The Yermakov Transfer

by Derek Lambert

  Libby wondered if he were laughing at her. She said: “You should see some parts of London. But why,” she asked, “has a man of your importance come to warn a girl tourist who may have wandered by mistake into your wooden city?”

  “A man of my importance?”

  “You’re obviously not a traffic warden.”

  “Please?”

  “You have presence, importance.”

  “You are a girl of perception,” Razin said, not displeased. He drew on his cigarette. “It’s like this. Through no fault of your own you have come on the Trans-Siberian with a very important passenger. I know you didn’t intend to.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because your booking was made before Comrade Yermakov decided to make the journey. We are very thorough, you see. We have checked everyone. And we have to check every little irregularity. Like a pretty English girl defying an Intourist request and wandering abroad by herself. That’s why I came here. To ask you not to do it again.” He smiled at her. “It would help me greatly. You see, my future depends on the outcome of this journey.”

  Libby smiled back because you couldn’t help liking him.

  “Tonight,” Razin said, “I believe you’re dining with Mr. Harry Bridges.”

  “Am I?” She was surprised. “I didn’t know I was. He passed me on the stairs a little while back, as if he hardly noticed me.”

  “Did he?” Razin examined this as he examined everything that didn’t fit. “I wonder why?” He paused and then went on: “Anyway he’s taking you to dinner. I have a record of the booking he made at a restaurant. Happily the restaurant is approved by Intourist.”

  Razin stood up to leave. He said: “Please stay with Intourist, Miss Chandler, at least until we get to Khabarovsk where we go our separate ways.”

  As he went out he fingered the pocket containing the micro-film. “A nice piece of cloth,” he remarked. “I wish I could buy my wife a coat like that in Moscow.”

  * * *

  He couldn’t explain the apprehension; usually it came to him in the early hours of the morning to be quietened with sleeping pills. These days, since he set out across Siberia, it had been arriving earlier. It was something to do with this vast land; the frosty arrogance that had never been tamed. This isn’t my Russia, he thought. They don’t give a damn about the Kremlin here. In the cities, perhaps, but not on the steppes, in the taiga.

  And Yermakov thought suddenly: This is a place to die.

  He poured himself a shot of vodka, swallowed it neat and called to his secretary waiting in the office outside his suite in the mansion on the outskirts of Novosibirsk. “Get me Razin,” he said, when the young man came in, mouth trembling.

  “I’ll try,” the secretary said. “But I don’t know where he is.”

  “Get him,” Yermakov said.

  He poured himself another vodka, took off his jacket and tie and went to the bathroom to shave.

  Outside in the grounds dogs prowled and sentries were posted round the walls. Not enough protection, he thought, skimming the cut-throat razor down his cheeks, staring at the pouchy face looking back at him.

  A place to die – and thousands had as the victorious Red Army chased the Whites towards the Pacific. When the Reds crossed the Ob in mid-December, 1919, they found 30,000 dead in Novonikolayevsk as it was then called. Four months later 60,000 had died from typhus.

  The leader tried to find some glory in these victories which were his roots. Instead he saw women and children abandoned in the snow to die of cold, starvation and disease.

  He carefully shaved his neck where the tired skin bled easily. You are thinking like an old man tottering towards death, scared of what lies ahead, scared of the punishments for your crimes, he told himself; but the razor was still unsteady in his hand.

  Think what you have achieved, he argued to himself; think of the power and prosperity; instead he thought of the Jew kicked in the groin on the platform at Moscow and of the years between 1936–38 when one million people had been imprisoned and executed in Siberia. I’m returning to the graveyard I helped to dig, he thought.

  Razin knocked at the door and came in. They were alike, these two survivors, the price of survival showing on their faces.

  Yermakov said: “Is everything all right, Comrade Razin?”

  Razin looked surprised. “Everything’s fine. The crowds are waiting for you in the square.”

  “I meant security. Have there been any incidents? With the Jews or anyone?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Yermakov turned round. “If there had been you would know, Comrade Razin?”

  “Of course.”

  Yermakov said: “I want the guards doubled. Have you checked every window and rooftop in the square?”

  “You are quite safe,” Razin answered, his voice losing a little of its respect.

  “I’d better be, Comrade Razin,” Yermakov said.

  He dismissed Razin with a wave of his hand. The city’s a graveyard, he murmured to himself. He shivered despite the central heating.

  * * *

  The speech was a success as usual, the crowds packed into the floodlit square cheering the predictable exhortations and promises. But, because it was a fine night deep with stars and the moon, a curved knife, hanging among them, the rally was endowed with a pagan majesty: Yermakov’s voice echoing through loudspeakers planted throughout the city, marksmen with high velocity rifles on the rooftops, winged with snow, searching the floodlit faces.

  Harry Bridges and Libby Chandler walked with the crowd after the speech, their shoes crunching on the slush that had frozen at dusk.

  “I get the impression you expected me to ask you out,” Bridges said, guiding her through a bunch of children celebrating the public holiday declared by Yermakov.

  “I did.”

  “That was very presumptuous of you.”

  “A man called Razin said you were taking me out.”

  Bridges tightened his grip on her arm. “Razin? How did he come to say that?”

  Libby told him about Razin’s warning.

  Bridges said: “They’re very worried.”

  “With any reason?”

  Bridges shrugged. “How should I know?”

  “You’re a journalist.”

  “I was a journalist.”

  Libby said: “Why did you pass me on the stairs like that?”

  “I’m sorry,” Bridges said.

  They went into a restaurant, sporting a gold-braided doorman, where Bridges had booked a table. They sat near a small band playing Glen Miller.

  Bridges ordered them 100 grammes of vodka each – “You’re not allowed any more,” he explained – borsch, jelly-fish salad and pilmeni.

  She felt the vodka burn and smiled at him. Now that she had carried out her assignment she was more relaxed and she liked this tall American with the languid ways; there was a maturity about him and a suppressed quality which she couldn’t analyse. He was wasting, she thought, and she didn’t know why.

  Bridges pointed at the band wearing punished tuxedos playing Moonlight Serenade and said: “We could be back in the forties. I guess a lot of Russia’s like we were in the last war. The clothes, the queues.” He stopped as if he were betraying something. “But in a hundred years time Russia, with the help of Siberia, will be the richest country in the world.”

  “Are you going to stay?” She poured some more vodka from her carafe.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You can’t spend the rest of your life here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not for us. We’ve grown up with freedom.”

  “You may have,” Bridges said. He told her about his father, about John Ralston who had blown his brains out in Miami.

  “You can’t dismiss freedom because of personal experience,” she said. “You’re looking for an escape and cultivating two injustices as an excuse.”

  Bridges said: “I’m a journalist operating in on
e of the most exciting countries in the world. It’s about time Western journalists gave Russia a break.”

  “And it’s about time Russian journalists gave the West a break.”

  “Sure,” Bridges said. “Both ways. And I can do it this end.”

  The waiter brought them blini pancakes covered with jam.

  “Why can you do it better than anyone else?” Libby asked. “Do you have some sort of influence with the Kremlin?”

  “I tell you what I’ll do,” Bridges told her. “I’ll get you a job on my paper. You haven’t stopped interviewing me since we sat down.”

  She put down her spoon as the band swung into Tuxedo Junction. “Are you a communist, Harry?”

  “Goddam,” he said.

  “Are you?”

  “No. At least, I don’t think so.”

  They were silent for a few moments then Harry Bridges took over the questioning. “What’s happened to you since we got here? On the train you were scared. You aren’t any more.”

  The micro-film was in her room hidden inside a wooden Russian doll with fat red cheeks and yellow painted hair.

  She looked at him candidly. “It was just the train, coming to Siberia.… Annette Meakin probably felt the same way.”

  “Annette Meakin?”

  She told him about her pioneering counterpart.

  Bridges shook his head. “It was more than that. You’re not the sort of girl who scares easily.” He put his hand over hers. “Before the journey’s over I’ll find out. I used to be a good reporter.”

  Outside her hotel room she thought he might kiss her. He hesitated, glanced along the corridor, saw the implacable watchdog staring grimly at them, squeezed her arm and went to his own room.

  * * *

  Next day the streets were running with water and the wooden city steamed in the sunshine.

  The overnight passengers took cabs to the station to pick up the Trans-Siberian due at 10.31. The special coach was hitched on and at 10.46 the train moved out.

  On the banks of the Ob the snow spewed out by the vacuum-cleaner was melting and the shape of a body in a sack was becoming discernible.

  CHAPTER 6

  From the locomotive Boris Demurin watched the taiga gently rotating past the windows under a lavender-blue sky. To most passengers the impression was one of emptiness; but not to Demurin making his last trip.

  When he climbed from the footplate for the last time at Vladivostock – where, on May 31, 1891, His Imperial Highness Tsarevich Nicholas dug the first shovelful of clay soil to inaugurate the railway – Demurin would start to write his History of the Great Siberian Railway.

  The gleaming rails and the Siberian jungle on either side were peopled with its characters. This was the Mid-Siberian sector and it had been one of the toughest to build. Started in 1893 by a plump engineer with an arrogant little beard called Nicholas P. Mezheninov, it had been cut through jungle so thick that, in places, the sun never reached the ground. And nature had fought the metal road every inch of the way: the granite perm frost lingered till July, then thawed dramatically leaving the construction crews paddling in mud; the local timber was too feeble for sleepers and bridges; great conifers, weakened by excavations, crashed across the newly-laid line; once an avalanche of sand buried the line; when a flintstone hill was found to be impassable an engineer called O. K. Sidorov diverted a river and laid the rails on its bed, his crews working in waist-high water and quicksand. But not one life was lost.

  Along the track Boris Demurin saw the convicts shipped from Irkutsk felling trees and building bridges. Murderers, thugs and innocents, they slept in sod huts and worked in 60-below temperatures to get their sentences cut and earn 12½ cents a day to buy tobacco and illegal vodka.

  The other enemies of the constructors were the crooked contractors who swindled the Government and the manufacturers who supplied shoddy goods. Demurin wasn’t sure whether he would refer to them in his book: it was always difficult to assess what episodes of history were acceptable.

  On August 18, 1898, two years ahead of schedule, Mezheninov completed the Mid-Siberian and the first engine steamed into Irkutsk.

  Demurin’s thoughts were interrupted by a loudspeaker announcement:

  “The identity of our illustrious passenger is well known to all of us.” The man’s voice had a tremor in it because Yermakov would be listening. “What is not so well known is the identity of the heroic driver. His name is Comrade Boris Demurin and he is making his last journey as leader of the crew of this train which he has served loyally for forty years. “

  “Forty-three,” Demurin said.

  “He was chosen specially for this auspicious occasion. We salute you, Comrade Demurin, loyal servant of the Soviet Union. May this train speed you to a long and happy retirement.” There was a sharp click and the voice was replaced by martial music.

  Tears misted Demurin’s eyes. He smelled smoke and steam and heard the clank of hammers driving home bolts. He was Nicholas P. Mezinov hacking his way through birch and pine and larch. He was a father of Siberia, The Sleeping Land which he had helped to awaken.

  * * *

  Viktor Pavlov was another who wasn’t fooled by the emptiness. He was saddened by what lay beneath and beyond it: it was the storehouse of which his wife was queen and he was betraying her. He was returning to her throne, not because she had demanded his presence but because of a heritage: the Masada Complex.

  The taiga twirled past, a spinning top returning the same bunches of trees, the same small stations, the same women drawing boiled water from taps, the same men parading the platform in striped pyjamas or blue track suits, the same peasant women in faded blue standing beside the track waving on the train with gold batons. “The Siberians love their cold,” he had read somewhere. And so did Anna. Her country – where the people watched each other’s faces for frostbite, where they loved flowers so much that they would pay two roubles for a lily or a rose.

  Often she had bored him with Siberia’s awesome statistics. An oil field at Tyumen which, in two years, would produce 130 million tons; a gas field at Nadym containing three-quarters of all American reserves,

  Pavlov tried not to think about Anna. He picked up a copy of the European Herald Tribune which a tourist had managed to get past customs on the Soviet border – more reassuring evidence of incompetence.

  It contained an article referring to an Israeli commando raid in April into the centre of Beirut to liquidate Palestinian leaders. That’s the way we have to fight, he thought. Direct, cold-blooded, brilliantly-executed. Caution, caution – to hell with caution.

  Colonel Yury Razin said: “I see you read the decadent imperialist press.”

  Startled, Pavlov put the paper on the restaurant car table. “It was lying there,” he said, and was immediately angry with his defensive attitude.

  “I’ve no doubt,” Razin said. He leaned over the table and Pavlov noticed a slight tick in one eye. He looked exhausted. “There’s a new passenger in your compartment now,” he said.

  Pavlov said: “I noticed. What happened to Gavralin?”

  “I thought you might be able to tell me.”

  “I’ve no idea. I presume he left the train at Novosibirsk.”

  “Please.” Razin touched the pouches of tender skin under his eyes. “Let’s not pretend with each other. You know perfectly well he was one of my men making the whole journey. I want to know what happened to him.”

  A Yak 40 mini-jet overtook them in the pale sky. Pavlov wondered if the Prospector had reached Irkutsk.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” Pavlov said.

  The same crew had been retained and the plump-breasted girl with the glossy hair hovered unhappily behind Razin.

  Razin waved his hand to dismiss her. “It’s very odd,” he murmured, “that he should disappear from your compartment.”

  Pavlov shrugged. “It’s not my fault if one of your men goes missing.”

  Razin straightened up. “If you can think of an
ything that might help.…” He walked away without smiling: the benevolent exterior under strain. He paused for a moment to glance at the girl’s backside. He shook his heavy head as though remembering his youth and walked slowly back towards the special coach.

  Pavlov waited a few moments before returning to his compartment. The Tartar general was there lying on his bunk in his wool vest; he had been eating a raw onion and reading Red Star, the army newspaper which had once been so critical of the Arab League; but its contents had sent him to sleep and he was snoring contentedly, refighting old battles. Beneath him, his wife was starting her third orange of the morning, the peel scattered around her like fallen petals.

  The new occupant was another man from the outdoors with a Red Indian face, deep brown eyes and a lean body. When Pavlov opened the door his eyes opened and his hand slid to the hunting rifle lying beside him on the bunk. He apologised, smiling. “A natural reaction,” he explained. “You’ve got to be awake when you’re asleep when there are bears around.”

  He told Pavlov and the general’s wife that his business was soft gold – furs; that he was a hunter and a trapper. Pavlov sat beside the window, half-listening. The trapper explained that it was a release to talk after months alone in the taiga.

  Once, he said, he had shot tigers – the shaggy Siberian tigers that used to prowl the forests of the Far East killing Chinese coolies working on the Trans-Siberian for supper. These days he trapped them; but not very often because they were becoming scarce.

  The general snarled in his sleep as his beleagured infantry drove back the enemy. His wife peeled another orange.

  “We still trap them the same way they did a hundred years ago,” the hunter continued. “At dawn, with dogs, when the sun throws bars of light through the trees like the tiger’s stripes.” He became lyrical. “Sometimes in the autumn, before the snow, the ground is covered with blue berries. When the dogs pick up the tiger’s trail we suddenly see the slats of light move because this time they’re the stripes of old felis tigris. The dogs surround him and we lassoo him. One man, usually me” – the trapper swung his legs off the bunk and sat on the edge, fists bunched – “gets him by the neck. I get a muzzle round his jaws, then, when he’s finally beaten, we rope his legs to a pole and carry him away upside down. It’s sad in a way,” he said, “such a noble animal. But I’d rather trap a tiger than a bear. Funny animals, bears. Our national image. Very friendly when they’re happy, bastards when they’re mad. I’ve seen them dance to a mouth organ and I’ve seen them kill a tiger with one blow. Part of our heritage, bears,” he said.