by John R Burns
‘Christ. Christ,’ he managed to complain, ‘Fuck this.’
‘She was your wife.’
‘She hated it when I wanted to talk, especially about anything political. She’d just stare up at the ceiling and then after a few minutes would get up and go out of the room. It’s like she knew that it would be the politics that would finish it for me.’
‘Jews believe in the power of the word.’
‘Well good for fucking Jews cos it’s never done me any favours.’
‘In books.’
‘Them as well.’
‘I’m cold....very cold,’ came Leon’s complaint.
‘I’ve always talked politics, ever since I was young.’
‘The train’s stopping.’
‘I remember seeing my father come home every day from the mine, filthy and knackered. To begin with I thought that was all there was.’
‘Are we going to get fed?’
‘Are you listening?’
‘I’m trying to listen. I....I find....find it hard to concentrate. I’m hungry.’
‘We’re all fucking hungry.’
‘Are we going to be fed?’
Adam pulled in his shoulders and tried to move the position of his legs before he said, ‘I’m trying to work out when was the last time.’
‘I don’t think I’ll be able to get up,’ mentioned Leon as he stared across at some of the other rags pulled up into mounds of clothes that were beginning to frost over.
‘I was coming down Printov Street, in our town, when I saw the government official. He was being driven in a car with his own driver and was sat there on the back seat like the fucking lord of everything. There was my father coming home filthy and so tired he could only manage his tea and then go to bed, day after day, nothing different. But this big shot was in his chauffeur driven car. I must have been ten or eleven and it was the first time I had properly looked, you know, seen what was going on.’
‘Will you help me stand up if they come with the food?’
‘A Russian has to believe in something.’
Light flickered across the wagon. Steam momentarily clouded in the shafts of new light as the train finally screeched and shuddered to a stop.
‘It’s warmer when we stop,’ said Leon.
‘All of life is a few having it over the rest. But I believed in the revolution. I really did. It was going to give real power to everybody for the first time. But I should have known. We all should have guessed. Some of our brothers in red made the attempt and I couldn’t leave it. My wife, she knew what was coming.’
‘You talked too much.’
‘I wouldn’t shut up. So it was Vorkuta for me, cutting down fucking trees.’
‘I’m glad you talk.’
‘So you said.’
‘It’s....it’s more human.’
‘I’m not sure I know what that is.’
‘It’s talking.’
‘Well I must be one, human, but one who never learnt his lesson. So I was in the cafe scrounging scraps when over the road a fucking goods train jumped the tracks. Industrial espionage they called it. Because I was within a million miles of what happened they had me again. It’s like they knew I was there. They were just fucking waiting.’
‘Is it night?’ Leon asked.
‘It’s always night up here.’
‘Did you hear that? I can hear people outside. There are people outside. Can you hear them?’
‘We must have stopped at some God forsaken place. That or they’re changing guards or they’re just preparing to leave us here and let the winter do its job.’
‘You said they wanted us alive.’
‘That’s just my theory. We never get told anything so we don’t know.’
‘You said they did.’
‘Not want us. Just require us for cutting down trees for a crazy new railway line Stalin wants or to dig coal in the Vorkuta mines.’
‘It has to be better than this train.’
‘You get more entertainment, especially when a rag wants to get out of the heavy work so he tries to slice off his hand with a shovel or cut the muscles down the back of his leg so he can’t walk. If it gets really bad you know what they do. We call em Christmas decorations, human decorations hanging from trees all over the work area of the forest. Some try and escape but they’ve got three thousand miles of snow plains to cross full of murderous wolves and temperatures below 50degrees. So you stay there.’
‘We must be at a station.’
They could hear more voices and then the noise of the guards coming along the train.
‘It doesn’t feel right,’ was Adam’s opinion.
Abruptly came the noise of the guards’ shovels breaking through the ice on the locks followed by the sound of metal on metal.
‘Fucking hurry up!’ one of the prisoners complained.
Some of the bundles of clothes on the bunks began to move. Other remained where they were.
‘Christ there’s more fucking dead than alive in here. Get a move on you bastards and open the fucking doors,’ muttered another prisoner.
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Eventually the doors were shuddered open to allow a blast of cold air and snow to fill the wagon.
‘You don’t move. You don’t move,’ they were told, ‘you clean this out. We get brushes and you sweep this shit place clean.’
‘What’s the point?’ was Adam’s weary question.
None of them could get down from the wagon until all the straw had been swept out and the dead ones had been dragged to the edge where they were lifted and rolled out.
All their breaths merged into huge clouds of condensation that mixed with the train’s steam so they almost disappeared into it.
Eventually they could climb down beside the track with Adam carefully supporting Leon across the wagon and then down off the edge, slipping him down slowly until his dead feet touched snow.
Some of the prisoners were told to lift the corpses. They were taken away from the tracks and laid in the snow. The rest watched as the bodies were lifted out of the wagons. The prisoners were so weak it took six of them to carry each body.
Finally the food was given out. The train had stopped near a cluster of huts. People were pushing handcarts along a frozen track and from them the guards were handing out big chunks of bread and a mug of hot water from a huge samovar.
The bread was black and grey with mould but the pieces were the largest they’d seen since the start of the journey.
‘I told you we were being fattened up,’ muttered Adam.
‘Some fucking chance,’ one of the prisoners squatting nearby replied.
‘Faith brother. We have to be alive to work.’
‘Not that the fucking guards care.’
‘They have their quotas like all business.’
‘Stop trying to sound fucking smart because you aren’t,’ was the prisoner’s final word.
Leon tasted the snow. Its movement curled into shapes across the open land. He could smell the wood smoke from the huts. The carts were being pushed by women who wore huge coats and fur hats, their boots strapped around their legs. They were the first civilians any of them had come across since before prison. They moved differently, quicker, with more energy. They were alive and chatting. They lived in log huts where fires burnt. Leon wanted to cry at their presence. It was almost too much for him, too sad to know that people could still appear free. He could hear the guards becoming more animated. These were women bringing bread and hot water in which it could be softened. A group of them came along steadying the cart with the huge, metal samovar. Finally he could see their eyes and the start of the curve of their cheeks under their scarves. Their skin was tanned and reddened, their voices fast and soft. He could almost taste their existence. They were so different, so unexpected. It made him dizzy just to concentrate on them as they moved closer.
The thick gloved hands he held out were shaking.
‘Bless you,’ he wanted to say, ‘Bless and thank you,’ but nothing came out as one of the women handed him a metal mug.
She glanced at him and then at Adam. Her coat smelt of wood smoke, her breath clouding in front of her as she went back to join the others at the cart before they continued along the line of prisoners.
When they reached the end they waited a little and then started collecting in the mugs as the guards stood by watching.
Leon listened to their boots crunching over the frosted snow and their light, fast voices that spoke in a Russian he did not understand. Even though they were dressed in many layers he could still make out the outline of their womanly shapes, the most beautiful lines darkly emphasised against the white background. His mind followed their contours, imagining the colour of their hair and everything else that was hidden.
It was dreadful as they pushed the cart back to the huts. They were already a memory. Painfully he yearned for them to return.
In other ways he wished they had never existed. They had created sudden feelings and nothing had prepared him. Momentarily he pitied himself and all the other prisoners. He wished them freedom and life. The women for a few minutes had shown something that had been completely lost to him. They were the other reality. He envied the guards who had so easily spoken to them, making them smile, their mouths widening into quick, uncertain smiles.
When they had clambered back into the wagon and the doors locked blocking out the late afternoon light, nobody spoke.
For a while the bread had been filling and the hot water had warmed their mouths and throats and stomachs. But by the time the train had got up steam and had started all the effect was disappearing.
Leon tried to see the huts as their wagon passed but the slits between the planks were frozen over. All that he could manage was the smell of smoke from their fires. In his imagination they were brewing tea, gossiping about the convict train, warming themselves in front of a fire. They were gone. He had known them for a brief time and now they were back down the tracks and time was destroyed again.
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Sleep was becoming impossible it was so cold. Their wagon was icing up on the inside. The feeble shits and piss would not melt it on the metal grid over the hole but any smells were frozen and destroyed as the human waste turned solid in seconds. Breath formed crystals that in the short day light reflected a silver sheen in the air, a mesh of tiny stars that their feeble emissions of life created.
‘Don’t...don’t even try,’ Adam finally said after hours of silence, ‘don’t you go to sleep....to sleep on me because you won’t wake up.’
‘I can’t sleep. ‘
‘Well at least you can hear me.’
‘I want to hear you.’
Once in a while a prisoner would turn over on his bunk. Some had one to themselves now. Those like Adam and Leon stretched out on the floor moved rarely. The floor was where they died the quickest, where the ice wind cut through, moaning to the sound of the train.
‘Tell me about....about this Brucker.’
‘No,’ Leon said.
‘It was you who mentioned him.’
‘It....it doesn’t matter.’
‘Nothing fucking matters. It’s just you who started on about him. You said he was a German captain.’
‘Do you think the war is still going on?’
Adam made no reply.
One of the rags pulled himself up onto his knees and clasped his huge gloved hands in prayer, but after a few moments he laid back down, moaning with the effort.
‘He might still be alive,’ Leon went on.
‘Who?’ Adam finally asked.
‘Brucker.’
‘He sounds just like the kind who would fucking survive.’
‘That....that idea would make me want.....want....to....to live.’
‘It shouldn’t have to depend on a fucking Kraut.’
‘He was in command of...of the unit that took over our town.’
‘Yes,’ Adam sighed as he tried to turn a little, ‘that fucking bread is giving me gut ache, I know that much.’
‘And later he...was still in the area....searching for partisans.’
‘And is that what you were?’
‘No. I was a Jew. That’s what I was.’
Again Adam made no response.
The train slowed and then seemed to pick up speed.
With his finger nail Leon scratched through the ice over a crack in the wood. His one eye could see snow being whipped up from the side of the track and through it the flat whiteness like the end of everything laid out to a dissolving horizon.
He knew they were all near the end. There was less and less movement in the wagon. Once in a while he would nudge Adam beside him. In his mind was Polyna, looking at him, confirming him.
He sat back and closed his eyes for a moment. It now felt so cold it was as if he would never be able to open them again.
One of the prisoners bent his knees into a tighter position. Another was standing, his body swaying to the movement of the train, supporting himself by pressing both gloved hands against the frosted side of the wagon.
‘Come on. Come on. Come on,’ he was muttering.
Leon tried to keep focused on him. His overcoat was in tatters where it touched the floor. He had a woollen hat pulled down over his ears and then pieces of cloth tied round the hat. Spittle had formed tiny icicles on his exposed chin.
Then slowly he bent forward as his legs started to bend, walking with his hands down the silvered wood until he was crouched on his knees moaning to himself.
They would all die together. Leon imagined the guards at the next stop opening the doors onto an array of corpses. This time none of them would have been stripped of their clothes. They would be frosted lumps on the bunks, on the floor, resting up against the far wall. It would have become a train of death, all still and quiet except for the wind whipping snow across the steppes.
‘What will it be like?’ he said to no one.
But Adam stirred.
‘Friend,’ he muttered.
‘Friend,’ Leon managed.
‘That’s good.’
‘It is good.’
‘That’s....that’s what talking does for you.’
‘It’s more important than anything.’
‘It makes friends.’
‘It makes things make sense, sometimes.’
‘Words.’
‘Just words.’
‘We’re about done,’ was Adam’s comment.
‘Not long now.’
‘But...but you’re a Jew who....’
‘Who doesn’t believe in any God.’
‘No God.’
‘Nothing.’
‘A long sleep.’
‘You won’t know.’
‘Or care.’
‘It will be as if you had never existed.’
‘Somebody will remember.’
‘I...I don’t think I have anybody left.’
‘You will have.’
‘No,’ said Leon.
In his imagination he could see his mother and father walking together out of the town towards the forest.
They were part of a long line of people trudging with their bags and suitcases.
Now all he could feel were his bones. The hunger and cold and created a skeleton of his senses. His brain resisted and Adam beside him refused to stop. He had momentary consciousness, suddenly, briefly aware of himself.
‘I know I’m still here.’
‘I know that,’ Adam agreed.
‘And you.’
‘And me.’
‘What....what about the others?’
Adam tried to sit up, ‘The rags. Some of em will last longer than us.’
‘When did...did we last have food?’
‘Too long ago to care.’
He listened to the wheels creaking along the frozen lines. Steam still trailed its smell into
the wagon. Leon managed to be at a distance, watching the whole train like a dark object moving across the vast sweep of snow.
He could remember Benjamin and himself laughing and joking about synagogues, festivals, the Torah, Rabbis, bar mitzvahs, anything to do with Jewish religion. They were different. They were from the race of the Jews. There was no Jewish God, only a historical group of people who had lived in Palestine and had been persecuted for the last two thousand years.
‘We don’t need any stupid God,’ Benjamin had laughed.
‘We are our people. That’s what we’re proud of,’ Leon had shouted, a young teenager who had understood nothing.
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Suddenly the train was shuddering, its brakes scraping the wheels so they screeched and the wagon shook. The few prisoners remaining grabbed hold of anything they could.
‘Fucking hell,’ groaned Adam as he was swung across the floor.
Again the wagon jolted from side to side as the whole thing slipped along the ice lines.
Finally with a final tension it stopped, followed by voices outside mixed in with the complaints of the prisoners.
Leon forced himself to listen as Adam crawled his way back.
‘New guards,’ was his suggestion, ‘but God knows where they’ve come from.’
‘Have we arrived?’
‘Not at all, this is not it unless Uncle Joe has found some new coal seams.’
There were different smells from outside as they could hear the iced up locks being smashed open.
‘What?’ Leon wanted to know.
‘I don’t know.’
A few prisoners were slowly climbing down from the bunks, their attention captured by the sounds of a sudden urgency.
Finally it was their lock being hit by bars and rifle butts. As the doors were opened sunlight bounced off the snow into their eyes.
White coated figures appeared with fur lined hoods and machine guns strapped over their shoulders. With them were also other men they had never seen before, men without guns.
‘What....what are they saying?’ Leon asked.
‘I....I....It’s too fast.’
Suddenly a prisoner rolled off the top bunk smashing the ice around his body as he landed. He lay there while some of the others started shuffling towards the open door.