Archangel (43 page)

'Be my witness, remember me.'

Her head lay against his chest, and her hair bobbed against his chin with the motion of her crying.

The jeep skidded to a halt as Rudakov stamped on the brake-pedal. It was a curious and confused creature that he had brought from Yavas, a pencil-thin man whose breath was foul. Rudakov had offered no explanation on the journey; the poor bastard was too timorous to ask for one.

They had driven in silence, and at reckless speed. Rudakov reached across., screwed up his nose, and unlocked the man's handcuffs. He jumped out of the jeep, opened the man's door, and pulled him viciously down so that the man staggered on the ice.

A tall, helmeted figure waited beside the gates. The Colonel General studied his watch, held it up to his face so that the thin light would fall on the dial. He nodded, he accepted.

Rudakov propelled his prisoner towards the gates. A soldier dragged them open, wide enough for one man to pass through. Rudakov pointed towards the Kitchen, and pitched the man into the compound.

The gate closed.

Rudakov walked to the Colonel General.

'I want a rifle.'

'Was that your bargain, one for one?'

'One for them all. Holly for all of them that are in the Kitchen.'

'He is a brave man, your Holly.'

'Just give me a rifle.'

The man hesitated in the doorway. He blocked some of the light that filtered from the arc lamps and from the flames into the Kitchen. He stopped as if he needed time to acclimatize himself. He had walked past a downed helicopter and a burnt-out tank, past huts that smouldered. He had come from the condemned cell. He had not understood the charge against him, now he did not understand the scene that greeted his return to the camp. He reached out with his hands in front of him like a blind man in a strange room.

The zeks watched his return, they waited on Holly. From the floor Holly looked at the man in the doorspace. He saw the frail shoulders. He saw the hungry fleshless face. He saw the scabs at the mouth. This was the spear in his side, the nail in his hand.

Holly stood up. He turned his back on the man, he reached down and lifted the girl and for a few moments he held her warm and loving against the mud of his tunic. Once he kissed her forehead, a light and gentle kiss, and she trembled against him.

'I will be your witness, I will never forget,' the girl said.

Feldstein came beside him. 'They can rebuild the huts, but the camp is broken.'

Chernayev was behind him. 'The word will be heard in every camp.'

Poshekhonov faced him. He tried to smile, wiping away the bright rivers from his face with the back of his glove.

'Remember the woman who did handstands; when you are in the compound, remember her . . . '

Holly walked out into the night. He wondered if they crowded the doorway to watch him go.

The fires were lower now, close to exhaustion.

A blackness around him.

God . . . I'm frightened.

What for, Holly? What was it for?

. . . I don't know . . .

Did you think you could beat them, Holly? Did you think you could win all on your own?

I don't know . . . Damn, damn, y e s . . . I know. We won.

We won against their helicopters and their tank and their wire.

Do they know that you won, Holly?

The bastards know. Certainly they know.

The searchlight beam exploded in his face. He was naked in the light. He was captured. They know that we won.

Lying on the roof of the Administration block, Rudakov fired.

One shot.

The noise echoed away, withered on the wind and in the snow. He saw the first of the zeks step out of the doorway of the Kitchen. The searchlight tilted up and away from the single prone figure, and found the spreading mass of men.

Away to his left the gates were opening, dogs were barking, there was the tramp of marching men.

Yuri Rudakov thought that he should have felt the clean draught of victory. He knew only the stale sweat-scent of despair.

Chapter
25

The first passengers off the Aeroflot dribbled through into the Zurich concourse. Alan Millet rummaged through his mind for the description that Century had given him. He looked at his watch again. He took a step nearer the glass

'Arrivals' door. He was hot, yet he shivered. He felt as a mourner does who arrives too late at the wicket gate of a country churchyard and hears the singing of a distant hymn.

He had opened the file on Michael Holly. He would close that file. That he should seal it, bind it shut, had been an obsession with him since the end of February when the first outline of events in the Dubrovlag had reached Century House. A brief message from a man called Carpenter at Foreign and Commonwealth. 'Your man's dead. They've informed the Embassy that he was shot during a camp riot.

They buried him in the Camp cemetery. We've tried to get a bit more, but they're not giving.. .' A telephone call from a girl in the Soviet section of Amnesty. Nice of her to have remembered him. 'We get this material through from the camps - sometimes we take it as gospel, sometimes we're a bit cautious. The word is that an Englishman was involved in leading a riot at Barashevo, and that he was killed just before the rebellion folded. It's pretty thin, but that's all I have.' A visit to a small house in Hampton Wick and a doorway conversation with an old man whose face was scarred and aged, and behind whom an invisible woman inquired in a frail quaver who the visitor was. 'We know no more than you, Mr Millet. It is your job to find out what happened to our boy. It was you that sent him.'

After Carpenter's call he had swivelled round on his chair and gazed for some time out of the window over the dismal flow of the Thames. After the Amnesty message he had cleared his desk, locked his drawer, gone home. After the visit to Hampton Wick he had paced the streets through the squall showers until mid-evening.

There was a young man next to him now, wearing jeans and an aggressive red shirt under an open lightweight suede jacket. A girl stood beside him, with high, wide cheekbones and a trail of golden hair onto the shoulders of her blouse.

They too were waiting for a passenger.

She was smaller than he had expected.

She wore tight black trousers, a yellow jersey, and a blouse that was clean and had once been white. She had large round brown eyes. Her dark hair was cut short against her scalp. Her face was pale. She came boldly to the sliding door, but when it opened she hesitated, as if this were the final step to the new world, courage had fled her. She looked for a friend.

The boy and girl who had been waiting bounced past Alan Millet.

'Morozova . . .'

irina . . .'

'Alexei . . . 'Tasha . . . I hoped . . . I didn't know you would be here.'

'We met every flight this week.'

'They told us from Moscow that it would be Zurich, they didn't know which flight.'

The boy and the girl and Irina Morozova made a bundle of closed, desperate hugging and kissing. Alan Millet felt powerless to intervene into the passion of the greeting. She was a small town pianist, she was a small time
samizdat
courier, big Mother Russia would not miss her. Every year they let out a few like her, he thought, because it was good for their statistics, it was good to throw in the faces of the visiting Congressmen.

The bundle broke open. The boy held Morozova's hand, the girl had linked herself to Morozova's arm. As if it were hard for her, as if the act were unfamiliar, a happy wide smile split across Irina Morozova's face and her head was tilted first to the right and then to the left as she nuzzled cat-like, with affection against the boy and girl.

'Miss Morozova, can I speak to you?' Alan Millet stepped forward. His hand was outstretched. He spoke in Russian.

He felt strained, and in his mind was the face of a man sitting opposite him on a low stool in a London pub with a glass of beer and a sandwich for his lunch.

The boy turned, annoyed. 'Are you a journalist? There will be a press conference tomorrow. The news agencies will be given the time and the address.'

'I have to speak with you now, Miss Morozova.'

She looked puzzled and the smile faded.

The girl narrowed her eyes at Alan Millet. 'She's just come off the plane. Can't you leave her alone? You can ask her anything you want tomorrow.'

'I'm not a journalist, Miss Morozova,' Millet persisted.

'I'm from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

That's the equivalent of the Soviet Foreign Affairs Ministry.

You were in Camp 3 at Barashevo, that's what I want to talk to you about.'

The fear came to Morozova's face. Her silence seemed to ask if their long arm reached here, beyond the Customs and Baggage Hall at Zurich.

'You've nothing to be frightened of, Miss Morozova, I promise you. You were in Camp 3 at the end of February . . . ?'

'Leave her alone,' the boy snapped.

'Miss Morozova, you were in Camp 3 at the time of the riot?'

'You've no right to ask her such questions,' cried the girl.

'Miss Morozova, when the riot happened there was an Englishman in the leadership. The Women's zone is beside the compound where the riot was . . . '

'Michael Holly?' A small, nervous voice.

'Michael Holly was the Englishman's name.'

'Did you know Michael Holly?'

i was . . . I was his friend. My name is Alan Millet.'

'Before he died he kissed me. Before he died I said to him that I would be his witness, that I would never forget him.

They shot him like a dog .. .'

'We'll go and have some coffee.'

Alan Millet took her arm. The boy and the girl fell back, leaves in the wind.

He took a table far from the counter. Their elbows were on the table, their heads were hunched close together, and the coffee when it came grew cold, totally ignored. Irina Morozova spoke, Alan Millet listened. She talked for an hour. She talked of the office of Vasily Kypov, and the water supply of the garrison, and of the cut holes in the wire fences. She talked of the world of the zeks who sat down in the snow, and of helicopters screaming out of control, and of a tank ravished by the damage of an internal explosion.

Around them the loudspeakers broadcast the news of arriving flights. Passengers gulped down their beers, swilled their soft drinks, ran for 'Departures'.

She talked of a Kitchen building where the men were close packed, where some were wounded and mutilated, where the minute hand of a wall clock travelled over a final hour.

She talked of a kiss, of the silence that followed his going, the crash of a single shot.

'Why?'

'The Authority had to be given a target for their vengeance after what had been done to them. He gave himself as their target. The zeks would have fought on for him, they would have been butchered. They loved him for the courage he had given to them.'

'Did he win, is that an idiot question?'

'The camp was destroyed. That night the flames could be seen the length of the Dubrovlag railway. On the morning afterwards the smoke could be seen by every man in every camp. I think he won .. .'

'And his friends, what happened to them?'

if you were his friend in London, you would not know the men who were his friends in Barashevo. Adimov who was a murderer is in Vladimir. Chernayev who was a thief is in Camp 9, Poshekhonov who was a fraud has been sent to Baku in the Azerbaidzhan SSR. Feldstein who was a dissident has gone to the Political camps at Perm, Byrkin too has gone to Perm. That is what I have heard. None of them were executed, they all lived because one man died. The Captain of KGB had given his word, and his word was honoured.

That they kept their word, that too was a victory of a sort.'

Alan Millet held his hand softly over Irina Morozova's clenched fist.

'Your friends are waiting for you.'

'Why was he there, Mr Millet?'

'That's not the sort of thing I can discuss.'

'Why?'

'1 can't talk about that.'

'You sent him?'

'I sent him . . . myself and others.'

She snatched her hand away. 'Do you know what that place is like, Mr Millet?'

'I suppose I've a fair idea.'

'And you left him there?'

'We tried

'Tried?'

'We tried to get him out.'

'And because you only tried, he died there.'

'We did all we could.'

'Find out what that place is like, Mr Millet, because you should know that before you send another man to Barashevo.'

'I understand your feelings, Miss Morozova.' Millet sat miserably in his chair. 'It's been a hideous experience.'

'They loved him at Barashevo. People he had not known before, they loved him.'

Millet shuffled, looked around him. 'I think your friends want to go.'

'I want to tell you one thing.'

'Tell me.'

'We heard the shot. We came out of the Kitchen. Holly was dead, near to the tank. The soldiers were coming into the compound. The zeks surrounded Holly's body. They were all around him. They linked their arms. There was ring upon ring of men around him. The soldiers could not get to him. They stood, stupid bastards, around the zeks, around the rings. The Colonel General came and then the Commandant and then the Political Officer, and told the zeks they could sleep on the floor of the Factory. The zeks didn't move, no man moved throughout the whole night, even the wounded stayed out in the compound for the whole night.

Two men died. The zeks stood in the cold . . . do you know that cold, Mr Millet?. . . they stood in the cold for the whole night to protect the body. In the morning when the dawn came, some of the zeks spoke with the Colonel General.

They asked one favour of him, they said it was a small thing to set on the balance scales against his life. I never before heard of a Colonel General who granted a favour to the zeks. This once, this one time alone, a favour was granted.

When the day came the gates of the camp were opened and the strong men, those that had been Holly's friends, took him on their shoulders. The whole camp marched after them. They carried him to the cemetery, and all the zeks behind walked with their arms linked. The chain was never broken. They buried him in the cemetery, they walked back to the camp, they went into the Factory. A Procurator came that morning by air from Moscow and when he reached Barashevo they were all working, they were all in the Factory.'