Archangel

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 forward 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 their 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.

It was not that he had been dilatory in his duty of interviewing all those sent to the camp who were in any way, minor or major, special. His own inclination would have led him towards this first interview three or four days earlier. But in the wake of the personal file of Mikhail Holovich had come further instructions and briefings over the teleprinter in his office. More material from Dzers-zhinsky Street that he must assess. By the time that he felt ready to bring Holly before him, he had spent three clear days shut in that office with the door closed to all inquiries.

The Captain was a young man, not yet past his twenty-eighth birthday.

There were those in the dim corridors of Headquarters who said that his rise had been too fast. Rudakov knew the pitfalls, knew of the knives that waited for him. The KGB officer responsible for the security, both physical and spir-itual, of the camp was a man on trial. It was his strength that he recognized the testing-ground. He had been on trial before. Aged only twenty-four he had held down the post of KGB officer attached to the 502nd Guards Armoured Division stationed at Magdeburg in the German Democratic Republic. He had learned there how a full colonel could wince and supplicate in his presence. He had felt the power of his position when he had taken a bottle to the room of any major and propositioned for information on the talk in the mess when he, the KGB's ears, was not present. He had seen the tremble jelly of a captain's chin and known it was his uniform and the blue unit tabs that won it. He was roller-coasting towards a high-rise career and now they had sent him to this stinking backwater to test further his resolve and capability. If he won here too, if he came back from Barashevo without a stain of the shit and slime of this place on his tailored khaki uniform then the road upwards and onwards was clear to him. The Captain was an egocentric man, one who believed in the great blueprints of life. He reckoned in a destiny that was mapped for his career. Fate had thrown the dice. Twin sixes had fallen, rocked, rolled for him to see them. Mikhail Holovich had been sent to Camp 3, Zone 1.

The files told him their story – a tale of rare incompetence and of opportunity for him.

An agent of the British espionage services had been captured in Moscow. A strong creature and determined in his denials, but that should have been short-lived. Of course there had been interrogation sessions in the Lubyanka, but they had been flimsy affairs, for hanging over their progress had been the sword of a man's release. From the very start the question of exchange had reared. All the superiors, all the gold-braided ranking officers, had been short in their duty when it came to the breaking of this Englishman.

Where the Colonel Generals, where the Colonels, where the Majors of Headquarters had failed, idiot buggers, there was the opportunity for an ambitious Captain to succeed.

Since the first file had arrived off the train from Pot'ma, Yuri Rudakov had dreamed of little else than his triumph of interrogation over Mikhail Holovich.

He sat now at his desk, a manicured little man with a strength on his face, and a power about his sparse body, and a whiplash edge to his movements. A decisive and active young man. One who was going up. One on whom the sun played even through the bed of snow cloud over the roofs of the Administration block. His desk was clear of the papers that were memorized and locked in his personal safe. He had told his wife that morning over breakfast in their bungalow on the edge of Barashevo and within faint sight of the outer wooden fence of Zone 1, that he stood to gain a great prize… not tomorrow, not next week, but he had time, he had months of time to break this bastard.

As he waited he realized that he had not felt such keen anticipation and happiness since he had served in the front line at Magdeburg.

The knock at the door was respectful. Rudakov drummed his fingers on the table to count out five slow seconds, then called quietly for the prisoner to be brought into his presence.

Holly looked around him.

An office that might have been occupied by the Personnel Manager of the factory in Dartford. A tidy desk and behind it a man who might have come in on the Saturday afternoon for extra work. The collar of a checked shirt peeped from the neck of a thick blue sweater. A smaller table was beside the desk with a high-backed typewriter, the sign of a junior executive who has not been allocated a personal secretary and must write his own memoranda. A safe, a filing cabinet, a window that was curtained against the dusk of the camp and the reef of arc lights that surrounded it. A calendar with a colour photograph of a snow scene was set between the framed painting of Lenin and the portrait of Andropov of the Politburo. But a desolate room, without carpet, without furniture of quality, without personal decoration. Yellow painted walls that were cheerless and ran with dribbles of condensation.

The warmth from the hot pipe that skirted a side wall billowed across Holly's face, rubbed at the cold that had settled under his tunic and shirt as he had walked from the compound with the trustie from Internal Order. One week and the changes had fastened on Holly, winter leaves sticking to lawn grass. Unthinking, he had placed himself not in front of the desk but at an angle to it so that he was closer to the pipes, and he wondered how long the interview would last because it was short of thirty minutes until the call to the Kitchen for dinner and the hunger pain pinched at his stomach.

The man behind the desk would have been a little younger than himself. The man lounged easily in his chair and Holly stood. The man wore fitting and casual clothes and those of Holly were thin. The man was close-shaved, wore the scent of deodorant, and Holly was stubble-bearded and stank so that he himself could know the foulness. The man was relaxed and rested and Holly felt the tiredness brush through his mind and for nine and a half hours he had worked in the Factory at the lathe that fashioned chairs' legs. The man possessed power and pressures and Holly knew no stare he could offer in competition.

And if they were together in Hampton Wick, if they were sitting in the front room of his home in south-west London, then Holly's company Fiesta would be in the road outside, and the clothes would be smart on his back, and the whisky and water in his hand, and the confidence in his talk. But this was not his ground. He stood in the damp boots that leaked the snow wet to his socks, and he hated the man who sat at the desk.

'Would you like to sit, Holovich?'

Holly straightened himself, shrugged at his shoulders to try to rid himself of the weariness, gazed back at the man's face.

'I believe it is quite hard, the work that you do as a Strict Regime prisoner. You would be better to sit, Holovich.'

The air was filled with cigarette smoke. Different to Holly's nose from the dry dust filth of the tobacco used in Hut 2. Something from a former world, a part of a deep memory. His nostrils flicked, the smoke spiral played before his eyes.

'Forgive me, I didn't think, would you like a cigarette, Holovich?'

'I don't smoke… my name is Michael Holly.'

'My name is Rudakov,' the mouth of the Captain sagged in amusement. 'My papers tell me you are named Holovich, that is what the file calls you.'

'Holly… Michael Holly.'

'And it is important to you to keep an identity? You find that significant?'

Holly stared down at him.

'If your name is Holovich or Holly, that is important to you? That is my question.'

His hands were clasped behind his back. Holly dug a thumbnail into the flesh of his hand. Trying to beat the tiredness and the sapping warmth of the room, and his eyes blinked when he wished them clear.

'If you want me to call you Holly, then I shall call you that. To me it is immaterial, to you it should be irrelevant.

You shall be Holly, you can be Michael Holly. I will start again. .. would you like to sit down, Holly? Would you like a cigarette, Holly?'

'I will stand… I don't smoke.'

He recognized the churlishness, saw Rudakov open his hands in the gesture of refused reasonableness.

'Then it is your choice that you don't sit, your choice that you don't smoke, am I right?'

'It is my choice.'

'Your choice whether you smoke a cigarette, my choice on the name I give you. Whether I call you Holovich, or Holly, or Mister Holly, or Michael, that is my choice.

Whether I call you by your number, that is my choice. I have every choice, and unless 1 wish it otherwise, you have no choice. That is the reality of your position. Know this. It is not important to me what your name should be. I don't give a shit, Mister Holly, what you are called. It is not something I would dispute with you; your insistence on a name amuses me. Understand this, though – if I were to dispute the matter with you, I would win. I spoke of the reality of your position, and I would like now to expand on that reality.'

The muscles ached in his thighs and calves. The sweetness of the cigarette drugged his mind.

Remember that you hate him, Holly…

'You have been here a week, Holly, I have been here one hundred times longer. I know a little of the camp life. I tell you something, I tell you this as a friend, because I have a sympathy for you… Holly, you have to forget the past, that is what anyone who has spent time in the camps will say to you, you have to forget the past life. The name of Holly is behind you, it does nothing to help you. That you wish to be defiant and stand when you can sit, that is the attitude of your past life.' He leaned across his desk, and his chin rested comfortably in the palms of his hands, and there was a gentleness that belied the cut in his words. 'There is no exchange to look towards, that is in the past, just as your name is in the past. You must point towards your future, you must wonder if your future is to be fourteen years in the Dubroulag. I think you are a young man now, what will you be in fourteen years, and will it matter then whether you are Holovich or Holly? Will it matter?'

Holly swayed on his feet. He looked past Rudakov's head to the curtain. He focused on the place where the draught blew a small bulge in the cotton.

'Those who sent you here, those who sent you on your mission against the people of the Soviet Union, they are from your past. Is that a lie? You are not at your home, you have not crossed a bridge in Berlin… you are in Mordovia, in a Strict Regime camp. Their arm is not long enough, not strong enough, they cannot lift you out from here ..

The bell rang, metallic and screeching. The call for the camp to hurry to the Kitchen. For the first in line the soup is warm, only for the first.

'Can I go now?'

'The pig swill they feed you, that is the future. You are learning well and quickly. The past has nothing for you, nothing, the past has abandoned you. Those that sent you here have forgotten you, buried you, stamped down the earth on your memory. I speak the truth, yes? If they had not abandoned you then you would not be here, you would not be wanting to run the width of the compound to drink the shit you wouldn't give your dog at home. Think on that… '

'Can I go now?'

'Enjoy your dinner, enjoy your future,' Rudakov leaned back in his chair and his face was happy with a smile, then he snapped to his feet. 'I will take you back to the cage… and in the morning I will give the order that you are to be called by any name you want.'

They went together into the night and, when the inner gate was opened, Rudakov called at Holly's back, 'Good night, Michael Holly, good night. Think of those who sent you here, think of how they are spending their evening.

Think of it when you are in the Kitchen line, when you are eating, when you have gone to your bunk. Piss on them, Michael Holly.'

Holly walked steadily along a stamped snow path, and the laughter from behind gusted to his ears.

'We are going to meet often, Michael Holly. You will learn that I can be a better friend to you than those who sent you here.'

The inner gates of the Zone scraped shut, and Holly strode on towards the doors of the Kitchen where the end of the queue spilt out from the light.