The convoy of Army trucks had struggled since nightfall toward the town of Vologda. On the snow-covered road the chained wheels skidded, gripped and skidded again as the convoy crawled forward at ten miles an hour. Twenty-five zeks and three guards to a truck, they had shivered together beneath the canvas coverings praying that the journey would soon end.
Only as the late dawn began to break could the drivers see the lights of Vologda ahead. Even so the trucks edged forward for another hour or more until, first, houses began to appear on either side of the road, then a small church and finally lines of apartment blocks. With the outskirts of the city came a miraculous drop in the wind’s bite.
The convoy halted in a small square surrounded by low-built concrete offices. There was no sign of the inhabitants, and the guards, climbing down from the back of the trucks, conferred with the drivers. In the back the zeks, all from Leningrad prisons on their way north to Vorkuta, could hear the baffled exchanges of the soldiers on the road.
There was no one, it seemed, in the KGB headquarters to which they had been ordered to report. Did they now go on into the middle of the town? Or wait here?
The captain in command was hesitant. He had brought his charges by cattle car from Leningrad as far as Cherepovets on the edge of the great lake. There he had been ordered to transfer the 250 prisoners to motor transport. Why? The rail transport officer at Cherepovets declined to say. Someone else hinted at difficult conditions for rail traffic through Vologda to the north. Yet no one could possibly have imagined that the motor vehicles could make the journey along the frozen, barely visible track to the wilderness of Vorkuta. The captain begged to know what his instructions were on arriving at Vologda. The transportation officer told him that that depended entirely on the situation. In all this bureaucratic confusion nobody mentioned the returning penals and their disruption of the rail system. Nobody wished to be guilty of spreading malicious anti-Soviet rumor. However true.
At midmorning the suburban KGB office was still closed and the only people the convoy captain had seen on the streets hurried nervously along as if hugging the doorways for protection. He had allowed the prisoners down from the trucks to relieve themselves, but he had no rations to distribute and precious little petrol for the vehicles.
He had decided he would go on to the town center alone and inquire at the main KGB headquarters building when he first heard the approaching commotion. He was crossing the square to investigate when a shabby mob of men came drifting round the corner. There were probably twenty or thirty of them, mostly drunk, and he could tell immediately by their remnants of uniform (even though most of them wore non-regulation fur hats and sometimes coats) that they were, or had recently been, members of a Penal Brigade.
He flipped open the top of his pistol holster, a more or less automatic gesture, and stepped out toward them.
They stopped, as he expected. But their further reaction was less than expected. With all eyes on his approach they began to chant… left, right, left, right…!
Angrily he stopped in front of them to ragged cries of halt!
“Line up, you men,” he shouted. “Get in line there.”
They cheered.
From the trucks the soldiers watched. The prisoners peered through splits in the canvas and passed back information to the others.
More ragged men drifted into the square from other side streets. The guards drew closer to their vehicles.
Stubbornly the young captain stood his ground. His thumb was twitching on his pistol holster. “Get back…” he shouted above the jeers.
A stone the size of a fist hit him in the cheek. His head snapped to one side, his fur cap was knocked askew. As he reeled under the blow a man ran from the front of the crowd and kicked him violently in the legs. Another reached out and tore at the captain’s leather cross-belt.
Two guards, not 50 yards away, watched in horror. One fired his rifle high above the crowd surrounding the fallen officer. A man from among the newcomers hurled a short ax at the guard who had fired the shot. The ax flashed past him and clattered against the metal side of the truck, but the young guard dropped his rifle and scrambled back behind the vehicle.
There were over 200 men in the square now, most ranged in a half circle round the parked convoy, shouting abuse at the white-faced guards. The captain had disappeared in a mass of shouting, kicking men.
From the back of the crowd came the sound of glass smashing. A moment or two later a chair sailed over the heads of the men and crashed down on the hood on one of the trucks. The guards, their rifles across their chests, not daring to point them for fear of further provoking the penals, flinched as a second chair flew across their heads and shattered a windscreen behind them.
“Release the zeks,” the crowd of men took up the chant. “Release the zeks…”
The guards were pressed tight against the sides of the vehicles now; the closest unshaven, dark-eyed faces were not five yards away. Each side realized the guards’ weapons were all but useless.
A shower of missiles struck the vehicles and fell or broke on the ground — books, table lamps, bottles, another chair. The guards, ducking, ran for the back of the trucks as the penals closed in. The soldiers’ rifles were snatched from them, they were dragged by the collars of their overcoats away from the back of the trucks. A gauntlet opened toward the side streets across the square. The first guard stumbled forward, his arms shielding his bare head from the blows. The flat of a rifle butt wacked against the back of his neck. As he pitched forward two more guards ran past him, and others in threes and fours, arms protecting their heads, while the jeers and blows of the penals rained down upon them.
From the back of the leading truck, Joseph Densky was the first to jump down. He stood for a moment among the cheering penals, then, his round snub-nosed face turned up toward the other prisoners hesitating in the truck.
“You hang if you stay, Brothers, that’s for certain.”
Then he turned round and moved through the crowd of penals, shaking hands, slapping backs until he reached the edge of the square and disappeared from sight.
All that day Zoya and Laryssa continued along the railway track. By early afternoon they had finished the last of their bread, but both felt confident that they would soon reach some habitation. What story they would make up then they were still not sure. They were, after all, zeks and hundreds of miles from their Gulag area. Having come this far from Krasibirsk they found it impossible to decide whether to surrender to the nearest militia post or to make good their escape.
But in the meantime they were both driven by a similar urge to make progress down the track and that, they could see by the red-and-white ten-mile poles, they were certainly making.
It was another bright, cold day, the vast skies a hazy blue-gray and the wind hardly enough to shake the tops of the snow-covered pines.
The track itself was almost clear of snow, the plow on the front of the penal’s train having cleared it to a few inches above the ties. It made for a strangely irregular step onto the timber and then down into the deeper snow but they both, that first full day, suffered no more discomfort than aching calf muscles.
Their second night was colder than the first. By agreement if either of them was unable to sleep she was to wake the other. Laryssa still had a half-pocketful of rough mahorka tobacco which she had stolen from the cattle car and a box of matches. With a twist of newspaper, which every zek carries in the small of his back for extra warmth, they could make cigarettes.