‘Sure, that’s him, our Chukchee … Kolya, come over here. She wants to meet you. Medical Officer Komarova.’
Her eyes gazed at him coolly as they shook hands. She wore an open parka and a cap like the others, and was sitting with a cigarette over a cup of coffee.
‘You’re new here, I understand.’
‘Yes, not long. A few weeks.’ They had made room for him on the bench opposite, and his smile flashed brilliantly at her. He decided to take his fur cap off.
‘Tea or coffee?’ the old waitress said. She had slapped his plate of kasha and gravy down, and was also staring at his shaven head.
‘Coffee.’
‘From Chukotka?’ Medical Officer Komarova said.
‘Chukotka. I’m filling in for a friend.’
‘They haven’t sent your papers in yet. Have you had all your shots?’
‘Sure.’
‘Tetanus, polio, yellow fever?’
‘Sure, sure.’ He forked in the kasha, smile still flashing.
‘Don’t worry about his shots. He’s getting all his shots in,’ one of the drivers said.
‘The condoms come from her place. She calls the shots,’ another said, as the laughter continued.
Medical Officer Komarova smiled thinly herself. Under the cap her face looked paler, longer, slightly anaemic; but the eyes were as uncompromising as he remembered.
‘Check into the office, anyway,’ she said. ‘I’ll see they have your papers. Are you outward bound now or coming back?’
‘Outward. Bilibino.’
‘That’s three days.’ She held the cigarette in her mouth and with her eyes screwed up opened a zipper bag and took out a notebook and a pen. ‘Today’s Tuesday? … Make it Friday. The afternoon, 4 p.m. You’ll need a lie-in in the morning.’ She wrote in the book and on a card and gave him it. ‘It’s the administrative building in Tchersky. Anyone will tell you.’
‘You want to check me over or what?’
‘I won’t be there. They need to update your papers and get you on our records.’
She went soon afterwards and he finished his breakfast, still in doubt. Had she recognised him? Would she so specifically have mentioned the yellow fever if so? Surely not. It was the Chukchee interest: he looked different from the others. And totally different from the Korean seaman. No. He was a new face in town, a new driver. A matter of papers.
He finished his coffee and in twenty minutes was out with the convoy again. The snow had stopped. He took the wheel and steered the big rig into place in line.
‘We keep two hundred metres,’ Vanya told him. ‘Give him plenty of room to get off in front. And practise the gears. You’ll be running up and down them soon.’
‘Okay. She seems a decent sort, that medical officer.’
‘You think so? Don’t bet on it. The slightest thing wrong with you, she has you off the long runs.’
‘Does she check all the drivers?’
‘See, the company sick bay is hers — the nurses, the supplies, all from Tchersky. They keep the medical histories there. She’s a strict manager, Komarova.’
‘To me, she was like one of the boys.’
‘Try getting a dose of clap, and you’ll find out. All this is her district and she knows what goes on in it. Change down now. Watch him in front — he’s climbing.’
They were climbing, and they continued climbing, the ice road running through a series of passes, first between hills and then mountain peaks. From Green Cape they had ascended 2800 feet, and now went much higher — on all sides the icy crests smoking in clouds. More snow was waiting in the clouds and Vanya silently observed it through his window. But the road was straight, and continued straight, even in the switchbacks that now came. After the climb, a sharp drop, and then up again, and down again, and up and down, a glassy and treacherous ribbon of ice.
‘Not your brakes! Only the gears!’ Vanya yelled. ‘And leave him room — two hundred metres.’
The convoy pulled on, stopping every hundred kilometres at the road stations. At each one they replenished the flasks of tea and coffee, and the day slowly went. The straight also went, and with night came the snow, and Vanya took over; and sharp bends now began to zigzag through the mountains.
Between stations the men were supposed to alternate in sleep. But with the bends and the snow, Vanya now drove from every station. And there was no sleeping through the constant roar of oaths that came from him as they swung and lurched behind their headlights in the white dazzle of snow; only a few metres of track visible ahead. He drove through the night, and he drove the first turn of the day as well, until the road straightened out. At one o’clock Kolya took over, sleepless himself, and he drove into Bilibino, Vanya snoring beside him.
Bilibino, named for Bilibin the geologist who first assayed the reefs, was the centre for the most northerly goldfields of Siberia, and the big trucks and the ice road were the only means of getting heavy equipment there: this was what they carried. Scores of thousands of tons of it had built up, shipped from St Petersburg and Archangel in the summer. Only in summer could it be shipped, and only in winter could it be hauled. And now it was here, Bilibino.
They reached it at four in the afternoon, left the trucks for unloading and reloading, and went to bed at a hostel. Eight hours later, after a meal, they left again on the return journey; midnight; the night black, road white in their headlights.
A hard country, an exhausting routine, and he took the first leg. Over thirty hours of driving still ahead — thirty-two, in fact, the timekeeping good through all difficulties — and nonstop except for brief rests at the road stations. Which would get them in — what? — late tomorrow. No, not tomorrow; the time confusing. All tomorrow they would be driving. The next day. Friday, early.
Well, after a good rest he’d organise a bobik for that night, see Vassili in the afternoon. But in the afternoon, Jesus, the medical centre at Tchersky! Well, he’d do it, wouldn’t make waves, an administrative matter. Nothing wrong with Khodyan’s papers; they just hadn’t received them. He’d handed them in himself when Bukarovsky had signed him on. In the early confusion, the start of the season, they hadn’t been sent on. An administrative matter.
He would sleep all morning. Get up and see Vassili. Arrange a bobik. With the bobik run into Tchersky and get his papers settled at the medical centre. Then the time was his. Yes.
He finished his stint at the first road station and Vanya took over. And now he tried to sleep, and managed it, no curses coming, just slow steady driving through the zigzags.
The next turn, still in the mountain labyrinth, still not snowing, Vanya put him on the wheel again but remained awake himself to watch. And the night went, and the day went, and the following night; and at eight on Friday morning, seventy-two hours after leaving it, they pulled back into Green Cape.
30
At half-past two, as arranged, Anna Antonovna woke him and gave him his dinner. He was stiff, creaky, aching all over. But after a shower he felt he could make it. He went to see Vassili.
‘What do you want to take?’ Vassili said.
‘The frame members.’
‘All four? The sides won’t go in a bobik. You’d need a roof rack. Take something else.’
‘The axle assemblies?’
‘Yes, they’d go.’
They ticked off the pair of axle assemblies on the specification, and Vassili made a careful note in his deficit book. These goods had never arrived at the depot; either hadn’t been sent or had gone missing on the way.