*
Six months after we arrived, sometime in February, they had reveille early and assembled us in the parade ground before breakfast.
It was still dark, and in the frosty silence you could see our breath rising and hear the muffled stamping of feet as the prisoners tried to keep warm.
Aside from the usual guards, there was another bunch, some of them newly created, all dressed for winter travel.
Each of them passed along the line and picked out a couple of prisoners. The leader of them was a fellow called Tolya who was half-Russian and Boathwaite’s deputy in the place. As he walked slowly past the prisoners, they strained slightly and swayed forward, as though they were desperate to be chosen.
Tolya stopped in front of me and paused. I could hear the men on either side of me groan and one muttered under his breath, ‘Me, Tolya.’ Tolya glanced at him, broke into a smile, and yanked him out of the line. The fellow was elated to be picked and looked back at us with a grin.
This went on until twenty prisoners had been chosen and marched off separately.
I asked the man who had been standing on my left what I’d missed out on. He looked at me puzzled. ‘Why, those lucky so-and-sos are off to the Zone.’
That was the first time I’d heard the place mentioned. Facts were like any other precious thing in there and hard to get hold of.
He told me that it was a factory city to the northwest of the base. Just as some prisoners were promoted to guards, others were taken to the Zone where they were trained to undertake industrial work. Only the ablest prisoners were chosen, he said.
I felt a stab of regret that I hadn’t been picked, and the next time we were mustered I hoped that someone would stop in front of me and tap my shoulder, but I never came close to being picked again.
3
WHEN THE OTHER prisoners sewed pants, or played cards and carved chess pieces, I tended a small garden in back of our barracks. I dug up wild flowers and planted them in it, and I took cuttings from some flowering shrubs. Because of what happened to Stavitsky and Maclennan, people let me be. Besides, there were always newcomers for them to pick on.
That chernozom was something else. And when the sweet peas came up, one of the guards bought some for his wife, and so did a couple of others. They paid me in clothes, some of which fit, and those that didn’t I was happy to stake and lose at cards. It never hurts your popularity to lose at cards.
*
We had Sundays free. There was some worship, but more drunkenness. The day I’m thinking of was a rainy day in July, which was the worst — hot and wet, and all of us stuck in our quarters making trouble. I was laying on my bed pretending to sleep when a guard came in and called my name.
That wasn’t in itself so unusual. From time to time people would be called out and told to bring their things. We didn’t know where they got sent, but we mostly didn’t see them again. No one ever refused, because of the chance you’d be made a guard.
I followed the man out, to
What had I expected? I don’t know. But the place I saw was not different from countless others that I had seen in the north or that we had passed on the march there two years before. It was another abandoned town, emptied out and overgrown.
After about fifteen minutes we reached a street of bigger houses, and this time there were signs of life in them. The yards were better kept and curtains hung in the windows. There were dogs barking — but not wild dogs, dogs with collars and chains.
I knew of this place, because in winter some of the prisoners would be marched out here to shovel snow. It was where Boathwaite and the guards had their homes. And the rumoured whorehouse was around here somewhere. This was the so-called town that our labour served.
The guards led me to the rear of the biggest house on the street. It was ugly enough, built out of a kind of liverish brick, with no real shape to it, but it was a grand size, and big-boned.
I complimented one of the guards on the house, knowing it wasn’t his, but wondering what he would say.
He said nothing at all, just looked awkward, spat through his teeth, and scuffed it in with the toe of his boot.
‘You’re to work here this afternoon,’ said the other, cutting in to shut up any more of my questions.
I looked around the yard. It was unkempt and gloomy.
‘What kind of work?’ I asked.
‘This garden. You’re to make it like the one behind the barracks.’
I kicked at the patchy turf. There was the makings of a lawn and some beds, but a lime tree at the far end was throwing shadow over the whole place. ‘It can’t be done,’ I said. ‘It’s too dark. The tree’s robbing light. The best I could do would be to stick in a few bulbs, but there aren’t any.’ It was the way I’d learned to be since coming in there: on principle, we dug our heels in when there was work to be done. I didn’t want to let on what I was really feeling, standing on the brink of work I could do alone, and who knew what other privileges.
The lead guard said the other one would fetch me what I needed, so I told him to get me a rake, and a spade, and a barrow if he could find one.
The two of us waited about fifteen minutes until the other fellow showed up with a bunch of tools and a sack in place of a barrow and I set to work.
*
From then on, my days took a whole different pattern. I worked with the prisoners in the morning, but two or three times a week, the guards came in the afternoon to collect me for my work in the garden. The guards’ names were Zhenia and Abelman. They watched over me while I was working, but though I was never entirely alone, it still felt like a taste of solitude.
Zhenia was the junior guard who wassent on errands, and once in a while helped me wrangle a tree root out of the ground or carry cut branches while Abelman kept an eye on me. They were fierce and aloof inside the palisade, but once out they grew easier with me and occasionally made small talk about the weather, or complimented my work. Abelman was a city fellow, but Zhenia was a country boy and he understood what I was doing.
My new duties also meant small freedoms inside the prison compound. I persuaded Abelman I needed a half-moon spade to edge the turf right. First it appeared there was no such thing to be had; then, when I drew him a sketch of what I wanted, he brought me one, but it had been badly made and broke apart the first time I used it. I showed him there was a cold shut in the blade and said that I could make a better one myself, if he would just let me into the smithy.
The smithy was outside the palisade and was under constant watch because of what the prisoners could get up to there if they had a mind to.
It was a time before he gave me an answer, but after a wait, he came back with a yes.
From then on, I made my own tools when I needed them, and I enjoyed the work in the smithy almost as much as the solitary toil in the garden. I think, too, that the prison smiths, who were a kind of nobility among us, were impressed by the skills I had picked up from all those years swaging my own bullets, and their good opinion of me made life easier in the barracks.
I knew there would be less to do in the winter months, so I saved myself jobs to last me through to spring: I talked them into letting me fell the lime, I cleared brush from around the edge of the garden, and I worked up tools for the planting season — anything to keep me out of the barracks and working on my own. The labour I spent on that garden kept me sane.