Siberia by Ann Halam Read Free Book Online Page A

free.”
    “I’m going to change my name,” I said, still not looking at him; or at Rose, silent on the other side of me. “You can tell the others, I’m going to call myself Sloe.”
    I had no trouble in school after that. Not from Rose, or anyone else. I had become one of them, and they knew it. I had the same weight on my soul, the same hardness inside, that comes from living without hope.
    Snory had sent my lessons to me, and visited me in the hospital when he was allowed, so I hadn’t fallen behind. I was always top of the class. Nobody minded after I came back with my crooked leg. Before the summer break that year, we seniors had to take a test. This was a new idea, nobody had tested Settlement children before. You had to stay in school until you were fourteen or fifteen, whether you were learning anything or not. Then if you were a girl you got a quota and started making nails, or you were sent to labor camp if you were a boy. That was the way it had been: but not anymore, apparently. No one told us what the test was about. Snory checked our papers before he sent them off to the Examining Board, and he got very excited. He said Rose and I were the best students he’d ever taught, and we were a credit to the Settlements Commission.
    I wasn’t excited, but it hurt my feelings when Mama wasn’t proud of me for coming top. I heard her muttering about it with Madame Imrat, the old lady who had been an ambassador, who sometimes came to spend the evening with us. They were sighing as if I’d done something wrong, and looking at me with pity. But Mama didn’t say anything, and no one at school explained. The first thing I knew about what it meant was when Mama got a letter.
    We hadn’t had a letter in six years. The outside world had been as if it didn’t exist (really the
inside
world. We were the ones outside, shut out from city comforts). I was with Mama when Nicolai, acting as Brigade Chief and not Nail Collector (he had several official positions), handed over the envelope. It was dirty and crumpled from traveling inside his clothes, but it had the Settlements Commission stamp on it. Mama’s face went completely white. Then she tore it open.
    Dadda, I thought. My dadda—
    I thought the letter would tell us that Dadda had died, in some other prison far away. . . . But it was about me. I had to go away to school, a
real
school, specially for the brightest and best of the Prison Settlements children. It was hundreds of miles away. I would have to leave my mama. I wouldn’t be allowed to come home, except for the long summer break.

* 3 *
    One Warm, Still day at the end of that summer, Mama made a picnic. We walked out beyond the potato patches, slowly because of my leg, into the marshy green plain which always looked wrong to me, as if snow and winter were the only clothes the wilderness should wear. Forest rimmed the edges of the sky, the sun was already lower than it had been. It was the farthest Mama had been from her workshop since the day we arrived. For six years her life had revolved entirely around our hut, the stores, and the potato patches.
    Nicolai had graciously allowed Mama this holiday, because I was going away. I knew he’d also fined her many days’ pay (that’s what our Brigade Chief was like. He was quite kind in his own way, but if he did you a favor it cost you plenty). I tried to be happy, to make the expense worthwhile: I kept chatting about the birds and the flowers, and the sweet, fresh air. Mama was very quiet. We found some boulders, lost in the seeding grasses and rattling reeds, and settled there. There were midges, but we were used to that. She took out our picnic, I limped off looking for berries. When I came back she’d spread a napkin, and poured cold fruit tea into our beakers. I arranged cloudberries in a circle round the chunk of rye loaf, the pieces of concentrate “cheese,” the tomatoes, and the small, luxurious pot of jam. Far away in the distance a bird was