Between Shades of Gray

That night, Jonas and Elena sleep under a fishing boat, while Lina sleeps on her suitcase. She stays up late to draw Janina’s mother strangling her and to write a letter to Andrius. Early the next morning, the NKVD wake them up and divide them into twenty-five groups of fifteen people each. The Vilkas are in group eleven. The men are put to work finishing the NKVD barracks, the boys are sent to fish in the sea, and the women, children, and elderly remain to build huts—or jurtas—for the prisoners made out of whatever they can scavenge from the landscape—sticks and stones, moss and driftwood. Jonas returns, empty-handed, to tell them that all the fish he catches is for the NKVD. They are to eat bread rations.

They spend weeks on their hut, racing to finish it before the first snow arrives. Ivanov, the particularly cruel guard with rotten teeth, visits with Kretzsky, and laughs when Elena asks for a stove for their hut. When she looks to Kretzsky for help, he looks away. They finish the hut, which Lina calls “a dung heap” (274), “something a child would make in the dirt” (274). She realizes that the NKVD mean for them to die.

The day after they finish their jurta, an American ship arrives. The NKVD pushes everyone into their jurtas to hide them from the Americans. They stay hidden for five hours while the Americans unload provisions onto pallets. After their ship pulls away, the prisoners are brought out to carry the provisions in for the guards, hauling load after load of “[c]anned peas, tomatoes, butter, condensed milk, powdered eggs, sugar, flour, vodka, whiskey” (277), and then “kerosene, fishing nets, fur-lined coats, hats, thick leather gloves” (277). Elena asks the man who winds his watch to “[p]lease, stop” (277). He apologizes, saying that winding his watch calms him, but she corrects him, telling him that she wants him to stop translating the English on the crates, because she “can’t bear to know what [they’re] carrying anymore” (277). The bald mad disagrees, arguing that they need to know what’s available, “if the opportunity presents itself” (277). Then, Lina and Jonas see Elena talking to Kretzsky again.

Jonas finds an empty barrel in the sea, so they use it to build a stove for the jurta, using empty tin cans from the NKVD’s trash for a stovepipe. They learn more about Ivanov’s cruelty—he likes to steal bread rations from the prisoners, and once chewed up and spit out an old woman’s bread in front of her, which she then picked up and ate. Mrs. Rimas also hears that he was transferred from Krasnoyarsk Prison, and Lina wonders if he was there with her father. Lina draws pictures of food and writes down the details of the American ship. The prisoners are made to pull logs out of the sea and chop them up for NKVD firewood, but they are not allowed to use it in their own stoves. Lina remembers dinners at home, when scraps of food were scraped into the trash and Jonas complained of being not hungry.

When Janina complains of being cold, the bald man encourages her to steal firewood. Lina will not allow it and goes out with Jonas to scavenge for wood to burn. They talk about Elena, noting that she “seems weaker and confused” (281). They realize that she has been giving the children her own bread ration and starving herself. It is September 26, and the polar night has begun; as they walk, Lina notices how the “desolate landscape was painted in blues and grays by the moon” (281). She thinks about how they need to make it through the first winter to survive. Jonas offers her his coat, but she refuses, knowing that he will be cold then. They meet Kretzsky and ask him if he has seen any driftwood. He throws them a piece of wood from his own bag and walks away. That night, the first snowstorm of the season begins and lasts for two days.  

After the storm, the prisoners are sent back out to search for and chop wood for the NKVD. They pass a jurta completely covered in snow, and Ivanov cackles that the people built their door to open out and thus trapped themselves inside when the snowstorm hit. Four people are dead.

Lina is sent out with the bald man to look for wood. She tries to leave him behind, as he is slow and grouchy, but he calls her back and demands her mittens. When she refuses, he offers to tell her something in exchange. She gives him the mittens and he tells her that Petras Vilkas—her father’s brother and Joana’s father—is the reason they were deported: Lina’s father helped Petras and his family escape Lithuania and go to Germany to repatriate, which was possible because Petras’ wife and Joana’s mother was of German descent. Lina can’t believe its true, but then she recalls her parents’ conversation and Joana’s letter about her father packing up books. She recalls their conversation about her aunt’s family in Germany and America and realizes that “It was possible. Joana’s freedom had cost” (287) her her own.

Lina goes back to their jurta and confronts her mother, who confirms that they did help Joana and her family escape and that they, in turn, were going to help them escape. Elena says that someone must have informed the Soviets, who searched Joana’s home in April before they were deported in June. Lina is angry and hurt about what her family has given up for Joana’s, but Jonas reminds her that Joana’s family had to give up their home and business and studies. She begins to draw to calm herself down, and though she is angry, she realizes that she can’t hate Joana. She hears the man who winds his watch scraping at a piece of wood and recalls a conversation about Munch’s paintings that she had with Jonas—about his use of his palette knife to scrape texture into his paintings, which Jonas says makes the woman in the painting look confused. They looked at another print of Munch’s work—the painting Ashes, which Jonas decides is “too weird” (290). He likes Lina’s work better. The memory of this painting and the description of Munch “feel[ing] colors” (291) and seeing “sorrow, crying, and withering” (291) gives Lina the idea to make a paintbrush from a stick and “a nice gray watercolor” (291) from ashes and snow.