Kolymsky Heights

by Lionel Davidson

  And indeed the girl did seem to be blushing a bit. A big girl, big all over, somewhat puffy, and pale – anaemically pale as all the white women of Siberia seemed to be; winter for nine months of the year and the summer tan soon gone. But an easy mover, and with a coquettish look. He knew Anna Antonovna had told her he didn’t know the contents of the parcel, but he saw from the girl’s knowledgeable eyes that she knew that he did know. It intrigued him. Was she so short of knickers and a bra? Surely she could have waited for Ponomarenko’s return. Why the hurry for collection?

  ‘Coffee? A drink?’ he said.

  ‘Oh no, Nikolai Dmitrievich. I didn’t mean to −’

  ‘Kolya. Please,’ he said.

  ‘Kolya. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Just in passing I thought I’d see if maybe you were in. You men spend so much time in the clubs –’

  ‘I know few people yet, Lydia Yakovlevna.’

  ‘Lydia – please.’

  ‘A lovely name. Have a drink, Lydia!’

  ‘Well, a small one, perhaps.’

  Just in passing she had jumped into her party boots: stiletto heels. Her outdoor ones must be in the large shopper she was carrying, hurriedly changed in the hall outside. A huge plunging neckline appeared once she was out of her fur coat. And hair piled ornately high as her headscarf came off; together with a seductive odour not long applied. Her eyelashes flickered about the room.

  ‘Ah, that kotek! Still here.’

  Kotek: pussy cat. She had picked up the panda.

  ‘Yes. And still wearing his lipstick. Now I wonder,’ he said gravely, ‘who gave him that?’

  She laughed. ‘A crazy night. Friends … ’

  ‘Ah.’ From Anna Antonovna he had already learned that the only friends in the apartment that night had been Ponomarenko and this girl; it had been the first of their friendly nights.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we are both good friends of Alexei.’

  ‘Ah, Alyosha, that crazy boy … Thank you.’ He had given her a cherry brandy, and noted her approval of his good manners. A lady’s drink; although he had also heard from Anna Antonovna that this girl had no trouble with a vodka.

  In no time they were chatting easily, and he saw that his startling head in no way fazed her. Quite the reverse; she seemed fascinated by it and was coming on fast.

  ‘Your Russian – so beautiful,’ she softly told him.

  ‘Thank you.’ Her own was far from high class, and he was fracturing his in the manner he had adopted here from the start. But he saw the remark as less a tribute to beautiful Russian than as a hint that ethnicity was no problem here. At the drop of a hat this girl could be tumbling in the Finnish bed. But the blatancy of it puzzled him. It also alerted him. Did she know that Ponomarenko would be absent a long time? And if so, how?

  ‘So what do you hear,’ he asked, handing her a third shot of cherry brandy, ‘from our friend?’

  ‘Alyosha? … What, another drink? I shouldn’t. But I also get lonely sometimes … Oh, Alyosha doesn’t write. Too busy with those Georgian girls, I expect.’

  ‘After you? Water after wine? Of course not.’

  ‘Liar,’ she said delightedly, and showed him more leg. ‘I’m sure you’re just as bad. Didn’t you go for those gorgeous Batumi girls?’

  ‘In Batumi I just relax.’

  ‘And have parties? He loved parties. I’ll bet you had parties.’

  ‘Parties, yes. There were parties.’

  ‘Loved them. And now he’ll miss one here. He’d be back if he knew that! Oh yes, like a shot. Pavel Grigorovich’s.’

  ‘Pavel Grigorovich?’

  ‘Bukarovsky. His sixtieth. Everybody’s going. You didn’t know?’

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ he said. And now he saw. Everybody wasn’t going. The mayor was going, and the top brass of Tchersky and Green Cape were going. Many of Bukarovsky’s drivers were also going. But supermarket assistants weren’t going.

  ‘He’d be showing me off there, all right. He loved to see me dressed up. I mean, what I’ve got on now isn’t anything. I’ve got some lovely clothes – and nowhere to go in them.’

  178

  ‘I’m sure you look lovely in anything. Isn’t that cherry brandy a little sweet for you?’

  ‘It is a little sweet, yes.’

  ‘Try a sip of vodka.’

  ‘Oh, no. I must be going.’

  ‘From mine,’ he said, and displaced the panda to sit beside her and give her a sip; which the girl refused so playfully that she managed to spill it down her dress front. He helped her mop up with a handkerchief.

  ‘Quite dry now?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘It didn’t go down further?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  He tried further, without the handkerchief, and left his hand there.

  ‘Naughty Kolya,’ she said, looking at him.

  ‘Naughty Lydia.’

  He kissed her and received a mouthful of cherry tongue. ‘We’re only human, aren’t we?’ she said in his ear.

  She said it again, next door, some time later, when he had begun to doubt it. The girl was a tiger. Presently she propped herself on an elbow and gazed down at him. ‘You know I haven’t been with a man since Alyosha. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ he said honestly. A minimum of four months’ energy had gone into her activities, and he didn’t think much could have gone spare.

  Later, lying more comfortably, she said reflectively, ‘Yes … that will certainly be a party, all right.’

  ‘Would you like to go to it?’

  ‘Who could I go with?’

  ‘Why not me?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if Alyosha would like that.’ Her eyelashes flickered at the ceiling. ‘I haven’t thought of it really,’ she said.

  26

  Pavel Grigorovich Bukarovsky, the road manager of the Tchersky Transport Company, had been given his job by Leonid Shevelyev, the founding father of the company and the man credited with opening up north-east Siberia. Shevelyev, arrested in 1947 for ‘unsound political beliefs’ had served his time in a local labour camp, and Bukarovsky had served time in the same camp. Most of the senior staff of the company had done time in the camps.

  The camps of the Kolyma, strung out all along the river, had been the most infamous in the Soviet Union; and yet when they were closed in the 1950s many of the inmates had chosen to remain in the area. Their reasons were simple. The land of restraint had suddenly become the land of the free – freer at least than anywhere else in the Soviet Union. It had fewer police, fewer party officials, fewer bureaucrats. It also of course had fewer amenities.

  But even that changed; for after the great gold and diamond finds of the 1960s, it suddenly had more amenities than elsewhere. It had more food, more housing, more pay. And by another reversal, what had once been the worst had become the best. By common consent Tchersky had been the worst. Under its former name of Nizhniye Kresty it had been a byword for horror even in the days of the Tsars: the remotest outpost of the Russian empire, the least accessible, a final hell for the most desperate prisoners. Now, as capital of the Kolymsky region, it had become the centre of all good things.

  Pavel Grigorovich Bukarovsky in his own life had witnessed these changes, and on his sixtieth birthday, forty years after arriving in the Arctic, he planned to celebrate them. Although he lived and worked at Green Cape, he had to celebrate at Tchersky, which had the largest premises: Barbara’s.

  Barbara’s was a labyrinth of rooms running one into another; it had been converted from a double row of log houses. Deloused, debugged, completely sanitised, it all the same still retained the atmosphere of another Siberia and was the most popular venue in all the Kolymsky region. With the assistance of the mayor, who served as head of the planning committee, walls had been removed and temporary plinths inserted to open up the area – for the largest party Tchersky had ever seen.

  Several hundred people were already there when
Porter arrived with the girl, and Lydia Yakovlevna was both excited and nervous.

  ‘Oh God, it’s huge. Oh God, everybody’s here! How do I. look?’

  She looked like an overdressed tart, but was not out of the ordinary. And not everybody was here. The winter roads were now laid and hundreds of the drivers were away. But the upper echelons of the two towns were here and their women were here, and all of them were in their best and overdressed. Stiletto boots were everywhere, and ornate hairdos and plunging necklines and eyeshadow and makeup.

  There were thirty tables for ten clustered round a space left open for dancing, and guests were now packed tight in this space, greeting each other and taking early refreshment from laden trays pushed through the throng. Music was playing – accordions, balalaikas, brass – and people had to shout to be heard. The girl was soon flushed and dewed, her mascara smudging. ‘Oh God, it’s wonderful, it’s marvellous. Everybody’s here! Just look at the tables!’

  The tables were indeed a sight: a mass of crisp napery and sparkling silverware, of glass, flowers, fruit piled high. And bottles, battalions of bottles.

  ‘Kolya!’ The limping Kama chief, Yura, was shouting in his ear. ‘You’re at my table! And your lovely lady, eh? You’re with me! Wonderful, very good! Never had one of you before.’

  ‘Was that Uri Sergeivich?’ the girl asked, her eyes brightened still more at being named a lovely lady.

  ‘Yura, yes.’ He hadn’t heard Yura’s patronymic.

  ‘Oh God, he’s important! He’s really important – an old comrade of Pavel Grigorovich! We must be at a good table. You don’t think we can be at Pavel Grigorovich’s table?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They were not at Bukarovsky’s table, but at one close by. Liova, the Light Vehicles head, was also at this table and some other departmental chiefs and their ladies. And a great hubbub rose from all the tables as the guests settled and saw what was before them, and what was still to come. Before each one of them was a bottle of champagne and of red wine, and for each couple a bottle of vodka and of cognac. And what was to come – on the elaborate commemorative menus – was the most extravagant meal Porter had ever seen. It was served on the trot by a small army of waitresses, Russian and Yakut, course after course of it.

  Three kinds of soup and sour cream; caviar, smoked salmon, Kamchatka crab; roast chicken and beef with venison and tongue; salamis, sausages, stuffed piroshkes; salads, vegetables, pickled everything in profusion; with sugared cranberries and macaroons and icecream. And a box of chocolates with the coffee for every lady.

  Bukarovsky, his haggard face relaxed and grinning, had. appointed himself master of ceremonies and gave the first toast. And the toasts went on throughout the meal: toasts to the guests, and the ladies, to Shevelyev and the company he had founded, to comrades now absent with the boats and those left always absent in the camps, to Tchersky and Green Cape, to the Kolymsky region and Yakutia, to peace and prosperity.

  They had grown somewhat slurred before a crash of cymbals announced a surprise event – a huge cake wheeled in as a present from Tchersky. The cake, iced to represent the original log premises of the Tchersky Transport Company, was set all around with models of the company’s first primitive trucks.

  Bukarovsky, highly emotional, had to reply to this, and he said that proud as he was of the company’s development it could never have happened without the willing help of the Tchersky municipality; which suggested further toasts from those who had not yet given any.

  Liova was on his feet, to give the Tchersky Road Services committee and its ambulance section whose vehicles he had the honour to service. Then Yura was on his, to say not only the ambulance section but all the health services, and in particular Tchersky’s magnificent hospital! And gazing round to where all the grinning faces had turned, Porter saw Medical Officer Komarova staring at him.

  His heart gave a single great thump.

  She was at a table beyond Bukarovsky’s, and now, through the cigarette smoke, he saw all the senior staff of the hospital. The director of the hospital was there, and Dr Gavrilov, and the isolation wing sister he had abused so loudly in Korean and Japanese. They were all looking and smiling quite amiably. But Medical Officer Komarova was not smiling. She was simply staring.

  But was she staring at him? Perhaps she was staring at Yura. He looked quickly away, and was grateful that Yura then sat down and the impatient band struck up and people began taking the floor. Lydia Yakovlevna wanted to take the floor. The girl was now quite drunk and nibbling his ear.

  ‘I want to dance. I want to make love. First I want to dance,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, we’ll dance.’

  ‘Lovely lady, why hurry from me?’ Yura was now quite drunk himself and dribbling at her.

  ‘Oh, Uri Sergeivich, I don’t hurry from you −’

  ‘Ah, you know my name!’

  ‘Uri Sergeivich! Who doesn’t know your name?’

  ‘Uri Sergeivich,’ said a voice from the rear, ‘I would like, on behalf of the Medical Services committee, to thank you for your kind words.’ Komarova was in the rear. She was bending over to shake hands. She was bending over Porter to do so.

  He dropped his napkin at once and got his head under the table to pick it up.

  ‘My privilege and my honour,’ Yura told her, drunkenly kissing the hand he was shaking. ‘But what’s this – not in your dancing clothes, not dancing with us tonight?’

  ‘Tonight it’s not possible. I am on call. But I felt I had to –’

  Porter ducked out, dragged by Lydia Yakovlevna, and glimpsed the arm of a severely tailored suit before he was on the floor and lurching with the mob.

  ‘Oh God! Oh, pussy cat! Isn’t it wonderful? I feel wonderful,’ Lydia Yakovlevna said. She was nibbling his ear again. ‘I love you. I want to do things. We’ll do things, won’t we?’

  ‘Yes, we’ll do things,’ Porter said.

  Komarova had certainly seen him. She had come over to see him better. Why else would she have come over to give thanks for kind words? The hospital director could have come and given them. But the hospital director didn’t seem to have recognised him, and nor had any of the others. All of them had examined him in the hospital; conscious and unconscious, clothed and naked: a sullen Korean seaman, bruised, with a pigtail and a moustache. Now he was a smiling Chukchee with a shaven head and a smooth face, a guest of Pavel Grigorovich’s. What connection could there be between the chance foreign seaman and this driver from Green Cape? But she had seen a connection.

  Or had she?

  He went frantically over every encounter he had had with her. She had seen him on the ship. She had brought him to the hospital. She had examined him every day. The others had examined him more – this was true – yet he was her patient, and her responsibility. She had had to make the arrangements to get him to Murmansk. Perhaps she had now heard from Murmansk …

  Or there could be another reason entirely.

  She was the district medical officer; perhaps in her district she had not before seen any Chukchees. He hadn’t seen any himself. He had certainly been a novelty to Yura, to liova, even to the old Yakut Vassili. Bukarovsky had been puzzled as to what he was doing here from Chukotka. She could be asking just such questions about him now.

  Yes, it was that. It had to be that.

  ‘Pussy cat, one more dance and then let’s go,’ Lydia Yakovlevna said. She was rubbing herself against him. ‘Oh God, I want to do things. I want to do everything. We’ll do everything, won’t we?’

  ‘Yes, we’ll do everything,’ Porter said.

  He had signed for a bobik to get down to Tchersky, and now they went back to Green Cape in it, and up to the second floor and did everything. But his mind was not on his partner, now strenuously enjoying herself in the Finnish bed, but on the stern figure in the tailored suit.

  This was at the end of October.

  27

  At the end of October, General Liu Shih-Yu, commander of the mili
tary region of Sinkiang in west China, flew from his headquarters at Urumchi to the desert station of Lop Nor.

  At Urumchi, a town of half a million people, he maintained an infantry division. At Lop Nor, with almost no people, he had two armoured divisions.

  Lop Nor was a nuclear test base: his country’s oldest.

  General Liu was not today on nuclear business, however. He was here to observe the impacting of a test missile. It was coming from Manchuria in east China and it would cross the intervening 3200 kilometres in nine minutes. A new guidance system had been designed to land it within a target area (CEP – circular error probable) of 250 metres.

  At Lop Nor he inspected the target area. Instruments had been set to record the impact from the air, from the ground, and from below the ground. Then he went to his observation bunker. Here contact was already established with Manchuria, and he greeted his opposite number, the commander of the Shenyang military region.

  Was all in position at Lop Nor? he was asked.

  Yes, all was in position at Lop Nor.

  Then launch procedures could commence immediately.

  Liu and his staff listened to the launch procedures on the loudspeakers, and then to the blast-off, and themselves joined Shenyang in a small cheer as the missile departed Manchuria on its nine-minute journey.

  After ten minutes – and then twelve, fifteen – confusion developed between Shenyang and Lop Nor. No missile had appeared.

  The first explanation was that its final stage had failed to ignite.

  A few minutes later, a correction. It had ignited, but after transiting Inner Mongolia the small flight-correcting rockets had evidently misfired for the missile had swung south. Its descent had been observed, however, and a true burn-out velocity logged at 24,000 kph.

  The vehicle carried no payload but this velocity had produced a large crater. It had produced it in the region of Lanchow; which was outside General Liu’s area.