The Englishman

by David Gilman

  50

  The four-inch gash on Raglan’s flank needed stitching but it was obvious he couldn’t report to the infirmary. One of the men in the dormitory was an ex-army medic who knew enough about battlefield wounds to clean and suture. There was no means of anaesthetizing the cut and Raglan knew that the men who gathered around his bedside watching the medic sluice the wound and then pierce the skin were waiting to see just how tough the tattooed killer was. Raglan winced as the needle pierced the raw skin, but kept his intake of breath shallow enough not to be thought a weakling. His reputation had already been boosted by winning the fight and the gathered men offered their cigarettes and tea rations as a gesture of admiration and desire for his patronage.

  Raglan kept his head and torso turned away and prayed that swabbing the wound did not smudge the tattoo that crept up his side and on to his stomach. The stinging nerve ends brought a tear to his eyes, and the men winced and grimaced in sympathy. The medic prisoner pulled Yefimov’s hand holding the candle closer to where he worked on the wound. When the siren wailed for ‘lights out’ it was a literal command which meant that they switched the electricity off. The medic muttered about fighting in Afghanistan and looking after Russian soldiers in the field, telling Raglan that this cut, this was nothing. Barely a scratch. He dabbed the wound again with harsh disinfectant stolen from the kitchen and Raglan cringed from its sting. The medic grinned. If tough gangland guys like Regnev had ever served in a war, then he would know what being hurt was about. Raglan stayed silent. The Russian admired his work and bound the wound with a broad bandage, contraband from the hospital wing, which he wrapped firmly around Raglan’s torso.

  When he’d finished, the men drifted away and Yefimov sat next to Raglan. ‘You have to stay on work detail; there must be nothing said of this. Matveyev’s injuries will be noted and probably written up as a workshop accident. No one in authority wants to report unrest in a camp. A personal disagreement is acceptable to them.’ He studied Raglan as he tugged out a bottle of pills from his jacket pocket. ‘Antibiotics. You will need them for your wound. I traded for these myself.’ He shook out two of the tablets and handed Raglan a tin cup of water. ‘You’ll feel shit for a few days but at least you won’t die of blood poisoning or infection.’ Raglan swallowed the antibiotics as Yefimov put the bottle next to him on the bedside table. ‘Take them every day, tovarich. I am still responsible for watching your back and if you die of sepsis, then my dick is on the block.’

  Raglan nodded his thanks and lay gingerly on the pillow. The wound hurt now that his body had rid itself of adrenaline. The battering he had taken would stiffen his muscles and slow him down. There was still much to do before he could escape and it seemed ever more unlikely that he would survive the attempt.

  ‘You beat a man who was feared even among the murderers imprisoned here,’ said his minder. ‘Men will turn to you for protection now and you will be looked after. Extra food and rations will be given to you.’

  ‘I won’t be here long enough. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘You’re a fool, Daniil Regnev. No one gets out of here. They have dogs and trackers. They have vehicles that chew up the snow. By the end of the week, it will be waist deep out there. What chance do you have?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Raglan. His eyes closed, and he fell asleep. In less than three hours he would be expected outside for roll call.

  Yefimov watched Raglan’s breathing settle. He had to decide how much he would tell the deputy governor about the night’s events. Whatever was going on between him and Raglan it all pointed to a business that Yefimov wanted to avoid being drawn into. As he considered his own term of imprisonment, he felt a glimmer of something that had died within him years before. If a man escaped and survived, he carried the desire and hopes of every man in the camp. Yefimov laid a fatherly hand on the sleeping man, then pulled the blanket over him.

  *

  Roll call was no different from any other day except that when Matveyev’s name was called, the section guard told the parade officer he was in the infirmary following an accident in the workshop. The officer readily accepted the explanation. No one said anything different and the work parties formed up and shuffled out of the gate. Raglan’s wound felt raw and the skin tugged at his muscles, insisting he bend into the pain. If he did that he would be noticed, so he forced himself to stay upright and let the nerve ends torment him.

  Kirill began swinging the axe but edged deeper into the undergrowth. He brushed snow from a fallen tree and gestured for Raglan to rest.

  ‘What about our quota?’ said Raglan.

  Kirill smiled. ‘Rest up. We have ways of cheating. Come on, sit. No good you working today, you’ll tear the stitches.’

  Raglan glanced to where the guard sat in his usual place, now half obscured by brush and saplings. He leant his back against the log and felt the relief on his side. Kirill kicked aside cut brush and then tugged more branches free to expose a half-dozen logs ready to be dragged away.

  ‘Some days we work extra hard, cut more than our quota. We keep it hidden for the days when we need to back off. Sometimes you’re sick or just too pissed off to work as hard as they want you to. We’ve got enough here to knock off for a few hours. I’ll do some brush clearing.’

  Raglan nodded, pleased that there were shortcuts even in prison. He looked up at the sky: the clouds were settling low, laden with their burden of snow, borne down from Siberia and ready to dump it on the camp.

  ‘Some today, more tomorrow and then a day of blue skies again. We live for a blue sky,’ said Kirill as he rhythmically swung the axe, reading the fighter’s thoughts. ‘You’ll see, the months of being caged in the near darkness kills men. Not many commit suicide, most of these prisoners are too tough for that, but it gets to some people. I don’t find it so bad. In fact, I see it as beautiful. The snow comes, smothers the world and its sins; the blue sky follows like the archangel’s light and the world looks pristine. You’ll work in the yard tomorrow and cut these logs into planks. It’s too early in the winter for anyone to put their arm in the bandsaw.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens. The shock usually kills them.’

  ‘You’re going to the house tomorrow?’

  Raglan’s question caused an almost imperceptible pause in Kirill’s rhythm. He stopped and dragged a sleeve across his brow.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do something for me,’ said Raglan.

  Kirill looked as though he was about to face a firing squad. ‘What?’

  ‘When you leave the house tomorrow night, don’t fasten the latch on the pantry window.’

  51

  When the work party returned to the camp Raglan approached the section guard in a small end-of-corridor booth where he sat behind a wooden table, close to a cast-iron radiator. He requested permission to make a phone call. He was questioned as to the who and the why and the guard filled in an official camp form with Raglan’s answers. Prisoner Regnev needed to contact his brother because their mother was ill and would soon be taken to hospital. It was a worrying time and, because of the distance from where his brother lived, almost impossible for him to receive any visitors.

  The guard wasn’t interested in why this murderer needed to talk to a family member and suppressed any comment expressing doubt that such a man even had a mother. He opened a shallow drawer, took out a rubber stamp and ink pad, laboriously pressed rather than stamped the official imprint on the form and then put everything back in the drawer. Perhaps the guards needed to kill time as well, thought Raglan as the man tore a piece of scrap paper and pushed it forward with a pencil stub.

  ‘The number.’

  Raglan wrote the area code and number and the guard lifted his telephone receiver and recited the information. The camp’s switchboard operator must have repeated back the information as the guard confirmed everything with a few grunts. After he replaced the handset, he pointed to a room. Raglan stepped inside. It was unfurnished except for a bench close to a booth that
had a thick glass window halfway up, set at a height to accommodate a prisoner sitting on the inside. When Yefimov had shown him around the camp he had told him that this was where the visitors sat. The prisoner was brought into the booth and communicated through the two-way telephone. A guard was always present. There was no privacy and no means of physical contact. And no matter how far the prisoner’s relative had travelled they were allowed only one hour.

  ‘There,’ said the guard, who had followed him into the room, pointing to a phone on the wall. ‘Wait.’

  Raglan stood next to the phone as the guard settled himself in the chair by the door and pulled free a folded newspaper and began reading. Raglan stood patiently for ten minutes and then the phone rang once. He picked up the receiver and listened for the connection to be made.

  ‘Konstantin, is that you?… Yes… Yes, it’s me, Daniil… Oh, I’m all right… It’s hard but they treat us well here…’ Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the guard raise an eyebrow at his remark. It was always worth praising the pig-ignorant bastards who beat you. ‘Konstantin, how is Mother… Oh… Oh… I see… Well… It’s snowing here as well, in fact, tomorrow will be heavy but I’m told the day after it should be clear… Oh, you too?… Yes, you’re right, after then I won’t be able to be outside…’

  Raglan knew he didn’t have long. Turning his back to the guard he listened and nodded to what was being said on the phone. The guard folded the newspaper. Raglan spoke rapidly, obscuring his true meaning. The guard walked towards him. ‘Yes, exactly as I have said, Konstantin. Take Mother to the lake while the weather is still good. Tell her my thoughts are with her and I will hold her hand and we will look at the blue sky together.’

  The guard tapped him on the shoulder with the folded newspaper. Time was up.

  ‘Konstantin, I have to go now. Give Mother my love and I hope to see you soon. Goodbye.’

  *

  Yefimov knelt, easing wood shavings into the dormitory’s stove and as they caught from the match, he fed in dry offcuts from the carpentry shop, then patiently built the fire up with chopped wood. It was already dark outside and the silent feathers of snow swirled beneath the sphere of the camp’s street lights.

  Raglan sat on his bunk while the Afghan war medic unwound the bandage and checked the wound. ‘What do we do tomorrow in the yard if it’s snowing heavily?’

  Yefimov stared a moment longer at his carefully laid fire. ‘We chop timber and stack it in the wood stores. This place needs as much as we can get for winter. We’ve almost got enough, I reckon. And then, as usual, they’ll cut back the meat ration because we won’t be working as hard.’

  The medic sniffed and jabbed the livid edges of the wound.

  ‘Why don’t you try and make it hurt even more?’ said Raglan.

  ‘Good,’ said the medic, ‘it’s supposed to hurt. It’s healing. Stay out of trouble and you’ll be all right.’ He magicked a fresh bandage and dressing from his pocket, tore open the sterile dressing and pressed it against the wound. ‘Hold this.’

  Raglan reached around his arm and did as the medic instructed, who then wound the bandage.

  ‘Make it tight,’ said Raglan.

  ‘You don’t want it too tight,’ the medic answered, ‘it’ll press against the sutures.’

  ‘It’ll help me move better,’ Raglan insisted.

  The medic shrugged and did as he was bid. ‘The Christmas dance isn’t for a couple of months yet.’

  ‘I have some heavy lifting to do tomorrow,’ countered Raglan.

  The medic got up from the bed and warmed his hands next to the stove even though there was barely enough heat from the freshly lit fire. ‘If he does too much, he’ll bleed. Who’s to say the guards won’t notice?’ he said, addressing the older man.

  Yefimov glanced up. He was now sitting on the edge of his bed, changing his socks. ‘It’s his choice. What am I, his fucking nursemaid?’

  ‘I’m just saying, is all.’

  ‘And I’m just saying to mind your own business,’ Yefimov snapped back.

  The medic raised his hands in surrender and left the dormitory.

  ‘We need to eat,’ said Yefimov as he finished lacing his boots.

  Raglan buttoned his shirt and reached for his jacket, but as he went to pass Yefimov, the man stuck his leg out to stop him.

  ‘Kirill tells me you want him to do something for you.’

  ‘I thought he might keep such a thing to himself.’

  ‘He won’t blab, but he comes to me out of respect.’

  ‘There was nothing I could tell you without implicating you and I didn’t want to do that.’

  The old man lowered his leg and laced his boot. ‘Whatever you have planned, Regnev, I cannot help you. You work tomorrow same as everyone. No favours.’

  *

  The snow duly arrived the next morning as predicted. After roll call, the men tucked their necks into their uniform collars against the wet flakes and then peeled away quickly to the canteen for breakfast. The snow was not yet heavy enough to stop the work parties going out, but once breakfast was finished, and with Raglan’s partner Kirill absent on his house duty, Yefimov kept Raglan in the work yard. A small group of men manhandled cut timber, two to a log. One man took the front, the other the rear, then they manhandled the log on to a set of steel ribs. At the other side of these ribs, two more prisoners waited next to a moving belt. The man at the front pressed a foot pedal and the hydraulic ribs hissed and clanked as they lifted and rolled the log down on to the belt next to the two men. As each man arrested the log’s momentum against their thigh, they fed the log forward into the whirring blade. As a plank of wood was cut from the log, the first two men retrieved what was left of the sawn log and repeated the operation over again until the log-cutters had sliced the final plank. And then another log was fed to them. The slow, monotonous routine created a steady pace that would take the men through their workload under Yefimov’s watchful eye. The watchtower guards cast only an occasional glance towards the work party inside the wire, their attention focused on those working at the forest’s edge.

  ‘You and him,’ said Yefimov, pointing to another prisoner. ‘Take the planks and you stack them over there. Can you manage that, tough guy?’

  Raglan lifted one end of a plank and followed the other man’s lead. The long plank was easily manageable and caused little stress on his wound. They settled the plank in an open-fronted woodshed that abutted one of the inner perimeter fences. After an hour’s toil, the astringent stickiness of the resin stuck to Raglan’s hands. Raglan’s work partner saw Yefimov’s nod of dismissal and stepped away to relieve himself against the side of the building.

  ‘Here,’ said the old killer to Raglan as he stepped into a woodshed. Raglan followed. Yefimov lit a cigarette and watched the smoke drift away. ‘Wind’s shifting from the east. More snow tonight. It’ll get colder.’ He glanced towards the watchtowers. ‘It’s a blind spot here.’

  Raglan checked. The corner of the building and the low roof of the woodshed obscured the watchtower guards’ view.

  Yefimov stuck the cigarette between his lips, bent down and heaved free one of the broad slats from the wood store’s wall. It was as wide as the planks that Raglan had been stacking. Once the first slat had been removed the one below it came away easily. Raglan saw that no one outside the woodshed could see the missing planks. A double-blind. Without being beckoned he stooped and pushed himself through the gap. Half a metre behind the woodshed the wire fence was loose enough to crawl under. He crawled back inside. Yefimov pushed the slats back in place.

  ‘You would have to clear seventy metres across open ground until you reach the next fence. Did you see that workshop?’

  Raglan nodded.

  ‘If a man used those oil drums next to it to get on to the roof, then he could jump down across that wire fence. He would need a blanket to throw on the barbed wire and it’s three metres to the ground. A man with an injury might not make it.’


  ‘I think he would,’ said Raglan. ‘The bigger problem is that there’s a dog run on the other side. I saw it when I was brought in.’

  Yefimov nodded. ‘They are silent attack dogs. They don’t bark. They have had their vocal cords cut. The dogs would tear a man apart and only his screams would be heard.’

  ‘I need a knife.’

  ‘You think you can kill an attack dog?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Da, of course you could. A killer like you would slaughter their own mother if it benefited them. No, Regnev, you don’t kill these dogs, or in this case one dog. There’s only one in that run. The first thing the guards see is blood on the snow and the crows fighting over its carcass. You want to buy as much time before roll call and have a chance to escape, you give it meat. They are hungry all the time. Uncooked meat is better than human flesh. For a few minutes anyway.’

  Raglan waited as Yefimov sucked the last of the cigarette’s smoke into his lungs and ground out the stub beneath his boot. A few moments passed.

  ‘I can get meat. Someone in the guards’ kitchen owes me.’

  ‘Why are you helping me?’

  ‘I have my reasons.’

  ‘Which are?’

  Yefimov averted his eyes. The two men were still in the woodshed but he looked somewhere beyond the unseen horizon. ‘One man escapes, we are all free.’ He faced Raglan and tapped his chest. ‘In here at least.’

  52

  Raglan slept until two in the morning. The years spent in the Legion had taught him to awake at an appointed time. He dressed in the near darkness, checking that his wound was still bound tightly. The stove seeped warmth into the barrack room but most of the men slept half dressed beneath their inadequate bedding. That night Raglan slept in his underwear, wanting to feel the benefit of his clothing when he faced the bitter journey to the house and the unsuspecting JD.

  Yefimov was the only figure who moved in the gloom. He freed himself from beneath the blankets and pushed his feet into a worn pair of slippers. They scuffed across the wooden floor as he shuffled over to Raglan.