Archangel

Behind him the ranks of prisoners trudged towards the gate and the transfer to the Factory compound.

The perimeter path is the only place of privacy in the compound. Each night there are always a few who walk the path, sometimes in company, sometimes alone. The boot-crushed snow of the track holds no eavesdropper, the barbed wire that shields the killing zone offers no hiding-place for a 'stoolie'.

Holly had been the first to leave the hut. There were stars for a ceiling and a misted moon. He was joined by Adimov.

There was a naturalness about their meeting.

'Will you have them?'

'Cutters, food, sheets – I'll have them.'

'By Sunday?'

'I'll have them. Shit, that's the easiest…'

'Give me those and I'll get you out,' Holly said softly.

'Where? Where do we go out?'

There was a grating in Adimov's voice, and his glance roved up against the silhouette lines of the wire and the bare height of the wooden fence. Holly waited, ignoring the frustration of his companion. They walked on to the corner of the compound, the right-angled turn on the perimeter path. Their faces were lost in the grey shadow of the watch-tower.

A slow smile from Holly. 'We go out here.'

Adimov darted his eyes at Holly. 'Under the tower…?'

'Right.'

'That's crap, that's suicide… '

'That's the safest place in the compound.' it's right under him, under his gun.'

'Under him, and out of sight of him. It's the safest place.'

'I'm not having my bloody guts blown o u t…'

'Look at the place, look at it… ' Holly had seized Adimov's sleeve, gripped him, turned his body back towards the angle and the fences and the wire. 'Under the tower there is darkness. The lights are blocked by the tower and by the stilts. From the other towers they cannot look here because to do so they look into the other tower's searchlight.'

'Two lots of wire, one wooden fence.'

'Right.'

'Shit… I'm not a coward, it's mad…'

'I said I'd get you out, Adimov.'

'Under the tower, under the gun, where if we fart he'll hear us, and we cut through. two wire fences and we climb a wooden fence… shit, Holly, what tells you I've the balls for it…?'

'You have a wife with cancer of the stomach, that's why you'll come with me. That's why I chose you.'

As he walked away from Adimov and towards Hut z, Holly slapped his body with his arms, trying to beat some warmth into his skin. Just once he looked back, and then not at the man that he had left but at the small, shadowed space beneath the watch-tower. Above the shadowed space was a watch-tower and a guard and a machine-gun. A machine-gun, and the targets would be at point-blank range. Nowhere else, Holly, nowhere else. He slammed the door of the hut behind him and felt the heat waft across him, and there was a shudder in his breath. Ignoring the questioning glance of Feldstein, he climbed onto his mattress and turned to the wall.

Long after the lights had been switched off, and the warmth of the stove had waned, the hut was a chilled and dark place.

The old ones said that it was always coldest in Mordovia when the winter was close to running its course. A hundred men lay on their mattresses in Hut 2, and those that were lucky had found sleep, and all were wrapped tight in their blankets and had discarded only their boots for the night hours.

Anatoly Feldstein had not found sleep.

It was the hunger that made it hardest to drift into the dream world that was an escape. The hunger caught at his stomach. The hunger had stripped the flesh from his bones and those bones made him believe that he lay on a bed of stones rather than a mattress of waste straw.. The bones gouged into his body, pressed on his organs and nerves. And when he was exhausted, the bitterness welled in him, and sleep was even harder to achieve.

Above him Adimov was asleep. Regular, grunted waves of breathing. He'd be counting, his mind playing at a cash-register… who owed him money, who owed him tobacco, who owed him food… The criminals could always sleep…

That was the cruelty of the Dubrovlag, to leave a man such as himself in the company of these animals. Pig-headed, imbecile criminals who were the fodder on which the camps fed. They could have moved Feldstein, could have sent him to Perm where they had gathered the dissidents.

Not that the regime at Perm would be different to Barashevo

… same stinking food, same stinking huts, same stinking regime. .. but he would have been with friends. The people at Perm were all together. Chained in a common purpose, weren'tthey? Camp 35 and Camp 36 and Camp 37 were the homes of the people that Feldstein yearned to be with, the camps of Perm where the Article 72. men rotted their lives away. Article 72 – Especially Dangerous Crimes against the State – was the net that pulled in the hard bedrock of the • dissidents, that consigned them to Perm that lay 400 kilometres to the east of the Dubrovlag. Almost an insult, for a dissident not to be imprisoned at Perm. They were the elite, and Anatoly Feldstein was committed to a camp of criminals.

He thought of the men in the hut. Adimov was a thug, Poshekhonov was a fraud, Chernayev was a thief, Byrkin was a fool, Mamarev was an informer. Those were Anatoly Feldstein's companions. That was the knife-edge of real cruelty.

And there was Michael Holly.

Holly should have been the friend of Feldstein.

Holly should have been different to the herd. Holly who tossed on the bed close to him and sometimes cursed in the tantalizing unknown of a foreign language. Holly should have been the colleague of a political activist. Holly knew the meaning of freedom, had grown to manhood in its company.

Yet Holly barely acknowledged the existence of Anatoly Feldstein – Feldstein the dissident, the Prisoner of Conscience, the victim of the abuse of Human Rights.

Could Holly ever know what it took in courage to be an opponent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Could he know what it meant to breed the fear that this day or this month the lift would come? The lift and then the interrogation, the interrogation and then the imprisonment?

Could Holly know what it meant to fight from within?

There were few enough allies. Forget the students at the University and the trainees at the laboratory. Don't look for a pillar from your mother and father and grandmother, from your brothers and sisters.

Holly should have known, Holly had lived in liberty.

Feldstein rolled on his mattress, listened to the night sounds of the hut. He heard the scrape of the springs of Holly's bed.

'Holly… you are awake?' A whisper, a pleading for contact.

'I'm awake.'

'Sometimes we are too tired to sleep.'

'You can't sleep if somebody talks to you.'

A hesitation. 'I'm sorry, Holly…'

'I didn't mean that, Feldstein… I take it back.'

'When you came here, to Russia, when you did whatever you had to, did you think it might end in a place such as this?'

'No.'

There was a rough laugh from Holly.

'Did you know of such places as this?'

'Vaguely… I didn't have the names and the map references.'

'The people of Britain, they don't know about such places as Barashevo?'

'There are a few who tell them, not many who listen.'

'If you had known this place waited for you, would you have done what you did?'

'I don't know… Christ, Feldstein, it's halfway through the night…'

'You have to know that answer.'

'I have to sleep… I don't know.'

'All of us knew, everyone in my group. Can you understand that? We knew what faced us, we knew of this camp and a hundred other camps. We knew when we started…'