“No. But I spent part of my childhood in the country with my grandmother. She knew home remedies and taught me a few things,” the woman said. By evening the man’s fever had eased.
Word spread through the car: the woman had helped a dying man. By nightfall, there was a line waiting for her. One had an abscess. Another had an infected wound. Another had stomach trouble.
She helped however she could—sometimes with her hands, sometimes with advice. She lanced abscesses with sharpened metal heated over a candle flame. She bandaged wounds with strips torn from old shirts.
She taught them how, even in that filth, to keep some minimal cleanliness. An old thief called Gray brought her his ration. “Thanks, kid. That abscess had me hurting for a week.”
By midnight she returned to her corner, exhausted. Crutch was still there, still keeping watch. “Good work. Now half the car won’t let anything happen to you.”
“But this is only the beginning. Twenty-eight days still to go.” And then a voice came from outside: Melnikov had arrived for a night inspection. “Car seven, inspection!” he shouted, and the door opened.
The captain stood in the doorway with two armed guards behind him. His flashlight moved across the faces and stopped on Anna. “Well, Mikhailova, how do you like your new company? Settling in?”
She said nothing. Melnikov stepped into the car. “I asked how the night went. The men treating you all right?”
“As long as you’re breathing, Captain,” Crutch said from the dark. “But none of us is permanent, and that includes you.” Melnikov swung the flashlight toward him. “Threatening an officer, old thief?”
“Just stating facts. We all have sentences. You have a life. Those can end suddenly. Trains derail sometimes.”
The tension in the car turned almost physical. Two hundred men held their breath. Melnikov understood that one more step and the whole thing could erupt.
He turned and walked out, but before the door shut he said, “You’ve got twenty-eight more days. We’ll see who lasts.” The bolt slammed into place.
The train rolled on into the night. And in car number seven, the second night of that ordeal began. But now Anna was not alone.
Now she had allies. Or at least men who needed her alive. Time would sort out the difference.
The fifth day of the trip arrived. The train crawled through endless forest, stopping only for water and inspections. In car seven, a rhythm had taken hold.
Morning rations, long dull afternoons, evening talk. And always the smell—human bodies, sickness, fear. “Listen, Doc, can I call you that?” a man in his forties with an intelligent face and gray at the temples asked Anna.
“I’m not a doctor, but call me what you like.” “Name’s Pavel. Used to be an engineer. Now I’m an enemy of the state.”
A pause followed. In that car, pauses carried whole lives inside them—everything left behind on the other side of the bars.
That morning, what everyone feared finally happened. One of the common criminals, Misha Portnov, came down with severe diarrhea. In ordinary life that would be miserable. In a railcar with one waste bucket, it was a disaster.
And worse, it was a clear sign. Dysentery. In conditions like these, it could kill faster than a bullet.
“That’s it. We’re done for,” one of the thieves said darkly. “Three days and half this car will be dead from it.” Anna understood: if an outbreak started, only a few would make it.
They had to act fast. She went to Crutch. “We need a quarantine area. Separate the sick from the healthy.” “And how exactly do you picture that? This isn’t a hospital,” he said.
“Take the far corner. Put everyone with symptoms there. Move the waste bucket there too. Healthy men stay away.”
Crutch thought it over. Then he stood and walked to the center of the car.
“Listen up. We’ve got dysentery. For anybody who doesn’t know, that means you can bleed out and die fast.”
“The woman says we need quarantine. Anybody with stomach trouble goes to the far corner. Everybody else stays clear.”
“And if we don’t?”
