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The Yermakov Transfer

Page 2

by Derek Lambert

Time had now begun to lose its dimensions for Demurin. He was prematurely old with coal dust buried in the scars on his face and he lived in a capsule of experience in which he could reach out and touch the historic past as easily as the present.

  The capsule embraced the slave labour that had helped to build the railway; the corrupt economies which had sent trains charging off frost-buckled track; the life and times of Tsar Nicholas II who had baptised the railway only to die by the bullet beside it; the Czech Legion which had converted the coaches into armoured cars after the Revolution; Lake Baikal which had contemptuously sucked an engine through its ice when the Russians tried to cross it to fight the Japanese.

  The railway’s heroes, its lovers and victims, peopled Demurin’s capsule. At seventeen he had stood on the footplate of a butter train bound for Vladivostock carrying 150 exiles to the gold and silver mines, with soot and coals streaming past his face: now, nearly half a century later, he was an attendant in a power house.

  He scowled at his crew, bewildered by the fusion of time. “How are we doing for time?”

  His second-in-command, a thirty-year-old Ukranian with a neat, knowing face and a glossy hair style copied from a 1940 American movie still, said: “Don’t worry, old-timer, we’re on time.”

  The Ukranian thought he should have been in charge. Demurin’s rudimentary knowledge of electric power was notorious, and on this trip he was merely a symbol of heroic achievement. “Be kind to him,” they had said. “Get him there on time on his last journey.” If you fail, with Yermakov on board, they had implied, prepare yourself for a career shunting fish on Sakhalin island. The Ukranian, whose ambition was to drive the prestige train between Moscow and Leningrad, intended to keep the Trans-Siberian on time.

  Demurin wiped his hands with a cloth, a habit – no longer a necessity. “Steam was more reliable,” he began. “I wonder …”

  The Ukranian groaned theatrically. “What, old-timer, the line from St. Petersburg to the Tsar’s summer palace at Tsarskoye Selo?” But, although he was half-smart, he wasn’t unkind. He patted Demurin’s shoulder, laughing to show that it was a joke. “What do you remember, Boris?”

  “In 1936 I was on the footplate of an FD 2-10-2 which hauled a train of 568 axles weighing 11,310 tons, for 160 miles.”

  The item had surfaced like a nugget on sinking soil. He didn’t know why he had repeated it. It bewildered him all the more.

  The Ukranian thought: That’s what Siberia does for you.

  “Did you know,” Demurin rambled on, “that when Stalin and his comrades travelled on the Blue Express from Moscow to the Black Sea resorts they had the train sprayed with eau-de-cologne?”

  The Ukranian didn’t reply. You could never tell what nuance could be inferred from any comment about a Soviet leader, dead, denounced or reinstated. All the carriages were crawling with police: it was quite possible that the locomotive, as well as the coaches, was bugged. He stared uneasily at the darting fingers of the dials.

  Demurin was silent for a few moments. Silver birches flickered past the windows. Time had overtaken him, the trains had overtaken him. Timber, coal, diesel, electric. What next? Nuclear power? He smelled the soot and steam of his youth, stared round a curve of track with snow plastering his face. He stayed there for a moment, a year, a lifetime, before returning to the electrified present.

  “Mikhail,” he said, “make sure we have a smooth journey. Make sure we keep to time. You understand, don’t you?”

  The Ukranian said: “I understand.” And momentarily the smartness which masked knowledge of his own inadequacies was nowhere visible on his neat, ambitious face.

  * * *

  It was 10.10. The train was gathering speed and it would average around 37 m.p.h. It would traverse 5,778 miles to Vladivostock, pass through eight time zones and, without interruptions, finish the journey in 7 days, 16½ hours. It would normally make 83 stops, spending 13 hours standing at stations. It would cross a land twice the size of Europe where temperatures touched –70°C and trees exploded with the cold. It would circumvent Baikal, the deepest lake in the world, inhabited by fresh-water seals and transparent fish that melt on contact with air. It would skirt the Sino-Soviet border where Chinese troops had shown their asses to the Soviets across the River Amur, where the threat of a holocaust still hovered, until it reached the forests near Khabarovsk where the Chinese once sought Gin-Seng, a root said to rejuvenate, where sabre-toothed tigers still roam. At Khabarovsk, which claims 270 cloudless days a year – no more, no less – it would disgorge its foreigners who would change trains for Nakhodka and take the boat to Japan. The train had 18 cars and 36 doors; the restaurant car boasted a 15-page menu in five languages and at least a few of the dishes were available.

  In a small compartment at the rear of the special coach a K.G.B. colonel and two junior officers occupied themselves with their own statistics: the records of every passenger and crew member. The colonel had marked red crosses against fourteen names; each of those fourteen was accompanied in his compartment by a K.G.B. agent. As the last outposts of Moscow fled past the window the colonel, whose career and life were at stake, stood up, stretched and addressed his two subordinates. “Now check out the whole train again. Every compartment, every lavatory, every passenger.”

  The officers walked respectively past Yermakov who stared at them closely, communicating apprehension which made them feel a little sick. He had just remembered that, in the old days, it was considered unlucky to travel on the Trans-Siberian on a Monday.

  FIRST LEG

  CHAPTER 1

  The kidnap plot was first conceived by Viktor Pavlov in Room 48 of the Leningrad City Court at Fontanka on December 24, 1970.

  On that day two Jews were sentenced to death and nine to long terms of imprisonment for attempting to hi-jack a twelve-seater AN-2 aircraft at Priozersk airport and fly it to Sweden en route to Israel.

  At the back of the courtroom, which seated 200, Pavlov listened contemptuously to the details of the botched-up scheme. When he heard the evidence of one of the accused, Mendel Bodnya, revulsion burned inside him like acid.

  Bodnya told the court that he had yielded to hostile influence and deeply regretted his mistake. He thanked the authorities for opening his eyes: he had only wanted to go to Israel to see his mother.

  Bodnya got the lightest sentence: four years of camps with intensified regime, with confiscation of property.

  Pavlov’s contempt for the other amateurs was tempered by admiration for their brave, hopeless idealism.

  The woman Silva Zalmanson in her final statement: “Even now I do not doubt for a minute that some time I shall go after all and that I will live in Israel.… This dream, illuminated by two-thousand years of hope, will never leave me.”

  Anatoly Altman: “Today, on the day when my fate is being decided, I feel wonderful and very sad: it is my hope that peace will come to Israel. I send my greetings today, my land. Shalom Aleikhem! Peace unto you, Land of Israel.”

  When the sentences were announced Pavlov joined the disciplined applause because he had cultivated the best cover there was – anti-Semitism. A woman relative of one of the defendants rounded on him: “Why applaud death?” He ignored her, controlling his emotion as he had controlled it so often before. He was a professional.

  He watched impersonally as the relatives climbed on to the benches weeping and shouting. “Children, we shall be waiting for you in Israel. All the Jews are with you. The world is with you. Together we build our Jewish home. Am Yisroel khay.”

  With tears trickling down his cheeks an old man began to sing “Shma Yisroel”. The other relatives joined in, then some of the prisoners.

  Viktor Pavlov sang it too, silently, with distilled feeling, while he continued to applaud the sentences. Then the local Party secretary who had collected the obedient spectators realised that the hand-clapping had become part of the Zionist emotion. Guiltily, he snapped, “Cease applause.” Another amateur, Pavlov thought as he stopped clapping:
each side had its share of them: the knowledge was encouraging.

  At 11 a.m. on December 30, at the Moscow Supreme Court, after a sustained campaign of protest all over the world, the two death sentences were commuted to long sentences in strict regime camps and the sentences on three other defendants reduced.

  While the Collegium of the Supreme Court was deliberating the appeals Pavlov waited outside noting the identity of a couple of demonstrators. With their permission he would later identify them to the K.G.B. at their Lubyanka headquarters opposite the toy store. They would be locked up for a couple of weeks for hooliganism and his cover would be strengthened.

  The Jewish poet, Iosif Kerler, was giving interviews to foreign correspondents. The Leningrad verdict, he told them, was a sentence on every Jew trying to get an exit visa for Israel. But Pavlov knew there was no point in laying information against Kerler: the police had a dossier on him and there was nothing poetic about it. Nor was there any point in informing on the Jewess from Kiev who was telling correspondents about her son dying in Jerusalem: the K.G.B. had her number, too.

  No, the information had to be new and comparatively harmless. Pavlov had an arrangement with a Jewish schoolteacher who didn’t mind a two-week stretch during the school holidays. He wore a piece of white cloth pinned to his lapel bearing in Hebrew the slogan NO TO DEATH with a yellow, six-pointed Star of David beneath it. He meant well but he was over-playing his hand; it was like laying information against a man walking across Red Square with a smoking bomb in his hand. A pretty Jewess had also agreed to serve a statutory two-week sentence. Pavlov would report that she had been chanting provocative Zionist slogans; although she had been doing nothing of the sort because, like Pavlov, she had little time for pleas and protests; Israel was strength and you didn’t seek entry with a whine. Pavlov stared at her across the crowd; she stared back without recognition; she, too, was a professional.

  Among the correspondents Pavlov noticed the American Harry Bridges. Tall, languid, watchful. He had the air of a man who had the story sewn-up. He didn’t bother interviewing the demonstrators and managed to patronise the other journalists. Pavlov admired him for that; at the same time he hoped he would rot in hell.

  When the success of the appeals was announced the demonstrators sang and shouted their relief. Viktor Pavlov felt no relief; now the amateurs had even lost their martyrdom. They had perpetrated an abortion: he was conceiving a birth.

  * * *

  Viktor Pavlov belonged to that most virulent strain of revolutionaries: those who don’t wholly belong to the cause they are fighting for. He was fighting for Soviet Jewry and he was only part Jewish.

  Sometimes his motives scared him. Why, when so many full-blooded Jews advised “Caution, caution” did he, a mongrel, call for “Action, action”? What worried him most was the sincerity of his conviction. Was the scheming and inevitable brutality merely a heritage? – a family tree planted in violence? And the right of the Jews to emigrate to Israel: Was that merely a facile cause?

  Passionately, Viktor Pavlov sought justification. He found it mostly in the richness of his Jewish strain of blood. So deeply did he feel it that it sometimes seemed to him that it had a different course to his gentile blood.

  His great, great grandparents had been Jews born in the vast Pale of Settlement in European Russia where the Tsars confined the Jews. After the murder of Alexander II the Jews became scapegoats and Pavlov’s ancestors were exiled to Siberia to one of the mines which produced 3,600 pounds of gold loot a year for Alexander III.

  The persecution of the Jews continued and Viktor Pavlov found deep, bitter satisfaction in its history. Scapegoats; they were always the scapegoats. In 1905 gangs like the Black Hundreds carried out hundreds of pogroms to distract attention from Russia’s defeat – its debacle – at the hands of the Japanese. Followed in 1911 by the Beilis Case when a Jew in Kiev was accused, and subsequently acquitted, of the ritualistic murder of a child.

  By this time the Jewish blood that was to flow in Viktor Pavlov’s veins had been thinned. His grandmother, Katia, married a gentile, an ex-convict who helped to build the Great Siberian Railway and became a gold baron in the wild-east town of Irkutsk.

  Here Pavlov’s soul-searching got waylaid. His great grandfather lived in a palace, brawling, whoring and gambling and using gold nuggets for ashtrays. He was a millionaire, a capitalist, and thus an enemy of the revolutionaries – a White Russian. Most of the Jews were Reds.

  Pavlov allowed his great grandfather to retreat from his deliberations; across Eastern Siberia during the Civil War where he was finally shot by the American interventionists who were not always sure which Russians they were supporting – Reds or Whites.

  Pavlov concentrated on World War I. Scapegoats again. The Tsarist government, trying to explain its shattering defeats by the Germans, blamed traitors in their midst. Jews, naturally.

  Then, after the Revolution, the Jews came into their own. The Star of David in ascendancy; but too brilliantly, too hopefully, a shooting star doomed to expire. The Jews were among the leaders of the October Revolution and, with an optimism which had no historical foundation – bolstered by the Balfour Declaration in November, 1917 – they anticipated the end of persecution. They were Russians, they were Bolsheviks, they were Jews.

  Even V. I. Lenin lent his support in a speech in March, 1919:

  “Shame on accursed Tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.

  “Long live the fraternal trust and fighting alliance of the workers of all nations in the struggle to overthrow capital.”

  Today, Viktor Pavlov thought, it was Leninism that he was fighting.

  During the Civil War his grandfather, half-Jewish, a rabid Bolshevik, fell in love with a wild Jewish Muscovite who wore a red scarf and gold earrings. Illegitimately, they sired Pavlov’s father.

  According to Pavlov’s father, Leonid, they had always intended to marry. But when the shooting star faded and Stalin, frightened of the Jewish power around him, began to turn on the Jews again with a ferocity unequalled by his aristocratic enemies, there came the 1 a.m. knock on the door. Pavlov’s grandfather, who looked a little like Trotsky, was away addressing a meeting of railway workers; but his wife was at home and they took her away to one of the camps which history has always provided for Jews and she died giving birth to Leonid Pavlov.

  There is my motive, Viktor Pavlov thought. The origins of my hatred. More often than not, he believed it.

  * * *

  He was born in violence during the siege of Leningrad in World War II, the son of a teenager, Leonid Pavlov, and a peasant woman, possibly wholly Jewish, possibly not, who had found time in between dodging shells and eating stews made of potato peelings and dog meat, to make love and get married. She was killed by a German shell shortly after giving birth to Viktor.

  So many records were destroyed during the siege that it was easy to register Viktor as a Russian. This grovelling hypocrisy angered him in his teens, but later it was to become his strength.

  When he was ten Viktor Pavlov stopped some bullies beating up a small boy with springy black hair, rimless glasses and a dark complexion, in the school playground in Moscow.

  “Why,” he demanded, grabbing the arm of the biggest bully, “are you picking on him?”

  The bully, whose name was Ivanov, was astonished. “Why? Because he’s a Yid, of course.”

  “So what?” Pavlov was an athletic boy with flints in his fists which commanded respect.

  “So what? Where have you been? Everyone knows about the Jews – it’s in the papers. They’ve just closed the synagogue down the road. It was the centre of the black market in gold roubles and Israeli spies.”

  “I didn’t know you read the papers,” Pavlov remarked. “I didn’t know you could read.”

  A crowd had gathered round the two protagonists on the sunlit, asphalt playground. The original victim had vanish
ed.

  Ivanov, who had a pudding face and pale hair cut in a fringe, ignored the question. “My father’s told me about the Yids. He was in the war.…”

  “So was mine.”

  “He said the Jews wouldn’t fight. He says we should finish off the job Hitler started.”

  “Then your father’s an idiot. I was born in Leningrad. The Jews fought well. And what about the Jewish generals?”

  Dodging logic, Ivanov searched for a diversion. He stared closely at Pavlov’s intense dark features, his cap of black hair, his hawkish nose; he saw intelligence and good looks and it made him mad. “Are you a Yid?” he asked. “Are you Abrashka?”

  The crowd of boys was silent. The question was a provocation, an insult; although they weren’t sure why. Why was an evrei, so different from a Kazakh, a Kirghiz, a Uzbek?

  Ivanov grinned. “Prove it.”

  A cold, dark anger froze inside Pavlov, like no anger he had experienced before. He wanted to batter Ivanov into insensibility; to kill him. “I’ll prove it” – he put up his fists – “with these.”

  Ivanov was still trying to grin. “That’s not proof.”

  “What proof do you want?”

  “Show us your cock.”

  Recently, there had been a scandal in the suburb about Levin the circumciser. He had performed the small operation on the penis of a baby and then gone to Leningrad for a couple of days. But there had been sepsis, so the baby’s parents took the baby to a clinic where a Jewish doctor dressed the cut and told the parents they needn’t worry. But a porter reported the case to the police.

  Three weeks later, after intensive interrogation, Levin made a public address renouncing his profession. It was, he announced in a beaten voice, a barbaric ritual. He appealed to Jews all over the Soviet Union to abandon it.

  Pavlov advanced on Ivanov. Ivanov backed away appealing to the others: “I bet he’s been cut.” A few sniggered, the rest remained silent because there was ugliness here they couldn’t comprehend.

 

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