OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  In the mean time, I kept my pen in my hand, but I stopped writing his story word for word. I just jotted down notes, so he would think I was interested.

  Mukharbek Zabakov, Kazakhstan, 2008

  The notebook: in prison in Shaktinsk… then different camp… people in just underwear… story about a man called Idris who stole a coat… in camp in Gorlovka… Germans separated out the Communists, the officers, the Jews…. No water… hot, thirsty … they ran when the Germans brought water, and fought, fought their comrades… the Germans laughed.

  Sent to Pskov to a camp called Pskhi… got ill… then to Estonia… to Tartu… Latvia… two camps near Riga… selected to work for a local farmer… new camp by sea… all officers dead.

  At this point I appear to have begun to wonder if I should not have been taking more thorough notes. At the top of the page, I can see that I scribbled a star with the word ‘Interesting’ and a circle round it, and I even started transcribing his comments properly for a while.

  He said it was not smoking that saved him. All the officers had smoked, and he had traded his cigarettes with them and had got more food. The officers were dumped outside when they died, which was not a problem because it was winter and their bodies froze rather than rotted.

  At this point, I may have been concerned about how many spare pages were left in my notebook, because I began to just note down odd words again. There is even a doodle of a frowning face with a dunce’s cap in the top corner of one page. I was getting annoyed. I only had this one day, and I wanted to talk to the other two men properly, and his story was going on for a very long time.

  The notebook again, with its odd words: 1944 Warsaw… The Germans organised work battalions… battalion only included men from the North Caucasus: Adygeans, Cherkessians, Karachai, Balkars, Kabardians, Ossetians, Chechens, Ingush, Kumyks, Nogais… worked for farmers in East Prussia… 16 Jan 1945, Germans moved them from there… Russian planes flying… Polish village… 18 Jan 1945, picked up by Red Army along with eight Germans who were taken away and killed… one of them called Klaus.

  I have to admit I was bored. My hand ached. He had been talking for more than an hour and a half. I was getting nowhere in my research, and I tried to interrupt him. He took no notice and talked on.

  The Red Army put them under guard and sent them back east to the Soviet headquarters, towards home. They had not been home for more than two years. They were marched along a road. It was a wide road but there was snow on it so you could not know what the road was made of; stones or just mud. He walked and walked and then there was another road coming down from the left, and tanks were coming down that road.

  He looked up at me, and gestured for a salad bowl. I passed him the bowl and he took out two pieces of dill and placed them carefully on the table.

  It was like this, you see, the road came from the side. And the commander of the tank column stopped them. The commander was a Russian. I mean, ethnically Russian and the commander could see they were not and asked who they were. The guards said they were freed prisoners and they were all from the North Caucasus, of many ethnic groups. And the commander asked them to separate out by ethnicity, so they milled about and the Karachai were next to the Balkars in one group, further along were Chechens, and then the Dagestanis in their different groups, and so on. They were about thirty-five Balkars. The tanks were lining up alongside the column of prisoners, and the soldiers grouped the freed prisoners together in a long line, and suddenly the tanks started to shoot.

  Br-br-br-br-br. Zabakov made the sound of a machine gun firing, and flinched downwards to his right towards the table.

  The snow was so deep and he threw himself into it, and held his head down. And all around he heard prayers. Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah. He did not know if there was one machine gun or more than one, but he knew there was one very nearby because it was so loud. It fired and fired and fired until the belt ended. Then there was silence, then an order. Those of them left alive should stand up. He saw someone near him was standing up, so he stood up too and he could hear crying and moaning all around him. Then the belt in the machine gun was changed and it started to fire again and he threw himself into the snow once more.

  Br-br-br-br, and there was the sound of the hot bullets hitting the snow. Pss-pss-pss-pss. Then the order to stand up, so he stood up. Then they changed the belt and fired again and he lay in the snow and waited to die. He waited for a bullet to hit him. And they fired another belt of bullets and he cried out to Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah. And thanks be to Allah, he was not hit.

  Silence. Zabakov looked at me.

  Then, he said, came another order. Whoever is left alive stand up. They had shot everyone with the machine gun. And he lay there, but he saw someone else was standing so he was not the only one alive and he stood up. And in the white snow there was a black mass of bodies, all lying in the snow, with blood. They who survived walked to the side, and the machine gun passed along the bodies again. And back. Until the belt ended. Then a tank drove over the bodies. There were arms and legs flying like this. And when the tank left, one more man stood up: a Kumyk. They had shot this Kumyk three times and the Kumyk survived the tank going over, and looked around, all shocked, and walked over to them. The Kumyk had worked as a hairdresser in the camp.

  Zabakov reached for his glass of water, and drank from it. They were about 270 survivors, he said, from 1,500 people. And the dead surrounded them. They were dressed in all sorts of clothes that they had made, and he had a hat he had paid for with cigarettes. In short, they were dressed well and the soldiers surrounded them and stole their clothes. One soldier took his shoes, and told him to take shoes from the dead people but he did not want to. He was left in his socks. Another soldier took his waistcoat. Another soldier took his hat.

  Then they walked in the snow along the road towards Rodomsk, which is in Poland. He walked there and all the houses were intact. There had been no war there. In the morning they went further. They arrived at the headquarters of the division and all these drunk, half-drunk soldiers started to beat them. Any soldier could take him to one side and beat him or kill him. One man was taken aside but the pistol did not work and the man was saved.

  They were put in a barn and all the soldiers beat them with sticks. One soldier asked him how he got there, thinking he was Russian, because he had blue eyes, and the soldier tried to kill him but he was stronger and got into the barn. Then he was beaten inside the barn.

  His socks had worn out on the bottom and his feet were cold. That was how it was. These things happened. Then they were taken to a special place for people under suspicion and were interrogated. He got given ten years. All of them got ten years.

  There were fifteen of them in the courtroom at the one time. That was in Lvov. There were three judges and everything was clean except the prisoners. They were still dirty. Had they been in a prisoner camp? Had they worked for the Germans? Yes and yes. Had he sworn allegiance to the Germans? No. That was why he got only ten years and he was sent to the North, to Molotovsk to build a big factory. A man asked for carpenters, and he had said he was a carpenter although he wasn’t, and he didn’t have to work as a carpenter really, just carry wood.

  The notebook again: sent to Komi… worked there… Far East… could see Sakhalin… many many camps… plasterer… supposed to go to Magadan camps but too cold…. Criminals all together… former soldiers together… Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur… man called Zaitsev … story about a Japanese spy… killed the people who over-fulfilled the plan, killed people who under-fulfilled the plan… Zaitsev survived… from there to Mylki, worked in forest… 1953.

  He heard Stalin had died on 6 March 1953, and he and the other prisoners cried. Honestly, they cried. That is what happened. His father had died in prison, and he was in prison, and his father had done nothing wrong and he had done nothing wrong and they all had to work, and when he heard Stalin died, he cried. There were all nations there, Russians, Ukrainians, everyone, and everyone cried. That wa
s how they were brought up, he said, to honour the leader. They cried for Stalin. Then, he was released.

  He sat back and breathed out heavily, looking at me all the time.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘You can ask these two about the deportation now. I know that you didn’t want to hear that, and that you weren’t interested, but I have been waiting more than sixty years to tell that story to someone who would listen, and I’ve told it now. I wrote to the newspaper and no one cared. I tried to tell everyone, and no one listened. I am eighty-six years old and I am the last person alive who knows how our own people killed us in the snow like rabbits.’

  He reached for his plate. He speared a fatty lump of lamb onto his fork and ate it, then drank some water. It was only his second drink of water in the whole two hours of the story.

  ‘You know now too, and you will tell the world.’

  The Penguin and the Tree

  LLOYD JONES (born Lower Hutt, New Zealand, 1955) has written a number of novels, including Biografi, The Book of Fame and Mister Pip – which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2008. His most recent novel is Hand Me Down World. Based in Wellington, he visited Antarctica in December 2008 as a guest of the New Zealand Antarctic Centre.

  The Penguin and the Tree

  LLOYD JONES

  Until I received an invitation from the New Zealand Antarctic Centre I had never thought of Antarctica as a place that I must visit. As large as Antarctica is, and despite the fact that after Australia it is our next closest neighbour, it has never really exerted presence.

  So it was a surprise to hear and feel contact with ground as hard as concrete as the plane touched down on the frozen ice field of the Ross Sea in December 2008.

  In a single file of buffoonery we exited the plane. We were mainly returning American scientists and field workers. Bundled up in four layers, heavy boots that were impossible to walk in, head gear, and special sunglasses, I followed hard on the heels of an equally burdened and shuffling figure – Boyd Webb, from Brighton, England, the other invited artist – into a sun-blazing white landscape.

  On the plane down I had finished Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita, and that was the end of my reading for the duration of the trip. It made more sense for me to directly experience the place for myself. So I had stocked up weeks before. I had read Ernest Shackleton’s South and picked up Frank Worsley’s Endurance for about the tenth time and as with all the other times read with the same mounting sense of awe. South, though, pays closer attention to the dailyness of the men’s lives. I made notes on the quirkier details, such as the banjo Shackleton thought to unpack from the Endurance; as well as the endless amounts of seal and penguin eaten by the men on Elephant Island (including the special treat of morsels of undigested fish taken from the gullets of the larger penguins cooked in tin cans strung up on bits of wire around the stove); and the surprisingly small selection of books – a copy of Browning, Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and a ‘portion of Encyclopedia Britannica’ to settle the usual disputes.

  I’ll be brief about the next ten days. What we got up to. The tiresome but understandable rules and regulations around individuals leaving Scott Base on their own. Boyd’s elephantine snoring which he professed not to know about. Boyd has the extraordinary ability to go from his last utterance to fast asleep the moment his head touches the pillow. It’s a great talent and one which I feel will ensure his longevity so long as one day in the future he is not slaughtered in his sleep. At Scott Base, I had to wear the ear muffs issued by the plane crew for the flight from Christchurch. It was hopeless. The only sleep I got was when we slept out at the ice caves below Mt Misery and at Royds, by which time his snoring had become so legendary and feared that he was sent to sleep in a tiny hut above Shackleton’s hut while the rest of the party slept on the ice in tents. Boyd, by the way, is the loveliest fellow you could ever hope to meet.

  It is eighteen months since I returned from Antarctica to the marvel of green lawns, bitumen, kerbs and cars. I was nearly run over twice on the five minute walk from the Antarctic Centre to the Christchurch domestic airport. Since then the Antarctic experience has been one of slow devolvement of certain highlights. Such as the time Boyd and I stood grinning at the window of the A-frame hut near the ice caves, urging the distant figure on skis bearing wine for the ‘artists’ to go faster. And in Scott’s Hut, the dead penguin laid out on the dissection table. Presumably it will go on waiting. And on visits such as the one enjoyed by Boyd and myself, poets will commemorate the penguin, painters will paint it; and the penguin will continue on, as it were, to be captured over and over.

  In Antarctica, everything is preserved for all eternity – mistakes, follies, vanities, even the exhaust fumes of the massive Hercules landing and taking off. The smell of pony shit in the stables outside Scott’s hut lingers on more than a century after the last of his Welsh ponies expired; Discovery Hut continues to be marked by a filthy, smoke-grimed degradation and a dangerous level of boredom.

  IT WAS ON the stony wastes behind Scott’s Hut at Cape Evans that I first encountered a skua, a large grey bird which from afar looked like a very large seagull as it floated on air, its wings still and cut out against the immense sky; then as it came closer I saw its claws, and as its motionless eye looked down I understood that I was its target. I ducked just in time, and then as it circled, and unfussily lined me up a second time, I picked up a stone. As it swept in, I waited until I could stall no longer and lobbed the stone into its flight path and the skua lifted off again. It seemed to hang in the air, on its wing, before it began another sweep at my head. I lobbed up another stone and it lifted off as before. Then another skua arrived, and joined in the attack from a different direction. I must have lobbed twenty or thirty stones in the air before I regained the safety of Scott’s Hut from the nesting ground I had unwittingly strayed onto.

  This was also the day we made our way to Royds. After unpacking our gear and pitching tents on the ice beneath Shackleton’s hut, after forcing down a few biscuits and hot tea, and after Boyd was shown his own splendid, separate accommodation, we followed a path up through scree and around the ‘summer pond’ to the Adelie penguin nesting colony. From up there we found ourselves on a high coastal point above the frozen sea. In the distance we could see small numbers of Adelie penguins making awkward progress across the ice to the sea. They had another sixty miles of falling over and getting up again before they would strike open water. They were males and either they had crushed the nesting egg in a clumsy moment, or else had abandoned the nest, fed up with waiting for the female to return from the sea with food. We settled down in a hollow amongst the rocks. Boyd handed me the binoculars. I had them trained on several hundred nesting Adelies when the air shifted just above our heads and the skua came to rest about twenty feet beneath our position.

  The whole penguin colony immediately erupted. Those Adelies nearest the skua drew up their flippers and bobbed forward, making aggressive gestures with their beaks. The skua raised its wings as if in readiness to fly off, but it didn’t move. It seemed to know it could come to no harm and calmly turned its head to look in another direction. Very quickly the protest settled down. And when I next looked the skua had dropped its wings. Another five minutes passed. By now the Adelies had forgotten about the skua. Over the same time, imperceptibly the skua moved itself deeper inside the nesting Adelies.

  It happened to be my turn with the binoculars when the skua, with a shoplifter’s sense of opportunism, grabbed a chick in its beak. Once more the penguin colony erupted. Their noise added to the horror of the spectacle. The Adelies gazed up as the skua raised its wings and beat lethargically as it tried to gobble the chick in the air. It didn’t manage either task very well. The chick was too big or too fluffy and the skua dropped down to an uncontested area just beneath where Boyd and I crouched, and there it coughed up the baby Adelie. The grey fluffy chick wobbled onto its feet. It shook its head. It shook and shook. It was alive. It was alive – in sp
ite of what had happened, and as it tried to move away I felt the onlooker’s horrible dread. It had two more seconds of life left. The skua picked it up in its beak and shook it vigorously until the sides of the chick split. Then the skua released it and dove in with its beak and pulled the red stitching out of the chick’s insides, and that red, that shocking red against the immensity of the silent white continent is what remains of my ten days in Antarctica.

  BACK AT SCOTT BASE I recounted the event to one of the scientists. He was surprised that I had found it upsetting. It was just Nature taking its course. None of this I disagree with, and yet what remains is this undiminished horror whenever I remember the skua coughing up the Adelie chick. What remains, forever I suspect, is the moment between the ‘before’ and ‘after’; it is the chick shaking off the experience. It has a second more left of life. But for the moment it remains gloriously alive, eternally alive.

  I’ve gone back over the notes I made at the time to see if there is anything more I might add. I see I made a note about the thickness and the size of the Adelie eggs. They lay shattered and piled on the ground beneath where Boyd and I had sat in the rocks. The chicks aren’t so much born as smash their way out into the world.

  There is something else too which may be relevant. This morning it just surfaced in that way of old memories as I lay in the bath.

  I am ten years old. My mate has just handed me his slug gun. It’s the first time I’ve held it, or any gun for that matter, and yet I seem to know what to do. I put the stock against my shoulder, aim casually up at a tree, and squeeze the trigger. To my astonishment a bird falls out of the tree. I am appalled.

  Forty years later, I am still appalled.

  Manoli