Archangel (12 page)

He's a man that a woman wants to love. You feel very proud when you're with him. He's perfect, you see, Mr Millet.

What's the silly bitch saying, that's what you're asking, isn't it? He's punctual, I'm late. He's tidy, I drop everything anywhere. He speaks when he has something to say, I'll talk about anything with anyone. He has a patience and a calmness, I lose my temper and shout and scream. I never had a chance to bitch at him . . . do you know what that means? Can you imagine what that's l i k e . . . I can't express it properly. He was like a kind of martyr, it was as if all my failings were stones that were thrown at him and which he never complained of. If he'd yelled at me then I'd have been delirious, then I could have lived with him . . . He didn't need a wife, can you believe that? He didn't need me, or anyone else. He's an entity on his own . . . '

'I said it would be pretty dreadful where he is now, how will he cope there?'

She giggled shrilly and swayed against him as the train lurched on the points on the approach to Waterloo.

'I don't have to answer that, do I? I mean, well, it's pretty obvious from what I've said . . . I told you that I loved him, that's God's truth, I love him and I tell you they might have made such a place just for him.'

The train had stopped.

i said you shouldn't come back to me, Mr Millet, and you agreed.'

'I gave my word, Mrs Holly, thank you.'

Millet and the girl were pushed towards the door, dis-gorged from the carriage.

The smile swept her face and she patted his hand, and then she had spun on her heel and the swing was in her hips as she walked away into the hurrying crowds.

Holly worked on alone at the lathe that fashioned the chairs' legs.

Around him the other machines were silent, closed down.

The saws and planes and chisels and hammers were abandoned. The benches were deserted. Only Holly was at his place. His back was to the window and he did not turn to spare a glance at the crush of the zeks who squirmed against the grime of the windows. There was no expression on his face, just the blank skin facade of hunger and tiredness.

At first the civilian foremen who came to the Factory each morning from Barashevo village had shouted that the men should stay at their work, but their protests had made a battle that he could not win. The trusties of Internal Order had added their voices and they, too, were ignored. The two wings of authority had accepted defeat and then joined the workforce at the windows. Beyond the glass there was a sporadically placed ring of guards and dogs who seemed uncertain as to whether to stare back at the distorted press of faces at the glass panes, or whether to watch instead the spiral column of smoke and the flames that played at its heels. Only the roof of the Commandant's hut was visible over the high wooden fence that was the boundary of the Factory compound, but the fire was high and the smoke higher. There was much for everyone to see. Like children the prisoners revelled in the spectacle, and their enjoyment was spurred by the noise of sirens and shouting and the crackle of old wood in the fire.

Holly heard above the drone of his lathe motor the scenario of sound that the fire carried, and heard too the happiness of the men who had left their benches.

'All the files, all the bastard case files, all there to burn, all gone.'

'They'll only have the sand buckets, they won't have a water supply. I saw the hoses last week, they hadn't been drained, they're frozen solid in their coils.'

'Did you see the pig Kypov? He came in running like a fat sow, his uniform's half burned off his fucking back.'

'How could a fire start there?'

'The speed it spread, that's not electrical, it spread like tart's clap.'

'Shit how it started, it did. Bugger how it started.'

Holly knew.

Holly could have answered the babble over his shoulder.

He picked at another piece of raw wood that had been crudely cut in the workshop across the compound in preparation for the finishing work of the lathes.

The wood shavings and dust reached up in an awkward mess from the floor beside his legs. A great mound close to him, but the daily norm that was so precious to the administration of the camp would be found wanting that day.

Bloody dangerous, this lathe, Holly thought. Wouldn't have wormed through any Factory Safety Act passed in Britain in the last fifty years, open and unshielded parts, and half of the men who used them wore the scars on their hands to prove the danger. There should have been gloves and protective goggles and face masks to field the resin and varnish dust. And the men worked without these essentials because work was food, and food was life.

Holly knew how the fire had started in the office of Major Vasily Kypov.

In his mind that was guarded by grey, disinterested eyes and his sallow tight-drawn forehead, Holly could picture the process of how a match lit in innocence had tumbled upon an incendiary device. He had looked for a loophole in their guard, he had found that crevice at the first time of asking. Smug, weren't they? Believing in their authority so totally that they could not envisage a mere prisoner, a mere item of scum, daring to kick back. Kick back with interest.

And the interest was prime rate high, and the flames were falling now because little was left for them to feed from.

The foremen called again for the men to return to their work. They came when the fire had dipped below the level of the high fence. There was a rumble across the workshop floor as the motors of the machinery sluggishly coughed back to life.

The old thief, Chernayev, from Hut 2. was beside Holly. A grizzled gnome of a man with a face as white as office paper and a pepper speckle of beard growth across his jowls and chin.

'You weren't interested? You've been here three weeks -1

tell you, when it is three years you will run to the window with the rest of us.'

Holly did not look away from his work.

'How long have you been here?'

'This camp five years, before that twelve years in Perm.

They call me Chernayev the thief. I have not been a thief for seventeen years, chance would be a thing. I did twelve years in Perm, and I was stupid . . . I had a tattoo done . . .

imbecile . . . Brezhnev is a parasite, that was the tattoo on my arm. You know they could have shot me for that.

Self-defacement, inciting anti-Soviet attitudes, it's all in the penal code. Four words and they could have shot me, that's in the book. I have four more to go • • • See this .. .' He held out his arm and pushed back the sleeve of his overall and there was a rectangle of puckered ruddy skin. 'They had to get rid of the offensive literature, they couldn't burn it, so they scraped it off and grafted back some skin from my arse

. . . You understand why I laugh when Kypov's hut goes down?'

Holly seemed to look at him as if the matter of a fire that destroyed the office of the Commandant was neither of occasion nor note.

'I understand why you laugh.'

The foreman was behind them peering between their shoulders, and there was a sniff of impatience.

it's not a wives' meeting, it's a workshop .. . and you're behind, Chernayev . . .'

It had been very simple once he had absorbed the mechanics of the attack.

A juvenile could have done it. They were so flabby. They believed so completely in the strength of their discipline and the spider net of submission that it secreted.

The screws that they used in the workshop came in plastic bags a few inches square. Holly had picked a discarded one from the floor. The lathes were serviced with a light oil film, draped in it as if to give them an overcoat protection that would ensure their survival against age and wear. Holly had filled the plastic bag with oil and twisted the neck tight and fastened it with a snip of wire. The bag and the oil had nestled behind his testicles, held in place by his underpants, as he had walked from the Factory to Hut
z,
evaded the evening search. Feldstein had given Holly a magazine and said he wanted it no longer. In his iron mug, on the privacy of his bunk, Holly had manufactured the pulp of papier-mache as he had been taught to by his mother when he was a small boy. He made a rough shape that was neither a cube nor a sphere, but a wet and hollow lump. In the night when the hut was quiet apart from the coughing and the bed creaks and the whimpering of men in despair, he had gone to the stove and heated his shape until it was dried and firm.

The bag that was filled with oil sat inside its carton. He had smeared the shape with coal dust.

Each morning there was a rota of men designated to fill the coal containers for the day - buckets for the Administration offices and the Guard Room and the barracks, sacks for the huts - from the central heap of fuel beside the compound gate. The perimeter path was beside the coal mountain. On Exercise that morning he had tossed his offering the few inches from his pocket to a waiting bucket. From the far side of the perimeter path he had watched the detail at their work as they scraped the overnight snow from the coal mountain, then shovelled the buckets and sacks full. He did not know which building he would raze . .. but one would go. One was doomed when a bucket of coal was tipped on to a blazing fire and the flames eroded the dust covering, ate at the brittle papier-mache, flickered at the softness of the plastic bag. Really it had been very simple. Simple and anonymous. The covert attack of the unseen guerilla. And no one for them to strike back against. Simple and anonymous and safe. And a beginning, Holly, only a beginning.

The first shot of war. And war, once started, has a long road to run.

At mid-day they were marshalled and marched back from the work compound to the living compound to take their places in the queue for the Kitchen. Holly saw the confusion of the guards' officers and NCOs, the way that instructions were given in a frantic pitch and confronted by the sullen amusement of the zeks. The dogs were allowed to drag their handlers closer to the ranks of men as the roll-call was made. And those in charge strutted along the lines and there was an anger at their faces that Holly had not seen before.

Anger at humiliation, at pride lost. It was a bright day with thin sunshine burnishing up from the snow and men blinked and rubbed their eyes as they crossed the open space between the two compounds, tramping over the road running down to the village and the railway line that stretched far the other way to Pot'ma. The guards who sealed the zeks into their corridor were restive, in poor temper. Another group of prisoners, themselves surrounded by guns and dogs, waited for the slow column to clear the road so that they themselves could pass on. Holly grimaced. A log jam at Barashevo, as if this forgotten end of the world was a metropolis of movement and then he looked again at the huddle of prisoners separated from him by two lines of uniformed guards.

Women. And Holly had not gazed on a woman for thirteen months.

Women who wore black. Black tunics and black skirts and black boots. Dissent and crime are not the prerogative of the male. A chorus of shouting began around Holly. Fun for the zeks, diversion from the tedium of the parade line and the parade march and the parade search and the parade lunch. And the women matched the men in earth and coarseness and the laughter pealed between the two groups.

Perhaps because he was not yet bowed with the burden of imprisonment, Holly was a man to be noticed. Taller than those around him.

A girl had seen Holly.

A tiny creature who was muffled in a tunic with the collar upturned and with a scarf across her mouth and a forage cap whose peak was pulled down over her eyes. An elf and an urchin, she had seen Holly. He stared back at her. Two people on opposite platforms and when the trains come they will go their different ways and not meet again. And the railway track that divided them was lines of men in uniform who cradled machine-pistols, who held tight to dragging dogs.

He saw a name printed across the right side of her tunic.

He knew her only as Morozova. Why one girl in a crowd?

Why one girl who possessed only a hidden face and a printed name?

Poshekhonov was at Holly's side, chuckling from the side of his mouth.

'Hard for you young bastards . . . old buggers like me, we've forgotten what it's like. Not that thinking about it helps. Tie a knot, boy, that's the best.'

He remembered her. Standing beside the rails at the junction at Pot'ma she had held the baby of an exhausted mother, and she had smiled at him. He could not see if she smiled now that her mouth was hidden by her scarf.

'Don't look at those beasts,' Poshekhonov said. 'That's the slime at the bottom of the can. They'd eat a man. . . You don't believe me? I tell you, I'd rather go without than have that lot screw me. They're shit, in Zone 4 they're not women as we'd know them, just shit.'

The column moved on. Holly surprised himself, he turned his head to watch the women cross the path. He thought he saw the girl again, but he could not be sure.

The gate stood in front of them. The girl was gone from his mind, swept aside by the burned-out office at the end of the Administration block. They had done quite a good job, Holly could see that, in containing the fire. Only the Commandant's room was wrecked, gutted. He told himself that the office would have been an addition, built onto the end of what had before been an exterior wall of brick and therefore powerful enough to hold back the spread of the flames.

'You know, Holly, there was a man here once who told me an extraordinary thing about women. . .' Poshekhonov babbled as a stream runs over rocks.'. . . he said that a girl he knew once used to do it while in a handstand position.

Can you believe that, Holly? I never quite knew whether to believe him. Standing on her hands with her back against the wall, and she wanted him to run at her. I could never believe that. . . Shit, I've wanted to . . .'

Holly saw the blackened uniforms of the guards as they moved amongst the debris of the office that they had retrieved. Some still threw buckets of snow into the small flames that lived. There was the rich stench of charred wood, and the python hiss of water on embers. Dark on the snow, beneath the windows, were items of furniture and crumpled photograph frames and scattered wisps of paper.