Archangel Page 5

  Holly's hand moved, the lightning strike of the cobra. His fingers found the wrist. They gripped and savagely twisted.

  The knife sprang into the air, arced up a few inches as if powered by a small spring. It fell between the bunks and clattered dully in its landing. He held the man's wrist hard against the clean edge of the frame of the bunk.

  'Don't threaten me, not ever again. My name is Michael Holly . . .' he paused, then grinned quickly. 'I have no tobacco . . . what is your name?'

  Holly bent to the floor, picked up the knife, admired the workmanship of the weapon, reversed it so that the string whipped handle was towards the man, passed it back to him.

  'Adimov . .. this is my hut.'

  'You can have all of it, but not me. No one has me.'

  A nervous, hesitant gust of laughter blew the length of the hut.

  'Remember that you sleep beside me . . . Holly . . . '

  'I am a light sleeper, Adimov.'

  Before dusk Holly and those who had arrived that day were taken to the Bath house to stand for a few moments beneath the trickle of lukewarm water. When they had dried per-functorily on the threadbare towels that were issued they were marched across the stamped snow of a path to the Store for the clothing issue. Black cotton trousers, a black tunic, a black quilted coat, a balaclava that was padded.

  Boots of army style that fitted loosely over his socks. There was a mattress to be carried away, calico cloth and filled with straw. A blanket and a shallow pillow. He dressed, he signed for the garments, he saw his old clothes parcelled into a plastic bag that was labelled and tossed to the floor. He was in the uniform of the camp, he was a part of its essence.

  The camp had drawn him with whirlpool force into its mouth. He belonged in the camp, he belonged nowhere else.

  He shouldered the mattress and carried it back to Hut 2, and slung it up onto his bunk, and threw the pillow and blanket after it.

  Adimov was sleeping.

  Feldstein told Holly at what time they went over to the Kitchen for the evening's food and he spoke of the compul-sory attendance afterwards at the Political Education Unit.

  Holly sensed the loneliness of Feldstein in the hut, the dissident among the zeks. That was a bitter punishment, the placing of this boy amongst the criminals. The boy would have no defence against these people.

  'Adimov is the "baron" of this hut. Nobody has spoken to him in the way that you have, not for more than a year . . .

  'He broke a man's arm a year ago, snapped it like a dried twig behind his back. There are two men that you should fear here. Adimov in the Hut, and Rudakov in the Administration. Adimov you have seen, Rudakov you will find. In the punishment cells last week, Rudakov, who is the Political Officer, kicked over a man's slop bucket and the water ran all over the floor. There is no bedding in the punishment cells and no heating. The man slept on the floor, and the water that had been spilt froze on the floor. The man slept on ice. They are the two men who are feared here, they survive in their authority because we are afraid of them.'

  A private smile murmured on Holly's face.. . He thanked the boy, then went out into the gathering darkness and across to the trodden path on the inner perimeter of the camp.

  Ahead of him, spaced at compact intervals, other men walked the path. This was the place of aloneness, this was where a man went to talk only with himself. Out into the freezing, bitter wind. Holly stepped into the slow-moving queue, took his pace from those who went before and after him, did not close and did not widen the gaps.

  He walked against the clock.

  Away from Hut z. Past Hut 3, turn to the left, past the gate and Administration which was now a darkened hulk, past where the roof of the camp's prison peeped over the fences, turn to the left, past Hut 4, past the old Kitchen which was now a sleeping hut, past the Bath house and then Hut 6, past the Store, turn to the left, past the Guard Room, turn to the left, past Hut 1 . . . three hundred and eighty-five paces . . . Away from Hut z.

  They were the margins for Holly, those were the limits.

  And Camp 3 is one of the old ones, Holly, there have been thousands here before you, tens of thousands of booted and bandaged feet dragging round this path. Not the first to step onto that path and wonder in rage at four left turns adding to three hundred and eighty-five paces. The path was packed snow or worn earth before you were born, Holly. The path will see you out, see you dead and forgotten. Beside the path to his right there was a low wooden fence, a yard high he reckoned it to be, and in some places the snow had driven against it and reached its top. A fence of sawn-off, creosoted planks. Beyond the low innocence of the fence the snow was smooth, untrampled. Over the wooden fence is the death-strip, Holly. He thought of a bullet, and he thought of the chill lead set in the brass cartridge cases of the rifles or machine-guns that watched him. And after the low wooden fence and the clean snow was the barbed wire fence that stretched up on poles to the height of Holly's head. And after the barbed wire was another fence that was higher and again the floodlights played and caught on the cutting edges

  . . . and after the high barbed wire was a wooden fence that was three yards high. Two wooden fences, two wire fences, and all lit as day, all covered by the watch-towers standing in each corner of the compound, and over the highest of the wooden fences he could see only the roof of the prison.

  A terrible silence without beauty. The silence of those without hope.

  A man in front of him had stopped. He stared at the low wooden fence and the pure sward of snow yellowed by the lights, and at the low wire fence and at the high wire fence and at the high wooden fence. Holly saw his face as he passed behind him on the perimeter path, a face that was scraped with despair. Holly walked on and the man behind him was an abandoned nothing.

  It can't be real, Holly. It can only be canvas. Put a knife to it and the canvas will rip. There must be another picture behind the paint.

  Crap, Holly, it's real. And the bullets in the gun in the watch-tower above, they're real . . . and the cold, and the sentence of the court which has fourteen years to run, and the worst luck that the Consul had ever heard of. . . they're real.

  He had completed another revolution of the prescribed path, and the man still stood and stared at the fences, and his shoulders were not hunched as if the cold no longer concerned him.

  Where did it begin?

  Where was the start of the story that brought Mikhail Holovich, who was to become Michael Holly, to this place of wire and snow, of dogs and guns?

  The town called Bazar in the heart of the'Ukraine was found on the fringes of thick forestland to the north of the Kiev to Zhitomir railway. In its way the town possessed a certain prosperity that was based on the quality of the nearby timber, the richness of the black soil, and the failure of central government's collectivization policy to reach with any great thoroughness into the self-sufficiency of the few thousands who lived there.

  The Ukraine is not Russia. The Ukraine had struggled to preserve its identity of language, heritage, and literature.

  Moscow was a distant capital, a foreign overlord handing out its satraps and commissars. In spite of, and because of, the Stalinist purges of the Thirties, the uniqueness of the Ukraine had not been dislodged. And where better to remember that individuality than in the town of Bazar. On the lips of every child of that town was the story of the day-long battle fought there on November 21st 1921 between the men loyal to George Tiutiunnyk and the fledgling Red Army. A gunfight that stretched from dawn until night as the group who believed themselves to be Ukrainian patriots held out, without hope of rescue or reinforcement, against the encircling advance of Moscow's soldiers. It was an epic fight. Old rifles against mortars and machine-guns and howitzers. It was followed, after the ammunition pouches of the defenders had been emptied, by total slaugh-ter as the last line on the summit of an open hill was breached.

  The sacrifice of Tiutiunnyk and his men, because sacrifice was how it was seen in Bazar, lingered for twenty years as a whispered
obsession in the minds of the townspeople. From the time they could read and write and understand, Stepan Holovich and Ilya, who was to become his wife, had known of the battle.

  And then in November 1941 the unimaginable happened.

  The Militia were gone from Bazar. The Party offices were closed and its workers speeding East in open lorries. Straggling, beaten columns of troops marched without equipment into the town and out along the main road to Kiev.

  And a day after them the Panzer convoys took the same road, and some of the girls and women of Bazar with great daring threw flowers onto the mud-spattered armour of the Panther heavy tanks, and some of the men cheered and the headmaster of the secondary school said that evening in the cafe on Lenin Street that this was a moment of deliverance.

  The people of Bazar could not differentiate between the front line forces of the Wehrmacht and the garrison troops of the SS divisions. Nor could those people know that after the combat generals had moved further East into Russia that their authority over the civilian population would fall to the hands of Erich Koch, drafted to Kiev to head the Reichskommissariat.

  On the afternoon of November 21st the townspeople flocked to the hill site of Tiutiunnyk's battle. They came in their best clothes as if it were a Sunday from the days before the church was closed. The headmaster made the first speech, flags flew, the town band played a medley of the tunes of the old Ukraine, a hymn was sung. In the evening the SS troops came to the homes of those who had organized such a happy day. In the morning the SS firing squads shot dead twenty-four of Bazar's most prominent citizens. The following week the train took all the young men and women of Bazar to the war factories of the Ruhr.

  Stepan and Ilya Holovich were amongst those transported in the sealed wagons through Lvov and Krakow and Prague to Essen. They were the Ostarbeiters, intelligent and educated, and set to work as labourers, made to wear a badge.

  Three and a half years later, the Panthers that had stormed through Bazar and the Ukraine came home in defeat.

  Emaciated, servile, exhausted, Stepan and Ilya Holovich found themselves herded with a hundred thousand others into the Displacement Camps. The majority, the huge majority, were to be shipped back in the same closed trains to the Motherland of Russia. The minority, the tiny minority, succeeded in persuading the American authorities that they should not be returned.

  In 1947 Stepan and Ilya Holovich arrived with no money and no luggage at London's Tilbury docks on a freighter from Bremen. Stepan Holovich had sunk to his knees to kiss the rain-soaked paving of the quayside. From a single room in Kingston-upon-Thames which he rented and where he lived with Ilya, he repaired watches and clocks. When the local doctor, confounded by the sparrow size of his patients, informed the couple that they were to become parents, Ilya Holovich had dropped her lined and weary face to her chest and wept, and Stepan Holovich had jumped up from his chair and then scratched between his thin grey hair and laughed. A fortnight later the buff OHMS envelope had been delivered which announced the granting of the natur-alization papers. They were British citizens by the time that Ilya Holovich entered Kingston General Hospital for a difficult confinement. That it was difficult was of no surprise to the duty obstetrician. A woman of that physique had no business producing 8 lb 7 oz babies.

  They called the boy Mikhail.

  In the year that the child first went to a nursery school his father anglicized the family name. It was his hope that whereas an essentially Ukrainian background would rule behind the front door of their home, his son could become assimilated into the society that had adopted his flotsam parents.

  Michael Holly was an unremarkable boy growing up in the suburbs of south-west London.

  That is perhaps the start of the road to the perimeter path of ZhKh 385/3/1.

  A man stood, rakish and upright, and stared at the fences.

  The night pressed down on the flood of the arc lights, the line of lamp clusters rested on the outer fence of wood planks.

  The snow gathered in a thin cloak on his tunic's shoulders and he made no attempt to scatter the fall. Those who walked the perimeter path went behind him, and no one spoke to the man who gazed at the wall that held him. He communed in a solitude, and much of his face was hidden by the quilted balaclava, and his mind was blocked to those who passed him. When the bell sounded and the ghost figures pitched from the huts to form the lines at the Kitchen, he remained, his attention held all the time by the upper strands of wire and the topmost line of the wooden fence.

  From the corner of the compound the raised machine-gun and its minder watched and bided their time.

  In the dining area of the bare brick Kitchen there was a stirring in the pool of lethargy. This was Sunday evening, the end of the one day of the week when the Factory was idle. The zeks had rested, they had reinforced their strength by spending the daylight hours on their bunks. They had written the letters that would be read during the week by the camp censors, that would be passed or slashed or shredded.

  They had read from the paltry choice of books in the Library. They had dreamed of somewhere that was beyond the fence. They have been revived. Sunday is a hypodermic dose to the zeks.

  There was a spatter of life and talks in the queue that Holly joined and that stretched twice around the inside walls of the Kitchen. For the first time in the day he heard men laugh freely.

  At the far end from the door was a hatch at waist height, the level at which a man will naturally hold his steel tray.

  The man who ladles the food into the steel bowl on the tray cannot see the face of the man to whom he gives the food.

  He is blind to him and cannot therefore offer the favour of increased rations to a friend, reduced rations to an enemy.

  Except that Adimov and his fellow barons will speak their names, and the cook will respond, which is the way of survival. Their bowls will be brimming, they will head the queue for the sprat of meat or fish that floats in the soup gruel. There is a rule, there will be a path around it. That is the way of Camp 3, it is the way of all camps in the Dubrovlag.

  Adimov had not looked at Holly, he was far to the front of the slow-moving line with his cronies, the iron men of the huts, Feldstein stood half a wall's length ahead of Holly, beyond conversation.

  The soup was a mash of wheatmeal flour and groats.

  There was a skim of grease that shone in the fluorescent light of the Kitchen. A square of grey fish floated like a hostile iceberg, all but submerged. A tight chopped stalk of a cabbage plant. Different to Lefortovo, back in the dark ages from the second floor of the hospital block at Vladimir. Hot water to drink and rye bread to chew.

  Holly found a place at the end of a table, extra room was made for him. He sat down, he smiled.

  'You are the Englishman . . . the one who insists on his English name . . . I am Poshekhonov, from Hut z. I sleep close to the stove.'

  Holly looked across the table at the stubby, round-faced little fellow who breathed a cheerfulness that was alien here.

  He could have been a bank manager from the High Street of Twickenham, he could have sold insurance policies or slashed-price holidays to Benidorm.

  'Pleased to meet you - I'd rather it were elsewhere.'

  'The way you look at your food you are new to the camps. You have to close your eyes, close your nose, close your guts, you swallow it down. You throw the bread on top of it, the bread is the cork. The bread holds, it below till you're ready to shit. You don't eat like this in London?'

  'Not everyday . . .'

  Holly lifted the steel bowl to his mouth, tipped and tilted it, swallowed and felt the lukewarm drip in his throat and then the rising sickness, and he clamped his mouth shut, and swallowed again. More from the bowl.

  'You have to feed, you must feed,' said Poshekhonov sombrely, and then his laughter broke again. 'There is some goodness in the food. They even say there is protein, but that may be propaganda.'

  Holly thought he would choke. He bit at his lip and swallowed again.

>   is this the worst?'

  'Not the worst and not the best, this is everyday.'

  Poshekhonov leaned across the table and slapped at Holly's shoulder. 'You will get used to it. How long do you have to learn to love our food? I once had two weeks to learn to love everything, two weeks until I was to be shot. The two men sentenced with me, they killed them, they spared me. Since that day I love to eat, I love all the food. Life here is very beautiful, to me any life is preferable to death. You understand me, Englishman?'

  'Holly . . . yes, I understand you.'

  Only the grease lay at the bottom of the bowl. Holly took the bread and tugged it between his fingers and wolfed it to his mouth. Tasteless and dry, it suffocated the revulsion.

  The man next to him winked in a fast act of conspiracy, a runner bean of a man who then extended his hand to Holly and their fists gripped in a distant greeting, but there were no words. The camp was not a place of easy friendships. It was a place where men weighed and evaluated before they extended kindliness. They have learned to co-exist, they have learned to live without a colleague. He wiped the scattered crumbs on his tray to a neat heap and then pinched them between his fingers and gobbled them. The meal had done little to staunch the hunger pains in his stomach.

  Hunger would be the battle. But they survived, all of these men in the Kitchen hut had found a track of survival. And so, too, would Holly . . .

  'Englishman, you have not asked me why I am here

  . . .' The disappointment was flushed on Poshekhonov's face.

  Holly stood up. Around him the benches emptied. When the food was finished, the tables cleared.

  'Because it is not my business. Nor your business why I am here.'

  'Easy, Englishman, you cannot be an island, not in this place. The man who can live here is the one who reaches out to his fellows.' Poshekhonov had gripped Holly's arm.

  'They have the guns and the dogs and the wire, they have their norms of output in the Factory, they have their regulations and their camp regime. They seem to have everything.