Kolymsky Heights (17 page)

‘I
think
so.’

‘It didn’t go down further?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

He tried further, without the handkerchief, and left his hand there.

‘Naughty Kolya,’ she said, looking at him.

‘Naughty Lydia.’

He kissed her and received a mouthful of cherry tongue. ‘We’re only human, aren’t we?’ she said in his ear.

She said it again, next door, some time later, when he had begun to doubt it. The girl was a tiger. Presently she propped herself on an elbow and gazed down at him. ‘You know I haven’t been with a man since Alyosha. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I’m sure,’ he said honestly. A minimum of four months’ energy had gone into her activities, and he didn’t think much could have gone spare.

Later, lying more comfortably, she said reflectively, ‘Yes … that will certainly be a party, all right.’

‘Would you like to go to it?’

‘Who could I go with?’

‘Why not me?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if Alyosha would like that.’ Her eyelashes flickered at the ceiling. ‘I haven’t thought of it really,’ she said.

Pavel Grigorovich Bukarovsky, the road manager of the Tchersky Transport Company, had been given his job by Leonid Shevelyev, the founding father of the company and the man credited with opening up north-east Siberia. Shevelyev, arrested in 1947 for ‘unsound political beliefs’ had served his time in a local labour camp, and Bukarovsky had served time in the same camp. Most of the senior staff of the company had done time in the camps.

The camps of the Kolyma, strung out all along the river, had been the most infamous in the Soviet Union; and yet when they were closed in the 1950s many of the inmates had chosen to remain in the area. Their reasons were simple. The land of restraint had suddenly become the land of the free – freer at least than anywhere else in the Soviet Union. It had fewer police, fewer party officials, fewer bureaucrats. It also of course had fewer amenities.

But even that changed; for after the great gold and diamond finds of the 1960s, it suddenly had
more
amenities than elsewhere. It had more food, more housing, more pay. And by another reversal, what had once been the worst had become the best. By common consent Tchersky had been the worst. Under its former name of Nizhniye Kresty it had been a byword for horror even in the days of the Tsars: the remotest outpost of the Russian empire, the least accessible, a final hell for the most desperate prisoners. Now, as capital of the Kolymsky region, it had become the centre of all good things.

Pavel Grigorovich Bukarovsky in his own life had witnessed these changes, and on his sixtieth birthday, forty years after arriving in the Arctic, he planned to celebrate them. Although
he lived and worked at Green Cape, he had to celebrate at Tchersky, which had the largest premises: Barbara’s.

Barbara’s was a labyrinth of rooms running one into another; it had been converted from a double row of log houses. Deloused, debugged, completely sanitised, it all the same still retained the atmosphere of another Siberia and was the most popular venue in all the Kolymsky region. With the assistance of the mayor, who served as head of the planning committee, walls had been removed and temporary plinths inserted to open up the area – for the largest party Tchersky had ever seen.

Several hundred people were already there when Porter arrived with the girl, and Lydia Yakovlevna was both excited and nervous.

‘Oh God, it’s huge. Oh God, everybody’s here! How do I. look?’

She looked like an overdressed tart, but was not out of the ordinary. And not everybody was here. The winter roads were now laid and hundreds of the drivers were away. But the upper echelons of the two towns were here and their women were here, and all of them were in their best and overdressed. Stiletto boots were everywhere, and ornate hairdos and plunging necklines and eyeshadow and makeup.

There were thirty tables for ten clustered round a space left open for dancing, and guests were now packed tight in this space, greeting each other and taking early refreshment from laden trays pushed through the throng. Music was playing – accordions, balalaikas, brass – and people had to shout to be heard. The girl was soon flushed and dewed, her mascara smudging. ‘Oh God, it’s wonderful, it’s marvellous. Everybody’s here! Just look at the tables!’

The tables were indeed a sight: a mass of crisp napery and sparkling silverware, of glass, flowers, fruit piled high. And bottles, battalions of bottles.

‘Kolya!’ The limping Kama chief, Yura, was shouting in his ear. ‘You’re at my table! And your lovely lady, eh? You’re
with me! Wonderful, very good! Never had one of you before.’

‘Was that Uri Sergeivich?’ the girl asked, her eyes brightened still more at being named a lovely lady.

‘Yura, yes.’ He hadn’t heard Yura’s patronymic.

‘Oh God, he’s important! He’s really important – an old comrade of Pavel Grigorovich! We must be at a good table. You don’t think we can be at Pavel Grigorovich’s table?’

‘I don’t know.’

They were not at Bukarovsky’s table, but at one close by. Liova, the Light Vehicles head, was also at this table and some other departmental chiefs and their ladies. And a great hubbub rose from all the tables as the guests settled and saw what was before them, and what was still to come. Before each one of them was a bottle of champagne and of red wine, and for each couple a bottle of vodka and of cognac. And what was to come – on the elaborate commemorative menus – was the most extravagant meal Porter had ever seen. It was served on the trot by a small army of waitresses, Russian and Yakut, course after course of it.

Three kinds of soup and sour cream; caviar, smoked salmon, Kamchatka crab; roast chicken and beef with venison and tongue; salamis, sausages, stuffed piroshkes; salads, vegetables, pickled everything in profusion; with sugared cranberries and macaroons and icecream. And a box of chocolates with the coffee for every lady.

Bukarovsky, his haggard face relaxed and grinning, had. appointed himself master of ceremonies and gave the first toast. And the toasts went on throughout the meal: toasts to the guests, and the ladies, to Shevelyev and the company he had founded, to comrades now absent with the boats and those left always absent in the camps, to Tchersky and Green Cape, to the Kolymsky region and Yakutia, to peace and prosperity.

They had grown somewhat slurred before a crash of cymbals announced a surprise event – a huge cake wheeled in
as a present from Tchersky. The cake, iced to represent the original log premises of the Tchersky Transport Company, was set all around with models of the company’s first primitive trucks.

Bukarovsky, highly emotional, had to reply to this, and he said that proud as he was of the company’s development it could never have happened without the willing help of the Tchersky municipality; which suggested further toasts from those who had not yet given any.

Liova was on his feet, to give the Tchersky Road Services committee and its ambulance section whose vehicles he had the honour to service. Then Yura was on his, to say not only the ambulance section but all the health services, and in particular Tchersky’s magnificent hospital! And gazing round to where all the grinning faces had turned, Porter saw Medical Officer Komarova staring at him.

His heart gave a single great thump.

She was at a table beyond Bukarovsky’s, and now, through the cigarette smoke, he saw all the senior staff of the hospital. The director of the hospital was there, and Dr Gavrilov, and the isolation wing sister he had abused so loudly in Korean and Japanese. They were all looking and smiling quite amiably. But Medical Officer Komarova was not smiling. She was simply staring.

But was she staring at him? Perhaps she was staring at Yura. He looked quickly away, and was grateful that Yura then sat down and the impatient band struck up and people began taking the floor. Lydia Yakovlevna wanted to take the floor. The girl was now quite drunk and nibbling his ear.

‘I want to dance. I want to make love. First I want to dance,’ she said.

‘Yes, we’ll dance.’

‘Lovely lady, why hurry from me?’ Yura was now quite drunk himself and dribbling at her.

‘Oh, Uri Sergeivich, I don’t hurry from
you
−’

‘Ah, you know my name!’

‘Uri Sergeivich! Who doesn’t know your name?’

‘Uri Sergeivich,’ said a voice from the rear, ‘I would like, on behalf of the Medical Services committee, to thank you for your kind words.’ Komarova was in the rear. She was bending over to shake hands. She was bending over Porter to do so.

He dropped his napkin at once and got his head under the table to pick it up.

‘My privilege and my honour,’ Yura told her, drunkenly kissing the hand he was shaking. ‘But what’s this – not in your dancing clothes, not dancing with us tonight?’

‘Tonight it’s not possible. I am on call. But I felt I had to –’

Porter ducked out, dragged by Lydia Yakovlevna, and glimpsed the arm of a severely tailored suit before he was on the floor and lurching with the mob.

‘Oh God! Oh, pussy cat! Isn’t it wonderful? I feel wonderful,’ Lydia Yakovlevna said. She was nibbling his ear again. ‘I love you. I want to do things. We’ll do things, won’t we?’

‘Yes, we’ll do things,’ Porter said.

Komarova had certainly seen him. She had come over to see him better. Why else would she have come over to give thanks for kind words? The hospital director could have come and given them. But the hospital director didn’t seem to have recognised him, and nor had any of the others. All of them had examined him in the hospital; conscious and unconscious, clothed and naked: a sullen Korean seaman, bruised, with a pigtail and a moustache. Now he was a smiling Chukchee with a shaven head and a smooth face, a guest of Pavel Grigorovich’s. What connection could there be between the chance foreign seaman and this driver from Green Cape? But she had seen a connection.

Or had she?

He went frantically over every encounter he had had with her. She had seen him on the ship. She had brought him to the hospital. She had examined him every day. The others had examined him more – this was true – yet he was her patient,
and her responsibility. She had had to make the arrangements to get him to Murmansk. Perhaps she had now heard from Murmansk …

Or there could be another reason entirely.

She was the
district
medical officer; perhaps in her district she had not before seen any Chukchees. He hadn’t seen any himself. He had certainly been a novelty to Yura, to liova, even to the old Yakut Vassili. Bukarovsky had been puzzled as to what he was doing here from Chukotka. She could be asking just such questions about him now.

Yes, it was that. It had to be that.

‘Pussy cat, one more dance and then let’s go,’ Lydia Yakovlevna said. She was rubbing herself against him. ‘Oh God, I want to do things. I want to do everything. We’ll do everything, won’t we?’

‘Yes, we’ll do everything,’ Porter said.

He had signed for a bobik to get down to Tchersky, and now they went back to Green Cape in it, and up to the second floor and did everything. But his mind was not on his partner, now strenuously enjoying herself in the Finnish bed, but on the stern figure in the tailored suit.

This was at the end of October.

At the end of October, General Liu Shih-Yu, commander of the military region of Sinkiang in west China, flew from his headquarters at Urumchi to the desert station of Lop Nor.

At Urumchi, a town of half a million people, he maintained an infantry division. At Lop Nor, with almost no people, he had two armoured divisions.

Lop Nor was a nuclear test base: his country’s oldest.

General Liu was not today on nuclear business, however. He was here to observe the impacting of a test missile. It was coming from Manchuria in east China and it would cross the intervening 3200 kilometres in nine minutes. A new guidance system had been designed to land it within a target area (CEP – circular error probable) of 250 metres.

At Lop Nor he inspected the target area. Instruments had been set to record the impact from the air, from the ground, and from below the ground. Then he went to his observation bunker. Here contact was already established with Manchuria, and he greeted his opposite number, the commander of the Shenyang military region.

Was all in position at Lop Nor? he was asked.

Yes, all was in position at Lop Nor.

Then launch procedures could commence immediately.

Liu and his staff listened to the launch procedures on the loudspeakers, and then to the blast-off, and themselves joined Shenyang in a small cheer as the missile departed Manchuria on its nine-minute journey.

After ten minutes – and then twelve, fifteen – confusion developed between Shenyang and Lop Nor. No missile had appeared.

The first explanation was that its final stage had failed to ignite.

A few minutes later, a correction. It
had
ignited, but after transiting Inner Mongolia the small flight-correcting rockets had evidently misfired for the missile had swung south. Its descent had been observed, however, and a true burn-out velocity logged at 24,000 kph.

The vehicle carried no payload but this velocity had produced a large crater. It had produced it in the region of Lanchow; which was outside General Liu’s area.

Cursing, he led the way to his aircraft. He knew nothing of the research station at Tcherny Vodi – a frozen world away, far, far to the north. But at Tcherny Vodi much was known of General Liu.

At Urumchi he learned that soon he would be back at Lop Nor. A re-test had been ordered – extremest urgency. It had been ordered for November.

By November with the weather hard and the roads good, Kolya Khodyan had won golden opinions from his comrades at the Tchersky Transport Company. This was due to his cheerfulness, his modesty and his generosity. His generosity was exceptional.

Already sickness and injury among the crews had moved his name high up the reserve list; and already he had twice declined lucrative long-distance hauls. Family men needed the money more, he said; he was a bachelor, just filling in for a friend. He didn’t mind pottering about the area.

By now he had pottered widely and knew every route in and out, short hops that had him frequently back in the despatch depot. At the depot too he was very popular – no moans, no arguments from Kolya. Anything to go, he took it, wherever, whatever. And always smiling, a lovely fellow. He’d even help with the loading – no way his job! – to give the fellows a break.

He was familiar now with every aspect of the depot, knew the stacks, the destinations, was never in the way. A really bright Chukchee, true gold.

He’d seen the four one-ton crates stencilled
Tch. Vod
., in Local Delivery: radius fifty kilometres. Tcherny Vodi! He hungrily haunted this bay, fearful somebody else would get it; and as the bay emptied, tried to precipitate the action.

‘No, Kolya, no. That’s not to go yet.’

‘What is it?’

‘Turbines. For a place up in the hills. They had some kind of
blow-out a few months ago. There you don’t just deliver. They have to call through and say when. They have the stinking heads there.’

‘Ah, stinking heads.’ Stinking heads were high-ups, usually security services, usually Moscow, but here sometimes Irkutsk or Novosibirsk. ‘What do they want with stinking heads there?’ he asked in surprise.

‘God knows. We don’t ship them much. They fly in what they need, they have a strip. It’s just sometimes heavy gear – this has been here weeks, from Archangel, maybe they don’t need it yet.’

‘Is funny that. Stinking heads! I have friends in that place, I think – Evenks.’

‘Right. They have Evenks there, you’re right, Kolya.’

‘I like to see my friends there. I take this stuff, eh?’

‘Sure you will. Sure, Kolya. You’ll take the job – just when we get the call.’

And they got the call, and he took the job. He took the four crates on a Ural and helped load and strap them right way up. The Ural had a hoist and a hydraulic tailgate. He headed out of town and followed his map and picked up the creek. The creek was flagged at entry to show the weight it could take and he drove fifteen kilometres along it to be sure he had it to himself; though there wasn’t much doubt. Apart from the road gang who had checked it, nobody had used the creek this season. Then he got out and climbed in the back.

He undid the straps on the tarpaulin, picked out a crate and got to work with a screwdriver and a pot of paint. He scored out parts of the stencilling and overpainted fresh marks. Then he smudged the result with a grease rag until it was hard to tell which was the correct marking. It was now very cold. The exterior thermometer of the Ural showed forty below, but the air was dead still, no wind. The oily mess hardened immediately and he refastened the tarpaulin.

Twenty kilometres farther along the creek he saw the red flag and the turnoff he had to take out of it. The river bank was
steep but a ramp had been lowered and strewn with grit. He saw the bundled-up figures waiting on top, and they waved him on as he crunched slowly up. There were two men, their breath standing in the air, quite jovial, ear flaps down, automatic weapons slung, beating themselves in the cold. They had come out of a wooden guard hut in a small levelled area. A military jeep stood next to the hut.

‘Found it okay?’

‘No problem.’

They were gazing at him curiously, not expecting a native; quite friendly, though.

‘You unload all this on your own?’

‘Sure. Only there’s a problem with the manifest.’

‘Bring it inside.’

It was snug inside, two oil stoves going; and it became snugger still when he produced his flask. He heard, what he knew already, that they had run down here an hour ago, to open up the post, flag his turnoff and lay the ramp. They would wait until the tracked vehicle came down to pick up the load, and then take up the ramp and return: the post wasn’t manned normally.

‘What’s the problem with the manifest?’

‘See, is some kind of cockup,’ he said. ‘The marks don’t tally – we couldn’t understand it there.’

He took them out and showed them the marks and they puzzled over them.

‘Well, the crates are all the same.’

‘Sure, we got a hundred crates like that. Is Archangel crates.’

‘Just dump them anyway, and they’ll sort it out.’.

‘Is fine with me. You sign for it, you got it. But you don’t sign, I can’t leave it. Maybe you sign and it’s wrong.’

The two men looked at each other.

‘Well, what’s to be done about it?’

‘I don’t know. Either I run it up there and they, check it or someone comes down and checks it here.’

They went back in the hut and made a call on a communications set. The call established that someone would come down and check it.

They finished off the flask while waiting for the tracked vehicle to come down. Two Evenks and an officer came down with it. The officer was irritable and he paced impatiently while the Evenks prised open the suspect crate. Then he mounted the Ural and perched on the cab top while consulting a piece of paper and peering down into the crate.

‘It’s all right. Of course it’s all right. Bloody nonsense! Seal it.’

Then he paced again while the crate was sealed and Kolya and the Evenks transferred the load. They chatted merrily while they did this – the Evenks, like the other Siberian natives, intrigued that he ‘had the tongue’.

‘How is it up there, brothers?’

‘Fine. Good conditions, good pay. A job.’

‘It’s as well you came down. I thought I was going to have to run up there with this.’

The Evenks laughed. ‘Not in a million years. They’d never let you.’

‘Oh, the stinking heads – I forgot. What goes on up there? What kind of problem with stinking heads?’

‘They’re no problem. Not if you have a pass. We don’t mix with anybody. It’s just scientists there – who knows what they do?’

But he learned more. The Evenks’ reindeer herds were far away, at the other side of a mountain. From there they helicoptered you in. You rotated the jobs at the hill station, a month at a time. They didn’t let you stay any longer. But anybody could do it. A stinking head came down and made out the passes; he dealt with Innokenty, the headman.

Then they finished the loading and took off, and his manifests were signed and he took off too, and drove back along the creek, thinking.

The Evenks were the way in, obviously. They were the only way in. Herdsmen, nomads. With a headman, Innokenty. He would have to meet this Innokenty. He would have to get out to the herds. But there were no deliveries to the herds …

He turned the matter over in his mind. Somehow there would
have
to be a way of getting there.

And in the days that followed he found it; and before it, something else.

The load was for a big Kama to Provodnoye, 260 kilometres each way, and nobody wanted it: not while the huge backlog for Bilibino and Pevek still remained, real mileage and proper money. Good Kolya took it, in a Ural, two journeys. They broke up the load, window frames and central heating for a new apartment block, and he took off, single-handed. A jewel, a piece of gold dust!

The Provodnoye route was a new one to him, and it looked interesting: you could lose yourself here if you needed to. He ran south on the river, and turned off for the section of made track to Anyuysk. This part he knew. Then he left the made track and picked up the winding tributary to Provodnoye. The tributary ran between steep banks and in season it evidently ran fast; in the narrow bends coves were gouged out of the banks.

He kept a steady sixty kilometres an hour, slowing to thirty and twenty on the bends, and was changing up as he pulled out of one when a flock of ptarmigan exploded out of a piece of bush. A beautiful sight! White rockets in a lead sky. He watched them in his rear-view mirror as they returned to the bush but they did not return to the bush. He could not make out where they returned.

He stopped the truck and got out and walked back on the river. The cluster of bush grew out of the bank; stunted willow, white with ice but mottled where the birds had nibbled the twigs. He padded softly but still they knew and rocketed up again; fox also padded softly.

They had rocketed not from the bush but from behind the bush. The clumps overhung a hole in the bank. Quite a large hole, torn out by fast spring floods. He pulled the frozen vegetation aside. All dark inside, but high, broad, deep. He felt cautiously with his hands. Ice on the walls, a crackling underfoot; twigs the birds had brought in. He could see nothing, but it was deep, deeper than the span of both arms. A cave. He had left his torch in the truck, and did not venture any farther. He had started a little late. Provodnoye was still a couple of hours away.

He slept the night at Provodnoye, was held up in the morning by faulty goods for return, and made Green Cape in the afternoon, too late for another journey. He did it the day after.

The bend, the ptarmigan rocketing up again. He stopped the truck alongside, unshipped the ladder and went in.

It was even deeper than he thought. Some obstruction, centuries past, had sent the river thundering in and out of here. He shone his flashlight round. Only a skin of ice on the walls, and under it rock. The same with the roof. Rock, not permafrost. He tried it, all the same; set the ladder, climbed it, bored with the battery drill into the roof. Granite. After an inch he didn’t bother any more. He could go as deep as he needed. It could hold what it had to hold.

He had his chat with Vassili soon after. In between he had made a trip to Ambarchik on the coast and from there had brought back a fish, an Arctic chir. Vassili’s old woman had been bemoaning the lack of chir, and this was a present for her. Very often now he had been sharing the old Yakut’s food.

He produced the fish in a sack; quite fresh but stiff as a board, and Vassili’s eyes popped.

‘This is a
fish
,’ he said. He examined it all over. ‘This fish goes a metre.’

‘Yes, it’s a good fish.’

‘She’ll go mad with it.’ He stood the fish on its nose and with his knife pared off a sliver and ate. ‘By God, an excellent fish. Full of oil.’ He pared a sliver for the Chukchee and gave him it. Kolya ate the sliver and nodded. A nutty flavour; not fishy, not bad, slight oily aftertaste.

‘Good,’ he said.

‘The best. With a half of this fish she’ll make a fantastic stroganina. You’ll come and eat it.’

‘With pleasure.’

‘Did you eat lunch yet?’

‘Not yet.’

They shared the Yakut’s pot.

‘Vassili,’ he said, chewing, ‘I need a bobik.’

‘Take one.’

‘To keep. For myself.’

‘What for?’

‘I want one.’

The Yakut nodded, cutting a piece of meat between his teeth. They were eating boiled foal and blood sausage stewed in mare’s milk.

‘Do you know any Evenks?’ Kolya asked him.

‘There are no Evenks here now.’

‘Where would you find them?’

‘You said you knew some at the station in the hills.’

‘They’re not there. I ran a load for that station.’

‘Then either they’re with the herds or at the collective.’

‘Which collective?’

‘Novokolymsk. What other?’

Kolya pondered this. Evidently the collective was not only for the Yukagir. For Evenks also. And they rotated not just from the herds to the station. They rotated from the collective as well.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

Vassili cut off more meat in his mouth. ‘I hear the Evenk women are good,’ he said.

‘I hear that.’

‘I never tried one myself. Where is she?’

‘Who?’

The Yakut’s face split, but whether with a smile or from tugging at the meat he couldn’t tell.

‘I think you are a young bastard,’ he said. ‘You have an Evenk girl and don’t know where she is – the collective or with the herds. Right?’

Kolya grunted and got on with his meat.

Vassili wiped his mouth. ‘All right,’ he said, sucking his teeth, ‘you need a bobik. I’ll think about it.’

Next day he told Kolya, ‘She wants you to come and eat stroganina. You can come tonight.’

‘Good. Thank you.’

He went and ate stroganina. The two elderly Yakuts lived in a tiny apartment in one of the earliest blocks; the Europeans had moved out to better blocks. A table came with the apartment but they ate on the floor, on cushions. Vassili’s wife gave him a bowl of his own but the two old people ate out of. the pot; the stroganina was a rich oily fish stew, highly seasoned, and on a wooden board alongside it was a mound of the raw fish flaked like coconut.

The old woman had put on a Yakut party dress, brightly embroidered; her centre parting and brilliant dark eyes were directed intently on him as he ate. She was silent as a mouse but very busy, refilling his bowl until the pot was finished, and piling on the flaked fish.

‘A man needs oil,’ she said to him significantly. ‘A young man has to have it.’

It was all she said to him, but in the morning Vassili told him, ‘She says you have a nice face.’

‘Well, it’s younger than yours,’ Kolya said.

‘She also says you are a young bastard. She says you should stop fucking Lydia Yakovlevna.’

‘Who says I am fucking Lydia Yakovlevna?’

‘Our grand-daughter cleans in the supermarket. Lydia Yakovlevna says you fuck her every night and give her
presents, also take her to the best parties. Is that the way a young man like you should get it?’

‘Or?’

‘It’s better to fuck this Evenk. She says they don’t want presents and it’s healthier for you.’

‘Well, it’s true.’

‘Of course it’s true. Where would you keep the bobik?’