Archangel

by Gerald Seymour

  We have only our strength to laugh at them.'

  'And does your laughter wound them?'

  'From laughter we can have small victories.'

  'Small victories win nothing.'

  'That is the answer of a man who hurries. There is nobody in this camp who runs. There is nowhere to run to . . . it is your first night, Englishman, you have to learn of a new world, you have to be patient if it is to give up to you its secrets. I tell you now - the big victory is not possible.'

  'If you say so,' Holly said over his shoulder. He joined the slow column heading out of the double doors of the Kitchen.

  Poshekhonov was still beside him. 'You have yet to sleep here one night. The man from Internal Order is already your enemy . . . Adimov, who is a killer, is your enemy. A man cannot be an island here if he-is ever to turn his back on this place.'

  'Thank you,' said Holly quietly.

  Beyond the door the snow was falling more heavily and the men who crowded there braced themselves to run or shamble back to their huts. Holly stepped out into the bitter wind. You give yourself to no man, Holly. Myself first, myself second, myself third. Dancing shadows passed by him. No talk now, because the business was serious, crossing the open metres from the Kitchen to the huts.

  The shots ripped aside the murmur sound of sliding feet.

  The shots dipped and gouged into Holly's consciousness.

  And Holly knew where to look. The instant of clarity.

  God, Holly, you had forgotten him. You had been swilling food into your guts and making the small talk of camp survival, and you had lost him from your memory . . . The columns of men that splintered from the Kitchen to their huts were first frozen still, then drawn in concert to where the lights were brilliant, where the fences hung between the blackness and the snow.

  One more shot.

  You could have spoken to him, you could have offered something of yourself, but you left him there in the stinking bloody cold. You went to your fucking soup and your fucking swill and left him in the night.

  Holly ran.

  He barged aside those who were in front of him. He cannoned against grey-quilted bodies, his breath came in sobs and the chill caught at that breath and sucked out little gauze puffs of air. He ran, and came with the front rank to the perimeter path and the low wooden fence.

  Only his arms had reached to the top strands. He hung from his arms and his body was quivering and his boots kicked at the snow. Not dead.

  Around Holly there was a wail of anger that seethed across the illuminated strip and reached up to the watch-tower from where the searchlight dazzled them. And there was the roaring of the dogs and shouting from across the compound and the Guard Room. Afterwards Holly could not explain to himself his action. He could offer no reason as to why he had stepped deliberately over the low wooden fence and onto the clean snow beside this one man's spaced footsteps. Instinct took control of him and the noise of the men behind him died to a whisper. With clean, sharp steps Holly walked to the wire.

  He did not look up towards the guard in the watch-tower.

  He did not see the guard revise his aim, away from the gathered crowd.

  Two shots into the snow a metre to the right of his legs, tiny puffs in the snow.

  Holly saw only the man on the wire. He reached up, took the weight of the body and lifted it higher and then wrenched the material of the tunic from the barbs of the wire.

  A tall and awkward body and yet light as a child's. Holly carried him cradled in his arms, retraced his steps, stretched over the low wooden fence and was back, swallowed again among the zeks. Other arms took on the burden, and blood stained richly on the sleeves of Holly's tunic. Two guards on skis had infiltrated themselves between the high wire and the high wooden fence and covered the growing mass of prisoners with their rifles. From the interior of the camp, warders pitched through the crowd with the aid of weighted staves and forced back the crush around the prone body.

  Amongst the warders was one man who wore no uniform, but instead a warm quilted anorak. This man spared one short glance at the crippled zek, then looked away, folded his gloved hands across his stomach and set himself to wait patiently. This one man set himself above the bloody incident in the snow and the yelping sound of the siren.

  Holly watched him.

  Life was ebbing fast. It was ten minutes before the stretcher came, and then the prisoners parted and allowed this one from their number to be taken to the opened gates.

  When the gates were shut again the crowd broke, drifted again towards the huts.

  Poshekhonov was beside Holly.

  'You should not have intervened, Englishman.'

  Holly felt a slow wave of exhaustion. 'It was bloody murder.'"*

  'He is now outside the camp, that is why he climbed the wire. He has found his freedom . . . Who were you to stop him? Who were you in your arrogance to try to save him from his wish? That was his freedom, against the wire.'

  'I couldn't watch him, not like that.'

  'It is the way of the camp. Any man is free to go to the wire. It is an intrusion to prevent it. You saw the man who came in his padded coat; that was Rudakov. It was from Rudakov that our friend sought his freedom. Rudakov made an ice rink of the floor of his punishment cell. A man who has slept on ice, whose clothes have been ice, should not be prevented by a stranger from making his journey to what freedom he can find. You will learn that, Englishman.'

  On that Sunday night there should have been a film show for the camp, but the projector was broken and the prisoner who knew the trade of projectionist and might have repaired it was serving his second consecutive fifteen day spell in a SHIzo isolation cell. A concert had been organized in place of the cancelled film. A group of Militia from Yavas, who formed a choir that was well known throughout the Dubrovlag, sang for an hour and a quarter. With special enthusiasm they gave their pressed and numbed audience

  'The Party is our Helmsman', and 'Lenin is always with You'.

  Holly knew the man who had climbed the wire would be dead before the concert was finished.

  Chapter 5

  The old zeks, the long-term men, they say that the first months in the camps are the hardest. And harder than the first months are the first weeks. And harder than the first weeks are the first days. And worst and most horrible is the first morning.

  The regime of the darkness and the arc lights still rules when the loudspeakers erupt and relay the national anthem of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A crackling and worn tape plays the music of the nation from the Guard House, and it is six-thirty. It is never late, never earlier. The volume is high and the sounds of the military band with their brass and their drums rampage into the slumber of the men in the huts. No sleep will survive that wakening call.

  The old ones say that the first morning, the first experience of dawn in the camps, is the greatest test.

  The old zeks say that if a man has a nightmare then he should not be disturbed because the awakened life of the camps is more awful than the pain of any dream.

  The old zeks say that a man is weakest when he comes to the camps for the first time, when the desire for life is first squeezed from him.

  They have all slept in their clothes under the one permitted blanket. They sleep in their socks and their trousers and their tunics, and still the cold bites them. They are fast out of their bunks and the hut shakes from the futile cursing. The warders and the trusties from Internal Order are at the doors of the huts, and the zeks are pitched out into the night darkness and spill to the perimeter path, and like an ant trail they wind around the compound for what is classified as Exercise. Above them hovers the white wool vapour of their breath, beneath them the fresh overnight snow is beaten to another layer of ice. They hear the stamping of the guard in his watch-tower, they hear the swish of the skis of the guards who are between the high wire fence and the high wooden fence, they hear the snap bark of the dogs. When they exercise, the zeks see nothing but their feet dropping fo
rward on the path. Head down, balaclava tight on the face, scarf wrapped close, tunic collar raised. There is no talk at morning Exercise because no man is concerned with his neighbour. The young go fast on the perimeter path, and the old take the way more slowly, but each man is struggling for speed, because speed is warmth. Exercise is for every morning. If the tunics and trousers are wet then that is hard for the prisoners and they will be damper and colder for the length of the day that follows. The old cannot run, and they want the latrine, but only after Exercise are the men permitted to queue for the privilege of the latrines. The latrines are better in winter because the droppings under che board seats are frozen and the ice quickly binds the smell of men's waste. After the latrines, a wash of hands and face, but no shave because shaving is done by the barber and that is once a week with the bath. After the cold wash, it is breakfast of gruel swill and a cup of hot water. After breakfast it is parade and the men stand in the lines while the warders, who are backed by the fire power of the guards, come with their lists to count and recount.

  Seven-thirty. The start of the working day. Each morning there is a faint stirring of excitement when the zeks march to work. They must walk out through the camp gate and cross the road and the railway line and then the file will enter the compound of the Factory. It is a brief walk, no more than a hundred metres, but it is a sliver of freedom. The men march with their warders and when they are clear of the confines of the fences for those few steps they are hemmed in by the soldiers and the dogs. The road serves the village of Barashevo and sometimes the civilians have to stand behind the lines of the guards and wait for the columns of criminals to go by before they can proceed on their way. They areas much prisoners as the zeks. Their gaols are the villages of Barashevo and Yavas and Lepley and Sosnovka and Lesnoy. They live between the islands of wire and wooden walls, they exist within sight of the watch-towers and beside the garrison barracks. Meagre villages that are blighted by the camps and their factories. And because they, too, are prisoners they detest the convicts, and their children ape their elders and shout 'Fascists!' as the zeks walk in their guarded column between the Zone and the Factory. The villagers'

  employment is the Camp. They are the warders, the drivers, the technicians, the Factory supervisors. A manacle secures them to the Dubrovlag. While the camps remain, the villagers are themselves captive. Against the shuffling columns, they have only the weapons of abuse and loathing.

  There is a break of one hour for lunch. During that hour the zeks recross the railway line and the road and return to the Zone, once more to be counted and to be searched. In the afternoon they return to the Factory. In the evening they return again to the Zone. The searches are painstaking, the roll-calls are long. The men must stand in the wind and the stamped snow. Always they must wait.

  The rhythm of the camp is constant, a ticking metro-nome.

  Former Major of paratroops, now seconded to MVD, Vasily Kypov had in his short time at ZhKh 385/3/i received two commendations from the Ministry for the smooth running of the Zone. The commendations are framed and hang on the wall of the Commandant's office.

  The hunger comes quickly, the exhaustion is slower. But they are twins, these two, and their approach is inevitable.

  Ten hours work each day in the Factory, three meals of hidden meat without fresh vegetables and fruit. Exhaustion and hunger will run together. They will sap his will. When he is spent by the work load, sagging from the diet, then he will be pliable and no longer make trouble. When he is beaten then he will be a zek, and that is the way of them all, all eight hundred in the compound.

  Holly learned the code of behaviour by watching others.

  When the mob of Hut z fell from their bed bunks and went out into the blackness for Exercise, Holly was with them. When the name of Holovich was called at the parades and counts, he shouted back 'Holly. . . here' and the trifle of the gesture was ignored. When the columns went to the Factory he was in their ranks. When he was given work at a lathe that rounded and spiralled chairs' legs he took no advice from the foreman, and instead watched the man next to him to study the working of the machine.

  He ate the food that was provided with the avidness of those who sat around him. He lay on his bunk with his eyes open and staring at the rafter ceiling for all the hours that were common for the men of Hut z. He blended. Not first in the line and not last. Not highest in the production line of the Factory, not lowest. He joined the ghost ranks, became common and unremarkable.

  There was interest in the Englishman, of course, in Hut z.

  Something rare this one, they thought, something rare and original. They gazed with a covetousness at the scarf around his throat, the socks under his boots, the pants he stripped off in the Bath house, wanted to hold and feel the texture of the garments of a stranger. They talked to him of their lives as if by that they smeared some ointment on their existence.

  They sought confidences from him. They were unrewarded.

  Holly built a castle, a castle on an island, a castle on an island that is a prison camp.

  A killer who slept at night half a metre from Holly came with his story to the Englishman's side. Adimov shuffled aside the moment of their first meeting.

  The dissident who had been the first to speak to Holly talked the hesitant monologue of revolution. Feldstein came to Holly as if in hope of finding a kindred mind.

  The fraud whose bunk was beside the stove and whose fall had been the hardest and cruellest of any sought out Holly on the perimeter path. Poshekhonov ladled out the lore of the Correctional Labour Colonies.

  And there was Chernayev who was a thief, and Byrkin who had been a naval Petty Officer, and Mamarev who they said was an informer.

  All reached for Holly's ear and all were turned aside.

  He seemed indifferent. Not curt in his rejection of their stories, not rude. Indifferent and disinterested.

  Adimov boasted of the planning of a robbery in Moscow.

  The State Bank on Kutuzovsky Prospekt was to be Adimov's target. Himself and two colleagues, and even a car found for the escape run, and a homemade pistol that would be sufficient to unnerve the cashier clerks. Two hundred thousand roubles in the hold-all and out into the street and into the car where the engine ticked snugly and into the traffic . . . and the stupid bitch had been on the pedestrian crossing, and her bags filled both hands, and she had frozen, not stepped back, and the car had hit her, swerved, crashed.

  Stupid bitch. Well, they weren't going to bloody stop because the foot sign was lit, not with the hold-all full. Can't put the handbrake on and sit on your hands with the alarm bells ringing because a babushka's on her way home with her son-in-law's dinner. Swerved and crashed into a lamp post. Three men in the car, all dazed, all half-concussed when the Militia pulled them out, and the bank's door not fifty metres away. Twelve years to think on it, twelve years and not five gone. And Adimov seemed to look for admiration from Holly when he told his story. Each new man into the hut had clucked sympathy for Adimov's mishap, each had thought that wise. All except the new stranger, the Englishman.

  In Holly's ear Feldstein whispered of the circulation of the samizdat writings.

  Typescripts photocopied and distributed that carried the rivulet of dissent from eye to eye for the few who trusted in a future of change and the ultimate destruction of the monolith that controlled their lives. He was a part, he said, of the illegal and dangerous dissemination of information, dangerous because those who were arrested risked being parcelled off to the Sebsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry or thrown to the mercy of the zeks in the camps. Two years served and four to go because one in the chain had not owned the strength to withstand the interrogation of the KGB questioners in Lubyanka. And he was proud in his puny and isolated fight, and believed in a vague victory in the future, and a present of martyrdom. He spoke of the nobility of the struggle, not of the failure of achievement. He was known in the West, he said, he was supported in his agony by many thousands, he was comforted by thei
r distant communion. Holly had listened with a chilled politeness and shrugged and turned away on his side for sleep.

  At the tables in the Kitchen, Poshekhonov found Holly.

  The joint history of the camps and of his life bubbled clear as a hill stream. A spring of guarded hope and a source of amusement. Poshekhonov said that he had found the way to laugh, he had picked up the spear of ridicule. 'Not too often, you understand, but enough to prick them . . .' His fall had been fast and far, but it had been almost worthwhile, almost, and one day, one distant day, there was the dream of a flight beyond the borders of the Motherland. It waited for him in Zurich, Poshekhonov would say, the pay-off. Had Holly ever been to Switzerland, because there was a bank there? He told of the Black Sea fishing collective where the catch was counted not in kilos of fish flesh but in the grams of the salted roe of the sturgeon. A co-operative company for the canning of caviar, and the plan had been brilliant in its sauce and complexity. A Dutch businessman had proposed the idea, a wonderful invention . . . A tin of caviar but the label declared the produce to be herring, and as herring it was sold to Amsterdam before the transfer of the labels in Holland and entry to the shops of the European capitals.

  And the rip-off was well divided and a segment found its way to a bank account that was anonymous in all but its number. Couldn't have lasted. Brilliant but temporary, and Poshekhonov was lucky not to have been shot with his two principal collaborators. Poshekhonov could summon a short clear smile from Holly, a smile that was chained and brief.

  Each in his way - Adimov, Feldstein, Poshekhonov -

  reached out towards Holly and waved a flag of interest or concern or friendship. All failed.

  Holly was alone.

  He waited, bandaged in his own thoughts, for the summons to the Administration block.

  A full week after Holly had been delivered to Camp 3, Captain Yuri Rudakov issued the instruction that the new prisoner was to be brought to his office.