Brendan opened his eyes as a groan of protest arose from the men who had not yet made it up onto deck. The sailors were starting to close over the hatches. Desperate pleas were made for the right to piss, but once the crew embarked on a course of action Brendan knew that they never changed their minds. There was no possibility of food tonight either. From tomorrow the zeks would be somebody else’s responsibility and therefore somebody else could feed them. The urkas had been fed earlier because even the sailors were wary of these common criminals who banded together in a fraternity of thieves that lived by their own code.
After years of hearing zeks attempt to puzzle out exactly what alleged conspiracy they were arrested for, Brendan suspected the urkas to be the only genuine alliance in the Soviet Union not under the Kremlin’s heel. Yet, ironically, the gulag authorities encouraged these common criminals because, being merely a socially harmful element, they ranked above the zeks accused of sabotage or treason, and the brutality of the urkas helped to keep the political prisoners in their place.
In truth, few zeks knew what they were charged with. After being taken by train from Sevastopol to Moscow in 1937 Brendan had indignantly demanded the right to contact the British Consulate and for his first interrogators in Lubyanka prison to produce proof of the unspecified charges against him. Expecting them to have inherited a file from Georgi Polevoy, he had reviewed each detail of his life like a Catholic before confession. But his interrogators merely sat with a sheet of blank paper, outraged by his attempt to defend himself and his refusal to supply them with a list of crimes to try him for. They maintained that he only wanted proof so as to twist and distort it. The case against him was watertight precisely because there was no proof. Therefore his guilt was indisputable, because Brendan could produce no defence against it. Impatient with his non-cooperation when they had so many cases to get through, the interrogators had bound his feet and hands behind his back, using a hoist to lift him high into the air, then dropped him onto the stone floor. With his face such a mass of blood that he could not have managed to mumble a confession even if he had still been able to think clearly enough to formulate one, they brought him to a standing cell like an upturned stone coffin. Brendan had no idea how long he remained standing in it, without space to even lift his hands to the congealed blood on his face. But after hours or days they lifted him out and dumped him in a small cell where a hundred men fought for space. Nobody befriended him, but by trying to follow the conversation with his limited Russian, Brendan had learnt the importance of self-denunciation if you wished to have any chance of surviving.
His second interview had occurred at night when he was led down stairs ringed with nets to prevent suicide attempts. Screams came from each room in the long corridor set aside for night interrogations. Brendan felt that this was a place which Art obviously didn’t know about, because his brother’s sense of justice would never have let him pledge his soul to a state which tortured and butchered its own people. Every survival instinct told him to invent a conspiracy. He should confess to having plotted with POUM members to smuggle Trotsky into Spain to create a fifth column to collaborate with the fascists. But even in the torture cell with the huge thug whom the prisoners called ‘the Boxer’ lurking behind him, Brendan’s character had not allowed him to engage in such ludicrous falsehoods. He had not seen the eyes of the interrogator enquiring if he had formulated a hypothesis for the reason for his arrest. Instead, he had visualised Martin Luther’s eyes in the portrait in his father’s study. The interrogator had looked pained by Brendan’s silence, insisting again that Brendan must know the reason why he was brought here. When Brendan still refused to reply he had nodded to the Boxer and stepped from the room.
The bones of Brendan’s left hand had never set back into their proper shape and he blacked out twice while being throttled. He was hallucinating by the time the interrogator returned and so could not even remember the charges to which he must have confessed. His trial had occurred without notice two days later. The chairman of the troika read out the charges so quickly that Brendan barely heard them. He was sentenced to eight years. It was over before he had time to speak, with the next case already called. Even allowing for how everything appeared to happen in slow motion, he knew that at most his trial had lasted ninety seconds.
Looking back now, Brendan knew how illogical it had been to put himself through such unnecessary suffering. Nothing was gained. His crippled hand had hindered him in the years since, making his work rate suffer so that he was often punished with starvation rations. But, despite that, he still sometimes had a feeling of pride in his defiance on that night. It was the one moment that still gave him a sense of himself.
Life before his kidnapping in Barcelona was lived by a naive stranger. Since his trial he had no real life or self-worth. At first he was shocked by how the camp guards treated people as if they had forfeited the right to exist. Now he understood that such brutality was easy, because zeks were not people, but enemies of the people. However, balanced between his old life and this non-life there hung the moment in that interrogation cell when he thought of Martin Luther and refused to yield. Just before he lost consciousness for the first time, he had felt an extraordinary surge of foolish triumph at the realisation that he was actually stronger than Art. Because if Art found himself there he would have bent the knee for the sake of the Party, confessing to any lie like a dog doing tricks to please its master.
The squash of men in the hold was getting worse as zeks tried to retreat a safe distance from a group of urkas playing cards nearby. The old Pole whom Brendan had helped in the latrine managed to squeeze onto the floor beside Brendan, who silently cursed him for disturbing his thoughts. Even memories of torture were preferable to sitting here unable to focus on anything except his incessant hunger. He tried not to think of food, knowing that once he did he would start a vain search through every fold of his rags in case a crumb of bread had somehow lodged there. Still, maybe rations were not as bad in Kolyma as Yasili claimed. Maybe his family knew where he was. Maybe he could escape and join the hunter tribes who somehow survived in this wilderness. But he knew that the tribes would be indifferent to his plight, hunting him down like a bear, interested only in the eleven pounds of wheat that the NKVD offered for an escaped zek.
A rough shout from the card game disturbed his thoughts again.
‘You. Give me your shoes.’
Brendan looked up, realising that an urka was addressing him.
‘You heard, foreign bastard. Fascist spy. Give me your fucking shoes. It’s your tough shit I’m after losing them. You think I like losing to this bastard?’
Brendan knew that no zek would support him against the urkas. They had such a network in the camps that no zek they targeted could escape retribution. This card game was one of several going on since the voyage started. At first, the urkas had gambled their own possessions, but when these ran out they simply gambled the possessions of the zeks around them. Brendan knew that he had been fortunate. It could just as easily have been his clothes, the use of his body or even his life that was forfeited. But without shoes, he stood no chance of surviving tomorrow’s march.
‘Don’t do this, comrade. You have no use for his shoes.’ The old Pole spoke up. Silence greeted his intervention, not just because he risked his own life by interfering, but because it was a crime for prisoners to use the term comrade.
‘What’s it to you, grandfather?’ the urka said. ‘Be careful or I’ll gamble your teeth and pull out the last stumps in your stinking mouth.’
‘The foreigner will die in the cold.’
‘He’s a spy, it will save the waste of a good Soviet bullet.’ The urka looked around, sensing that his authority was being defied. ‘On the next hand of cards I’m staking your throat. Don’t run away, dokhodyaga, with my luck you’ll soon be grinning from ear to ear.’ He glared at Brendan. ‘Now give me those fucking shoes.’
Brendan handed over the rubber shoes made from strips of old t
ractor tyres. So far the nearby zeks had shown little interest in this altercation with the urka, being too preoccupied with their own misery. However the threat to the Pole’s life ignited interest in the card game. The old man said nothing, watching the homemade cards being dealt. From his expression Brendan could not tell if the Pole wanted the urka to win or lose. Truly he was a dokhodyaga, one of the walking dead barely clinging to life. Perhaps a slit throat was preferable to a slow death from frostbite and exhaustion in the snow tomorrow. It would end the perpetual hunger which haunted every second of a zek’s day. Brendan wondered would the Pole try to scramble his way into another part of the hold if the urka lost, hoping to hide among the thousands of prisoners? Or would he remain seated, summoning a final surge of human defiance? Nobody belonging to him probably knew where he was or would know of his death. Though with rumours of people being executed for simply having a Polish surname maybe nobody belonging to him remained alive.
Brendan felt an irrational need to carry the Pole’s name in his memory until his own turn came to die. He had seen this desire to be remembered in condemned prisoners in Lubyanka. They had invariably scrawled their names on the wall of the holding cell prior to execution, even though they knew that when the cleaning lady finished wiping their blood off the tarpaulin in the cellar where they were shot, she was always sent up to whitewash the cell walls.
‘Who are you?’ Brendan whispered.
‘A member of the family of a Traitor to the Fatherland. They arrested my brother for counter-revolutionary activity. I hadn’t seen him for twenty years but they still tracked me down. For his sake I hope you have no brother.’
The Pole went silent as the dealer dealt out the last cards. He gripped Brendan’s wrist with sudden vice-like strength. Brendan was unsure if this was for human support or because the old man wanted to offer him as a victim instead. But as the urka slapped down his cards with a triumphant shout, curses from the other player told Brendan that he had won. The Pole released his grip, only now starting to breathe heavily as if he had previously been too scared to show fear. The urka turned.
‘Your luck held, grandfather, I don’t have to kill you. I am a butcher, very clumsy. The man who lost is much better with a knife. It’s he who has to cut your throat.’
The Pole was surprisingly quick in rising to push his way through the mass of bodies. But the urkas would have easily caught him had Brendan not deliberately tripped as he rose to get out of their way. They stumbled against him and one kicked out but with men so tightly squashed together there was little force in his kick. The Pole might conceal himself for a short time but he could not get far in this crowd. The urkas would search all night because under their code no forfeit could be unpaid. If the urka who lost at cards failed to kill the Pole, he himself would be killed so as to restore the thieves’ honour.
With a survivor’s instincts Yasili had absented himself from Brendan’s side at the moment when the urka demanded his shoes. Now the painter was back, urging Brendan to disappear from this part of the hold until the prisoners were led up onto deck tomorrow. With luck by then, the urkas would have forgotten his existence. Their power would be lessened in the gold fields, though they would still do less work than political prisoners and secure all the indoor jobs. But casual killings there would be infrequent because camp commandants hated to see a unit of labour wasted. Brendan would survive, but only if he found warm shoes.
Men cursed as he stumbled against them in the hold. Here and there a stub of candle burned and it amazed him how much you could actually see with a flicker of distant flame to give you bearings. Yasili said that the ability to create a flame was the most vital skill in the gold fields. Striking sparks from a flint was the only way to start a bonfire out there on the frozen wastes. Without a bonfire you could not melt ice-blocks cut from the river and without boiling this water over the fire you could not soften the frozen sand to sieve it for gold. If you could not sieve like this for twelve hours a day you did not receive the meagre ration of bread needed to keep you alive.
In the transit camp in Vladivostok, the gold fields had sounded more terrible than any gulag he had been in so far, but now in the belly of this dark ship they sounded like freedom.
Brendan pushed further on into parts of the hold he had never previously entered. Occasionally he trod on bodies lying amid pools of urine and vomit. Some cursed while others lay as if dead. It would be easy to steal shoes from any of these figures. But Brendan’s character refused to allow him to do so unless certain that they were dead. Most of the dead were already stripped of every possession. No zek knew how many men had been crammed onto this ship at Vladivostok. Some said four thousand and others said ten. It was impossible to imagine such a cargo. All Brendan knew was that his holding cell in Vladivostok, with bunks for a dozen prisoners, had contained a hundred and sixty-eight men.
Another group of urkas played cards by candlelight to his left. Behind them he could see the ship’s steel wall, the first time he had seen it in days. The dull sheen reminded him of the time last year when, passing a shaving mirror in an orderly’s hut, he had glimpsed the face of a man whom he could not recognise as himself.
Ordinary zeks were trying to stay clear of this other card game, crowding into the shadows, desperate not to be caught up in the bets. One man had not been so fortunate however because his body lay on the floor in a pool of blood close to the urkas, gagged and stripped with his hands and ankles neatly tied together. The strands of rope left Brendan confused as to why the man had died. If it had been a fight he would merely be stabbed. But this was a deliberate execution. Perhaps he was an urka who betrayed their code of honour or a zek publicly murdered as a warning. Or maybe he had been chosen at random, with each stage of his being bound, gagged and stripped representing a separate hand lost in the card game. Maybe the victim had been forced to lie there and watch each card being dealt, until the eventual loser was handed the knife and ordered to slit him open like a pig. The corpse’s back was to Brendan so he could not see if the throat or stomach had been cut, but Brendan had never witnessed such a sight before. He sensed the silent terror of the zeks nearby.
The corpse’s feet were bare, with his shoes having obviously been among the first possessions gambled away. The body was thin, with protruding bones trying to push their way through the skin. But something about the hunched shoulders seemed disturbingly familiar. Brendan recalled the Pole’s story of being sentenced because he was related to his brother. But Art was in Ireland or somewhere safe. Surely he had not been mad enough to try and return to Moscow? Art could not know where Brendan was. But perhaps word had leaked out, with Art arriving in Russia to try and save him because that was what older brothers did. Dunkineely was suddenly clear to him again, being carried on Art’s shoulders along the Bunlacky shore. These couldn’t be the same shoulders, yet Brendan was unable to prevent himself from stepping forward, surprising the urkas who halted their card game to observe him.
Brendan knelt by the body, resisting an urge to cradle it. He did know these features, this chin, the nose, even if starvation and beatings had altered them. He pushed the body over. The neck was untouched, as was the breast. It was the testicles that had been cut off with the man left to bleed to death. How long had it taken to die? Brendan wanted to shake the body and ask. Brendan wanted to scream into his face. He wanted answers, wanted to unravel the previous ten years. He wanted to remove the gag and hear his own name being spoken. But an instinct for self-preservation prevented any such rashness. He let Georgi Polevoy’s head drop back onto the floor and stood up, knowing that the urkas were scrutinising him. He had no idea what Georgi had been arrested for or if the urkas who killed him knew that he was a former NKVD man. Perhaps his death was random, with Georgi not knowing his place as a mere zek. Or perhaps back in his glory days when he reigned in Lubyanka prison Georgi had made the mistake of torturing one of these urkas. If Brendan appeared to recognise Georgi now they might think that he too had once been a
policeman. Therefore he gave the urkas a practised imbecilic glance, shrugged his shoulders indifferently and slunk off. He waited until he was a distance from the card game before starting to run, not caring what blows he received when he pushed past men or how often he fell over bodies huddled on the floor.
It was pitch dark in this part of the hold but he knew where he was heading. The steps up to the deck were packed tight with men perched there. It was colder with night air coming through the air vents in the shutters. Men cursed at him as he invaded their space, but he didn’t care or even feel their kicks at his bare feet. All he could see was Georgi Polevoy’s defiant stare in death.
He felt no sense of revenge. Yuri was also probably dead or in a gulag. Brendan had met many Russian volunteers arrested as spies once they returned from Spain. But Georgi had always seemed too ruthless and clever to be ensnared, one step ahead of everyone. Perhaps cleverness was treasonable now too. Maybe Stalin really was like God and came for all men in the end.
A hand reached out to grab him from the mass of men.
‘Sit down.’ Yasili had cat’s eyes in the gloom. Brendan sank down, forcing the cluster of men to reluctantly yield space. ‘Are you okay?’
The Family on Paradise Pier Page 37