Chapter 7

Holly worked on alone at the lathe that fashioned the chairs' legs.

Around him the other machines were silent, closed down.

The saws and planes and chisels and hammers were abandoned. The benches were deserted. Only Holly was at his place. His back was to the window and he did not turn to spare a glance at the crush of the zeks who squirmed against the grime of the windows. There was no expression on his face, just the blank skin facade of hunger and tiredness.

At first the civilian foremen who came to the Factory each morning from Barashevo village had shouted that the men should stay at their work, but their protests had made a battle that he could not win. The trusties of Internal Order had added their voices and they, too, were ignored. The two wings of authority had accepted defeat and then joined the workforce at the windows. Beyond the glass there was a sporadically placed ring of guards and dogs who seemed uncertain as to whether to stare back at the distorted press of faces at the glass panes, or whether to watch instead the spiral column of smoke and the flames that played at its heels. Only the roof of the Commandant's hut was visible over the high wooden fence that was the boundary of the Factory compound, but the fire was high and the smoke higher. There was much for everyone to see. Like children the prisoners revelled in the spectacle, and their enjoyment was spurred by the noise of sirens and shouting and the crackle of old wood in the fire.

Holly heard above the drone of his lathe motor the scenario of sound that the fire carried, and heard too the happiness of the men who had left their benches.

'All the files, all the bastard case files, all there to burn, all gone.'

'They'll only have the sand buckets, they won't have a water supply. I saw the hoses last week, they hadn't been drained, they're frozen solid in their coils.'

'Did you see the pig Kypov? He came in running like a fat sow, his uniform's half burned off his fucking back.'

'How could a fire start there?'

'The speed it spread, that's not electrical, it spread like tart's clap.'

'Shit how it started, it did. Bugger how it started.'

Holly knew.

Holly could have answered the babble over his shoulder.

He picked at another piece of raw wood that had been crudely cut in the workshop across the compound in preparation for the finishing work of the lathes.

The wood shavings and dust reached up in an awkward mess from the floor beside his legs. A great mound close to him, but the daily norm that was so precious to the administration of the camp would be found wanting that day.

Bloody dangerous, this lathe, Holly thought. Wouldn't have wormed through any Factory Safety Act passed in Britain in the last fifty years, open and unshielded parts, and half of the men who used them wore the scars on their hands to prove the danger. There should have been gloves and protective goggles and face masks to field the resin and varnish dust. And the men worked without these essentials because work was food, and food was life.

Holly knew how the fire had started in the office of Major Vasily Kypov.

In his mind that was guarded by grey, disinterested eyes and his sallow tight-drawn forehead, Holly could picture the process of how a match lit in innocence had tumbled upon an incendiary device. He had looked for a loophole in their guard, he had found that crevice at the first time of asking. Smug, weren't they? Believing in their authority so totally that they could not envisage a mere prisoner, a mere item of scum, daring to kick back. Kick back with interest.

And the interest was prime rate high, and the flames were falling now because little was left for them to feed from.

The foremen called again for the men to return to their work. They came when the fire had dipped below the level of the high fence. There was a rumble across the workshop floor as the motors of the machinery sluggishly coughed back to life.

The old thief, Chernayev, from Hut 2. was beside Holly. A grizzled gnome of a man with a face as white as office paper and a pepper speckle of beard growth across his jowls and chin.

'You weren't interested? You've been here three weeks -1 tell you, when it is three years you will run to the window with the rest of us.'

Holly did not look away from his work.

'How long have you been here?'

'This camp five years, before that twelve years in Perm.

They call me Chernayev the thief. I have not been a thief for seventeen years, chance would be a thing. I did twelve years in Perm, and I was stupid… I had a tattoo done… imbecile… Brezhnev is a parasite, that was the tattoo on my arm. You know they could have shot me for that.

Self-defacement, inciting anti-Soviet attitudes, it's all in the penal code. Four words and they could have shot me, that's in the book. I have four more to go • • • See this…' He held out his arm and pushed back the sleeve of his overall and there was a rectangle of puckered ruddy skin. 'They had to get rid of the offensive literature, they couldn't burn it, so they scraped it off and grafted back some skin from my arse

… You understand why I laugh when Kypov's hut goes down?'

Holly seemed to look at him as if the matter of a fire that destroyed the office of the Commandant was neither of occasion nor note.

'I understand why you laugh.'

The foreman was behind them peering between their shoulders, and there was a sniff of impatience. it's not a wives' meeting, it's a workshop… and you're behind, Chernayev…'

It had been very simple once he had absorbed the mechanics of the attack.

A juvenile could have done it. They were so flabby. They believed so completely in the strength of their discipline and the spider net of submission that it secreted.

The screws that they used in the workshop came in plastic bags a few inches square. Holly had picked a discarded one from the floor. The lathes were serviced with a light oil film, draped in it as if to give them an overcoat protection that would ensure their survival against age and wear. Holly had filled the plastic bag with oil and twisted the neck tight and fastened it with a snip of wire. The bag and the oil had nestled behind his testicles, held in place by his underpants, as he had walked from the Factory to Hut z, evaded the evening search. Feldstein had given Holly a magazine and said he wanted it no longer. In his iron mug, on the privacy of his bunk, Holly had manufactured the pulp of papier-mache as he had been taught to by his mother when he was a small boy. He made a rough shape that was neither a cube nor a sphere, but a wet and hollow lump. In the night when the hut was quiet apart from the coughing and the bed creaks and the whimpering of men in despair, he had gone to the stove and heated his shape until it was dried and firm.

The bag that was filled with oil sat inside its carton. He had smeared the shape with coal dust.

Each morning there was a rota of men designated to fill the coal containers for the day – buckets for the Administration offices and the Guard Room and the barracks, sacks for the huts – from the central heap of fuel beside the compound gate. The perimeter path was beside the coal mountain. On Exercise that morning he had tossed his offering the few inches from his pocket to a waiting bucket. From the far side of the perimeter path he had watched the detail at their work as they scraped the overnight snow from the coal mountain, then shovelled the buckets and sacks full. He did not know which building he would raze. .. but one would go. One was doomed when a bucket of coal was tipped on to a blazing fire and the flames eroded the dust covering, ate at the brittle papier-mache, flickered at the softness of the plastic bag. Really it had been very simple. Simple and anonymous. The covert attack of the unseen guerilla. And no one for them to strike back against. Simple and anonymous and safe. And a beginning, Holly, only a beginning.

The first shot of war. And war, once started, has a long road to run.

At mid-day they were marshalled and marched back from the work compound to the living compound to take their places in the queue for the Kitchen. Holly saw the confusion of the guards' officers and NCOs, the way that instructions were given in a frantic pitch and confronted by the sullen amusement of the zeks. The dogs were allowed to drag their handlers closer to the ranks of men as the roll-call was made. And those in charge strutted along the lines and there was an anger at their faces that Holly had not seen before.

Anger at humiliation, at pride lost. It was a bright day with thin sunshine burnishing up from the snow and men blinked and rubbed their eyes as they crossed the open space between the two compounds, tramping over the road running down to the village and the railway line that stretched far the other way to Pot'ma. The guards who sealed the zeks into their corridor were restive, in poor temper. Another group of prisoners, themselves surrounded by guns and dogs, waited for the slow column to clear the road so that they themselves could pass on. Holly grimaced. A log jam at Barashevo, as if this forgotten end of the world was a metropolis of movement and then he looked again at the huddle of prisoners separated from him by two lines of uniformed guards.

Women. And Holly had not gazed on a woman for thirteen months.

Women who wore black. Black tunics and black skirts and black boots. Dissent and crime are not the prerogative of the male. A chorus of shouting began around Holly. Fun for the zeks, diversion from the tedium of the parade line and the parade march and the parade search and the parade lunch. And the women matched the men in earth and coarseness and the laughter pealed between the two groups.

Perhaps because he was not yet bowed with the burden of imprisonment, Holly was a man to be noticed. Taller than those around him.

A girl had seen Holly.

A tiny creature who was muffled in a tunic with the collar upturned and with a scarf across her mouth and a forage cap whose peak was pulled down over her eyes. An elf and an urchin, she had seen Holly. He stared back at her. Two people on opposite platforms and when the trains come they will go their different ways and not meet again. And the railway track that divided them was lines of men in uniform who cradled machine-pistols, who held tight to dragging dogs.

He saw a name printed across the right side of her tunic.

He knew her only as Morozova. Why one girl in a crowd?

Why one girl who possessed only a hidden face and a printed name?

Poshekhonov was at Holly's side, chuckling from the side of his mouth.

'Hard for you young bastards… old buggers like me, we've forgotten what it's like. Not that thinking about it helps. Tie a knot, boy, that's the best.'

He remembered her. Standing beside the rails at the junction at Pot'ma she had held the baby of an exhausted mother, and she had smiled at him. He could not see if she smiled now that her mouth was hidden by her scarf.

'Don't look at those beasts,' Poshekhonov said. 'That's the slime at the bottom of the can. They'd eat a man… You don't believe me? I tell you, I'd rather go without than have that lot screw me. They're shit, in Zone 4 they're not women as we'd know them, just shit.'

The column moved on. Holly surprised himself, he turned his head to watch the women cross the path. He thought he saw the girl again, but he could not be sure.

The gate stood in front of them. The girl was gone from his mind, swept aside by the burned-out office at the end of the Administration block. They had done quite a good job, Holly could see that, in containing the fire. Only the Commandant's room was wrecked, gutted. He told himself that the office would have been an addition, built onto the end of what had before been an exterior wall of brick and therefore powerful enough to hold back the spread of the flames.

'You know, Holly, there was a man here once who told me an extraordinary thing about women…' Poshekhonov babbled as a stream runs over rocks.'… he said that a girl he knew once used to do it while in a handstand position.

Can you believe that, Holly? I never quite knew whether to believe him. Standing on her hands with her back against the wall, and she wanted him to run at her. I could never believe that… Shit, I've wanted to…'

Holly saw the blackened uniforms of the guards as they moved amongst the debris of the office that they had retrieved. Some still threw buckets of snow into the small flames that lived. There was the rich stench of charred wood, and the python hiss of water on embers. Dark on the snow, beneath the windows, were items of furniture and crumpled photograph frames and scattered wisps of paper.

He wondered whether he were pleased, excited, whether he was proud.

Poshekhonov tugged at Holly's arm, demanded further attention.

'I never knew whether I should believe that man… but, you know, he gave me great pleasure. He implanted the thought in me, the thought of this woman with her handstand. She changes for me each day – she is blonde and she is dark, young and mature, fat and thin – it doesn't matter.

Extraordinary pleasure.'

'Does the sight of the Commandant's hut flattened, busted, does that give you pleasure?' Holly asked.

They stood waiting their turn to go through the gate.

Ranks of five and the counting again, and the calling of names, and across the compound the beckoning presence of the low-built Kitchen.

'Why should that give me pleasure?'

'Because at worst they are hurt, at best they are inconvenienced.'

'And if they are hurt, does that help me? Does that shorten my sentence? Does it soften my mattress…'

'I don't know.'

Holly was withdrawn, private. He felt no call to share the small purseful of glory. To his left three guards had taken the strain on a rope that ran tight and stretched to the building. He heard the command, he heard the men's feet slither in the snow as they pulled. With a shriek the last beams of the roof collapsed and pitched down.

'Kypov's office is nothing. Now the handstand, that's different. I could kiss the man who told me that, two years of happiness he's given me. All I wish is that I could find out whether it's possible.'

Holly smiled drily. 'Anything is possible if you have the will.'

'I have the will, I'm short of the bloody woman… '

Poshekhonov turned to Holly to have the satisfaction of seeing his joke shared. Holly no longer looked at him, he stared back at the stunted ruin that had been the office of the Commandant.

That morning Captain Yuri Rudakov had taken his wife to the shops at Pot'ma.

By the standards of the Dubrovlag she had a nice home, a two-bedroomed bungalow on the outer edge of the village.

With no children, two bedrooms was a privilege. Two bedrooms and the best furniture that could be made in the Factory. But she hated this place. Hated it for its bleak isolation and petty preoccupation with the work of fences and confinement. She admitted to no friends amongst the small clutch of camp officers' wives at Barashevo. She had no companion in this snow wilderness with its circles of wire. She had been brought up in the sophistication of inner Moscow, and she had travelled to European Germany. She was an outsider and feared by the wives of the other officers of Camp 3 because her husband was KGB and because his reports could break and crush the career of any man, however senior. She urged on the days until the chance of their transfer away, she wrote waspy letters to her mother three times a week, and whenever possible she badgered her Yuri to take her to the shops at Pot'ma.

They were little enough, those shops. But to be in Pot'ma, to walk along Leninsky Prospekt, that was bliss. And when she went to Pot'ma she had the whole and unchipped attention of her man, and when he drove their car and walked with her in front of the shops he had no files, no papers. It was a victory for her each time that she wrested him away from his desk and his teleprinter and his uniform.

The life of the camp consumed their married life, oppressed her from her hour of waking until the time she fell asleep.

And each third Sunday of the month was the evening that she detested, when she must take the political studies lecture for Camp 3, Zone 1. It was her duty, Yuri had said. She had trained as a teacher, and was the daughter of a Colonel of KGB and a probationer member of the Party, it was her duty to participate in the re-education of prisoners. And they stank, stank like cattle carcases outside an abattoir.

And they had eyes, bright and pricking eyes that shredded her clothes and burrowed to the soft underwear she had purchased in the Centrum store on Magdeburg's Karl-Marx-Strasse. There were some who were clever, some who were stupid, and none who cared for the lecture that would take her forty-five minutes to read and three evenings to prepare. Yuri had said it was her duty. At times she believed she could make her hard man into a piece of putty, but not when he spoke of duty. Duty was his life. Duty was the bastard world of the Dubrovlag.

Elena Rudakov sat beside her husband, and on the back seat of the car, in plastic bags, was a new nightdress of flannelette and two shirts for Yuri to wear at home and two kilos of turnips from the open market and a small rug to go in front of the stove in their living-room. He had even been attentive, Yuri, and that was rare. He had talked of a new prisoner – too much to hope that he would speak of anything other than the camp – a prisoner who was an Englishman. Guarded talk, because she was never fully in his confidence, but he had spoken of a prisoner who was special and different. He drove slowly because the rough road was always treacherous in winter and insufficiently sanded, but the inside of the car was warm and the sky alive in blue beyond the windows.

She was almost happy, almost at peace, until they saw, together, the high column of the black smoke.

She was left to take the car home. The spell was broken, the pool was rippled from its serenity by the way he snapped instructions to her and then ran to the Administration block. She could have kicked a dog. He had not kissed her or looked back, just sprinted across the snow.

The sight was a hammer blow to Yuri Rudakov.

The end of the Administration block was a grotesque mess.

Only the smoke now, because the flames had been suffocated. Smoke that rippled and soared.

He saw Kypov, a comedy clown with a soot-smeared face and the back of his uniform singed and brown from collar to knee-boot. There were no thoughts in his mind, no precon-ceptions, only the demand for information.

Empty words. 'What happened?'

'Where the hell have you been?' Kypov shouted at him across the few metres that separated them, and the breath spouted white from the Major's mouth. 'Why were you not here?'

'I asked what happened.' Rudakov said. He despised these army men, in particular those who had lost their units in exchange for secondment to M V D camp detachments.

'You should have been here.'

'Will you tell me what happened or not… Major Kypov?'

They were all the same, all noise and sparrow fart, and if the man only knew the idiot scene he c u t…

'My fire exploded.'

The fight had fled the Major. His hands hung simply by his trouser pockets, ungloved, and Rudakov could see that they trembled.

'More.'

'The fire had been lit before I came to the office. My orderly put more coal on for me. After he had gone I was standing in front of the fire, my back to it. There was a sort of an explosion, not very loud, the flames took my back. I was alight. My orderly had to roll me on the floor. He pulled me out, he saved my life.'

'What have you lost?' i could have lost my life…' and the indignation was rich again in the Major's voice.

'What have you lost in the fire?'

'The administration files that I kept, some of the convicts' files.'

'They were not in the safe?'

'You have seen my safe. It could not hold half the papers that were in my cupboard.'

The men who worked around the building acknowledged a secret circle that surrounded their camp Commandant and their camp KGB officer. None broke into the circle. They threaded a wide path round them.

'Then you will have to inform Moscow.'

'And what are you going to do?'

'Try to find out why, to find how, to find who. That is what I am going to do, Comrade Commandant. And you, you should get to your quarters, and get out of those clothes.

The Commandant should not be an object of ridicule to his prisoners.'

There was a fleck of amusement at the corner of Captain Rudakov's mouth. He considered whether Major Kypov's commendations, so preciously framed, had perished. He walked to his own office. An accident or an attack, he wondered, and stamped the snow from his walking shoes on the steps of the main Administration doorway.

The line edged forward towards the food hatch.

Holly heard only occasional talk about the burned office because the job of the men around him was to get the food inside their guts, get the warmth into their throats.

A line creeping forward, and a rabble of men leaving the hatch and hurrying for the first bench place they could find.

And hungry men are pliable men, hunger wins submission, hunger is the tool of Major Vasily Kypov, hunger is the whip of the Commandant of Camp 3, Zone 1. But Holly and eight hundred with him had a roof over their Kitchen, and there would be a roof over Hut 2 when the freezing night came.

Kypov had no roof, and the thought carried a first-found peace for Holly, lifted him from the line of men who straggled across the dirt-smeared floor boards. You did it well, Holly, bloody well.

Byrkin had been a Petty Officer in the Navy.

In the evenings in Hut 2. he had twice pulled Holly to a corner to tell him of his innocence.

Now he staggered towards Holly, making a path between the tables and benches and the backs of sitting men that flanked him on one side, and the waiting line on the other.

Byrkin would have been tall when he was in the Navy, but the camp had bent his back and plucked his hair from a smoothed scalp. His hands shake and his balance is cruelly uncertain, a fly wheel that has lost its rhythm.

Byrkin had twice found out Holly to tell him of the sailing of the frigate Storozhevoy from the naval harbour at Riga.

Mutiny by the men, and what could a Petty Officer do if the Ministry in Moscow determined that the sailors of the Storozhevoy should not be freed from their conscripted service after four years at sea, that they should serve another year, what could a Petty Officer do? Not Byrkin's fault that the mutiny disease had swept the cramped quarters of the lower decks. He had been locked in a cabin, a prisoner with the officers when the bombers came on a low-clouded November afternoon. Seven years before, and the memory still with him, bleeding him. A memory of imprisonment below the water line as the high explosive had silenced the engines of a fighting frigate, marooned its escape to Swedish waters. Fifty men dead before the turbines of a Krivak class frigate with a displacement of 3 800 tons were halted. And more to die before the firing squad, and few who did not wear the gold rings of the officers to escape the penalty of imprisonment. One unguarded remark by Byrkin, one remark that had been carried back by a man with innocence on his face to those who would judge Byrkin. What did the Ministry expect, how did they think the men would react?

What insensitivity from the Ministry! Ten years in the Dubrovlag for the private expression of a Petty Officer who was a captive in a cabin while the high explosive bombs rained on to the armour plate of the Storozhevoy.

They said in Hut 1 that he was mad. The zeks did not know of the bitter trial of the breakdown. Byrkin's balance was lost, and each step that he took was an agony of effort and fear.

Holly saw him, heard his shrieking wail as a shoulder lifted from the bench and caught square on the underneath of Byrkin's enamel soup bowl. The opaque yellow liquid floated high beside Byrkin's face then splashed on his tunic, onto the shoulder of the man who had nudged him, onto the boards of the floor. It was Byrkin who shouted. A howl of protest, of despair. The man who rose from the bench seemed to offer a grudging apology, but Byrkin would not have seen the gesture as he scrabbled on the floor for his slice of black bread. Holly looked into Byrkin's eyes witnessing the suffering. What price against that suffering was the pleasure that the Commandant had no roof to cover his office? Holly had felt pleasure, allowed it to cocoon him.

Where did that pleasure stand on the scale against the misery of a man in the Kitchen whose soup was spilled, whose bread was soggy from the floor's snow water?

Poshekhonov was beside Holly. Always Poshekhonov seemed to be close to him. , 'Only happens to someone like Byrkin. He's doomed, damned. Mark me, Englishman, he'll go to the wire.'

'He's sick,' said Holly. The tranquillity had gone from his face. He moved forward to close the gap again with the tunic back in front of him and his lips were dented white where the teeth had bitten at them.

'Sick? Of course he's sick. Sick like everybody. What do you expect, a nice neat psychiatric ward? He's better here, better with us than at the Sebsky… '

'I don't know of the Sebsky.'

'For one who intends to stay a long time with us, Englishman, you know little of us. In Moscow is Kropotkin Lane.

At Number 23 is the Sebsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. Ask Feldstein, our little revolutionary. He shits himself each day that they will send him there. Friend Byrkin would get robust treatment at the Sebsky. Even this place is better than some, Englishman.'

They were at the hatch. Soup in a bowl, hot water in a mug, bread on the tray.

'Will you sit with me, Englishman?'

There was a wintry smile on Holly's face.

'Find a place for two of us, I'll come to you.'

Holly took his tray and walked briskly back along the line of men who waited for their food. He saw ahead of him the bowed back of Byrkin, hunched head in hands with an empty bowl in front of him on the table. Holly's movement was very quick, sudden, and few would have seen the gesture. His soup bowl snaked from his tray, tipped, tilted, the liquid ran steaming to the bowl in front of Byrkin. And Holly was gone, moving to where a space waited for him beside Poshekhonov.

Adimov had seen. One of the few, but he had seen. He sat with a frown of puzzlement on his forehead, then turned back to join again the talk around him.

'Where's your soup?' Poshekhonov asked Holly as he sat down, squeezing himself over the bench. i had it on the way here – little enough of it.'

'You shouldn't do that. You get more goodness if you take it slowly. There was a man here once, he could take half an hour to drink a bowl of soup, big as an ox. Didn't matter if it was stone cold, still took it sip by sip…'

Poshekhonov liked to talk. That was his happiness, to talk to a captured ear was for him the thrill of seeing the Commandant's office roofless and destroyed. Holly did not interrupt him, and broke his bread into small pieces and husbanded the crumbs.

The report that the office of Major Vasily Kypov, Commandant of ZhKh 385/3/1 in the Mordovian ASSR, had been burned to destruction in as yet unexplained circumstances was a matter of sufficient significance to be seen by a senior official at the Ministry of the Interior.

The official was a member of the staff of the Procurator General who had responsibility for the smooth running of the Correctional Labour Colonies scattered across the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Before giving up this half-filled sheet of paper to his file system, the official had noted well its contents. Anything extraordinary that happened in Camp 3, Zone 1, was out of place. Such a well-administered camp, so little difficulty springing from it, a Commandant in whom great confidence was justly placed.

In the weeks that followed, the teleprinter messages from Barashevo were to become familiar reading to the official who now hobbled on the built-up shoe that supported his club foot towards his filing cabinets.

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