He turned toward her. “We both want it, Carole.”
“I see.”
“But it still alters nothing. In normal circumstances what you now decide to do with Bureaucrat Letsukov would be your business. Try and understand that here and now, in Moscow, it’s mine.”
“I still want to see him again, Tom.”
‘Then I’ll inform the Embassy of what’s been happening to date.”
“You’ve already done it Tom, haven’t you? This afternoon.”
“Okay, I’ve done it. It was the only way.”
“Harriet must be some tough girl.”
“You’d admit that she’s a hell of a lot more suitable as a Foreign Service wife than you.”
“I’d admit that,” she said, almost gaily. “And I’m still taking those few days.”
It was a night of shouting and screams and men and women sobbing hopelessly. While a bitter wind swept down from the north the zeks of Panaka One were assembled on the square between the huts and issued a loaf and a bottle of water each for the journey east. Like infinitely pathetic refugees they clutched the few possessions they had acquired during their stay. An old political held a tattered copy of the Bible beneath his quilted jacket; a woman stared at a crude hand-colored picture of a child, someone else’s child; one carried a single spare boot, another a bundle of rags wrapped in brown paper.
The whip guards, ferocious in their nervousness, called the zeks’ numbers in batches of twenty or thirty and pushed and whipped them toward requisitioned lorries or horse-drawn carts.
The colonel-commandant paced the square anxiously, flinching from the growling guard dogs, as tensely keyed as their masters. There had been nineteen suicides during the night, the last and most inexplicable reported to him was Madame Ustinova, the camp doctor.
When the last horse-drawn cart trundled through the gates its canvas covering was already dusted with the first thin snow of winter.
The colonel climbed into his car and drove himself along the rutted track in the direction of Panaka Five. These were hard times for him. He knew that in the Gulag command circles they were watching him and others like him for any slipup in the whole Amnesty operation. Those who succeeded would definitely be marked for promotion.
Almost a month earlier Anton and Zoya had driven this same road.
I had not been to Panaka Five for almost a year now [Anton recounted], and I suppose I imagined that not much had changed. But as our leading cart trundled round the bend in the forest road and approached the barbed wire I was reminded of nothing so much as the films of the fascist concentration camps that had been shown and reshown throughout my youth. Belsen was one name I remember, and a place in Poland called Auschwitz. A gray-brown sea of men heaved listlessly behind treble-wire fences. The huts that we had built showed great gaping holes where timbers had been ripped from them to feed winter fires. And the smell… it obliterated totally the last autumn scents of the forest from which we were emerging.
These men were savages. When we arrived they were still half-starved, the eyes full of hatred, staring from gaunt faces. Among the shaven heads, the universal gray skin and the protruding ears, it was almost impossible to tell at this stage of their malnutrition a Central Asiatic from a Slav. Only by the eyes might one know, and there were precious few blue eyes in Panaka Five.
We so-called carpenters, and especially Bubo and myself who had been fed medical rations by Zoya during the harsh summer months, felt almost ashamed of the flesh on our bodies, although to be truthful it could not be called excessive.
To be working all day with my wife, Zoya, was an unexpected bonus. But as “doctor” she stomped around the hut we were building, asking for extra benches here and more plank beds there. And at night in the separate tented camps we occupied in the woods, the guards stood out in the exposed late autumn winds and we, the zeks, sat inside round our improvised wood stoves. Every night in Panaka Five Zoya and I spent together in our own tent.
Only Bubo really made contact with the penals. As their rations improved and work schedules were gradually reintroduced, Bubo would take a group of the fittest out to the woods to fell timber for the huts we were building.
Still, none of us had any idea of the date of the General Amnesty. It was clear enough that the men were becoming fitter now as each week passed, but their snarling hatred for the guards and the ferocious guard dogs was unabated.
When the medical hut was finished Zoya and the other two girls, Laryssa and Anna, worked fourteen hours a day cleaning the most dreadfully neglected wounds, isolating dangerous fever cases and even, under the new rules, sending the worst penals to the clinic in Krasibirsk. Much more leeway was now allowed in reporting sick (indeed, in Panaka Five it had hardly existed before). Each morning from the roof of the hut I was repairing, I would watch the lines outside the medical hut of men still thin and bent as if old, in tattered gray uniforms and sinister black summer skullcaps with long ear-flaps designed to protect the shaven head against mosquitoes. How Zoya ever controlled them in there I shall never know.
Through Bubo we soon got to know a little of what was happening in the camp. Naturally among the penals some form of organization had developed, as it always does. A Siberian (where exactly he came from we never knew) named Barkut was the most feared among the penals’ leaders. If anything I suppose he looked like an unusually tall Mongolian. He had developed, Bubo told me, some sort of violent religion which selected penals were forced to adhere to on pain of death. Among his terrifying fraternity he was known as Barkut Khan.
The Khans, as we called them, had little or nothing to do with us. How many Khans there were in this camp of 30,000 men we did not know, but from stories Bubo heard in the woods, Barkut claimed hundreds. Since a man had no choice, once selected, it seemed possible.
Meanwhile the weather changed. The winter came in with all its solitary fury. We zeks built a small hut for ourselves on the site of our tent-camp and divided it into small rooms. So still Zoya and I spent every night together. And every night we prayed that the Amnesty would not be declared on the morrow…
Chapter Thirty-Four
At dawn after a heavy night’s snowfall a young Rumanian lieutenant emerged from his billet at the comfortable Belescu farm just outside the town of Satu Mare and saw a black tank facing him across the half-frozen Somescu River. He waved to it. The machine gunner, upright in the open hatchway, cut him down with a five-second burst.
Troops of the lieutenant’s platoon tumbled out of the Belescu’s barn and were shot down by white-cloaked soldiers rising from the roadside. An hour later Rumanian troops on the Negresti-Satu Mare road were violently attacked by a motorized infantry company and the vital crossroad was taken.
It was certainly some hours later before the headquarter unit of the Rumanian division in the undermanned Northwest Defense Area received anything approaching a coherent report. By midday, when the Rumanian reserve army was alerted, the Hungarian invasion was already well under way.
Nobody in the East or West, no speculating journalist, military planner or position paper writer had even considered the possibility. While the attention of the world in the late seventies and early eighties had been concentrated on the more flamboyant nationalism of Poland, the Baltic States and the Ukraine, developments in Hungary and Rumania had gone largely unobserved.
Take Hungary first. After the burst of national feeling which had led to the 1956 rebellion and Khrushchev’s brutal suppression of it, it was generally agreed in the West that Janos Kadar, the Moscow puppet prime minister, had slowly but effectively divested himself of his strings. Of all the Eastern satellites Hungary seemed the most content, Hungary and Rumania, among the most quiescent.