The Innocent Bystanders c-4

by James Munro

  The Innocent Bystanders

  ( Craig - 4 )

  James Munro

  A British agent named John Craig out-Bonds James Bond.

  James Munro - THE INNOCENT BYSTANDERS

  CHAPTER 1

  It was time to go, and two by two the men embraced, looking in wonder into each other's faces, trying to read there what they felt: tension, fear, and an overwhelming joy. Zhelkov went first, in his hand the little packet of poison that Goldfarb and Kaplan had prepared. His task was dangerous, because when he fed the dogs a guard watched him, careful to see that he stole none of their food. But Zhelkov was dexterous, and the poison found its way into both food and water. He was very gentle with the dogs that night, fondling them, calling them by name, till the guard ordered him out and slouched off to his hut, and Zhelkov sat by himself and watched the dogs slump down and sleep. They always did, after their meal, but this time they did not finish their food.

  Klein, Goldfarb, and Kaplan came next. They had the wire cutters Zimma had made, and the skill to use them. Over and over they had practiced on baling wire tougher than the obstacle in front of them. They sat by the wire and waited as the sky darkened. Then Moskowitz and Avramov brought out their mattresses and began to beat them. This was a common enough sight in the camp, where fleas and bedbugs abounded, but this time there was a special reason. The mattresses would protect them against the wire. Next it was Daniel, followed by Asimov and Gabrilovich. They were the rear guard, and in their pockets were the knives Zimma had made for them. Daniel had picked the other two because they were the fittest and hardest of the ten, and he had trained them well. They left the hut and moved, past the powerhouse and the guardroom toward their huts. The sky was dark now, and as they passed the stables the light came on, ponies stamped, and there was the chink of harness. In another five minutes the signal would sound for them to go inside their huts, and a guard would go to release the dogs. Daniel stepped out quicker. When the lights went each man had to be as near a guard as he could, without causing suspicion. Without the guards' carbines they would have no chance at all, and this work mustn't be wasted, he thought. Must not. And yet I feel it. Something is wrong. Where is Zimma?

  Zimma had prayed once more, alone, and God had heard him and clearly answered. When Zimma had heard all that God had to say, he rose, picked up the ax that was in the tool shed, and limped toward the powerhouse. As he did so, Moskowitz and Avramov rolled up their mattresses and walked toward the wire, hanging on the outskirts of the crowd that was already moving toward the huts. Zimma kept on walking, a man who had been sent to chop wood and was returning his ax, and nobody noticed or cared. When he reached the guard, Zimma went straight up to him, mumbling a question. The guard motioned him forward impatiently, and Zimma advanced two more steps, then swung the ax, and the blade bit deep into his head, severing the back of the skull. Zimma picked up the guard's carbine and turned. After a moment of incredulous quiet, prisoners were running, yelling, to their huts, away from the powerhouse to which the guards were racing. Zimma shot the first two guards and stepped into the powerhouse, a prayer on his lips. He was very happy. Quickly he found what he wanted, and limped forward. Hear ye, Israel, he said aloud, and swung the ax for the last time.

  The darkness when it came was total, but already the men with the wire cutters had moved into position, the men with the mattresses close behind. The pandemonium around them was so complete that men had eyes only for their own huts, thought only of the terrible revenge that would be taken for the powerhouse sentry. When Zimma fired, Daniel attacked his guard, who was trying to push his way through a crowd of prisoners to reach the source of the shots. Asimov and Gabrilovich followed his lead. Zimma had given them a wonderful opportunity, and they took it. Daniel's hands snapped the life from the guard as if it were thread. Gabrilovich and Asimov used their knives. All three men killed quickly, but without pity. The one Asimov killed had been his lover.

  They took the carbines and ammunition pouches and grouped together. No one stopped them; every face they saw was filled with incredulous horror. Then the rights died and they raced to the wire, the mattresses went down and they were through, running, Daniel in the lead, feeling his way along the track that he had memorized, eyes closed, for the last three weeks. They fought the clearing in the forest and lay panting as Daniel called out their names. Asimov, Avramov, Daniel, Gabrilovich, Goldfarb, Klein, Moskowitz, Zhelkov. Of Kaplan there was no sign.

  Goldfarb said at last, "I think he knew he had no chance. He did this to help us."

  Daniel heaved up the great stone that covered their hoarded food.

  "I hope so," he said, "but there is something wrong. I know it."

  Quickly he gave each man his share of the food, then, put into each hand a nugget of gold.

  "We split up now?" Moskowitz asked.

  Daniel said, "In a moment. First let me have the weapons."

  He distributed them carefully. The best shot in each team got a carbine, the rest had knives. Gabrilovich led a team, and so did Klein. Daniel's team of four was reduced to two: Zimma dead, Kaplan missing.

  "Go now," said Daniel. "Asimov and I will be the rear guard."

  They said no word, and it was dark still, but their silence was filled with meaning. Then Gabrilovich and Klein left, and the others followed.

  "What do we do?" Asimov asked.

  "We move north," said Daniel.

  "North? But that's the wrong way."

  Daniel said nothing for a moment, then: "We'll draw off the pursuit," he said and smiled.

  "You're a good man," Asimov said.

  Daniel remembered the jingle of harness in the stable.

  The ponies had been saddled and ready even before the breakout. No point in going into all that with Asimov; not now. The boy admired him too much.

  A squadron of guards, mounted on ponies, overtook Gabrilovich's team before dawn and killed them all at a loss of a man and two ponies. It took them longer to find Klein's team, because they had lost their route, and when they did, Klein's team fought hard. The guards wanted one prisoner at least, but in the end only Zhelkov was left alive, and he died of wounds on the way back. The guards lost two more men. Shortly afterwards the Uzbek commandant was shot by firing squad, and his second-in-command, who had led the pursuit, was promoted in his place. For six months Kaplan, Daniel, and Asimov were posted missing; after that they were presumed dead.

  To die in Volochanka is not perhaps such a terrible thing; to survive is infinitely worse. Volochanka is special. It is designed, as Hell was, for the fallen angels, and like Hell's its final torture is despair. The achievement of the ten was that they faced despair and did not let it defeat them. Gabrilovich began it, with the kind of accident that only later they learned to recognize as the hand of God. Gabrilovich had been a mining engineer, and worked in the coal mine. It was part of his rehabilitation; learning how the miners themselves lived and worked and suffered, so that if society again found him acceptable, he, the intellectual, would know what workers must endure as a result of his decisions. His rehabilitation consisted of hauling a truck loaded with coal for fourteen hours a day from the face to the shaft. Zimma helped him. Zimma had been a doctor, specializing in survival techniques. For three years he had worked on the training of astronauts. They had hauled the trucks together for days, collapsed like exhausted animals in their rest periods, wolfed their appalling food at noonday, and talked hardly at all. Talk was dangerous, it led to nostalgia, and nostalgia only increased the just-bearable weight of suffering that each man bore. Then one night Gabrilovich had a dream: it re-created vividly the new suit his father had bought him for his bar mitzvah, and the smells of the food his mother had cooked, the delic
ate dry flavor of Crimean wine. Gabrilovich wanted very much to share the weight of that dream. It was too much to carry alone. He had looked at Zimma that noon, gulping his lukewarm soup, dividing up his bread—Zimma always saved some of his bread, and Gabrilovich hated him for it—then he had spoken the words.

  "Zimma, forgive my asking, but are you Jewish?"

  Zimma stared at him, incredulous. He was transported back immediately to an Embassy party in Stockholm. He had worn a suit he had bought that morning, he remembered, a dark rich blue that exactly matched the pattern on his tie. A silk tie made in Italy. There was a young Swede at the party who had been to Washington and told American stories in English. One of them had been about the millionaire who had lost all his money in the depression. His wife had left him, his children disowned him, his house and cars were taken away, and he had nothing. One day he stood in the bread line waiting for a handout. It was a bitter day in February and he had no overcoat, so to keep himself warm he, who had had millions, wrapped himself in old newspapers, picked up at random from trash cans, and one of them was the Jewish Chronicle. As he stood waiting, in line, a Cadillac drew up by the curb and its chauffeur opened the door to a Jewish lady, snug in chinchilla, secure in diamonds, who walked down the line and gave each man a quarter. When she got to the former millionaire she saw the Jewish Chronicle wrapped across his chest.

  "Forgive me for asking," she said, "but are you Jewish?" "Jesus," the former millionaire said. "That's all I needed."

  And Zimma had remembered, totally, completely, the party, his suit, his tie, the young Swede and his story, and he had laughed. It was the first time anybody had laughed in that coal mine, except a guard. It was a beginning.

  At first it had been enough that there were two of them. They had begun by exchanging biographies, but from the start the nostalgia was carefully rationed. They had concentrated more on the fact of their Jewishness, and how much it had contributed to their being in the camp, even after the terrifying old madman had died in Moscow, convinced till the last that Jewish doctors were poisoning him. Then Avramov began to eat with them, and he too began to talk. Avramov had lectured on political science in Riga. It had been Zimma who brought in Moskowitz, and then Avramov reported that Daniel, who had lived in his hut, would like to join, but Daniel worked in the forest. He could not come and talk in the mine. Daniel was also the camp's millionaire. He had been a soldier and had risen to the rank of major. He was strong and ruthless and had somehow stored away a little hoard of gold. One day Avramov brought word that Daniel would donate some of his gold to hiring a meeting place. Moskowitz, a former lawyer, sought an interview with the commandant of his sector of the camp. The commandant had first beaten Moskowitz, who expected it. The commandant, an Uzbek, always beat prisoners who asked for interviews. But in the end he agreed. They could meet for an hour once a week. The place they were given was a tool shed, the entirely unofficial rent a hundred rubles a month. The limit of their membership was to be ten, a number Moskowitz accepted at once. It was the number of the minyan. But they said nothing of religion. Not then.

  Daniel brought a young poet with him, and the poet, Asimov, suggested Kaplan, an agronomist. Zimma produced Goldfarb, another doctor, and then Klein the singer and Zhelkov the psychologist appeared. That closed the list. By then other Jews in the camp had heard about them, and begged to join, but they would accept no more. It was the other Jews who called them the minyan: the minimum number of Jewish men who must meet together before a service can be held. The ten.

  At their first meetings they talked about communism. Avramov lectured, and the rest asked questions, dialecti-cally pure questions about the dangerous fallacy of Israel and the gratifying decline in Judaic religion; questions one could address to the hidden microphone that Gabrilovich found within minutes of entering the hut. After four weeks the microphone was withdrawn; the Uzbek had found the tapes both boring and pathetic. Obviously these men hoped to have their sentences reduced by proving how deserving of rehabilitation they were. But the Uzbek knew they would never be released.

  So did they. When the microphone went they talked about the world as it should be, not as it was. Avramov told them how the world need never hunger, Zhelkov told them how the human mind could develop into an instrument beyond their comprehension, Kaplan how the desert in Israel could blossom, quite literally, like a rose. Asimov related stories, Klein sang. Without books or writing materials they created something new with their voices, part seminar, part magazine. Then Gabrilovich discussed survival, their own—how to hoard their food, their sleep, their strength, to give them the best possible chance to avoid the terror of the hospital and a slow but certain death. It was Daniel, always the bravest, who asked the questions: How many of us want to survive? To their surprise, their joy, they found they all did, so long as they could meet together, and that night Klein prayed. He alone was Orthodox, he alone knew the words, but that night when Klein prayed they all prayed with him and from him took lessons in their own religion.

  Daniel let two more weeks go by before he talked of escape. He had never spoken before, and at first they did not want to hear him, but Daniel had two persuasive arguments: his gold rented their meeting place, now, inevitably, nicknamed the synagogue, and on escape he was the expert, and a rule of their society was always to listen to the expert. He disarmed them at once by saying that it was inevitable that most of them would fail, but even they would achieve the reward of a quick death. For the others, the successful ones, there would be a chance to get out of the country, and if they succeeded, they could tell of their suffering and contribute to the arrival of the world as it should be. That was a debt they would owe to God. Asimov agreed at once; he was by far the youngest, and the enormous odds frightened him least. With the others it took time, but in the end they all agreed, even Kaplan, who at fifty had no chance at all. Two things persuaded them: the fact that it was a moral—even a religious—duty, and the fact that if they failed, as most of them would, death was their only punishment, and death, so long as it came quickly, was the only release that would ease them once the minyan was disbanded.

  Even so, the magnitude of their task, when they began to examine it, appalled them. The camp was at Volochanka, two hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle. In its bitter winter no human being could survive outside the camp, in summer the guards were doubled, dogs roamed the spaces between the huts all night, and searchlights played at random, without predictable patterns. There were, besides, two tangles of barbed wire and machine guns mounted at each corner of the camp's perimeter. The guards, armed with tommy guns and clubs, used skis in winter and Mongolian ponies in summer. And it was all waste, all display. Until the ten men began plotting together, none of the prisoners, even the crazy ones, had even thought of escaping. There was nowhere to escape to.

  They began by nourishing and training their bodies. Daniel taught them how to exercise, Klein how to develop their breathing, Gabrilovich how to work their muscles to the utmost limit of their capacity. They pooled all their possessions except Daniel's gold—that would be needed after their escape—and used them to buy food. They were ruthless about this: when food could not be bought it was stolen, and to steal prisoners' food at Volochanka meant agonizing death at the hands of other prisoners, if they were caught. Here, too, the Mosaic law operated. A life for a life. To take a man's food was to take his life. But they succeeded, and grew strong. Goldfarb taught them hygiene, and they survived the wave of typhus that swept the camp in the spring. Chance alone had kept them alive as a group through the January influenza epidemic, and they thanked God for it. Asimov developed into a bold and cunning thief and stole worn-out tools, hinges, screws that Zimma patiently transformed into wire cutters and weapons. That winter a guard fell in love with Asimov, who submitted and brought his presents into the common pool to buy food. Kaplan found a suitable patch of ground and grew flowers in it and the camp thought he was crazy as the summer slowly waned, the nights grew shorter and almost di
sappeared.

  The break was planned for July. There were only two hours of darkness in Siberia then, and Kaplan's flowers had reached the state they needed. Nightshade, most of it, but there were other ingredients. One day he picked them all, as the camp jeered, and let them wither, then he and Goldfarb set to work extracting the poison that would deal with the dogs. It was Zhelkov who fed the dogs. They loved him. Whatever he fed them, they would eat ... Zimma had his own plans to deal with the power cable. They might work, and they might not—insulation was impossible even to steal, but Zimma had agreed to tackle the job, and the risks were his own. God might yet let him live. They had their escape route planned, their rallying point in the forest that Daniel had mapped out for them already memorized, their hopes and prayers centered on a boat that might take them to Vadso, in Norway, eight hundred miles away. Then Zimma cut his leg in the mine, and he knew that he, who by his laughter had started the movement, would not see it through to the end. The cut was not serious, but it turned septic and there were no medicines. It grew worse and he found it harder to work, his strength faded. But every day until the escape he staggered to work. On the last three days he gave the others his food. And he was happy. God had been generous. Even if he had decided not to let Zimma live, at least he had simplified the problem of cutting the power supply.

  On the night of the break nine of them assembled in the hut and waited for Kaplan, whose job it was to bring the poison for the dogs. This they needed desperately, but even more they needed his presence. Without him they were not ten; there could be no ritual prayer. It was strange how important prayer was to them. Zhelkov had lectured on it once, not stating a theory, but verbalizing the question that nagged in all their minds, except the Orthodox Klein's: Why do we need the prayers when we none of us believe in God? They had decided at last that the answer was in their Jewishness, which the ritual, the prayers, the Hebrew tongue all made manifest. But there was more than that, and they knew it, though what that "more" was they never could define. To the end the question nagged at some of them, though Zimma, Klein, and Daniel joined Kaplan in his faith. But now, all alike, believer and non-believer, waited for Kaplan and their prayers.