The People's Act of Love (24 page)

‘The captain had the chain taken off me and let me sleep in the boiler room, where it smelled of smoke and sulphur. Before that time I’d never in my life been so happy as when they brought me in from the cold and let me sleep there. There was nothing soft to lie on, and the deck was covered in ash and cinders and crumbs of coal, but it was warm. The warmth was so good, it was like a friend who’d missed me, and was going to miss me when I went away again.

‘The deck hand shook me awake, handed me a broom and told me to go up and clear the snow. It was morning, and the boat was moving against a blizzard. You could hardly see either bank of the river for the rolling clouds of it. The captain’s face in the wheelhouse was angry and frightened. He’d never come this far north so late in the year before. I cleared snow for hours, working my way up and down the boat till my back hurt. The blizzard lifted, the wind dropped and the snow fell in big, heavy flakes. At the water’s edge I could see what the captain was afraid of. There were delicate, curving blades of ice crystallising out from the freezing mud, half transparent, fragile and powerful. There were fewer trees now, they were further apart, and they were stunted.

‘Next day we turned east off the Yenisey onto a tributary.
It meant steaming against the current, which slowed us down. The current was strong, though, the river was black and deep, which kept the ice back. The sky turned the colour of leather and the blizzards returned. When they cleared we saw steep mountains of grey rock patched with snow. Bodrov, in a wolf hat and a black lambskin coat, was in ecstasy. He said it was Putorana, and that the story of the world was written there.

‘They put him ashore to a log hut and promised to be back within four days to pick him up. He wasn’t listening to anyone. He wanted to get ashore with his hammer and his instruments and his snowshoes. Before we moved out of sight we could see him walking steadily up the slopes behind the cabin, making a trail between the trees.

‘I asked the captain what would happen to Bodrov if the steamer got frozen in upriver. The captain looked at me like a man seeing a dog juggling. He said: “He hunts, or he dies. But where you’re going you won’t be worrying about him.” Just after dawn two days later, we reached the White Garden.’

The White Garden

‘T
he White Garden is in the tundra, between the river and cone-shaped hills of rock, the foothills of the Putorana mountains. The hills have deep grooves, and the grooves are serrated; have you seen limpet shells? They’re like that. They’re only a few hundred metres high, but even in August there’s snow between the grooves. To the north of the hills are the mountains, glaciers, Taimyr, and the Arctic sea. The river bends, and the White Garden is on the promontory, so the river binds it east, south and west. There’s no human settlement except Tungus chumas for a thousand miles in any direction. In the summer you get moss and berries and flowers on the ground, and there are bushes, hard bushes. When they turn green for a few weeks it’s like barbed wire sprouting leaves. No trees. No grass. The earth’s always frozen under your feet. Out on the ice on the river in January you’ll get 70 degrees of frost. That’s when it’s still. When the black purga blows it can pile the snow higher than a ship’s mast overnight. It’s not our world. When I was a student we used to talk about how it might be possible to build a ramp high enough and long enough for a train to fly off the end into space, to the Moon, or Venus. The White Garden was a place like that, at the terminus of a journey from the sum of all our homes. In deep winter the air is another air, it hurts to breathe. The sun isn’t seen for weeks. You have to kick the pilings of the jetty to believe there’s any
connection between the place you are and the place you were, and even when you see the boats hauled up on the shore, they seem like craft fallen by mistake from the astral plane, when the river’s frozen so solid it might be harder and older than the rocks themselves, and to believe it could melt and be water again takes an act of faith harder than any godbeliever’s. When the summer comes with its everlasting light it’s like the final passage into madness, the sun never going away. The barracks sat on a stretch of white quartz gravel. It used to reflect the sun for a few days in midsummer, sparkling like a dragon’s hoard, burning a pattern into your eyes that you’d see when you closed them. Up by the hills there was a waterfall, and when it wasn’t frozen it left minerals on the rocks where it fell, big white crystals shaped into trunks and branches like Christmas trees. The first time you saw them you thought they were pretty but later you got to hate them, as exiles do when souvenirs of their old lives turn out to be fakes. The first Europeans to see it saw the quartz twinkling and the mineral trees and called it the White Garden and thought there would be gold there. They kept us looking, digging into the hillsides with picks, spikes and hammers, trying to find veins of precious metal, or any metal, iron, nickel. We found nothing. We only turned solid rock into fields of broken rock, and every rock broken made you stronger or weaker, but either way it made you older.

‘When I arrived I was given a bunk in a barrack hut with forty others, and assigned a foreman for a work detail which began the next day. Twelve hours a day, six days a week. Sunday was a rest day. I wasn’t ready for the White Garden. I came into the hut with a valise and a box of books, with my head shaven like a convict, but still wearing my student’s uniform. The other convicts looked at me as if I was a fat wallet someone had dropped, and it was only a question of
making sure the owner was far enough away. I was there under the criminal code like them but not like them. It wasn’t that they hated me. There was no hate. It’s nothing to do with hate, except the hate you need to take like a drink before hitting someone. Here’s how little I understood: I thought the commandant, an aristocrat called Prince Apraksin-Aprakov, ran the camp, and I thought the guards were his means of controlling us. Of course he didn’t run the camp; he owned it. The guards were there to protect him and to make sure nobody escaped. The running of the camp was left to the most senior prisoners, mainly three criminal authorities, Avraam the Matchstick, Sergei the Machinegun, and the Mohican.

‘I began to doubt Prince Apraksin-Aprakov existed. For years, I never saw him, although he was said to be there. He had a house on the edge of the camp, up against the barbed wire. At night you saw lamps burning, and you could hear a gramophone. The only evidence of his presence was his warped decrees. Once Pchelentsev, the head of the guards, got us together at the autumn equinox and said the prince had been pleased to give us the honour of sculpting an ice replica of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, England. Pchelentsev asked if any of us had ever been to England. Nobody said anything. Tolik Redhead, a recidivist chicken-thief from Kiev, said he hadn’t been to England but he knew a girl in Brovary whose underwear came from Manchester. The lieutenant gave him twenty strokes of the knout and stuck him in a cage for a few days till the snow was ankle deep. He lost a couple of toes. They turned black and the surgeon cut them off like a cook trimming a potato. Tolik said it was nothing terrible, he still had eight left, and the doctor gave him a swig of spirit before each one, so he asked him to take them all off, slowly, in return for 100 grammes of alcohol for each one and he’d settle for
the pain to wash it down with, but the doctor said he hardly had enough spirit left for himself till the thaw came, and what would he do with eight healthy toes now that the ground was hard and he couldn’t bury them, he’d have to burn them. He was afraid they’d come back to haunt him, eight ghostly Christian toes pattering up to his mattress in the moonlight. The ice sculpture was never made.

‘I was robbed, cuffed, and mocked by some of the convicts, helped by others, left alone by most. For the first year, when there was a tolerable amount of food, steamers ran through the summer and deer teams made the winter run from the south to the White Garden, I could endure the labour. The Prince set quotas, but the foremen of the work gangs didn’t enforce them tightly. They cared that when they walked by your spot, your pick was striking rock, and they cared that their gang had altered a stretch of hillside by shift’s end, and because they cared, your neighbours cared and kept their eye on you.

‘It would have been in 1916 that it started to change. A military barge came and took the strongest and most generous convicts away to be slaughtered in uniform. The Prince was ordered to seek war metals, whatever that meant, and he doubled our quotas, with fewer men to work. At the same time our rations were cut.

‘In the beginning, when I arrived at the camp, they had a kitchen hut. A group of prisoners who’d got in with the guards cooked the food, baked the bread, and doled it out inside. They fed us twice a day, bread, kasha, soup and tea, sometimes a bit of sausage on the Prince’s birthday or some saint’s day. The guards were fed there too, but they sat down inside, and we took ours back to our barracks to eat. When the shortages began the first thing was that the soup got thinner and there wasn’t so much kasha on your plate. They put sawdust, ashes and bits of dried moss into the bread flour to make the bread
go further. The bread was grey and the loaves didn’t hold together properly. When they tried to cut them they’d crumble like rotten wood. Sometimes you wouldn’t get a slice of bread so much as a handful of flakes and crumbs.

‘I began to be an object of trade. I belonged to Matchstick, and he began to sell me. Either he’d sell me as a slave, to work an extra half-shift for a buyer, or he’d sell my ration. One day he sold both. It nearly killed me. Sixteen hours with the pick in the snow, and nothing but hot water at the end of it. I put straw from my mattress in the water. I know it sounds absurd, but there was nothing else to thicken it with. The next day I ate and worked a normal shift but I carried the deficit with me for months. I can still feel the missing meal now. My salvation was Machinegun, or so it seemed. Authorities like him never felt the shortages; they were always looking for amusements. I heard he couldn’t read and I offered to teach him, to read to him, if he would buy me from Matchstick. He made the purchase. I still had to work my twelve hours but no more, and I had a better chance of eating. Machinegun liked to have the books on a shelf by his bed and I’d read to him. He liked Pushkin and the Book of Revelation. He was sentimental. He was from the Caucasus, Svanetia, he wore the grey skullcap. He robbed banks. He stole a machine gun from a unit in Kutaisi and fixed it to the back of a four-horse hearse. He called ammunition caviar, and the gun the mother-fish, the sturgeon. He’d come riding into dusty Mengrelian squares, pull the tarpaulin off and cock the gun, screaming “She’s going to spawn!”, and everyone would run out of the bank, they’d throw the money out of the windows, but it was no good, once he’d announced it, he couldn’t stop until he’d emptied every last bullet he had into the bank. When they caught him he was bathing naked with the gun in an earthenware tub full of olive oil. He offered to
go to the war with it, to kill Germans. He said: “Only I can make the mother fish spawn.” They separated them, sent him to the White Garden and took the gun to the war without him. And it never did work, though they said it was because it was the wrong kind of oil. I wanted to read to him from Bakunin. I thought he’d like Bakunin. But he only wanted to hear about the last trumpet and
The Prisoner
. You know, Pushkin.

We are birds, we are dying; time, brother, time!

There, beyond clouds, where the white mountains climb

There, where the land takes the blue of the sea

There, where only the wind walks, and me.

‘The first couple of times I read it to him he shed a few tears, hugged me, kissed me and went to sleep. The third time the flesh on his face seemed to harden to stone while I read it. He lay on the bunk without moving, his eyes wide open, for a long time after I finished. He got up and began walking up and down the barracks. He put his fists together and shook them and started making noises as if he was firing the machine gun. He paced from one end to another, the noises getting louder, and each time when he reached me he looked at me. He stopped, screamed “She’s going to spawn!” and hit me in the face with his two fists together. He was a big man, I went down straight away, he sat astride me and was battering his knuckles against my face, my neck, my chest, making this sound in his throat akh-akh-akh-akh-akh-akh-akh-akh-akh, foam and phlegm dripping off his lip. I think he … well, he stopped suddenly and fell forward on top of me, his stubble combing the bloody curls of my beard. He had never had a wife, and he was missing his gun very badly.

‘I believed in God less than any of them but I was the only
one who believed I deserved to live. Not just wanted, but deserved, as if there was someone else to make the choice. They felt that. They were curious. It provoked them. They wondered who the someone else was. They wanted to take me to pieces. They wanted to feel inside me. Machinegun said: “What makes you think you’re better than us?” I said “I don’t, all men are the same.” He looked into my eyes for a long time and told me to undress. He said “We’ll see if all men are the same.” Two days later I woke up on the floor of the barracks. I could hardly see but he was there, I could make out his boots and his fat knees bulging out over the toecaps as he squatted there, looking at what he’d done to me. He said what was that you were saying, it was interesting, about the proletariat. He said: “Under socialism, will I get to have my own machine gun?” I told him that, according to my understanding of socialist dogma, all workers would have full and equal access to the means to defend their homes and workplaces. He said: “Yes, but will I get to rob banks?” I told him there’d be no need to rob banks in future. He spat and said I didn’t know what he did and didn’t need and left me there.

‘After that Machinegun didn’t beat me so often but he still stole my food. At night when he couldn’t sleep he’d kneel by my bed, put his hand under the blanket and stroke my ribs, running his fingertips in the troughs between them, rubbing the pit where my stomach’d been with the palm of his hand, kneading the hollow from hipbone to hipbone like a baker smearing dough. He said: “Do you want to know what I’m doing?” I said “No.” He said: “I’m feeling for your heart.” I lay still on my back and let him do it. I wanted to ask him for bread. I was afraid to. His fingers were rough and warm and down through the bones and flesh I could feel him shaking as he wept. Sometimes his tears fell on my face and I opened my mouth. He couldn’t see in the darkness that I was drinking
them. In the morning he’d take half my ration. He took food from the others too, not so much. He said to me: “Who is it that looks after you, Intelligent?” and I said: “No-one.” He said: “You’re not a saint, are you, God wouldn’t have saints who don’t believe in him.” “No,” I said. “Why d’you think you deserve to live, then?” he said. “It must be the proletariat.” I said I couldn’t eat the proletariat. He said: “Well you wouldn’t have to eat it all,” and he laughed. I tried to laugh too, thinking he might leave me more bread. I noticed how much quieter Machinegun had become, part of the general murderous quietness over the camp as the food ran out and the guards began to disappear. The convicts and the garrison were starving. You could see the bird of hunger roosting on them, waiting for the hunger to hatch out, a mildewed mother bird waiting for a brood of white skulls to peck their way blindly out of these shrivelled heads.