CHAPTER 1
“Wake up, Dochka.”
Anya’s father brushed the hair from her face. His breath was warm on her ear, and she smelled the faint bitter herbs from his morning tea. She rolled over under the weight of a thousand blankets, or so it felt, quilt upon quilt to keep out the relentless chill. It was night dark. The sun would not rise today. Her father pulled the chain of the small brass lamp next to her narrow bed.
“You don’t want to be late.”
Anya sat up with a start, remembering what day it was, immune, suddenly, to the cold.
“Breakfast is on the table,” he said.
She cartwheeled across the small bedroom they shared, her heart leaping ahead of her, and flung open the door to the amber light of the kitchen. Her skin was as pale as milk, a thin shroud over the blue lattice of her veins. Her hair, as dark and sleek as mink, hung halfway down her back. Like her mother’s. They will make you cut it, he had told her.
The table was set with tea and bread and cheese, and in the middle of her plate, one perfect orange.
“Papa!”
She held the orange to her face and breathed it in. The rarest of indulgences in Norilsk. She closed her eyes and let the extravagant smell transport her, for the briefest moment, to somewhere warm and bright.
“A special occasion,” her father said. He crossed one arm over his chest and rubbed his fiery beard with his free hand. His eyes glinted green in the lamplight. “We’ll celebrate tonight.”
She didn’t ask, What if I am not chosen? It was what they had worked for.
“Irina’s made vatrushki,” he said.
Irina lived on the first floor of their building. She came over sometimes and sat at the kitchen table and drank vodka with Anya’s father, and they would sing Komsomol songs and hug each other.
Anya peeled the orange with ritualistic concentration, pulling off the white membrane string by string. She held the soft puckered orb in all ten fingertips and then laid the little half-moons in a ring on her plate like petals.
Norilsk was north of the Arctic Circle, three thousand kilometers from Moscow. A Siberian town reachable only by plane or ship ramming through cracks in the frozen Arctic Sea. The home of some of the largest deposits of nickel and copper on earth. Anya was born here and had never been anywhere else. The rain burned her skin, the fog made her throat itch, and the air made her cough. The snow blew gray and sharp like tiny nails. The Daldykan ran red from the sludge of copper smelting. During the polar winter, the sun didn’t rise for two months. But Norilsk Nickel employees each received a Yunost’ black-and-white TV, and the state store shelves were stocked with sweetened milk, while everyone else scrabbled for a block of margarine. The wages were almost twice what workers made on the mainland, the rest of the Soviet territory that wasn’t their inaccessible outpost.
Anya lived for summer to arrive, that brief chapel of light, from late May to late July, when the sun never set, and a manic joy infused even the drunk old men who left their chess games and traipsed along the tundra hills. Herds of deer emerged from the taiga and came north, galloping right through town. The melted snow revealed a glittering landscape of scrap metal and unfinished train tracks warped from the cold. She and her father would shiver into Dolgoye Lake near where the town’s heating pipes passed through. Afterwards they would sun themselves on the rocks like seals. They would fill baskets with bittersweet golden cloudberries under a vast, translucent sky, the heat like balm.
There were the bones, of course, that rose up and washed ashore each June, reminders of the camp closed fifteen years before. No one spoke of the labor camp, Norillag. The kerchiefed babushki collected the femurs and ulnas and skulls and buried them next to the gardens they tended like children, lovingly caring for every plant that dared to grow in that brief reprieve.
“Sometimes you need cruelty to appreciate beauty,” her father told her after he and Irina had started in on the vodka.
Anya glanced out the dark window at a row of streetlights that would stay lit all day. It was a long time until spring. Her father packed cold sausages in his lunch pail to take to the copper plant. At least he didn’t go in the mines, she thought, down into the depths of the earth in blackness so complete it could rob your mind. It frightened her to imagine him there. Her classmate Viktor told her he’d gotten to ride the elevator down the mineshaft once with his father. When the door had opened back at the top, a voice over the speaker said, “We bid you farewell. May your life be filled with much good news.”
Anya placed the last section of orange on her tongue and held it there before crushing it with her teeth.
* * *
They had to have a plan before they went outside. No dawdling. The air felt like shards of glass in Anya’s lungs. Her father wrapped her in wool scarves and her fur-flap hat until all that was exposed was her nose. She was barely able to see through slits where the edges of the scarves met. The school had declared aktirovka two days last week, but the wind had died down enough to reopen, despite the snow and temperatures that dipped to forty degrees below zero.
“Go to Vera’s after school,” Yuri said. “I will fetch you there.”
Their neighbor was older than the domovoi, but she had a bowl of little chocolates wrapped in silver foil. She had looked after Anya since she was five, when her mother went missing.
Copyright © 2022 by Rae Meadows
