Men of Snow

by John R Burns

  Somebody walked across his vision. With all his weak strength he tried to shift his head to the right, just an inch to change the angle of what he could see.

  The officer tilted backwards. Another soldier cut at an angle across his shape and then another with his machine gun strap over his shoulder.

  The officer from the square was standing there, now in the forest the same German officer.

  The flicker of consciousness brought him back to all the sensations. Brucker had moved closer, commanding his men in a low, calm voice. Several of them crossed Leon’s angled sight. Momentarily he could see part of the scar as Brucker unclasped his helmet, pulled it off and placed his arm rigidly around it. Flecks of snow were spiralling through the greyness. They began to glisten on the officer’s hair as he pulled out a cigarette and lit it using his free hand.

  Bewildering shots rattled out, echoing between the trees but the officer did not respond. He took in a mouthful of smoke, tilted his head slightly and released it back out blowing some of the snow away.

  Leon watched it falling, imagining being buried, men of snow becoming mounds in the forest, so many white remains.

  Brucker was giving his men more commands until he flicked away the cigarette, strapped his helmet back on and walked out of Leon’s vision.

  Then quickly so many smells and sounds disappeared. What was left was the stale odour of the body on top of him and the cold flurry of pine as the wind shifted and the snow became heavier.

  There was the sound of branches stirring. The rest was a quietness that disturbed him more than anything. He could feel the forest’s silence and its loneliness, only himself amidst the endless trees. He understood that he was alone, that nobody was near him except for the dead one pressing him down.

  But he knew he had to wait and not ever to trust the quietness. For a time he half slept. For a time he believed that the particles of white drifting down were pieces of a sky that was in mourning. He wanted to say Kas’s name but understood he could not, only say it to himself as a token of his feelings.

  He waited through what he thought was the night. He remained where he was for most of the next day, the roof of the corpse over him keeping his upper body warmer than his legs that were numb and aching.

  Finally he knew he had to move. With all of the mind’s attention he could manage he listened and looked over the small area he could see. There was only the persistent snow smothering all other smells.

  As he lifted himself the body started to fall away as he rolled in the other direction. Big Paul was open eyed, open mouthed and had part of his head sheared away from where the blood had come. Leon sat up, rubbing his legs, looking at the frozen Pole, at his grey face and twisted body. His hands were hooked and one of his legs had bone sticking though his trousers below the knee. Some of the snow had fallen off his back leaving only an outline of his new position.

  Weakly Leon stood up and looked around. Individual bodies were lying in their white heaps. Carefully he started to walk around the camp, always listening, tense, ready, scared. Two children were laid across each other. Kas’s mother was curled round a tree. Another woman was further away, her body on its side forming a ridge of snow. None of them had managed to get far. Red and white, the blood and the snow were smudged patterns across their shapes in the soft silence.

  He knew there was something worse. All his feelings were prepared. But even then the sight of Kas and his father hanging from the same branch was a sudden upheaval as he stopped and turned away and then looked back at the two bodies suspended there.

  Radek was bare from the waist. His legs were covered in blood and his eyes bulged out in a muted astonishment. But for the boy it was mutilation. Kas was completely naked. His feet were black. His face was a frozen blue. Part of his chest had been gouged. Both legs were twisted in odd directions. His black tongue and ears contrasted with the agony of his features that seemed to be held in an everlasting scream.

  Leon sat against a tree and stared at the two of them as they moved ever so slightly in the shifting flurries of snow. There was nothing but the boy and his father hanging there like pieces of some large, frozen animal.

  For Leon there was nothing else as he sunk to his knees, nothing that mattered anymore as he curled up in the snow, no resistance, not even to the new soldier with the rancid smell and alcohol breath who dragged him to his feet and started shaking him while speaking in words that Leon unconsciously recognised as Russian.

  MEN OF SNOW

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  PART FOUR

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  CHAPTER 12

  ‘Just needed to sleep cos I was exhausted, wanted to sleep twenty four hours a day. Just started brother like I’d been hit with something. Me, a fit young man, or I used to be. Desperate stuff. It was like I woke up when I was supposed to wake up and then fall back asleep. I couldn’t stop myself. Then it would be coming round every hour or so, just for a few minutes and then straight back into it. Never drink. It’s not that if that’s what you’re thinking. And when I became properly conscious like, which would usually be around evening time, I’d be so weak and aching all over. If I tried to talk or listen to anybody I’d start feeling dizzy. Just couldn’t focus like, no concentration. And this has lasted for months. So I’m talking to you now and I don’t know when it’s going to start again. It’s not mental. It’s a physical thing. I’m not a lazy shit. I am not looking for a skive, never have done. I know Russia needs us workers like never before. I knew that. I believe in our motherland, course I do. I’m a true patriot. But that didn’t stop me falling asleep. There was no control. I couldn’t just snap myself out of it. That’s what the factory bosses thought, that I should be able to buck up and get on with it. And I wanted to. I wanted to do my bit for the country. Of course. Goes without saying. I have a disease, a sleep disorder. I am always exhausted. But nobody figured it. They called me a conspirator. Me! Industrial espionage. That’s what they accused me of. Ten years for industrial espionage. When I was ill. Still am. It’s a terrible tiredness, like you’re under water all the time and in pain. All your functions are destroyed. I switch off and disappear. It’s no longer me. It’s this person who just needs to sleep. Fucking ten years for that. So I say fuck Russia. I needed care. I needed somebody to respect my illness. But when you’re at war then you’re treated like a joke. You’re pathetic. But I can’t get angry. I can’t get frustrated because I haven’t got the energy. I haven’t got the strength for anything like that. My wife thought I was bored with her, empty like. Nobody in my family understood. They thought I’d mentally lost it, that I’d cracked up. Because all of a sudden I wasn’t the person they wanted me to be so they lost interest, even my wife. She started to resent me, screamed at me to get out of fucking bed and get to the factory to do some work. She did not believe it was serious. She hated me lolling around the place, incapable, when she had to go out to work and then come home to do everything in the house. Maybe they’re all right. Maybe it is me. Maybe it’s the war and I can’t stand all of it, the fucking fourteen hours factory shifts. But I was not trying to destroy anything. Industrial fucking espionage. It’s a joke.’

  The cattle truck rattled and shuddered. Smoke trailed along the side as sunlight shafted through the splits in the wood. Leon counted over a hundred of them.

  Some of the men were laid up on three tiers of shelves. They called it the wankers’ section. That was where most of the sexually hungry lay where the occasional rape would take place when things became desperate.

  Through the stench from the squat hole he sometimes could smell the mixture of sperm and straw, that and the stinking breath and clothes and sour tobacco lit up from rolls of newspaper in this long box clattering along an endless track linked up to all the rest of
the cattle trucks.

  The masturbation lasted for only the first few days. Usually the rapes were at night, a sudden struggle followed by screams and shouts as the fucked was rolled from one to the next. The conclusion would be groans and whimpering or sometimes death.

  But soon the masturbators lost energy. Quick wrists slowed and finally stopped. Even the rapes became increasingly infrequent. Hunger had overcome sex. Energy had been dissipated.

  Nine had died already. At each stop the guards would pull out the dead. Two had been with them for over a week, the bodies of two politicos who had suffered too much of a beating when the journey north had just started.

  ‘If you weren’t a partisan, what were you doing in a Polish uniform?’ Leon had been asked in the Chekist prison.

  Their blows had battered him senseless.

  ‘How did you get there?’

  ‘Where did you get your supplies?’

  ‘Tell us how you communicated with other groups.’

  ‘Why were you the only one left alive?’

  ‘Who gave the orders?’

  ‘Tell us your real name.’

  ‘What was a fucking Jew doing with a load of Poles?’

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘Who decided where your group should be based?’

  ‘How many other units did you have contact with?’

  They stood him up and punched him down again.

  ‘How did the Germans pay you?’

  ‘Who hung the rest of the group?’

  ‘Where was their radio hidden?’

  ‘What were you doing in the Russian sector of the forest?’

  ‘What was the group planning to attack?’

  ‘How often did you move your base?’

  He had been barely conscious when they had loaded him with the rest into the cattle truck. Unable to move he had been trampled on continuously for the first days and nights. Existence had been a grey edge beyond which were vague sounds and smells and a sense of motion. Everything else was pain. There was not a part of his body that was not hurting.

  ‘It goes on forever my friend. It’s like an ocean of different seas, the steppes, the forest, the tundra, the ice lands. Russia is the biggest emptiness of all. How can you think of defending such vastness? On the other hand how can the Germans think of taking over such a country? Neither is possible. The vastness will defeat them, the thousands of miles of nothing. Russia is not a country. It’s a whole world. And how far have those in the Kremlin ever travelled? Do they really know the country they rule? Maybe the war will disappear into the endless spaces of our motherland. Armies will never be seen again. Do you know how long it takes to walk from one side of Russia to the other? Do you understand there are millions of Russian people who have never heard of Lenin or Stalin or a revolution or the start of another war? How will they understand what’s going on? It’s possible they might never hear about it until it is all over with. Or maybe our survival will come from those who live out on the edge, those far beyond our cities and railway lines, people of a faith, hidden away from the rest of us. But who are you friend? Who are you?’

  The voice had aggressively come into his consciousness and had gone again.

  At one point somebody had pissed on him. Others had pulled off his boots. Instinctively he had tried to crawl to another edge where the floor met the wall.

  ‘Thought you were a fucking dead un,’ came a harsh voice nearby, ‘They were about to roll you out. You look like you’ve had a right pasting from the NKVD boys. Told em everything I bet. Doesn’t matter a fuck what you tell em. They have made up all the answers they want before they start. Suppose they made you stuff your prick in your mouth. They like that. Did they make you do that? Did they? Tell me what the fuckers did. Stop fucking moaning and tell me what they did you useless cunt.’

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  Finally his eyelids slowly unsealed to give a blurred vision of a quivering, shaking wall and a narrow sight of the crowd of jumbled figures, and then the slightest consciousness of air, faint, cold, air touching against thin areas of his skin that had been bruised and cut.

  There was a small push and then a lower voice, secretive, very close.

  ‘It’s alright,’ the voice said among all the other strained sounds, ‘I’m Adam.’

  Leon did not want to listen. Words had become the worst weapon.

  ‘I’ll give you a swig of water,’ it continued.

  But it was part of the dream as the hunger said other things to him.

  ‘You have to swallow it, can’t be wasted. I want you to nod if you understand.’

  Sickness was the sour taste and the stretch in his stomach.

  ‘They’ll cut my throat if one drop of this water is wasted.’

  Suddenly there was a hand cupping his chin and liquid burnt down his throat.

  ‘You have to show you’re alive or they’ll have you stripped of everything.’

  Water was a memory of some other time. It sang. The water was the song of life.

  ‘You see I’ve made this trip before and even here there is a routine. For the first days they’ve acted as if things haven’t changed. Some of them still are mad enough to think that. So they wank and joke and threaten and kill. But now the days are passing. They’re all getting hungrier and colder and the connections are being cut. Now you can hear the rattle of the wheels on the track. To begin with there was so much arguing and shouting. That’s all there was, just a noise. You missed all that.’

  The words would not stop. They were very close, born of a breath that touched what was left of his face.

  ‘The authorities calculate a third of us will be gone before we reach our destination. I know where that is. I’ve been there before. But it takes food for the imagination to work and you’d need a lot of imagination to see what I could describe.’

  Leon thought he was crying. He wanted to cry but he had not the energy.

  ‘Understandably you’ve switched off, like the rest of them because that’s what the brain has to do. It’s still, even now, trying to protect you.’

  He was clothed in tears and they were burning his skin.

  ‘You might wonder why I am talking, still talking, talking to you. But I’m experienced you see. I’ve been through this before. Like everybody else the first time I thought the only way I could survive was by disappearing, becoming unseen so nobody would notice me. I was sure that was the trick. It was automatic, my reaction, but not this time. I’m not doing all that again. Because you see I hardly made it. I almost really did disappear and that’s not for me, not again. Right now I’m clear about what I’m doing. My name is Adam and you’re listening. I’m sure you’re listening.’

  In the dream sunlight glazed fields of corn until on the horizon thunder clouds appeared like huge fists.

  ‘I got ten years the first time. This stretch is for twenty five. No surprise. Once you’re in the system there’s no getting out. You stupidly look for reasons to begin with but there aren’t any. I used to wonder if it was because my mother was from Chechnya or because I never went to school or because I’m only four foot eleven in height or I was too clever at expressing myself.’

  The motion was of a sea he had never seen. He was rolling over fast waves in a boat of different noises.

  ‘None of it matters,’ the voice continued within all the other sounds, ‘There will be at least thirty wagons on this train. One hundred to a wagon makes three thousand convicts, prisoners, enemies of the state and hardly any of them will have any idea. We’re all going to the great place of nowhere. It doesn’t exist. Even when you’re there you feel it doesn’t exist, like the end of the world and then some. But that’s its purpose, to make you feel that you don’t exist because time and space when you’re there have no definition. Distance is multiplied by itself. All the reasons for anything are not there. That’s where I went wrong on my first stretch. I was so silent I thought I was dead. Th
ere was no contact, no response, not a glimmer of myself as me. I was gone. So I promised myself, I vowed that if I was sentenced again, which I knew I would be, I would never allow the silence again no matter what happened. Every silence is a death. I told myself that I would be a presence, that I would speak, would utter words, would try and communicate with a fellow sufferer. Each word is a promise. I know it takes too much energy and it hurts and I know there is none to spare but I am Adam or shorty as they called me and I my friend am talking to you whether you like it or not.’

  The pause that came was suddenly a fear. With no words came the miserable sense of all the hurting. But again the voice started and already its sounds were a relief.

  ‘’I think you’re listening and if you’re wondering what’s happening at the moment we’ve stopped again. The train has stopped. We could be laid up here for days which means no food because if there is any it will be further up the line or it will have been. If the train’s not there then somebody else will have it eaten it all by now. And what is it, herring and black bread, just herring and black bread. Always herring and black bread washed down with water, pure Siberian water. On my last trip the policy was to starve us to death but what I hear this time is that things might be different. Our great leader has different plans for us, plans that mean we have to work and you can’t do that if you’re dead from starvation. I hope friend that makes sense. I’m speaking quietly because I don’t want the rest to get interested. Any interest on their part can only mean trouble. That is the biggest problem with talking at all. It doesn’t make any sense, except to me, and that’s not enough. Anyway I’ll let you rest now. But I am here. Remember I am here. My name is Adam. Even if you don’t want to hear me again I’m not going to give you that choice.’

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