“Are you willing to take his place? Are you willing to be my sdelat kozyol? Are you, Jamie? Because that’s a trade I’d be very happy to make. Oh very, very happy, indeed.” Gregor laughed, a low, oily sound that made Jamie’s stomach roil like a terrorized snake. He knew the term. A sdelat kozyol was a homosexual slave, a person apart in the camp, used for his body but not considered human. Like Vanya.
He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. The man’s hold was like iron locked against his back. Panic built under his breastbone, spreading up his windpipe in a cold, greasy slick. He had to stop. He needed to breathe. If he passed out he knew exactly what would happen to him and he wasn’t sure he would survive it, either physically or emotionally.
A rough finger curled around the shell of his ear and stroked down his neck to his collarbone. The man’s mouth whispered in his ear, wet and hot.
“You are very warm-blooded, Yasha, no?”
The long body pressed even harder against his and he felt the man’s erection pushed into the small of his back. Panic was close to taking over now. Never mind what harm he might incur. It no longer mattered. There was only the animal drive to survive.
The utterance of his name was an obscenity in the man’s mouth. Jamie knew what the use of the diminutive of his name from this man meant. It was a sign of disrespect, of placing him on a lower level, of saying they could do with him as they liked and that they would.
Gregor grabbed him by one shoulder and spun him around again, huge callused hands pinning him swiftly, though even had he been able to slip in a punch, it would have done him little good. The men were packed around him like hungry wolves that could smell blood on the air. Each one had the congested look in his face of lust for blood, lust for another’s pain, salivating for something Jamie prayed he would not be forced to give.
Gregor’s eyes were nearly black, dense as tar with hunger. Jamie did not blink. He knew he must not be the first to look away. Men like Gregor fed on fear, glutted themselves with it and were never satiated. Their appetites would always call for more. Jamie knew if the man smelled or sensed it on him, he would never be rid of him short of killing him, which wasn’t a measure he was prepared to take… yet.
Still, his throat was dry with fear, his entire body panicked at the thought of what was about to happen to it. There was little choice in the matter. He could not talk his way out of this, nor could he overpower the opposition. It made him think of Pamela and that terrible night so long ago when she had been raped by four men on a train. Then he had felt a murderous fury, and now he felt the fine edge of a terror that she had experienced for hours.
Then from the doorway, a deep voice, heavy with the rumble of disuse, spoke. “You leave him alone or I will shoot you where you stand. Don’t doubt my word. I have nothing to lose.”
“Go away, old man,” Gregor said, though he eased his hold on Jamie’s arm a little.
Nikolai’s response was to shoot the air directly above Gregor’s head. Gregor swore but backed away from Jamie—not far, but enough to allow Jamie to take a shaky breath.
Gregor turned, his entire frame one of killing menace. Yet standing so near, Jamie sensed a hesitation. Jamie remembered Shura’s words about Nikolai and how he was the one exception to all the rules.
Nikolai never wavered. The gun was as steady in his hand as though he merely held a flower. Gregor must have read the intent in the old man’s eyes for, much to Jamie’s relief, he took his hands off him and backed away a little.
Nikolai nodded at the men in a way that must have been command enough, for they began to file out of the low-slung hut, one by one, some muttering curses under their breath but most silent and avoiding eye contact with the old man who held the rifle in his clawed hands as if it were an extension of his own arms.
But Gregor, it seemed, was not quite done with him yet. Before he followed his coterie out the door, he turned to Jamie and smiled, a thick cloying thing that spoke of horrors Jamie had never imagined.
“Not tonight then, my sweet,” Gregor said, pupils still dilated with lust, “but soon. I promise you, very soon.” And then he was gone, vanished into the night without a sound, as if he had truly become the demon he seemed.
Jamie fell to his knees in relief, furiously rubbing his ear where it was still wet from the man’s tongue and breath. He wanted nothing so much as a hot shower to wash the man’s insidious touch from his skin.
“You shouldn’t have done that, but thank you all the same.” Vanya said. Nikolai had seemingly vanished into the evening air without a word.
“You’re welcome,” Jamie said. “Don’t worry. He won’t touch me.”
“How can you be so certain?” Vanya asked, pulling himself up into a sitting position.
“Because I’ll kill him if he tries it again,” Jamie said, and knew he meant every word.
Vanya stood and pulled on his pants without shyness.
“How—?” Jamie began, but halted his tongue, for it was none of his business.
But Vanya seemed to understand the unspoken words for he shrugged, the amethyst eyes opaque with some emotion Jamie could not put a name to, and thought perhaps it was best that he did not try.
The boy turned back and looked at him. There was no shame in him, only a sort of singularity that Jamie had encountered once or twice before in his life.
“It is only a body. It is not who I am.”
Any reckoning with Gregor would have to come soon. Jamie knew he could not afford to wait too long, and waiting only stretched the agonizing tension out to its limits, leaving him with the feeling that it could snap back on him without warning.
The compound itself was secure enough, and the guards would often retreat to their hut to play cards and numb their boredom with the anesthesia of cheap vodka. They made a patrol of the area once an hour, more time than Jamie needed.
The ground was hard as steel, the dirty snow caking thickly in his cuffs. Jamie crouched beneath the window of the long hut, waiting for the last of the grumbling conversations to die down to the small night noises of sleep. Then he used footholds he had mapped out during the last week to climb up, silent as a snowflake drifting upward through the air, onto the roof.
All his senses were heightened, the scent of the smoke from the guard’s hut thick and gelid in his mouth, the wind sliding with chill fingers around his body like a frost harlot. His thoughts were slippery and he knew this wasn’t the best time, yet could not think of a better to do this deed.
The windows were shut, but it was only the work of a moment to open the one he wanted. A fetid fug hung in the hut, where multiple men slept. He slid over the lip of the roof, grasped the upper edge of the window, and slipped through noiselessly. He landed on the floor lightly on the balls of his feet, ready to spring, scenting the area like a cat. He knew that Gregor’s bunk stood alone to the far left of the hut. He had chosen a window some way from the bunk so that his eyes would have time to adjust to the dark before he made his way there.
The end of a crossbeam hung over Gregor’s bed, smoke-blackened and soaked with the animal miseries it had witnessed. It was his silent ally. He swung up lightly, the wood rough under his palms. His blood was fizzing and he knew he needed to keep a cool head or risk making a mistake.With Gregor being the size and temperament he was, it was not a risk Jamie could afford to take. He could not let Gregor dominate him in any way, shape or form.
He hung above him, and the man stirred in his sleep, softly mumbled words slipping from his mouth. Jamie froze, hanging like a spider on a very dangerous web. It took a few moments—moments that seemed like hours—before the man settled again. He began to snore, just as Jamie felt his hands slipping on the beam. He let out a little of his breath and then let himself down onto the bed carefully, so that his weight was distributed evenly, no more than a vague disturbance on the air.
For a criminal, Gregor slept deeply. Jamie slipped the knife from his teeth into his left hand. His knees were to either side of the man, who slept on his stomach. He grabbed the man’s chin hard and pulled his head up, clamping the jaw shut so that he could not yell and alert everyone in the hut. He put the knife to the prominent adam’s apple.
“Don’t fucking move,” he hissed, his Russian guttural with threat. The pressure of the knife was enough to kill the man with the slightest move, but not enough to draw blood. Not a fool, Gregor didn’t move, but lay taut beneath Jamie. Jamie’s knees held his arms to his sides as effectively as a vice. He didn’t have the Russian’s size, so he had to take him at a disadvantage like this and hope that his size wasn’t equalled by agility.
Jamie pulled the massive head back a little further, the neck arched at its apex. Any further and it would break. His own muscles were strained to the point of snapping but the hand on the knife remained steady, increasing the pressure inexorably. He would not cut him, for that would be to shame the man and he could not afford to do that. He leaned in to Gregor’s ear and spoke in a whisper as intimate as a lover’s but as cold as the ice that surrounded their prison.
“Touch me again without my permission, and I will kill you. Make no mistake about it. I know how to make it slow and hard for you. Do you understand?”
He eased the pressure just enough so Gregor could nod ever so slightly, not enough that he could so much as grunt for help. He wasn’t quite so jazzed on his own adrenaline as to think he would make it out of this stinking hut alive if even one man awakened and became aware of his presence.
It was time to go. His point was made and now he needed to move like the proverbial greased lightning. With a last judiciously placed squeeze of the man’s neck, he was up and off him, hitting the floor as lightly as a cat and with as little noise.
He slid out of the window, tumbling into the trampled snow, coming to his feet like an acrobat and running low and fast before he was fully upright. Behind him, where he had expected a roar of outrage and a flurry of movement, there was only stillness and the sound of his own breath. The guards were still in the hut, their raucous laughter spilling out onto the night. He kept his body low in the shadows, half expecting a knife to land with a thunk between his shoulder blades. He had squeezed the carotids just long enough to daze Gregor and give himself the needed seconds to slip out the window and away.
Moments later he was in his bed, lying on his back, blood lurching through his veins like a rabbit that had narrowly escaped the wolf’s jaws, and was hiding in the hedgerow trying not to die from the resulting heart attack.
There was something strange in the hut, something unfamiliar. It was the silence, he realized. Nikolai wasn’t snoring or muttering in his sleep.
Jamie found he wasn’t breathing, but anticipating, afraid that if he made the slightest noise the man would not speak, for he was certain he was about to. The very energy in the room testified to it. Nikolai’s voice, when it came, was as deep and dense as the oak tree everyone claimed him to be.
“You have done what needed doing. Don’t look back, don’t regret, no matter the price.”
“I won’t, Nikolai Ivanovich,” Jamie said quietly, as ridiculously grateful for the old man’s few words as he would have been for the blessing of a saint. For with that one sentence, the man had made him feel that he was no longer alone, no matter what terrors the days and months ahead held.
Chapter Thirty
April, 1973
Seanachais
Jamie thought the old saying that a man could get used to anything, given enough time—including being hanged—had never perhaps been proven truer than in his current situation. A man could get used to having every liberty and right he had ever taken for granted stripped from him. He could get used to constant hunger with no hope of alleviating that terrible gnawing in his belly. He could become accustomed to standing to attention in the frozen dawn while Soviet platitudes and diatribes were broadcast over a squawking PA system. He could get used to the inhuman quotas that had been designed long ago to work a man to death while providing him the minimum requirement of nutrition in order to draw his death out to vulgar limits. He could even get used to being cold all the time, so cold that sleep did not come easily despite an utter and complete exhaustion that sat deep in every cell of his body.
Despite his repeated demands that he be allowed to contact someone at the British embassy in Moscow, that he be allowed to make a phone call, that they in fact acknowledge in any way, shape or form that he existed and had even a snowball’s chance in hell of ever getting out of here, or that they contact someone on the outside to let them know why and how he had disappeared off the face of the earth—he had not been allowed any of these rights, for rights were a rather foreign concept in the Soviet Empire. He might as well have landed on another planet in a far off solar system for all that a gulag resembled the life he had left behind.
Life was brought down to its bones here. What was necessary and what was not became clear very quickly.
Everything had its uses: tin cans became cooking pots, bits of string were used to tie foot wrappings in place, scraps of paper could be used to line boots and mittens. Every item had use as barter as well. Even things not material had their place in the complex trading system of the camp. The item of greatest value Jamie had, it soon became clear, was his ability to tell a story.
Storytellers resided near the top of the prisoner hierarchy, as any sort of distraction from reality was very highly valued. And so he became the camp storyteller through the simple expedient that the previous storyteller had dropped dead in his boots only two weeks before Jamie’s unfortunate incarceration. This new occupation bought him extra rations of bread, small bits of chocolate, and favors when he needed them.
He had long believed that novels had a life of their own, far beyond that of an individual reader. For a good novel lived on in the minds of hundreds, perhaps even thousands or millions of readers and thus became another entity outside and beyond the rough-cut pages and black-type words. This became truer as he told stories each night near the pot-bellied stove. His memory had always been an unreliable sort of fellow when it came to certain events in his life, mercifully perhaps, for there were things it shielded him from that he suspected he did not need nor want to know. Books he remembered, though, with a near photographic clarity that served him well in his role of storyteller.
He pulled from the well of memory other stories, ones he himself had invented during an adolescence that had been both unbearably dark and incandescent to the point of scorching his spirit. These stories he changed, for he was not that boy anymore and did not see things in the same light. But it gave him a feeling of grounding himself here in Russia, as though by saying words he had written down long ago, he had rooted the lodestone of his soul.
Memory, however photographic, was like water, in constant flux so that one perceived things differently depending upon the angle one approached it from or, as the case might be, the age. Some things flitted beneath the surface, flickering, a flash of scale and fin, and others tore the surface of that still pool, glittering and arcing, spraying a thousand other droplets of time and remembrance. So it was for him with tales, finding something different with each telling, another layer through which to peer or sink wholly, depending upon the angle from which he viewed the story, or the mood, easily sensed, of his listeners that particular night.
And so he became the camp Seanachai. He thanked God for his fluency in the Russian tongue, for between Yevgena and Andrei, he could speak it as though he were a native. He knew many Russian stories and could recite Eugene Onegin from memory. He was also familiar with many of the other great Russian poets—Blok, Pasternak, Akhmatova and others. He gave them the poets of his own world too—Yeats and Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth, Keats and Rilke, and the stories that sat closest to his soul—Les Miserables, The Idiot,
The Inferno, Ulysses (that was a challenge and a half in Russian—his brain felt like a pretzel twist during the telling), Dr. Zhivago and the whole lovely world of Trollope’s Barchester Tower series. He told Dickens in installments, just as the great man had written his stories, instinctively knowing where to leave off to create the maximum anticipation for the next session.
He knew if they were caught he was likely to be punished severely. Western literature had long been banned in the Soviet Union, and despite Kruschev’s thaw and the phenomena of samizdat, it was still a punishable offense. But he knew that to take a people’s stories was to kill something in their soul, to strand them on a far shore where nothing seemed familiar, for people were their stories and the re-telling of them in all their facets had the power to keep a man sane. Stories knew no national borders, nor politics, but rather a truth universal to the human condition, no matter the regime under which the minds had been captured.
His own mind had been molded in the traditions and teachings of the West, whether from the ancient Greeks or the less ancient Jesuits. The teachings of the Jesuits had been many, but if they had left him one gift of lasting power, it was this: he was able, when it was most necessary, to build himself a fortress of the spirit to keep safe that which was most imperative in a man. It was a place within which to seek the eternal and unchangeable, to fix one’s sight far beyond pain and humiliation and to roam unhindered in a place of beauty and peace. It was a sanctuary that he carried everywhere with him, and had for as long as he could remember. For this he was grateful to those men who had the teaching of him in his youth.
He noticed Gregor and his lackeys sometimes hung about the edges of this storytelling circle, close enough to hear, occasionally close enough to menace. If he was unfortunate enough to lock eyes with Gregor, the man would give him a long, slow smile and then run his tongue suggestively across his lower lip. Jamie merely held the look long enough to be sure the man knew he was not afraid, even if his insides felt slippery with the thought of what the man wanted to do to him.
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