That night the soup ration had been cut with barely a fish head or a few small bones in the bowl. But nobody had any appetite. People were waiting for the distant sound of machine-gun fire, knowing that when they returned to the huts the urkas would share out whatever few possessions were hidden in the mattresses of the German prisoners now in a mass grave.
During the next week in Kolyma there had been no other mass executions, but every zek knew that his file was being reopened. Access to radios was forbidden, letters and parcels stopped arriving. Most political prisoners had made token confessions of spying for the very forces that were now invading the USSR. This made them enemy soldiers, especially foreigners like Brendan. Every morning he had yearned for the gold fields where he could toil in safety. No slacking was allowed there, with defeatism viewed as sabotage of the war effort and punishable by death. Even after the prolonged evening counts Brendan had never felt safe because of the midnight searches, with guards stabbing open mattresses as if a fifth column of Nazis might lurk inside them. Finally, Brendan’s name had been called out, along with every foreign national in the camp. They were told that they were leaving for a new camp. They had marched out beneath a banner painted by Yasili before his death, which proclaimed the glory of working for the USSR. Dogs had hurried them along, with some zeks openly crying and others too numbed to care. But after several days’ march all had gasped in relief at the sight of a waiting boat, knowing that they were not going to be shot, for now at least. They had been crammed into the hold, with guards screaming at them until every inch of space was used. Brendan had no idea what port they finally reached, but once there they were herded towards these waiting carriages with planks nailed across the doors and this long journey had begun.
Brendan was starving now but his hunger would be worse later. He would wait until the apex of this agony before starting to slowly chew his small hunk of black bread. Nobody had yet soiled themselves so there was no stream of urine and no stink of shit. Nobody had died in the wagon today or, if they did, they had done so without attracting attention. The wagon was so quiet that for a few moments, despite a phobia that his bread might be stolen, Brendan blacked out into sleep and dreamed of Donegal. They were bathing off Bruckless Pier with Art racing hand in hand with Eva along the stone pier to tumble laughingly into the waves. Brendan saw himself, sleek as a silvery fish, flitting through the green water. Art surfaced to ruffle Brendan’s hair and asked if he liked the kite that he had made for him. Brendan plunged his head into the water to glide behind his beloved big brother.
The train’s unexpected jolt woke him as he crested the waves. The zeks began to talk, wondering if they would be allowed out into the air. Others shouted for quiet so they could listen for the click of the guards’ rifles. Brendan discreetly checked that his bread was still there. No zek spoke but he sensed a new terror. There was just the gusting wind and the drone of an aeroplane leisurely approaching. Then the silence was broken by indistinct sounds, the bark of released dogs, guards shouting in panic, a scramble of boots scattering across the barren ground.
‘The bastards,’ an older zek muttered. ‘The guards are more concerned with saving the dogs than saving us. Come back, you cowards, unlock these doors.’
The entire wagon was on its feet now, banging at the roof and wooden walls. Bursts of machine-gun fire came from above, interspersed with cries and the noise of frantic hammering from inside every wagon. Brendan heard the crush of timber and knew that one set of prisoners had succeeded in breaking free. Their shouts turned to screams amid a heavy burst of gunfire, but he could not tell if it came from the plane or if guards might have set up a machine-gun post in the undergrowth. Two men beside him kept hammering on the roof, being lifted up by other prisoners. They broke away a wooden slat, yielding a glimpse of blue sky. Everyone was screaming, but Brendan was utterly still, mesmerised by the sky above him. It was the deepening blue of an Irish summer twilight and crossing that blue patch was a small aircraft, either departing or wheeling around for another assault. The gleam made him catch his breath as it turned in a slow loop. Others saw it too and began to scream louder. But Brendan said nothing because he had become a boy again, standing on Bruckless Pier, drawing in the bright kite that his big brother had made for him.
Then a bomb burst, bringing him to his senses as it struck a carriage further down the train. The impact rocked Brendan’s wagon so violently that the walls almost buckled before it toppled sideways down the siding. The wagon was filled with screams but Brendan barely heard them because the explosion left him disorientated and partially deafened. He closed his eyes and the sensation felt like being underwater amid a shoal of tumbling bodies. He knew that his face was bleeding and he could feel a wrenching pain where his right arm got wedged between falling bodies. People trapped near the roof had surely died while breaking his fall and those of the zeks around him.
Wooden slats burst open at the side of the wagon, wide enough for a person to crawl through. He joined in the scramble, climbing over zeks who were dead or dying. It was impossible to save anyone trapped there, because the German plane was swooping low, anxious to destroy the locomotive. The second explosion was blinding. Now there were flames all along the track as carriages ignited. The smell of burning flesh reminded him of Georgi’s corpse being burnt in a pyre at Magadan.
Brendan’s hands were covered in blood and the explosion had damaged his retinas, so he could see little beyond after-images of light. He rose to run amid the flock of zeks, all wheeling and turning in panic as if they possessed a single mind. They were swallows in search of Africa. They were children seeking their mothers. They were humans stripped of everything except this last impulse to live. Behind them the German plane wheeled around, the machine gunners on board spraying bullets along the tracks, delighting in their power to mow down the stragglers trying to flee. A further crackle of machine-gun fire came from the bushes where the Soviet guards were arrayed to prevent zeks from escaping, even though they themselves would be shot for letting the precious rolling stock be destroyed.
Brendan stopped running but the momentum of people fleeing the burning train carried him on, until he was halted by the crush of bodies at the front trying to push their way back. All that was saving him from death was the mass of bodies caught between the two hails of bullets. But, judging by the shrieks of the dying, this wall of flesh was growing thinner. A man directly in front of him turned around to face Brendan, desperately trying to push deeper into the bodies. Brendan’s sight was clearer now and by the light of the flames he recognised him as a vicious urka who had been put on the train after it was discovered that he had a foreign grandmother. Managing to free his arms amid the crowd, Brendan pinned them around the urka’s neck. You’re going nowhere, comrade, except to hell. He didn’t say the words aloud, but the urka understood them. The man had twice his strength and should have been able to fight back but seemed momentarily paralysed by fear. Then he roared into Brendan’s face and lifted his hands to break the grip. He would have succeeded had a bullet not entered him. He jerked forward, eyes fixed on Brendan. His arms kept moving but only managed to drape themselves around Brendan for support. Brendan swayed with him, using the dead body as a shield, even though he knew that a direct hit would slice through them both.
Enough space was clearing for bodies to fall. Many zeks were dead or playing dead or so terrified that they had lost the use of their legs. Among them a small child sat on a dead woman’s body, banging on the chest with her fists as if demanding that her mother rise. A lull came in the firing as if the Germans were bored, and the Soviet guards had decided to flee. But Brendan knew that this would not last. He had more chance on his own because the child would only weigh him down and even if he managed to flee he had no way of feeding her in this wilderness. But it was not in his character to leave her there. At first she screamed when he picked her up, reaching out to claw at his bloodied face. But then the firing resumed and she pressed her face against his chest
, shivering in shock and with the cold. Yet her body felt warm, her face reminding him of a child he once saw in London during the General Strike. He cradled her like he knew that he would never have a chance to cradle a child of his own. Crouching down, he pushed blindly through the screaming zeks. He had a purpose now, a mission. All his life he had simply wanted to know that he was helping humanity in a small way, that his presence on earth would make some slight difference. This desire had led him to leave Marlborough College, had led him to Spain, had eventually led him here to run across this blood-soaked soil. Because maybe in the end it boiled down to this, to hold one child in a crowd and fight to give her an extra few seconds of life. If he succeeded he might finally have done something that earned him the right to stare back into Martin Luther’s eyes.
The child pressed tightly against him, whispering words that he could not hear. He wanted to share so many things with her, wanted to describe the feel of his mother’s hand stroking his hair in bed at night, the attics in the Manor House where he had played at her age, his sister Eva sketching in her studio. He wanted her to have heard a church bell instead of a siren, to wake up without the stench of mildewed clothes, to see a dog not snarling at the end of a chain. Just once in her life he wanted her to have known what it was like not to be hungry, to have lice-free hair, to picnic on a beach and have a big brother to look up to. Brendan wanted her to know these things, yet he couldn’t speak because he needed to save his breath for running. A gap appeared ahead, a space through the dying zeks, though he was so dizzy that he no longer knew in what direction he was running. But now they were out in the open with fewer bodies here and for a second he thought they were free. Then he saw the Soviet guards with their machine guns and knew that the German plane had gone and he was running directly towards the bullets with no time to turn. He knew that the same bullet which passed through the child would enter him. They would die at the same moment, with him bearing her to her death. More than anything he wanted to tell her about Bruckless Pier. About the great dread he had always felt when running down it to fling himself out into the mercy of the waves. Because tumbling down through the depths there was always this moment when he felt truly done for, before his body instinctively turned amid the green water and he knew in the core of his being that he would rise again into the light.
THIRTY-ONE
The Knock
January 1942
It was nearly midnight when the knock came. Art had just finished stapling a batch of his latest pamphlet: Trotskyism: Its Roots and Its Fruits, which he had self-published under the banner of Proletarian Publications. Priced at 3d, he needed to sell four hundred to recover his printing costs. After that he would give the remaining stock away free. Today it took him five hours to sell two copies, but at least it was two minds saved from the cancerous treachery that had liquidated the Communist Party of Ireland. Trotsky’s paid agents in Dublin must feel threatened by his defiance as they sensed the keen edge of truth homing in on their lies. This was why their knock did not surprise him now. The opportunist traitors would want to seize every copy so as to suppress the one small voice of dissent. Art took the one knife he possessed and, clenching it in his right fist, kept it concealed behind his back as a second knock came.
He flung the door open, making himself as big as possible. Only one figure stood there, an old man with a raincoat folded under his arm. Art glanced past to see if others lurked on the stairwell, but the man seemed alone. He was no policeman or cleric – Art had developed a second sense for these. But there was something familiar about his quiet gentility, recalling memories of childhood. It was hard to distinguish his features in the unlit hallway of this, the coldest tenement Art had ever lived in. The only light came from two candles stuck in old ale bottles in his room. The man removed his hat. He seemed breathless and slightly disorientated. Perhaps he was lost. Art stepped back to pick up a candle so that they would see each other clearly.
‘Hello, Art.’
‘Mr Barnes?’
Art could not remember when he last saw the retired manager of the Royal Bank in Donegal town. Mr Barnes whose son used to play duets with Eva on the piano. Art reserved a special contempt for bankers as lackeys of international capitalism, but found it hard to feel hostility towards this quiet figure.
‘You’d better come in.’
Mr Barnes took the single chair beside the small table where the pamphlets were stacked. Art sat on the bed, watching the old man examine his spartan room. The walls were bare except for a portrait of Stalin hung from the nail where a previous tenant had erected a Sacred Heart candleholder. Noise came from the pavement below, with men congregating around the now closed pubs of Wexford Street. Somebody had started singing The Foggy Dew. Mr Barnes produced a white handkerchief and scrupulously cleaned his hands, although Art knew they were not dirty.
‘I’m afraid I can’t offer you tea,’ Art said, ‘or anything else for that matter, unless you would like some dry bread. There is a tap on the ground floor if you would like me to fetch you some water.’
‘That’s not necessary,’ Mr Barnes replied. ‘The stairs just left me winded, I have been up and down so many of them. Two days I have been looking for you. I didn’t want to stop and have to start again tomorrow. There’s so little time, you see.’ His gaze was neither kind nor aggressive, but contained a hurt bemusement. ‘Prepare yourself, lad, the news I bring is bad.’
‘Brendan?’
Mr Barnes shook his head. ‘It’s your father. He died in London three nights ago. Your mother wanted him to deliver a letter in person to the Soviet Embassy, hoping they might be more co-operative now that they’re our allies. He was on his way back for the late train when an oil bomb fell close by. Having his warden’s armband with him, he helped people leaving the local cinemas to reach the nearest shelter. By that time there was no chance of a train back to Oxford. An old lady was refusing to leave her kitchen because she had two cats and animals aren’t allowed in bomb shelters. But your father persuaded them to let her bring one cat, then he went back out to help direct the fire crews. Afterwards people thought that he was asleep in a corner of the shelter. Only after the All Clear was given did anyone realise that he was dead, with the second cat curled up inside his coat.’ Mr Barnes paused. ‘Nobody knew how to contact you. I am executor of your father’s will. I know a man in the Dublin constabulary who was able to say that you are frequently seen around this area.’
‘So they’re still keeping files on me?’
The banker leaned forward. ‘Just for once in your selfish life forget about yourself. Your father is dead. Did you not hear what I said?’
‘My life has not been selfish. I have kept nothing for myself.’
‘Your father…’ Mr Barnes sounded exasperated.
‘Yes, I heard you.’ Art rose. ‘Do you think I am not grieving? All my life I’ve grieved in advance for this moment.’ Walking to the window Art looked down at the men below whose casual camaraderie could turn as easily to blows. These were the people for whom he had left his family, people who jeered him when he tried to sell his pamphlet in the pubs.
One of his earliest memories was of his nurse saying that one day he would be master of the house when Father died. He had been five years of age and previously never understood why people treated him differently from his big sisters. Nurse’s words had promised riches but also filled him with dread because he had never previously contemplated the fact that his beloved father could die. Her remark had set a clock ticking in his mind, a clock he had spent his life trying to hold back. Perhaps his hatred of inherited wealth sprang from the fact that what he most wanted was for Father not to die. Now that clock had finally struck. He turned to Mr Barnes.
‘You think me a bad son.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I loved him more than any of you realised.’
‘All I know is that you hurt him more than you may realise.’
Art saw that Mr Barnes was uneasy with thi
s conversation. He was a practical man, here for practical reasons to do one final duty for a friend.
‘I also know, whether you wish it or not, that you are now head of the Goold Verschoyle family, with the responsibilities that entails. You have your Travel Identity Card, don’t you? I can advance funds for your trip to Oxford for the funeral. Your sister Eva has already travelled over. It will just be the pair of you and your mother. Afterwards I can explain the details of the estate to you. There is a considerable volume of papers…’
‘Can I sell the Manor House?’
Mr Barnes sighed. ‘This is hardly the time. Come and see me in Donegal.’
‘It’s a valid question.’
‘You know the answer. The Manor House is yours for your lifetime only. After that it must be passed to your eldest son.’ Mr Barnes looked up. ‘You possess a son, I believe.’
Art looked down at the secondhand army boots that had seen him through the past six years. Did his son have boots for the Russian winter? Judging by reports, conditions in Russia were atrocious. Stalin’s genius had made the Germans walk into his trap, imagining that the Soviet people were fleeing as they retreated towards Moscow, leaving not one grain of flour or can of gasoline behind to aid the fascists through the winter. This retreat had caused riots among traitors in Moscow, imagining that Stalin had fled to safety. But Stalin had publicly stood on the roof of the Lenin Mausoleum to steady the population. He refused to leave his people and had suffered with them as they dug machine-gun nests on every street corner. His brilliance had twice repelled the Germans who tried to storm the city, and then in the ice of December, he counter-attacked. The Germans had not taken Moscow and never would while Stalin lived to inspire liberty. The people were united in this Great Patriotic War, along with their neighbours in the newly-liberated Baltic States. But they were also starving and being butchered by enemy fire. To be stuck in Dublin was worse than manning an artillery position in minus forty degrees outside Moscow, because Art was helpless here, unable to discover if his wife and child had died in the desperate slaughter and unable to protect them if they had survived. Stalin would ensure that nobody needlessly suffered, but not even Stalin could be everywhere to watch over his people at every moment.
The Family on Paradise Pier Page 40
