by Alex Dryden
Her head, like the others’ in the line, was cast down, her demeanour was submissive and her expression was blank. In the other Russian workers in the line, this blankness and submission was the kind of look that came from daring not to hope. And in their case this came from never having very much to hope for in the first place. It was the predominant look in the line and she’d seen it for two days now. The dejection could be seen in the half-hidden faces all along it and she impersonated it well.
What she knew she couldn’t impersonate, however, was the poor state of their physical health. She couldn’t hide what, relative to the others ahead of and behind her in the line, was a robust, good-looking freshness. For one thing, even under her baggy, dirty worker’s clothes, she knew she looked too well fed. And the skin on her face was too clear and had a brightness to it.
The others, for the most part, were thin, pinched and drawn, with grey-looking skin and asthmatic breath that betrayed lives of forced ill-health under the city’s smokestacks.
Her fellow job-seekers reminded her of those dismal newspaper pictures of refugees waiting, unwanted, at frontiers. In any case, they seemed to come from the same tribe of the desperate, the dispossessed, the betrayed and the hopeless. These unemployed Russians pinned any hope they might be able to summon up, from the deepest resources they possessed, on the hiring office and the hiring office alone.
They stood like slumped statues, she thought, only to break the spell of their pained stillness with a foot-dragged shuffle forwards when the line inched towards the concrete hut. It was after eight o’clock in the morning and they’d been in line for more than three hours. But they still formed a sinuous thread that stretched back for almost thirty yards along the river front. It was a weak and pitiful human trickle next to the confident power and muscular strength of the river itself.
There were both men and women in the line and most of them had spent the long Siberian winter unemployed, and in some cases hungry. Dressed in old, faded and colourless working clothes, with tattered quilted jackets slung over their shoulders for warmth, they nevertheless shivered in the cold early June morning. The women wore scarves over their heads in most cases, the men wore fur hats or Russian military winter caps from their conscription days. Except at the city’s aluminium factories, work was scarce here and even in those satanic furnaces it was underpaid. The people in the line knew that if they were lucky enough to be hired for the hard summer labour at the timber mills in Igarka, downriver towards the Arctic Circle, their wages would be barely enough to live on.
As a picture of human dejection, this creeping filament of the miserable and deprived seemed to have leached somehow from the choking smokestacks located pitilessly in the centre of the once triumphantly propagandised industrial Soviet city and which, with their variously poisonous chemical effluents, clouded the air the people breathed and the skies above them.
And behind the slumped human flotsam on the quayside, the broad, tumbling green and brown Yenisei river worked its icy way through the dockyards and the shabby piers toothed with cranes and derricks. It, too, was heading north, beyond the Arctic Circle to the Kara Sea, though with a force and energy that made the humans on the quay seem half-dead.
The line shifted and Anna shuffled forward a step.
She noted that the city’s tilting quays through which the river rushed had only recently been released from snow. The rusted vessels that lay alongside them had been laid up for the winter when the river was partially iced, but they looked as if they’d been discarded decades ago and left to rot beneath the aluminium smog of Krasnoyarsk.
In most cases, however, the ships’ engines were kept in surprisingly good working order – she could hear them now – thanks to the necessity of eking out everything that could be summoned from machinery and man combined. Many of the ships were over a hundred years old. The river water on which they operated didn’t have the corrosive effect that salt did on seagoing vessels.
And behind everything – the hiring office, the line of people and the busy quays – she was aware of the polluted city that squatted on the vast Siberian land like a sick and rasping ogre.
Anna forced her eyes down again, while occasionally flicking a glance from under her peaked cap to right or left. It was an instinctive reaction, born of a life of watchfulness, the life of a spy. The real Anna Resnikov had always been one of two things; either the hunter or the hunted. Here, on enemy territory, she was undoubtedly the latter. And she could afford no more lapses of the kind that had afflicted her at the border.
A ship tooted its horn in the background, as if impatient to be off downstream. Several ships were preparing for the first voyage of the year down the Yenisei. The various rust buckets leaned exhaustedly up against the quays, their half-loaded holds tilting them this way and that. Only the newer passenger ferry that took the few tourists part of the way to the Arctic Circle and rested on a quay of its own seemed fit for the journey.
The sound of diesel engines being test-run for the 1500-mile journey downriver towards and beyond the Arctic Circle numbed the hearing. Perhaps this, too, explained the bent heads of the unemployed. Conversation was almost impossible above the engines and the shouted instructions of the foreman or the whooping cries of stevedores.
The foreman was a rumbustious six-foot-four giant by the name of Ivan, born and bred in the Siberian taiga and descended from nineteenth-century Russian settlers – as he’d lost no time in proudly explaining to the people in the line. He was looking up and down the line now with his sneer of contempt. But when his eyes rested on Anna, as they had done several times already, his expression changed to one of intense, and greedy, study. It was just what she did not wish for – to be noticed at all, let alone studied with the foreman’s fixed stare.
Nearing the front of the line, Anna had now almost reached the door of the hiring office.
She averted her eyes from his gaze. She was close enough to the hiring office to be able to see inside the small building, which was little more than a concrete box. What she saw was a dark room, furnished – if that was the word – with only a worn wooden table and two wooden chairs, one of which was to receive each applicant for the summer jobs. The lumber mills down river at Igarka were changing from their pared-down winter shift and increasing their workforce for the few months of the summer. With the ice broken, the ships were now able to take the work crews downriver at last. Up in the river’s huge bays around Igarka, a thousand miles to the north, the great rafts of loose logs would soon also find the way free to the northern Arctic sea port of Dikson.
To take her attention away from the foreman Ivan, Anna looked at the decrepit building that was the hiring office. It was made of poor materials – that much was clear – which the ice winters had made worse with chips and gouges in the concrete. It was little more than a block of pale, disintegrating cement.
From the look of it, it had been erected more than half a century before by Stalin’s slaves before the dictator’s death. The starved and beaten political exiles whose job it had been back then to build it either didn’t know how to make concrete or they lacked the proper equipment to do so.
Directing her eyes around the foot of the building, she also now observed four courses of uneven brickwork. They were so poorly made that her eyes fixed on them for a long time and it was then that the foreman seized the opportunity. He came up too close to her and spoke, breathing hotly in her ear as he did so. He’d been looking for just such a chance as this.
‘That’s what you get when low-life political exile scum do the work for you!’ he sneered and nodded at the brickwork.
Anna turned away from him and fixed her mind ahead in time.
Fifteen hundred miles to the north of where she stood, up in the Kara Sea where the river disgorged itself into the salt waters of the Arctic, the ice was still solid – nearly ten feet thick in places. Now in spring the disparity between the melted waters of the south and the frozen ice in the north was causing its annual
, cataclysmic freak of nature. Backed up against the northern ice, the melted water down here built up into a dangerous surge that carried thousands of trees torn from the river’s banks and tons of boulders in a headlong rush that would now be finally smashing the ice floes at the river’s mouth. The furious torrent ground the floes and broke them with ear-splitting cracks that could be heard ten miles away. Finally it reduced the ice by hurling it against the bare cliffs to the north and against itself.
This event signified the end of winter at the other end, where the river met the Kara Sea. The thousands of blocks of broken ice were then dispersed by the rage of fresh water out into the Arctic and, for a time after that, the Kara Sea was filled with a small forest of broken trees bleaching slowly in the salt and the thin northern sun.
The end of May or the first half of June – depending on the severity of the winter – was the time when vessels could at last begin to head north after the seven-month grip of the Ice King. Up in Igarka and, beyond, in Dudinka, they would have begun the annual task of reconstructing the wooden piers and wharfs and port facilities which had to be dismantled every year to avoid being smashed and washed away by the surge of melted waters.
Anna glanced around casually again without perceptibly lifting her head, and again she saw the foreman watching her. She didn’t like it and he was still keeping his gaze steady. Did he suspect something? No, that was impossible. More likely, his interest in her, despite her dishevelled, dirty appearance, was that he wanted to imagine her in one of Krasnoyarsk’s pole-dancing bars and brothels. She was used to men like the foreman. So be it. She had the papers.
Then she shifted her eyes calmly past his level stare to look back at the port and the river and, behind everything, the dreadful city.
She wore old plastic yellow boots, faded brown overalls a size too big for her, and a quilted blue jacket over the top, also marked with dirt and grime, and faded like the overalls. All had been bought in one of the cheap shops on the edge of the city. Her hair, cut short and dyed black, was concealed under a military green felt cap with felt ear flaps. Her face was almost too carefully touched with worker’s grime, grease and engine oil. But the particles from the yellow-grey smog of the city that clung to her otherwise clear skin were real.
Once more she shuffled forward as another worker was admitted to the office.
To anyone watching her, including, she trusted, the over-curious foreman, she was just another impoverished twenty-first-century Russian citizen looking for work. But if anyone should doubt it, she had the false papers in her jacket to prove who she was. She was travelling under the name of Valentina Asayev.
She was a citizen of the Siberian city of Bratsk to the east – so the papers said, anyway. Her internal Russian passport, made dirty and scuffed with apparent use like her clothes, allowed her to move anywhere in the Krai of Krasnoyarsk that stretched from the Mongolian border to the Arctic seas. Only the Arctic city of Norilsk – the initial destination of her mission after Igarka – was a closed area. It was the second biggest city in the world beyond the Arctic Circle, and had been closed to anyone without a special pass since 2001. It was barred not just to foreigners but also to any Russian without the pass.
Anna’s thoughts drifted almost in a dream to her mission and the next journey that now lay ahead towards it. Even she, a woman of extreme courage and belief in herself, had to admit it was a desperate throw of the dice into the unknown.
But somewhere – she knew this for sure – somewhere up there above the Arctic Circle, she would find the man she was looking for, Vasily Kryuchkov. Whether it would be in the slave-built Norilsk itself – the filthy, degraded city whose pollutants had killed every tree within a fifty-mile radius – or whether it would be in the Putorana mountain nuclear facilities to the east of there, or in Dudinka to the west of Norilsk, or even further north at Dikson, the island port out on the far edge of the Gulf of Yenisei in the Kara Sea – wherever Kryuchkov could be found up there in the bitter far north she would find him and the secrets he was said to possess.
But for now, her immediate aim – her necessity – was to get the next boat to Igarka, the lumber town two thirds of the way downriver towards Norilsk. Igarka was her next base and a journey she could make with at least the pretence of legality. But to reach there, she needed to be hired.
Aside from her false identity papers, other false papers zipped in her jacket pocket declared her to be a skilled lumber machinist and maintenance worker on the type of vast saw machines that day and night cut the Siberian forest into logs or planks for export. She had endlessly studied similar Swedish saw machines back in America until she knew them back to front. She knew she could do the work for as long as she needed to remain in Igarka.
But at some moment, after she reached the lumber town outpost, she would have to break free – alone – and head north again.
Then, through these thoughts, she again felt the sudden and unwelcome presence.
‘Ivan,’ the voice said next to her suddenly, and she felt the foreman’s alcohol and onion breath wash down again on her face from above. He was standing over her, much too close to her body now. ‘My name is Ivan,’ he explained, and she saw his chipped and yellowed broken teeth and a red, pock-marked nose, with the pitted skin of childhood smallpox on his face. There was a charcoal stubble on his chin that was collecting the light particles of industrial smog.
But it was his eyes, which had a lustful, fevered and decided look about them that she liked the least.
‘And you?’
‘Valentina,’ she replied, with just enough of a pause to demonstrate she intended no further intimacy.
Suddenly he gripped her arm in his big, greasy hand. He was a powerful man. He didn’t let her go or lighten his grip and she didn’t resist. No matter how much she wanted to – and could have – throw him back on the pitted cement forecourt of the hiring office, she resisted the temptation. She might need him later, certainly. But most of all she couldn’t afford to cross him now and fail to be hired.
She had the training to break his neck in two, or drive his nasal bone into his brain, or any number of lesser moves to render him harmless. But it was certainly not the type of training she could afford to reveal here. Her real training was not the training of a machine operator at a sawmill, but of a highly decorated, former intelligence officer in Russia’s foreign service. A service to which she had become a most hated and most wanted traitor.
So for now, Ivan the foreman might be useful to her. Later, she thought grimly, I’m going to have to deal with him, one way or another.
‘Come with me,’ he said loudly over the top of her head. The volume of his voice boasted his superior, official position. ‘I’ll clear things with the office.’ But still he stood there, looking at her for too long, as before. The leer on his mouth and the glint in his eyes communicated an unmistakable and deeply unwelcome message.
‘I can wait my turn,’ she replied passively. She must be passive, she must be just like the others. She must show no knowledge, no fight, no resistance at all – and above all no special training.
His hand was still on her arm, gripping it too tightly. ‘You’re strong,’ he said, now with some admiration, and feeling the muscles under the jacket. ‘Where did you get to be so strong?’
‘Nothing but work,’ she said dully.
This time, he didn’t pose his words as a question. ‘Come with me,’ he said, and pulled her forcibly out of the line. She followed him ahead of the three people in front of her and meekly entered the darkness of the hiring office.
‘Papers!’ he commanded when they were inside.
She offered him her false internal passport and the false paperwork that qualified her for the job. He took them and threw them on to the table in front of the seated hiring officer, a man with a puffed alcoholic face and running snot on his upper lip, which he wiped from time to time with the sleeve of his coat.
The hiring officer looked bored having to deal w
ith the sickening line of feeble losers in front of him. But she was different, he could see that at once. He looked up questioningly at Ivan with bloodshot eyes.
The foreman just nodded for him to get on with it. The hiring officer exhaled a cloud of bitter smoke from a Kosmos cigarette gripped in the gap between his two front teeth and casually looked through her papers. Then he cast his eyes up at her, lingering too long on her face and on the outline of her breasts, an outline which, despite her baggy overalls and jacket, could still be faintly seen. Finally he took out a form from a drawer in the table, copied her details, and stamped the form with the name of the lumber company. Then he scribbed his initials over the stamp. He winked at Ivan with a lascivious smile, then turned to her.
‘Where are your things?’ he said.
The others in the line mostly carried their possessions with them – as if that were some kind of reinforcement of the hope that they would be on the ship to Igarka.
‘I can get them in a few minutes,’ she said, and she said it with the tone of barely dared hope in her voice that characterised the others.
He pushed the paperwork back across the table to her and she put the documents inside her jacket, zipping the pocket.
‘The boat leaves at five,’ the hiring officer said. ‘It’s the Rossiya. Quay three.’
Just under eleven hours from now, she thought.
Ivan turned to her. ‘I’ll see you on board then.’ The foreman grinned openly now, and the suggestion was clear. But he wasn’t satisfied with just the implicit suggestion. ‘I’ll look forward to that,’ he said. ‘You can be sure I’ll look after you as a woman like you needs to be.’
Then he pushed her out of the door. It was still drizzling.
The foreman’s promise turned her attention to this new danger. If necessary… if necessary she would break his neck, fell him like a tree. She felt nothing of the doubt she had felt four days before at the border.