Katerina (16 page)

It was as if my memory plunged deep within me, but I took in the motions and grating noises that happened around me very well. And I also noticed that the bars of the cell were thick but not close together.

I managed to take off my shoes. My ankles also proved to be swollen, but not excessively. I remembered that my mother used to say, “Katerina tears her socks so that they can’t be darned anymore. I’ve already gotten tired of telling her that she’s not allowed to crawl on the floor.” I was three then, my father and mother still talked to each other, and my mother, for some reason, complained about me, a fond complaint, and I was glad that my mother loved me.

Later, a policeman approached and stood at the door of the cell. He seemed gigantic. He looked at me the way one looks at an unruly cow and ordered, “Get up, murderess.” Hearing his voice, I got up on all fours, but it wasn’t in my power to rise. He saw clearly that I was trying to get up, but my efforts seemed insufficient, and he beat me with his club. The blow was strong and knocked me over.

“What do you want from me?” I said.

“Don’t talk to me like a human.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t play the innocent. Talk like a murderess, understand?”

Then two men came and hoisted me up and put me in a lighted room. The sight of my face was, apparently, horrifying. They stood at a distance from me and spoke in Romanian. I didn’t understand a word. One of the policemen addressed me in Ruthenian, asking, “Why did you kill him?” I don’t remember what I answered. They, apparendy, slapped my face and kicked me. I fell, and they kept kicking me. I didn’t scream, and that drove them mad. In the end they brought me back to the cell. I don’t know how many days I was kept away from the light of day. The darkness in the cell was great. All that time I felt that I was being swept away in a broad, deep river. Black waves covered me, but I, with a fish’s gills, overcame the drowning. When I managed to open my eyes, I saw it was the Prut River; its flow heavy and red.

20

I
WAS TRANSFERRED TO
the prison on Sunday. Bells rang, and an autumn sun flooded the streets. Two armed gendarmes led me, and from every side people pointed: the monster. I was empty and frozen, and no pain annoyed me. In fact, it seemed to me that at that pace, I could march for hours. For the first time I felt my mother within me, not the mother who used to beat me but the courageous mother, who had wanted to teach me courage all those years and didn’t know how. Now I strode with her, indivisible, like a single body.

Thus my new life began. The women in the prison knew everything, all the details, and they didn’t greet me. In time I learned that they didn’t greet other women with joy, either. A person who enters prison knows that here one doesn’t die, one falls apart. No thread will mend the tears. It wasn’t the walls that frightened me but the faces.

The trial had not been long. I admitted every detail of the accusation, and the old judge said that he had not met
with such a horror to that day. If it hadn’t been the murder of a murderer, he would have ordered that my neck be placed in a hangman’s noose. There was no one in the courtroom. The defense attorney appointed by the court told me, “You can be content. As long as there’s life, there’s hope.” He was a Jewish lawyer, who scurried from place to place and seemed embarrassed by himself. He reminded me of Sammy for some reason, though there was no resemblance between them.

Life in prison was very orderly. We rose early and lights-out was at eight-thirty. Between rising and going to sleep—labor. One squad went to work outside in a textile factory, another worked in the field, and another maintained the prison. Once the legs of the women prisoners had been chained, but that practice had been abolished. Later they were tied together by a rope and led in groups of three. Each squad numbered thirty women. Some old women bore their punishment with contempt and a straight back. At the age of seventy, the prisoners were freed for life, but not always. There was one ninety-year-old woman in the prison.

I was attached to the maintenance squad. I was alert and did what I was supposed to, but my life was narrow, like that of a beast of burden. After ten hours of scouring floors, I would sink onto the cot. My sleep was cramped, like in a pressured corridor. When the bell rang, I would rise and report for work. I did my job thoroughly. The women guards didn’t beat me or torment me. My contact with my fellow prisoners was little. They sat for hours after work and talked. Sometimes, at twilight, I would hear their confessions, sounding to me like yearnings that no longer touched upon life.

Once, at lunch, one of the prisoners asked me, “Katerina, how did you have the courage?”

“I don’t know,” I answered her.

That was the truth. My life was truncated, as though it no longer belonged to me, but I myself, wonder of wonders, stood on my own feet.

The women prisoners didn’t abuse or mock me. One has to be wary of a woman capable of carving up a corpse into twenty-four pieces, I heard them whispering. Most of them were imprisoned, as I found out in the course of time, for poisoning or throwing acid. There were only two real murderesses, and I, it turned out, was one of them. The commandant summoned me and asked, “Do you have relatives?”

“I haven’t. My parents died, and I was an only daughter.”

“What are you laughing about?”

“The phrase ‘only daughter’ struck me as funny.”

“Did you have other relatives?”

“My father had some bastards, but I didn’t know them,” I said, and kept on laughing.

“People don’t laugh here. Get out of the room,” they ordered me, and I left.

I rued my laughter, but I couldn’t control myself. Before my eyes I saw my father’s two redheaded bastards on the narrow wagon, the way I had seen them many years ago.

Although everyone here is sentenced to many years of imprisonment, still they count the days, the months, and the years. I was so hollow that the whole matter of time didn’t concern me. I worked like a machine, and at the sound of the bell at night, I would put my tools down in the storeroom and report for roll call. After dinner they closed the sheds, and I would fall on my bunk like a sack.

The days passed, and one day was like the other. The women prisoners who worked outside used to talk of the summer sun and the harvests. Here, between the walls, it was very cold even when the sun shone. Everything absorbs the cold. But to me, to tell the truth, nothing was disturbing.

Once a month there were visits. Everyone looked forward to them, even putting on makeup. There was no one to visit me, and I was content that I didn’t have to undergo that embarrassment. The visits left a layer of oppression and sadness. After the visits, the prison would be stirred up all night long.

“What are you thinking about?” One of the women prisoners surprised me while I was scouring the floor.

“I’m not thinking, I’m tired.”

“It seemed to me that you were thinking.”

“What is there to think about?” I said, trying to end the conversation.

The woman, my age, told me that she had already been imprisoned in that jail for six years and she had another seventeen years before her.

“What were you sent to jail for?” I asked, and I regretted it immediately.

“For throwing acid,” she said, and smiled a strange smile.

Before getting married, she too had worked for Jews for many years. I immediately saw that she remembered her years with the Jews fondly, and like me, she had first worked for an observant family and then in the city for nonreligious Jews.

“They were my nicest years,” she said, and tears welled in her eyes.

That is how the friendship between us began. Her name
was Sigi. In the winter, in the darkness and chill, we would bring up memories of Hanukkah and Purim; in the spring, of Passover and Shavuot. On Yom Kippur she would wrap herself in a shawl and fast. Had it not been for the boy who seduced her, had it not been for that cheat, she would have remained with the Jews forever.

Thus, miraculously, I found a secret tunnel to return to my loved ones. One evening I saw Henni. She knew what had happened to me and how I had landed there. I told her that there was no remorse in my heart. I was prepared for a long life in prison, without any illusions.

“Where do you get that faith?” Henni asked me.

“From my mother.” I didn’t hesitate.

“Strange,” said Henni. “You didn’t love your mother.”

“I didn’t know how to love her.”

“And now you love her?”

“Now she’s within me.”

Barely had I pronounced those words when darkness covered that clear vision, and I sank down into the abyss.

21

W
HILE THE WORK WORE THE
days out, the cold made the nighttime hours infinitely long, and still I would wake each morning standing in line. There’s no limit to how much a person can endure. I felt, sometimes, that changes were taking place in my body. My legs swelled up and the veins turned blue on my hands, but I had no pains. I worked from morning to night. At night I would stand on my feet and say to myself, Another day. The thoughts shriveled up in my head, like a hollowed pumpkin.

“Were you married?” Sigi asked me.

“No, but I had a child.”

“Good for you.”

Later she told me about her first days with the Jews, how she was afraid of them, and how she got over her fear. In the first winter she had come down with pneumonia, and she was sure they would fire her right away, but the Jews surprised her and took care of her. The first summer she met Herz Reiner, a young, nonreligious Jew, a student in Lemberg, who courted her with frightening gentleness.

“Wouldn’t you like to go back to them?”

“I would.”

Sigi was tall and strong and full of contradictions. “I love the Jews,” she used to say. “But it’s too bad they’re Jews. If they weren’t Jews, I would love them even more. They are special creatures. I love contact with them.”

“Would you have married Herz Reiner?” My tongue egged me on.

“That’s something else. A woman has to get married in the church. We sin and love young Jews, but the church doesn’t love them. We have to marry people like ourselves.”

“So you don’t love them.”

“I’m a Ruthenian, my dear, a Ruthenian wild beast. The Jews are another race. We can be amazed by them, sleep with them, love them, and curse them, but not marry them. We’re different. What can you do? It’s not our fault. That’s how the Creator made us.”

I liked Sigi. I didn’t talk about everything with her, but I felt that we were attached to a memory full of warmth and sin, and that feeling gave us a kind of hidden advantage. We didn’t talk about it to anyone, and not much between ourselves, but we enjoyed each other’s company.

At night there was lots of talk. There were nights when they got carried away and talked about failed loves, and there were nights when they talked about harsh and vicious parents, or sometimes about brothers and sisters, and there were nights when they talked only about the Jews, and those were the liveliest nights of all. All of them had worked for Jews. And there were some whose fathers and forefathers had worked for the same family.

To steal from a Jew’s house, that was a craft a person
learned over the years. It wasn’t easy to steal from Jews, they were alert and quick, but if you confused them, it was quite possible. After a year or two, one knew all the secrets—when they prayed and when they mated. On the holidays they were all in the synagogue, and that was the time to rifle through the drawers. To steal from a Jew’s house was a special kind of pleasure, almost like making love, declared one of them, and she made the women all laugh. Love affairs with Jews—that was also a matter they liked to explore. In that matter, there were some differences of opinion. Some women were sure that there was nothing like the Jews’ love; they were clean and gentle and never would abuse a woman. Others held that their manners were too refined. A woman needs a beast of the field, not caresses and whispers.

Meanwhile, they informed me that my lawyer had come to visit. Visiting hours were tense. Within a short time you had to take everything in and tell everything, and all through a narrow barrier. The shouts were deafening. My lawyer got permission to see me in a guardroom, not with everyone else.