His office was up on the second floor. It had a big desk at one end. A map hung on the wall behind his chair. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was an old one, of the sort we’d had in school, with the western edge of Alaska in the top right corner, Kamchatka and the Kuriles below it, and the great mass of Asia running west to the Urals, and Europe beyond. The face of the world that must have once seemed as fixed and unalterable as the man in the moon himself. I could see the route we’d marched marked in blue ink. I’d guessed we weren’t the first prisoners to make that journey. Elsewhere on the map, there were other inked corrections, place-names in the Far North and symbols which were too far away for me to read.
The walls on either side had red circassian rugs hanging off them and a bearskin. On his desk, Boathwaite had a kinzhal, a Cossack knife.
He offered me a smoke, and when I said no, he lit one himself. The smell of it was cedary, like pipe smoke. I noticed he had a brown stain on his finger from smoking so much of it.
‘My wife is very happy with the way the garden turned out,’ he said. ‘She’ll be sorry if you don’t want to carry on your work.’
‘That’s too bad,’ I said, ‘because I’ve lost the stomach for it.’
*
So it was back to regular work with the others. I missed the garden. Sometimes, at night, while the place was settling down to its louse-ridden sleep, I’d picture it in my mind, the plants the way I’d last seen them, the hard yellow quinces that I’d mulched for compost, the damp cool of the lawn after rain. The other prisoners would have thought I was mad for giving it up. But I was happy never to be going back.
Facing that woman, I had felt like a beggar, holding open the door of a restaurant for pennies and thank-yous. I hated the thought of them in the ease and calm of the garden I’d sweated to build, while I rotted in here, and Ping rotted in the ground, and they crunched ice-cubes, wilfully ignorant of us, living like beetles in this dung heap of a barracks.
Now I began to plan in earnest to escape.
4
I FIGURED ON breaking out come spring. Over December and January I traded most of my warm clothes with the other prisoners. I waited until weather turned biting cold so I could fetch the best price for them. They paid me in the oddments that passed for currency in that place — smokes, drink and bits of food. The random-seeming bits of trash we used to buy things from one another had a value that couldn’t have been more fixed if they’d had price tags on them. So a foot-cloth was worth two smokes, and a pair of woollen mittens would buy you a bottle of moonshine, and so on.
*
When I had amassed enough, I bribed the boss of the prison smithy, a fellow named Pankratov, to let me back in there for a week. They never let me forget I was the most junior, and I had to shovel charcoal, and work the bellows, but it kept me out of the cold, and when it was quiet, I pulled little birds and flowers out of hot wire which I sold cheaply to the guards for them to give their sweethearts.
That one week turned into two, and then three, and it looked like I might be there a while, but a couple of the smiths got jealous over the trinkets I was making for the guards, and so to keep the peace, Pankratov told me my time was up.
I missed the warmth, but my work was done. In between the fancy wire work, I had made pieces for a tiny grapple that I hid in my shoes while the guards were cooing over the little owls and forget-me-nots. I buried the pieces just inside the wall of the latrine.
The little that I earned from the guards, I traded for a pair of leather boots off one of the new arrivals. They were a little broken down from the marching, but I paid another prisoner to fix them.
A few of the old-timers said I was a fool to pay so dear for them this time of year. No amount of foot-cloths could make them feel warm, they said.
These are the kind of things we talked about all the time. Every prisoner in that place was an expert on the tiny details that made our lives more bearable. In winter, every man who could get hold of them wore felt boots.
But I didn’t have them in mind for winter wear. I needed shoes that would hold up for a thousand miles of wet spring walking.
*
I took half my bread away with me, morning and evening, as many of the prisoners did. But where they ate it or used it for swaps and card games, I dried mine in my bunk, and when it was hard, I took it out to the grain store and hid it in places I’d found under the eaves, hanging on nails or from wires so the mice couldn’t reach it. I’d never done it myself before, but I’d heard you could make rusks this way. I stored it here and there, since if some were found, I’d still be left with the rest, and I thought I just needed enough to get me on my way.
Selling my warmest clothes left me underdressed for winter, and from eating less I grew weaker and my health suffered. Having being one of the strongest there, I began to fall sick with every fever that passed through the barracks.
The really ill were excused work and sent to the sick ward, but the place was so awful, and so full of consumptives, that most of us felt we were better off labouring through our fever.
One of the few signs of tenderness between us was that prisoners in the work gangs would notice a sick fellow among them and carry him through the day’s labourquo;dsquo;d done it often enough myself. We’d give the sick man the lightest bundles, or if we were working inside, let him rest on his feet leaning against the wall for as long as he could stay out of sight.
I say tenderness, but it was no more than reason. Each of us knew that there’d come a time when we needed to redeem the favour.
The worst one swept through the barracks towards the end of January. I was wobbly at the early morning milking. The men I was with put me down on a stool, and I began to shake with the almost pleasurable first shivers of a strong fever.
I was beside myself with the sickness. I seemed to be watching not Billy Erasmus, not Chingiz, not Gosha, carrying pails, but my mother and Charlo and Anna cooking Christmas dinner in the kitchen of our home. The light of the byre, which was so weak and watery, leaped up like a yellow flame, and there was a roaring heat all around me.
Gosha smiled at me. ‘Makepeace is flying! She’s been drinking. Look at her eyes!’
I couldn’t say anything, because the roar was deafening, and I recognized the sound: it was another plane coming. I stood up to tell them that we were all saved, and as I did, that yellow light turned blinding, and everything in front of my eyes melted into stars.
Gosha told me later that I went ghost-pale and fell to the floor with a crash that shook the walls. All I remember is things going dark, and me worrying what would happen to all the bread that I’d hid.
*
I came to in the sick ward, soaked in sweat and raving to be let go. The place was dark and smelled like a butcher’s. There were no guards posted. Because of the horror of the place, no one worked there and the sick were left to tend each other. As I soon as I was able to stand, I got up and left.
This time they took away my shoes to keep me put, but in the morning I stumbled out in the snow to reveille barefoot.
Boathwaite saw me this time. He had a word with one of the guards to keep me behind and give me my shoes back. I was too feverish to tie up my laces. One of my toes was white with frost-nip. And when I walked, it felt like my limbs wouldn’t move properly. They seemed to jerk forward in fits and starts like there was clockwork inside me.
I followed the guards, protesting to them all the way that I was well enough to work. But instead of leading me back to the sick ward, they took me to Boathwaite’s office.