Winter in the Summer Garden by Natasha Templeton

Author:Natasha Templeton [Natasha Templeton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869796808
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2011-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Reception Centre for Orphaned Children

On their refugee journey, Sofya talks about the past. Sitting on their suitcase at some railway junction, indistinguishable from the previous one, somewhere in the middle of a countryside traumatised by war. The station room poorly lit, the platform abandoned to the cold of night-time. Waiting with other families, their children and bundles, for a train that might or might not arrive.

‘What about the time at the orphanage?’ Nadya wants a real-life fairy tale with a happy ending, even though she has heard it many times. Then Sofya’s soft murmur carries them far away from the screams of tired babies and the anxious conversations of their fellow refugees.

‘They took you away, Nadyenka, wrapped up in our yellow duvet … In prison they told me that you were back at home with Babushka, and they told her that you were in prison with me. And this is what we both believed for six months until I was allowed my first parcel from home.’

What a joy that parcel was, she remembers, even though it had been dug over and carelessly tied up again. Anna Pavlovna had wrapped it lovingly but, by the time the warders had finished checking the contents, the sugar cubes were smashed, the piece of pork fat slashed, the bread rusks pulverised. Anna Pavlovna had packed a child’s pink pinafore, and in its pocket there were Mishka sweets. (You know, the ones with bear cubs on the wrapping paper: four cubs playing on a fallen tree trunk in the forest.) That was the moment when Sofya realised that the Mishkas were meant for Nadya, they were her favourites; but this could only mean that Nadya was not at home with her grandmother.

There was that story in Pravda how the children from socially unfriendly groups were cared for in special reception centres. She thought at the time that it must be a euphemism for orphanages. Now she wondered if it meant that children of arrested parents were being raised in state institutions; given new names, trained to be loyal Soviet citizens, taught to forget their families. In prison she’d heard rumours that more and more young children were being taken away at the time of the parents’ arrest, and used to blackmail prisoners. If you refuse to sign the confession, the interrogator threatened, your family will suffer for it: your wife might be put on the conveyor belt, your children might get lost in a reception centre.

Sofya found the Mishka sweets in Nadya’s pinafore, and lost her way. She clutched the pinafore to her breast, and felt her heart beating a staccato message that her child was in an orphanage. An hour earlier Sofya was savouring the smell of her hunk of bread, the closeness of her friends, but now the cell had turned into a wasteland. She was aware that the warder expected her to sign for the parcel, saw the blank line on the docket in front of her eyes, but some primeval cunning guided her hand to scrawl ‘Nonadya’ instead of her own signature.

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