Archangel

by Gerald Seymour

  Adimov had seen. One of the few, but he had seen. He sat with a frown of puzzlement on his forehead, then turned back to join again the talk around him.

  'Where's your soup?' Poshekhonov asked Holly as he sat down, squeezing himself over the bench.

  i had it on the way here — little enough of it.'

  'You shouldn't do that. You get more goodness if you take it slowly. There was a man here once, he could take half an hour to drink a bowl of soup, big as an ox. Didn't matter if it was stone cold, still took it sip by sip . . .'

  Poshekhonov liked to talk. That was his happiness, to talk to a captured ear was for him the thrill of seeing the Commandant's office roofless and destroyed. Holly did not interrupt him, and broke his bread into small pieces and husbanded the crumbs.

  The report that the office of Major Vasily Kypov, Commandant of ZhKh 385/3/1 in the Mordovian ASSR, had been burned to destruction in as yet unexplained circumstances was a matter of sufficient significance to be seen by a senior official at the Ministry of the Interior.

  The official was a member of the staff of the Procurator General who had responsibility for the smooth running of the Correctional Labour Colonies scattered across the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  Before giving up this half-filled sheet of paper to his file system, the official had noted well its contents. Anything extraordinary that happened in Camp 3, Zone 1, was out of place. Such a well-administered camp, so little difficulty springing from it, a Commandant in whom great confidence was justly placed.

  In the weeks that followed, the teleprinter messages from Barashevo were to become familiar reading to the official who now hobbled on the built-up shoe that supported his club foot towards his filing cabinets.

  Chapter 8

  A building has been destroyed and can be rebuilt. A roof has fallen and can be replaced.

  The Captain of KGB begins an investigation. The Major in command is at first flustered, then morose.

  There is labour in Zone i, and to spare. In a few days there will be a new office for Major Kypov at the end of the Administration block.

  For nearly half a century the camp has survived the storms. More than fire is required to break the regimen of ZhKh 385/3/1.

  Later, those who were to piece together the events at the camp of the early months of that year, from the time of snow till the approach of spring, were to wonder what was the ambition of Michael Holly, prisoner of Hut z in Zone i of Camp 3 in the Dubrovlag complex.

  For a few days there was a swirl of conversation in the camp about the fire and its likely cause, and then the talk slipped.

  The zeks had more to concern them. Interest in food, in warmth, in punishment, soon outstripped a matter as trivial as a fire. The fire was a dream, the fire was as nothing as the new bricks were slapped into cold cement and the air rang with the rasp of the carpenters' saws as they fashioned the ceiling framework.

  Only for Holly did the fire live on. If he had chosen to confide in anyone then he could not have said clearly what was the summit of his aspiration. He would have fumbled for explanations. But the point was irrelevant because he had no confidant. He offered his friendship to no one.

  Feldstein the dissident, Chernayev the thief, Poshekhonov the fraud, all reached for the Englishman as if to draw out some spark of friendship. All were resisted.

  When he walked the perimeter fence, when he worked at the bench with the wood that would become a chair's leg, when he ate in the Kitchen, when he lay on the top tier of the bunk, he was alive and alert. Always watching.

  Holly searched for the next opportunity to strike again at the administration of the camp that held him.

  Darkness outside the hut, and beyond that darkness the ring of light from the arc lamps over the fence and the wire. The hut windows were misted as if a concerted bluster of hot air had steamed them. The lights were on inside the hut.

  A few men read magazines, Feldstein was as always with a book. Another hour until lights out. Some tried already to sleep. At the end of the hut a boy waited, sitting hunched on an upper bunk, for darkness to come to the living quarters because then he could go to the mattress of the man who loved him . . . A low drone of talk hummed in the hut, and Holly lay on his back on his bunk and gazed at the roof rafters and counted the time between each fall of a water drop to his feet.

  Near to Holly, Adimov was stretched on his bunk stomach down. For a long time he had held the envelope in his chubby fingers and close to his face. He had seemed to sniff at the opened envelope as though it carried some scent, but the letter inside only peeped from the tear and was not taken out. A man seeming to fight some inner struggle. Lying still, with the fingers clenched on the envelope and the eyes saucer wide.

  ' H o l l y . . . ' A hissed whisper from Adimov.

  The knife had never been spoken of again. Holly did not interfere with the 'baron's' running of the hut.

  'Adimov . . .' No move of Holly's head.

  'Come here, Holly.' An instruction, a command.

  'I'm very comfortable, Adimov.'

  'Come . . . now.'

  'Listen when I speak to you . . . I said I'm comfortable.'

  Holly heard him shift on his bunk and the mattress seemed to belch at the movement.

  'Please come, Holly .. . please . . .'

  Holly jack-knifed his legs over the side of the bunk, swung himself down to the floor, dropped his feet beside Adimov's bunk. His head was close to Adimov, close enough to smell the force of the man's breath, to see the white anger of the scar on his face.

  'What is it, Adimov?' spoken gently.

  The toughness caved, the face of a child who is frightened.

  'I had a letter this morning, a letter from my wife's mother. It is the first letter that I have had here in a year . . .'

  'Yes.'

  i can't read, Holly.'

  The voice grated in Adimov's throat. Holly's ear was beside Adimov's mouth.

  'You want me to read it for you?'

  'They read it for me in Administration.'

  'You want me to read it again?'

  'You don't know whether those pigs lie to you . . .'

  'Give it to me, Adimov... no one here will know.'

  Only when Holly's hand was on the envelope did Adimov release his fingers' grip. He had held the paper as tightly as an old woman holds a rosary. Holly looked over the single sheet of paper that was covered in the large hand of one for whom writing was slow and difficult. He read the few lines through, then closed his eyes for a moment before reading aloud.

  Terminal cancer, cancer of the bowel. Perhaps a month.

  is that what they told you?'

  That is what they told me that the letter said.'

  Adimov sagged down onto his mattress and his head was half-buried in his pillow and there was a redness in his eyes.

  'Will they let you go to her?'

  There was a choking laugh from Adimov, derisive.

  'Will they bring her to you?'

  'Would you bring a woman to this place? Would you give to a dying woman as a last memory the sight of our camp?

  Would you, Holly...?'

  'What can I do, Adimov?'

  'I saw you with Byrkin's soup.'

  Holly started back and something of the kindness was lost from his face.

  'I saw you, it means nothing that I saw you . . . I thought you would help me, too. If you helped Byrkin, that you would help me.'

  'What can I do?'

  'I can't read, I can't write . . . '

  The man who dominated the hut, who controlled the tobacco racket, who took an undisputed place at the front of the food queue in the Kitchen.

  'You want me to write a letter to your wife?'

  'And none of these people shall know.'

  Because in the life of the camp, if the wife of the strongman has terminal bowel cancer and will be dead within a month, then that is weakness, and from weakness there cannot be spawned authority, and without authority the man who br
eeds fear throughout the hut will disintegrate.

  i will write the letter tomorrow. I'll get the paper and you will tell me what to write.'

  'Thank you, Holly. I am generous to my friends.'

  Holly turned away, climbed again on to his bunk.

  On his back he began again to count the interval between the water drops. He wrapped the blanket round him, a sparse level of protection against the cold. He thought of Alan Millet... didn't know why, couldn't place the trigger that led him to Alan Millet and a pub in the Elephant and Castle south of the Thames. It would be more than a week since he had thought of Millet. More than a year since they had last spoken, and more than a week since he had last examined his memory of those meetings. It had been a very typical contract that Mark Letterworth had contrived in outline for the sale of the turbine engines to a Moscow factory. And Letterworth had said that the deal was bogging down in that bloody stupid Olympic fracas and the Afghan mess, and that he didn't give a shit for politics, only for selling engines. Holly spoke the language, so he'd better jump on an Aeroflot and get over there and chase it up with the Ministry. All simple, all sweet. And the day after Holly had been up to London to apply from the Consulate for a visa there had been the telephone call at Letterworth Engineering. A call with a bad script. ..

  'You don't know me, Mr Holly, but there's something I'd like to meet you about when you're next in London. Hopefully that'll be in the next week . . .'

  They met near Waterloo station because that was good for a train from Dartford. He knew about Holly, this man who called himself Alan Millet. He had read a file on Stepan and Ilya Holovich that would have come with a dust coat out of a Home Office basement reserved for the histories of Aliens (Naturalized). He knew of attendance by Stepan Holovich at NTS meetings in Paddington, and had the date that a father had taken his son to a house off the Cromwell Road to celebrate the National Day of the Ukrainian exiles with supermarket Italian wine and kitchen table cheese. And Alan Millet had spoken soft words . . .

  it's not really anything very important, Michael, it's rather a small thing we're asking of you. It helps us and it doesn't help them, if you know what I mean.'

  There must have been a point of no return, but Holly could not remember passing it. It had not occurred to him that he could stand up in the pub, leave the beer half-drunk, the sandwich half-eaten, walk out into the London early evening. When he thought back over it, as he lay on the bunk and water drips splattered every eleven seconds between his ankles, he could remember only a film of excitement that had wrapped him. At their next meeting instructions had been given for a rendezvous. That had been a long meeting. Long and fulfilling because Alan Millet offered the chance to bite at an old enemy whose presence pervaded the rooms of the terraced home in Hampton Wick.

  Michael Holly had trusted Alan Millet implicitly. On his back, on his bunk, he doubted if he would ever trust another man again.

  If Yuri Rudakov, undressing in the front bedroom of their bungalow, had not been so tired, he would have taken the time to admire the new nightdress that his wife wore as she sat against the pillows and turned the pages of a picture magazine. If he had not been halfway to sleep he would have noticed that far from washing the make-up from her face she had taken the trouble to apply the eye shadow and lip-stick that her mother sent her from Moscow.

  She read him. Elena Rudakov knew the signs.

  'The fire .. . still the fire . . . '

  'Still the fire.' Yuri Rudakov settled in the bed beside her, he made no effort to close the gap between them.

  'You've let the cold in.'

  'I'm sorry . . . '

  'How did the fire start?'

  i don't know.'

  'It takes you two days and half of two nights to find out that you don't know?'

  'You want to hear?'

  'I've sat here two days waiting for you to come home, waiting to have a conversation with you. Yes, perhaps I want to hear.'

  He wanted only for the light to be put out, he waited only for darkness and sleep. He would get nothing before he had fulfilled the chore of explanation.

  'Something that was inflammable was in the coal bucket.

  'I don't know what it was, perhaps just paper with oil on it, I don't know. The room had draughts, you needed a greatcoat to stand in it. Kypov never complained, never did anything about it, seemed to think that the chiller his office the more masculine and vigorous he was. Would have made him think he was with the poor bloody paras in a tent in Afghanistan... I don't know. There were draughts through the window frame, under the door. He's a fat little bugger and he'd stood his backside in front of the fire. That's all I know. There wasn't a bomb, nothing like that. Just something that ignited enough to get a flame onto his seat. After that, panic . . . He was shouting, the door is opened, somebody puts a rifle barrel through the window. Draughts all over. I know how it spread, you see. I don't know what started it.'

  'What are you going to do?'

  'Put a couple in the SHIzo block for fifteen days, the ones who filled the buckets. That's all.'

  'Then you don't have to go early tomorrow?'

  Her arms reached towards his head, pulled him towards her.

  'I've a bastard day tomorrow. Really . . . They've given me a major interrogation — I'd told you about the Englishman - that's what I should have been working on, not an idiot fire. The interrogation is a challenge to me. It's a compliment in itself that they've given me the chance . . . '

  He felt her body surge away from him. His head fell against the pillow. He saw her back clothed in the flannelette nightdress. He wanted to touch her, but he did not know how.

  He reached up for the light switch. Sleep would be hard to find. Before his eyes would cavort the typed words in the file of Michael Holly.

  A fire must have a spark, a flash of ignition. So, too, must an idea of action. There is a moment when an idea is born, the clash of a flint.

  Holly was on the perimeter path.

  He walked alone, deep-wrapped in his own thoughts, and the morning was colder than any of those of the week before.

  The cold cut through him, summoned by the winds that had begun their journey on the far plains of Siberia and the Ural mountains and the great Kirgiz steppe.

  He felt it at his face and his fingers and his back and his arms, felt it at his buttocks and privates and thighs. No snow in the air that morning, only the wind that gusted and trapped the men on the perimeter path. And the cold was worst at the feet, he thought. Michael Holly had been a prisoner of the camp for less than one month, and already he believed that he could walk this path with his eyes closed.

  Four turns to the left on each lap of the compound, and he fancied that he knew at which moment he must drop his shoulder, cut his stride and turn. If he knew the path blindfold after one month, how well would he know it after fourteen years?

  In front of him was Chernayev who had not practised his trade of thieving for seventeen years. Twice that morning Holly had passed Chernayev on the path. Now the old man walked in the centre of the path and the way was blocked and Holly had to check his stride.

  Chernayev turned his head as if he felt the breathy impatience of the man behind him.

  'Holly . . . the Englishman . . . ?'

  'Yes.'

  'And in a hurry? Is it different to you if you make four times round the path and not three?'

  Holly faltered for an answer, if I go faster then I am warmer . . . '

  if you go faster then you are hungrier.'

  'Perhaps.'

  'I k n o w . . . I used to go fast when I was first at Perm, and my gut punished me. Slow yourself, Michael Holly, walk with me.'

  'There are many you can walk with.'

  He could have bitten at his tongue. Crudeness and arrogance, enough to shame himself. Chernayev turned towards him, little of his face showing. The old zek, the one who took care of himself and who would walk out of Camp 3, Zone 1, when his time came.

  'Easy, Michael Holl
y . .. you should not forget who you are. You are not one of us, you are from outside us. In the hut we all talk of you, you know that? If a man drinks only an alcohol made from paint or varnish or polish or acetone then he will dream of vodka. If a man talks only with the prisoners of his own world then he will seek out a stranger

  .. . You are important to us. You make a window for us.'

  'I will walk with you, Chernayev.'

  Holly fell into step with the old thief, clipped his pace.

  Holly's shoulder was high above Chernayev's. There was a distant whistle from behind Chernayev's teeth as if he tried to blow away the wind that settled on him.

  'The dirt is the hardest, you find that, the filth is the hardest. . .'

  'I suppose you learn to live with it,' Holly said distantly.

  'I've never learned to. I hate the scum on my body.. . And this week there will be no showers .. .'

  'Why not?'

  'Look with your own eyes.' Chernayev waved his arm towards the centre of the compound. The snow was dirtied there, earth spattered,, and a dark mound was set beside a hole. 'We dug a new water pipe, two summers back, across the middle of the camp. The old pipes were cracked, leaked.

  Some bastard cheated, they say there was not enough binding put around the joins, again the pipe leaks. It's the main water supply for the whole camp, for us and for the barracks. They won't keep the barracks short, so we lose the water, we do without.'

  'Yes.'

  'Where they have dug the hole is a main junction, they say it is the worst place for the leak, where the water is sepa--

  rated. Some goes to us from the junction, the rest goes to the barracks. The men who work in the hole say it is a pig to work there.'

  Holly's eyes flickered.