Sergei stared directly at them for the first time in the entire soliloquy: “I saw that with my own eyes. There is no bread. Tell them we are starving.”
“Can I film you saying that?” asked Jones.
“Film, you mean like Charlie Chaplin?”
“Yes.”
Sergei shook his head. “No, of course not.”
For a time, he stopped talking and sat in silence – until, finally, Jones and Evgenia stood up to leave. They had already stayed in one place for too long. Sergei escorted them to the door and nodded to a path that ran into the woods.
“Follow that path. There is a priest. He’s trying to do his best.”
“To his best with what?” asked Evgenia.
“The children,” Sergei breathed. “The children who ran away when the Cheka put their mothers and fathers on the train east.”
The makeshift orphanage had been set up in an abandoned church.
The first child’s stomach was a balloon made of papery skin, bigger than its head. Its limbs were thin sticks, its face bird-like, its mouth some kind of beak. The second child’s naked body was covered in a thin film of hair, a werewolf from the darkest nightmare imaginable. The third child had the same swollen belly, stick limbs but a frog’s wide-mouthed face. There were about twenty of them sitting in their dung, shafts of sunlight illuminating the strange creatures. All were listless; none spoke. A few mewed pitifully. The air was freezing; icicles hung down from the rafters, and the baptismal font had frozen over.
Jones reached for the Kinamo from its leather bag while the young priest watched at the window, his right leg twitching anxiously upon the stone floor.
Evgenia appeared at the doorway into the next room. “It’s worse here.”
“Is it well-lit?” asked Jones.
“No.”
“Father, have you got a candle?”
The priest, summoned back from his terror, scrabbled in the pockets of his cassock and produced the stub of a candle.
“A match, Father?”
Nodding, he scrabbled in his pockets again and produced a matchbox.
“How long are you going to film for?” Evgenia asked.
“I’ll shoot in here for three minutes and then enter the second room. Six minutes,” said Jones.
“That’s all of the reel.”
“Yes.”
“OK,” said Evgenia.
Walking backwards to the farthest corner of the barn, he started to record, his hand cranking the camera, his right eye taking in the Kinamo’s world view, his body bent as low as he could get so that the camera took it all in. Each child stared back at him, their eyes unblinking, their enormous heads like foetuses in jars of alcohol.
He was almost done in the first room when a rifle shot sounded, not far off, causing a murder of crows to rise up into the cobalt blue sky.
The priest smiled to himself, his nervousness gone now. “That’s my sacristan, a warning shot. It means they’re coming.”
“Who?”
“The Cheka.”
“How did they know we’re here?”
“Who did you speak to in the village?”
“Sergei.”
The priest’s face crumpled. “People say he talks too much. Maybe he is an informer. You must go.”
“How long have we got?” asked Jones.
“Fifteen minutes, maybe ten.”
“I’ll film the second room, then we go.”
In the second room, a dozen infants and babies, pale, dead or dying, were spread out upon filthy straw. Jones gasped, “Jesus Christ” but his left hand held steady, and his right kept on cranking until the reel stopped turning. When he finally switched it off, the Kinamo answered with a click.
Seven minutes of Stalin’s inhumanity, all of it captured in the can.
“Run,” whispered the priest.
“And you, Father?”
“I’ll stay here.”
Evgenia frowned. “But Father?”
“Someone has to stay with the children. Run. Tell the world what is happening here. Tell them what they are doing to us.” He paused. “You must run!”
Jones threw the Kinamo in his bag, his fingers struggling to fix the buckle.
“Run, for Christ’s sake!”
The buckle secure, Jones embraced the priest and bowed stiffly to the dying children. The priest made the sign of the cross, index finger straight, middle finger slightly crooked.
Evgenia followed Jones out of the church door and it was only on the porch that they started to move more quickly. Soon, they were charging through a thicket of birch trees, their branches laden with snow.
Some distance on, tiring already, they heard the sound they feared the most: the barking of dogs.
Evgenia led the way, plunging down a ravine to a small river. Ice had formed on the edges but there was still flowing water in the middle. They were both panting.
“In there?” asked Jones, not quite believing it.
Three shots rang out from the direction of the orphanage.
“The dogs will find it harder to follow our scent if we go in.”
“My God!”
“Don’t drop the Kinamo.”
The water was so cold it made Jones want to roar at the top of his voice –but such was his fear of the Cheka that all he did was hiss like an angered swan. The current was strong and the bed of the stream rocky. Jones almost fell over, but Evgenia steadied him and led the way to the far bank, pulling herself out of the water by gripping a tree branch, then turning round to help him out too.
By now, both of them were gibbering with cold. A fourth shot rang out, then there was fresh outrage from the crows. Instants later, there came a burst of machine gun fire, then more of it, again and again.
After that, there was only silence.
“The priest?”
“Not just the priest,” said Evgenia.
“The children too?”
She nodded.
“Christ. The savages.”
“Not savages. The Cheka.”
They scrabbled up the far side of the ravine, their breaths ballooning in front of them, their clothes stiffening with every passing minute. They both knew that if they didn’t warm themselves in front of a fire soon, they would not survive the night.
The weather was changing, a slow milky fog forming in the low-lying gulleys and furrows of the land. Hurrying out of the growing murk, they climbed up to a bluff and were running madly through the birch trees, Jones in the lead, when suddenly he disappeared from Evgenia’s view. Evgenia was a little way back and, as she crested the hill, she stopped, astonished. Ahead of her, the hillside had been chewed away, like a bite taken out of a giant apple. Great clumps of broken rock lay higgledy-piggledy and, a mile away, three trucks slogged along an earth road, downhill, disappearing into the endless, dense fog.
There was no sign of Jones.
Then, seemingly from a long way off, came a cry for help. Looking straight down, Evgenia made out a stark drop ending in a pool of whiteness, a frozen sump, the remains of an old quarry. Jones was hanging half way down, clinging onto the satchel carrying the precious Kinamo with one hand. With the other, he was hanging on to the bough of a tree, his legs dancing in the air.
To the right was a workman’s stone hut, long abandoned. Hurrying over to it, she forced the wooden door. Inside was a muddle of junk, a splintered pick-handle, a broken axe, two wooden chairs set against a rough table. Nothing of any use. She cursed and was about to leave, when she glanced at the back of a door and there, on a hook, was a coil of rope: grimy, ancient, matted with cobwebs. Was it long enough, she wondered, to reach him? Would it snap the moment any weight was put on it?