Mamichu

By Robert Walton

 

“Mamichu, it’s cold!”

I looked at Ivar. I looked at his knobby lump of a head, at his lips lying beneath his broken nose like twin dead slugs, at his eyes glistening beneath his granite ledge of a brow, eyes so small I never knew their color. There was no pleasure in looking at him. I looked away. “Why do you say this?”

“Because the wind cuts like a gypsy blade.”

“No, why do you say ‘mamichu’? What is mamichu?”

“Just a curse—a Zagreb curse for when you have to look up to see hell.”

“What does it mean?”

Ivar’s brow lowered, extinguishing his eyes. “It’s the worst curse of all.”

“The worst of all?”

“The worst!”  He chuckled like a diesel engine starting on a frozen morning. “It blasphemes sisters, mothers, grandmothers even.”

“Oh,” I recoiled in mock horror, “even grandmothers! Saints preserve us!”

Ivar shrugged. “It should be reserved for the worst of the worst. I say it about the wind, but I don’t mean it, not really.”

“You don’t mean it? Why say it?”

“Habit. Curses become a habit. The morning wind, this camp, they’re not so bad. My grandfather told me of the true gulag, Stalin’s gulag. One in twenty lived. My grandfather was the one.”

“Bah! Old men’s stories. Stalin’s gulag couldn’t be worse than here.”

“Peter, do we have soup?”

“The soup is snot.”

“But we have the snot.”

I did not reply.

“Do we have bread?”

“The bread crawls with weevils.”

“But we have the weevils. Munch them. Savor the snot. You live, man. You live! This Putin camp is paradise. We could be in America, in a ‘tender care center’!”

“Ha! Mar-a-Lago, maybe.”

A troop of guards carrying Kalashnikovs approached the gate. Two dragged a man between them. The camp commandant followed behind. Six guards peeled off, three to either side, and leveled their weapons. Two more slung their rifles and opened the gate. The prisoner’s feet made twin furrows in the mud as he was pulled into the compound and dropped on his belly.

Three hundred men in the compound stood motionless.

“Who is it?” I whispered.

“Yuri—our mate.”

“How can you tell? His face is gone.”

“It will heal. Believe me.”

The guards turned and paced back through the gate. Ivar stepped forward then. He went to Yuri, knelt, rolled him gently onto his back and cradled his head.

The camp commandant stared at Ivar. He was a short, slender man, like a banker or a pimp—a man whose work is to make others work.

“Drop him.”

Ivar didn’t move.

“Drop him.”

Ivar stroked Yuri’s blood-matted hair. “Outside the wire, we are yours. Inside the wire— we may care for each other as we can. It is the law of the camps. The unwritten law.”

“I am the law.”

Ivar didn’t reply, but continued to cradle Yuri’s head in his battered hands.

“You’re the one called Ivar?”

“I am.”

The commandant nodded to the guards. “Bring him.”

Two guards handed their weapons to men standing beside them. Four more aimed vaguely at the motionless prisoners. All six entered the compound. The two gripped Ivar.

Ivar glanced at me. “Peter?”

I nodded.

Then he carefully laid Yuri’s head on the mud and rose on his own. When the gate shut behind them, we were forgotten. A dozen others followed me to help Yuri.

They took Ivar, but they did not bring him back. Only his screams returned—until they ceased.

•

A line of thirty guards formed in front of the wire the next morning. The camp commandant—chin lifted, eyes bright— stepped in front of them and stared at us. It was a challenge.

Mamichu.

It may have drifted on a forest breeze from pine needles nearby, or sparked from sunlight glinting off barbs on the wire.

Perhaps I whispered, “Mamichu.”

“Mamichu, mamichu.” We prayed, “Mamichu.”

“Mamichu, mamichu.” We chanted, “Mamichu.”

Raw throats opened wide and we roared, “Mamichu. Mamichu!”

Mamichu.

 

---

Robert Walton is a retired teacher and a lifelong mountaineer and rock climber, with many ascents in the Sierras and Pinnacles National Monument, his home crags. His writing about climbing has appeared in the Sierra Club’s Ascent. His novel Dawn Drums won the 2014 New Mexico Book Awards Tony Hillerman Prize for best fiction, first place in the 2014 Arizona Authors competition, and first place in the historical fiction category of the 2017 Readers Choice Awards. Most recently, his short story “Uriah” was published in Assisi, a literary journal associated with St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Learn more about Robert at his website and follow him on Facebook.

“The New Order” painting is by Noel Counihan, 1942, National Gallery of Australia.