Archangel

by Gerald Seymour

  The distance was impossible. Nine hundred miles to the Turkish border, seven hundred to Finland. Lunatic. He wouldn't get a mile clear of the track. But there would never be another chance, not in fourteen years. Never again a time with such opportunity as from the train that plodded across the flat wilderness lands on the way to the East.

  He twisted away from the two men. They whispered to each other.

  Back to his knees. Fingers again under the bolt. His body straightened as he took the strain and pulled the bolt upwards. Scratches of bright metal showed in its grime as the stem of the bolt edged clear. His fingers began to scrabble at the coarse edge of the steel plate. Should have worn gloves because they would have protected his hands, but they would have denied him the freedom of movement that he now needed. Even the numbed fingers could feel pain from the sharpness of the metal. And the plate screamed as he wrenched it upwards.

  There's no plan, Holly.

  The blueprint of the plan is to run. The plan is to fill the lungs and run faster, run further. To run, and anywhere.

  There is nowhere to go, no haven, no safety.

  Better to run and be caught than the other, because the other is fourteen years of failure.

  Anything better than the prison cage. Holly smiled to himself, chuckled softly, because he saw in his mind the face of the man who had brought the food to the hatch, and he thought of the retribution that would fall on the cretin's shoulders. That alone was worth i t . . . No, no, out of your bloody mind, Holly, and he laughed again. Why not, Holly, why not be bloody mad? He heaved again at the floor plate and there was room for his feet to slide down towards the blurred stones between the sleepers.

  Are you going, Holly? Night's coming, you can see the black shadow on the stones that rush past and between your feet. The train's idling, not running fast. Are you going, Holly? Your decision, Holly, yours and no one else's. He took a great gulp of the fresh air, enough to sustain him. He looked once more behind him.

  The two men sat on the bunk shelf very still, and their saucer eyes never left Holly's face.

  Holly pushed his feet beneath the steel plate and the wind caught at his socks and trousers and drove a channelled wind against his legs and he cursed the awkwardness of his overcoat, and his feet kicked in the space like the feet of a hanging man. He searched for a resting place for them and they lashed in a helplessness before finding a firm ledge out in the grey darkness beyond his vision. Holly wriggled, squirmed, manoeuvred his body down into the hole. The stench of the floor was close to him, the smell of vomit and of urine. The floor edge tore at his buttocks, the cloth of his trousers ripped. The rim of the steel plate scraped his upper thighs. Go on, Holly . . . Don't hesitate, don't look down, not at the stones, not at the wheels, not at the rushing sleepers. The train's crawling. Never again the same chance, Holly, not for fourteen bastard years. Don't look down .. .

  When you fall, fall limp.

  When you hit, clutch your body with your arms, don't bounce with your legs.

  Remember the wheels. When you've fallen, stay still, don't move.

  Is there a guard box at the end of the train? Hadn't looked, had he? Is there a machine-gunner at the end of the train? But he'll be high, and looking forward, the windows and the carriages will be his watch.

  Just remember the wheels.

  The train's running slow. It can be done at this speed.

  Leave it, and perhaps the gradient'll even out, the speed'l pick up.

  Go now or you're lost, Holly.

  Go.

  The last effort. The last pushing pressure on the steel plate to create the space for his stomach and chest.

  Past his eyes exploded the boots and ankles and shins of the big man sweeping towards the doorway of the compartment. And the smaller man was at Holly's back, his knee at Holly's shoulder blades and his fingers deep in the spare folds of Holly's overcoat, and he pulled and wrenched to drag Holly from the hole, and Holly knew his stale breath as he hissed and heaved to prise Holly clear. The big man beat on the door and shouted in the high nasal tone of the Caucasus, slammed his fist into the woodwork, demanded attention. The guard was running in the corridor. The big man turned and came fast towards Holly and caught his throat. Holly could not resist, and they squeezed him out from the hole and when his feet were clear the two men stamped together on the steel plate to flatten it back, and between his knees he could no longer see the whiteness of snow on the stones and the zebra flash of the sleepers. The bolt scraped in the door. The doorway gaped around the guard. The guard stood uncertain. His right hand was half hidden by the cover flap of the holster that he wore at his belt.

  'Comrade. . .' wheedled the big man with the pleading of a comic. 'We need water. Please, Comrade, we have had no water . . .'

  The guard stiffened in anger. He had been made to run, and they wanted water. 'Piss yourself for water.'

  'How long till we can have water, Comrade?'

  The guard was young, a conscript. Command did not come easily to him, He dropped his eyes. 'In two hours we are at Pot'ma Transit. There will be water there.'

  The door swung shut, the bolt ran home. Beneath Holly the wheels quickened over the rails. He felt weak and drew his knees up to his chest to contain his body warmth. The men had gone back to the bunk shelf and their feet swung, threatening and powerful, beside his face.

  Holly looked up at them, into their mouths, into their eyes. The tiredness had stripped his fury.

  'Why?'

  The big man picked his nose.

  'You have to tell me why.'

  The big man spoke slowly and without passion. 'Because of what would have happened to us. Because of what they would have done to us.'

  'You could have said something . . .' Holly's voice tailed away, beaten by the new apathy that overwhelmed him.

  The small man speared Holly with his gaze. 'For me it is myself first. Then it is myself second. After that it is myself third.'

  'If you had gone we would have been taken again before the courts. They would say that we were your accomplices, they would say that we helped you. You are a foreigner, we owe you nothing.'

  'A new charge, a new trial, a new sentence . . . For what?

  For nothing.' The small man battered his fist into the palm of his hand.

  'Your escape is not worth to us one single day more in the camps. How then can it be worth five more years?'

  'I understand,' Holly said, little more than a whisper.

  He rose stiffly to his feet, then bent and found the bolt where it had rolled against the compartment wall underneath the shuttered window. He placed it carefully into its entry, then stamped it down.

  He walked to the wall of the compartment and dropped his weight against it and closed his eyes. He thought of the forest beyond the carriage walls, and the lights in small homes, and the unmarked snow.

  The darkness of the long winter night had settled when the train came to an untidy halt at Pot'ma station. Holly joined the lines of men and women who formed files of fives beside the carriages and waited to be counted. The area was gaudily lit and the dogs on their short leashes yelped and strained the arms of their handlers. The dogs and the guards who cradled sub-machine-guns formed a ring around their prisoners. Captors and captives stood in dumb impatience for the roll-call to be finished.

  That night they would be held in the Pot'ma Transit prison. Away to the north, curving smoothly, stretched a branch line that Holly could see illuminated by the arc lights. The two men with whom he had shared the compartment from Moscow stood away from him, as if by choice.

  Holly started to murmur a tune, something cheerful.

  Close to him was a girl who rocked a sleeping baby and, when she caught his glance, she smiled sadly and held the baby tighter to save it from the snow flurries.

  A tiny girl, but her eyes were bright and large and caring, full of the compassion that should have been a stranger in the Pot'ma railway yards. Even here, she seemed to tell him in her silence, ther
e could be some small love for another sufferer, for a baby. When the order came she reached down to help an older woman to her feet and passed her the well-wrapped bundle, then she turned her back on the men and was swallowed by the mass of female prisoners.

  . . . It's just terribly bad luck, the Consul had said, it's the worst luck I've heard of since I've been here . . .

  In ragged columns they were marched between a corridor of armed men to the lorries.

  Chapter 3

  The western part of Mordovia is scattered with the Correctional Labour Colonies that are administered by the Ministry of the Interior in the distant capital. Mordovia is the cesspit into which are flushed the malcontents and malefac-tors of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Flat, desolate countryside, unbroken by hills, the plain of Mordovia knows the stinking heat of a windless summer and the cruel gales of frozen winter. A place without vistas, without the opportunity or charity of hope.

  To the south of the camps is the main road from Moscow to Kuibyshev and ultimately to Tashkent. Bedfellow of the road is the railway line that runs from European Russia to the desert lands of Kazakhstan. Pot'ma is a hesitation on that journey, none would stop there without business with the camps. The driver of the long-distance lorry would tighten his hands on the wheel and urge his machine faster past the bleak terrain that marks fear and anxiety across the breadth of the Motherland. The passenger in the railway carriage would drop his head into his newspaper and avert his eyes from the window. The camps of Mordovia are known of by all citizens. To the north are the wild acres of the Mordovia state reservation. To the west is the Vad river.

  To the east flows the Alatyn.

  Inside the box of the rivers and the railway and the reservation, the territory is barren, swamp-infested, poorly inhabited. The planners chose well. And having made their decision they set out with a will to forge a network of rough roads through this wilderness that would link the stockades of wire. The camps are historic, as much a part of history as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili who was to take the name of Stalin. Iosif's tomb in The Kremlin Wall may be hard to find, but the camps remain as a headstone in perpetuity to his memory. Iosif may have been erased from the history books, but his camps still linger, refined and modernized, as a hallowed memorial to a life's work of elimination and retribution. They possessed a faint whiff of humour, those men who sat at the ankles of Iosif. Perhaps with the taint of a half-smile they named the camps of Mordovia after the pretty, sun-dappled forests around Moscow where they took their family picnics and holidays.

  Dubrovlag, that was the name they offered to the pestilence of fences and huts in Mordovia. The Oak Leaf camps. And after Iosif came Malenkov. And after Malenkov came Krushchev. And after Krushchev came Brezhnev. Each in his time has painted over the inheritance of his predecessor, but the Oak Leaf camps have remained because they have been necessary for each new Czar's survival. Where the planners and architects of Iosif first planted their stakes and hung their wire, there remain posts and fences and watch-towers with searchlights and traversing machine-guns. If it is hard to remember you, Iosif, we can come to the Dubrovlag and watch the slow march of the men who have replaced your prisoners in the Oak Leaf camps.

  For thirty miles the branch line from Pot'ma winds north across the desolation of the prisonscape.

  Past Camp 18 and Camp 6.

  The hamlet of Lesnoy.

  Camp 19 and Camp 7 and Camp 1.

  The village of Sosnovka.

  The station at Sal'khoz, across the road from Vindrey to Promzina.

  Over the bridge that spans the turgid flowing stream at Lepley and past Camp 5, and sub-Camp 5 where the foreigners are held incommunicado from the domestic fodder of the Colonies.

  Past the farm where the short-term prisoners work under the guard of rifles and dogs, past the fields where beet and potato sprout from the long-used soil.

  Past the twins of Camp 4 and Camp 10, one to the left and one to the right of the single track line.

  Through the township of Yavas, over the bridge of rusted steel that crosses the river, and past Camp 11 and Camp 2.

  where the Central Investigation Prison has been built with concrete to house those who face interrogation for misde-meanours committed within the barbed wire and free-fire corridors.

  Past more fields where the work is back-breaking and by hand, past the station at Lesozavad and to the hamlet of Barashevo. Here is Camp 3, here is the Central Administration complex. Here at Barashevo are buffers on the siding track because few of the trains that run north from Pot'ma have need to travel further.

  The camps are rooted in the history of the state, but dedicated also to the present, and will be a part too of the future. They have their permanence, they have their place.

  They are indestructible.

  They are all criminals, of course, who ride in the Stolypin carriages from Pot'ma on the way to Barashevo. All have been convicted by legally constituted courts. There are some who have stolen from banks, there are some who have read poetry in Pushkin Square in Moscow. There are some who have raped virgin teenage girls in the darkness of an alley way, there are some who have taught their children the liturgy and practices of the church of the Seventh Day Adventists. There are some who have corruptly manipulated the production of state factories for their own personal gain, there are some who have covertly passed on the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And there are some who are traitors. They are all criminals, those who live in the barracks huts of the camps, and those who will join them when the train reaches the platforms of Barashevo.

  It had been a luxury, the journey from Moscow to Pot'ma., Only three to share a compartment. And a luxury, too, had been the cell on the second floor of the hospital block at Vladimir. And luxuries are temporary.

  There were fifteen of them in the compartment, crammed and squashed for three hours since their loading from the Transit gaol. Difficult to move, hideous to breathe in the shuttered carriage. The tight smell of men who have not washed their bodies or known clean clothes. All together, elbows in ribs, knees in calves, packed tight and swaying with the motion of the train as it struggled north.

  When he had woken from a faint sleep on the ice cold floor of the cell, Holly had known that the lice had found him. Creeping little bastards in the hair of his head and his stomach, and he had gouged with his fingernails at the flesh under his clothes. The men who sat or lay near to him on the floor had watched with a curiosity that a man who was held in the Transit gaol at Pot'ma should concern himself with such a small matter as the pin-sharp biting of the louse. Only an old man with his white hair cropped short and worn as a Jew's cap had spoken to Holly with the wry grin of experience at his mouth. They were nothing, the lice at Pot'ma, the old man said. At the Transit at Alma-Ata there were bugs that saturated the walls of the holding cells, red and fast with their crawl, with a bite like scissors. And at the Transit at Novosibirsk there were rats, great grey pigs, a tail as thick as your little finger, and the men in the holding cells slept in a laager in the centre of the floor and changed the watch in the dark hours so that always some men guarded the edge of their perimeter. So, what were a few lice? Holly had talked with the old man and realized only later that when he spoke all those who were within earshot had listened and tried to learn about him from his words. He was the outsider, he came from beyond the corrals of the big camp, from beyond the wire of the little camp. Though he spoke in Russian, the language that his parents had given him, he was from without the walls that bounded their experience. They examined him with their eyes and ears. They might have wished to touch him. They were without hostility and without friendship. They were interested in an object to which they had not before been exposed.

  There had been eighty men in the cell trying to sleep away the cold of the night.

  There had been fifteen men in the compartment of the train trying to endure the rattling movement on the rails.

  And the train had stopped. They heard the barking of the do
gs, the shouting of orders, and they waited because that is the lot of prisoners.

  For how long, Holly? For fourteen years.

  In the cell at Pot'ma Transit the old man had kissed him, the door was opened, the guards were calling names. Holly and the majority were to travel, the old man waited for another transport to another destination. He had kissed Holly, wetly on each cheek, and he had not cared who had seen him, and he had whispered in Holly's ear. In the Dubrovlag, he had said, pity for others is always possible, but self-pity is never possible. He had pulled Holly's ear then and crackled a laugh, and Holly had slapped his shoulder in a kind of gratitude.

  The wind swept aside the foetid air of the compartment as the door was unbolted. The guards who waited below them stamped their feet, beat down the snow beneath their boots.

  Some from the carriage could jump down and then slither into the lines they must form. Some must be helped.

  Beyond the platform stood the camp. An outer gate was open, an inner gate was closed. They stood in three rows of five, to be counted and then marched forward. On the ice one man fell and was scooped back to his feet by those who were behind him. Not really a march, not even a brisk tramp, but a shuffling movement forward towards the opened gate.' Holly saw the high wooden fence of vertical overlapping boards and above it the rise of steep angled roofs and in the corners were watch-towers built up on stilts with the platform reached by open ladder. They kept the dogs close to the prisoners.

  Put on a show, Holly . . .

  He walked with his back straight and his shoulders firm.

  And the other men saw him, and some would have sniggered at the fall that would follow such arrogance, and a few would have suffered in the knowledge that defiance brings only pain and punishment, and for one or two or three the young man who ambled erect in the first rank was a donor of comfort.

  It was not the proper way of things that one man should walk as if with indifference towards the opened gates of Camp 3 at Barashevo, and the guards watched him, and the dogs eyed him. Self-pity is never possible; do not forget that, Holly. Sejf-pity is unacceptable.