Archangel (6 page)

This is home, Holly . . .

He had no possessions to swing onto the bunk, he wore them all. Two pairs of underpants, two pairs of socks, two vests, his gloves, his scarf. He shivered, wrapping his arms tight around his body.

'You are a foreigner?'

The voice was sharp, beside Holly's knee. He was little more than a boy. Vivid red hair cut back to his scalp, a sheen of stubble across his cheeks.

'My home was in England.'

'Why are you not in Camp 5 ?'

'Long and complicated . . . I've fourteen years to find the answer for you.'

'I am Anatoly Feldstein.'

'Michael Holly . . . '

i think we know that now.' The boy murmured his laughter. 'You are political?'

i didn't rob a bank.'

'I am Article 70. Disseminating for the purpose of under-mining or weakening the Soviet regime slanderous fabrications which defame the Soviet state and social system. I am a prisoner of conscience, I am named by Amnesty.'

'That must help you to sleep sweetly,' Holly said.

Above the Jewish boy lay a larger, heavier man with rougher hands and a jowled chin where the white ribbon of a healed scar ran twisting across the folds. Something dominating about the mouth, something cruel about the eyes. His head was motionless on the pillow as he spoke.

'You have tobacco, Holovich?'

'My name is Holly . . .'

'I said - you have tobacco, Holovich?'

'Get the name right, and you have my answer.'

The man jack-knifed to a sitting position, the blanket fell from his chest.

in this hut when I ask something, it is answered,' he hissed. 'Whatever I ask, it is answered . . . Do you have tobacco, Holovich?'

'The name is Holly.'

'This is my hut. . .' A fleck of spittle rested on the blood blue lips of the man. 'Learn that this is my hut. . . '

'And learn my name.'

Holly saw the streak of the blade exposed by a fold of the blanket.

What's in the bloody name Holly? How does a name matter? What matters when home is Hut 2 in Zone 1 in Camp 3 of the Dubrovlag?... He had told himself that his name was Michael Holly, he had set himself that challenge.

Surrender was failure, failure is collapse, collapse is disaster.

Where is the better ground to fight? In the hut, in the open snow, in the Factory, the Administration block, in the punishment cells, is any one of them a better ground to fight on? If once the cheek is turned then you will never fight again. His name was Michael Holly.

He saw the fingers tighten above the snatch of blade, he saw the legs ripple beneath the blanket as if in preparation for sudden attack.

Holly's hand moved, the lightning strike of the cobra. His fingers found the wrist. They gripped and savagely twisted.

The knife sprang into the air, arced up a few inches as if powered by a small spring. It fell between the bunks and clattered dully in its landing. He held the man's wrist hard against the clean edge of the frame of the bunk.

'Don't threaten me, not ever again. My name is Michael Holly . . .' he paused, then grinned quickly. 'I have no tobacco . . . what is your name?'

Holly bent to the floor, picked up the knife, admired the workmanship of the weapon, reversed it so that the string whipped handle was towards the man, passed it back to him.

'Adimov . .. this is my hut.'

'You can have all of it, but not me. No one has me.'

A nervous, hesitant gust of laughter blew the length of the hut.

'Remember that you sleep beside me . . . Holly . . . '

'I am a light sleeper, Adimov.'

Before dusk Holly and those who had arrived that day were taken to the Bath house to stand for a few moments beneath the trickle of lukewarm water. When they had dried per-functorily on the threadbare towels that were issued they were marched across the stamped snow of a path to the Store for the clothing issue. Black cotton trousers, a black tunic, a black quilted coat, a balaclava that was padded.

Boots of army style that fitted loosely over his socks. There was a mattress to be carried away, calico cloth and filled with straw. A blanket and a shallow pillow. He dressed, he signed for the garments, he saw his old clothes parcelled into a plastic bag that was labelled and tossed to the floor. He was in the uniform of the camp, he was a part of its essence.

The camp had drawn him with whirlpool force into its mouth. He belonged in the camp, he belonged nowhere else.

He shouldered the mattress and carried it back to Hut 2, and slung it up onto his bunk, and threw the pillow and blanket after it.

Adimov was sleeping.

Feldstein told Holly at what time they went over to the Kitchen for the evening's food and he spoke of the compul-sory attendance afterwards at the Political Education Unit.

Holly sensed the loneliness of Feldstein in the hut, the dissident among the zeks. That was a bitter punishment, the placing of this boy amongst the criminals. The boy would have no defence against these people.

'Adimov is the "baron" of this hut. Nobody has spoken to him in the way that you have, not for more than a year . . .

'He broke a man's arm a year ago, snapped it like a dried twig behind his back. There are two men that you should fear here. Adimov in the Hut, and Rudakov in the Administration. Adimov you have seen, Rudakov you will find. In the punishment cells last week, Rudakov, who is the Political Officer, kicked over a man's slop bucket and the water ran all over the floor. There is no bedding in the punishment cells and no heating. The man slept on the floor, and the water that had been spilt froze on the floor. The man slept on ice. They are the two men who are feared here, they survive in their authority because we are afraid of them.'

A private smile murmured on Holly's face.. . He thanked the boy, then went out into the gathering darkness and across to the trodden path on the inner perimeter of the camp.

Ahead of him, spaced at compact intervals, other men walked the path. This was the place of aloneness, this was where a man went to talk only with himself. Out into the freezing, bitter wind. Holly stepped into the slow-moving queue, took his pace from those who went before and after him, did not close and did not widen the gaps.

He walked against the clock.

Away from Hut z. Past Hut 3, turn to the left, past the gate and Administration which was now a darkened hulk, past where the roof of the camp's prison peeped over the fences, turn to the left, past Hut 4, past the old Kitchen which was now a sleeping hut, past the Bath house and then Hut 6, past the Store, turn to the left, past the Guard Room, turn to the left, past Hut 1 . . . three hundred and eighty-five paces . . . Away from Hut z.

They were the margins for Holly, those were the limits.

And Camp 3 is one of the old ones, Holly, there have been thousands here before you, tens of thousands of booted and bandaged feet dragging round this path. Not the first to step onto that path and wonder in rage at four left turns adding to three hundred and eighty-five paces. The path was packed snow or worn earth before you were born, Holly. The path will see you out, see you dead and forgotten. Beside the path to his right there was a low wooden fence, a yard high he reckoned it to be, and in some places the snow had driven against it and reached its top. A fence of sawn-off, creosoted planks. Beyond the low innocence of the fence the snow was smooth, untrampled. Over the wooden fence is the death-strip, Holly. He thought of a bullet, and he thought of the chill lead set in the brass cartridge cases of the rifles or machine-guns that watched him. And after the low wooden fence and the clean snow was the barbed wire fence that stretched up on poles to the height of Holly's head. And after the barbed wire was another fence that was higher and again the floodlights played and caught on the cutting edges

. . . and after the high barbed wire was a wooden fence that was three yards high. Two wooden fences, two wire fences, and all lit as day, all covered by the watch-towers standing in each corner of the compound, and over the highest of the wooden fences he could see only the roof of the prison.

A terrible silence without beauty. The silence of those without hope.

A man in front of him had stopped. He stared at the low wooden fence and the pure sward of snow yellowed by the lights, and at the low wire fence and at the high wire fence and at the high wooden fence. Holly saw his face as he passed behind him on the perimeter path, a face that was scraped with despair. Holly walked on and the man behind him was an abandoned nothing.

It can't be real, Holly. It can only be canvas. Put a knife to it and the canvas will rip. There must be another picture behind the paint.

Crap, Holly, it's real. And the bullets in the gun in the watch-tower above, they're real . . . and the cold, and the sentence of the court which has fourteen years to run, and the worst luck that the Consul had ever heard of. . . they're real.

He had completed another revolution of the prescribed path, and the man still stood and stared at the fences, and his shoulders were not hunched as if the cold no longer concerned him.

Where did it begin?

Where was the start of the story that brought Mikhail Holovich, who was to become Michael Holly, to this place of wire and snow, of dogs and guns?

The town called Bazar in the heart of the'Ukraine was found on the fringes of thick forestland to the north of the Kiev to Zhitomir railway. In its way the town possessed a certain prosperity that was based on the quality of the nearby timber, the richness of the black soil, and the failure of central government's collectivization policy to reach with any great thoroughness into the self-sufficiency of the few thousands who lived there.

The Ukraine is not Russia. The Ukraine had struggled to preserve its identity of language, heritage, and literature.

Moscow was a distant capital, a foreign overlord handing out its satraps and commissars. In spite of, and because of, the Stalinist purges of the Thirties, the uniqueness of the Ukraine had not been dislodged. And where better to remember that individuality than in the town of Bazar. On the lips of every child of that town was the story of the day-long battle fought there on November 21st 1921 between the men loyal to George Tiutiunnyk and the fledgling Red Army. A gunfight that stretched from dawn until night as the group who believed themselves to be Ukrainian patriots held out, without hope of rescue or reinforcement, against the encircling advance of Moscow's soldiers. It was an epic fight. Old rifles against mortars and machine-guns and howitzers. It was followed, after the ammunition pouches of the defenders had been emptied, by total slaugh-ter as the last line on the summit of an open hill was breached.

The sacrifice of Tiutiunnyk and his men, because sacrifice was how it was seen in Bazar, lingered for twenty years as a whispered obsession in the minds of the townspeople. From the time they could read and write and understand, Stepan Holovich and Ilya, who was to become his wife, had known of the battle.

And then in November 1941 the unimaginable happened.

The Militia were gone from Bazar. The Party offices were closed and its workers speeding East in open lorries. Straggling, beaten columns of troops marched without equipment into the town and out along the main road to Kiev.

And a day after them the Panzer convoys took the same road, and some of the girls and women of Bazar with great daring threw flowers onto the mud-spattered armour of the Panther heavy tanks, and some of the men cheered and the headmaster of the secondary school said that evening in the cafe on Lenin Street that this was a moment of deliverance.

The people of Bazar could not differentiate between the front line forces of the Wehrmacht and the garrison troops of the SS divisions. Nor could those people know that after the combat generals had moved further East into Russia that their authority over the civilian population would fall to the hands of Erich Koch, drafted to Kiev to head the Reichskommissariat.

On the afternoon of November 21st the townspeople flocked to the hill site of Tiutiunnyk's battle. They came in their best clothes as if it were a Sunday from the days before the church was closed. The headmaster made the first speech, flags flew, the town band played a medley of the tunes of the old Ukraine, a hymn was sung. In the evening the SS troops came to the homes of those who had organized such a happy day. In the morning the SS firing squads shot dead twenty-four of Bazar's most prominent citizens. The following week the train took all the young men and women of Bazar to the war factories of the Ruhr.

Stepan and Ilya Holovich were amongst those transported in the sealed wagons through Lvov and Krakow and Prague to Essen. They were the Ostarbeiters, intelligent and educated, and set to work as labourers, made to wear a badge.

Three and a half years later, the Panthers that had stormed through Bazar and the Ukraine came home in defeat.

Emaciated, servile, exhausted, Stepan and Ilya Holovich found themselves herded with a hundred thousand others into the Displacement Camps. The majority, the huge majority, were to be shipped back in the same closed trains to the Motherland of Russia. The minority, the tiny minority, succeeded in persuading the American authorities that they should not be returned.

In 1947 Stepan and Ilya Holovich arrived with no money and no luggage at London's Tilbury docks on a freighter from Bremen. Stepan Holovich had sunk to his knees to kiss the rain-soaked paving of the quayside. From a single room in Kingston-upon-Thames which he rented and where he lived with Ilya, he repaired watches and clocks. When the local doctor, confounded by the sparrow size of his patients, informed the couple that they were to become parents, Ilya Holovich had dropped her lined and weary face to her chest and wept, and Stepan Holovich had jumped up from his chair and then scratched between his thin grey hair and laughed. A fortnight later the buff OHMS envelope had been delivered which announced the granting of the natur-alization papers. They were British citizens by the time that Ilya Holovich entered Kingston General Hospital for a difficult confinement. That it was difficult was of no surprise to the duty obstetrician. A woman of that physique had no business producing 8 lb 7 oz babies.