‘Yes I did,’ said Mametka.
‘Yes you did,’ he bellows. ‘Bette Davis, you little fucking girl!’
And that is it. Like watching a reel of film that suddenly trips and jumps a few frames, Benya misses the first moves, and then he sees Mametka has grabbed one of the shovels and, twisting its blade in the air, is thrusting it again and again into Strizkaz’s throat with such power that his neck is virtually obliterated. Blood spatters all over him – a trip of the reel – before Benya and everyone else can even get to their feet to stop him … or join in. Then another jump in the reel and Smiley, Garanzha and a suddenly awakened Cut and Run Ivanov are beating Strizkaz with anything to hand: a rifle butt, another shovel and a slab of rock. Everyone else just looks on. When they are finished, they lug the unrecognizable Strizkaz into one of the half-dug graves and drop a tombstone down on top of him.
‘What the hell’s going on here?’ Ganakovich is coming up through the graveyard, gawping at Mametka and drawing his Nagant, but Smiley and Garanzha take no notice of him. ‘Lads, you need to tell me.’
‘I don’t think so,’ says Spider Garanzha.
‘Leave this to us!’ adds Smiley.
Ganakovich looks them up and down, replaces his pistol and heads back down to the priest’s house. The state has officially lost control of the Shtrafbat.
Smiley’s forehead is pointed, temple veins swollen and charged, and he has come into himself with that strain of pure forthrightness he was born with, the killer’s easiness – and there are moments that Benya envies it. But now not. He is desperate to get away from the graveyard. He hurries past Mametka, who is so besmeared that the blood looks like stage make-up – even his hair is congealed – and staggers down the lane to the Italian Red Cross tent, which is pitched on the far edge of the village.
‘What’s going on?’ asks Dr Kapto, who is still patching up some of the wounded Shtrafniki. ‘Something happened in the graveyard?’
‘Nothing … it can wait till you’re finished. Can I sit here?’ Benya is just happy to be in the wholesome peace of the tent of serene healing – away from the others. He should be shaking after what he has seen – but he isn’t. He prays Melishko will return soon and tell them the plan; there has to be a plan.
He watches the nurses Tonya and Nyushka working hard, sewing up wounds and dressing them. ‘I have no doubt we’ll advance soon,’ chatters the dimpled Nyushka. ‘The Great Stalin knows what he’s doing. He’ll have a plan for us.’ She’s always been a fanatical Stalinist despite being arrested and sent to Kolyma. He notices how well she looks. Even though the doctor and nurses have ridden with the squadrons for many hours, she still has a bruised ripeness about her, her cheeks a little sunburnt, her auburn hair streaked gold. ‘Comrade Ganakovich will know,’ she says innocently. ‘He always knows Stalin’s orders.’
‘Of course, he does,’ agrees Benya, remembering that she is now Ganakovich’s girl, his ‘front wife’.
He turns to Tonya: she and Kapto seem to communicate without words. When he cuts, she is already there with the cotton wool to dab the wound, predicting his moves with smudged, half-closed eyes set in a flat, expressionless face. Does she love Kapto or isn’t it like that? Is it her destiny to attend the doctor but never have him?
They sew up the last of the wounded. Breezy and direct, Kapto pats each patient on the side when he finishes: ‘There! All done! Easy, now, easy!’ Benya spots his uniform now boasts a captain’s pips and he has a leather satchel which he always wears over his shoulder and across his chest.
‘You got promoted, doctor? I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Looking after Melishko’s piles has its rewards,’ he says.
‘And the satchel?’
‘The morphine of course. Do you need some? How was the charge, Benya?’
‘Terrifying …’
‘I saw you. You were like a devil possessed. Since you gave up writing, you might have found your new metier but …’ He sighs. ‘A sabre can do terrible damage – as you now know.’ Benya feels guilty and yet somehow pleased with this new reputation for brutality. It is so unlikely. ‘Cigarette? I have Italian ones. Africas. Shall we get out of the village?’ Kapto says, stepping outside the tent and lighting up.
‘We need to avoid the churchyard,’ says Benya, ‘but it seems quiet in the fields. They just killed Fats.’
‘Revenge for what he was in the Camps. Only Melishko can control them,’ muses the doctor. ‘Is he back? Where on earth are we going next?’
Benya takes his rifle and Kapto draws his new sidearm, a handsome German Parabellum he has found in the village, and they stroll into the countryside where the fields have been harvested. Ahead of them, there’s a combine harvester burnt out on the field. Benya looks back at the village and it might be a summer afternoon in peacetime. A magpie stutters; a skylark dances. But on the horizon, the dust broils densely, tainting the cornflower-blue sky a dirty burgundy, and the crump of the artillery is constant. To the west, there’s the crackle of shooting quickfire and then single shots.
Kapto cocks his head: ‘Doesn’t sound like fighting.’ Smoke rises, not fuel black, perhaps burning stubble.
‘Think what we’ve been through,’ says Benya. ‘We’ve seen so many people gone …’
‘Don’t look back; don’t look forward,’ Kapto replies. ‘Like in the Camps. Just live through today. Everything is out of our control, but even here a man can still save a man.’
They walk amongst the sheaves towards a haystack at the end of the field. Benya longs to throw himself into it; on impulse, he hands the doctor his rifle and runs and jumps and lies back kicking his legs in the air. The hay is sweet, prickly, bright yellow. But something twitches beside him. A rabbit maybe. Or a bird.
‘Careful,’ calls Kapto, coolly raising the rifle as Benya, spooked, jumps up.
‘What the hell? It’s something big,’ Benya says, drawing his pistol.
‘Come out!’ says Kapto. ‘We won’t hurt you!’ He pokes at the hay with his rifle. The hay slides off it and a child stands up, a little girl in a ripped floral dress, very frightened, black eyes, long auburn hair with a side parting held in a clip. She is matted in mud.
Benya kneels down and puts out his hand, coaxing her forward. ‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘We’re Russians. Where do you come from?’
She points to the west, towards the smoke and the occasional shots.
‘Where’s home?’
‘Dnieperpetrovsk.’
‘That’s a long way away.’
She nods.
‘How old are you?’
‘Five.’
‘Where are your parents?’
‘They took them.’
‘Who?’
‘Schuma and Germans. Are you—?’ She starts to shake.
‘No, no, we’re Red Army, not Schuma. Where are your parents now?’
She looks behind her and starts to cry. Benya notices that her legs are scratched, her little dress is in shreds, and her knee is bleeding. ‘They left. We were all in the hole. I waited. When it was dark I crawled out and ran away.’
Dr Kapto goes on one knee beside Benya and takes over the conversation. ‘You’ve been running all night and all day?’
She nods.
‘You haven’t eaten?’
She shakes her head.
‘You’re bleeding. May I see?’
‘He’s a doctor,’ explains Benya. She relaxes and Kapto examines her knee.
‘You ran through wire and cut yourself, quite deeply. I need to stitch you up. Will you come with us? I can carry you?’ He opens his arms to her and, slowly, she comes towards him and he hugs her and she sobs. Kapto is so tender with her that Benya fights the urge to cry too as they walk back together to the village.
In the Red Cross tent, Tonya’s smudged face lights up for an instant. She and the doctor have saved many children together. Perhaps children are the one part of her job that pleases her, Benya thinks. He watches the child eat; th
en Kapto stitches her leg with Tonya assisting.
Eventually, she falls asleep, and Benya and Kapto light up Africas and stroll into the village.
Outside, the orange sun has sunk so low that Benya feels he can look right into its bloodshot face and feel the red heat through his eyelids.
‘What do we do with her?’ asks Benya.
‘Well, she can’t go back and we can’t leave her here,’ says Kapto.
They hear the heavy clip of hooves down the tiny street ahead of them.
‘Melishko is back, Melishko is back!’ Benya hears his comrades shouting. He feels a surge of relief. Thank God for Melishko; thank God for Kapto.
Each man had saved his life.
In another world.
V
In the Camps, Benya was too old for Hard Labour. He was over forty, and although there were lots of other older men there, most of them died in the first weeks. The gold they were mining out of the mountain lay in the iron ore fifteen metres underground. After the earlier shift dynamited the rock, Benya’s job was to heap the loose boulders on to his wheelbarrow and, balancing precariously up and down along the twisting wooden walkways high above the mine, push it to the conveyor belt in the steamshack. It was back-breaking hard work. If the wheelbarrow tipped over, neither he nor his fellow Zeks would be fed and he would be beaten. If prisoners were too exhausted to move, the guards simply shot them. His quota was seven cubic metres of soil and rock per day.
Then suddenly, after just a week, the light dwindled and the snow came. It was winter, grinding Kolyma winter, and the snow was so deep, the wind so strong, the blizzards so blinding that even around the Camp there were ropes to hold on to to get to the dining block. Winter clothing was issued – boots, padded coats and mittens – but the clothing was too thin, and the prisoners were always freezing. At roll call each morning, shoved into lines by Fats Strizkaz and his Trusties brandishing truncheons, the prisoners beat their own bodies with their hands to stay warm, and friends spotted the whiteness that warned of icebite. That’s when Benya first met Melishko, who’d lost his teeth and fingertips to Beria’s torturers.
‘Rub your nose,’ he said to Benya one day, ‘or you’ll lose it.’
It was night-time for nine hours a day, with the temperature sinking to minus forty. Men lost noses, fingers, toes; one man who urinated outdoors lost his penis when his urine froze; those with dysentery sometimes didn’t get up again, glued to glacial faeces. Yet Benya learned to find gems and sparks of joy even in this hell – a delicious piece of bread, the chance to rest an extra few minutes – and the smile of a new friend, Shishkov, another Political who worked with him. Politicals were cautious, never talking of their cases unless they really trusted someone. ‘My name is Nothing, my surname is Nobody’ – ‘Zvat nikto, familiya nikak’ – was what they said. But Shishkov immediately knew who Benya was. ‘I was one of your readers,’ he whispered one morning. Benya came to trust Shishkov, who was one of those prisoners known as ‘Jokers’ – sentenced under Clause 159.10 for ‘counter-revolutionary agitation’, usually for telling a joke about Stalin: ‘Quite a funny one,’ said Shishkov.
‘Please don’t share it,’ retorted Benya.
‘I have another about Beria!’
They managed to laugh.
Shishkov had once been very important; he’d been Second Secretary of the Kherson Party until denounced by his brother-in-law for his one-liners on Georgian geniuses, and was one of those owlish, bespectacled, sensible people who always looked older than his years. He was kind to Benya and taught him how to work the wheelbarrow, how high to pile the rocks, how to avoid a crash, and how to inflate the quota: the entire Camp was engaged in inflating their quotas, a science of mendacity known as tufta.
‘Remember,’ said Shishkov, ‘love is life, love is what put your stars in the sky. Look at the moon. The moon shines everywhere and if you love someone, they can see the same moon! I call it Moon Magic. Loving will keep you alive.’ Benya knew that he thought constantly of his wife and his two daughters.
The prisoners rarely cried or gurned, realized Benya; the faces of those in the deepest pain were set in brittle, expressionless masks – even as the suffering tore them to pieces within.
If Benya had not been chiselling away at the rock and carrying stones he would have died of cold, yet the work itself was so punishing that even during the first day he staggered rather than walked. If the brigade’s quota of rock was not shifted each day, the prisoners received less food. Even so, the watery swill with its scraps of whale fat and herring bones daily ladled out from the Cauldron, plus the paika, the bread ration, in the dining block was not enough for any of them.
Just a week into winter, Benya noticed his Political friend, Shishkov, was deteriorating. His face was touched with death, his skin yellow, his nose jutting out; it seemed to Benya he was just gristle, bone and parchment. Benya begged his older friend to eat more, to find the will.
‘I realize that I will never see my children again,’ replied Shishkov, tears running down his face. ‘I am dying of hunger.’
That evening Benya saw Shishkov sitting in the frozen garbage heap behind the dining block sucking on a herring bone.
‘He’s a goner, a dokhodayaga,’ said Smiley, Benya’s friend who had saved his life on the voyage to Kolyma, and who now resided in the most comfortable barracks with some of his Criminal brethren. The ‘garbage-eaters’ were not long for the world of the living.
Two weeks into winter, Shishkov fainted while pushing the wheelbarrow, spilling the rocks.
‘Pick up those fucking rocks, cocksucker,’ cried one guard, a Mongolian like many of them. ‘Get working or we’ll shoot you,’ called another guard from the rim of the great hole.
Benya pulled him up, and collected his spilled rocks. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘They’ll shoot you! I’ll do your work today.’ It was snowing heavily. The rocks, the wheelbarrow: everything was frozen.
A couple of hours later, Shishkov again lost his balance and fell off the planks into the muddy hole. Benya climbed down but the guards shouted: ‘Get working! Leave the goner down there!’
He could see Shishkov was dying. ‘When you get out,’ he gasped, ‘go see my wife and children. Tell them …’
Benya had memorized their address and understood. He was just leaning over his friend to tell him this when he was struck on the shoulder: ‘Get to work or it’ll be the Isolator for you!’ shouted one of the Mongolian guards.
Benya took his wheelbarrow up to the conveyor hut but when he wheeled it back, the Zeks were down with Shishkov, stripping him of coat, hat, boots, trousers – everything, until there was nothing else to steal. ‘Man is wolf to man’ echoed in Benya’s ears. Never was this truer than in the Gulags.
Shishkov lay there with his eyes open, stark naked, angular and sunken, less like a man than an old ironing-board, already covered by a delicate sprinkling of snow. Twice he blinked.
‘He’s alive,’ cried Benya but the Zek next to him stopped him.
‘No, he’s gone,’ said Melishko. Respected by all in the Zone, Melishko was known as the General, and was one of the soldiers arrested in 1937. ‘And you mustn’t join him. How can we survive? Live just in the present, not the past, not the future, live minute by minute.’
No one picked up Shishkov. The next day, he was just a shape in the snow, frozen solid in his crusty tomb. By the following day, he’d vanished into the polar landscape. Could men just vanish like this? Benya learned the answer in the first days of spring. When the thaw came, and the streams were seething with fresh water which rushed through new tunnels under the muddy carapace of winter, the ice revealed its first flowers, the ‘snowdrops’, of spring – and amazingly while all the Zeks in the brigades looked ten years older, these corpses were the same age they had been when they fell.
Benya had survived almost the entire winter but in its last days of almost eternal darkness, just when veterans said spring was coming at any moment, he began to weake
n. Melishko, who was older than him but much tougher, was now his partner on the wheelbarrow. As the days became longer, Benya ached with hunger. He felt his legs get heavier, and he knew he was sinking. He experienced a strange weightlessness, like a speck of dust in the wind. Would he last the next day? Or the next? he wondered. Then came a day he could barely move.
‘That’s enough,’ said Melishko. ‘I’ll talk to the brigadier. You need to stay in barracks for a day.’
But by the following day, Benya was too ill to get out of bed. His temperature was raging, and he was hallucinating, images darting at him. There was his father, in his three-piece suit and watch chain, seeing patients in the waiting room of the surgery that was the basement of their house.
Then he was with Sashenka again; she was right there with him, her Greek profile so noble it took his breath away every time. He saw the slant of her cheekbones, could even smell her scent, touch her skin. Tears ran down his face. ‘Darling,’ he said. ‘I knew you were alive.’
Floating back to his parents, to his childhood home in Lemberg when that city was part of Habsburg Galicia, long before the Revolution, and he was in school uniform and his father was saying, ‘Work harder at school or if you’re not careful, Benochka, you’ll turn into a true Galitzianer skirt-chaser …’
‘I think that’s enough, Zakhary.’ His mother was at the door. ‘I think Benochka’s got the message. Come on, you two, we’ve got a feast! It’s supper!’ It was always a feast in the Golden house. He longed to hug his parents before he died – which was when he knew he was dying …
When Benya awoke, he realized there was no God but there was a doctor, who had a stethoscope around his neck, a white coat, a notebook, a doctor who was smiling down at him.
‘There you are!’ said the doctor as if he had been waiting a long time. ‘You must drink. We’ll feed you very carefully. Temperature normal this morning. You’re very weak but you’ll be all right.’
Benya looked around at what he assumed to be a hospital ward. The sheets were white, and there was the smell of disinfectant but without its antidotes, sweat and faeces. The wooden floor was clean. Was this Moscow? Had he escaped the Zone?