by Anne Fine
Here was a mystery. We all had hiding places and our little secrets. What was it Gregory had wanted to keep so badly he’d sewn it into his jacket? And all those times I’d watched him run his fingers over his sleeve as if idly tracing the pattern, had he been checking something? Making sure it was still there?
Lowering my head, I pinched the jacket and bit through a stitch. I pulled out just enough thread to work a finger inside.
There were two folded sheets of paper.
I tugged at more stitches till I could pull them out. I flattened them on my knee.
Identification papers! Gregory’s name and place of birth. His former occupation. Cabinet maker. How had he managed to keep them? Our papers were taken from us at the moment of arrest to make escape more difficult. Keeping them hidden in the way he had done must have earned Gregory more than one savage beating.
Why had he bothered? I brought to mind the gentle, hopeless man who’d coughed himself to death below my bunk, and thought I knew the reason. With Gregory, the sheer stupidity of his arrest was never out of his mind. The thought that his life had been destroyed for ever because of one stroke of the pen had seemed to him so monstrous, so far beyond belief, he’d felt obliged to keep the proof of it. Hadn’t I heard him saying it a thousand times? ‘How could I lose my wife and child, my job and home, and end up in this stinking hut? How could my life have boiled down to this?’ Knowing the reason was hidden in that little square of quilt must be what had kept him sane: ‘I’m not imagining this horror. Here under my fingers lies the cause. One scribbled number.’
I scoured it for the carelessly written date of birth that had derailed a good man’s life and led to his early death. What had he told me he’d said to the official he’d begged to change it? ‘Do I look eight years old?’
How long ago was that? How many years had Gregory rotted in the camps?
I peered at the year of birth as it seemed written, and tried to work it out. But to a boy whose only practice in numbers since he left school had been ‘one load, and then one more, and then one more’, the counting wasn’t easy. It took a while to reach the answer.
And yet, how worth the effort!
Eighteen years old!
This was a gift indeed to a boy who might pass for anything from fourteen to twenty! Papers that suited! Papers that might be handed over almost with confidence for inspection.
I put them safely under a stone and washed the jacket in the icy rolling water, remembering all the while how often Gregory had lain on his bunk and muttered bitterly, ‘One careless little mistake! Enough to ruin a life!’
An error like this could prove to be a club with two ends.
Enough to ruin his life. But, if I stayed lucky, perhaps enough to salvage mine.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
NOW THERE WAS nothing to be done but show more courage. I set off walking again, guessing that, since I’d not seen a living soul since leaving the forest, I must be days from a settlement. From time to time I’d see what looked like wisps of smoke in the distance, or some black smudge on a hill that might have been a man or a woman busy with sheep. But mostly there was nothing except hills thawing to a green almost unbearably bright to eyes so unused to colours, the bouncing spring breeze and, now the last of the powdery snow in the cart tracks had vanished, mud squelching underfoot.
Turning a corner, I saw a far-off figure and felt a wave of terror. Who was this stranger coming my way? A guard? A soldier? Perhaps even some other escaped prisoner ready to rob me of my bundle?
I didn’t dare leave the path. To change direction or step aside would look suspicious. I didn’t dare slow my pace. I simply let the figure draw so close that I could see the streaks of silver through his beard. My heart was thumping so loudly I was sure he could hear it.
Just as he passed, he raised a thumb to the sun and said in a voice so frail it might have been a sheet of paper rustling: ‘Not so uncertain today.’
I nodded as eagerly as a doll with a broken head-spring. ‘No, indeed!’ I heard myself saying as I strode past him.
Safely past him!
Into my mind sprang one of my teacher’s scoldings: ‘Only a simpleton offers his fellow man no more than talk of the weather.’ What did my teacher know? I felt as proud as if I’d passed the hardest examination! Indeed, I was still preening myself on my wits and repeating the clever exchange over and over – ‘Not so uncertain today.’ ‘No, indeed!’ – long after the two of us had become no more to one another than specks in the distance.
Puffed with the triumph of having passed so easily as just another stranger on the road, my boldness grew. Where better to practise the hardest deception than in this desolate place?
I pulled the uniform we’d stripped from the guard out of my bundle. ‘I’ll walk past just one person,’ I told myself. ‘Whoever it is, they’ll not dare speak, and I won’t even nod. I’ll just stride past as if they’re no more to me than the mud on my boots.’
With hands that shook, I put on the trousers and jacket. Even before I threw the overcoat across my shoulders, the sweat was pouring down. But as I pulled on the cap with that dread silver badge, my courage flooded back. So they were right, those old men in the camp! How many times had I heard them grumbling it as they struggled with warped saws and poorly mended hatchets? ‘Just give a man the tool and he can do the job.’
Put on that cap, and confidence and vigour surge through your body like an electric charge. Behind that little silver serpent coiled to strike lies all the power of a hundred thousand vicious beatings. I swear I rose in stature. My stride was steadier on the road. After the years of trying to be invisible, I was astonished to find myself marching along almost with pride.
Then turning a bend to meet my very first challenge. It was a haggard woman carrying some bundle of her own. She kept her eyes down as she scurried past. I stopped to watch her hurry on, and even if she realized the steady sound of my footfalls had come to a sudden halt, she didn’t dare turn.
‘Too easy,’ I told myself. ‘One more – just to be sure,’ and kept on walking down one long slope and up another, to the brow of the next hill.
Almost at once I heard the rumble of engines. A short way on, the track ran into a wide stony road. Keeping in the shadow of trees, I followed the road at my side as, trundling past, came lorry after lorry, closed and barred.
Still staying out of sight, I walked down yet another slope, and then another, till without warning I found myself stepping out under the struts of a watchtower.
Above me, a sentinel with a rifle was peering down.
I froze. Thinking myself back in my prisoner’s rags, I waited for the rifle’s sharp report and the last sting of flesh.
He took the briefest look, then, seeing me standing there in hopeless indecision, swung his rifle to the side.
It was an idle flick. What? Was he using it, not as a weapon but as a pointer? I glanced the way he’d shown and, sure enough, there was a sentry hut.
I could have run, but I’d have risked a bullet in my back. So, trapped, I walked towards the open doorway. From inside came the reek of fatty stew. A horribly scarred man with a mouth like a dark hole glanced up from his game of solitaire.
‘Where to?’ he asked me, reaching for the pad that lay beside his spread cards.
Where to? This was a harder test than talk of weather! And what a fool I’d been. Why wasn’t I better prepared? Even as a guard, I needed a story to account for myself. I’d carried the uniform in my bundle for days – cursed its weight, taken the trouble to brush it clean and shine the buttons with a gritty rag. And then I’d wasted all that time admiring the flight of eagles and even flowers – flowers! – but not put a single moment aside to work out my story.
Or even consider the truth. Because, if I am honest, this was the moment I first realized that the thought of home was no longer in my mind. Too much had happened. I had been away too long. I’d seen too many horrors. Hope, longing, yearning – all of the thoughts an
d feelings that keep a man’s heart alive were lost to me now. They’d brought me too much pain. I’d pushed them down so far it was impossible even to think of walking through the door into my mother’s arms. Indeed, it no longer seemed possible that the old building in which I’d spent my childhood was even standing. My parents were surely long lost in all the country’s bitter upheavals. And no doubt my grandmother lay, a heap of old bones, in an unmarked grave.
The only road was back. But as to where I might be headed, that was a mystery.
Still the guard was waiting. Laying down another card, he reached for the pen and looked up to ask with gathering impatience, Are you deaf? I asked, where to?’
And yet the future was a blank. The past was still too raw. All I could think of was the place I’d left. I stood and pawed the dirt like an anguished beast, unable to think of one single name except that of my own camp.
But then it came to me – a memory of Oskar drawing his map in the snow to show me where the train from the mines would meet the main line.
‘To Treltsky.’
‘A nice surprise!’ he said scornfully, lifting the pad’s mottled cover to reveal a hundred of those bright green slips I’d seen and envied so many times.
Rail travel permits.
He flicked to a few on which he’d already filled in some of the details. Even from where I stood, I could read the word ‘Treltsky’ on the one he tore from the pad. As he flattened it in front of him, the truth finally sank into my brain. I’d walked so far I’d met the railway line. The lorries rattling past must come from nearby mines. Some way beyond this hut must lie the track. And since the rail trucks only rolled this far to drop off prisoners or to pick up ore, the only ones to travel back on them were guards on leave, or off to some new posting.
Already his eyes were back on his cards. I’d watched enough solitaire to know his game had almost come out perfectly. Was that what saved me from any further questions – that and the fact that I’d chosen a destination so commonplace that this railway permit officer had already filled in the forms?
I reached for the voucher.
‘Not so fast!’ he snarled. ‘I know your unit’s little tricks – take it from me and sell it on to someone else! You sign it here – in my presence.’
He pushed the pen towards me. I stared at my right hand as if it were some small beast I couldn’t trust. Could I still write? How many years had it been since I’d grasped anything other than the handles of woodsaws and axes.
It took a while before I could force my fingers closed around the pen. The sweat of fear seeped out of every pore. Press on, I ordered myself. For all you know, he’ll think you’re some overgrown peasant who learned his letters badly. He’ll think it’s foolishness, not fear, that’s oozing out of you like fat from a roasting pig.
‘Take your time!’ he said sourly, laying one card on the next. But clearly my presence was distracting him because, with an oath, he whipped the top one off again and glared at me.
‘Must you hang around all day?’
Stay calm, I told myself. He can’t see into your head. He doesn’t know your brain has shrivelled to nothing in a camp. He thinks you’re stupid, so just struggle through.
Down they went, one by one, in letters so clumsy you’d think they’d been drawn by a child in his nursery.
Gregory Leonid Timorsch.
‘Your papers?’ he barked, shaking his head in wonder that he’d even had to demand them. ‘And your Permission of Leave or Transfer.’
Papers, I had. But as for any Permissions, I was stumped. To give myself time to think, I started to root in my bundle. Should I turn and run? Or pull out the gun?
But he’d turned one more card, and his impatience got the better of him. ‘Never mind!’ he snapped, and pressed his official stamp down twice – once on my destination, and once on my pitiful handiwork.
He pushed the voucher towards me. Before my clumsy fingers had even managed to scrape it off the desk, he was back to his game.
So there I stood. With papers. A uniform. A little money in my pocket. And a travel permit to Treltsky!
Now, for the very first time, I truly felt I might be headed for freedom. I hurried away, feeling my heart swell with a happiness so sharp it hurt. The flood of exhilaration could have lifted me from my feet, it was so strong. It was like growing wings.
The road turned. Stifling the impulse to move as usual into the shadow of trees, I forced myself to walk as boldly as any other man down one long open stretch of road and then round a bend.
There, in a valley, lay a huge workyard. Its slanted watchtowers were slung together with fences of barbed wire. Lorries rolled past the sentry post one by one. The place was a morass of carts and cranes and pallets, with scores of workers scurrying like ants.
And there, behind the fence, with jets of steam occasionally hissing, lay the great steam train that would carry me on the first step of my long journey home.
Can I describe it – that extraordinary feeling of watching the mountains behind me turn into hills, the forests become fields, the towering pines change back to aspen and birch? The train rolled over great rivers, some still carrying huge chunks of snow and ice down from the north towards the warming plains. That whole great sleeping land began to wake and breathe. It felt like a return to life.
I kept myself to myself, pretending to sleep when others came near. I left my place only to buy food from one of the starveling old biddies who seemed to appear out of nowhere whenever the train juddered to a halt. Strange feelings ran through me constantly. How odd it was not to feel perpetual hunger. How difficult to choose between this lump of bread and that (and how hard not to slide my arms round my choice to protect it when anyone came near).
I watched the land roll past – huge, endless – and thought back to the anthem I’d forced my parents and grandmother to sing all that long time ago, Fairest of Lands, about our nation’s boundaries. I understood it now. Always before, my patriotism had been stiffened by terror. (Just one word out of place and I’d have earned a beating.) But this was something new – an admiration for a land so vast, so strong, that it could suffer almost anything. A land I now understood had been made even more noble by its evil sufferings. A land whose glories shone all the brighter for the bloody sacrifices from which they sprang.
This was a different sort of love of country, born in my own mind, forged by my own experience.
Heartfelt.
One evening, shortly after darkness fell, I heard the warning call. ‘Treltsky! Treltsky Junction! All change!’
The train juddered to a halt. I gathered up my bundle and pushed the truck doors apart to gaze at this, the first real settlement on the way.
What had I been expecting? A golden city? Rivers of milk and honey running through? Chickens that fluttered to lay their eggs in my path? Sour cream in buckets?
It was a drab little town with only the sparsest lights dotted here and there on its plain grid. One pair of headlights juddered down a blacked-out street. A few dogs whined. Had this small place always been starved of kerosene, or had things worsened since I’d been away? No doubt Our Glorious Leader would still be knocking back his foreign wines, and stuffing his belly with rich imported foods. But clearly his blight lay just as heavily as ever on all the rest. I jumped down from the train, shaking my head in wonder. What sort of double book-keeping was this that made one man a king, and rated the lives of others so lightly that all their miseries could count for nothing?
I plodded up one street and down the next. All around loomed huge grey buildings, nine or ten storeys high, and yet the roads were no better than country cart tracks, scarred with the deepest potholes and running with mud.
Around the corner swept a brace of headlights – the first I’d seen since I stepped off the train.
Of course! A Black Maria. I flattened myself back in the shadow of a doorway, and out they poured, those men dressed just like myself.
I heard their grating voices. �
��Up on the seventh floor. This side.’
‘Is Popov round the back?’
‘Oh, yes. He’ll crush her into crowbait if she tries getting out that way.’
‘Right, then!’ I heard a laugh. ‘On with the ferret chase!’
The clatter of their steel-tipped boots rang through the door and up the staircase. I shrank back further. But for the guard they’d left by the Black Maria, I would have run, prepared to trade the risk of being seen against the horror of watching some poor soul dragged out to suffer as I had. What had this woman and I done to find ourselves swept with such ease into the rubbish bin of history? Was it no more than bad luck that we’d been born in the hollow of such a poisonous wave? Was everyone living now supposed to comfort themselves that those born after might have better fortune, and live out their own days on some happy new crest?
The shouts grew louder. I heard the sound of wood splintering.
Way, way above, a casement window opened. A woman scrambled onto the narrow sill and stood, spreadeagled against the torchlights swirling behind her, shouting to rouse the dead.
‘Wake up, all you good people! Take courage and support us! Join the fight! Freedom and justice!’
The guard on the street bellowed upwards. ‘Grab her! Don’t let her jump!’
But just before that sickening thud so very close in front of me, I heard the hunted woman’s last brave cry.
‘Yellow and Black!’
CHAPTER TWENTY
I’LL TELL YOU this. Sow seeds of anger and bitterness deeply enough and what will bloom is utter fearlessness. I strode back to the station, stopping each person who passed.
‘A pen? Have you a pen?’
One glance at my cap, and they’d have sold their souls for one to offer me. I had no time to make a play of kicking them for being empty-handed. I let them pass, still grovelling, and before they’d even scuttled down the next side street, astonished at their luck, I would be tackling another of those whose work shifts started long before dawn.