Алистер Маклин - The Last Frontier

Reynolds in his turn had told her of what had happened to him, and now, just after the departure of the three policemen, he looked at her in the gloom of the shelter. Her hand was still in his, she was quite unaware of it: and her hand was tense and rigid and unyielding.

‘You’re not really cut out for this sort of thing, Miss Illyurin,’ he said quietly. ‘Very few people are. You don’t stay here and lead this life because you like it?’

‘Like it! Dear God, how could anyone ever like this life? Nothing but fear and hunger and repression, and, for us, always moving from place to place, always looking over our shoulders to see if someone is there, afraid to look over our shoulder in case someone is there. To speak in the wrong place, to smile at the wrong time–’

‘You’d go over to the west tomorrow, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes. No, no, I can’t. I can’t. You see–’

‘Your mother, isn’t that it?’

‘My mother!’ He could feel her shift against him as she turned to stare in the darkness. ‘My mother is dead, Mr Reynolds.’

‘Dead?’ His voice inflected in surprise. ‘That’s not what your father says.’

‘I know it’s not.’ Her voice softened. ‘Poor, dear Jansci, he’ll never believe that Mother is dead. She was dying when they took her away, one lung was almost gone, she couldn’t have lived a couple of days. But Jansci will never believe it. He’ll stop hoping when he stops breathing.’

‘But you tell him you believe it too?’

‘Yes. I wait here because I am all Jansci has left in the world and cannot leave him. But if I told him that, he would have me across the Austrian frontier tomorrow – he would never have me risk my life for him. And so I tell him I wait for Mother.’

‘I see.’ Reynolds could think of nothing else to say, wondered if he himself could have done what this girl was doing if he felt as she did. He remembered something, his impression that Jansci had seemed indifferent to the fate of his wife. ‘Your father – he has looked for your mother, searched for her, I mean?’

‘You don’t think so, do you? He always gives that impression, I don’t know why.’ She paused for a moment, then went on, ‘You will not believe this, no one believes this, but it is true: there are nine concentration camps in Hungary, and, in the past eighteen months, Jansci has been inside five of them, just looking for Mother. Inside, and, as you see, out again. It’s just not possible, is it?’

‘It’s just not possible,’ Reynolds echoed slowly.

‘And he’s combed a thousand, over a thousand collective farms – or what used to be collective farms before the October Rising. He has not found her, he never will find her. But always he looks, always he will keep on looking and he will never find her.’

Something in her voice caught Reynolds’ attention. He reached up a gentle hand and touched her face: her cheeks were wet, but she did not turn away, she didn’t resent the touch.

‘I told you this wasn’t for you, Miss Illyurin.’

‘Julia, always Julia. You mustn’t say that name, you mustn’t even think that name … Why am I telling you all these things?’

‘Who knows? But tell me more – tell me about Jansci. I have heard a little, but only a little.’

‘What can I tell you? “A little,” you say, but that’s all I, too, know about my father. He will never talk about what is gone, he will not even say why he will not talk. I think it is because he lives now only for peace and the making of peace, to help all those who cannot help themselves. That is what I heard him say once. I think his memory tortures him. He has lost so much, and he has killed so many.’

Reynolds said nothing, and after a time the girl went on, ‘Jansci’s father was a Communist leader in the Ukraine. He was a good Communist and he was also a good man – you can be both at the same time, Mr Reynolds. In 1938 he – and practically every leading Communist in the Ukraine – died in the secret police torture cellars in Kiev. That was when it all started. Jansci executed the executioners, and some of the judges, but too many hands were against him. He was taken to Siberia and spent six months in an underground cell in the Vladivostock transit camp waiting for ice to melt and the steamer to come to take them away. He saw no daylight for six months, he didn’t see another human being for six months – his crusts and the slops that passed for food were lowered through a hatch. They all knew who he was and he was to take a long time dying. He had no blankets, no bed, and the temperature was far below zero. For the last month they stopped all supplies of water also, but Jansci survived by licking the hoar frost off the iron door of his cell. They were beginning to learn that Jansci was indestructible.’

‘Go on, go on.’ Reynolds still held the girl’s hand tightly in his own, but neither of them was aware if it. ‘And after that?’

‘After that the freighter came and took him away, to the Kolyma Mountains. No one ever comes back from the Kolyma Mountains – but Jansci came back.’ He could hear the awe in the girl’s voice even as she spoke, even as she repeated something she must have said or thought a thousand times. ‘These were the worst months of his life. I don’t know what happened in those days, I don’t think there is anyone still alive who knows what happened then. All I know is that he sometimes still wakes up from his sleep, his face grey, whispering, “ Davai, davai !” – get going, get going! – and “ Bystrey, bystrey ” – faster, faster! It’s something to do with driving or pulling sledges, I don’t know what. I know too, that even to this day, he cannot bear to hear the sound of sleigh bells. You’ve seen the missing fingers on his hands – it was a favourite sport to drag prisoners along behind the NKVD’s – or OGPU’s, as it was then – propeller-driven sledges, and see how close they could be brought to the propeller … Sometimes they were jerked too close, and their faces …’ She was silent for a moment, then went on, her voice unsteady. ‘I suppose you could say Jansci was lucky. His fingers, only his fingers … and his hands, these scars on his hands. Do you know how he came by these, Mr Reynolds?’

He shook his head in the darkness, and she seemed to sense the movement.

‘Wolves, Mr Reynolds. Wolves mad with hunger. The guards trapped them, starved them and then flung a man and a wolf into the same pit. The man would have only his hands: Jansci had only his hands. His arms, his entire body is a mass of these scars.’

‘It’s not possible, all this is not possible.’ Reynolds’ low-pitched mutter was that of a man trying to convince himself of something which must be true.

‘In the Kolyma Mountains all things are possible. That wasn’t the worst, that was nothing. Other things happened to him there, degrading, horrible, bestial things, but he has never spoken of them to me.’

‘And the palms of his hands, the crucifixion marks on his hands?’

‘These aren’t crucifixion marks, all the Biblical pictures are wrong, you can’t crucify a man by the palms of his hands … Jansci had done something terrible, I don’t know what it was, so they took him out to the taiga, the deep forest, in the middle of winter, stripped him of all his clothes, nailed him to two trees that grew close together and left him. They knew it would be only a few minutes, the fearful cold or the wolves … He escaped, God knows how he escaped, Jansci doesn’t, but he escaped, found his clothes where they had thrown them away and left the Kolyma Mountains. That was when all his fingers, his fingertips and nails went, that’s when he lost all his toes … You have seen the way he walks?’