Archangel (25 page)

A lungeing swaying fight when the men of the hut had stayed back on their mattresses with their eyes locked to the brightness of two steel blades. A wordless fight that soared to an instant climax when the silver of steel was blood-

darkened. The old 'baron' was now in Hut 4, a morose figure stripped of influence.

No man had ever come to Adimov with a proposition of partnership. No man had ever come to Adimov as an equal.

When he twisted his mind back over the months and years that he had been a prisoner in the camp he could not recollect any moment when he had entertained the thought of escape. He would have reckoned escape to be the final idiot fling of the suicide. He had thought only of making himself supreme over all others within the confines of the camp.

But a new man had come to their hut, a man who was indifferent to the power wielded by Adimov.

The power of the 'baron' had been eroded by that very indifference. The new man had drawn weakness from Adimov's strength, sapped his very authority. He had asked the new man to write a letter for him when no other zek in the hut could be allowed to learn that Adimov was illiterate. A new man had placed Adimov in his debt. No other prisoner in the camp could boast that he was the creditor to Adimov.

The suspicion had succumbed to confusion. The confusion had been beaten back by the very confidence of Michael Holly . ..

And Adimov would again be with his woman.

She was a blowsy creature, an untidy, tyre-fat woman who was warm and kindly to Adimov. In all his life she was the only person that he had loved. He thought of her on her back in the bed of the tiny room that he had shared with her.

He thought of the disease that ran through her stomach. Of course they would be watching the flat, but he could come at night. If he could see her just once, hold her, whisper some happiness into the ear of his woman who was dying.

That bugger, the Englishman, he didn't ask for much.

Wire-cutters and food and two white sheets, and three days to find them.

The 'baron' had influence. The 'baron' was the puppeteer who could tug the strings.

There was a guard, a creeping, curved-shouldered youth, with more than one year served in the M VD detachment of the camp who could be owned, manipulated by Adimov. It was the power of the 'baron' that he knew the flaws of the mighty and the lowly of the camp. There was a guard who brought sugar and chocolate to a trustie of Internal Order because the man was from the same suburb of Murmansk, a guard who in the innocence of his first weeks at the camp had compromised himself for all the time of his conscripted service. That guard would supply the wire-cutters.

There was a zek who worked on the duty rota in the Kitchen and who was behind with his tobacco payments to the 'baron', a bent willow of a man who could be persuaded to provide a package of bread and parboiled potato.

There was a boy who had come with a pale, tear-ridden face to his 'baron' to ask for protection, a boy with slim hips and cropped blond hair who would pay every rouble and kopeck that he earned in the workshop for the privilege of sheltering under the strong arm of Adimov. There were two old bastards who wanted the kid, neither would dare to touch him while he was under the guardianship of Adimov.

The boy worked in the Laundry where camp uniforms and blankets were washed, and also the sheets from the garrison's barracks.

Adimov could supply wire-cutters, a supply of food, two white sheets.

He spoke to the guard who stood beside the gate of the compound, and the hissed threat of exposure was sufficient to silence his stuttered hesitation.

He spoke to the Kitchen hand at morning exercise on the perimeter path in the half-light, and twisted his arm painfully up into the valley of his back.

He spoke to the Laundry worker as they were marched to the Factory, and the boy imagined his trousers being ripped down from his waist and the hands of an old man on his skin, and he nodded in dumb acquiescence.

Adimov could provide as Holly had asked, for the coming Sunday.

Morning roll-call.

A frost gathering on the noses and eyebrows of the zeks in their ranks. The checking of names. Rudakov stood beside Kypov, at his shoulder. Michael Holly was always in the rear rank for roll-call, and always Rudakov could see him.

There was a stature that put him above the other men in the forward ranks.

'Holly . . . ' The bark of the sergeant who held the clip board and the pencil.

'Present . . .' The reply drifting over the heads from the back.

Another name, another answering call. Rudakov walked towards the sergeant.

'Get Holly here.' Rudakov said.

The flow of the sergeant was broken.

'Holly to the front. To the Political Officer. Ignatiev . . . '

'Present. . .'

Holly moved from his place in the rear line. He skirted the end of the rank and came slowly forward. Perhaps, Rudakov thought, there was ah insolence about the way the prisoner approached. Not deliberately delaying, not hurrying.

'Isayev . . .'

'Present. . . '

Rudakov watched him come, noted that his tunic for all its padding hung looser now on the Englishman's body than when he had first come to the camp. And all the time that Holly walked, Rudakov could see that his eyes were on him.

That was the difference with this man. Any other would have dipped his head, avoided the boldness of the close gaze.

ivasyuk . . .'

'Present. . .'

Rudakov permitted Holly to come near to him and when he stopped, only a couple of metres short, then Rudakov stepped forward. He spoke quietly.

'You are ready?'

'Very soon . . .' There was a distance in Holly's voice.

'When?' The bite of impatience frolm Rudakov.

'Next week . . . '

'When next week?'

'On Monday, Comrade Captain.'

Rudakov looked into Holly's face, tried to read a message of defeat and was confronted only with a lacklustre mask.

'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?