sergei in a pretend official voice, and they all laughed tiredly.

Olga looked at them with a smile. The Russians here in the bunker reminded her of her childhood on the outskirts of Moscow. Along with their words and jokes, the world of her earliest memories surfaced: gray prefab buildings, filthy snowdrifts at the entrance, kindergarten with a potted palm and songs about the little creature Cheburashka and Lenin, her hurried, frantic mother, her stubborn, incredibly talented, and very loud father, her sick grandfather, the “Red October” upright piano, strep throat and the customary Russian New Year’s tree, the neighbor’s cat Bayun, the first grade of Soviet school, the second, the third, the game of rubber bands at recess. And emigration.

After that — it was only memory.

For some reason, here in the bunker, Olga cherished first memories more than other memories. Distant and lost in the twilight as they were, it was more pleasant and comforting to fall asleep to these memories of snowdrifts, cats, and strep throat.

Their turn in line had come. Two Chinese in white coats furnished her tray with the usual food: vegetable soup, a boiled egg with mayonnaise, rice, cabbage salad, two pieces of cold fish in tomato sauce, Jell-O with whipped cream, and a glass of orange juice. Picking up the tray, Olga moved to the third Chinese standing between two pans with the main course. On the left was fish, on the right chicken fingers. Olga chose the fish, and tray in hand, walked toward the Russian table. Three people sat there. But then someone from the American table called her name. A tall, golden-haired fellow, slightly resembling Bjorn, stood and gestured for her to come over. The Russian table was also actively waving at he
r...
Olga halted indecisively, not knowing which to prefer — the forgotten, dimly familiar, but touching Russian world or the well-known, comprehensible, and reliable American.