Archangel

'Some day they'll strike you a medal.'

'Why will you not talk of this, Holly?'

'Because I want to sleep… damn you, Feldstein, because talk doesn't help. Talk wins nothing.'

'Only through talking can we win. Only that way do we succeed.'

'What has your talking won you?… Sakharov is exiled, Shcharansky and Orlov in camps, Bukovsky and Kuznetsov booted out. Bloody marvellous talkers all of them. Talked their bloody heads off, and won them nothing.'

'There is no other possibility, Holly.'

'Then you are doomed. For fifteen years you've been pushing round paper, collecting fifty people to stand in Pushkin Square, burying the White House in cables. You've filled the camps again, Feldstein, and nobody cares. million people go to work each morning in London and they're thinking of the bird next to them, whether they can afford a Music Centre, how much it's going to cost to get to Spain in the summer. They couldn't give a damn about you

… nor about me, nor about anyone else who's plastered in flea-bites and sores and working his arse off in Mordovia.'

'We knew when we started on our journey that it would bring us here.'

'What do you want of me, Feldstein?'

'We chose the weapon against them that hurts them most, we took the weapon of legality. We demanded the rights that are owed to us through the Constitution.'

'Feldstein… Christ, I admire you. I admire all your colleagues. You are all bloody marvellous. What I am saying… Christ, I'm tired… I'm saying you're not winning anything. When they put you in here and they throw the bloody key away, then you're beaten. Nobody listens to the shout of Anatoly Feldstein. You can lift the bloody roof, and nobody hears you. That's not winning…'

'When we have a hunger strike… '

'Then they save on the food. They don't give a shit.'

'What is your way, Michael Holly?'

'I don't know.' A quaver of evasion.

'You have a different way to our way.' The glint of sarcasm.

'I don't k n o w… but if you fight to win, then you use the weapons that bring victory…'

'And non-violence is not such a weapon?'

'Go to sleep, Anatoly.'

'Why do you run from every question?'

'Because answering questions helps not at all. Go to sleep.'

'And Zatikyan and Stepanyan and Bagdasaryan, the Armenians who were shot for the Moscow bomb that killed seven persons in the Metro – were they using the right weapon? You have to answer that question, you have to…'

Quiet fell between the bunk frames.

For a long time Feldstein waited, and he was rewarded only with the sounds of Michael Holly's breathing.

Hopelessness consumed him. Holly preferred the company of Adimov who was a killer, Feldstein had seen them together on the perimeter path. There was cruelty all round him, but that was the cruellest.

Another evening, another fall of darkness, another hushing of the life of ZhKh 385/3/1.

Elena Rudakov walked beside her husband across the compound.

She took the centre of the path and her leather knee-boots were unsure on the diamond ice and she hugged her husband's arm and muffled herself in the warmth of her fox fur.

She was a creature of duty. She had chosen for her text the munificence of the aid supplied by her government to the Third World. She had written out her speech in full. Better that she should bury her head in her script. If she looked up into the faces of her audience, she would see the animal lust of the pigs… There was a meat stew in the oven of the bungalow gently simmering, potato and carrot in the saucepans waiting for the gas to be lit when she returned. For the life of her she could not comprehend why Yuri had asked Kypov to come to dinner.

In a watch-tower a young guard swore at the wind that pierced the open window at the front of his platform. It was in Standing Orders that the window must be open and the barrel of his machine-gun jutting from it. The guard saw the Political Officer and the Political Officer's woman heading for the Kitchen. Great fanny, the wife of the KGB Captain, and three more months until his leave. The guard stood back on the platform, tried to keep himself away from the gale that sang through the window.

The Kitchen was almost full.

A woman would be talking to them. She came one Sunday a month, and still seemed as preciously rare as a winter orchid. After the woman there would be a film.

A steaming warmth of breath and bodies in the hall and a chair set on the small dais, and the men at the front would see her knees and more if she shifted her legs.

Poshekhonov was at the back. He'd see her face, and think of a story told long ago of a woman who managed a handstand and leaned her buttocks against the wall. Beside Poshekhonov, Chernayev had taken his place. In Chernayev's pocket, safe and hidden, was a letter. He had not questioned Michael Holly who had given him the letter. He had accepted it, he had promised that the next evening he would personally give it to the hand of the Political Officer.

He had shaken Holly's hand, he had known. He had looked into the face that wore a boyish grin, almost a thing of mischief, before he had gone to find a chair at the back of the Kitchen hall.

Holly and Adimov stepped down from the door of Hut 2.

The quiet of the compound dripped around them.

Chapter 15

The snow fell close and thick, hiding them. Sweet, perfect snow dropping in the confetti of tickertape.

To cross the compound they used the safety of the huts, hugging the long shadows. From Hut 2 they scurried to the dark pall of the Bath and Laundry block. A panting pause there, and ears cocked for sounds of movement and voices.

Then the short sprint to the front of Hut 6, and they sheltered against the stilts of brick that supported the building while they calmed the frantic breathing. A few stumbling, running metres and they found the padlocked, recessed door of the Store. That was the waiting place, that was the last place where they would stop before the charge at the fences.

They had made the sheets into crude cloaks. The fastening on each of a single safety-pin left a hole for the head to dip through, and the sheets would hang down and lie secure over their backs. Like two children engaged in unimaginative fancy dress.

God, the snow helped them, the snow that cascaded from the low cloud ceiling.

God, Holly, that was luck.

Holly waited until the searchlight on the corner tower arced away along the length of the fence. The snow made its beam mottled and disturbed. He looked up at the tower, saw it as a fleeting image, checked like a chess-board, dark shape on white snow. He saw the barely distinct outline of the torso of the guard. Far back, the bastard, where he could warm himself. The guard would have to move forward on his platform each time that he varied the aim of his searchlight, but he'd do that rarely enough. He'd move the beam when he had to, when it was necessary, he'd not be hanging through the window.

He grinned, something mad in his eyes.

'Ready, Adimov…?'

"Course I'm ready.' A snarl from Adimov.

'Stay close to me.'

'Right up your arse.'

Holly reached out in the blackness, found Adimov's hand, felt through the wool of their gloves the trembling of the fingers. He squeezed Adimov's hand, squeezed it tight, dropped it.

'We shouldn't hang a b o u t… '

Holly turned again towards the angle of the compound.

He looked up again at the watch-tower. He waited, and Adimov's body was pressed against him as if to propel him forward. Holly waited, and was rewarded. The shadow of the guard came to the window, and the searchlight rotated across the huts and the inner compound, swung in a great sweep before coming to rest on the opposite fence.

Holly was gone. The very speed of his movement seemed to catch Adimov unprepared. Adimov chased after the billowing white back. Snow in their faces, in their eyes, melting in their mouths, settling on their capes. Hard to keep the eyes open when they were running, when they were bent, when the iced snow landed on them. Holly stopped, he crouched, Adimov crashed against him. A second of awkwardness, balance failing, but the discipline held. No words, and the white sheets blanketed their bodies and they froze to a statue stillness. They were at the angle of the perimeter path, on the ice of the tramped walkway where the snow now painted over the boot marks. Holly had been here many times. Now the new route, now the magic road.