Archangel Read online

  The first shot of war. And war, once started, has a long road to run.

  At mid-day they were marshalled and marched back from the work compound to the living compound to take their places in the queue for the Kitchen. Holly saw the confusion of the guards' officers and NCOs, the way that instructions were given in a frantic pitch and confronted by the sullen amusement of the zeks. The dogs were allowed to drag their handlers closer to the ranks of men as the roll-call was made. And those in charge strutted along the lines and there was an anger at their faces that Holly had not seen before.

  Anger at humiliation, at pride lost. It was a bright day with thin sunshine burnishing up from the snow and men blinked and rubbed their eyes as they crossed the open space between the two compounds, tramping over the road running down to the village and the railway line that stretched far the other way to Pot'ma. The guards who sealed the zeks into their corridor were restive, in poor temper. Another group of prisoners, themselves surrounded by guns and dogs, waited for the slow column to clear the road so that they themselves could pass on. Holly grimaced. A log jam at Barashevo, as if this forgotten end of the world was a metropolis of movement and then he looked again at the huddle of prisoners separated from him by two lines of uniformed guards.

  Women. And Holly had not gazed on a woman for thirteen months.

  Women who wore black. Black tunics and black skirts and black boots. Dissent and crime are not the prerogative of the male. A chorus of shouting began around Holly. Fun for the zeks, diversion from the tedium of the parade line and the parade march and the parade search and the parade lunch. And the women matched the men in earth and coarseness and the laughter pealed between the two groups.

  Perhaps because he was not yet bowed with the burden of imprisonment, Holly was a man to be noticed. Taller than those around him.

  A girl had seen Holly.

  A tiny creature who was muffled in a tunic with the collar upturned and with a scarf across her mouth and a forage cap whose peak was pulled down over her eyes. An elf and an urchin, she had seen Holly. He stared back at her. Two people on opposite platforms and when the trains come they will go their different ways and not meet again. And the railway track that divided them was lines of men in uniform who cradled machine-pistols, who held tight to dragging dogs.

  He saw a name printed across the right side of her tunic.

  He knew her only as Morozova. Why one girl in a crowd?

  Why one girl who possessed only a hidden face and a printed name?

  Poshekhonov was at Holly's side, chuckling from the side of his mouth.

  'Hard for you young bastards . . . old buggers like me, we've forgotten what it's like. Not that thinking about it helps. Tie a knot, boy, that's the best.'

  He remembered her. Standing beside the rails at the junction at Pot'ma she had held the baby of an exhausted mother, and she had smiled at him. He could not see if she smiled now that her mouth was hidden by her scarf.

  'Don't look at those beasts,' Poshekhonov said. 'That's the slime at the bottom of the can. They'd eat a man. . . You don't believe me? I tell you, I'd rather go without than have that lot screw me. They're shit, in Zone 4 they're not women as we'd know them, just shit.'

  The column moved on. Holly surprised himself, he turned his head to watch the women cross the path. He thought he saw the girl again, but he could not be sure.

  The gate stood in front of them. The girl was gone from his mind, swept aside by the burned-out office at the end of the Administration block. They had done quite a good job, Holly could see that, in containing the fire. Only the Commandant's room was wrecked, gutted. He told himself that the office would have been an addition, built onto the end of what had before been an exterior wall of brick and therefore powerful enough to hold back the spread of the flames.

  'You know, Holly, there was a man here once who told me an extraordinary thing about women. . .' Poshekhonov babbled as a stream runs over rocks.'. . . he said that a girl he knew once used to do it while in a handstand position.

  Can you believe that, Holly? I never quite knew whether to believe him. Standing on her hands with her back against the wall, and she wanted him to run at her. I could never believe that. . . Shit, I've wanted to . . .'

  Holly saw the blackened uniforms of the guards as they moved amongst the debris of the office that they had retrieved. Some still threw buckets of snow into the small flames that lived. There was the rich stench of charred wood, and the python hiss of water on embers. Dark on the snow, beneath the windows, were items of furniture and crumpled photograph frames and scattered wisps of paper.

  He wondered whether he were pleased, excited, whether he was proud.

  Poshekhonov tugged at Holly's arm, demanded further attention.

  'I never knew whether I should believe that man . . . but, you know, he gave me great pleasure. He implanted the thought in me, the thought of this woman with her handstand. She changes for me each day — she is blonde and she is dark, young and mature, fat and thin - it doesn't matter.

  Extraordinary pleasure.'

  'Does the sight of the Commandant's hut flattened, busted, does that give you pleasure?' Holly asked.

  They stood waiting their turn to go through the gate.

  Ranks of five and the counting again, and the calling of names, and across the compound the beckoning presence of the low-built Kitchen.

  'Why should that give me pleasure?'

  'Because at worst they are hurt, at best they are inconvenienced.'

  'And if they are hurt, does that help me? Does that shorten my sentence? Does it soften my mattress . . .'

  'I don't know.'

  Holly was withdrawn, private. He felt no call to share the small purseful of glory. To his left three guards had taken the strain on a rope that ran tight and stretched to the building. He heard the command, he heard the men's feet slither in the snow as they pulled. With a shriek the last beams of the roof collapsed and pitched down.

  'Kypov's office is nothing. Now the handstand, that's different. I could kiss the man who told me that, two years of happiness he's given me. All I wish is that I could find out whether it's possible.'

  Holly smiled drily. 'Anything is possible if you have the will.'

  'I have the will, I'm short of the bloody woman . . . '

  Poshekhonov turned to Holly to have the satisfaction of seeing his joke shared. Holly no longer looked at him, he stared back at the stunted ruin that had been the office of the Commandant.

  That morning Captain Yuri Rudakov had taken his wife to the shops at Pot'ma.

  By the standards of the Dubrovlag she had a nice home, a two-bedroomed bungalow on the outer edge of the village.

  With no children, two bedrooms was a privilege. Two bedrooms and the best furniture that could be made in the Factory. But she hated this place. Hated it for its bleak isolation and petty preoccupation with the work of fences and confinement. She admitted to no friends amongst the small clutch of camp officers' wives at Barashevo. She had no companion in this snow wilderness with its circles of wire. She had been brought up in the sophistication of inner Moscow, and she had travelled to European Germany. She was an outsider and feared by the wives of the other officers of Camp 3 because her husband was KGB and because his reports could break and crush the career of any man, however senior. She urged on the days until the chance of their transfer away, she wrote waspy letters to her mother three times a week, and whenever possible she badgered her Yuri to take her to the shops at Pot'ma.

  They were little enough, those shops. But to be in Pot'ma, to walk along Leninsky Prospekt, that was bliss. And when she went to Pot'ma she had the whole and unchipped attention of her man, and when he drove their car and walked with her in front of the shops he had no files, no papers. It was a victory for her each time that she wrested him away from his desk and his teleprinter and his uniform.

  The life of the camp consumed their married life, oppressed her from her hour of waking until the time she fe
ll asleep.

  And each third Sunday of the month was the evening that she detested, when she must take the political studies lecture for Camp 3, Zone 1. It was her duty, Yuri had said. She had trained as a teacher, and was the daughter of a Colonel of KGB and a probationer member of the Party, it was her duty to participate in the re-education of prisoners. And they stank, stank like cattle carcases outside an abattoir.

  And they had eyes, bright and pricking eyes that shredded her clothes and burrowed to the soft underwear she had purchased in the Centrum store on Magdeburg's Karl-Marx-Strasse. There were some who were clever, some who were stupid, and none who cared for the lecture that would take her forty-five minutes to read and three evenings to prepare. Yuri had said it was her duty. At times she believed she could make her hard man into a piece of putty, but not when he spoke of duty. Duty was his life. Duty was the bastard world of the Dubrovlag.

  Elena Rudakov sat beside her husband, and on the back seat of the car, in plastic bags, was a new nightdress of flannelette and two shirts for Yuri to wear at home and two kilos of turnips from the open market and a small rug to go in front of the stove in their living-room. He had even been attentive, Yuri, and that was rare. He had talked of a new prisoner — too much to hope that he would speak of anything other than the camp - a prisoner who was an Englishman. Guarded talk, because she was never fully in his confidence, but he had spoken of a prisoner who was special and different. He drove slowly because the rough road was always treacherous in winter and insufficiently sanded, but the inside of the car was warm and the sky alive in blue beyond the windows.

  She was almost happy, almost at peace, until they saw, together, the high column of the black smoke.

  She was left to take the car home. The spell was broken, the pool was rippled from its serenity by the way he snapped instructions to her and then ran to the Administration block. She could have kicked a dog. He had not kissed her or looked back, just sprinted across the snow.

  The sight was a hammer blow to Yuri Rudakov.

  The end of the Administration block was a grotesque mess.

  Only the smoke now, because the flames had been suffocated. Smoke that rippled and soared.

  He saw Kypov, a comedy clown with a soot-smeared face and the back of his uniform singed and brown from collar to knee-boot. There were no thoughts in his mind, no precon-ceptions, only the demand for information.

  Empty words. 'What happened?'

  'Where the hell have you been?' Kypov shouted at him across the few metres that separated them, and the breath spouted white from the Major's mouth. 'Why were you not here?'

  'I asked what happened.' Rudakov said. He despised these army men, in particular those who had lost their units in exchange for secondment to M V D camp detachments.

  'You should have been here.'

  'Will you tell me what happened or not .. . Major Kypov?'

  They were all the same, all noise and sparrow fart, and if the man only knew the idiot scene he c u t . . .

  'My fire exploded.'

  The fight had fled the Major. His hands hung simply by his trouser pockets, ungloved, and Rudakov could see that they trembled.

  'More.'

  'The fire had been lit before I came to the office. My orderly put more coal on for me. After he had gone I was standing in front of the fire, my back to it. There was a sort of an explosion, not very loud, the flames took my back. I was alight. My orderly had to roll me on the floor. He pulled me out, he saved my life.'

  'What have you lost?'

  i could have lost my life.. .' and the indignation was rich again in the Major's voice.

  'What have you lost in the fire?'

  'The administration files that I kept, some of the convicts'

  files.'

  'They were not in the safe?'

  'You have seen my safe. It could not hold half the papers that were in my cupboard.'

  The men who worked around the building acknowledged a secret circle that surrounded their camp Commandant and their camp KGB officer. None broke into the circle. They threaded a wide path round them.

  'Then you will have to inform Moscow.'

  'And what are you going to do?'

  'Try to find out why, to find how, to find who. That is what I am going to do, Comrade Commandant. And you, you should get to your quarters, and get out of those clothes.

  The Commandant should not be an object of ridicule to his prisoners.'

  There was a fleck of amusement at the corner of Captain Rudakov's mouth. He considered whether Major Kypov's commendations, so preciously framed, had perished. He walked to his own office. An accident or an attack, he wondered, and stamped the snow from his walking shoes on the steps of the main Administration doorway.

  The line edged forward towards the food hatch.

  Holly heard only occasional talk about the burned office because the job of the men around him was to get the food inside their guts, get the warmth into their throats.

  A line creeping forward, and a rabble of men leaving the hatch and hurrying for the first bench place they could find.

  And hungry men are pliable men, hunger wins submission, hunger is the tool of Major Vasily Kypov, hunger is the whip of the Commandant of Camp 3, Zone 1. But Holly and eight hundred with him had a roof over their Kitchen, and there would be a roof over Hut 2 when the freezing night came.

  Kypov had no roof, and the thought carried a first-found peace for Holly, lifted him from the line of men who straggled across the dirt-smeared floor boards. You did it well, Holly, bloody well.

  Byrkin had been a Petty Officer in the Navy.

  In the evenings in Hut 2. he had twice pulled Holly to a corner to tell him of his innocence.

  Now he staggered towards Holly, making a path between the tables and benches and the backs of sitting men that flanked him on one side, and the waiting line on the other.

  Byrkin would have been tall when he was in the Navy, but the camp had bent his back and plucked his hair from a smoothed scalp. His hands shake and his balance is cruelly uncertain, a fly wheel that has lost its rhythm.

  Byrkin had twice found out Holly to tell him of the sailing of the frigate Storozhevoy from the naval harbour at Riga.

  Mutiny by the men, and what could a Petty Officer do if the Ministry in Moscow determined that the sailors of the Storozhevoy should not be freed from their conscripted service after four years at sea, that they should serve another year, what could a Petty Officer do? Not Byrkin's fault that the mutiny disease had swept the cramped quarters of the lower decks. He had been locked in a cabin, a prisoner with the officers when the bombers came on a low-clouded November afternoon. Seven years before, and the memory still with him, bleeding him. A memory of imprisonment below the water line as the high explosive had silenced the engines of a fighting frigate, marooned its escape to Swedish waters. Fifty men dead before the turbines of a Krivak class frigate with a displacement of 3 800 tons were halted. And more to die before the firing squad, and few who did not wear the gold rings of the officers to escape the penalty of imprisonment. One unguarded remark by Byrkin, one remark that had been carried back by a man with innocence on his face to those who would judge Byrkin. What did the Ministry expect, how did they think the men would react?

  What insensitivity from the Ministry! Ten years in the Dubrovlag for the private expression of a Petty Officer who was a captive in a cabin while the high explosive bombs rained on to the armour plate of the Storozhevoy.

  They said in Hut 1 that he was mad. The zeks did not know of the bitter trial of the breakdown. Byrkin's balance was lost, and each step that he took was an agony of effort and fear.

  Holly saw him, heard his shrieking wail as a shoulder lifted from the bench and caught square on the underneath of Byrkin's enamel soup bowl. The opaque yellow liquid floated high beside Byrkin's face then splashed on his tunic, onto the shoulder of the man who had nudged him, onto the boards of the floor. It was Byrkin who shouted. A howl of protest, of despair. T
he man who rose from the bench seemed to offer a grudging apology, but Byrkin would not have seen the gesture as he scrabbled on the floor for his slice of black bread. Holly looked into Byrkin's eyes witnessing the suffering. What price against that suffering was the pleasure that the Commandant had no roof to cover his office? Holly had felt pleasure, allowed it to cocoon him.

  Where did that pleasure stand on the scale against the misery of a man in the Kitchen whose soup was spilled, whose bread was soggy from the floor's snow water?

  Poshekhonov was beside Holly. Always Poshekhonov seemed to be close to him.

  , 'Only happens to someone like Byrkin. He's doomed, damned. Mark me, Englishman, he'll go to the wire.'

  'He's sick,' said Holly. The tranquillity had gone from his face. He moved forward to close the gap again with the tunic back in front of him and his lips were dented white where the teeth had bitten at them.

  'Sick? Of course he's sick. Sick like everybody. What do you expect, a nice neat psychiatric ward? He's better here, better with us than at the Sebsky . . . '

  'I don't know of the Sebsky.'

  'For one who intends to stay a long time with us, Englishman, you know little of us. In Moscow is Kropotkin Lane.

  At Number 23 is the Sebsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. Ask Feldstein, our little revolutionary. He shits himself each day that they will send him there. Friend Byrkin would get robust treatment at the Sebsky. Even this place is better than some, Englishman.'

  They were at the hatch. Soup in a bowl, hot water in a mug, bread on the tray.

  'Will you sit with me, Englishman?'

  There was a wintry smile on Holly's face.

  'Find a place for two of us, I'll come to you.'

  Holly took his tray and walked briskly back along the line of men who waited for their food. He saw ahead of him the bowed back of Byrkin, hunched head in hands with an empty bowl in front of him on the table. Holly's movement was very quick, sudden, and few would have seen the gesture. His soup bowl snaked from his tray, tipped, tilted, the liquid ran steaming to the bowl in front of Byrkin. And Holly was gone, moving to where a space waited for him beside Poshekhonov.