Siberia

The little girl was me, Sloe. I was Rosita. (I had to give up my name, I'll explain why when I get to that part.) That tractor ride is my oldest memory. I think about it often and I treasure all the details, because I can't remember anything from the time before. I have been told things, and I've seen photographs, but I can't remember my father's face. It's as if my life began that day, under the wide blank roaring sky, with the nice guard who smiled, the coldness; my cherry red coat. The strangest thing is remembering that I didn't know there was anything wrong. When I realized that my shoes were too thin for the snow, I was frightened because my mama had made a mistake--and Mama never made mistakes! I didn't know what had happened to us, I didn't know what was going on at all. I didn't know anything: I was only four. I don't remember what I saw when my mother put me down, but I know how our hut must have looked when it was empty. I know that Rosita saw a rather long, narrow room (I thought it was big, until I knew it was our whole house), with a concrete floor. At one end there was a dark green enamel stove, with a chimney going up the wall. Beside the stove there were wooden sliding doors shutting off an alcove in the wall, that turned out to hold the bed Mama and Rosita shared. Along the edge of the cupboard-bed, the floor was covered by a kind of raft of wooden planks, gratefully warm to your feet compared with the concrete (which was like walking on gray ice, winter and summer). On the other side of the room there was a dark green sink, with a strange kind of spout standing by it and no taps. The walls were dusty bare planks, in places cracked so you could see the earth-bricks behind them. There was no ceiling, just the naked beams of the rooftree, and a shelf going all around, where the roof and the walls met. Halfway down the room was a partition, with sliding doors like the bed-cupboard, but dark green and shining like the stove and the sink. Through there, Rosita would find the workshop where her mama was going to spend hours and hours, every day, turning out nails from scrap metal. The nails were to be used in the making of huts like ours, and furniture for huts like ours, in prison Settlements all over the wilderness: but the little girl didn't know that. She didn't know what the red light on the wall in the workshop meant either. She thought the machines were more ugly toys, and she hated it when Mama insisted on playing with them. All she wanted to do was to get out into snow, into the wild emptiness. . . . But if she had to stay in, why wouldn't Mama play with her? When we arrived our hut had nothing, not even a mattress for the boards in the cupboard-bed. Mama had a wad of start-up vouchers, better than the normal paper money of the Settlements (which was called scrip, and which would hardly buy anything, as we found out later). We went to one of the big buildings with our wealth, and bought a mattress, a table and two chairs, an oil lamp, and some lamp oil. There was enough to pay for delivery of the table and chairs. Mama dragged our mattress home herself on a sled, with me sitting up on top in my thin little baby shoes; then she returned the sled to the store. We had to go to another building for food supplies and kitchen things. We didn't have to buy fuel for the stove. The heat came through pipes, from a smoky, stinky brown-coal power station. We didn't have to buy water either. It came out of the spout by our sink when you pumped the handle . . . except in the worst part of winter, when we had to melt snow and boil it. We thought we'd done well on that first shopping trip. In fact it was weeks before we had everything we needed. Mama didn't know how to live like this. She didn't know that you needed chemicals to drop down the hole in the earth closet, to keep it from smelling bad. She didn't know what a can opener was. We didn't know we needed vegetable seeds; or a sack of gHalam, Ann is the author of 'Siberia ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780553494143 and ISBN 0553494147.