John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

“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?

There was no alternative, so she hoisted it up and hurried on.

Charging back to the top of the chasm, she scrambled down as far as she dared without tumbling into the pit, then secured the rope to a stout tree and let the free end fall down. The rope ran out a full yard above Jones.

“I can’t reach it,” he said, matter-of-factly.

In a frenzy, Evgenia pulled the rope back up, found a tough stick of birch two yards long, tied that to the free end of the rope and lowered it again, more carefully this time. The stick touched Jones on the shoulder but he didn’t move, only cried out something that she couldn’t catch.

The fog was coiling upwards, moving in, obscuring the white sump below, first masking Jones, then moving away in an eddy.

“I can’t move!” cried Jones. “My muscles are frozen!”

There was nothing else for it. Evgenia took hold of the rope in her hands and lowered herself over the edge.

Descending hand over hand, her shoes sometimes losing their grip, took an age.

“Hurry!” he called out. “I can’t hold on much longer!”

Accelerating down the wall of the pit, showering his head and shoulders with stones and earth as she came, she pleaded for him to hang on. Just above where he’d come to rest was a goat track, a thin lip of earth which edged along the pit and disappeared around a bend. It could be an escape route. It could be nothing. She steeled herself to look down. Beneath them, the frozen sump had entirely disappeared. All that could be seen were coils of fog, their tendrils climbing higher, closer to Jones with every passing minute.

Finally, she was at his level. Grabbing hold of him with her free hand, she heaved him to the pit wall so that, for the first time, his feet could get some purchase. Scrabbling up to the goat track, he lay on his belly, gasping for air, his face blue with cold, his eyes unfocussed.

The goat track followed the pit wall until, by some strange mercy, it led into a cavern as big as a house. Leading off from the cavern were three tunnels that disappeared off into three separates darknesses. She half-dragged him, half-carried him into one of the tunnels and there laid him down, using the film bag as a pillow.