Archangel (43 page)

He stayed there for a couple of minutes, recovering his nerve. It occurred to him that what he ought to do - the calm, rational, sensible th
ing: the not leaping to
any
hy
sterical
conclusions kind of thing, that a serious scholar would do - was to return and briefly make a note of the names for checking later.

So when he had satisfied himself for the twentieth time that not a soul was moving in the trees, he stood and ducked back through the low door, and the first thing he saw on re
-
entry was the rifle propped against the wall, and the second was the Russian, sitting at the table, perfectly still, watching him.

'He possessed
in a high degree the gift
for silenc
e, 'according to his secretary
and
in this respect he was unique in
a country where everybody talks f
ar too much...'

He was still in full uniform, still in his greatcoat and cap. The gold star of the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union was pinned to his lapel and shone in the dull light of the kerosene lamp.

How had he done that?

Kelso started gabbling into the silence. 'Comrade - you -I'm startled - I - came to find you - I wanted -, He fumbled with the zipper on the front of his jacket and held out the satchel. 'I wanted to return to you the papers of your mother, Anna Mikhailovna Safanova -'

Time stretched. Half a minute passed, a minute, and then the Russian said, softly, 'Good, comrade,' and made a note on the sheet of paper beside him. He indicated the table and Kelso took a pace towards it and laid the satchel down, like an offering placed to appease some unreliable and vengeful god.

Another endless silence followed.

'Capitalism,' said the Russian eventually, putting down his stub of pencil and reac
hing for his pipe, 'is thievery,
a
nd imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Thus it follows
that the imperialist is the greatest thief of all mankind. Steal a man's papers, he will. Oh, easily! Pick the last kopek from' yer pocket! Or steal a man's boat, eh, comrade?'

He winked at Kelso and continued staring at him as he struck a match, sucking the fire into the bowl of his pipe, producing great spurts of smoke and flame.

'Close the door would you, comrade?'

It was beginning to get dark.

If we have to stay here the night, thought Kelso, we shall never leave.

Where the hell was O'Brian?

'Now,' the Russian continued, 'and this is the decisive question, comrade: how do we protect ourselves from these capitalists, these imperialists, these thieves? And we say the answer to this decisive question must be equally decisive.' He extinguished the match with one shake and leaned forwards. 'We protect ourselves from these capitalists, these imperialists, and these stinking, crawling thieves of all mankind only by the most ferocious vigilance. Take, for example, the Norway couple, with their serpenty smiles - crawling on their maggoty bellies through the undergrowth to ask for "directions, comrade," if you please! On a "walking holiday" if you please!'

He waved their open passports in Kelso's face and Kelso had a second glimpse of the two young people, the man in a psychedelic headband -'Are we such fools,' he demanded, 'such backward prim:tives, not to recognise the capitalist-imperialist thief- spy when it worms its way among us? No, comrade, we are not such backward primitives! To such people we administer a hard lesson in socialist realities - I have their confessions here before me, they denied it at first but they admitted it all
in the end - and we need say no more of them. They are as Lenin predicted they would be: dust on the dunghill of history. Nor need we say anything of him!' He waved a set of identity papers - the older man. 'And nor of him! Nor him!' The faces of the victims flashed briefly. 'That,' said the Russian, 'is our decisive answer to the decisive question posed by all capitalist5~ imperialists and stinking thieves!'

He sat back with his arms folded, smiling grimly.

The rifle was almost within Kelso's reach but he didn't move. It might not be loaded. And even if it was loaded he wouldn't know how to fire it. And even if he fired it he knew he could never injure the Russian: he was a supernatural force. One minute he was ahead of you, one minute behind; now he was in the trees and now he was here, sitting at his table, poring over his collection of confessions, making the occasional note.

'Worse by far however,' said the Russian after a while, is the canker of the right-deviationism.' He relit his pipe, sucking noisily on the stem. 'And here Golub was the first.'

'Golub was the first,' repeated Kelso, numbly.

He was remembering the row of crosses: T Y Golub, his face blacked out, died November-the-something, 1961.

The essence of Stalin's success was really very simple, he thought, built around an insight that could be reduced to a mere three words: people fear death.

'Golub was the first to succumb to the classic conciliationist tendencies of the right-deviationism. Of course, I was merely a child at the time, but his whining still clamours in my ears: "Oh, comrades, they are saying in the villages that Comrade Stalin's body has been removed from his rightful place next to Lenin! Oh, comrades, what are we going to do? It is hopeless, comrades! They will come and
th
ey will kill us all! It's time for us to give up!"

'Have you ever seen fishermen when a storm is brewing on a great river? I have seen them many a time. In the face of a storm one group of fishermen will muster all their forces, encourage their fellows and boldly put out to meet the storm:

"Cheer up, lads, hold tight to the tiller, cut the waves, we'll pull her through!" But there is another type of fishermen -those who, on sensing a storm, lose heart, begin to snivel and demoralise their own ranks: "What a misfortune, a storm is brewing; lie down, boys, in the bottom of the boat, shut your eyes; let's hope she'll make the shore somehow."'

The Russian spat on the floor.

'Chizhikov took him out int
o the dark part of the forest
that very night and in the morning there was a cross and that was the end of Gol
ub and that put an end to the b
eatings of the right-deviationists - even that old hag his widow put a sock in her mouth after that. And for a few years more, the steady work went on, under our four-fold slogans: the slogan of the fight against defeatism and complacency, the slogan of the struggle for self-sufficiency, the slogan of constructive self-criticism is the foundation of our Party, and the slogan of out of the fire comes steeL And then the sabotage began.'

'Ah,' said Kelso. 'The sabotage. Of course.'

'It began with the poisoning of the sturgeon. This was soon after the trial of the foreign spies. Late in the summer this was. We came out one morning and there they were -white bellies floating in the river. And time without number we discovered that food had been taken from the traps and yet no animals were caught. The mushrooms were shrivelle
d, useless things - scarcely any
to be had all year - and that had never happened before, e
ither. Even the berries on the t
wo-verst track were gone before we could pick them. I
discussed the crisis confidentially with Comrade Chizhikov
- I was older now, you understand, and able to take a hand
- and his analysis was identical to mine: that this was a classic outbreak of Trotskyite wreckerism. And when Yezhov was discovered with a flashlight - out walking, after curfew: the swine- the case was made. And this,' he held up a thick pile of barely legible scrawl and slapped it against the table, 'this is his confession - you can see it, here, in his own hand - how he received his signals by torch-transmission from some spiderish associates he had made contact with while out fishing.'

'And Yezhov -?'

'His widow hanged herself. They had a child.' He looked away. 'I don't know what became of it. They're all dead now, of course. Even Chizhikov.'

More silence. Kelso felt like Scheherazade: as long as he could keep talking, there was a chance. Death lay in the silences.

'Comrade Chizhikov,' he said. 'He must have been a -' he nearly said 'a monster" - a formidable man?'

'A shock-worker,' said the Russian, 'a Stakhanovite, a soldier and a hunter, a red expert and a theoretician of the highest calibre.' His eyes were almost closed. His voice fell to a whisper. 'Oh, and he beat me, comrade. He beat me and he beat me, until I was weeping blood! On instructions that were given to him, as to the manner of my upbringing, by the highest organs: "You are to give him a good shaking every now and again!" All that I am, he made me.'

'When did Comrade Chizhikov die?'

'Two winters ago. He was clumsy and half-blind by then. He stepped into one of his own traps. The wound turned black. His leg turned black and stank like maggoty meat.

There was delirium. He raged. In the end, he begged us to leave him outside overnight, in the snow. A dog's death.'

'And his wife - she died soon afterwards?'

'Within the week.'

'She must have been like a mother to you?'

'She was. But she was old. She couldn't work. It was a hard thing to have to do - but it was for the best.'

'He never ever loved a human being, 'said his schoolfriend, Iremashvili. 'He was incapable of feeling pity for man or beast, and I never knew him cry...'

A hard thing- For the best- He opened one yellow eye.

'You are shifty, comrade. I can tell.'

Kelso's throat was dry. He looked at his watch. 'I was wondering what had become of my colleague -'

It was now more than half an hour since he had left O'Brian by the river.

'The Yankee? Take my tip there, comrade. Don't trust him. You'll see.'

He winked again, put his finger to his lips and stood. And then he moved across the cabin with an extraordinary speed and agility - it was grace, really: one, two, three steps, yet the soles of his boots barely seemed to connect with the boards -and he flung open the door and there was O'Brian.

And later Kelso was to wonder what might have happened (I~ next. Would it all have been treated as some terrific joke? ('Your ears must be flapping like boards in this cold, comrade!') Or would O'Brian have been the next interloper in the miniature Stalinist state required to sign a confession?

But it was impossible to say what might have happened, because what did happen was that the Russian suddenly
shoved
O'Brian roughly into t
he cabin. Then he stood alone at
the open door, his head tilted to one side, nostrils dilated, sniffing the air, listening.

SUVORIN never even saw the smoke. It was Major Kretov who spotted it.

He braked and pointed to it, put the snow plough into first gear, and they crawled forwards for a couple of hundred yards until they drew level with the entrance to the track. Halfway along it, the sharp white outline of the Toyota's roof showed up clear against the shadows of the trees.

Kretov stopped, reversed a short distance, and left the engine idling as he scanned the way ahead. Then he swung the wheel hard and the big vehicle lurched forwards again, off the road and down the track, clearing a path to within a few paces of the empty car. He turned the engine off and for a few moments Suvorin heard again that unnatural silence.

He said, 'Major, what are your orders, exactly?'

Kretov was opening the door. 'My orders are plain Russian good sense. "To stuff the cork back in to the bottle at the narrowest point."' He jumped down easily into the snow and reached back for his AK-74. He stuffed an extra magazine into his jacket. He checked his pistol.

'And this is the narrowest point?'

'Stay here and keep your backside warm, why don't you? This won't take us long.'

'I won't be a party to anything illegal,' said Suvorin. The words sounded absurdly prim and official, even to his ears, and Kretov took no notice. He was already beginning to move off with his men. 'The westerners, at least,' Suvorin called after them, 'are not to be harmed!'

He sat there for a few more seconds, watching the backs of
the soldiers as they fanned out across the track. Then, cursing, he shoved the front seat forwards and squeezed ~ himself into the open door. The cab was unexpectedly high off the ground. He leapt and felt himself jerked backwards, ~ heard a tearing sound. The lining of his coat had snagged on a bit of metal. He swore again and detached himself.
It was hard to keep up with the other three. They were fit and he was not. They had army boots and he had leather-soled brogues. It was difficult to maintain his footing in the snow and he wouldn't have caught them at all if they hadn't stopped to inspect something on the ground beside the track.

Kretov smoothed out the screwed-up yellow paper and turned it this way and that. It was blank. He balled it up again and dropped it. He inserted a small, flesh-coloured miniature receiver, like a hearing-aid, into his right ear. From his pocket he took out a black ski-mask and pulled it over his head. The others did the same. Kretov made a chopping motion with his gloved hand towards the forest and they set off again: Kretov first with his assault rifle held before him, turning as he walked, ducking this way and that, ready to rake the trees with bullets; then one soldier, then another, both keeping up the same wary surveillance, their faces like skulls in the masks; and finally Suvorin in his civilian clothes
- stumbling, slipping, in every way absurd.