“It’s far too much,” Bukansky said. “When will this trial take place?”
“You will be informed later,” the colonel rose and circled the table. “I would like to believe,” he said slowly, “that in your circumstances, I, too, would have behaved the same way. So far.”
Bukansky was immediately alert to the menace of that final qualification.
“So far?”
“Yes. Because if we go a step further I would not find it admirable if you continued to refuse your cooperation.” Bukansky placed two large hands flat on the table and stared directly at the colonel. He knew he was no longer dealing with a man like the doctor.
“One thinks of exile for instance,” the colonel said, “to remote regions of Siberia. A life among the stinking Yakuts. Admirable people, but try as we might to change their ways, they still stink.”
Bukansky laughed shortly. “You don’t expect to frighten me with that prospect, Colonel. Not after my stay here.”
“No, no,” the colonel sat down again. “Why should exile frighten you?”
“Come to the point then.”
“I will. But first consider the disadvantaged life, even in our society which stresses equality, for let’s say a child brought up out in the east. And for a mother, too.” He paused. “Especially one accustomed to the best the Western world can produce.”
It was as if an icicle had pierced his chest He sat staring down at the patterned plastic of the table.
“Yes, Bukansky, Lydia Petrovna has borne you a son. Despite persuasion from many sources, she refused an abortion. Strange she should love you, given the considerable difference in your ages.”
Bukansky’s hands covered his face.
“Now,” the colonel said, “control yourself, my dear man. And ask yourself this question — can you now reasonably refuse your cooperation?”
Bukansky reached slowly for another of the colonel’s cigarettes. “All this may be lies,” he said.
The colonel unbuttoned the flap of his sidepocket and took out a bundle of letters. He passed them across the table. “A quick glance, that’s all we’ve time for.”
He waited while Bukansky desperately leafed through the letters reading a sentence here, another there. Then he leaned over and took the bundle back.
“Am I not to be able to read them in peace?” Bukansky asked, swallowing hard.
“You are an unrepentant, Bukansky,” the colonel said harshly. “When you decide to cooperate, the letters are yours. And so for that matter is Lydia Petrovna and your son.”
He took his cigarettes and buttoned them into his pocket “I can give you until tomorrow. After that you’ll be of no use to us.”
“This system of which we’ve been speaking,” Bukansky said, “tell me why it should keep its promise. Why, after I’m no more use to it, should it release me?”
“It will.” He threw his coat over one arm and picked up his hat.
“Will it, Colonel? Will our system release me, Bukansky, someone who knows the West, knows how to smuggle a samizdat memoir to London or New York? Will it, Colonel?”
“Your only hope is to believe it will,” the colonel said, and pausing at the door to nod confirmation of his own words, he left.
That night Bukansky sat writing at a table among the shuffling figures in long gray dressing gowns. When he finished he took his remaining gold ring and went in search of the orderly.
At three o’clock that morning a patrolling guard discovered the body of a man on the snow-covered path below an open seventh-floor window. No one, in the subsequent inquiry, was able to establish how Patient Igor Alexandrovich Bukansky acquired a key to unlock the normally secure armor-plate window.
Chapter Forty-Three
During the early hours of December 20th, the penals in the great Pavlovsky compound tore down the chain-link fence and marched out. Before this vast assemblage of men, the guards on the improvised machine-gun platforms fearfully held their fire. In the intense cold, the Gulag Regiments, each flying a rough-sewn national flag of one of the autonomous republics, formed up on the Moscow highway and set out for the capital. They were going home.
Perhaps messengers were dispatched to Noginsk, or perhaps an independent decision had been taken there, but however it happened, the men in the smaller camp broke out of their compound at just after dawn. In long ragged columns they, too, set off on the 25-mile march to the city. Like the Pavlovsky Gulag Regiments they were unarmed.
In the early dawn the two columns marched roughly parallel routes for the first hours. The Noginsk column, with the more direct route to Moscow’s eastern suburbs, found itself only a half-mile behind the Pavlovsky Gulags where the two roads joined at the M8 highway. The commissary of each Gulag Regiment was adequately stocked. The dawn was cold but not intolerable. As they marched the regiments sang the sad convict songs of Siberia.
The train journey [wrote Zoya], for all its comfort and good food, was a nightmare. Every town along the way seemed crowded with penals. We passed through stations where hundreds of men were sleeping on the platforms, others where militiamen were struggling to control them, yet others where the penals themselves seemed to be in control. Then bricks and iron bars would be hurled at the windows as our train sped through.
At night, as we got closer to Moscow, we could see the fires blazing in towns on either side of the railway line. From the train, at least, our impression was that the whole area north of the capital was in the grip of anarchy.
I remember the blue-and-white station boards announcing our arrival in Vologda. It was early morning and we could see a pall of smoke drifting across the town. The outskirts seemed empty of people and vehicles except for a few trucks abandoned in the middle of the street or a burned-out trolleybus turned on its side.
Then to our alarm we heard the train’s brakes squealing, jerking us forward violently onto the official and his wife and daughter in the seats opposite.
As the train crept forward slowly through the marshaling yards we could see that Vologda Station was a burned-out skeleton of iron work.
We stopped. Hanging out of our broken window (we had received a brick through it at the last station) I saw that the men on the locomotive had jumped down and were trying to swing the canvas water funnel across the top of the engine. I also saw through the fretwork of black metal, a group of perhaps fifty horsemen galloping down the street toward the station.
Within moments the whole train was an uproar of screaming women and frightened men. The horsemen galloped through the wrecked station, swerving round obstacles and leaping fallen iron girders with incredible skill. There was no need to see their faces to know that they were Asiatics from one of the horse-worshipping Central Asian Republics. Or to know that they were penals.
We were dragged from the train and lined up along the platform. Any man carrying a gun was taken off and shot before our eyes. These men, these penals, brutalized by years in the northeast camps, had no pity for the vlasti when they found them trembling and begging before them.
Other horsemen arrived as I stood shivering in the dawn cold, huddled next to Laryssa. One or two of the women, especially the middle-aged ones in silk dresses and furs, were hauled away and we heard their screams of panic from behind the station a few moments later. But Laryssa and I were left untouched. The penals (we hadn’t yet learned to call them Gulag Regiments) were more interested in dragging the vlasti’s possessions from the cattle trucks at the back of the train.
We were still awaiting our fate when one of the horsemen, galloping along the line of trembling vlasti, reined his horse violently and turned back toward me.