Kolymsky Heights

23

He switched the light on, closed the door behind him and stood quite still, looking and listening.

He was in a living room, a warm and foetid one. A faint smell of rotting fruit. The place had been empty for four months; its last occupant hurrying out to catch a plane in June. He had left a mess behind — newspapers on the floor, a discarded grip, scattered work boots, half-open drawers. A toy panda sat on the sofa, cutely watching. It had lipstick on. He could see all the flat at once, all its doors open, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. A subdued noise of music and voices came from surrounding apartments.

He waited some moments longer, then moved to the window and closed the curtains. He saw that the port was not visible from here, or even the street. He was at the back of the building, second floor — a big block, 165 apartments. Directly opposite was its twin, five storeys of lighted windows. At the end of the stamped-snow courtyard the two blocks were joined by a glassed-in walkway. Through the panes of the walkway he could see, beyond, a supermarket, part of the same complex. A few lights glimmered in it but the place was shut. Almost nine o’clock. He sighed and took his mink hat off.

Apart from the night’s sleep at Murmansk he had barely stopped moving for three days. He took Khodyan’s jacket off too, and prowled the flat, sniffing, touching. The furniture looked new, Finnish, good quality. Bed left unmade; a huge kingsize; fine pillows, plump duvet: Swansdown, the label said in English. The slob who owned all this was a bachelor who liked his comforts. Wardrobe stuffed with winter clothing, all good.

The bathroom too — towels of fine quality, fluffy foreign ones; the tub and shower also far from standard, all extra, all paid for by this high earner. There was a lingering smell of used clothing. He looked around and saw heavy winter socks and underwear spilling out of a laundry basket. A bra and panties were mixed in with them.

In the kitchen further signs of hurried departure; rinsed breakfast things upside down on the drainer and, in a sink-tidy alongside, the source of the fruit smell; orange peel and pear cores. Not much food in the cupboards: tea, coffee, a few cans. He had a look in the fridge. Sausage, eggs, fuzzy cheese, all due for despatch. But not tonight.

Tonight sleep. But the sheet, on closer inspection, showed signs of use, so he changed it first. Piping hot from the linen cupboard, the new one was beautifully silky, the elasticated edges slipping neatly and smoothly under the mattress. He marvelled at it. He’d never had such stuff himself. They lived high, in the Arctic. Alexei Mikhailovich Ponomarenko had lived high.

‘Alexei! Are you back, Alexei?’

In his sleep he’d heard the ringing and thought himself again in the hospital. But now an accompanying rapping at the door brought him to, and he turned out. He turned out in Ponomarenkos’s fine woollen dressing gown. It was eight o’clock in the morning.

‘One minute, I’m coming!’ he called, as the rapping continued.

‘Alexei! It’s good to hear you again. Welcome back, Alyosha!’

‘Yes, but it’s not Alyosha,’ he said. He was smiling as he opened the door. Kolya Khodyan was a smiler; sometimes taciturn, always temperamental, mainly a smiler. He smiled at difficulties. All this had been worked out.

‘Oh.’ A little old lady in carpet slippers was gazing at him. Her face was lined and like a tabby’s, and it was now gazing up in astonishment at the startling Siberian native with his shaven head. ‘Isn’t Alexei here?’

‘No, he’s still at the Black Sea. He lent me the place for a while. He can’t come just yet.’

‘Is he in trouble there?’

‘No trouble! He’s enjoying himself.’

‘Ah. A girl, is it?’

‘A beauty. Don’t worry about him.’

‘Again — that bad boy! But you — excuse me — you’re —?’

‘Khodyan. Nikolai Dmitrievich — call me Kolya,’ Porter said, and warmly shook her hand. He hadn’t stopped smiling. ‘You don’t know me, but I know you, Anna Antonovna. I know everything about you! He never stopped speaking about you down there.’

‘He did? At Batumi he spoke of me?’ The old lady was delighted.

‘All the time. He said you kept him like a prince here. He said you’d do the same for me. So here I am!’

The old lady did not have many teeth but all of them were now radiantly on display in her smile.

‘Well, well,’ she said, and nudged his arm. ‘But he could have dropped me a line at least. If only to say you were coming. I’ve got his mail here, I’ve been emptying his box, he left me the key.’ Over her arm he now saw she had a string bag stuffed with papers, magazines mainly, by the wrappers. ‘He didn’t have an address when he left. Does he want it sent on now?’

‘No, no. He knows it’s only his magazines. Keep them for him,’ Porter said. ‘And meanwhile keep me like a prince.’

The old lady was peering past him into the room. ‘Well, the usual mess, I see. I thought it was him banging about — I’m just next door. You want me to start now?’

‘No, I’ll take a shower first,’ Porter said. He hadn’t investigated Khodyan’s cases yet and wanted to do so without the old babushka’s scrutiny. There was a sharp look on the catlike face. He hadn’t been banging about. He had made no noise at all. She most have spotted the light come on before he’d drawn the curtains last night.

She asked, ‘Have you anything to eat here?’

‘I brought something with me, enough for now. I won’t waste time. I want to run down to the port office.’

‘Ah, you’re on boats, too?’

‘Boats?’ Porter said. Some of the sunshine faded from his smile. Ponomarenko was supposed to be a truck driver.

‘The trucks. You’re not a driver?’

‘Ah, you know our slang!’ It was as well that he did himself now. The first example of the casual dangers. ‘Sure. On the boats. How are things shaping here this season?’

‘The usual mess at the beginning — they’re running in all directions. But the ice is nearly right. They’ll be glad of you. You’re not from these parts, then — Kolya, is it?’

‘Kolya. No — from Chukotka, the Magadan circuit. But I go anywhere — a boat’s a boat.’

‘Of course — you boys! Well, give me a knock, Kolya. You want the same arrangements to carry on: wash, clean, get in the shopping?’

‘Everything. Whatever you did before, old lady, do it again. You’ll tell me what you need and I’ll leave the money.’

‘And if I find anything?’ Her eyes were still roaming the little apartment. ‘Return it? Or?’

‘Let me take a shower, a mouthful of coffee,’ he pleaded, ‘and I’ll come and see you.’

But he was thoughtful as he closed the door behind her. It wasn’t till he was in the bathroom and his eyes fell again on the bra and the panties that it occurred to him what the ‘or’ meant. There would be a claimant for these goods.

That was another thing they hadn't told him.

24

The Tchersky Transport Company, at this season, had the running of Green Cape. The river had frozen, not solidly as yet, but solidly enough for all the shipping to have vanished. The half-mile length of dock showed no trace of a gangplank, and would not show any for eight months. Now it was crammed with freight, the last frantic unloading of ships that had dashed for open water before the ice trapped them.

Not only the dock but the sheds that lined the dock were crammed; and the huge warehouses on the hill above the dock, acre upon acre of them; all crammed. Through this one small Arctic opening all north-east Siberia was supplied: its gold and diamond mines, its processing plants and power stations, and all the industrial settlements that had developed round them.

In the short summer, when the Kolyma flowed, barges carried the supplies south, for distribution through the river’s tributary system to east and west. But that was in summer, and in the south. Up here no long-distance tributaries ran to east or west. To east and west the area was impassable in summer, and had to wait for winter.

In winter the Tchersky Transport Company took over.

On the steep hill above the dock, Porter watched them doing it. From here he could see the spread of warehouses on top as well as the frenetic activity below. Below, some dozens of teams were at work freeing the crates jamming the dock. The crates towered crazily, dumped one on top of the other as the ships had hurried to leave. Snow had fallen and an icecap had formed, freezing the stacks together. The bulky figures, earflaps down in the bitter wind, were chipping them apart, while cranes and forklifts shifted them on to trucks. A steady stream of trucks was grinding uphill and churning into the storage area. Here the loads were being stowed under the last of the cover — a roofed and pillared overhang extending the length of the warehouses.

He watched for some time, and then turned and trudged through the rutted snow to the administrative block. He had identified it immediately, a squat two-storey building on short piles at the beginning of the warehouse row.

In the dismal morning all the lights were on inside, and the draughty foyer bustled with activity. Clusters of men were going from one wall roster to another; others gathered round the samovars, talking and smoking. He stood for a while, jostled on all sides, and presently made his way to a double set of glass doors at the end. He peered through to a large room filled with desks. Men and women were writing, phoning, passing papers to each other over glasses of tea. He couldn’t make out anyone noticeably managerial, and turned away to get himself some tea at a samovar. There were no glasses here, just paper cups and a drum of somewhat grubby lumps of sugar. He reached for a couple of lumps, and as he turned jostled another man, spilling his tea.

He apologised.

‘It’s nothing.’ The man wiped his leather jacket.

‘Some crush here!’

‘Start of the season. Nothing’s rolling. You new here?’

‘Just got in. Is Bukarovsky still here?’

‘The road manager? Sure. Upstairs.’

‘I suppose he’s the one to see.’

The man was looking at him curiously. ‘For driving, or?’

Porter noted again the ‘or’, evidently local style. It hadn’t appeared on the tapes.

‘For driving, sure.’

‘Then it’s him. End of the corridor up there. You’ll tell by the noise.’

Porter sipped his tea, looked around, and shouldered his way to the rosters. There were several of them, listing the teams and what they would be driving. The lists showed three drivers to a truck, two on, one off. He saw that Ponomarenko’s name wasn’t there. There was a large variety of trucks, different models of Tatra, Kama, Ural. He knew about this. They had some hundreds of heavy trucks, almost 1500 drivers and mechanics: close on a million tons of freight to be hauled.

He finished his tea, threw the cup in the bin and walked upstairs. Even at the stairhead he heard the uproar; and as he neared it, a nameplate on the end door confirmed the source: P. G. BUKAROVSKY, ROAD MANAGER. He paused there, uncertain whether to knock or enter, until a girl emerged in a hurry, and left the door for him, and he went in.

A sunken-chested man with a haggard face was shouting into a phone, his feet on a desk. He was doing several things at once: drinking tea, furiously smoking, coughing, pointing out something to a girl hanging over him with a clipboard, and offering advice to an older woman who sat talking on another phone at the other side of the desk. ‘Tell them to rot at Bilibino!’ he told her. ‘With my compliments. Not you,’ he said into the phone. ‘I promised you! Two-three days. When I see fifteen centimetres. Not a minute before! What do you want?’

The last was to Porter, who was standing before him, flashing a smile. He’d hesitated whether or not to take his fur cap off and had decided against; the men below had kept their caps on.

He carried on smiling, waving the manager on with his conversation, and looked around the room as it proceeded. The walls here were also covered with rosters; and with large maps. A phalanx of coloured flag pins was stuck neatly at the bottom of each map. No flags were yet distributed on the maps. He turned as the phone smashed down.

‘What’s your problem?’ the man said.

‘You want a driver?’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Chukotka.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘A favour to Ponomarenko. We met at Batumi. He can’t come for a few weeks.’

‘That bastard will stretch his holiday once too often! What can you drive?’

Porter offered his papers. ‘Whatever you’ve got.’

The phone rang again, and the man picked it up and laid it on the desk, where it angrily chattered. He glanced through the papers.

‘You’re square with the union?’

‘All square.’

‘What trouble are you in at Chukotka?’

‘No trouble … Look,’ Porter said amiably. He hadn’t stopped smiling. ‘I’m doing Ponomarenko a favour. You also. You want me, it’s okay. You don’t — also okay. I’ll go.’

‘Bukarovsky!’ Bukarovsky said into the phone. He continued glaring at Porter. ‘Leave your songsheet here,’ he told him. ‘And go round to the sheds. Not you,’ he said into the phone, between spasms of coughing. ‘Tell Yura to try you on a Kama 50, and to call me back. The 50, right? Hello — Pevek, what the hell is it now? … Here, you — take a bobik,’ he said to Porter.

‘A bobik?’ Porter said. A bobik was a terrier.

‘So now I’m telling you! I’m sick of your problems. I’ve got my own problems,’ the man told the phone. ‘And I’m sick of talking about them!’ He was groping in a tray of keys. He tossed one to Porter. ‘Give him the book,’ he said to the woman across the desk.

Porter looked at the key on its leather tab, and at the book the woman shoved across to him. She pointed where he had to sign. It was against one of a row of numbers. He signed N. D. Khodyan and left as the roaring continued behind him.

Below he threaded his way through the foyer, and at the door asked a man, ‘Where do I get a bobik?’

‘Back of the building, right behind here.’

The number he’d signed was the number on the key, a car key. He went round the building and found the cars, in an open shed. There were four or five pickups and a number of jeeps. There was nobody there. He walked around examining the registration numbers and found his bobik. It was one of the jeeps, a solid enclosed job, very square and ugly like a little tank. The tyres looked half flat. He walked round, kicking them, and saw that all the tyres in the shed were half flat: evidently it was intended.

He got in the car, found the ignition and turned the key. It sparked immediately, a rough throaty snarl. It was dark in the shed and he couldn’t see the display on the dash. He fumbled the gears and got the thing moving, out of cover and into the light. In the light he saw there was no display on the dash, and hardly any dash: a speedo, a switch for the wipers, and that was all. There had to be a switch for the lights but he couldn’t find it. But the thing was powerfully heated, and had a motor that surged at a touch with a satisfying grating bark — evidently accounting for the name. He took to the terrier at once, and got it moving again, to the front of the building. Someone was coming out, and he hailed him out of the window.

‘Hey! Where do I find Yura?’

‘Which Yura?’

‘For a Kama. A Kama 50.’

‘Straight on, half a kilometre, turn up the ramp, you’ll find him.’

He kept on along the line of warehouses, dodging in and out of the path of spinning forklifts, and found the ramp. The whole massive hangar was up on short piles, evidently as air insulation for the permafrost below. Inside, as far as he could see, was an amazing army of trucks, row upon row of them, all lined up, waiting, and bearing the logo of the Kamaz Auto Works: Kama 30s, 40s, 50s. The front line, he saw, had laden trailers already attached, but farther back were just the tall cabs.

He parked the bobik and emerged into a rush of warm air from big blowers spread out over the area. Around the walls work was going on at long benches, and nearby the spit and flash of welding gear. He walked over to the man there.

‘Where’s Yura?’ he yelled in his ear.

The man put his visor up. Who?’ ’

‘Yura.’

‘The boss? In the office — the glass booth at the end.’

He found the booth, and a white-overalled Yura, on the phone, busily scribbling, on an inventory pad. He was a little brawny pug of a man with a shock of grey hair. Porter waited till he’d finished, and flashed his smile.

‘I’m Khodyan — Kolya. Bukarovsky wants me to try a 50.’

The man looked him up and down.

‘Ever driven one before?’

‘Sure.’

At the camp all they’d had was a 40, but he’d been assured it was the same. Sixteen gears; almost identical to a Mack.

‘Where have you driven?’

‘Chukotka, Magadan — that circuit.’

‘Roads.’ The man grunted. ‘None of that here. Here we run soft, low pressure. Better traction, but a heavy wheel. All right, then.’ He opened a tall cupboard. It was neatly laid out with several lines of hooks, keys hanging from them. His scarred hand flitted about the keys and selected one. ‘Let’s see what you’re made of,’ he said. He put a fur cap and leather jacket on and led the way.

An experienced ex-driver, evidently, and an injured one, Porter saw: one leg was shorter than the other. The man limped down a row of cabs, their umbilicals hooked up at the rear, and stopped at one. He went rapidly up an iron ladder, and Porter took the other side. He climbed the six or seven feet and swung himself behind the wheel.

Yura, settling himself, slammed the door and handed over the keys. ‘You’re sure you can handle her?’

‘No problem,’ Porter said. His smile was dazzling. Right away he saw the bastard didn’t have sixteen gears. It had twenty. Reverse in the normal position, though.

‘She’s warmed up, take her right out. Hard on the wheel, remember, she’s heavy.’

Porter started up, slotted into first and pulled slowly out of line and along the aisle.

‘Down the ramp and to the right.’

The cow was heavy. And the brake was heavy, and snatched when he stood on it.

‘Easy, easy, you’re pulling nothing,’ Yura said. ‘Keep rolling now. To the trial ground, at the end.’

The trial ground was beyond the warehouses, and lay under unmarked snow, already iced. He took her round the perimeter at varying speeds, slow, fast, slow, working up and down through the gears. He’d done all this at the camp, as also the emergency stops and the figure of eights that Yura now put him through. But the extra gears flustered him and he fumbled the positions, though he was certain it didn’t show.

‘All right, now back and park where you found her,’ Yura said.

This one had him sweating as he manoeuvred and reversed in the hangar to get tight back in line.

Yura switched off for him and took the key.

‘You’re sure you drove a 50 before?’ he said.

Porter decided his smile had better go.

‘What are you calling me?’ he said.

‘You drove a 40 before,’ Yura told him, ‘with sixteen gears.’

‘I drive anything! I drive sixteen gears, twenty. Any boat you got I drive! You’re saying I’m a liar?’

‘Easy now,’ Yura said. His little pug’s face had suddenly opened up in a great smile of its own. ‘Easy, Kolya. You a Chukchee?’

‘Never mind what I am! No business of yours what I am. I drive. You don’t want me, I go home.’

‘Easy, Kolya,’ Yura said, still smiling. ‘You’re okay. You’re fine. I’m passing you, Kolya. Give me your songsheet.’

‘Bukarovsky’s got my songsheet,’ Porter said sulkily.

‘So I’ll call him. Don’t get so hot, Kolya. I like you. I never had a Chukchee before. You just need a little more time on the 50, you’ll take the right-hand seat a few trips, it’s nothing. Come on, smile now.’

Porter sheepishly gave him a smile.

‘That’s better. You’re on, Kolya. You’re with friends here, we want you. Go back there and sign now.’ The little man was chuckling as he scrambled down the ladder. ‘Hey, you got transport?’

‘Sure. A bobik,’ Porter said.

‘Good. I don’t like my drivers walking. Never had one of you before,’ Yura said. He was still chuckling as he limped away.

Porter got in the bobik, and drove back. He felt dizzy. A lot had happened in just over twelve hours. He had arrived in Green Cape and installed himself in an apartment. He had taken on a housekeeper. He’d got himself on the strength of the Tchersky Transport Company. And he had taken in some new lore. Songsheets, bobiks, soft tyres, twenty-gear trucks, ‘or’ …

He’d also learned a few things about Ponomarenko they hadn’t told him. Before leaving that morning he had removed a plinth under the kitchen unit and found a hidey-hole there. Under two floor tiles, grouted in with a slightly newer-looking mastic (and finding a tube of the stuff in a cupboard had set him off on the hunt), was a taped-up plastic bag. Other bags were inside it. He had found a few grams of what looked to be cocaine, together with a sniffing reed. An ounce, maybe an ounce and a half, of gold dust; and, oddly, twelve South African Kruger rands. There was also a photo of Ponomarenko, slightly younger than in the ones he’d seen but not much. He and a woman were sitting smiling stiffly at the camera, each holding a young child, each child the image of Ponomarenko. The raised lettering on the bottom of the photo gave a studio address in Kiev. Porter parked the bobik back in the shed and thought about this. He was a funny, fellow, Ponomarenko. He had a wife and kids somewhere. Was he the one who’d drawn the lipstick on the panda?

Or?

25

As the last man to sign on, Kolya Khodyan joined the reserve list. He had seen the short block of names at the bottom of the wall rosters — men who were sick or for some other reason not assigned to a team. Now he saw his own name added there, as available for general duties. At the beginning of a season, with nothing yet rolling, this was not important; but from the other drivers he heard that to stay with General Duties was bad news.

Under union agreements the men were paid whether the ‘boats’ ran or not. But once they were running, the teams were eligible for bonuses. With the distances involved here the bonuses were huge — easily outstripping the already high basic pay. The trucks ran through storms, through blizzards, through every kind of hazard the country could offer, and they ran twenty-four hours a day. Any hour over the week’s norm was an overtime hour and paid double. Long hauls were obviously much in demand, and General Duty men rarely got them. They got short hops and road maintenance jobs, seldom running into overtime.

The new Chukchee driver accepted his listing with good grace, and this together with his cheerfulness soon made him popular. He was very cheerful; he smiled all the time. He took on any job without argument — and in fact volunteered for one the same day when a call was put out. He could stand on his dignity (and it was understood he wasn’t to be addressed as a Chukchee), but in general he was a good comrade and, as a Chukchee, almost a mascot.

The job he volunteered for was to haul freight up from the dock. This was, strictly speaking, the work of the Green Cape port authority, and the men doing it were dockers. But when further snow made the task urgent, he took a Tatra flatbed down and joined the shuttle. He had seen right away that many of the workers below were Siberian natives and he wanted a closer look at them. He saw that several were Evenks or Yukagirs; this was the end of their seasonal work and soon none would remain in town. Ponomarenko had given some information on this.

He jockeyed his truck into line and saw he’d won a team of Yukagirs. He climbed out in the swirling snow and stood by, beating his gloved hands as they loaded the truck in front. It didn’t take long to identify the likeliest man; a cackling bundled-up little fellow, robustly swearing, the wit of the gang.

‘Warm work, brother!’ he called to him.

The man glanced round in surprise. He had called in Yukagir.

‘You got the tongue?’ the man said, looking him over.

‘A few words. Glad to see the end here, eh?’

‘You’re right. Except for the money. And the booze. Here the bastards keep it to themselves. We don’t smell it where we go to.’

‘Where do you go — traplines or the herds?’

‘Traps. But first the collective. The maniacs here work you till you drop. We need a rest.’

‘There’s a collective here?’

‘Sure. Ours. Novokolymsk. You don’t know the area?’

‘Not so well. A few friends who work up at the station, in the hills. You know that place?’

‘With the scientists?’

‘That one.’

‘See, it isn’t any use now,’ the Yukagir told him. ‘They don’t allow traps there any more, not for years. It’s useless.’

‘You could make it up there on foot?’

‘Sure — a few kilometres, no distance. But it’s useless now. Your friends are Evenks?’

‘Evenks.’

‘Yes. It suits them. They do a few weeks with the herds and a few weeks there, turn and turn about. They fly them in, they don’t want whites, and not bad money. But it isn’t for us. This is good fox country, and ermine — the best ermine. Not prime for a couple of months yet, but the best when they come on. You speak the tongue nice,’ the Yukagir told him.

The line moved then, so he got back in the Tatra, and no further opportunity offered. But he’d heard enough …

In summer, in the camp, he had watched week by week as the research station had been repaired. He had watched it from satellite photographs, a world away. Now he was there − a few kilometres, no distance … And now the planning was his; and now he was on his own.

He learned something about the bobik that week.

He had been sent out with spares and some instruments to a road gang fifty kilometres out. The road stretched 700 kilometres to Bilibino and it had been out of use all summer, a bog. Now it was hardening, and this was the first section to come into condition. When fifteen centimetres of new frost showed, treatment could begin. The heavy equipment for it was kept at road stations 100 kilometres apart; the stations served also as rest centres for the drivers, and as bases for the rescue and recovery service, tracked vehicles that patrolled the route all winter.

Porter ran out to the gang, dropped his supplies and headed back, and was halfway into the journey when the bobik stopped.

He got out and had a look at the engine. Nothing wrong with the supply or the plugs. Or the points. No shortage of fuel. He turned the engine by hand — the little brute also packed a handle. Nothing. The weather was not yet tremendously cold, maybe fifteen degrees below, but his fingers were freezing up without gloves. He swore. He tried everything again. Fuel okay and getting through. Distributor okay. Spark. What the hell!

On all sides the dreary taiga stretched for miles, snow covered, iced. He must be twenty, thirty kilometres along the way and nothing whatever would be coming past. Not for several hours at least, until it occurred to somebody at Green Cape to come and look for him. He had no communications set. He couldn’t walk to Green Cape. He couldn’t walk back to the road gang. The road was like a rink. He’d had to use a gentle hand just to keep the thing moving.

You bastard, he told the bobik, and took a swig at his hip flask; and while doing it thought of something. In midwinter, he’d heard, they often had to start the engines with White Dynamite, high-proof vodka. He had no White Dynamite in his flask but plain vodka might help. Maybe the fuel was contaminated or the carburettor faulty; a drop of the volatile spirit might fire and clear it. He warmed his hands in his gloves first and beat them together before fumbling with the carb. Then he gave himself a small swig and the carb one, and got a kick and a cough, and the thing rumbled hesitantly into life. He kept it running, revving cautiously by hand till he was sure of it, and then closed the hood and got back in and started off again.

It happened twice more on the way, and he knew it was the carburettor. The trick worked with petrol, too. He’d sucked a bit out of the tank with a plastic tube, and he dripped it in and got the kick and the cough. The fuel was okay. The carb was dodgy.

He drove back to the Light Vehicles depot where he had picked up the loaded bobik in the morning, and looked around for Liova. Faults had to be reported to the chief mechanic. But Liova and all the mechanics were at lunch and only Vassili, the old Yakut storeman, was there, eating out of a pot on a kerosene stove. He told Vassili the problem.

‘This isn’t a problem,’ the Yakut said. ‘I’ll give you another carburettor and you’ll fit it. It takes two minutes.’

‘I’m reporting a fault. I don’t need a carburettor,’ Porter told him.

‘You do. You have another load, a rush job. There’s no spare bobik, and they have no time to repair it. Here, I’ll give you it now.’

And the old man left his meal, wiping his mouth, and took the Chukchee into the storeroom and gave him a carburettor; and Porter’s eyes popped. A whole bay, neatly arranged, was stuffed with bobik spares. Gearboxes, shafts, clutches, doors — engines, even. The old man looked at him and shrugged. ‘It’s a toy,’ he said. He hunted around and found a greasy manual. ‘A child can do it.’

And Porter did do it while the old Yakut, picking his teeth, pointed out the details on the exploded diagram. It took a single spanner. The carb worked right away.

‘I told you, it’s nothing,’ Vassili said. ‘Did you eat yet?’ They had been talking Yakut which had intrigued and pleased the old man.

‘Not yet. What have you got there?’

‘Proper food. My old woman’s. Not that garbage in the canteen. Join me.’

Porter joined him, and grunted favourably over the food, and presently signed for the carburettor, and the Yakut helped him load up. He was gone before Liova and the mechanics returned. He drove down into Tchersky, listening to the engine. Not a thing wrong with it. A workhorse, robust, primitive, and all of it put together the same way, with a spanner. He thought about this. A number of plans had been prepared for getting him out. They were neat enough plans, but obviously someone else must know of them. It might be an idea to have other plans. He thought about this all the way there, and all the way back.

That same night the doorbell rang and a young woman stood there; of considerable development; he saw, and had already gathered so from her underwear.

‘Nikolai Dmitrievich,’ she said, ‘you don’t know me. But I have a request to make.’

‘Is it Lydia Yakovlevna?’

‘Ah, you know!’ Both hands had gone up to her mouth, but whether with embarrassment or amazement at his shaven head he could not as yet tell. ‘You have a small parcel of mine, I think.’

‘The linen you lent Alexei — yes indeed. Anna Antonovna said you might call. Please come in.’

The old lady had cooked up the story herself. She had laundered the goods and asked if she should return them; the girl only worked in the supermarket below. No, he had said, if she wanted her pants and bra she could come and get them. But Kolya, Kolya, Anna Antonovna had said, cackling and nudging him, only think of her feelings! I’ll put them in a parcel as if it’s handkerchieves or something she lent Alyosha — it will spare her blushes.

And indeed the girl did seem to be blushing a bit. A big girl, big all over, somewhat puffy, and pale — anaemically pale as all the white women of Siberia seemed to be; winter for nine months of the year and the summer tan soon gone. But an easy mover, and with a coquettish look. He knew Anna Antonovna had told her he didn’t know the contents of the parcel, but he saw from the girl’s knowledgeable eyes that she knew that he did know. It intrigued him. Was she so short of knickers and a bra? Surely she could have waited for Ponomarenko’s return. Why the hurry for collection?

‘Coffee? A drink?’ he said.

‘Oh no, Nikolai Dmitrievich. I didn’t mean to −’

‘Kolya. Please,’ he said.

‘Kolya. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Just in passing I thought I’d see if maybe you were in. You men spend so much time in the clubs —’

‘I know few people yet, Lydia Yakovlevna.’

‘Lydia — please.’

‘A lovely name. Have a drink, Lydia!’

‘Well, a small one, perhaps.’

Just in passing she had jumped into her party boots: stiletto heels. Her outdoor ones must be in the large shopper she was carrying, hurriedly changed in the hall outside. A huge plunging neckline appeared once she was out of her fur coat. And hair piled ornately high as her headscarf came off; together with a seductive odour not long applied. Her eyelashes flickered about the room.

‘Ah, that kotek! Still here.’

Kotek: pussy cat. She had picked up the panda.

‘Yes. And still wearing his lipstick. Now I wonder,’ he said gravely, ‘who gave him that?’

She laughed. ‘A crazy night. Friends … ’

‘Ah.’ From Anna Antonovna he had already learned that the only friends in the apartment that night had been Ponomarenko and this girl; it had been the first of their friendly nights.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘we are both good friends of Alexei.’

‘Ah, Alyosha, that crazy boy … Thank you.’ He had given her a cherry brandy, and noted her approval of his good manners. A lady’s drink; although he had also heard from Anna Antonovna that this girl had no trouble with a vodka.

In no time they were chatting easily, and he saw that his startling head in no way fazed her. Quite the reverse; she seemed fascinated by it and was coming on fast.

‘Your Russian — so beautiful,’ she softly told him.

‘Thank you.’ Her own was far from high class, and he was fracturing his in the manner he had adopted here from the start. But he saw the remark as less a tribute to beautiful Russian than as a hint that ethnicity was no problem here. At the drop of a hat this girl could be tumbling in the Finnish bed. But the blatancy of it puzzled him. It also alerted him. Did she know that Ponomarenko would be absent a long time? And if so, how?

‘So what do you hear,’ he asked, handing her a third shot of cherry brandy, ‘from our friend?’

‘Alyosha? … What, another drink? I shouldn’t. But I also get lonely sometimes … Oh, Alyosha doesn’t write. Too busy with those Georgian girls, I expect.’

‘After you? Water after wine? Of course not.’

‘Liar,’ she said delightedly, and showed him more leg. ‘I’m sure you’re just as bad. Didn’t you go for those gorgeous Batumi girls?’

‘In Batumi I just relax.’

‘And have parties? He loved parties. I’ll bet you had parties.’

‘Parties, yes. There were parties.’

‘Loved them. And now he’ll miss one here. He’d be back if he knew that! Oh yes, like a shot. Pavel Grigorovich’s.’

‘Pavel Grigorovich?’

‘Bukarovsky. His sixtieth. Everybody’s going. You didn’t know?’

‘Oh. Yes,’ he said. And now he saw. Everybody wasn’t going. The mayor was going, and the top brass of Tchersky and Green Cape were going. Many of Bukarovsky’s drivers were also going. But supermarket assistants weren’t going.

‘He’d be showing me off there, all right. He loved to see me dressed up. I mean, what I’ve got on now isn’t anything. I’ve got some lovely clothes — and nowhere to go in them.’

‘I’m sure you look lovely in anything. Isn’t that cherry brandy a little sweet for you?’

‘It is a little sweet, yes.’

‘Try a sip of vodka.’

‘Oh, no. I must be going.’

‘From mine,’ he said, and displaced the panda to sit beside her and give her a sip; which the girl refused so playfully that she managed to spill it down her dress front. He helped her mop up with a handkerchief.

‘Quite dry now?’

‘I think so.’

‘It didn’t go down further?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

He tried further, without the handkerchief, and left his hand there.

‘Naughty Kolya,’ she said, looking at him.

‘Naughty Lydia.’

He kissed her and received a mouthful of cherry tongue. ‘We’re only human, aren’t we?’ she said in his ear.

She said it again, next door, some time later, when he had begun to doubt it. The girl was a tiger. Presently she propped herself on an elbow and gazed down at him. ‘You know I haven’t been with a man since Alyosha. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I’m sure,’ he said honestly. A minimum of four months’ energy had gone into her activities, and he didn’t think much could have gone spare.

Later, lying more comfortably, she said reflectively, ‘Yes … that will certainly be a party, all right.’

‘Would you like to go to it?’

‘Who could I go with?’

‘Why not me?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if Alyosha would like that.’ Her eyelashes flickered at the ceiling. ‘I haven’t thought of it really,’ she said.

26

Pavel Grigorovich Bukarovsky, the road manager of the Tchersky Transport Company, had been given his job by Leonid Shevelyev, the founding father of the company and the man credited with opening up north-east Siberia. Shevelyev, arrested in 1947 for ‘unsound political beliefs’ had served his time in a local labour camp, and Bukarovsky had served time in the same camp. Most of the senior staff of the company had done time in the camps.

The camps of the Kolyma, strung out all along the river, had been the most infamous in the Soviet Union; and yet when they were closed in the 1950s many of the inmates had chosen to remain in the area. Their reasons were simple. The land of restraint had suddenly become the land of the free — freer at least than anywhere else in the Soviet Union. It had fewer police, fewer party officials, fewer bureaucrats. It also of course had fewer amenities.

But even that changed; for after the great gold and diamond finds of the 1960s, it suddenly had more amenities than elsewhere. It had more food, more housing, more pay. And by another reversal, what had once been the worst had become the best. By common consent Tchersky had been the worst. Under its former name of Nizhniye Kresty it had been a byword for horror even in the days of the Tsars: the remotest outpost of the Russian empire, the least accessible, a final hell for the most desperate prisoners. Now, as capital of the Kolymsky region, it had become the centre of all good things.

Pavel Grigorovich Bukarovsky in his own life had witnessed these changes, and on his sixtieth birthday, forty years after arriving in the Arctic, he planned to celebrate them. Although he lived and worked at Green Cape, he had to celebrate at Tchersky, which had the largest premises: Barbara’s.

Barbara’s was a labyrinth of rooms running one into another; it had been converted from a double row of log houses. Deloused, debugged, completely sanitised, it all the same still retained the atmosphere of another Siberia and was the most popular venue in all the Kolymsky region. With the assistance of the mayor, who served as head of the planning committee, walls had been removed and temporary plinths inserted to open up the area — for the largest party Tchersky had ever seen.

Several hundred people were already there when Porter arrived with the girl, and Lydia Yakovlevna was both excited and nervous.

‘Oh God, it’s huge. Oh God, everybody’s here! How do I. look?’

She looked like an overdressed tart, but was not out of the ordinary. And not everybody was here. The winter roads were now laid and hundreds of the drivers were away. But the upper echelons of the two towns were here and their women were here, and all of them were in their best and overdressed. Stiletto boots were everywhere, and ornate hairdos and plunging necklines and eyeshadow and makeup.

There were thirty tables for ten clustered round a space left open for dancing, and guests were now packed tight in this space, greeting each other and taking early refreshment from laden trays pushed through the throng. Music was playing — accordions, balalaikas, brass — and people had to shout to be heard. The girl was soon flushed and dewed, her mascara smudging. ‘Oh God, it’s wonderful, it’s marvellous. Everybody’s here! Just look at the tables!’

The tables were indeed a sight: a mass of crisp napery and sparkling silverware, of glass, flowers, fruit piled high. And bottles, battalions of bottles.

‘Kolya!’ The limping Kama chief, Yura, was shouting in his ear. ‘You’re at my table! And your lovely lady, eh? You’re with me! Wonderful, very good! Never had one of you before.’

‘Was that Uri Sergeivich?’ the girl asked, her eyes brightened still more at being named a lovely lady.

‘Yura, yes.’ He hadn’t heard Yura’s patronymic.

‘Oh God, he’s important! He’s really important — an old comrade of Pavel Grigorovich! We must be at a good table. You don’t think we can be at Pavel Grigorovich’s table?’

‘I don’t know.’

They were not at Bukarovsky’s table, but at one close by. Liova, the Light Vehicles head, was also at this table and some other departmental chiefs and their ladies. And a great hubbub rose from all the tables as the guests settled and saw what was before them, and what was still to come. Before each one of them was a bottle of champagne and of red wine, and for each couple a bottle of vodka and of cognac. And what was to come — on the elaborate commemorative menus — was the most extravagant meal Porter had ever seen. It was served on the trot by a small army of waitresses, Russian and Yakut, course after course of it.

Three kinds of soup and sour cream; caviar, smoked salmon, Kamchatka crab; roast chicken and beef with venison and tongue; salamis, sausages, stuffed piroshkes; salads, vegetables, pickled everything in profusion; with sugared cranberries and macaroons and icecream. And a box of chocolates with the coffee for every lady.

Bukarovsky, his haggard face relaxed and grinning, had. appointed himself master of ceremonies and gave the first toast. And the toasts went on throughout the meal: toasts to the guests, and the ladies, to Shevelyev and the company he had founded, to comrades now absent with the boats and those left always absent in the camps, to Tchersky and Green Cape, to the Kolymsky region and Yakutia, to peace and prosperity.

They had grown somewhat slurred before a crash of cymbals announced a surprise event — a huge cake wheeled in as a present from Tchersky. The cake, iced to represent the original log premises of the Tchersky Transport Company, was set all around with models of the company’s first primitive trucks.

Bukarovsky, highly emotional, had to reply to this, and he said that proud as he was of the company’s development it could never have happened without the willing help of the Tchersky municipality; which suggested further toasts from those who had not yet given any.

Liova was on his feet, to give the Tchersky Road Services committee and its ambulance section whose vehicles he had the honour to service. Then Yura was on his, to say not only the ambulance section but all the health services, and in particular Tchersky’s magnificent hospital! And gazing round to where all the grinning faces had turned, Porter saw Medical Officer Komarova staring at him.

His heart gave a single great thump.

She was at a table beyond Bukarovsky’s, and now, through the cigarette smoke, he saw all the senior staff of the hospital. The director of the hospital was there, and Dr Gavrilov, and the isolation wing sister he had abused so loudly in Korean and Japanese. They were all looking and smiling quite amiably. But Medical Officer Komarova was not smiling. She was simply staring.

But was she staring at him? Perhaps she was staring at Yura. He looked quickly away, and was grateful that Yura then sat down and the impatient band struck up and people began taking the floor. Lydia Yakovlevna wanted to take the floor. The girl was now quite drunk and nibbling his ear.

‘I want to dance. I want to make love. First I want to dance,’ she said.

‘Yes, we’ll dance.’

‘Lovely lady, why hurry from me?’ Yura was now quite drunk himself and dribbling at her.

‘Oh, Uri Sergeivich, I don’t hurry from you −’

‘Ah, you know my name!’

‘Uri Sergeivich! Who doesn’t know your name?’

‘Uri Sergeivich,’ said a voice from the rear, ‘I would like, on behalf of the Medical Services committee, to thank you for your kind words.’ Komarova was in the rear. She was bending over to shake hands. She was bending over Porter to do so.

He dropped his napkin at once and got his head under the table to pick it up.

‘My privilege and my honour,’ Yura told her, drunkenly kissing the hand he was shaking. ‘But what’s this — not in your dancing clothes, not dancing with us tonight?’

‘Tonight it’s not possible. I am on call. But I felt I had to —’

Porter ducked out, dragged by Lydia Yakovlevna, and glimpsed the arm of a severely tailored suit before he was on the floor and lurching with the mob.

‘Oh God! Oh, pussy cat! Isn’t it wonderful? I feel wonderful,’ Lydia Yakovlevna said. She was nibbling his ear again. ‘I love you. I want to do things. We’ll do things, won’t we?’

‘Yes, we’ll do things,’ Porter said.

Komarova had certainly seen him. She had come over to see him better. Why else would she have come over to give thanks for kind words? The hospital director could have come and given them. But the hospital director didn’t seem to have recognised him, and nor had any of the others. All of them had examined him in the hospital; conscious and unconscious, clothed and naked: a sullen Korean seaman, bruised, with a pigtail and a moustache. Now he was a smiling Chukchee with a shaven head and a smooth face, a guest of Pavel Grigorovich’s. What connection could there be between the chance foreign seaman and this driver from Green Cape? But she had seen a connection.

Or had she?

He went frantically over every encounter he had had with her. She had seen him on the ship. She had brought him to the hospital. She had examined him every day. The others had examined him more — this was true — yet he was her patient, and her responsibility. She had had to make the arrangements to get him to Murmansk. Perhaps she had now heard from Murmansk …

Or there could be another reason entirely.

She was the district medical officer; perhaps in her district she had not before seen any Chukchees. He hadn’t seen any himself. He had certainly been a novelty to Yura, to liova, even to the old Yakut Vassili. Bukarovsky had been puzzled as to what he was doing here from Chukotka. She could be asking just such questions about him now.

Yes, it was that. It had to be that.

‘Pussy cat, one more dance and then let’s go,’ Lydia Yakovlevna said. She was rubbing herself against him. ‘Oh God, I want to do things. I want to do everything. We’ll do everything, won’t we?’

‘Yes, we’ll do everything,’ Porter said.

He had signed for a bobik to get down to Tchersky, and now they went back to Green Cape in it, and up to the second floor and did everything. But his mind was not on his partner, now strenuously enjoying herself in the Finnish bed, but on the stern figure in the tailored suit.

This was at the end of October.

27

At the end of October, General Liu Shih-Yu, commander of the military region of Sinkiang in west China, flew from his headquarters at Urumchi to the desert station of Lop Nor.

At Urumchi, a town of half a million people, he maintained an infantry division. At Lop Nor, with almost no people, he had two armoured divisions.

Lop Nor was a nuclear test base: his country’s oldest.

General Liu was not today on nuclear business, however. He was here to observe the impacting of a test missile. It was coming from Manchuria in east China and it would cross the intervening 3200 kilometres in nine minutes. A new guidance system had been designed to land it within a target area (CEP — circular error probable) of 250 metres.

At Lop Nor he inspected the target area. Instruments had been set to record the impact from the air, from the ground, and from below the ground. Then he went to his observation bunker. Here contact was already established with Manchuria, and he greeted his opposite number, the commander of the Shenyang military region.

Was all in position at Lop Nor? he was asked.

Yes, all was in position at Lop Nor.

Then launch procedures could commence immediately.

Liu and his staff listened to the launch procedures on the loudspeakers, and then to the blast-off, and themselves joined Shenyang in a small cheer as the missile departed Manchuria on its nine-minute journey.

After ten minutes — and then twelve, fifteen — confusion developed between Shenyang and Lop Nor. No missile had appeared.

The first explanation was that its final stage had failed to ignite.

A few minutes later, a correction. It had ignited, but after transiting Inner Mongolia the small flight-correcting rockets had evidently misfired for the missile had swung south. Its descent had been observed, however, and a true burn-out velocity logged at 24,000 kph.

The vehicle carried no payload but this velocity had produced a large crater. It had produced it in the region of Lanchow; which was outside General Liu’s area.

Cursing, he led the way to his aircraft. He knew nothing of the research station at Tcherny Vodi — a frozen world away, far, far to the north. But at Tcherny Vodi much was known of General Liu.

At Urumchi he learned that soon he would be back at Lop Nor. A re-test had been ordered — extremest urgency. It had been ordered for November.

28

By November with the weather hard and the roads good, Kolya Khodyan had won golden opinions from his comrades at the Tchersky Transport Company. This was due to his cheerfulness, his modesty and his generosity. His generosity was exceptional.

Already sickness and injury among the crews had moved his name high up the reserve list; and already he had twice declined lucrative long-distance hauls. Family men needed the money more, he said; he was a bachelor, just filling in for a friend. He didn’t mind pottering about the area.

By now he had pottered widely and knew every route in and out, short hops that had him frequently back in the despatch depot. At the depot too he was very popular — no moans, no arguments from Kolya. Anything to go, he took it, wherever, whatever. And always smiling, a lovely fellow. He’d even help with the loading — no way his job! — to give the fellows a break.

He was familiar now with every aspect of the depot, knew the stacks, the destinations, was never in the way. A really bright Chukchee, true gold.

He’d seen the four one-ton crates stencilled Tch. Vod., in Local Delivery: radius fifty kilometres. Tcherny Vodi! He hungrily haunted this bay, fearful somebody else would get it; and as the bay emptied, tried to precipitate the action.

‘No, Kolya, no. That’s not to go yet.’

‘What is it?’

‘Turbines. For a place up in the hills. They had some kind of blow-out a few months ago. There you don’t just deliver. They have to call through and say when. They have the stinking heads there.’

‘Ah, stinking heads.’ Stinking heads were high-ups, usually security services, usually Moscow, but here sometimes Irkutsk or Novosibirsk. ‘What do they want with stinking heads there?’ he asked in surprise.

‘God knows. We don’t ship them much. They fly in what they need, they have a strip. It’s just sometimes heavy gear — this has been here weeks, from Archangel, maybe they don’t need it yet.’

‘Is funny that. Stinking heads! I have friends in that place, I think — Evenks.’

‘Right. They have Evenks there, you’re right, Kolya.’

‘I like to see my friends there. I take this stuff, eh?’

‘Sure you will. Sure, Kolya. You’ll take the job — just when we get the call.’

And they got the call, and he took the job. He took the four crates on a Ural and helped load and strap them right way up. The Ural had a hoist and a hydraulic tailgate. He headed out of town and followed his map and picked up the creek. The creek was flagged at entry to show the weight it could take and he drove fifteen kilometres along it to be sure he had it to himself; though there wasn’t much doubt. Apart from the road gang who had checked it, nobody had used the creek this season. Then he got out and climbed in the back.

He undid the straps on the tarpaulin, picked out a crate and got to work with a screwdriver and a pot of paint. He scored out parts of the stencilling and overpainted fresh marks. Then he smudged the result with a grease rag until it was hard to tell which was the correct marking. It was now very cold. The exterior thermometer of the Ural showed forty below, but the air was dead still, no wind. The oily mess hardened immediately and he refastened the tarpaulin.

Twenty kilometres farther along the creek he saw the red flag and the turnoff he had to take out of it. The river bank was steep but a ramp had been lowered and strewn with grit. He saw the bundled-up figures waiting on top, and they waved him on as he crunched slowly up. There were two men, their breath standing in the air, quite jovial, ear flaps down, automatic weapons slung, beating themselves in the cold. They had come out of a wooden guard hut in a small levelled area. A military jeep stood next to the hut.

‘Found it okay?’

‘No problem.’

They were gazing at him curiously, not expecting a native; quite friendly, though.

‘You unload all this on your own?’

‘Sure. Only there’s a problem with the manifest.’

‘Bring it inside.’

It was snug inside, two oil stoves going; and it became snugger still when he produced his flask. He heard, what he knew already, that they had run down here an hour ago, to open up the post, flag his turnoff and lay the ramp. They would wait until the tracked vehicle came down to pick up the load, and then take up the ramp and return: the post wasn’t manned normally.

‘What’s the problem with the manifest?’

‘See, is some kind of cockup,’ he said. ‘The marks don’t tally — we couldn’t understand it there.’

He took them out and showed them the marks and they puzzled over them.

‘Well, the crates are all the same.’

‘Sure, we got a hundred crates like that. Is Archangel crates.’

‘Just dump them anyway, and they’ll sort it out.’.

‘Is fine with me. You sign for it, you got it. But you don’t sign, I can’t leave it. Maybe you sign and it’s wrong.’

The two men looked at each other.

‘Well, what’s to be done about it?’

‘I don’t know. Either I run it up there and they, check it or someone comes down and checks it here.’

They went back in the hut and made a call on a communications set. The call established that someone would come down and check it.

They finished off the flask while waiting for the tracked vehicle to come down. Two Evenks and an officer came down with it. The officer was irritable and he paced impatiently while the Evenks prised open the suspect crate. Then he mounted the Ural and perched on the cab top while consulting a piece of paper and peering down into the crate.

‘It’s all right. Of course it’s all right. Bloody nonsense! Seal it.’

Then he paced again while the crate was sealed and Kolya and the Evenks transferred the load. They chatted merrily while they did this — the Evenks, like the other Siberian natives, intrigued that he ‘had the tongue’.

‘How is it up there, brothers?’

‘Fine. Good conditions, good pay. A job.’

‘It’s as well you came down. I thought I was going to have to run up there with this.’

The Evenks laughed. ‘Not in a million years. They’d never let you.’

‘Oh, the stinking heads — I forgot. What goes on up there? What kind of problem with stinking heads?’

‘They’re no problem. Not if you have a pass. We don’t mix with anybody. It’s just scientists there — who knows what they do?’

But he learned more. The Evenks’ reindeer herds were far away, at the other side of a mountain. From there they helicoptered you in. You rotated the jobs at the hill station, a month at a time. They didn’t let you stay any longer. But anybody could do it. A stinking head came down and made out the passes; he dealt with Innokenty, the headman.

Then they finished the loading and took off, and his manifests were signed and he took off too, and drove back along the creek, thinking.

The Evenks were the way in, obviously. They were the only way in. Herdsmen, nomads. With a headman, Innokenty. He would have to meet this Innokenty. He would have to get out to the herds. But there were no deliveries to the herds …

He turned the matter over in his mind. Somehow there would have to be a way of getting there.

And in the days that followed he found it; and before it, something else.

The load was for a big Kama to Provodnoye, 260 kilometres each way, and nobody wanted it: not while the huge backlog for Bilibino and Pevek still remained, real mileage and proper money. Good Kolya took it, in a Ural, two journeys. They broke up the load, window frames and central heating for a new apartment block, and he took off, single-handed. A jewel, a piece of gold dust!

The Provodnoye route was a new one to him, and it looked interesting: you could lose yourself here if you needed to. He ran south on the river, and turned off for the section of made track to Anyuysk. This part he knew. Then he left the made track and picked up the winding tributary to Provodnoye. The tributary ran between steep banks and in season it evidently ran fast; in the narrow bends coves were gouged out of the banks.

He kept a steady sixty kilometres an hour, slowing to thirty and twenty on the bends, and was changing up as he pulled out of one when a flock of ptarmigan exploded out of a piece of bush. A beautiful sight! White rockets in a lead sky. He watched them in his rear-view mirror as they returned to the bush but they did not return to the bush. He could not make out where they returned.

He stopped the truck and got out and walked back on the river. The cluster of bush grew out of the bank; stunted willow, white with ice but mottled where the birds had nibbled the twigs. He padded softly but still they knew and rocketed up again; fox also padded softly.

They had rocketed not from the bush but from behind the bush. The clumps overhung a hole in the bank. Quite a large hole, torn out by fast spring floods. He pulled the frozen vegetation aside. All dark inside, but high, broad, deep. He felt cautiously with his hands. Ice on the walls, a crackling underfoot; twigs the birds had brought in. He could see nothing, but it was deep, deeper than the span of both arms. A cave. He had left his torch in the truck, and did not venture any farther. He had started a little late. Provodnoye was still a couple of hours away.

He slept the night at Provodnoye, was held up in the morning by faulty goods for return, and made Green Cape in the afternoon, too late for another journey. He did it the day after.

The bend, the ptarmigan rocketing up again. He stopped the truck alongside, unshipped the ladder and went in.

It was even deeper than he thought. Some obstruction, centuries past, had sent the river thundering in and out of here. He shone his flashlight round. Only a skin of ice on the walls, and under it rock. The same with the roof. Rock, not permafrost. He tried it, all the same; set the ladder, climbed it, bored with the battery drill into the roof. Granite. After an inch he didn’t bother any more. He could go as deep as he needed. It could hold what it had to hold.

He had his chat with Vassili soon after. In between he had made a trip to Ambarchik on the coast and from there had brought back a fish, an Arctic chir. Vassili’s old woman had been bemoaning the lack of chir, and this was a present for her. Very often now he had been sharing the old Yakut’s food.

He produced the fish in a sack; quite fresh but stiff as a board, and Vassili’s eyes popped.

‘This is a fish,’ he said. He examined it all over. ‘This fish goes a metre.’

‘Yes, it’s a good fish.’

‘She’ll go mad with it.’ He stood the fish on its nose and with his knife pared off a sliver and ate. ‘By God, an excellent fish. Full of oil.’ He pared a sliver for the Chukchee and gave him it. Kolya ate the sliver and nodded. A nutty flavour; not fishy, not bad, slight oily aftertaste.

‘Good,’ he said.

‘The best. With a half of this fish she’ll make a fantastic stroganina. You’ll come and eat it.’

‘With pleasure.’

‘Did you eat lunch yet?’

‘Not yet.’

They shared the Yakut’s pot.

‘Vassili,’ he said, chewing, ‘I need a bobik.’

‘Take one.’

‘To keep. For myself.’

‘What for?’

‘I want one.’

The Yakut nodded, cutting a piece of meat between his teeth. They were eating boiled foal and blood sausage stewed in mare’s milk.

‘Do you know any Evenks?’ Kolya asked him.

‘There are no Evenks here now.’

‘Where would you find them?’

‘You said you knew some at the station in the hills.’

‘They’re not there. I ran a load for that station.’

‘Then either they’re with the herds or at the collective.’

‘Which collective?’

‘Novokolymsk. What other?’

Kolya pondered this. Evidently the collective was not only for the Yukagir. For Evenks also. And they rotated not just from the herds to the station. They rotated from the collective as well.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

Vassili cut off more meat in his mouth. ‘I hear the Evenk women are good,’ he said.

‘I hear that.’

‘I never tried one myself. Where is she?’

‘Who?’

The Yakut’s face split, but whether with a smile or from tugging at the meat he couldn’t tell.

‘I think you are a young bastard,’ he said. ‘You have an Evenk girl and don’t know where she is — the collective or with the herds. Right?’

Kolya grunted and got on with his meat.

Vassili wiped his mouth. ‘All right,’ he said, sucking his teeth, ‘you need a bobik. I’ll think about it.’

Next day he told Kolya, ‘She wants you to come and eat stroganina. You can come tonight.’

‘Good. Thank you.’

He went and ate stroganina. The two elderly Yakuts lived in a tiny apartment in one of the earliest blocks; the Europeans had moved out to better blocks. A table came with the apartment but they ate on the floor, on cushions. Vassili’s wife gave him a bowl of his own but the two old people ate out of. the pot; the stroganina was a rich oily fish stew, highly seasoned, and on a wooden board alongside it was a mound of the raw fish flaked like coconut.

The old woman had put on a Yakut party dress, brightly embroidered; her centre parting and brilliant dark eyes were directed intently on him as he ate. She was silent as a mouse but very busy, refilling his bowl until the pot was finished, and piling on the flaked fish.

‘A man needs oil,’ she said to him significantly. ‘A young man has to have it.’

It was all she said to him, but in the morning Vassili told him, ‘She says you have a nice face.’

‘Well, it’s younger than yours,’ Kolya said.

‘She also says you are a young bastard. She says you should stop fucking Lydia Yakovlevna.’

‘Who says I am fucking Lydia Yakovlevna?’

‘Our grand-daughter cleans in the supermarket. Lydia Yakovlevna says you fuck her every night and give her presents, also take her to the best parties. Is that the way a young man like you should get it?’

‘Or?’

‘It’s better to fuck this Evenk. She says they don’t want presents and it’s healthier for you.’

‘Well, it’s true.’

‘Of course it’s true. Where would you keep the bobik?’

‘I know a place.’

‘You can’t just steal one — they’re all registered. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Of course I know it.’

‘So how would you get one?’

‘I could put it together, if I had a friend with the parts.’

The Yakut smiled. ‘You think you could do it on your own?’

‘With a manual, why not? It’s a toy, you said.’

‘One man can’t fit an engine on his own. It’s too heavy.’

‘With a block and tackle?’

Vassili mused. ‘The block and tackle would be for borrowing only? I can’t make a deficit out of a block and tackle. I only have two.’

‘Of course for borrowing only. What do I want with a block and tackle?’

‘It’s a strong heavy engine. The block would need a strong roof to support it.’

‘I have a strong roof.’

‘Well, I’ll see. Don’t bother me with it now.’

Kolya began taking parts for the bobik the same week. Vassili gave him a printed specification of the car and they ticked off the parts as he took them. The first parts he took were the wheels. He had been angling now for regular deliveries to the area.

To Anyuysk was no problem. Scattered developments there meant frequent trips by light truck. The problem was the further leg to Provodnoye. Factories and apartment blocks were going up there — top class ones, an inducement for European Russians to stay in the wilderness; good heating, big boilers, triple glazing. Heavy loads, and for a big Kama. As the season went on, and the drivers could pick and choose less, big Kamas would regularly do this journey. Two-man crews. No good. He had to be on his own.

He saw he was going to have to do it at night. He could always get a bobik for the night. But there were difficulties here, too. He could get a bobik, but how about the parts? The Light Vehicles depot wasn’t open at night. He would have to take the parts during the day and keep them somewhere. Where? Not in the apartment. How could he run an engine up there, gear box, transmission?

He thought about it while taking the wheels, and a load, down to Anyuysk. He dumped the load quickly, and took off with the wheels towards Provodnoye.

Off the made road and on to the tributary; round and round the tight bends. It took him sixty-five minutes from Anyuysk to the cave. With a bobik he could cut that to maybe forty-five. And from Green Cape to Anyuysk itself — another hour and a quarter. Total, two hours. Four hours there and back. If he started at nine at night when nobody was about, he could be back soon after one in the morning. Nothing.

It would take time to build up the parts before anything could usefully be put together. The heavy engine would be a problem. He would need help getting it in the bobik. Vassili would help him get it in. Then he would have to take off immediately with it, in the lunch hour — whatever other jobs were scheduled for him. He couldn’t leave an engine dumped in a bobik. He would have to take it right to the cave. And then? How to get it out of the bobik and into the cave? A block and tackle could raise and lower it. It couldn’t get it in.

The ptarmigan had shot up again as he approached.

He left the engine running and walked over to the cave and parted the frozen branches. The entrance was wide, far wider than it looked. He tried to find a way of keeping the shrubbery held back but couldn’t. He got back in the truck and, with his headlights on, drove slowly through the screen of branches, careful not to break any off: the screen effectively hid the cave.

He got the nose of the truck in and climbed out and looked about him. The headlights brilliantly lit up the place, a hoary ice box: roof, walls, floor, all glittering like diamonds. A spacious ice box, too. Plenty of room to build a bobik, and also to drive one right in. He looked up at the roof, and the hole he had drilled. In the wrong place, but yes! Of course. A piece of cake! He could fit the block to the roof at the rear of the cave. Then back the bobik in and hoist the engine out. No problem.

He wasted no more time, got the wheels out and stacked against the end wall, reversed the truck on to the river and drove back to Green Cape.

He’d build up the supplies fast; on as many days as he could. And night after night if possible. Yes, he’d start seriously now.

And this he did, by day and also by night.

29

The Despatch depot: ‘Kolya — Yura wants you. Run down and see him now.’

‘But I’ve got a load here, ready to go.’

‘Leave it. He’s in a temper, very excited. Take the bobik there — the key’s in.’

He drove down to the Kama hangar, puzzled and cautious.

The place had greatly changed, he saw. No longer the vast array of vehicles lined up row on row. Only a dozen or so of the giant trucks were scattered about now; most being worked on by mechanics.

Yura was in his glass booth and on the phone again. He frowned at the Chukchee and motioned him in.

‘Kolya, what’s this?’ he said, putting the phone down. ‘Piddling about all the time to Anyuysk — and with little Tatras and Urals. What is it?’

‘It’s trips. It’s okay. They give me the jobs.’

‘They’re taking advantage of you. This is no good, Kolya.’

‘I don’t complain, it’s fine.’

‘You don’t complain, but it bloody isn’t fine! You’re picking up no money! And getting no time on a 50! What experience are you getting?’

‘I didn’t come for experience. I’m filling in.’

‘You’re mine! My driver! I told you so. There’s a good distance man in you — young, stamina, plenty of go. You need time on a 50. Piddling about locally is no good. It’s no good, Kolya!’

‘They want me, what can I do?’

‘You can go to Bilibino. Tomorrow. I’ve cleared it with Bukarovsky. You’re down on the sheet. No arguments. It’s done!’

Well, if it was done; on the sheet. He couldn’t make a fuss about getting off it. To Bilibino and back was 1400 kilometres — a plum three-day job for the drivers, and soon to be scarce as the backlog cleared …

He cursed as he drove back. Three days away, and what shape would he be in for his night work afterwards? To hell with Bilibino!

But to Bilibino he went.

They left at eight in a snowstorm and day didn’t dawn till almost eleven. They drew a twenty-ton trailer, with another one hitched on behind, and were in a convoy of four, all big Kamas. The two in front could not be seen through the wall of snow in the headlights, but as the day slowly came and the dim shapes emerged lumbering ahead, Vanya relaxed. He was a grizzled elderly fellow, specially selected as a mentor for the Chukchee.

‘You’ll take over after the first stop,’ he said. ‘There’s a straight stretch coining, but plenty of uphill shifts. Mustn’t lose your footing — it’s a long slide down for these bastards.’ His yellow teeth showed in a grin.

The first stop came soon after eleven, No. 1 of the road stations. The two trucks in front had pulled in, together with another couple going the other way; and behind them, as they parked in a clutter of bobiks, came the fourth of their convoy.

A radio was going and it was very warm and smoky in the log hut. Cooking smells drifted from the kitchen, and cigarette smoke hung over the tables where the drivers sat so that in the fug it was some minutes before he saw that one of them was a woman. She was also smoking, and in conversation, and his eyes were drawn in that direction because he heard his name mentioned. The drivers were grinning as he looked over.

‘Sure, that’s him, our Chukchee … Kolya, come over here. She wants to meet you. Medical Officer Komarova.’

Her eyes gazed at him coolly as they shook hands. She wore an open parka and a cap like the others, and was sitting with a cigarette over a cup of coffee.

‘You’re new here, I understand.’

‘Yes, not long. A few weeks.’ They had made room for him on the bench opposite, and his smile flashed brilliantly at her. He decided to take his fur cap off.

‘Tea or coffee?’ the old waitress said. She had slapped his plate of kasha and gravy down, and was also staring at his shaven head.

‘Coffee.’

‘From Chukotka?’ Medical Officer Komarova said.

‘Chukotka. I’m filling in for a friend.’

‘They haven’t sent your papers in yet. Have you had all your shots?’

‘Sure.’

‘Tetanus, polio, yellow fever?’

‘Sure, sure.’ He forked in the kasha, smile still flashing.

‘Don’t worry about his shots. He’s getting all his shots in,’ one of the drivers said.

‘The condoms come from her place. She calls the shots,’ another said, as the laughter continued.

Medical Officer Komarova smiled thinly herself. Under the cap her face looked paler, longer, slightly anaemic; but the eyes were as uncompromising as he remembered.

‘Check into the office, anyway,’ she said. ‘I’ll see they have your papers. Are you outward bound now or coming back?’

‘Outward. Bilibino.’

‘That’s three days.’ She held the cigarette in her mouth and with her eyes screwed up opened a zipper bag and took out a notebook and a pen. ‘Today’s Tuesday? … Make it Friday. The afternoon, 4 p.m. You’ll need a lie-in in the morning.’ She wrote in the book and on a card and gave him it. ‘It’s the administrative building in Tchersky. Anyone will tell you.’

‘You want to check me over or what?’

‘I won’t be there. They need to update your papers and get you on our records.’

She went soon afterwards and he finished his breakfast, still in doubt. Had she recognised him? Would she so specifically have mentioned the yellow fever if so? Surely not. It was the Chukchee interest: he looked different from the others. And totally different from the Korean seaman. No. He was a new face in town, a new driver. A matter of papers.

He finished his coffee and in twenty minutes was out with the convoy again. The snow had stopped. He took the wheel and steered the big rig into place in line.

‘We keep two hundred metres,’ Vanya told him. ‘Give him plenty of room to get off in front. And practise the gears. You’ll be running up and down them soon.’

‘Okay. She seems a decent sort, that medical officer.’

‘You think so? Don’t bet on it. The slightest thing wrong with you, she has you off the long runs.’

‘Does she check all the drivers?’

‘See, the company sick bay is hers — the nurses, the supplies, all from Tchersky. They keep the medical histories there. She’s a strict manager, Komarova.’

‘To me, she was like one of the boys.’

‘Try getting a dose of clap, and you’ll find out. All this is her district and she knows what goes on in it. Change down now. Watch him in front — he’s climbing.’

They were climbing, and they continued climbing, the ice road running through a series of passes, first between hills and then mountain peaks. From Green Cape they had ascended 2800 feet, and now went much higher — on all sides the icy crests smoking in clouds. More snow was waiting in the clouds and Vanya silently observed it through his window. But the road was straight, and continued straight, even in the switchbacks that now came. After the climb, a sharp drop, and then up again, and down again, and up and down, a glassy and treacherous ribbon of ice.

‘Not your brakes! Only the gears!’ Vanya yelled. ‘And leave him room — two hundred metres.’

The convoy pulled on, stopping every hundred kilometres at the road stations. At each one they replenished the flasks of tea and coffee, and the day slowly went. The straight also went, and with night came the snow, and Vanya took over; and sharp bends now began to zigzag through the mountains.

Between stations the men were supposed to alternate in sleep. But with the bends and the snow, Vanya now drove from every station. And there was no sleeping through the constant roar of oaths that came from him as they swung and lurched behind their headlights in the white dazzle of snow; only a few metres of track visible ahead. He drove through the night, and he drove the first turn of the day as well, until the road straightened out. At one o’clock Kolya took over, sleepless himself, and he drove into Bilibino, Vanya snoring beside him.

Bilibino, named for Bilibin the geologist who first assayed the reefs, was the centre for the most northerly goldfields of Siberia, and the big trucks and the ice road were the only means of getting heavy equipment there: this was what they carried. Scores of thousands of tons of it had built up, shipped from St Petersburg and Archangel in the summer. Only in summer could it be shipped, and only in winter could it be hauled. And now it was here, Bilibino.

They reached it at four in the afternoon, left the trucks for unloading and reloading, and went to bed at a hostel. Eight hours later, after a meal, they left again on the return journey; midnight; the night black, road white in their headlights.

A hard country, an exhausting routine, and he took the first leg. Over thirty hours of driving still ahead — thirty-two, in fact, the timekeeping good through all difficulties — and nonstop except for brief rests at the road stations. Which would get them in — what? — late tomorrow. No, not tomorrow; the time confusing. All tomorrow they would be driving. The next day. Friday, early.

Well, after a good rest he’d organise a bobik for that night, see Vassili in the afternoon. But in the afternoon, Jesus, the medical centre at Tchersky! Well, he’d do it, wouldn’t make waves, an administrative matter. Nothing wrong with Khodyan’s papers; they just hadn’t received them. He’d handed them in himself when Bukarovsky had signed him on. In the early confusion, the start of the season, they hadn’t been sent on. An administrative matter.

He would sleep all morning. Get up and see Vassili. Arrange a bobik. With the bobik run into Tchersky and get his papers settled at the medical centre. Then the time was his. Yes.

He finished his stint at the first road station and Vanya took over. And now he tried to sleep, and managed it, no curses coming, just slow steady driving through the zigzags.

The next turn, still in the mountain labyrinth, still not snowing, Vanya put him on the wheel again but remained awake himself to watch. And the night went, and the day went, and the following night; and at eight on Friday morning, seventy-two hours after leaving it, they pulled back into Green Cape.

30

At half-past two, as arranged, Anna Antonovna woke him and gave him his dinner. He was stiff, creaky, aching all over. But after a shower he felt he could make it. He went to see Vassili.

‘What do you want to take?’ Vassili said.

‘The frame members.’

‘All four? The sides won’t go in a bobik. You’d need a roof rack. Take something else.’

‘The axle assemblies?’

‘Yes, they’d go.’

They ticked off the pair of axle assemblies on the specification, and Vassili made a careful note in his deficit book. These goods had never arrived at the depot; either hadn’t been sent or had gone missing on the way.

‘What time are you coming for them?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. Say five.’

‘Remember, we shut at six.

‘it will be before.’

‘And the back door here.’ They were in the stores room. ‘Don’t go through the garage. People will be working there. Bring the bobik round to the back.’

‘Okay. First I have to get it.’

By a quarter to four he had the bobik and was running down to Tchersky in it. He knew the administrative building, and parked outside. He found the medical centre, and presented himself at the enquiry window.

‘Khodyan,’ he said to the woman clerk who answered the buzzer, ‘I was told to be here at four.’

‘For what?’

‘I’m a new driver with the transport company.’ He handed in the card he had been given. ‘You were getting my papers.’

She had a look at the card. ‘Oh yes. Khodyan. We have to update you. Just a minute, I’ll get them.’

He looked at the two other clerks at work in the room while she went out, and presently she was back and letting him in. ‘Yes. Come through,’ she said, and he followed her through the room and into a corridor, and into another room. ‘Khodyan,’ she said, and left him.

Medical Officer Komarova was in the room, writing at a desk. She was in her white hospital coat. She glanced up briefly. ‘Please sit down,’ she said.

He did so, after a small jolt.

‘I thought you wouldn’t be here,’ he said.

‘I thought so, too. Work.’ She continued writing for a few moments and then screwed the top back on an old-fashioned fountain pen. She drew a dossier towards her.

‘You had rheumatic fever at age twelve,’ she said.

‘Very slight. If I even had it at all.’ He flashed his smile.

‘Diagnosed at Anadyr. Streptococcal infection.’

‘But at Novosibirsk, not. There everything fine. All checked out. Nothing wrong with me.’

She read further. ‘Yes. What were you doing at Novosibirsk?’

‘My father was a teacher, without a degree. Nothing doing for our people then at Anadyr. We went to Novosibirsk and he got one.’

‘I see. And then the family went back?’

‘No. They like Novosibirsk.’

‘And you?’

‘I don’t. I just knock about — no student. For me is better up here.’

‘Where did you learn your — Russian?’

‘Everywhere. Is not very good, I know.’

‘Better than my Chukchee,’ she said. She said it in Chukchee and his smile flashed wider.

This tough and knowing cow knew something. What? The faint smile was there again, elusive, slightly mocking. If she had Chukchee, she had mixed with Chukchees. Did she know he wasn’t one? He couldn’t make her out. She looked different every time he saw her. In the hospital, the cool doctor; at Bukarovsky’s banquet the stern suited spectre; at the road station the gamin in the cap; here, calmly managerial. Yet the same face — pale, thin-nosed, vaguely anaemic. No lipstick or makeup. The hair blondeish, severely drawn back; not remarkable. Nothing about her was remarkable, except the air of pale competence. Was she forty, thirty? Impossible to say. The grey eyes were looking him over.

‘Are you pure Chukchee?’

‘I don’t know how pure I am. I’m Chukchee.’ He allowed a spurt of temper to show as he said this, and she looked down at his dossier again.

‘There’s nothing further we should know about, here?’

‘Nothing.’

‘All right. Let’s have a look at you. Strip off over there. There’s a bench.’

His mouth opened, but she had risen immediately and was washing her hands at a basin. The bench was behind a plastic curtain. He took his boots off, then closed the curtain and took everything off down to his socks and shorts.

‘I’ll need to see your feet,’ she said, briskly parting the curtain.

‘My feet? My feet are fine.’

‘Have you had frostbite ever?’

‘No, never.’

‘Show me.’

He took his socks off, and she closely inspected the feet. ‘Yes. Good. A fine instep — all you northern people have it. Now the shorts.’

‘My shorts? What —’

‘I will examine your testicles.’

He silently removed the shorts and she examined the testicles.

‘Cough.’ He coughed.

‘Again.’ Again.

‘Yes.’ She examined further in the area, and then his abdomen, ribs, arms, armpits, mouth, ears, eyes, head.

‘The head. Have you had alopecia?’

‘I had delayed shock, after an accident. All the hair fell out.’

‘This has been shaved recently.’

‘I shave it. You don’t like it this way?’

She made no comment, adjusting her stethoscope. She listened to his chest. She listened to his back. She listened to his chest again.

‘Well, I think Anadyr was right,’ she said, ‘and Novosibirsk wrong. You have a murmur.’

‘A murmur?’ He had no murmur. Khodyan might have one, but he didn’t. ‘What murmur?’

‘The streptococcal infection had an effect on the heart. Very slight, but it’s there. You can get dressed now.’

He got dressed, thinking this over. What was going on here? He absolutely had no murmur. He had been checked out thoroughly at the camp. He went out of the cubicle, very wary.

‘I can’t recommend that you drive long distances,’ she said. She was writing again, and nodded to him to sit. ‘It’s dangerous, for you and for others.’

‘But I’m a driver!’

‘You are entitled to a cardiological examination. I will arrange it for you at the hospital if you wish. But for the present, no long journeys.’

‘Then what will I do?’

‘Are they so important to you, long journeys?’ She had glanced up quickly as she said this.

‘Well.’ He had seen the advantages at once: a word from her and no more of Yura’s Kamas. But what was her game? ‘It’s my work,’ he said.

‘You can do other work, short journeys. That I will allow. After a rest. You are quite tired. I am authorising a week off work for you. Hand this in to the office there.’

He stared blankly at the form she gave him.

‘A few days’ rest isn’t a punishment,’ she said, the faint smile appearing again. ‘You have friends here, I believe.’

‘Yes, friends.’

‘But not Chukchee — is that it?’

‘No. No Chukchees here,’ he said with more confidence.

‘Oh, but there are. At Novokolymsk, the collective. You haven’t been there yet?’

‘No.’ Chukchees there, too? It must be a collective for all the native peoples.

‘And even nearer at hand — at Panarovka, this side of the river. I go there tomorrow. It should have been today. If you want I’ll take you. Then you can talk Chukchee.’ There was now — was he wrong? — something taunting in her expression.

His smile easily outshone hers. ‘I would like that! Thank you.’

‘All right. I have a few things to do at Green Cape. Be outside your building at eleven and I can pick you up. I have to stay overnight, but there’s accommodation for you, too. Bring what you need — pyjamas, toothbrush. A razor,’ she said, looking at his head.

He went out in a daze.

In the bobik, he saw it was a quarter past six. He’d missed Vassili; the Light Vehicles depot would be shut. But there was more urgent and serious business here. She knew something. The inch-by-inch examination of him. She had examined him before … She knew.

But had she told anyone else? So far as he could tell he hadn’t been watched. Perhaps she hadn’t been sure until now; perhaps was still not sure. But tomorrow she would be sure. The Yukagir had not thought him a Yukagir, or the Evenks an Evenk. Was he any more likely to fool the Chukchees? … Perhaps with Khodyan’s screwed-up background — Anadyr, Novosibirsk, here, there — he might just swing it.

But she had swung it, against him. A clever as well as a tough bitch. With Khodyan’s suspected murmur she had effectively stopped him from leaving her district. She wanted to keep an eye on him. And tomorrow she would have ample opportunity. With Chukchees to confirm her suspicions.

What then? Should he get out of it? And afterwards be stuck here, a week off work, not knowing what she was doing? No, not that. But was it any better staying close to her?

He couldn’t think.

‘Pussy cat, where have you been?’ Lydia Yakovlevna was huddled in the doorway. ‘I haven’t seen you for days!’

In the same confusion of mind, he had driven back, parked the car, walked into the building, quite unaware of any of it. He looked at her.

‘I’ve been to Bilibino,’ he said.

To Bilibino! Oh, what a lot of money. But poor lamb, you’ll be tired. Come in, have a drink and we’ll do things. Tonight I’ll really relax you.’

And that night she almost wore him out. But relax him she did, and as the big girl worked away he knew what he would do. He would keep to the plan. He would go with Komarova the next day; but if anything untoward happened, she would not see another.

31

The broad Kolyma, shining white; a blinding white. At eleven-thirty the day had not long dawned but already they needed their snow glasses. She was in her cap and parka, and she handled the bobik efficiently — a white one striped with red which he recalled having seen at the road station.

‘You drive everywhere yourself?’ he said. This he said for something to say; she had said almost nothing, buzzing quite fast on the river.

‘I fly if I have to. It means arrangements. Driving is easier.’

‘Yes. On a fine day.’

Today was very fine, the sky clear, faintly blue. Smoke stood straight in the air from occasional houses on the bank; from the opposite bank also, three or four miles away across the white expanse, the air crystal clear. This was no good. It was the way to Anyuysk, and he knew it. No good.

‘But not in bad weather,’ he said, ‘or for long distances. The road station we met at — a long distance.’

‘Yes. The limit of my district.’

‘You treat people there?’

‘Settlements. They send a tractor over for me.’

‘And take them food also?’ She had picked up a couple of crates at Green Cape, evidently from store; fruit and vegetables, canned goods.

‘No.’

She had seen him glance behind at the stuff, but made no other comment.

All right, tough baby. No questions from her about Chukotka, or even his driving experiences, which would have been normal. Well, he could wait too. Until tomorrow, at any rate. He needed information from her first, to find out how far the thing had gone. He had decided to dispose of her anyway. The matter of Murmansk would always remain in the air. All he needed was a place for the accident.

‘It’s up a creek, this settlement?’ he said.

‘A small river. Panarovka.’

‘That’s the name of the river?’

‘Of the village. The river is the Little Ghost.’

‘A strange name. Why Little Ghost?’

‘A camp used to be there — an old one, from Tsarist times. It was used since, of course. Many people died there. Their ghosts remain.’

‘You believe that?’ he said incredulously.

She smiled.

‘The Chukchees believe it.’ And now she became suddenly talkative. ‘You’ll know a good many of the old beliefs, I expect?’

‘Well, some. A broken childhood,’ he said cautiously. ‘And my father a teacher — he didn’t believe.’

‘These are old-fashioned people here. They believe. They’ve been here for generations. And they know many things. Maybe they even know you.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said regretfully. ‘I never was here.’

‘But they go there — to Chukotka. They fly out, they keep up their contacts.’

‘They do?’

‘Oh, yes. Regularly. They know everything that goes on there — a wonderful knowledge of family networks. It’s good to keep such things alive. Don’t you agree?’

‘Yes, it’s good. It’s nice,’ he said.

‘They’ll certainly know of your family — parents, aunts, cousins. You will have a lot in common. It will be interesting even apart from the language.’

‘Yes, interesting,’ he said.

‘I thought so. I have a good relationship with them. They tell me everything. Now here,’ she said, ‘we’re just coming to the Little Ghost. Over there, the opposite bank, is Novokolymsk, a few kilometres farther, you can’t see it from here. It isn’t far in a bobik. They are more up to date at the collective. As a modern person perhaps you’ll have more in common. If you want to visit, I can arrange it for you.’

‘Yes. I’d like it,’ he said. ‘Maybe while I’m off work I can run an errand for you there?’

‘Maybe. I’ll try and think of something.’

‘You could write me a letter here. I could take it later.’

She smiled behind her snow glasses. ‘You prefer more up-to-date people,’ she said.

‘Well. While I have nothing else to do — I could meet them.’

‘All right, I’ll write a few lines. Remind me.’

‘I will. Good,’ he said. And everything now was good. The little Ghost river was good. The bank of the Kolyma had fallen away and they were in the tributary. A wonderful little tributary, like the one to Provodnoye; winding, sharp bends. The banks were not so high, and not so vertical; but high enough and vertical enough. And quite narrow, no more than four metres, in places only three. Yes, easily done here.

He sized it up carefully as she wound around the bends, but in twenty minutes — rather too soon — Panarovka came into view. The river widened suddenly into a small curving bay and the bank fell to form a beach. The village was set back on a snow-covered slope, perhaps 300 metres away; at first glance a huddle of small blobs with a taller one behind. A track had been made, climbing from the river, and she turned up it.

Closer to, the small blobs became recognisable as three rows of houses. The taller one was no less recognisable.

‘A church,’ she said, as he peered. ‘The place is old.’

‘Do they use it any more?’

‘Yes, they use it.’

Both the church and the houses were of wood, the houses detached and with a fence of palings round each. Smoke came from the houses but no one was about, and she drove along the upper row and parked outside the last house on the corner.

‘Your clinic?’ he said.

‘Yes. Bring the other crate.’ She had got one out of the back and was walking up the stamped snow path.

So that was it. The bearer of gifts used one of the Chukchee houses as her clinic. She could have explained, if she’d wanted. What she wanted was evidently to confront him right away with some Chukchees. Okay; he braced himself.

A Chukchee woman, elderly and shapeless, opened the door as they reached it. ‘I heard the car,’ she said in Russian.

‘Yes. I’m sorry I’m late. There’s fruit here, Viktoria.’ To his surprise she kissed the Chukchee. ‘And some tinned stuff. Bring it in,’ she said to Kolya.

The woman barely glanced at him as she took the crate of fruit and looked into it, and he followed with the other crate through a little hall, curtained to keep out the draughts, into a large room. It was very warm, a big porcelain stove set against the far wall. The walls were of wood and the room dark, the windows small. Another woman was sitting in a big armchair, knitting, and Komarova bent and kissed her too.

‘Tanya!’ the woman said. She was a little bag of bones with a shawl; a walking stick leaned against the chair. ‘We expected you yesterday.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. Wait — she’ll come and take it from you,’ she said to him. ‘Mother, I’ve brought a visitor — Nikolai Dmitrievich Khodyan. He’s from Chukotka. Alexandra Ivanovna,’ she introduced her mother. ‘He can’t shake hands with you now, he’s holding a crate.’ But the Chukchee woman returned just then and took the crate, glancing at him as she did so.

‘Nikolai Dmitrievich?’ the old lady said, holding out her hand.

‘Kolya,’ he said, shaking the hand.

‘You are visiting us from Chukotka?’

‘Bend down, she can’t see you,’ Komarova ordered.

He bent and the old lady felt his face, and his head. ‘Ah, an old person?’

‘Not as young as I should be, but not that old.’

‘His hair fell out. He’s my age,’ Komarova said.

Was he now? Khodyan was thirty-six.

‘Khodyan?’ the Chukchee woman said, returning to the room. ‘One of the Khodyans from Anadyr?’

‘Yes, I am. You are Viktoria —’

‘Eremevina.’ The Chukchee woman shook his hand. ‘And if I am not mistaken — did you say Nikolai Dmitrievich?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘The son of the schoolteacher?’

‘That’s me.’ They were talking now in Chukchee.

‘Then I was present at your birth! Heaven save us all!’ She gave him a resounding kiss on the lips. ‘But your family moved to Novosibirsk! And your elder sister, the one who was so ill — what was her name?’

‘She died,’ Kolya said promptly. ‘It hurts me to talk of it.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry!’

‘What are they babbling at? Why babble?’ the old lady said. ‘I am also here.’

‘Viktoria is telling him she was present at his birth. His father was a schoolteacher in Anadyr. He had a sister who died.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to hear it. But they can speak a Christian language. While I am still here! Nobody has come to talk to me for half a year!’

‘I was here six weeks ago,’ Komarova said coldly. ‘And this is a busy time. Is my consulting room ready?’ she asked the Chukchee.

‘Of course. And ten people were sitting here waiting yesterday!’

‘Well, tell them I’m here now. And prepare a room for Nikolai Dmitrievich, he will be staying the night. I expect you’ll find something to talk about,’ she told him.

She was looking at him curiously, and he returned the look.

She had understood every word of the Chukchee. Well, what of it? His story had held up — indeed had been miraculously confirmed. If Khodyan did not have too many other siblings to dispose of, he could hold his own. She would question this Viktoria, he had no doubt of it, and the other Chukchees; ten patients … A very comprehensive checking out of him. A thorough bitch, and cold; brusque with her mother, and this old retainer. All of a piece, at any rate. He could handle her as long as he had to. Not so long now.

He brought in their two bags, and was shown to his room; all wood, dark, smelling of camphor.

She had gone to her consulting room when he returned and he sat and took a glass of tea with the old lady. But presently as patients arrived and, after introductions, began talking loudly to him in Chukchee, the old woman struggled wrathfully to her feet, and was helped by Viktoria to her room.

But so far, so good. His story was sound, reasonable. A schoolmaster a little above himself had taken his family to a big town, and preferred it there. The daughter had died and the boy, detached from his background — even speaking his own tongue with an accent! — had gone on the loose. But he had hankered for the far north, had healthy instincts himself, a good young fellow.

He heard Khodyan’s antecedents discussed, flashed his smile of rueful ignorance, listened to their own stories, told of his driving experiences, of the money to be made. A levelheaded young fellow, as well as charming.

So many invitations came his way that he was able to skip the late lunch at the house and take it elsewhere: a snack here, a drink there, mainly among women and old men; and he learned the reason for this.

In summer the villagers fished and farmed. Because the river had no bank here, when the ice broke the first flood came up and washed the top metre of ground almost all the way to the village. In the good soil they grew everything — potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, beans — flowers even. Yes, in the gardens, sunflowers, this high!

But in winter the men went to the traplines, came home maybe only once in ten days. They sold the pelts through the collective at Novokolymsk. All sorts were there, Yakuts, Evenks, Yukagir, Chukchees — yes, Chukchees too. Not quite our sort, but decent people. If he was interested someone would always take him there, easily arranged.

He began to see he wouldn’t need Komarova for this. But he needed her for something else, of course, and he took dinner at the house. An endless meal, in which the daughter’s impatience with her mother grew.

The old lady talked. And talked. The villagers had told him, no doubt, of her late husband, Dr Komarov? An angel to them. When he had come out of the camp he had been eagerly awaited in Leningrad, where his reputation stood so high. But no, he had set up his surgery here. An angel. They kissed his feet. Wouldn’t leave them, had selflessly ministered to all here. And now lay in his final place here. Which she would never leave, no never. Had he seen the graveyard?

No, he had not yet had that opportunity; he would like the opportunity.

Just beyond the church, on the high ground. Was he a churchgoer?

Sometimes he was a churchgoer; in his job it was not always easy. And there were not that many churches!

Well, tomorrow he could go to church, Sunday. They would all go to church. This one had a beautiful, a holy history —’

‘We will go out now,’ Komarova said.

‘Out? Out where?’ her mother said.

‘To the graveyard. He wants to see it.’

‘Tatiana, are you mad? It will be pitch dark.’

‘There’s a moon.’

‘If you can see it, it will be freezing hard. He’ll see it in the morning, of course. We’ll all go.’

‘There might be no time in the morning.’

‘No time — what are you thinking of? I’ve arranged flowers for you to lay there!’

‘And tell Viktoria we’ll need fresh tea. We’ll have it when we return. It won’t be long.’

‘But you’ll freeze! It’s iron hard out there. Put everything on that you have!’

They put everything on, but he still gasped as they stepped outside. The cold was so intense it seemed to burn the backs of his eyeballs. The night was dead still, glaring white. Below her cap Komarova had wrapped her head and mouth in a woollen scarf; he held gloved hands to his mouth and smelt the leather.

They mounted the path to the church. It stood squat in the moonlight, its wooden steeple sheathed in ice. Beyond, the graveyard was set out like a camp on the white slope, neat rows of small knobs, the tops of iced crosses. They crunched between the rows. On the mounds wisps of dried flowers poked through the snow like bits of tinsel. She paused between a couple of mounds and bent to brush the snow off one, peering.

‘Your father?’

‘Piotr Petrovich … Yes. More flowers here. Five bunches. Remember that, she’ll ask.’

Her mouth was muffled through the scarf, but her eyes when she straightened up were looking at him very levelly.

‘But we didn’t come out here to look at graveyards, Nikolai Dmitrievich,’ she said. ‘There is something I have to say to you.’

32

The church was not locked and he followed her inside. In the blackness a tiny point of red wavered above the altar. She led the way there, groping along the aisle. ‘There are candles somewhere.’

He heard a rattling. ‘Here. And they make a charge. Put a few coins in the box. I have no money.’

He lit the candle with his lighter and searched his pockets. ‘All I have —’ he peered, ‘ — a note.’

‘They won’t complain,’ she said dryly, and took the note off him. ‘Incense,’ she said, sniffing. ‘That’s what they spend money on! Well now, Nikolai Dmitrievich, I have an apology to make to you.’

‘An apology? For what?’

‘An attitude you might have found — incorrect. Perhaps unfriendly, even racialist. Do not mistake my mother’s attitude for my own. There is no trace of racialism in me. Quite the contrary. I have profound respect for all the peoples of the north. The fact is, I was not sure who you were − even if you were a Chukchee at all.’

He stared at her.

‘What else could I be?’

‘Well, you could have been something else. You know we have few strangers here, a security area. But a few weeks ago we did have one, in Green Cape. A Korean seaman, very ill; I took him off his ship to Tchersky hospital. I thought you resembled him.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You have a seaman in hospital, and think I —’

‘He isn’t. He recovered and went away, to Murmansk, to rejoin his ship. But there were certain things about you — your accent, for instance. It didn’t sound to me Chukchee … In short, it’s why I brought you here. These people would know, of course, and I trust them.’

He flashed his smile. ‘Well, I hope Viktoria Eremevina’s guarantee is good enough. I don’t remember my birth personally, but she was there!’

‘Yes, I know. But understand my grounds. Even now the people here say you have some other accent — maybe a little like Evenk. It’s what I thought myself, and it puzzled me.’

‘Well, my friends are Evenk, it’s true. And my own language — I mainly lost it in Novosibirsk. Without even speaking Russian properly. I’m a mess, I know.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, a little more warmly. ‘But I wanted this opportunity to apologise, and to tell you not to be alarmed if the police question you.’

‘The police?’

‘As the medical officer for the district I must report any stranger I cannot vouch for absolutely. But there’s nothing to worry about. They will simply check over your background —’ She frowned at his expression. ‘Is there something you have not told me?’

He was silent, staring into the candle.

‘Nikolai Dmitrievich,’ she said, ‘speak in confidence. know there are people here who don’t want their affairs looked at too closely. Particularly drivers. Matters to do with women, things of that nature … It’s why they’re here. I don’t report such things. Is there something?’

‘Well, in confidence … There is. A woman, yes.’

‘Then have no fear. The police won’t tell her — they don’t bother with that.’

He was silent some moments longer.

‘Can I trust you further?’ he said softly.

‘If it’s not of a criminal nature, of course.’

‘It’s not criminal,’ he said. ‘But I’m not Khodyan. All that I’ve said of my life — the broken background, Novosibirsk — all that is true. Yet I’m not Khodyan. In Novosibirsk I knew Khodyan. His father was the schoolteacher. We were friends, and we became drivers together. But he was unsettled and went back north, to Magadan. Then this year — this summer, just a few months ago — we met again, at Batumi on the Black Sea. He wanted to stay there, and lose his identity. An affair of the heart, a girl he wished to marry. And he already had a wife and children! So, we exchanged papers. It was crazy, I know — although at the time it seemed a joke! But that’s it, and I can’t have the police searching through papers.’

She stared at him. ‘But this is a lunatic thing,’ she said. ‘If they had to investigate you for any reason — a driving accident, anything — they would soon discover the truth.’

‘How?’

‘I’m not a policeman. But fingerprints?’

‘What fingerprints? I have done nothing wrong, ever.’

‘And Khodyan?’

‘The same. I would swear to it.’

‘Then what have you to fear from an investigation, either as Khodyan or — whoever you are?’

He lowered his eyes.

‘Well. There is still something else, something very upsetting. Khodyan drowned. He drowned there at Batumi, a tragic accident. And he is buried there. Under my name! It upset me deeply. The authorities informed my parents — that I was dead. And also — also this other woman I mentioned to you. What was I to do? I couldn’t go back to Novosibirsk. I was dead! Or to Magadan — where Khodyan was known? Also I couldn’t stay at Batumi. He was known there too, Khodyan. And I had his papers. So in the end … Ponomarenko, who knew all this — the three of us had teamed up together — Ponomarenko said I should come up here for a bit, take his apartment, his job, until I’d sorted myself out. And that is the whole truth, I swear to you!’

She looked at him a long time in the candlelight.

‘Well, you made a good impression on your comrades, at any rate. As well as here. But this is an insane thing you did!’

‘Yes. I’m a fool. I think I have always been a fool,’ he said sadly. ‘But not bad! If I could convince you of that, Tatiana Petrovna!’

She pursed her lips and moved down the aisle with the candle.

‘You will not submit me for police investigation?’

She blew the candle out and set it on a bench and opened the door. ‘I must think about this.’

‘You know I am not a bad man!’

‘Look, Nikolai Dmit — What do I call you now, anyway?’

‘Kolya?’ he said, smiling anxiously.

‘All right, Kolya. I have a responsible function here, a trusted one. People trust me.’

‘Then trust me. You know me now. You have examined me — every part of me,’ he said, smiling more widely. ‘Tell me … do I have a murmur?’

‘No.’ Her own faint smile came on. They crunched down the path together. ‘I had to restrict your movements, in order to — Well, never mind. But it’s true you are very tired and need a few days off. Hand that form in on Monday. And we’ll leave early tomorrow. No church!’

‘Thank you. I know I can do with a rest.’

‘And while having it — your eagerness for the collective. It was the Evenks you wanted there, wasn’t it?’

‘They have always been my friends.’

‘A secretive man.’ Her smile remained. ‘And I can understand why now. But I was right to have my suspicions.’

‘I hope you didn’t mention them to anyone else?’

‘Of course not. I rely on my own judgment.’

‘Yes. I see why it is so respected. May I mention how much I admire you, Tatiana Petrovna — your thoroughness, your observation … among other things?’

She glanced at him swiftly. ‘You can mention that I observed five bunches of flowers — if asked. You will be asked. But thank you, anyway … Kolya.’

They went into the house, and he was asked, and mentioned the flowers, and they took tea with the old lady and went to bed.

And then all that was over, and only the events of tomorrow remained.

It was a long time since he had done anything of the kind. But he had gentled her, he had disarmed her; she would give no trouble. And she had told nobody.

He undressed and got into bed. There was still the question of Murmansk, whether inquiries had come from there. He would ask her. Also whether she had written into his record the ban on long-distance driving. She had been writing something, not only the sick-note. He would ask that, too.

And the letter to the collective. Had she written it? Not that he any longer needed a letter. They knew him now in this place, Panarovka. He would come up for her funeral, perhaps … They would take him to the collective, he would meet the Evenks; go out with them to the herds, see this headman Innokenty.

Yes, it was shaping up.

He blew the light out and lay back. He had better do the driving himself tomorrow. He could stop where he wanted then, and do what he had to …

He had a sudden image of the Little Ghost river winding in the moonlight. He would need a spot to overturn the car afterwards; a broken neck had to be explained. He thought it over for some minutes and then stopped and eased himself down in the featherbed. There were plenty of spots, and there would be no problems. Yet he slept badly.

They were out at nine, still in the dark, despite ructions from the mother. ‘No, I am too busy this time,’ Komarova told her impatiently, and handed out perfunctory kisses. He received one himself from Viktoria, and shook hands with the old lady.

‘Let me drive,’ he said, at the car. ‘I am quite relaxed today.’

‘No, I don’t like to be driven. And get in quickly. She will send Viktoria out on some nonsense. Anything to delay me!’

He got in, and the reliable little bastard started immediately. Well, some other way …

She took off down to the river, and drove carefully on to it. ‘It’s even more slippery this morning — last night’s low temperature.’

This was true. In the headlights the river ice had a greasy sheen. He knew he had only about twenty minutes on it, twenty-five at the most, if she drove slowly.

‘Drive slowly,’ he said. ‘There were many sharp bends I noticed on the way in.’

‘I know them. And I trust myself more at the wheel than you. Your hands are shaking.’

‘Perhaps I am tireder than I thought.’

‘You are. You need your rest.’

‘Well, sometimes the patient isn’t the best judge.’

‘He never is. The drivers try and fool me — particularly after sick bay, when they want the long-distance jobs.’

‘Yes. Did you write it in my record — that I can’t drive long distances any more?’

‘I did. But I can change my mind,’ she said, the slight smile appearing.

Yes, but you won’t, he said silently. They had gone a kilometre. He decided to give it another eight, perhaps nine; halfway between the village and the Kolyma. He kept his eye on the clock.

‘Are you watching my speed?’

‘No. I didn’t know I was doing it. A habit of the job.’

‘Of the “boats”?’ She smiled again.

‘Yes. The boats … This seaman you mentioned, the Korean. You thought I looked like a Korean?’

‘Just a look. He had more hair than you.’ She glanced at him, still smiling. ‘A head of hair. With a pigtail, and a moustache. A very angry man.’

‘What was the matter with him?’

‘We thought yellow fever. But it wasn’t.’

‘Why was he angry?’

‘Frustration, mainly. He had almost no Russian. He kept shouting in Korean, bits of Japanese. We thought he wanted to go to Japan — he’d come from there. But it was Murmansk he wanted, and his ship.’

‘So he went there and sailed away?’

‘Yes. I suppose so. He went, anyway.’

‘And you heard nothing more?’

‘No.’ She steered carefully round a bend. ‘Not yet. They’ll acknowledge receipt in time. I discharge a patient from my district, they accept him in theirs. You can’t board a ship after a fever without a proper discharge; which they have first to accept. We get it with Russian sailors sometimes. They’re always slow with the paperwork, Murmansk.’

So something would come. Well, somebody else would deal with it. Two kilometres to go, he saw.

‘Can I smoke?’ he said.

‘You know I don’t permit smoking while I drive.’

‘Then stop for a minute. We’ll both have one.’

‘Don’t be silly, Kolya. You can wait.’

‘It’s true my hands are shaking. Look. A cigarette will pull me together. It confused me, that village. I was quite confused.’

‘So many Chukchees?’

‘Yes. And perhaps — your attitude.’ She had a scarf round her neck. It wouldn’t be in the way. An elbow crooked round the head, a hand at the base of the neck. ‘Stop a while and we’ll talk about it.’

‘I’ll drive, you talk,’ she said dryly.

He took his cigarettes out and opened the packet.

She glanced at him swiftly. ‘Put them away, Kolya. I told you!’

‘Stop the car,’ he said.

‘Don’t talk to me in that way!’ she said angrily.

‘Stop the car.’

‘What do you —’

He got a foot up and kicked both hers off the pedals, at the same time wrenching the wheel. The car slewed and hit the bank and he pulled on the handbrake, still fighting her for the wheel, and managed to steer it round, and again, two complete circles, before it bounced again off the bank, and slowed to a long slithering halt, aslant the track.

Her mouth was open, her face chalky in the reflected light of the headlamps.

‘What are you —’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘No, don’t! Don’t!’

He had an arm round her neck, could feel her breath.

‘It’s me! Understand! Kolya — it’s me you want! You’ve come here for me. For Rogachev — don’t you understand? Rogachev!’

Her head was crooked in his elbow, and he relaxed it slightly, staring at her. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I know who you are! I landed you from the ship. I waited for you! Idiot — fool! Let me go!’

He let her go and they stared at each other. Her mouth, her whole jaw was shaking, eyes still glassy with fright. ‘Were you going to kill me?’

‘Yes.’

They still stared at each other.

‘Where are the cigarettes?’ she said.

He found them under his feet, the packet crumpled. He found two whole ones, and lit them, one for him, and one for her.