Elena Rudakov sat beside her husband, and on the back seat of the car, in plastic bags, was a new nightdress of flannelette and two shirts for Yuri to wear at home and two kilos of turnips from the open market and a small rug to go in front of the stove in their living-room. He had even been attentive, Yuri, and that was rare. He had talked of a new prisoner – too much to hope that he would speak of anything other than the camp – a prisoner who was an Englishman. Guarded talk, because she was never fully in his confidence, but he had spoken of a prisoner who was special and different. He drove slowly because the rough road was always treacherous in winter and insufficiently sanded, but the inside of the car was warm and the sky alive in blue beyond the windows.
She was almost happy, almost at peace, until they saw, together, the high column of the black smoke.
She was left to take the car home. The spell was broken, the pool was rippled from its serenity by the way he snapped instructions to her and then ran to the Administration block. She could have kicked a dog. He had not kissed her or looked back, just sprinted across the snow.
The sight was a hammer blow to Yuri Rudakov.
The end of the Administration block was a grotesque mess.
Only the smoke now, because the flames had been suffocated. Smoke that rippled and soared.
He saw Kypov, a comedy clown with a soot-smeared face and the back of his uniform singed and brown from collar to knee-boot. There were no thoughts in his mind, no precon-ceptions, only the demand for information.
Empty words. 'What happened?'
'Where the hell have you been?' Kypov shouted at him across the few metres that separated them, and the breath spouted white from the Major's mouth. 'Why were you not here?'
'I asked what happened.' Rudakov said. He despised these army men, in particular those who had lost their units in exchange for secondment to M V D camp detachments.
'You should have been here.'
'Will you tell me what happened or not… Major Kypov?'
They were all the same, all noise and sparrow fart, and if the man only knew the idiot scene he c u t…
'My fire exploded.'
The fight had fled the Major. His hands hung simply by his trouser pockets, ungloved, and Rudakov could see that they trembled.
'More.'
'The fire had been lit before I came to the office. My orderly put more coal on for me. After he had gone I was standing in front of the fire, my back to it. There was a sort of an explosion, not very loud, the flames took my back. I was alight. My orderly had to roll me on the floor. He pulled me out, he saved my life.'
'What have you lost?' i could have lost my life…' and the indignation was rich again in the Major's voice.
'What have you lost in the fire?'
'The administration files that I kept, some of the convicts' files.'
'They were not in the safe?'
'You have seen my safe. It could not hold half the papers that were in my cupboard.'
The men who worked around the building acknowledged a secret circle that surrounded their camp Commandant and their camp KGB officer. None broke into the circle. They threaded a wide path round them.
'Then you will have to inform Moscow.'
'And what are you going to do?'
'Try to find out why, to find how, to find who. That is what I am going to do, Comrade Commandant. And you, you should get to your quarters, and get out of those clothes.
The Commandant should not be an object of ridicule to his prisoners.'
There was a fleck of amusement at the corner of Captain Rudakov's mouth. He considered whether Major Kypov's commendations, so preciously framed, had perished. He walked to his own office. An accident or an attack, he wondered, and stamped the snow from his walking shoes on the steps of the main Administration doorway.
The line edged forward towards the food hatch.
Holly heard only occasional talk about the burned office because the job of the men around him was to get the food inside their guts, get the warmth into their throats.
A line creeping forward, and a rabble of men leaving the hatch and hurrying for the first bench place they could find.
And hungry men are pliable men, hunger wins submission, hunger is the tool of Major Vasily Kypov, hunger is the whip of the Commandant of Camp 3, Zone 1. But Holly and eight hundred with him had a roof over their Kitchen, and there would be a roof over Hut 2 when the freezing night came.
Kypov had no roof, and the thought carried a first-found peace for Holly, lifted him from the line of men who straggled across the dirt-smeared floor boards. You did it well, Holly, bloody well.
Byrkin had been a Petty Officer in the Navy.
In the evenings in Hut 2. he had twice pulled Holly to a corner to tell him of his innocence.
Now he staggered towards Holly, making a path between the tables and benches and the backs of sitting men that flanked him on one side, and the waiting line on the other.
Byrkin would have been tall when he was in the Navy, but the camp had bent his back and plucked his hair from a smoothed scalp. His hands shake and his balance is cruelly uncertain, a fly wheel that has lost its rhythm.
Byrkin had twice found out Holly to tell him of the sailing of the frigate Storozhevoy from the naval harbour at Riga.
Mutiny by the men, and what could a Petty Officer do if the Ministry in Moscow determined that the sailors of the Storozhevoy should not be freed from their conscripted service after four years at sea, that they should serve another year, what could a Petty Officer do? Not Byrkin's fault that the mutiny disease had swept the cramped quarters of the lower decks. He had been locked in a cabin, a prisoner with the officers when the bombers came on a low-clouded November afternoon. Seven years before, and the memory still with him, bleeding him. A memory of imprisonment below the water line as the high explosive had silenced the engines of a fighting frigate, marooned its escape to Swedish waters. Fifty men dead before the turbines of a Krivak class frigate with a displacement of 3 800 tons were halted. And more to die before the firing squad, and few who did not wear the gold rings of the officers to escape the penalty of imprisonment. One unguarded remark by Byrkin, one remark that had been carried back by a man with innocence on his face to those who would judge Byrkin. What did the Ministry expect, how did they think the men would react?
What insensitivity from the Ministry! Ten years in the Dubrovlag for the private expression of a Petty Officer who was a captive in a cabin while the high explosive bombs rained on to the armour plate of the Storozhevoy.
They said in Hut 1 that he was mad. The zeks did not know of the bitter trial of the breakdown. Byrkin's balance was lost, and each step that he took was an agony of effort and fear.
Holly saw him, heard his shrieking wail as a shoulder lifted from the bench and caught square on the underneath of Byrkin's enamel soup bowl. The opaque yellow liquid floated high beside Byrkin's face then splashed on his tunic, onto the shoulder of the man who had nudged him, onto the boards of the floor. It was Byrkin who shouted. A howl of protest, of despair. The man who rose from the bench seemed to offer a grudging apology, but Byrkin would not have seen the gesture as he scrabbled on the floor for his slice of black bread. Holly looked into Byrkin's eyes witnessing the suffering. What price against that suffering was the pleasure that the Commandant had no roof to cover his office? Holly had felt pleasure, allowed it to cocoon him.
Where did that pleasure stand on the scale against the misery of a man in the Kitchen whose soup was spilled, whose bread was soggy from the floor's snow water?
Poshekhonov was beside Holly. Always Poshekhonov seemed to be close to him. , 'Only happens to someone like Byrkin. He's doomed, damned. Mark me, Englishman, he'll go to the wire.'