Archangel

by Harris, Robert

  In the Russian provinces, every car is a potential taxi, most drivers willing to hire themselves out on the spur of the moment, and this one was no exception. He swerved towards them, throwing up a fountain of dirty snow, and even as he pulled up he was winding down his window. He looked respectable enough, muffled against the cold – a schoolteacher, maybe, a clerk. Weak eyes blinked at them through thick-framed spectacles. ‘Going to the concert hall?’

  ‘Do us a favour, citizen, and take us to the railway station,’ said Kelso. ‘Ten dollars US if we catch the Moscow train.’ He opened the passenger door without waiting for an answer and tipped forward the seat, shoving O’Brian into the back, and suddenly he saw that this was their chance, because the Russian, caught by surprise, had fallen behind slightly, and was making heavy progress through the snow with his case.

  ‘Comrade!’ he shouted.

  Kelso didn’t hesitate. He rammed back the seat and got in, slamming the door.

  ‘Don’t you want –’ began the driver, looking in his mirror.

  ‘No,’ said Kelso. ‘Go.’

  The Lada skidded away and he turned to look back. The Russian had set down his case and was staring after them, seemingly bewildered, a lost figure in the widening vista of the alien city. He dwindled and disappeared into the night and snow.

  ‘Can’t help but feel sorry for the poor bastard,’ said O’Brian, but Kelso’s only emotion was relief.

  ‘“Gratitude,”’ he said, quoting Stalin, ‘“is a dog’s disease.”’

  THE Archangel railway station was at the northern edge of a big square, directly opposite a huddle of apartment blocks and wind-blasted birch trees. O’Brian threw a $10 bill in the direction of the driver and they sprinted into the gloomy terminal. Seven wood-fronted ticket kiosks with net curtains, five of them closed, a long queue outside the two that were open, a baby crying. Students, backpackers, soldiers, people of all ages and races, families with their home-made luggage – huge cardboard boxes trussed with string – children running everywhere, sliding on the dirty, melted snow.

  O’Brian pushed his way to the front of the nearest line, spraying dollars, playing the westerner: ‘Sorry, lady. Excuse me. There you go. Sorry. Gotta catch this train –’

  Kelso had an impression of a fortune changing hands – three hundred, four hundred dollars, murmurs from the people standing round – and then, a minute later, O’Brian was striding back through the crowd, waving a pair of tickets, and they ran up the stairs to the platform.

  If they were going to be stopped then this would be the place. At least a dozen militia men were standing around, all of them young, all with their caps pushed back like Imperial Army privates off to war in 1914. They stared at Kelso and O’Brian as they hurried through the terminal, but it was no more than the frank stare that all foreigners received up here. They made no move to detain them.

  No alert had been issued. Whoever is running this show, thought Kelso, as they came back out into the open air, must be convinced we’re already dead –

  Doors were being closed all the way along the great train; it must have been a quarter of a mile long. Low yellow lighting, snow falling, lovers embracing, army officers hurrying up and down with their cheap briefcases – he felt they had stepped back seventy years into some revolutionary tableau. Even the giant locomotive still had the hammer and sickle welded to its side. They found their carriage, three cars back from the engine, and Kelso held the door open while O’Brian darted across the platform to one of the babushkas selling food for the journey. She had a wart on her cheek the size of a walnut. He was still stuffing his pockets as the whistle blew.

  The train pulled away so slowly it was hard at first to tell it was moving. People walked alongside it down the platform, heads bent into the snow, waving handkerchiefs. Others were holding hands through the open windows. Kelso had a sudden image of Anna Safanova here, almost fifty years ago – ‘I kiss mama’s dear cheeks, farewell to her, farewell to childhood’ – and the full sadness and the pity of it came home to him for the first time. The people ambling along the platform began to jog and then to run. He stretched out his hand and pulled O’Brian aboard. The train lurched forwards. The station disappeared.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  THEY SWAYED ALONG the narrow, blue-carpeted corridor until they found their compartment – one of eight, about halfway down the carriage. O’Brian pulled back the sliding wooden door and they lurched inside.

  It was not too bad. A thousand roubles per head in ‘soft’ class bought two dusty, crimson banquettes facing one another, a white nylon sheet, a rolled mattress and a pillow neatly folded on each; a lot of laminated, imitation-wood panelling; green-shaded reading lamps; a little fold-up table; privacy.

  Through the window they could see the spars of the iron bridge clicking past but once they were across the river there was nothing visible in the snowstorm except their own reflections staring back at them – haggard, soaking, unshaven. O’Brian drew the yellow curtains, unfastened the table and laid out their food – a grubby loaf, some kind of dried fish, a sausage, tea-bags – while Kelso went in search of hot water.

  A blackened samovar stood at the far end of the corridor, opposite the cubicle of the carriage’s female attendant, their provodnik: a hefty, unsmiling woman, like a camp guard in her grey-blue uniform. She had rigged up a little mirror so she could keep an eye on everyone without stirring from her stool. He could see her watching him as he stopped to study the timetable that was fixed to the wall. They had a journey of more than twenty hours ahead of them, and thirteen stops, not counting Moscow, which they would reach just after four in the afternoon.

  Twenty hours.

  What were their chances of lasting that long? He tried to calculate. By mid-morning at the latest, Moscow would know that the operation in the forest had been bungled. Then they would be bound to stop the only train out of Archangel and search it. Perhaps he and O’Brian would be wiser to get off at one of these earlier stops – Sokol, maybe, which they would reach at 7 a.m., or, better still, Vologda (Vologda was a big town) – get off the train at Vologda, get to a hotel, call the American Embassy –

  He heard a sliding door open behind him and a businessman in a smartly cut blue suit came out of his compartment and went in to the lavatory. His neatness made Kelso aware of his own bizarre appearance – heavy waterproof jacket, rubber boots – and he hurried on down the corridor. It would be best to stay out of sight as much as possible. He begged a couple of plastic cups off the grim-faced guard, filled them with scalding water, and made his way unsteadily back to their sleeping-berth.

  THEY sat opposite one another, chewing steadily on the dry, stale food.

  Kelso said he thought they should get off the train early.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t think we should risk being picked up. Not before people know where we are.’

  O’Brian bit off a piece of bread and considered this.

  ‘So you really think – back there in the forest – they’d’ve shot us?’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  O’Brian had apparently forgotten his earlier panic. He began to argue but Kelso cut him off impatiently. ‘Think about it for a minute. Think how easy it could have been. All the Russians would have had to say is that some maniac took us hostage in the woods and they sent in the special forces to rescue us. They could have made it look as though he’d murdered us.’

  ‘But nobody would’ve believed that –’

  ‘Of course they would. He was a psychopath.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A psychopath. This is why I didn’t want to bring him with us. Half the people in that cemetery, he put there. And there were others.’

  ‘Others?’ O’Brian had stopped eating.

  ‘At least five. A young Norwegian couple, and three other poor bastards, Russians who just happened to take a wrong turning. I found their papers while you were down at the river. They’d all been made to confess to spying, an
d then they were shot. I tell you, he’s a sick piece of work. I only hope to God I never have to see him again. So should you.’

  O’Brian seemed to be having difficulty swallowing. There were bits of fish stuck between his teeth. He said quietly, ‘What d’you think’s going to happen to him?’

  ‘They’ll get him in the end, I imagine. They’ll close down Archangel until they find him. And I don’t blame them, to be honest. Can you imagine what Mamantov and his people would do if they got hold of a man who looks like Stalin, talks like Stalin and comes with a written guarantee that he’s Stalin’s son? Wouldn’t they have had some fun with that?’

  O’Brian had slumped back in his seat, his eyes shut, his face stricken, and Kelso, watching him, felt a sudden twinge of unease. In the rush of events he had entirely forgotten Mamantov. His gaze shifted from O’Brian to the wire luggage rack where the satchel was still carefully wrapped inside his jacket.

  He tried to think, but he couldn’t. His mind was shutting down on him. It was three days since he’d had a proper sleep – the first night he’d sat up with Rapava, the second he’d ended in the cells beneath Moscow militia HQ, the third had been spent on the road travelling north to Archangel. He ached with exhaustion. It was all he could do to kick off his boots and begin making up his meagre bed.

  ‘I’m all in,’ he said. ‘Let’s work something out in the morning.’

  O’Brian didn’t answer.

  As a flimsy precaution, Kelso locked the door.

  IT must have been another twenty minutes before O’Brian finally moved. Kelso had his face to the wall by then and was drifting in the hinterland between sleep and wakefulness. He heard him unlace his boots, sigh and stretch out on the banquette. His reading lamp clicked off and the compartment was in darkness save for the blue neon night light that fizzed above the door.

  The immense train rocked slowly southwards through the snow and Kelso slept, but not well. Hours passed and the sounds of the journey mingled with his uneasy dreams – the urgent whisperings from the compartments on either side; the slop slop slop of some babushka’s slippers as she shuffled past in the corridor; the distant, tinny sound of a woman’s voice over a loudspeaker as they stopped at the remote stations throughout the night – Nyandoma, Konosha, Yertsevo, Vozhega, Kharovsk – and people clumping on and off the train; the harsh white arc lights of the platforms shining through the thin curtains; O’Brian restless at some point, moving around.

  He didn’t hear the door open. All he knew was that something rustled in the compartment for a fraction of a second, and then a hard pad of flesh clamped down over his mouth. His eyes jerked open as the point of a knife began to be inserted into his throat, at that point where the flesh of the under-jaw meets the ridged tube of the windpipe. He struggled to sit up but the hand pressed him down. His arms were somehow pinned beneath the twisted sheet. He couldn’t see anyone but a voice whispered close to his ear – so close he could feel the hot wetness of the man’s breath – ‘A comrade who deserts a comrade is a cowardly dog, and all such dogs should die a dog’s death, comrade –’

  The knife slid deeper.

  KELSO was awake in an instant – a cry rising in his throat, his eyes wide, the thin sheet balled and clenched between his sweating hands. The gently swaying compartment was empty above him, the blue-edged darkness faintly tinged by grey. For a moment he didn’t move. He could hear O’Brian breathing heavily and when eventually he turned he could see him – head lolling, mouth open, one arm flung down almost to the floor, the other crooked across his forehead.

  It took another couple of minutes for his panic to subside. He reached over his shoulder and lifted a corner of the curtain to check his watch. He thought it must be still the middle of the night, but to his surprise it was just after seven. He had slept for the best part of nine hours.

  He raised himself up on to his elbow and pushed the curtain a fraction higher and saw at once the head of Stalin floating towards him, disconnected in the pale dawn beside the railway track. It drew level with the window and passed away very quickly.

  He stayed at the window but saw nobody else, just the scrubby land beyond the rails and the faint gleam of the electricity lines strung between the pylons seeming to swoop and rise, swoop and rise as the train trundled on. It wasn’t snowing here, but there was a cold, bleached emptiness to the emerging sky.

  Someone must have been holding up a picture, he realised. Holding up a picture of Stalin.

  He let the curtain drop and swung his legs to the floor. Quietly, so as not to wake O’Brian, he tugged on his rubber boots and cautiously opened the door to the empty corridor. He peered both ways. Nobody about. He closed the latch behind him and began walking towards the rear of the train.

  He passed through an empty carriage identical to the one he had just left, all the while glancing at the passing landscape, and then ‘soft’ class gave way to ‘hard’. The accommodation here was much more crowded – two tiers of berths in open compartments down one side of the corridor, a single row arranged lengthwise on the other. Sixty people to a car. Luggage crammed everywhere. Some passengers sitting up, yawning, raw-eyed. Others still snoring, impervious to the waking carriage. People queuing for the stinking toilet. A mother changing a baby’s filthy nappy (he caught the sour reek of milky faeces as he pushed past). The smokers huddled at the open windows at the far end of the carriage. The scent of their untipped tobacco. The sweet coldness of the rushing air.

  He went through four ‘hard’ carriages and was on the threshold of the fifth, and had decided this would be the last – had concluded he was worrying about nothing: he must have dreamt it, the countryside was empty – when he saw another picture. Or, rather, he realised it was a pair of pictures coming towards him, one of Stalin, the other of Lenin, being held aloft by an elderly couple, the man wearing medals, standing on a slight embankment. The train was slowing for a station and he could see them clearly as he passed – creased and leathery faces, almost brown, exhausted. And a couple of seconds later he saw them turn, suddenly years younger, smiling and waving at someone they had just seen in the carriage Kelso was about to enter.

  Time seemed to decelerate, dreamily, along with the train. A line of railway workers in quilted jackets, leaning on their pick-axes and shovels, raised their gloved fists in salute. The carriage darkened as it drew alongside a platform. He could hear music, faintly, above the metallic scrape of the brakes – the old Soviet national anthem again –

  Party of Lenin!

  Party of Stalin!

  – and a small band in pale blue uniforms slid past the window.

  The train stopped with a sigh of pneumatics and he saw a sign: VOLOGDA. People were cheering on the platform. People were running. He opened the door to the carriage and there facing him was the Russian, still in his father’s uniform, asleep, sitting no more than a dozen paces away, his suitcase wedged in the rack above his head, a clear space all around him, passengers standing back, respectful, watching.

  The Russian was beginning to wake. His head stirred. He batted something away from his face with his hand and his eyes flickered open. He saw that he was being observed and carefully, warily, he straightened his back. Someone in the carriage started to clap and the applause was taken up by the others, spreading outside to the platform where people had crammed up against the window to watch. The Russian stared around him, the fear in his eyes giving way to bewilderment. A man nodded encouragingly at him, smiling, clapping, and he slowly nodded back, as if gradually beginning to understand some strange foreign ritual, and then he started to applaud softly in return, which only increased the volume of adulation. He nodded modestly and Kelso imagined he must have spent thirty years dreaming of this moment. Really, comrades, his expression seemed to say, I am only one of you – a plain man, rough in my ways – but if venerating me in some way gives you pleasure –

  He wasn’t aware of Kelso watching him – the historian was just another face in the crowd – and after a fe
w seconds Kelso turned and began fighting his way back through the jostling throng.

  His mind was in a turmoil.

  The Russian must have got on board the train in Archangel, a minute or so after them – that was conceivable, if he had copied what they’d done and flagged down a car. That he could understand.

  But this?

  He knocked into a woman who was pushing her way roughly along the corridor, struggling with a pair of carrier bags, a red flag and an old camera.

  He said to her, ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? Stalin’s son is with us! It’s a miracle!’ She couldn’t stop smiling. Some of her teeth were metal.

  ‘But how do you know?’

  ‘It’s been on the television,’ she said, as if this settled matters. ‘All night! And when I woke, his picture was still there and they were saying he’d been seen on the Moscow train!’

  Someone pushed into her from behind and she was pitched into him. His face was very close to hers. He tried to disentangle himself but she clutched on to him, staring hard into his eyes.

  ‘But you,’ she said, ‘you know all this! You were on the television, saying it was true!’ She threw her heavy arms around him. Her bags jabbed into his back. ‘Thank you. Thank you. It’s a miracle!’

  He could see a bright, white light moving along the platform behind her head and he scrambled past her. A television light. Television cameras. Big grey microphones. Technicians walking backwards, stumbling over one another. And in the middle of this mêlée, striding ahead towards his destiny, talking confidently, surrounded by a phalanx of black-jacketed bodyguards, was Vladimir Mamantov.

  IT took Kelso several minutes to claw and squeeze his way back through the crowds. When he opened the door to their compartment O’Brian had his back to him and was staring through the window. At the sound of Kelso entering, he wheeled round quickly, his hands up, his palms outwards – pre-emptive, guilty, apologetic.