by Gary Haynes
The Chechen smirked. ‘When you’re authorized to trade, come back. Otherwise, don’t bother.’
The Chechen gathered up his cigarette papers and tobacco pouch. He looked right through Hester as if he was made of glass. He stood up and walked away.
Carla knew Hester didn’t have authority to trade.
When the Chechen was out of earshot, she said, ‘We’ve got to trade with him.’
Hester sighed. ‘I mentioned him to the FSB. They said he’s a child pornographer. A paedophile. Tell me you can’t see a problem.’
81
Ministry of internal affairs special camp, Irkutsk region, east Siberia, March 1953.
They emerged into the cold air, squinting despite the dullness.
In truth, the recent dead could only be separated from the exhausted living when no sound or movement came from their wasted bodies, following a beating for supposedly malingering. But even if they could withstand a beating without movement or sound, it wouldn’t do them any good. The bodies were dragged away by the MVD, the skulls crushed with hammers to ensure that no one was feigning death. The guards flung the corpses down a disused mineshaft that was subsequently covered with clumps of frosted dirt. There were no mistakes in the special camp. There was no mercy or compassion.
Some prisoners were Ukrainians, who’d been rounded up in 1942, due to Stalin’s paranoia over potential collaborators. They’d aged twenty-five years in half that time. They were the forgotten ones. There were Latvians, Lithuanians, Finns, Estonians, Poles, Belarusians. They knew that thousands of others had been shot by the NKVD in abandoned prisons and forced labour camps, those closest to the German advance in 1941; shot rather than being allowed to defect. But no one here thought they themselves were the lucky ones.
There were political prisoners. There were those deported for their ethnicity or religious views. There were sometime convicts, kulaks. There were the habitual ‘thieves in law’. There was Icchak Stolarski.
Staraya Chara uranium mine had an ideal location for a forced labour camp. It was a canyon bordered on three sides by towering rock faces. The fourth was a craggy slope that was fastidiously guarded, day and night. No one had ever escaped. Escape to what? the prisoners said. The bitter cold made for swollen chilblains inside the confines of the mine. Outside it, a man would freeze to death in hours amid the windswept bleakness of a landscape made up of rock fragments and icy lakes.
In winter, the temperature dropped to minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit in the Siberian taiga. Only the nomadic tribes of reindeer herders could survive out there, and they were bought easily enough with the promise of substantial rewards for aiding the guards in capturing an escapee. There was even talk of a guard becoming an inmate if his negligence was responsible for a runaway. Everyone agreed that there was no more incentive for diligence than that.
Some prisoners reduced themselves to spying for the guards. Some got a threadbare coat for it. Some got murdered in the mine with a pickaxe by the half-crazed convicts for the symbolism of the coat.
Most prisoners worked in rags, held in place with string. They wore rubber boots made from useless tyres. They ate potato peelings and bits of bony and salted fish off studded tin plates. They drank stale water from studded tin mugs. They were put into roofless, stone punishment cells, with studded wooden doors. The food was rancid there.
They pushed barrows of rock for fifteen hours a day. They sweated the water from their bodies at hundreds of feet below ground. They died from tuberculosis, leukaemia, lung cancer. Cancers with no names yet. Uranium ore wasn’t the problem, but rather the radon gas it emitted when mined. None of them knew this.
Some took to suicide, blowing themselves up with dynamite. Some were shot for minor transgressions. Hundreds died in the frenzy for atomic bombs. Thousands.
In December 1944, the secret police had been assigned to supervise the Soviet atomic bomb project, known as Task Number One, which led to the first testing five years later. The Gulag uranium mines were integral to that and to the mass production of atomic weapons, which was ongoing.
*
It was night time and Icchak lay awake on his bunk of slatted wood, staring at the corroded studs on the cell door. His mind was scarred now. He no longer led men as a trusted NCO. He no longer had a modicum of respect from others, or for himself. He was no longer a man in any meaningful sense of the word. The tips of his toes were black, the rank cloth his head was wrapped in as useless against the cold as a match in a hurricane.
When he’d asked a guard if he could contact his family within the first hour of his arrival, the man had sneered at him and had had said to forget he ever had a family, that he would never see them again. When Icchak had spoken of his army service against their mutual enemy, the guard beat him with a rubber truncheon. The pain in his body had been eclipsed tenfold by the agony he experienced via his imagination. He’d vowed then, not to think of his family again.
Below him the eighteen-year-old boy was whimpering. Icchak didn’t have the energy to tell him to sleep. He barely had the energy to breathe. The man to Icchak’s left had said he’d been there since the beginning, just after the end of the war. Most of the inmates, including Icchak, had been to lumber camps and other non-toxic mines before coming here.
The man, whose name was Vasily Popov, had said he’d been crammed into a small transport plane with a dozen others, and had been told that they were to set up a mine. He’d said they’d looked at one another with bemusement and trepidation. The aircraft had landed on the right bank of the Sakukan River, around ten miles from the canyon, which he referred to as ‘the pit’. They’d crossed the frigid river with the aid of ropes and had trekked through the stark landscape. Icchak had just shaken his shaven head at that. Vasily was the only man he trusted in the camp, apart from the handful of other Poles.
He, like the others, coughed up blood in the tunnels. The guards just smirked. They would all die here, wouldn’t they?
Early each morning, all the prisoners, or zeks, lined up in the unrelenting cold for the rollcall, which happened twice a day. This morning the air numbed their bodies and their minds. Those that had gone insane with the cold, or because of their predicament, or both, made little noises like children, like monkeys. The guards thinned them out on a periodic basis.
Icchak’s dulled brain registered three men dressed in civilian winter clothes standing to the side of an MVD officer. Dimly, he wondered if a new war had started, or if the MVD had been replaced by something even more sinister and brutal, something these men represented. Was that possible?
Snow fell in glops from the rock faces. The prisoners shivered in silence.
‘Prisoners,’ the officer said. ‘I have terrible news and I have other news.’
Icchak stared at the hard dirt. He didn’t know what could be terrible news. This was terrible. What else could be? Even burning to death meant he would be warm for a while.
‘These men are from the MGB, the Ministry of State Security. Our glorious leader, Comrade Stalin, is dead.’
The prisoners just shivered in silence still.
‘You will be freed.’
Five seconds passed.
Some wept. Some shook their heads, thinking it was a vile game, Icchak knew. Some collapsed. Some began to murmur. Icchak waited.
A few weeks later, the survivors found out that the men from the MGB had been sent to Siberia from Moscow to shut down the mine and murder the zeks to a man, just like in 1941. But they had received an urgent message at a fuelling station. Stalin’s death had meant they’d lived. It had been an almost comical piece of luck.
Today, the day Icchak was told he was free, he went to the camp infirmary, which was a pitiable and ineffectual place, a stone-built building the size of the communal latrine. There were no doctors, just a couple of ex-army medics.
Ignoring the stench, Icchak walked to his wooden bed and laid down on it. His ulcers bled daily and were the size of scallops. But these were the least of his
physical problems. There’d been no diagnosis of his illnesses, but he knew instinctively that they were fatal, or at least one of them was. He knew nothing could be done for him, but still he’d come here.
He cradled his head.
He thought: I’m dying and I’m free.
A man he knew came into the infirmary, wincing at the sickly smells that pervaded it, he could see. He walked towards Icchak.
He bent down to Icchak’s head and spoke to him for a minute or more.
When he’d finished, Icchak tried to speak but his breath was rattling. He just nodded. The man put a small piece of salted fish into his hand and left.
82
West Berlin, 1954.
West Berlin was a city that had existed for five years, an enclave surrounded by communist East Germany. Its two million population was split into the French, American and British occupation sectors, although the border with East Berlin was still open and people travelled between the two with ease.
Kazapov was in the north, the French sector, dressed impeccably in the fashion of the day: a broad-shouldered, double-breasted grey flannel suit with cuffs. His hair was parted to the right, slicked down with cream. He wore browline glasses. He might have been mistaken for an up-and-coming architect, with a passion for Bach and Proust, perhaps.
He’d been told by the MVD, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, the renamed NKVD in which he was now a major, that this was a rare dispensation. Two days. No more. False papers. No weapons. If caught, he would be shot by the French. The MVD didn’t have to tell him that if he didn’t return to the USSR, they’d find him. They’d kill him. He didn’t doubt it. But he’d said he didn’t need two days. One would suffice.
But the communist state didn’t like personal revenge, he knew. Even considering such an act was deemed an offence, despite Stalin’s death. A man or woman thinking for themselves was a dangerous habit, after all. Imagine what it could lead to.
He’d made up a plausible story as to why he’d wanted to come here. He was valued by the state now. He didn’t know when he could get to those Kalmyks that had fled. But the day would come. He had no doubt of that. He looked up at the brick façade of the terraced house.
Brigitte Bayer walked towards it ten minutes later. The sun was bright above the reconstructed church steeples and birds were singing in the chestnut trees across the road in a little park.
She is still beautiful, Kazapov thought.
She held a girl’s hand. The girl was blonde, like her mother, and wore a navy-blue skirt and a yellow-coloured blouse buttoned up to her neck. He skulked behind a small parked car, but heard the girl call her mother, ‘mama’. His eyes caught a glint of a ring on Brigitte’s right hand. He remembered it being there. He steadied himself.
This would be the hardest test, he thought.
*
He waited for two hours before the child left. On some errand, he guessed. Or to play in the park. He took off his glasses and crossed the street. He walked leisurely up the short flight of mottled steps.
Half a minute later, Brigitte Bayer put her hand to her mouth when she opened the door. ‘It’s you,’ she said. ‘Is it really you, Joseph? My God, I thought you were dead!’
‘No. I — ’
‘Come in, come in,’ she said, beckoning him with her hand.
She wore a short front-pleated white dress, adorned with red flowers. Her hair was up, and she glowed with a now natural beauty. She led him to the living room, with white wallpaper embossed with a yellow diamond pattern, and gestured to a red-satin couch and asked him if he wanted a drink. He said no.
She sat beside him. There was a plate of unfinished food on a box frame coffee table, together with a half-empty glass of water. The walnut-framed radio was on. Sender Freies Berlin was playing Edith Piaf’s Le Vagabond, the sound oddly distant and crackly.
They talked for five minutes or so. She confirmed that she hadn’t married. She worked as a secretary for a burgeoning magazine. She was doing well, she said. He didn’t doubt it. She would do well anywhere. People were drawn to her as if she held a secret that could transform their lives into something more splendid and interesting.
‘The general was executed by firing squad two years ago,’ Kazapov said, offhandedly. ‘The child?’
‘You saw her?’
He nodded.
‘She’s your daughter, Joseph,’ she said, placing her hand on his forearm.
‘Please don’t be angry at me, but how can you be so sure?’
‘The general couldn’t get it up,’ she said, without a hint of a blush. ‘He just liked to watch me undress, as he puffed on a huge cigar. The sad old man. But at least he protected me from being raped. There was only you, Joseph. Kurt died before I met you, as you know. I was an actress, but never a whore. That’s how I’m sure. And I wanted a child. I wanted something good and pure to come out of that madness. You can understand that, can’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘She’s a wonderful child. Musical and good-tempered. You’ll love her — ’ She looked down at her lap. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to presume. What will you do, Joseph?’
‘Do?’
‘Now you’re in West Berlin.’
‘I can’t stay long.’
‘Oh.’ She looked disappointed.
‘I’m sorry, Brigitte.’
‘Sorry?’
‘For telling you about my mother and sisters.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
He picked up a cushion and slammed it into her face. He pushed her head back onto the arm of the couch where there was no give. She made muffled sounds. Kicked out. Scratched his hands. Then she didn’t move. He kept up the pressure for a further minute before getting up to go, leaving the cushion in place.
She could recognize him. She knew his name. But more than this, he’d foolishly told her about his family in Kalmykia. A possible link could be made. He couldn’t risk it. She had to die. He felt wretched about it, even though he burned, drowned, maimed and murdered all manner of people for the state now. Even though his specialty was young women.
He walked out of the room and heard the front door open and looked about for something to use as a weapon. He saw a metal torch on a table against the wall. But he drew his hand back when he heard his daughter call out, ‘Mama, mama. I forgot — ’
He looked down at her. She looked quizzical.
‘Where’s my mama?’
‘She’s resting.’
‘Who are you?’ she said.
‘Please forgive me.’
He saw her looking behind him. She ran past him and heard her calling ‘mama’ repeatedly, pitiably.
Leaving, he heard his daughter screaming.
83
East Berlin, the same day.
In East Berlin, the Soviet sector, the wind was picking up and the sun was fading inch by inch behind the blocks of flats, the concrete monoliths of Stalinist architecture. Kazapov had bought a rib-knit balaclava from an open-fronted shop. He didn’t want it to keep his ears warm.
Five minutes later, he placed a few Deutsche Marks into the hand of a teenage crook with dirty fingernails and bad teeth, who peddled flick knives from the lining of his black overcoat.
He walked past the dead trees, their fat trunks clothed in dried lichen, and sat down on a slab of granite in the remnants of an overgrown cemetery. He waited until he was alone and took out the knife and balaclava. He placed his hand into the face opening of the balaclava and stretched the wool that covered the back of the head with his fingers. He cut two eye slits and placed the balaclava and knife back into his jacket pocket. Standing, he checked the time on his wristwatch and walked off along the pebbled, weed-ridden path.
*
According to the nameplate beneath a doorbell, the man, Conrad Weber, lived on the third floor of a converted merchant’s house. It had survived the Allied bombing raids in 1945. The east of the city had been targeted less than the west, Kazapov kne
w.
The MVD intelligence files he’d accessed stated that Weber was unemployed and had taken to drink. He was separated from his wife and two children and lived alone. He’d spent the war as an official SS photographer and filmmaker and had joined the Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD in October 1939. When the Germans had advanced into occupied western Poland, he’d photographed the executions in the town of Kórnik. In 1942, he’d travelled to Kalmykia.
He would surely die if he fell from that height, Kazapov thought.
He waited until an old woman carrying a small dog under her arm had gotten halfway out of the front door, the light-blue paint flaking. Then he vaulted the flagstone entrance steps and grabbed the door just before it closed. He’d turned away from her so that she couldn’t recognize him.
He crouched down beside a beige wall inside the hallway. It was quiet. The staircase had an elaborate banister, but it was chipped here and there. The air smelled vaguely of damp and cat piss. The property was well past its prime.
He reached the second-floor landing and fetched out the flick knife and pushed it up the sleeve of his shirt, which was held tight to his wrist by a silver cufflink. He put on the balaclava backwards and knocked on the door, clenching his teeth with anticipation. He didn’t want to use the knife and would only do so if something went wrong. He didn’t want to get blood on his clothing and draw attention to himself.
The door opened. Conrad Weber was unshaven, his eyes reddened. He wore a pair of baggy trousers and a grease-stained undershirt. His SS blood-group tattoo had been burned off his upper arm, leaving a wrinkled piece of eggshell-coloured skin.
He registered the balaclava and tried to slam the door shut. But Kazapov had stuck his black leather shoe against the frame. He burst through. Weber retreated to the compact living room and onto the French windows that led out to the small balcony.
He turned, his arms outstretched before him, pleading for his life. Kazapov held up the knife, the blade shimmering, and told him to shut up or he’d stab him to death.
