Far North (15 page)

I felt a prickle of interest from around the hut as the others put down their work, or folded their cards to watch. Over on the far side of the bunks, where the muslim prisoners kept together, Shamsudin and Zulfugar were watching with grave, troubled faces.

Already, some of the other prisoners were joining in the sport, goading them to make good on their boasts. These men who ordinarily feared and distrusted each other felt a little easier now they had baiting me as their common purpose.

I thought it was better to be silent. It didn’t do to appear weak or craven, but equally too much tough talk was like buying things on tick, and sooner or later you had to pay up. I bit off the thread and slipped on my glove to check the new seam.

The taller fellow was still bragging away. He was enjoying his new notoriety. But some of the other prisoners were getting bored with just words and were urging him to do what he was boasting of.

Slowly, to a chorus of jeers and whistles, he made his way across to the bunk where I sat. I was on the lowest bunk of three and he had to crouch down to it.

I told him he was blocking my light and to get out of the way.

Next thing is he reached in with his hand to grab me. It was awkward and cramped for a man of his height, and he came at me with a looping arm so I went straight for the crotch of his pants with my gloved hand.

I don’t know if he was as big down there as he claimed, or I just got a lucky hit, but I put enough darning needle into his khui to send him back howling to the far side of the hut. I heard later it went an inch deep. The laughter that followed him was so loud that I thought it would lift the roof off the place.

Only Shamsudin wasn’t laughing. He had his eyes cast down at the floor and when he raised them, I seemed to see only coldness in them.

I didn’t feel he should have stuck up for me, but maybe he did. And we both knew that things being the way they were at the base, this wouldn’t be the end of it.

 *

The next evening after muster Shamsudin bumped me as we were walking in to eat. I was too surprised to say anything. He said sorry immediately and knelt down. ‘You dropped this,’ he said, and pressed something cold in my hand.

It was the haft of a trowel, snapped off at one end, and about six inches long. I appreciated what he’d done for me. The guards frisked us for knives at the muster, and if it had been found on him, they’d have made life hard for him.

I whet it on a rock and I made it a handle with rags and window putty. Each morning, I hid it in the corner of the outouse. Each night, I’d pick it up and keep it under the balled coat I used for a pillow.

It was a strain on my nerves to have to wait up, keeping an ear on the whish of breathing in that cramped hut, but I took the same kind of pleasure in it that I used to take in hunting at night, or making a new firearm in the workshop, with all my awareness fixed on a single point. And more than once, in the course of those wakeful evenings, I regretted that I never had a shiv in my hand when Eben Callard and his friends had burst in on me, all those years before.

 *

They waited over a week to try to catch me unawares, but when they made up their minds to come I was ready.

I heard their feet slap onto the floor as they slid out of their bunks and come padding across to where I lay with my eyes shut.

They had shivs too, of course, but I was soberer, and quicker and angrier, and I caught one of them in the throat, and the other a bunch of times in the back and ass as he ran away squealing. When the guards had run in with their lanterns, it turned out he’d cut his own finger half-off in his panic.

The guards dragged me to a punishment cell, and as I went I cursed the lot of them and told them that anyone who tried that with me could expect the same. Both the men lived, which was a pity, but they couldn’t save the finger.

 *

They made me stay in the punishment cell a few nights, which was no hardship. I was pleased with how things turned out and I expected to be left well enough alone after that. I understood that the guards wouldn’t kill me because we were of some value to them – why else drag us all that way and keep us fed and housed? And I was looking forward to getting back to the farm work when they let me out.

The only upshot of it was one day when Boathwaite was making his rounds of the fields; he came up to the cart where I was baling hay and made conversation with me.

He said, ‘I gather you had a contretemps with Stavitsky and Maclennan.’

I shrugged. I knew who he meant.

He told me about Maclennan losing his finger.

I couldn’t pretend to be sorry about it. And nor did he.

 *

Because I couldn’t abide my companions in there, and Shamsudin didn’t dare risk his position in his new muslim family by being open about his friendship with me, I was always slower to hear the current rumours than the other prisoners. That didn’t bother me at all, since most of what they talked about was nonsense. I gleaned enough overhearing conversations in the barracks where we slept. I realized early on that it made no sense for Boathwaite to go to all this trouble to round up farm labour, but because of my solitariness it was a while before I understood the real reason for our being there.

 *

Six months after we arrived, sometime in February, they had reveille early and assembled us in the parade ground before breakfast.

It was still dark, and in the frosty silence you could see our breath rising and hear the muffled stamping of feet as the prisoners tried to keep warm.

Aside from the usual guards, there was another bunch, some of them newly created, all dressed for winter travel.

Each of them passed along the line and picked out a couple of prisoners. The leader of them was a fellow called Tolya who was half-Russian and Boathwaite’s deputy in the place. As he walked slowly past the prisoners, they strained slightly and swayed forward, as though they were desperate to be chosen.

Tolya stopped in front of me and paused. I could hear the men on either side of me groan and one muttered under his breath, ‘Me, Tolya.’ Tolya glanced at him, broke into a smile, and yanked him out of the line. The fellow was elated to be picked and looked back at us with a grin.

This went on until twenty prisoners had been chosen and marched off separately.

I asked the man who had been standing on my left what I’d missed out on. He looked at me puzzled. ‘Why, those lucky so-and-sos are off to the Zone.’

That was the first time I’d heard the place mentioned. Facts were like any other precious thing in there and hard to get hold of.

He told me that it was a factory city to the northwest of the base. Just as some prisoners were promoted to guards, others were taken to the Zone where they were trained to undertake industrial work. Only the ablest prisoners were chosen, he said.

I felt a stab of regret that I hadn’t been picked, and the next time we were mustered I hoped that someone would stop in front of me and tap my shoulder, but I never came close to being picked again.

3

W
HEN THE OTHER
prisoners sewed pants, or played cards and carved chess pieces, I tended a small garden in back of our barracks. I dug up wild flowers and planted them in it, and I took cuttings from some flowering shrubs. Because of what happened to Stavitsky and Maclennan, people let me be. Besides, there were always newcomers for them to pick on.

That chernozom was something else. And when the sweet peas came up, one of the guards bought some for his wife, and so did a couple of others. They paid me in clothes, some of which fit, and those that didn’t I was happy to stake and lose at cards. It never hurts your popularity to lose at cards.

 *

We had Sundays free. There was some worship, but more drunkenness. The day I’m thinking of was a rainy day in July, which was the worst – hot and wet, and all of us stuck in our quarters making trouble. I was laying on my bed pretending to sleep when a guard came in and called my name.

That wasn’t in itself so unusual. From time to time people would be called out and told to bring their things. We didn’t know where they got sent, but we mostly didn’t see them again. No one ever refused, because of the chance you’d be made a guard.

I followed the man out, to

What had I expected? I don’t know. But the place I saw was not different from countless others that I had seen in the north or that we had passed on the march there two years before. It was another abandoned town, emptied out and overgrown.

After about fifteen minutes we reached a street of bigger houses, and this time there were signs of life in them. The yards were better kept and curtains hung in the windows. There were dogs barking – but not wild dogs, dogs with collars and chains.

I knew of this place, because in winter some of the prisoners would be marched out here to shovel snow. It was where Boathwaite and the guards had their homes. And the rumoured whorehouse was around here somewhere. This was the so-called town that our labour served.

The guards led me to the rear of the biggest house on the street. It was ugly enough, built out of a kind of liverish brick, with no real shape to it, but it was a grand size, and big-boned.

I complimented one of the guards on the house, knowing it wasn’t his, but wondering what he would say.

He said nothing at all, just looked awkward, spat through his teeth, and scuffed it in with the toe of his boot.

‘You’re to work here this afternoon,’ said the other, cutting in to shut up any more of my questions.

I looked around the yard. It was unkempt and gloomy.

‘What kind of work?’ I asked.

‘This garden. You’re to make it like the one behind the barracks.’

I kicked at the patchy turf. There was the makings of a lawn and some beds, but a lime tree at the far end was throwing shadow over the whole place. ‘It can’t be done,’ I said. ‘It’s too dark. The tree’s robbing light. The best I could do would be to stick in a few bulbs, but there aren’t any.’ It was the way I’d learned to be since coming in there: on principle, we dug our heels in when there was work to be done. I didn’t want to let on what I was really feeling, standing on the brink of work I could do alone, and who knew what other privileges.

The lead guard said the other one would fetch me what I needed, so I told him to get me a rake, and a spade, and a barrow if he could find one.

The two of us waited about fifteen minutes until the other fellow showed up with a bunch of tools and a sack in place of a barrow and I set to work.

 *

From then on, my days took a whole different pattern. I worked with the prisoners in the morning, but two or three times a week, the guards came in the afternoon to collect me for my work in the garden. The guards’ names were Zhenia and Abelman. They watched over me while I was working, but though I was never entirely alone, it still felt like a taste of solitude.

Zhenia was the junior guard who wassent on errands, and once in a while helped me wrangle a tree root out of the ground or carry cut branches while Abelman kept an eye on me. They were fierce and aloof inside the palisade, but once out they grew easier with me and occasionally made small talk about the weather, or complimented my work. Abelman was a city fellow, but Zhenia was a country boy and he understood what I was doing.

My new duties also meant small freedoms inside the prison compound. I persuaded Abelman I needed a half-moon spade to edge the turf right. First it appeared there was no such thing to be had; then, when I drew him a sketch of what I wanted, he brought me one, but it had been badly made and broke apart the first time I used it. I showed him there was a cold shut in the blade and said that I could make a better one myself, if he would just let me into the smithy.

The smithy was outside the palisade and was under constant watch because of what the prisoners could get up to there if they had a mind to.

It was a time before he gave me an answer, but after a wait, he came back with a yes.

From then on, I made my own tools when I needed them, and I enjoyed the work in the smithy almost as much as the solitary toil in the garden. I think, too, that the prison smiths, who were a kind of nobility among us, were impressed by the skills I had picked up from all those years swaging my own bullets, and their good opinion of me made life easier in the barracks.

I knew there would be less to do in the winter months, so I saved myself jobs to last me through to spring: I talked them into letting me fell the lime, I cleared brush from around the edge of the garden, and I worked up tools for the planting season – anything to keep me out of the barracks and working on my own. The labour I spent on that garden kept me sane.

Now and again, while I was working there, I noticed someone in the house watching. I’d hear voices, too – women’s voices, and the quick scattering sound of feet in the house. But the strangest thing was this: one day in the fall, when I had stayed longer than usual, and I was gathering up my tools in the half-dark, I heard a humming sound. I turned around, and the windows of the house were blazing with yellow electric light.

 *

In March the garden burst into life. It felt like winter had passed in a heartbeat. That was good for me, because spring meant more solitary work in the garden, but it made me think how things had altered.

Seeing the flowers in that garden bloom so early, and the trees bud so much sooner than they ought, it struck me that a change had happened deep down in the fibre of things, and it put me in mind of the Tungus who said the world needs to sleep through the winter, or it wakes angry, like a
shatoon
, and tears up everything in its path.

 *

Through spring and summer, I cut the grass of the lawn every other day with a push-mower. It was old and rusty and the devil to roll. In the July heat, with all the bugs out, it was hard work, and I’d break from time to time to mop my face with a rag. It doesn’t hurt me, but the salt in sweat makes my scarring flare up worse.

More and more, it was one or other of the guards, but not both of them. Today it was Abelman, who I liked less, leaning up agains the wall of the kitchen, his gun on his lap, and using a twig to tease the house-cat.