Dressed for a Dance in the Snow by Monika Zgustova; & Julie Jones

Author:Monika Zgustova; & Julie Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2020-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

{4}

Summer came. There was light day and night. In the early hours of the morning, the sky took on a deeper violet tone, but it quickly gave way to the sun, which pulled away from the horizon and stayed up for about twenty hours. Nobody could tell the difference between day and night. We couldn’t sleep, and we collapsed from fatigue like flies at the end of the summer. Every day I dreamed about those huge mosquitoes. They don’t bite as much as the little ones, but they’re repulsive. At night, they seemed like hairy angels flying around my head. At least the nights were a little quieter; the bugs didn’t bother us as much.

“They sent me to a different camp to do different work with different people. Part of our punishment was to make us lose our points of reference. As soon as we established a routine and got to know people, they would send us off to another camp with new people who had different ways to get on your nerves and different customs. There was no choice but to take it calmly, which in those difficult circumstances required a superhuman effort.

“They assigned me to the brickworks. Next to me, a tall, handsome blond man was working. He was obviously older than I. I was introduced to him, and he kissed my hand as if we weren’t two filthy, flea-bitten, starving, half-asleep scraps of garbage dressed in rags who, for fourteen hours a day, hammered bricks in, one after another, but relaxed, perfumed people who had met each other at a reception, one in a cocktail dress with a glass of champagne in her hand and the other in a dark suit with a gray tie.

“ ‘Heino Eller.’

“ ‘Valentina Grigorievna Iyevleva. I’m pleased to meet you. You have the same name as a famous Estonian composer.’

“ ‘That’s who I am,’ he answered, and I think he blushed.

“ ‘When I was a student, we played your compositions.’ I felt as though I had run into someone I knew from my former life. I felt like hugging him.

“ ‘Anatoly Vaneev,’ the prisoner who was working alongside Heino joined our conversation.

“The three of us went to the canteen together, and we soon became inseparable. Once I recited to them a few of the poems I composed before going to sleep and on the long walk to work to keep my mind busy. Heino Eller offered to compose music to accompany them. Later we presented them at our Saturday recitals.”

“You had recitals?” I wonder.

“Yes,” replies Valentina, slightly annoyed. “Very few camps had them. That camp organized recitals as a way to commemorate the Communist holidays and it became a weekly routine. So I convinced Anatoly to recite Gavrila Derzhavin. Standing in front of the public, with his shirt unbuttoned, he thundered in his deep bass voice:

I am a king, I am a slave,

I am a worm, I am God.

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