by Sam Eastland
Kirov tapped the passbook in his chest pocket. “If my friends were any higher, Comrade Kasinec, they would die from lack of oxygen.”
IT WAS AFTER DARK when Sergeant Gramotin and the six guards he had ordered to accompany him trudged out of the camp.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” asked one of the guards. “Going after those savages at night?”
Gramotin did not reply. He was so disgusted with the way his men had behaved when the attack broke out that he could not bring himself to answer their stupid questions. If they had performed as Gramotin had trained them, not a single convict would have escaped and the Ostyaks would now be lying dead in a heap in the middle of the compound. Instead, his men had fled en masse to the guardhouse and barricaded themselves inside. He would have liked to execute the whole lot of them on the spot, and except for the fact that this would have required at least two of the guards to help him with the paperwork afterwards, since Gramotin could not read or write, he would have killed them all by now.
For Gramotin the only bright spot in this otherwise shameful and disastrous day was that Klenovkin had shot himself. Dead men made excellent scapegoats, and now the blame for the escape could rest entirely with Klenovkin. Had he lived, the commandant would have wasted no time blaming someone else for the catastrophe and Gramotin knew full well that it would have been him.
Gramotin realized, however, that this did not let him off the hook entirely. As sergeant of the guard, he was obliged to account for his actions. In his mind Gramotin had already voyaged ahead to the hearing which would undoubtedly take place. The first question they would ask, those stone-faced functionaries of the Dalstroy inquiry board, would be if he had made any attempt to pursue the men who escaped. If his answer was no, the inquiry would convict him of negligence. That would be the end of his career and probably his life as well.
This was why Gramotin had decided to set out now, even though he had serious doubts as to whether he and his men were any match for the combined force of those sunburned, reindeer-herding primitives and the tattooed Comitati, whom he despised every bit as much as they loathed him.
After an hour of marching, they came to the place where the Ostyak sleds had turned into the woods. The snow was deeper here and the going made harder for Gramotin by two ammunition bandoliers he carried crisscrossed over his chest. By holding a candle lamp in front of him, he was able to see the sled tracks, even though they were now almost covered by the falling snow.
After a few dozen paces, Gramotin stopped to catch his breath. “All right,” he wheezed, “two minutes’ rest, but no more.” It was at this point that Gramotin realized he was alone.
The other guards were still back on the road.
Gramotin raised the lantern. Shadows seesawed through the trees, obscuring his view of the soldiers. “What’s wrong?” he shouted. “Why have you stopped?”
“You can’t expect us to chase them into the forest,” called one of the guards.
“And in the middle of the night,” another man chimed in.
“That is exactly what I expect! If we wait until morning, they’ll be too far away to catch. Now then! Who is with me?”
The only reply he received was the sound of wind through the tops of the trees, like static on a radio.
Cursing wildly, Gramotin made his way back to the road and discovered, to his astonishment, that his men had disappeared. Their footsteps in the snow showed that they were already on their way back to camp. “Bastards!” he howled into the dark.
The darkness swallowed his words.
In that moment, he realized how much he missed Platov. “Platov would have stayed with me,” muttered Gramotin. When he thought of the dead man, kneeling in a pool of his own blood, tears flooded into Gramotin’s eyes. Angrily he wiped them away with the rough wool of his glove. I will kill them for this, he decided. I will kill them all, guards and prisoners alike, starting with Inspector Pekkala.
Alone, he turned and trudged back up the trail, following the Ostyaks, the frail glow of his lamp growing fainter as the trees closed up around him.
KIROV’S EMKA SKIDDED to a halt outside the control room of Afanasiev airport, a small installation reserved for military flights.
He had followed Stationmaster Kasinec’s directions to the nearest airfield, only a five-minute drive north of the V-4 railway station.
“I will notify the airfield you are coming!” Kasinec had shouted as Kirov got into his car. “I’ll tell them you are bound for Vladivostok!”
Out on the runway, a plane had just taxied into position, ready for takeoff. The machine was painted green, with red stars on its wings and tail. It had a long cockpit canopy to accommodate both a pilot and a navigator/gunner.
Kirov cut his engine, bolted from the car, and ran inside the control room.
The traffic controller sat behind a radio, mouse-eared by a large set of headphones. “Are you Kirov?”
“Yes,” he gasped.
“He’s waiting for you,” shouted the controller. “Go!”
As Kirov ran out to the plane, the pilot leaned out of the cockpit and pointed to a fur-lined flying suit draped over the wing. “Put it on and get in.”
Kirov did as he was told. The suit smelled of old tobacco smoke, and its cuffs and elbows were tarnished black from use. He climbed into the rear seat of the plane, which faced towards the tail.
“Buckle your straps!” shouted the pilot.
The straps lay on the seat, tangled like a nest of snakes, and Kirov was still trying to figure out how they worked when the engine roared and the plane lurched forward.
Seconds later, they were climbing steeply into the night sky.
“POSKREBYSHEV!”
“Damn,” muttered the secretary. He had been almost out the door when Stalin’s voice crackled through the intercom. The Boss had already made him stay late and now Poskrebyshev wondered if he would be here all night, as had happened many times before. Cautiously, he pressed the intercom button. “Yes, Comrade Stalin?”
“How many bars of gold do you think a man could carry?”
Poskrebyshev had no idea. He had never seen a bar of gold before. He imagined them to be small and thin, like slabs of chocolate.
“Poskrebyshev!”
“I would say …” He paused. “Twenty?”
“You idiot! No one can carry that much.”
Poskrebyshev tried to imagine why on earth Stalin would be asking him such a question. Most of the time, even when Stalin’s ideas struck him as insane, Poskrebyshev was still able to glimpse some logic behind the insanity. This was, for Poskrebyshev, the most frightening aspect of working for Stalin—that the musings of the great man, even though they sometimes filled his mind with terror at their implications, were nonetheless easy to follow. But this Poskrebyshev could not fathom, and as innocent as the act of carrying a bar of gold might seem to be, he knew that what lay at the end of Stalin’s train of thought was blood and pain and death. All he could hope for was that it might not be his own. “Ten!” Poskrebyshev blurted out. “I meant to say ten bars.”
A sigh drifted over the intercom. “Go home. You are no help at all, Poskrebyshev.”
Poskrebyshev gestured rudely at the intercom. Then he went home for his supper.
IT WAS AFTER DARK WHEN Kolchak’s sled returned from the east, having found nothing that resembled the cliff Tarnowski had described.
Grim and silent, Kolchak remained on the tracks, staring into the darkness while he waited for Tarnowski to come back.
At last Tarnowski appeared. He and the Ostyak were half frozen. Together with the reindeer, they looked more like ghosts than living things under their crust of snow. Tarnowski stumbled off the sled and collapsed by the fire, where his clothes immediately began to steam. “I found it!” he said, the words barely decipherable through his locked jaw and chattering teeth.
For the first time Pekkala had seen, Lavrenov smiled. In that moment, the years of prison life, which had drained the
blood from his face, deadened his eyes, and creased his skin like a blunt knife drawn through butter, all fell away. For a moment, he looked young again.
Kolchak pulled Tarnowski aside. “Did you do as I told you? Did you travel past the place before you turned around?”
“Yes, just as you ordered, Colonel. The Ostyaks do not know where it is hidden.”
“All right,” he said, releasing his grip upon Tarnowski’s arm. Then he nodded with approval. “Very good, Lieutenant.”
The Ostyaks brought out the rabbits they had shot. Keeping one for themselves, they handed the other to Kolchak.
The Ostyaks skinned their rabbit. Slicing the flesh from its bones, they ate it raw, tearing at the rose-colored meat.
Kolchak watched them with a combination of hunger and disgust.
Seeing that the colonel was about to give up and go hungry, Pekkala borrowed a knife from one of the Ostyaks and used it to cut two wide strips of bark from a white birch tree. He curled one of them to form a cylinder and laced it together with the piece of string which served as a belt for his quilted trousers. He sewed the other piece of bark around the base to form a container and filled it with snow. Next Pekkala gathered some stones from the railroad tracks and put them in the fire. When the stones were hot, he scooped them from the flames and let them fall into the container, immediately plunging his hand into the snow to stop the skin from burning. In a couple of minutes, the snow in the container had melted. By shifting the stones back and forth from the fire to the snow, Pekkala was able to boil the water in less than half an hour. When the meat was cooked, Pekkala divided it among the four men. They sat by the fire, puffing clouds of steam as they devoured the scalding shreds of flesh.
From the other side of the fire, the Ostyaks watched and whispered to each other.
After the meal, Kolchak leaned over to Pekkala. “You are shivering,” he said.
Pekkala nodded. Even this close to the fire, he had to clench his teeth to stop them from chattering. The quilted telogreika jacket he had been issued was already several generations old when he arrived at Borodok. It had been repaired so many times that there were more patches showing than original cloth. These telogreikas were efficient only until they got wet. After that the only hope was to dry them over a fire or to wait for a layer of ice to form over the outer surface of the cloth, which would then act as a windbreak. Pekkala’s jacket was so old that neither option worked. The cotton padding had been soaked and dried so many times that it no longer retained the heat of his body. In his daily life at the camp, Pekkala had always been able to retreat to the kitchen and warm up next to the stove, but this journey had chilled him to the bone.
“Here,” said Kolchak, unbuttoning his own jacket and handing it to Pekkala. “Take it, Inspector. It’s the least I can do in exchange for a cooked meal in this wilderness.”
“Much as I would like to, I cannot accept it.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll just end up freezing instead.”
“Look!” Kolchak opened the flap of his jacket, revealing a fur vest he was wearing underneath. “I will be fine, and I need you alive, Pekkala. There are too few of us left as it is.”
Gratefully, Pekkala traded garments. He had not even done up the buttons before he felt the warmth trickling through his veins.
“Don’t worry, Pekkala,” said Kolchak, slapping him on the shoulder, “it won’t be long before you’re wearing decent clothes again, sleeping in a bed instead of on the ground, and eating with a knife and fork, all in the company of friends.”
Pekkala nodded and smiled, but the mention of friends sent a wave of sadness through his mind as he thought of Kirov and the potted plant jungle he had made of their office, the meals he had prepared each Friday afternoon, the pleas for Pekkala to buy his coats from any other place but Linsky’s. It twisted in him like a knife that he had never been able to thank Kirov for the time they’d spent working together.
Pekkala was jolted from these thoughts by one of the Ostyaks, who approached him wearing the blood-smeared pelts of the rabbits tucked into his belt. The man squatted down beside Pekkala and picked up the container he had used for boiling the meat. “You made this?” he asked, carefully shaping the unfamiliar words with his thin and sunburned lips.
Pekkala nodded.
“Where did you learn how?” asked the man.
“I taught myself. I had to. I used to live here.”
“Lived? In the camp?”
“No,” explained Pekkala, taking in the forest with a sweep of his arm. “Here.”
The Ostyak smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No man lives here.”
Pekkala pressed the flat of his hand upon the pelt he had cut from the rabbit. Then he raised his arm, like a man about to take an oath, showing his palm and fingers red with the gore of the dead animal. “Do you remember me now?” he asked. “I used to be the man with the bloody hands.”
For a moment, the Ostyak only stared at him. Then he made a noise in his throat, got up, and walked away. The Ostyak sat down among his friends and they began another whispered conversation, glancing now and then towards Pekkala.
He wished he could explain to them that the one man they really had to fear was nowhere near this forest.
How distant Stalin must seem to them, thought Pekkala. How safe they must feel in their hideaways out on the tundra, with only wolves and each other for company. But Stalin would learn of their betrayal, and he would bring his vengeance down upon them. Perhaps not for a year, or several years, but he would never forget. And what the Ostyaks could not fathom, even in their nightmares, was that Stalin would hunt them to extinction. He would tear their world to pieces, rather than let them go free.
At last, the exhaustion of the day began to overtake him. As Pekkala’s eyes drooped shut, the last thing he saw was a gust of sparks from the fire, skittering away across the snow as if some phantom blacksmith were hammering hot steel upon an anvil.
ALL NIGHT, Gramotin marched through the forest.
It was no longer snowing. The moon appeared through shredded clouds, filling the forest with blue shadows.
When the candle burned out in Gramotin’s lantern, he threw it away and pressed on, following the blurred furrows of the Ostyak sleds, which he found that he could see by moonlight.
As Gramotin scrambled through the drifts, his energy began to fade. From his pocket, he removed a paika ration he had taken from the kitchen the day before. Gnawing into the tough, gritty bread, he felt guilty. The truth was, although Gramotin stole these rations all the time, normally he never actually ate them. Instead, he would give them out to those convicts whose conduct irritated him less than usual on that particular day.
Gramotin’s reasons for handing out the bread were complicated, even to himself. In his years as a sergeant of the guards at Borodok, he had learned that the best way to rule effectively over the prisoners was to be known as a man who could, on occasion, exhibit faint signs of humanity, instead of living as a sadist every minute of his life. These acts of generosity, small as they were, gave the inmates of Borodok hope that if they did as they were told, they might, as a bare possibility, receive treatment slightly less than barbaric.
Ruling over the guards was a more complicated proposition. Kindness did not work on them. They were like a pack of dogs who would obey Gramotin as long as they felt he was more dangerous than they were. The minute they saw any weakness in him, they would either close in for the kill or else abandon him completely, as they had done back on the road.
It was the first time they had ever challenged his authority. Clearly, they did not expect him to return, or else they would never have taken such a risk. Gramotin knew that the only way to win back their respect was to do the one thing they refused to do themselves.
The fact that he might become lost did not bother Gramotin. Neither did he dwell upon the fact that the Comitati would probably butcher him when he finally caught up with their group. The only thi
ng Gramotin cared about now, as he stumbled onward into the darkness, was his reputation.
SEDOV WAS HAVING a dream.
In it he was a child again, reliving the moment when his mother caught him hiding in the woodshed and eating a pot of homemade plum jam which he had stolen from the cupboard. The theft had been spontaneous and the young Sedov realized only once he got to his hiding place that he had nothing with which to eat the jam. So he used his fingers, which soon became a sticky mass of tentacles.
From the pocket of her apron, his mother whipped out the large handkerchief which she always kept ready for such occasions, licked at it ferociously, and advanced upon him, saying, “You mucky boy!”
Sedov winced while his mother scraped away the jam stains around the corner of his mouth.
“Who is going to want that jam,” she shouted, “after you have been sticking your dirty hands in it?”
“Some other mucky boy, I suppose.”
Now, in this dream, Sedov was back in the woodshed and his mother was scrubbing away at his face with her coarse, spit-dampened handkerchief. “Stop it!” he protested. “I can wipe my own face!”
Waking with a shudder, Sedov was amazed to find himself still breathing.
It was morning. The sun had come out, glistening on the ice-sheathed branches of the trees.
A large dog was standing right in front of him. It had been licking his face. It had a shiny black nose and a long, narrow muzzle which was white around the sides and brown along the top. Its ears were thickly furred and set well back on its head. It was the eyes which most impressed Sedov. They were a warm yellow-brown and looked intelligent.
The dog seemed as startled as Sedov. It jumped back and growled at him from a safe distance.
Sedov noticed three more dogs lurking about at the edge of the clearing. Then it dawned on him that these were not dogs at all. They were wolves.
“Mother of God,” he whispered to himself.
The wolf, whose raspy tongue had translated in Sedov’s dream into the handkerchief of his long-dead mother, took another step back and growled at him again, jowls quivering above its teeth.