“The people,” she called after me, “not the vlasti, not our rulers sitting in their heated train among the bodies of those poor men.”
Was she completely mad? I stopped. I was hungry and anxious to get back to Laryssa but it was the word “train” that made me turn back toward the old woman.
“Which train is this?” I asked her.
She pointed behind her, north. “Along the line,” she said. “I’ve been there and seen it. Two days they’ve been clearing the track. And the bodies of those poor souls left unburied.”
I hurried back to Laryssa and told her what the old woman had said. “A train, full of what she calls the vlasti, is held up a few miles along the track.”
“You want to go tonight?” Laryssa asked fearfully. She was thinking of the wolves.
But since they’d run from us I no longer feared them. “Let’s eat, and get ourselves some sticks, an ax maybe, it’s not far.”
We finished our dinner, and washed in a bucket of boiled snow. In an apartment above the Collective’s offices Laryssa had found some clothes not more than badly seared by the heat. We made our selection, Laryssa laughing and pirouetting in the first skirt she had worn since her sentence. Then with knives tucked in our belts, a lantern with a little oil in it and two pitchforks recovered from what had been a haybarn next door, we set off along the track.
It was an easy journey compared to our last. We were stronger now after a month of Zityakin’s food and our lantern and pitchforks gave us confidence. But we heard no wolves.
We saw the lights while we were still several hundred yards away. The vlasti, if such they were, seemed to have come prepared. Bright blue arc lights illuminated a deep cuting. As we approached we saw a long line of shattered cattle trucks which had been tipped off the track. A modern diesel locomotive was hauling the ruined cattle trucks back over wooden ramps which had been constructed to raise one set of wheels to the point where the truck would unbalance and crash over its side clear of the track. It was a laborious process which I could well imagine had already taken two days or more.
We approached cautiously, throwing away our pitchforks and extinguishing the lantern. The bright lights which had been set up around the train cast us in darkness. We could see groups of men in uniform and fur-clad women eating and drinking as they stood among those little mounds of snow that could only have been the bodies of the penals.
We joined them. It was, as Laryssa would have said, as easy as that. Within minutes we were the center of a small group munching chicken wings and drinking wine and telling our story of two girls from Velinsky just along the track who had hid in the woods when the penals and Uzbeks fired the town.
The vlasti took us to their bosoms.
With the birth of Bukansky’s son, Lydia Petrovna had emerged from her crisis.
It was not, by any means, that she had given up hope of seeing Bukansky again. But she had given up immediate hope. When she came out of the hospital she had found an apartment to share with an eccentric lady who insisted on being known as Sophie de Nerval. Despite the differences in their ages they had become close friends and Madame de Nerval now spent her days looking after the child while Lydia worked as a secretary for a local factory manager.
Her evenings she passed, without the aid of vodka, listening to the stories of Madame de Nerval’s French noble ancestry and of her plans to emigrate to the West. Sometimes they thought of going together, taking the child with them to a new life. She sold what remained of her Western clothes and was now content to wear the same skirts and dresses as her fellow secretaries on the morning Metro.
Each week she wrote to Bukansky and told him how their child was progressing. She had no way of knowing whether he received the letters.
Sometime in December Igor Bukansky succeeded in bribing an orderly with one of his gold rings to take a message to Kuletsyn. On a scrap of paper he wrote:
“They have me in the fiksatiya, the chemical strait jacket, sodium amytal I think. I need above all some statement from you, some word.”
But from Barskoye no word came.
In his office in the Lubyanka Colonel Y’s preparations for the trial of Natalya Roginova continued. He had not, despite the initial setback, amended his plan to use Igor Bukansky as the chief witness. He could, he knew now, no longer hope that even the course of drugs which Bukansky had undergone would persuade him to hold the interview with the Western press. But he had not, by any means, given up hope.
In the third week of December Bukansky had stood with the doctor in the interview room waiting for the colonel to arrive.
The doctor had paced the small room, swinging round anxiously as footsteps approached along the corridor, drawing breath through his teeth as they passed on.
“Why so nervous, Doctor?” Bukansky asked, sitting on the edge of the table.
The doctor stopped pacing and faced him petulantly. “I could tell by the colonel’s voice on the telephone that he was displeased by our result,” the doctor said. “Your unrepentant attitudes are extremely distressing.”
Bukansky eyed him silently.
“Extremely distressing,” the doctor shuffled his feet in his agitation.
“Yes,” Bukansky said reflectively. “I understand the colonel reports directly to Semyon Trofimovich himself.”
“I believe that’s so,” the doctor said. “In the circumstances I would have thought even you were capable of seeing reason.”
Footsteps sounded along the corridor and stopped at the door to the interview room. Bukansky stood up, laughing. “Are you asking for my help, Doctor? Are you really asking for my help!”
The colonel entered and coolly dismissed the doctor. As he took off his coat and hat he could see that Bukansky had emerged from the period of the fiksatiya, weakened physically but with his spirit undimmed.
“You look well, Bukansky.” He sat down, placing his cigarettes and lighter on the table in front of him.
“Should I not, Colonel? Am I not in the care of some of the Soviet Union’s foremost medical specialists?” He sat down opposite the colonel.
“Yet the doctors tell me the treatment has not been successful.”
“I’m surprised to hear it. For my part,” Bukansky reached out and took one of the colonel’s cigarettes, “I seem to see things clearer than ever.”
The colonel flicked his lighter across the table to Bukansky. “We’re men of the system, you and me. Keep your games for that poor mouse of a doctor. I want something from you and I’m prepared to pay in return.”
“You want me as chief prosecuting witness at the trial of Natalya Roginova.”
“Yes.”
“And you want me to stand up and tell a pack of lies.”
“Not lies, Bukansky. What have lies to do with it?”
“Lies, Colonel.”
The colonel laughed.
“It’s true of course,” Bukansky said, “that in our system, of which as you say we are both men, we live with mendacity. But what you’re asking me to do is to set some seal on Natalya Roginova’s fate. I will have no part in making things easier for you.”
The colonel pursed his lips. “You realize the trial will go ahead anyway.”
“Perhaps.”
“And your evidence will be read into the record.”
“Not by me.”
“No. But it’s a footling difference, Bukansky,” the colonel urged. “Do it yourself and take your freedom. We’ll take you to court anyway. You’ll be seen to be taken into the trial, you will be seen leaving. It’s enough.”