Archangel Page 20

'Do it today.'

  'On Monday morning.'

  'You waste three more days of your life.'

  'On Monday morning.'

  There was a shrug from Rudakov. 'So be it. . . Monday morning. Get back to your place.'

  Holly turned away from Rudakov, shambled away towards the wing of the front rank.

  There was a flush of excitement running in Rudakov's body. His mind raced. He saw a punched tape jumping in the clamping hold of a telex machine. He saw a typed sheet being hurried from Communications along the corridors of Lubyanka. He saw the gleam of admiration playing on the face of a full Colonel of state security. He saw a telegram of fulsome congratulation being drafted for transmission to Barashevo. In the bag, where all the others had failed . ..

  Rudakov turned cheerfully to Kypov.

  'Commandant. . . Elena is doing Political Education on Sunday evening. She is giving a lecture, but it will be finished early. Would you care to join us afterwards for dinner?

  It was the first time such an invitation had been offered.

  'Your wife will hardly want to cook.'

  'She'll be finished quite early. She's excellent in the kitchen. She would enjoy your company, as I would.' Rudakov grinned. 'We'll break a bottle open. I have a little light one from Tsbilisi.'

  'I would enjoy that very much . . . ' Kypov thought of the file that rested in the safe of his Political Officer. 'I will look forward to the evening.'

  'Excellent.'

  Rudakov set off for his office in the Administration block.

  Though his lips were chapped from the cold he managed to whistle. Something lively that he had picked up like a virus in Magdeburg. And he might be back there soon, in the German Democratic Republic or in Moscow, or perhaps to Prague or Warsaw, or even to Washington . . . anywhere other than the Dubrovlag. And when he left Barashevo he would be wearing Major's pips on his epaulettes. With a jaunty step, with the tune rippling in his ears, he went to his office.

  Behind him the ranks of prisoners trudged towards the gate and the transfer to the Factory compound.

  The perimeter path is the only place of privacy in the compound. Each night there are always a few who walk the path, sometimes in company, sometimes alone. The boot-crushed snow of the track holds no eavesdropper, the barbed wire that shields the killing zone offers no hiding-place for a 'stoolie'.

  Holly had been the first to leave the hut. There were stars for a ceiling and a misted moon. He was joined by Adimov.

  There was a naturalness about their meeting.

  'Will you have them?'

  'Cutters, food, sheets - I'll have them.'

  'By Sunday?'

  'I'll have them. Shit, that's the easiest. . .'

  'Give me those and I'll get you out,' Holly said softly.

  'Where? Where do we go out?'

  There was a grating in Adimov's voice, and his glance roved up against the silhouette lines of the wire and the bare height of the wooden fence. Holly waited, ignoring the frustration of his companion. They walked on to the corner of the compound, the right-angled turn on the perimeter path. Their faces were lost in the grey shadow of the watch-tower.

  A slow smile from Holly. 'We go out here.'

  Adimov darted his eyes at Holly. 'Under the tower . . . ?'

  'Right.'

  'That's crap, that's suicide . . . '

  'That's the safest place in the compound.'

  it's right under him, under his gun.'

  'Under him, and out of sight of him. It's the safest place.'

  'I'm not having my bloody guts blown o u t . . .'

  'Look at the place, look at it . . . ' Holly had seized Adimov's sleeve, gripped him, turned his body back towards the angle and the fences and the wire. 'Under the tower there is darkness. The lights are blocked by the tower and by the stilts. From the other towers they cannot look here because to do so they look into the other tower's searchlight.'

  'Two lots of wire, one wooden fence.'

  'Right.'

  'Shit. . . I'm not a coward, it's mad . . .'

  'I said I'd get you out, Adimov.'

  'Under the tower, under the gun, where if we fart he'll hear us, and we cut through.two wire fences and we climb a wooden fence. . . shit, Holly, what tells you I've the balls for it . . . ?'

  'You have a wife with cancer of the stomach, that's why you'll come with me. That's why I chose you.'

  As he walked away from Adimov and towards Hut z, Holly slapped his body with his arms, trying to beat some warmth into his skin. Just once he looked back, and then not at the man that he had left but at the small, shadowed space beneath the watch-tower. Above the shadowed space was a watch-tower and a guard and a machine-gun. A machine-gun, and the targets would be at point-blank range. Nowhere else, Holly, nowhere else. He slammed the door of the hut behind him and felt the heat waft across him, and there was a shudder in his breath. Ignoring the questioning glance of Feldstein, he climbed onto his mattress and turned to the wall.

  Long after the lights had been switched off, and the warmth of the stove had waned, the hut was a chilled and dark place.

  The old ones said that it was always coldest in Mordovia when the winter was close to running its course. A hundred men lay on their mattresses in Hut 2, and those that were lucky had found sleep, and all were wrapped tight in their blankets and had discarded only their boots for the night hours.

  Anatoly Feldstein had not found sleep.

  It was the hunger that made it hardest to drift into the dream world that was an escape. The hunger caught at his stomach. The hunger had stripped the flesh from his bones and those bones made him believe that he lay on a bed of stones rather than a mattress of waste straw.. The bones gouged into his body, pressed on his organs and nerves. And when he was exhausted, the bitterness welled in him, and sleep was even harder to achieve.

  Above him Adimov was asleep. Regular, grunted waves of breathing. He'd be counting, his mind playing at a cash-register . . . who owed him money, who owed him tobacco, who owed him food .. . The criminals could always sleep . . .

  That was the cruelty of the Dubrovlag, to leave a man such as himself in the company of these animals. Pig-headed, imbecile criminals who were the fodder on which the camps fed. They could have moved Feldstein, could have sent him to Perm where they had gathered the dissidents.

  Not that the regime at Perm would be different to Barashevo

  . .. same stinking food, same stinking huts, same stinking regime. . . but he would have been with friends. The people at Perm were all together. Chained in a common purpose, weren'tthey? Camp 35 and Camp 36 and Camp 37 were the homes of the people that Feldstein yearned to be with, the camps of Perm where the Article 72. men rotted their lives away. Article 72 - Especially Dangerous Crimes against the State - was the net that pulled in the hard bedrock of the •

  dissidents, that consigned them to Perm that lay 400

  kilometres to the east of the Dubrovlag. Almost an insult, for a dissident not to be imprisoned at Perm. They were the elite, and Anatoly Feldstein was committed to a camp of criminals.

  He thought of the men in the hut. Adimov was a thug, Poshekhonov was a fraud, Chernayev was a thief, Byrkin was a fool, Mamarev was an informer. Those were Anatoly Feldstein's companions. That was the knife-edge of real cruelty.

  And there was Michael Holly.

  Holly should have been the friend of Feldstein.

  Holly should have been different to the herd. Holly who tossed on the bed close to him and sometimes cursed in the tantalizing unknown of a foreign language. Holly should have been the colleague of a political activist. Holly knew the meaning of freedom, had grown to manhood in its company.

  Yet Holly barely acknowledged the existence of Anatoly Feldstein - Feldstein the dissident, the Prisoner of Conscience, the victim of the abuse of Human Rights.

  Could Holly ever know what it took in courage to be an opponent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Could he know what it meant to breed the fear that
this day or this month the lift would come? The lift and then the interrogation, the interrogation and then the imprisonment?

  Could Holly know what it meant to fight from within?

  There were few enough allies. Forget the students at the University and the trainees at the laboratory. Don't look for a pillar from your mother and father and grandmother, from your brothers and sisters.

  Holly should have known, Holly had lived in liberty.

  Feldstein rolled on his mattress, listened to the night sounds of the hut. He heard the scrape of the springs of Holly's bed.

  'Holly . . . you are awake?' A whisper, a pleading for contact.

  'I'm awake.'

  'Sometimes we are too tired to sleep.'

  'You can't sleep if somebody talks to you.'

  A hesitation. 'I'm sorry, Holly . . .'

  'I didn't mean that, Feldstein . . . I take it back.'

  'When you came here, to Russia, when you did whatever you had to, did you think it might end in a place such as this?'

  'No.'

  There was a rough laugh from Holly.

  'Did you know of such places as this?'

  'Vaguely . . . I didn't have the names and the map references.'

  'The people of Britain, they don't know about such places as Barashevo?'

  'There are a few who tell them, not many who listen.'

  'If you had known this place waited for you, would you have done what you did?'

  'I don't know . . . Christ, Feldstein, it's halfway through the night. . .'

  'You have to know that answer.'

  'I have to sleep . . . I don't know.'

  'All of us knew, everyone in my group. Can you understand that? We knew what faced us, we knew of this camp and a hundred other camps. We knew when we started . . .'

  'Some day they'll strike you a medal.'

  'Why will you not talk of this, Holly?'

  'Because I want to sleep.. . damn you, Feldstein, because talk doesn't help. Talk wins nothing.'

  'Only through talking can we win. Only that way do we succeed.'

  'What has your talking won you?. .. Sakharov is exiled, Shcharansky and Orlov in camps, Bukovsky and Kuznetsov booted out. Bloody marvellous talkers all of them. Talked their bloody heads off, and won them nothing.'

  'There is no other possibility, Holly.'

  'Then you are doomed. For fifteen years you've been pushing round paper, collecting fifty people to stand in Pushkin Square, burying the White House in cables. You've filled the camps again, Feldstein, and nobody cares.

  million people go to work each morning in London and they're thinking of the bird next to them, whether they can afford a Music Centre, how much it's going to cost to get to Spain in the summer. They couldn't give a damn about you

  . .. nor about me, nor about anyone else who's plastered in flea-bites and sores and working his arse off in Mordovia.'

  'We knew when we started on our journey that it would bring us here.'

  'What do you want of me, Feldstein?'

  'We chose the weapon against them that hurts them most, we took the weapon of legality. We demanded the rights that are owed to us through the Constitution.'

  'Feldstein . . . Christ, I admire you. I admire all your colleagues. You are all bloody marvellous. What I am saying . . . Christ, I'm tired . . . I'm saying you're not winning anything. When they put you in here and they throw the bloody key away, then you're beaten. Nobody listens to the shout of Anatoly Feldstein. You can lift the bloody roof, and nobody hears you. That's not winning . . .'

  'When we have a hunger strike . . . '

  'Then they save on the food. They don't give a shit.'

  'What is your way, Michael Holly?'

  'I don't know.' A quaver of evasion.

  'You have a different way to our way.' The glint of sarcasm.

  'I don't k n o w . . . but if you fight to win, then you use the weapons that bring victory . . .'

  'And non-violence is not such a weapon?'

  'Go to sleep, Anatoly.'

  'Why do you run from every question?'

  'Because answering questions helps not at all. Go to sleep.'

  'And Zatikyan and Stepanyan and Bagdasaryan, the Armenians who were shot for the Moscow bomb that killed seven persons in the Metro - were they using the right weapon? You have to answer that question, you have to . . .'

  Quiet fell between the bunk frames.

  For a long time Feldstein waited, and he was rewarded only with the sounds of Michael Holly's breathing.

  Hopelessness consumed him. Holly preferred the company of Adimov who was a killer, Feldstein had seen them together on the perimeter path. There was cruelty all round him, but that was the cruellest.

  Another evening, another fall of darkness, another hushing of the life of ZhKh 385/3/1.

  Elena Rudakov walked beside her husband across the compound.

  She took the centre of the path and her leather knee-boots were unsure on the diamond ice and she hugged her husband's arm and muffled herself in the warmth of her fox fur.

  She was a creature of duty. She had chosen for her text the munificence of the aid supplied by her government to the Third World. She had written out her speech in full. Better that she should bury her head in her script. If she looked up into the faces of her audience, she would see the animal lust of the pigs . . . There was a meat stew in the oven of the bungalow gently simmering, potato and carrot in the saucepans waiting for the gas to be lit when she returned. For the life of her she could not comprehend why Yuri had asked Kypov to come to dinner.

  In a watch-tower a young guard swore at the wind that pierced the open window at the front of his platform. It was in Standing Orders that the window must be open and the barrel of his machine-gun jutting from it. The guard saw the Political Officer and the Political Officer's woman heading for the Kitchen. Great fanny, the wife of the KGB Captain, and three more months until his leave. The guard stood back on the platform, tried to keep himself away from the gale that sang through the window.

  The Kitchen was almost full.

  A woman would be talking to them. She came one Sunday a month, and still seemed as preciously rare as a winter orchid. After the woman there would be a film.

  A steaming warmth of breath and bodies in the hall and a chair set on the small dais, and the men at the front would see her knees and more if she shifted her legs.

  Poshekhonov was at the back. He'd see her face, and think of a story told long ago of a woman who managed a handstand and leaned her buttocks against the wall. Beside Poshekhonov, Chernayev had taken his place. In Chernayev's pocket, safe and hidden, was a letter. He had not questioned Michael Holly who had given him the letter. He had accepted it, he had promised that the next evening he would personally give it to the hand of the Political Officer.

  He had shaken Holly's hand, he had known. He had looked into the face that wore a boyish grin, almost a thing of mischief, before he had gone to find a chair at the back of the Kitchen hall.

  Holly and Adimov stepped down from the door of Hut 2.

  The quiet of the compound dripped around them.

  Chapter 15

  The snow fell close and thick, hiding them. Sweet, perfect snow dropping in the confetti of tickertape.

  To cross the compound they used the safety of the huts, hugging the long shadows. From Hut 2 they scurried to the dark pall of the Bath and Laundry block. A panting pause there, and ears cocked for sounds of movement and voices.

  Then the short sprint to the front of Hut 6, and they sheltered against the stilts of brick that supported the building while they calmed the frantic breathing. A few stumbling, running metres and they found the padlocked, recessed door of the Store. That was the waiting place, that was the last place where they would stop before the charge at the fences.

  They had made the sheets into crude cloaks. The fastening on each of a single safety-pin left a hole for the head to dip through, and the sheets would hang down and lie secure over their
backs. Like two children engaged in unimaginative fancy dress.

  God, the snow helped them, the snow that cascaded from the low cloud ceiling.

  God, Holly, that was luck.

  Holly waited until the searchlight on the corner tower arced away along the length of the fence. The snow made its beam mottled and disturbed. He looked up at the tower, saw it as a fleeting image, checked like a chess-board, dark shape on white snow. He saw the barely distinct outline of the torso of the guard. Far back, the bastard, where he could warm himself. The guard would have to move forward on his platform each time that he varied the aim of his searchlight, but he'd do that rarely enough. He'd move the beam when he had to, when it was necessary, he'd not be hanging through the window.

  He grinned, something mad in his eyes.

  'Ready, Adimov . . . ?'

  "Course I'm ready.' A snarl from Adimov.

  'Stay close to me.'

  'Right up your arse.'

  Holly reached out in the blackness, found Adimov's hand, felt through the wool of their gloves the trembling of the fingers. He squeezed Adimov's hand, squeezed it tight, dropped it.

  'We shouldn't hang a b o u t . . . '

  Holly turned again towards the angle of the compound.

  He looked up again at the watch-tower. He waited, and Adimov's body was pressed against him as if to propel him forward. Holly waited, and was rewarded. The shadow of the guard came to the window, and the searchlight rotated across the huts and the inner compound, swung in a great sweep before coming to rest on the opposite fence.

  Holly was gone. The very speed of his movement seemed to catch Adimov unprepared. Adimov chased after the billowing white back. Snow in their faces, in their eyes, melting in their mouths, settling on their capes. Hard to keep the eyes open when they were running, when they were bent, when the iced snow landed on them. Holly stopped, he crouched, Adimov crashed against him. A second of awkwardness, balance failing, but the discipline held. No words, and the white sheets blanketed their bodies and they froze to a statue stillness. They were at the angle of the perimeter path, on the ice of the tramped walkway where the snow now painted over the boot marks. Holly had been here many times. Now the new route, now the magic road.