Archangel

by Gerald Seymour

  Holly in a personal hell.

  On the evening of the tenth day they brought company for Holly.

  He heard the sounds of their coming as he lay on the floor, huddled and shivering. Two sets of boots beating a tattoo in unison in the corridor and the scraping of feet that were dragged. He had found that he always lay on the floor at the far wall to the door, always distanced himself as greatly as possible from the door, from the warders' entry. A bolt scraped. A prisoner was supposed to stand when a warder entered his cell, and they carried the truncheons to enforce the rule. Holly started to climb to his feet, from his stomach to his hands and knees, and then his fingers reaching up at the smoothness of the wall to give him leverage.

  He was halfway to his feet when the door opened, and the corridor light was impeded by the dwarfing shape of the men. They did not enter the cell, they pitched the old man in, and in the same movement that they discarded him they slammed shut the door. The bolt ran home. Holly rolled back onto the floor.

  The old man was close to him.

  'Bastards . . .' he growled at the door. 'Bastards . ..

  whores .. .'

  Holly looked at him. A skinny bag of bones and tattered uniform. A grey parchment of skin drawn across the face, a white stubble of hair across a skull that was rivered in high veins. A tiny man, and if they had been standing he would have rested his forehead under Holly's chin.

  'Scum . . . whoring scum.'

  Holly saw the bruises, red and flushed, on the old man's cheek.

  The old man turned to him, manoeuvred his shoulders slowly so that he stared at Holly. There was a brightness in the eyes. Holly recognized it and felt the disgrace that he had been clawing his way to his feet in submission while the old man had laid on the ground and cursed his captors. Holly had been caving, slipping, falling. If an old man could give back to them, then Michael Holly had no cause to slither upright in humility.

  He had been shown a way back.

  'Mikk Laas . . .'

  'Michael Holly . . . '

  'I've not seen you before.'

  'I've been here a little over a month, in the camp.'

  i know everyone who comes to the SHIzo.'

  'My first time.'

  'For me it is home.'

  'Thank you, Mikk Laas.'

  'For what?'

  'For showing me something that I had forgotten.'

  'For shouting?'

  'I had forgotten.'

  'You are not Russian ..

  'English.'

  'I am Estonian, from near Tallinn. You know where that is?'

  'Only from the map.'

  'How old are you, Michael Holly?'

  'Just past thirty.'

  'When you were a baby, perhaps even before you were born, they took me from Estonia.'

  'All the time here?'

  'Here —and in 4 and in 17 and in 19.'

  'You have earned the right to shout at them, Mikk Laas.'

  'What can they do to me now? What can they do that they have not already done?'

  They talked a long time, Mikk Laas who was from Estonia, Michael Holly who was from England. They talked in quiet, concerned voices and built themselves a wall around their two bodies that curtained off the wet running walls and the harsh concrete floor and the spy hole of the door. Later, Holly pulled his tunic up from the waist and tugged his undershirt clear and dipped a pinch of it into his mug of water and moved close to the old man and wiped at the dirt that had gathered at his bruised cheek. With his eyes closed and the brightness gone, the fight went from the face of Mikk Laas and he was pathetic and worn, and Holly knew he was close to tears, tears of pity.

  'You have been here thirty years?'

  'Thirty years and it is a sentence of life. I will be here until I die.'

  'For what?'

  'They call it treason, we said it was freedom . . . And you Michael Holly . . . ?'

  'Fourteen years more. They call it espionage.'

  Mikk Laas opened his rheumy eyes. They glowed in an instant sadness.

  'You are right, Michael Holly. You are right to guard yourself. You are beginning your time, it is right that you should first find who you can trust and who will betray you.

  It doesn't matter for me. I'm here, I stay here. You are right to have caution .. . but I tell you, Michael Holly, I'm not a

  "stoolie" .. .'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'You have nothing to be sorry for.'

  'Why are you in the punishment block?'

  'This time . . . ? Last time . .. ?'

  'This time.'

  'I was in the Central Hospital. I have stomach ulcers.

  They said I was malingering. Perhaps they were right, perhaps they are not too bad, my ulcers. I found the place where they dump the potato that they are feeding to the guards who are sick - not real potatoes, only the peelings. I was eating the peelings when I was caught. Under the blanket the bed was half-full of potato peelings.'

  A slow grin came to Holly's face. 'Rudakov gave me some coffee in his office, proper coffee. I threw it back in his face. I think I spoiled his uniform.

  Mikk Laas smiled too, and the laughter croaked in his throat. 'Always keep your pride, Michael Holly. Even if you must waste good coffee, keep your pride.'

  'Does your face hurt still?'

  ' L e s s . . . I kicked the bastard that hit me, kicked his balls.

  He hurts more. He'll whine to his woman tonight.'

  'What happened thirty years ago . . . ?'

  Holly unlaced his boots, put them under his ear. He lay on his side and faced the wall. Over his shoulder the old man spoke. A quiet and assured voice, and their bodies were beside each other and their warmth spanned the two of them. He listened to Mikk Laas tell his story.

  'I was a boy. In Tallinn my father had a small business, he sold gentlemen's clothes. Estonia was an independent country. For seven hundred years we had existed under the boot of conquerors, now for twenty-two years we knew freedom.

  If you set twenty-two years against seven hundred then the freedom is brief, but it was rich wine to Estonians at that time. In 1941 the Red Army came to Estonia. They had made a non-aggression pact with Germany, they had divided their spheres of influence. Estonia was to be Soviet.

  They purged anyone with brains, with initiative, with cul-ture. My father went.. . anyone who might have organized public opinion was taken. I don't know whether he went to the camps or whether he was shot outside the city, we have never heard. We fought them. Not an organized fight, not soldier to soldier. We fought them as guerillas. We went to the swamps south of Tallinn to the forests around the Suur Munamagi mountain. A few of us, and with old weapons.

  We tried to snipe them, to harass them. Then the Germans came and the Red Army retreated. There was no choice to make between our enemies. The Germans were hideous, the Soviets were worse. We fought as partisans against the Germans. We lived rough outside the villages. We hit and we melted back. I don't know what we achieved, nothing perhaps, but at least we were Estonians fighting for Estonia.

  At least the people who had stayed in Tallinn and Polt-samaa and Tartu knew that the freedom of Estonia lived in the hearts of a few men. And the Germans went and the Red Army returned. They came back to crush the last breath from free Estonia. They bombed Tallinn, they shipped the young men out. We fought on from the forests. When the Germans were there we had the weapons from the Soviets who had fled. Now. we used the weapons that the Germans abandoned. Perhaps it was all useless, I doubt that we hurt them. It ended near Mustvee, we were trapped on the shore of Lake Peipus. We had nowhere to run to. There was half a brigade in front of us and the lake behind. We surrendered.

  It is the only time in my life that I have raised my hands.

  They marched us through Mustvee to the army camp, the whole of the town had come out to look at us. We were in rags. No one shouted, no one gestured. There was no hate and no sympathy. They had been emasculated, those people.

  That is why I wi
ll never be allowed to return to Estonia.

  They would not permit a man who has fought against them to go back because he might again breathe something into the emptiness of those people's lives. I don't know whether I was lucky that they didn't shoot me. Twenty-five years they gave me .. .'

  Holly was near to sleep. His eyes were firm shut against the ceiling light.

  'You said you had done thirty years . . . '

  'After twenty years I wanted to escape.'

  'You waited twenty years?'

  'I waited twenty years. They gave me another fifteen . . .'

  'I could not have waited twenty years.'

  it is not easy . . . believe me.'

  Mikk Laas looked at Michael Holly's back. He watched the rhythm of the breathing. He believed the young man was asleep. He dragged his body closer and snuggled against Holly for more warmth and rested his head on his hands. A slight heat flickered between them, a slight small heat in the SHIzo cell.

  A man in handcuffs was driven by jeep to the Central Investigation Prison at Yavas.

  The KGB team of interrogators dispersed to their camp appointments and to headquarters.

  Major Vasily Kypov stood before his prisoners and announced that he was good to his word, that the restrictions he had imposed were lifted. The new roof for his office was completed and peeped smugly over the high wooden fence and waited for a snowfall to embrace it.

  In Hut 2, by an end wall and far from the stove, a bunk was empty and draped with a folded blanket. Nearby, rolled in the dream that showed to him a woman who was dying, Adimov was asleep, and Feldstein lay still with the picture of exile alive in his mind.

  Captain Yuri Rudakov could concern himself again with the prize that would be won when a confession of guilt was extracted from a prisoner in the solitary cells.

  The camp ticked away the hours, grudgingly maintained its motion. One man ran at the wire and when the sentry fired high, fled back to the safety of his hut. Another man hanged himself with a towel in the Bath house and was buried without the recognition of a stone in the prisoners'

  cemetery. Another man tried to steal the tobacco hoard of a

  'baron' and was clubbed unconscious and nobody witnessed the attack and nobody stood to defend him.

  In Moscow, in a high room at the Ministry, a senior official of the Procurator General's staff read the report that ZhKh 385/3/1 was again at peace, and wondered how it could ever have been otherwise.

  Through cold days and frozen nights the camp at Barashevo wheezed an existence. The camp worked and slept, ate its food, searched for its lovers, plundered and thieved, changed the guard in the watch-towers, patrolled the wire and the high wooden wall.

  And in the SHIzo cell past the perimeter fences two men found a friendship on a concrete floor.

  With a new office to work from, Major Vasily Kypov returned to the administrative details that had been neg-lected. For ten days he had ignored the paper piles that were now heaped as a punishment on his desk. The movement of prisoners into and out of his jurisdiction. The allocation of visits. The permission for parcels to be distributed. The reports on the letters vetted by the censorship team. The order for the camp's food supplies. Of course, he had a team of clerks and officers whose job it was to oversee such business. But the Commandant was responsible.

  Deep in the mound of paper was a laconic note from Captain Yuri Rudakov stating that the prisoner Michael Holly had been sent to the SHIzo 'box' for fifteen days.

  Kypov had not been consulted. The maintenance of discipline was the responsibility of the Commandant, yet he had not been told that a man had been punished. He had not entered the offence and the penalty on the man's security file. The slip of paper was inadequate. A matter such as this should have been brought directly to his attention, not left for him to find as he sifted the paper mass.

  Vasily Kypov instructed his Orderly to find Yuri Rudakov and bring him to the office. He could have gone himself, but he played the formal game and sat in full splendour behind his desk and waited for Rudakov to come.

  Ten minutes he waited, and the poor humour induced by the paper mountain was fuelled by the delay. And when Rudakov came, the annoyance of the Commandant verged with anger. Not even in uniform. And always with those sickly foreign cigarettes in his mouth, and a hand in his pocket.

  'Captain Rudakov . . . '

  'You sent for me, Major.'

  'I sent for you ten minutes ago, more than ten minutes ago . . .'

  'I came as soon as I was free, Major.'

  The hostility billowed from the Major's face.

  A shadowed smirk sidled to the Captain's mouth.

  'A man has been sent to the SHIzo block — I was not informed.'

  'The SHIzo is full, two-thirds men, one-third women from Zone 4.'

  'You sent one man there, Michael Holly.'

  'I provided your clerk with a memorandum of my action.'

  'Which I find now, buried in my papers.'

  'Then the blame is with your clerk.'

  'All matters of discipline should be referred to me.'

  'You've seemed preoccupied . . . '

  Vasily Kypov stared back at the KGB Captain, his pig eyes burned.

  'What was the nature of the man's offence?'

  'My report refers to insubordination.'

  'What type of insubordination?'

  'He was offensive to me.'

  'How was he offensive?' Kypov tunnelled with his questions, following a seam.

  'He threw something at me . . . ' Rudakov shifted on his feet. His hand was no longer in his pocket, his fingers flicked irritably.

  'What did he throw at you?'

  'He threw coffee at me.'

  'Coffee . . . ?'

  'Coffee.'

  is it a regular practice to serve coffee to your prisoners?'

  i t is not.'

  'Why in this case did you feel it necessary to supplement this man's diet?'

  'A mug of coffee is not supplementing a diet. I was interrogating this man.'

  'Did he have cake as well?'

  'I am entitled to interrogate a man in any manner I wish. It is a matter of state security.'

  'Does "state security" require that coffee be served to the enemies of the state?'

  'There are various techniques of interrogation.'

  'And some require the serving of coffee?'

  'I have been entrusted with a job of interrogation.'

  'We have had arson in this camp, we have had murder, now we have blatant insubordination to an officer. We are wavering on a collapse of discipline. I will not suffer insubordination.'

  'I think he lost his head.. .' Rudakov spoke with desperation.

  it will not happen again.'

  'I will see that it does not happen again.'

  'No, Captain, you don't understand me . . . I'm not asking you, I am telling you that it will not happen again.'.

  Rudakov lurched to the door. Failure soared at him.

  Failure to handle a prisoner who could toss coffee in his face and commit his Number One uniform to the civilian dry cleaners in Pot'ma. Failure to stand up to the cretin who had been thrown from military service to work out his last days in this shit-heap camp. He was a man familiar only with having his way. He believed his rank and office guaranteed his authority. But he had been caught out and humiliated.

  He flung open the door and went out, he heard behind him the cavern chuckle of Kypov.

  Two warders brought Michael Holly back to his cell from the workshop.

  When he had seen their faces he had known what faced him. In the workshop the other prisoners had known. They had turned away, all except Mikk Laas and from him there could be only a mute sympathy.

  Inside the cell they tripped Holly to the floor and as he fell he saw the squat shape of the Commandant who had waited for him to be fetched.

  The palms of his hands smacked into the concrete, the roughness caught and scratched his flesh. The boots were around him. Wet, di
rt-smeared, snow-soaked toecaps, and above the toecaps the bright black polish.

  Boots and truncheons working on Holly's body. He rolled himself into a defensive coil, but that was poor protection. When he saved his sides, then his head and his back were defenceless. When he saved his head and his back, then his sides were open to the kidney kicks of the boots. They said nothing, and he did not cry out. Only the squelch of the boot and the thud of the truncheons disturbed the silence of the cell. They didn't pant, they didn't sweat. It was not hard work to beat a man who was on the concrete floor beside their boots. His eyes were closed, his mind circled in hatred of the men around him. There was nowhere to flee, Holly lay still until they were satiated.

  When the door had slammed behind him the pain came, came in rivers, came in mountains. Pain settling in his muscles, flowing in his limbs, climbing to agony.

  Holly fainted. He was on the floor and with his arms around his head when Mikk Laas returned to the cell.

  The man who had come thirty years before from Estonia prised Holly's arms away from his head and cradled him in his lap. He saw the blood that caked his hair and the fierce technicolour of the developing bruises. Later, when the soup swill was brought to the door, Mikk Laas dipped bread into the warm liquid and opened Holly's mouth and put the wet bread on his tongue and massaged his throat so that he could swallow.

  The afternoon had merged with the evening, the evening had slipped to night, and the old man held Holly's head and crooned a song that came from the far villages of the Baltic coast.

  When Holly woke there was a moment before he felt the pain and in that time he was aware only of the old man's body and the calloused hands that held his cheeks. Then he moved, and pain swilled through him. He looked up into Mikk Laas's face.