As the wind rose they struggled forward. The snow, driving now, battered their faces and tore the stretcher from their hands. As they fumbled wildly to recover their grip the howling wind propelled the icy whiteness like a streaming curtain across their path. They could see neither the light ahead nor the shape of the ground below their feet.
Their only instinct now was to fall and roll into a ball and hide beneath the snow from the battering of this terrible wind.
They found themselves among trees again, tearing and scratching at them in alliance with the wind. In the white darkness the ground gave under them. Their screams, torn from their mouths, were lost as they tumbled forward, the stretcher rolling and crashing down with them.
Even then they made efforts to climb from the gulley, to drag the stretcher up with them until finally, without a word spoken or even attempted, they fell back into the shelter of the overhanging bank and surrendered to fatigue and hopelessness and the numbing cold.
Long before dawn the fierce wind began to abate, the snow thinned and stopped. By first light the purga had moved on.
Zoya woke with the desperate fear that she was alone. The stretcher was a hump of snow, a grave. Laryssa was curled beneath the ice overhang on the bank, her body no more than dusted with snow. She stirred and sat up facing Zoya, wild-eyed. Her lips were cracked and swollen, her eyes puffy with bruises.
Anna was dead. Perhaps she had been dead long before they reached the wood. They had no way of knowing.
They smoked a cigarette between torn lips, looking from time to time toward the white mound and Anna’s face from which they had brushed the snow. They had no words for each other.
When the cigarette was finished they climbed the bank to the top of the gulley. They were in a thin wood of leafless oak and lime trees. Behind them, less than 500 yards away, smoke rose from the chimney of a wooden hut. At the height of the purga they had dragged the stretcher past the hut, past Anna’s only hope of survival.
Chapter Forty
It was not incompetence on the part of the Investigating Officer Gregory Platonov which caused the delay. The same morning on which he completed his preliminary investigation of the fire at Razina Street he had been instructed by his superiors to concentrate all efforts on a series of new firebomb attacks on Asiatic workers’ hostels in the New Districts.
Had he been a less conscientious officer, Platonov would have signed the Razina Street Fire Report as he had several times been requested to do by the Senior Fire Officer. But Platonov was acutely conscious that he had still not interviewed the one surviving guard. After a further call from his Fire Service colleague, Platonov decided on the evening of December 17th to visit the guard on his own time.
Wheezing heavily at the end of each sentence the guard invited Platonov into a small flat crammed with plastic items of furniture and decoration.
The guard was under some misapprehension about the purpose of Platonov’s visit. “As you can guess,” he said, “I’m not the man I was. After an experience like that who would be? But if you’re investigating my disability pension claim, then what you see before you is a seriously sick man.”
Platonov’s eyes alighted on the full ashtray on the table.
“And Comrade, if you’re looking at the ashtray, assure yourself that it is not me that smokes, not anymore…”
“I’m not here to investigate your pension claim,” Platonov told him. “I’m here, Comrade, to establish culpability, you understand me?”
“You want to blame someone for the fire?”
“It didn’t start itself.”
“An electrical fault?”
“Very doubtful.”
The guard wheezed angrily. “You say you’re not here on the subject of my pension but if any blame comes to rest on me, would I still get a pension?”
“A jail sentence more like,” Platonov said laconically.
“Ah… I’ve got it,” the guard said, his triumph momentarily obscuring his anger. “This is the way it’s worked, is it? I’ve applied three weeks running for this pension and still not even received the forms.”
A plastic bird on a shelf at Platonov’s eye level swung downward, dipped its beak into a tray of water and swung upright again. Platonov had long learned that an investigation can often profit from a subject’s anger.
“You look fit enough to me,” he said.
“Fit,” the guard spluttered. “I’m not fit, any doctor can tell you I’m not fit. But when it comes to stopping a man’s disability pension, it’s my pittance you’re after. Nobody else is going to suffer.”
“The other guards died in the fire, remember.”
“Will I ever forget? But we weren’t the only ones on the sixth floor. What about Comrade Letsukov?”
“What about him?” Platonov asked, his interest quickening.
“I know for a fact he was working late that day. I spoke to him in the office. But you can depend upon it, he won’t lose his pension when the time comes.”
Before he left, Platonov took a full statement from the guard. He had no need to look up his copy of Letsukov’s statement. He remembered clearly that he had said that he had left at the normal time. Strangely Letsukov’s secretary had corroborated his evidence.
Back in his own apartment Platonov considered the possibility of an office romance. But the statement he had just taken from the guard made it clear the girl had left alone — and that Letsukov’s departure was more than half an hour later.
The Investigating Officer sat with his pipe empty, staring at the television set with the sound turned down. He could well understand Letsukov not admitting that he had worked late once he’d heard about the fire. But the girl… why had the girl risked backing him up?
Platonov went back to the possibility of a romance. But the girl was married and as ugly as sin and Letsukov was a good-looking young bachelor. No, that equation did not work.
On the silent television screen the picture showed the Moscow Dynamo Stadium. Conscientious as Platonov was, he turned up the volume as the two soccer teams lined up for the kickoff.
From some Gulag areas the amnesty evacuation was proceeding in a more or less orderly manner. Along the Trans-Siberian Railway where rolling stock was more readily available, almost 200,000 penals were transported west in the first two weeks of the amnesty operation. Some of these were routed through Moscow with very much the results that Sophie de Nerval recorded. But in mid-December, militia protests to the Gulag headquarters at the Lubyanka to slow down the rate of penals passing through the capital led to the fatal decision to create staging posts some 30 miles from Moscow at Noginsk and Pavlovsky Posad. At Noginsk four new factory buildings were taken over, the area hastily enclosed in a barbed wire fence and soup kitchens erected in each of the buildings. At Pavlovsky a long line of railway warehouses were emptied and the existing chain-link fencing supplemented with a series of rapidly improvised watchtowers.
Within a week 80,000 men had been herded into the Noginsk complex and a further 60,000 into the Pavlovsky warehouses. For the moment the exhausted men in these areas were acquiescent, but nobody in Gulag authority thought it necessary to tell them why exactly they were being held where they were. For the moment, with adequate food and straw Army mattresses, the penals ate and slept. The questions would come later.
On the northern approaches to Moscow no such order prevailed. The scarcity of rolling stock and the incompetence of the railway authorities were important factors. After the first days when possibly 10,000 reached Moscow’s northern stations (where Sophie de Nerval had recorded their arrival) another factor entered the equation. Along the single-track approach to Moscow, across the northern Urals from Krasibirsk and down through Pechora, Ukhta, Kotlas, Velsk and Vologda, rumor spread like fire through straw.