Archangel

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 dogs, 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.

The gates were pushed shut behind them. A beam cracked down into its sockets. More shouting, more orders. To Holly's right, lights glowed from the warmth of the Administration block where the windows were misted and the scent of coal smoke billowed from a brick chimney. The inner gates opened. In front of him Holly could see the expanse of the snow-draped camp. He had reached the Correctional Labour Colony in the Dubrovlag with the designated administrative title of ZhKh 385/3/1. He had arrived at Camp 3, Zone 1 (Strict Regime). He thought it was a Sunday, the eighth day after the death of a man in the Coronary Care unit of the Hammersmith Hospital.

The inner gate closed behind the new intake of prisoners.

From the window of the Administration block overlooking the open ground of the camp close to the inner gates, the Major watched as the prisoners were again lined in fives and counted, a necessary formality because this marked their passing from the charge of the M V D transport guard into the hands of the M V D Correctional Labour Detachment.

He was a short man, barrel-built, and his physique was suited to the paratroop unit he had been a part of before his transfer from the active service troops of the Red Army, to the mind-twisting boredom of Ministry of the Interior camp supervision. Paratroops were the elite while those seconded to M VD work were the latrine cleaners of the armed forces.

But a duty was a duty, a posting could not be evaded by a Major who had been turned down for promotion to Colonel. He would serve out his uniformed days as Commandant of Camp 3, Zone i.

The paratroop regiment that he had left eighteen months before was now bivouacked in a concrete and brick school house on the outskirts of Jalalabad and dominated the low ground of an Afghan valley. This was where his heart lay, where the helicopters waited to lift men into mountain combat, and the radio chattered the co-ordinates for Ilyushin strikes. He was an activist, with bluff red cheeks under his stunted pig eyes to prove his love of the outdoor life. Zone i was in its way as much of a prison for the Commandant as for the eight hundred men to whom he played a vague mutation of God and Commissar. Far from his paratroops, far from their mortars and machine-guns and rocket-launchers, far from their special camaraderie, he worried like a dog with freshly stolen meat over the in-cessant and aching problems of the camp's discipline and routine.

The little parade that he witnessed through the steamed window of the Administration block was a wound to him.

The conscript troops of the MVD could not entirely be blamed for the ill fit of their uniforms, for their slouched shoulders, for their callow and chilled faces. They were not the cream or they would not have found their way to this worthless place. Scum in uniform… he yearned for a parade ground of his former troops, for the whip crack of their rifle drill, the unison stamping of their marching boots.

And the prisoners were worse, the worst. No feet picked up, just a slovenly shuffle in the snow… as if they knew that their scraping passage festered in the mind of the Major. But he tried. He strove through all his waking hours to impose a smartness and snap on Camp 3, Zone 1, that he knew had never been present before, and that during the night hours when he was alone he doubted he would ever achieve.

He was Major Vasily Kypov, thirty-three years of service behind him, and three more to endure before the blessed release of retirement.

A young man stood a pace behind him, young enough to have been his son, and his breath played the sweet stale smell of the cigarette smoker's mouth across the Major's nostrils. The same uniform, but without the silver wings and blue tabs instead of red. A Captain in KGB he might be, the power in the kingdom of Zone 1, feared by the superior in rank and the inferior in fortune, but the Major had demanded that inside the Administration block in the mornings he should wear his uniform. Such were the victories available to the Commandant in his skirmishes with his Political Officer.

The Captain smoked imported Marlboro cigarettes. They were sent to him in packages of ten cartons from Moscow.

That was a display of influence, not that the Major needed information on the long arm of KGB. And Major Vasily Kypov knew well that he commanded Captain Yuri Rudakov in name only. They shared their responsibilities for the smooth running of Zone 1 with the enthusiasm of those bound by a loveless marriage. Where possible they went their own ways. Where contact was unavoidable their relations were frosted and formal. If asked, Captain Rudakov would not have been able to recall an occasion when he had given ground, important or trivial, to Major Kypov.

With his pocket handkerchief the Major wiped the window pane.

There was one amongst the dross people in their three ranks of fives who stood out. A tall man who gazed about him as if not yet intimidated by what he saw. Interest stirred in the Major. There were few enough who came to the camps with their heads erect, who stood their ground in the snow and fielded the threat of the gun barrels and dogs' mouths. The Major's sensibilities were divided between admiration for a man with self-pride and hostility to a man who by defiance might provide a threat to the peaceful and submissive nature of the Zone.

'What do we have today, the same shit as always?' The Major's breath blurred the glass, and he reached again for his handkerchief.

'The usual medley, Comrade Major… Criminals mostly.'

'Scum, parasites, hooligans… '

'And pliable and quiet, Comrade Major… if you want the busier life you can apply for Perm… '

'I don't want the politicals, I don't want Perm. I want a camp that is efficient and productive.'

'Then you must have the scum, the parasites and the hooligans. From the criminals you have no argument… 1 have the files… thieves, one who took a knife to a postmaster's throat, one who buggered a Pioneer intake class, one who caught his wife screwing the rent official and took off half her head with a hammer – he should work well.

There is only one…'

'The one in the front rank,' mused the Major.

'Of course you are right. They cannot send us a box that is filled only with good apples, there has to be one that is bruised.'

'Tell me.'

'A peculiar case. His name is Holovich. Mikhail Holovich. That is the bruised apple.' The Captain walked back from the window towards the Major's desk and tipped onto its ordered surface a bundle of buff card files. 'In Moscow they have given Holovich the Red Stripe category.'

The Major swung away from the window. The red stripe on the file was attached only if there was believed to be a risk of escape. The red stripe demanded a special vigilance. The blue stripe was its brother and indicated that a prisoner had shown tendencies towards organization and confrontation.

'Blue I can handle, blue you can see, blue is self-destructive and the posture of an idiot. The red stripe I detest. The prevention of escape is inexact..

'You haven't lost a man, not in your time.'

'Not in my time… Who is Holovich?'

'Quite a star, actually,' the Captain drawled. 'Something far from the ordinary. His parents lived before the Great Patriotic War in the Ukraine, they were married there just prior to the Fascist invasion. The Germans took them, man and wife, back to their war factories. After the surrender they refused to be repatriated, and they settled in Great Britain. It is certain that they became participants within the traitor ranks of NTS… you know of that, Comrade Major?

Narodno-Trudovoi Soyuz, an emigre organization, of course you know that… They have one son, born Mikhail Holovich and now thirty years old. In the eyes of the British the boy had their citizenship, but we see the matter differently. To us he will always be a Soviet citizen. Mikhail Holovich became Michael Holly, but the change of a name does not discard nationality. He is Soviet. Holovich is an engineer, small-scale turbines. He worked for a firm in the area of London, and that company began to negotiate with one of our Ministries for the sale of their products to the Soviet Union. During his childhood, Holovich had been taught Russian by his mother and it was ostensibly for that reason that his company asked him to visit Moscow – a quite spurious reason because we supply most adequate and experienced interpreters for commercial negotiations with foreign concerns. Before arriving in the Soviet Union, Holovich was recruited by the British espionage service and was given instructions for a contact – I don't have to go into detail, these are matters available to me. He was caught and he was sentenced. In the interests of detente, because of our belief in the value of friendly relations where possible, our government agreed to return this criminal to the British in exchange for a Soviet citizen falsely accused in London. We were giving them gold, they were handing us tin. We made this offer on humanitarian grounds. The gaolers of Holo vich reneged on the agreement, the exchange will not take place. In Moscow, the Ministry of the Interior after consultation with the Ministry of Justice has determined that the full rigour of the law shall now be turned on Holovich.

One year ago he was sentenced to a term of fifteen years imprisonment. Up to now he has known the soft ride of the foreigners' block at Vladimir… From now he will be treated as a Soviet offender, that is why he is not at Camp 5…

He is a spy, he is a traitor, perhaps he is fortunate not to have faced the extreme penalty provided for in the Criminal Code.'

The Major strode back towards the window and his boots sounded drum rattle over the hollow spacing under the bare boards of his office. A spartan, soldierly room.

'This Holovich, he is a self-confessed spy?'

The Captain laughed quietly. 'They were dilatory in Moscow. He is not self-confessed. That is to come…'

Always when the snow had recently fallen there was a damp fog over the camp, a link between the low grey cloud and the whitened ground. It was hard for the Major to see the little procession that moved away from the Administration block towards the heart of the camp, but he fancied he could still make out one dark head amongst the hazing image of the retreating column.

There were faces at the glass of the windows watching their approach.

A timbered hut, a hundred feet long and balanced on stilts of brickwork, with smoke flowing from a central chimney.

There were other huts visible as outlines in the mist of early afternoon, but it was to the hut with the figure '2' painted in yellow on the doorway that they were led. The snow had drifted at one end, at the beck of the wind, so that it reached almost to the eaves of the roof.

And the old man at Pot'ma had said that self-pity was not acceptable.

Holly kicked the snow from his shoes against the jamb of the door and climbed the few steps into Hut 2.