Archangel (19 page)

Chernayev who had not been a thief for seventeen years said, 'They can do nothing to us. One only they can shoot

. . . perhaps he would have died of pneumonia, or coronary exhaustion, perhaps anyway he would have run for the wire

. . . They can't do anything. But the man who killed the guard, I hope that man knows why the guard had to die.

Unless he knows why, then what he did was wasted.'

The voices around Michael Holly.

In the second rank two men fell, simultaneously, as if by signal. They were pulled back to their feet by the
zeks
of the same line. Blue, blood-drained faces, fingers that could not move, feet that could not be felt.

An old man screamed. A young man sobbed without shame. The snow fell on the compound.

Kypov paced alone around his prisoners.

The first twelve came back and one bled from the nose and another from the lip and a third was helped by others.

Another twelve were called, and the snow fell. Another twelve returned, and the snow fell. Another twelve were called . . .

No bell for lunch, no call for the Kitchen queue, no smoke from the iron stack on the Kitchen roof.

The guards shivered and their dogs moaned.

Holly stood straight, tried not to twist his face away from the snow flurries that were channelled between the bodies and over the shoulders of the men in front of him.

Why, Holly?

What's the justification, Holly? Eight hundred men lined in ranks in the snow, and the temperature sliding, and the snow settling, and the Kitchen idle. Why, Holly?

Because it's there . . .

There had once been a cartoon that he had seen in a London evening newspaper. A mountain of bodies, Asian and Caucasian and dead that were the casualties of the battle for South Vietnam's Khe Sanh, and on one side of the mountain was LBJ and on the other was Ho, and the caption read 'Because It's There'.

Everyone says you should fight them. Fight against a wrong, fight against an evil, fight against an injustice.

Everyone says that, until they are confronted themselves with wrong and evil and injustice. Different when you face it yourself .. . And because Holly fought, then Byrkin and Mamarev and Poshekhonov and Adimov and Feldstein and Chernayev stood in the snow and shivered and were cold to the marrow and their bellies scraped in hunger like a shingle"

sea shore.

You have an arrogance, Michael Holly.

Perhaps.

You have a conceit when you put these poor bastards to the agony of a day frozen in line in the snow.

Perhaps.

And one man will die, Holly. Perhaps you . . . perhaps some man that you know. Perhaps some grey creature from another hut whose life has never crossed yours. Will you cry for him, Holly? Will you, when he goes to the bullet in the yard of the Central Investigation Prison at Yavas?

God . . . God, I don't know.

When you made the bomb to go with the coal, when you forced the shit into the water-mains pipe leading to the barracks, did you know of this?

No . . . No . . . Of course I didn't bloody know. How could I have known?

A man in his rank crumpled and slithered to the ground, and his companions pulled him back to his feet and tried to chafe his legs and cheeks and hands, and then Holly knew weakness, felt his knees cave, his strength slide.

He fought a war with proxy weapons. He used the hand-gun of the men of the compound, and he hadn't asked them, he hadn't won them to his flag.

A man is a better man if he fights.

.You believe that, Holly?

I believe t h a t . . . I think I believe that. Anything is better than just surviving. And if you fight then some will be hurt, that is the way of fighting, and some will know why and some won't. And this is an evil place, this place should be destroyed. Even if another place rises afterwards, it should still be fought against.

Will you believe that, Holly, when they take a man to the yard at Yavas?

He watched Kypov striding his own perimeter, a short round figure made grotesque by the thickness and length of his greatcoat, made silly by the full wide cap.

Pray God I have the strength, to believe that.

In mid-afternoon the men who had not been questioned were sent back to their huts.

Internal Order knew the reason. The trusties reported that the interrogators had complained that the men who were being brought to them were too cold to talk, that their minds were as numbed as their feet and fingers.

Like rats after food the zeks struggled to get close to the central stove of the hut and the snow melted from their clothes and boots, puddling the floor. Beside the door Holly had scraped the snow from his tunic and trousers. Now he sat on his bunk, dangling his legs and listened to the skirmish of talk around the stove.

Feldstein came to his own bunk and shook his head with puzzlement.

'You know, Holly, there is a pride among the zeks tonight. You would expect it of the politicals, but not from the zeks . . . Nobody screamed at Kypov for deliverance.

There was no surrender out there. That was the strength of non-violence. Just standing there, dumb, and staring them out, that was incredible. I didn't think the zeks could behave like that.'

'And that matters?'

'Of course that matters. It shows them that we are people, not numbers. The more they believe we are people, then the more they will show respect towards us. Eight hundred numbers are simply an administrative question for them, eight hundred people is something else.'

'But they must find one to shoot.'

'I had forgotten. . . ' Feldstein spoke with a sharp sadness.

He flopped down onto his mattress.

From the door of the hut the names were called.

Those that came back said the interrogators were losing heart, were bored with battering at the silence wall. The questioning was sluggish, ill-informed, they said.

The dozen from Hut 2 came to the Administration block and the long internal corridor. Hanging out from each door was a KGB man, whores in a brothel and touting for a customer. Holly saw that their tunic collars were unfastened, that all pretence of smartness was abandoned. He wondered whether they would hit him . . . how he would respond if they did. He had never been hit in his life, least of all by a man with a rubber truncheon. They had been called in alphabetical order from the hut. After Adimov and Byrkin and Chernayev, together with Feldstein, before Mamarev and Poshekhonov. A routine was being followed.

If there were suspicion held against him then the rhythm of the questioning would have been broken, he would have been summoned ahead of his turn. But if they did not take Michael Holly, then they would take another. All the men in the hut said that they must take one man. Holly shuddered.

He saw that Yuri Rudakov had come to his door at the far end of the corridor. He heard the shout.

'Holly, to my office.'

He walked past the interrogators, smelt their breath, smelt the herring and bread they would have gulped between the beatings, smelt the coffee that would have for-tified them.

in here, Holly.'

Rudakov grabbed him by the tunic front, propelled him through the door. The lock clicked shut.

Rudakov loosed his grip. He said pleasantly, 'Sit down.'

Holly sat on the straight back wooden chair in front of the desk.

'Would you like some coffee? There's a sandwich if you'd like it. . .'

Holly craved coffee, would have grovelled for a sandwich.

'No.'

'I've plenty of coffee, sandwiches too.'

'No.'

'Please yourself,' Rudakov said.

i don't come cheap, not as bloody cheap as that.'

'Please yourself . . .'

Rudakov walked to the filing cabinet and the tray on the top with the thermos flask and the plate. He made a song of pouring the coffee, a dance of unwrapping the sandwiches from grease paper.

. . You can change your mind.'

'No.'

'My wife made the coffee, and the sandwiches. They're very good, she buys her meat in Pot'ma. Were you married, Holly?'

'You've read the file.'

Rudakov came back to his desk. Coffee ran on his chin, crumbs fell from his mouth.

The impact of a truncheon on flesh and bone and muscle buffeted dully through the thin wall, emptied the sound into Rudakov's office.

'That'll be Feldstein. Superior little bastard, don't you think so, Michael? Going to set the world to rights, going to change the order. Just a creep, our Comrade Feldstein, don't you think?'

'Why am I in here?'

Rudakov opened his hands, rolled his eyes in disbelief, theatrical and exaggerated.

'Do you want to be with him? You want to be with those animals? They're not pretty boys with a set of rules, they've come to find who killed a guard. That's their order and they will achieve it, they will find somebody they can charge with killing a guard. You want to go to their care? I've shielded you, Michael. . . You should thank m e . . . You want some coffee now?'

'No.'

Through the wall Holly heard the soft moan of Feldstein.

He stared back into Rudakov's eyes until they blinked and turned away from him.

'Did you think on what I said?'

'I don't remember what you said.'

'A transfer to Vladimir.'

in exchange for what?'

in exchange for a statement. Something about the work that you were sent to accomplish in our country. We would let you go for that. No one could blame you afterwards for a statement of that sort - it would only be the truth ..

Rudakov warmed to his own words, a smile of friendship snuggled at his mouth.'.. . The truth about who sent you, and who you were to meet.'

'You have the statement that I made at Lubyanka.'

i have read the statement, Holly.' Rudakov played the man who was disappointed. 'Not a very full statement and then you persisted in the lie of innocence.'

'I said in my statement that I was not a spy .. .'

The room shook. In the next office a body had been thrown with force against a wall.

'And that was a lie, Holly.'

'You say it was a lie, I do not.'

He thought of Feldstein, a thin Jewish boy who would have a bleeding mouth and bruises above his kidneys. A boy who could recite in the darkness the poem of a man who had died from a burst ulcer.

'Don't you want to go home?'

He thought of Feldstein who would be in pain behind a plasterboard wall, and of Byrkin who would lose a visit, and of Adimov who would not see his wife before the cancer caught her, and of Poshekhonov, and of Chernayev.

'You must want to go home, and we are making it so easy for you. But you have a problem, Holly. You labour under an illusion. You believe you can make me impatient. Holly, I have all day, I have every day to sit with you. Actually, I value the time I spend with you. You're not getting out of here; I'm not about to be posted. I have all the time I need. It is your time that is wasted. Personally, I would like to see you go home. You should believe me, Holly. Consider, who else can you believe?'

He thought of a girl that he had seen behind a line of guns and a cordon of dogs. An elfin girl with brave, bright eyes.

Morozova, the one word stamped on her tunic above a slight breast. A girl with no given name . . .

'You could be out of here within days, perhaps even hours. Listen to me, you have no need to be here.'

He thought of eight hundred men lined up in the snow, the pariahs and dross of a nation. And they had stood their ground.

'I want to see you go home, Holly. I want to see you go free to lead the rest of your young life away from this place.'

'Give me some coffee, please.'

'That's being sensible. Have some coffee and a sandwich then we'll talk. You won't have to go back to the hut tonight, I'll find you somewhere here. . .' Rudakov bounced across the room towards the filing cabinet, moving on his toes in a waltz of success. 'We'll have you out of that hut. I don't know how you've survived with that scum.'

Rudakov set the mug of coffee down in front of Holly.

Holly picked it up, pondered the coffee for a moment. He threw it in Rudakov's face.

Hot, steaming coffee ran down Rudakov's best uniform and scalded his skin, and the mug had bounced to the floor and smashed.

Rudakov blinked. Coffee droplets sprinkled from his eyebrows. He wiped furiously with his handkerchief at the growing stains on his uniform.

'If you are here fourteen years . . .' Rudakov spat across the table. '. . . If you serve fourteen years at Barashevo, remember each day the chance you were given. And remember this, too, Mister Holly. If I hit you, in the condition you're in, if I hit you then I break you. I can break any bone in your body. You remember that.'

'I said I didn't come cheap. Not as cheap as a mug of coffee and a sandwich.'

'Every day in fourteen years you will wish you had never done that.'

Holly smiled.

'When you report to Moscow will you say thqt you Back in the hut the limping Feldstein reported that Holly had been taken to the punishment cells.

'Rudakov offered him coffee, Holly threw it in his face. .

Some said the Englishman was an idiot, some that he had snapped. But the zeks do not linger on the misfortune of one man. Holly was instant interest, then replaced.

Chernayev gazed wistfully at the empty bunk, the folded blanket, then went to the window and looked across the snow to the high wire fence and the high wooden wall and the jutting roof of the prison block. He alone thought that, perhaps, he understood.

'So, how will he cope there?'

'He'll cope but it will be hard for him.'

'Why hard for him?'

'Because he won't lie down, that's not his way.'

'But you think he can cope, whatever that means?'

'They won't destroy him, he won't be on his back with his legs in the air.'

Alan Millet had been waiting for a week to see the Deputy Under Secretary, but that was the cross of carrying Grade II rank. The DUS could call you in and utter an instruction from the mountain summit, and you'd run your backside sore and ferret the facts he wanted, then you couldn't get back in to report. All the previous week Millet had badgered Miss Frobisher for fifteen minutes of DUS's time, and she'd put up a wall that the likes of Alan Millet couldn't scale.