Gerald Seymour - Archangel

Holly learned the code of behaviour by watching others.

When the mob of Hut z fell from their bed bunks and went out into the blackness for Exercise, Holly was with them. When the name of Holovich was called at the parades and counts, he shouted back 'Holly. .. here' and the trifle of the gesture was ignored. When the columns went to the Factory he was in their ranks. When he was given work at a lathe that rounded and spiralled chairs' legs he took no advice from the foreman, and instead watched the man next to him to study the working of the machine.

He ate the food that was provided with the avidness of those who sat around him. He lay on his bunk with his eyes open and staring at the rafter ceiling for all the hours that were common for the men of Hut z. He blended. Not first in the line and not last. Not highest in the production line of the Factory, not lowest. He joined the ghost ranks, became common and unremarkable.

There was interest in the Englishman, of course, in Hut z.

Something rare this one, they thought, something rare and original. They gazed with a covetousness at the scarf around his throat, the socks under his boots, the pants he stripped off in the Bath house, wanted to hold and feel the texture of the garments of a stranger. They talked to him of their lives as if by that they smeared some ointment on their existence.

They sought confidences from him. They were unrewarded.

Holly built a castle, a castle on an island, a castle on an island that is a prison camp.

A killer who slept at night half a metre from Holly came with his story to the Englishman's side. Adimov shuffled aside the moment of their first meeting.

The dissident who had been the first to speak to Holly talked the hesitant monologue of revolution. Feldstein came to Holly as if in hope of finding a kindred mind.

The fraud whose bunk was beside the stove and whose fall had been the hardest and cruellest of any sought out Holly on the perimeter path. Poshekhonov ladled out the lore of the Correctional Labour Colonies.

And there was Chernayev who was a thief, and Byrkin who had been a naval Petty Officer, and Mamarev who they said was an informer.

All reached for Holly's ear and all were turned aside.

He seemed indifferent. Not curt in his rejection of their stories, not rude. Indifferent and disinterested.

Adimov boasted of the planning of a robbery in Moscow.

The State Bank on Kutuzovsky Prospekt was to be Adimov's target. Himself and two colleagues, and even a car found for the escape run, and a homemade pistol that would be sufficient to unnerve the cashier clerks. Two hundred thousand roubles in the hold-all and out into the street and into the car where the engine ticked snugly and into the traffic… and the stupid bitch had been on the pedestrian crossing, and her bags filled both hands, and she had frozen, not stepped back, and the car had hit her, swerved, crashed.

Stupid bitch. Well, they weren't going to bloody stop because the foot sign was lit, not with the hold-all full. Can't put the handbrake on and sit on your hands with the alarm bells ringing because a babushka's on her way home with her son-in-law's dinner. Swerved and crashed into a lamp post. Three men in the car, all dazed, all half-concussed when the Militia pulled them out, and the bank's door not fifty metres away. Twelve years to think on it, twelve years and not five gone. And Adimov seemed to look for admiration from Holly when he told his story. Each new man into the hut had clucked sympathy for Adimov's mishap, each had thought that wise. All except the new stranger, the Englishman.

In Holly's ear Feldstein whispered of the circulation of the samizdat writings.

Typescripts photocopied and distributed that carried the rivulet of dissent from eye to eye for the few who trusted in a future of change and the ultimate destruction of the monolith that controlled their lives. He was a part, he said, of the illegal and dangerous dissemination of information, dangerous because those who were arrested risked being parcelled off to the Sebsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry or thrown to the mercy of the zeks in the camps. Two years served and four to go because one in the chain had not owned the strength to withstand the interrogation of the KGB questioners in Lubyanka. And he was proud in his puny and isolated fight, and believed in a vague victory in the future, and a present of martyrdom. He spoke of the nobility of the struggle, not of the failure of achievement. He was known in the West, he said, he was supported in his agony by many thousands, he was comforted by their distant communion. Holly had listened with a chilled politeness and shrugged and turned away on his side for sleep.

At the tables in the Kitchen, Poshekhonov found Holly.

The joint history of the camps and of his life bubbled clear as a hill stream. A spring of guarded hope and a source of amusement. Poshekhonov said that he had found the way to laugh, he had picked up the spear of ridicule. 'Not too often, you understand, but enough to prick them…' His fall had been fast and far, but it had been almost worthwhile, almost, and one day, one distant day, there was the dream of a flight beyond the borders of the Motherland. It waited for him in Zurich, Poshekhonov would say, the pay-off. Had Holly ever been to Switzerland, because there was a bank there? He told of the Black Sea fishing collective where the catch was counted not in kilos of fish flesh but in the grams of the salted roe of the sturgeon. A co-operative company for the canning of caviar, and the plan had been brilliant in its sauce and complexity. A Dutch businessman had proposed the idea, a wonderful invention… A tin of caviar but the label declared the produce to be herring, and as herring it was sold to Amsterdam before the transfer of the labels in Holland and entry to the shops of the European capitals.

And the rip-off was well divided and a segment found its way to a bank account that was anonymous in all but its number. Couldn't have lasted. Brilliant but temporary, and Poshekhonov was lucky not to have been shot with his two principal collaborators. Poshekhonov could summon a short clear smile from Holly, a smile that was chained and brief.

Each in his way – Adimov, Feldstein, Poshekhonov – reached out towards Holly and waved a flag of interest or concern or friendship. All failed.

Holly was alone.

He waited, bandaged in his own thoughts, for the summons to the Administration block.

A full week after Holly had been delivered to Camp 3, Captain Yuri Rudakov issued the instruction that the new prisoner was to be brought to his office.

It was not that he had been dilatory in his duty of interviewing all those sent to the camp who were in any way, minor or major, special. His own inclination would have led him towards this first interview three or four days earlier. But in the wake of the personal file of Mikhail Holovich had come further instructions and briefings over the teleprinter in his office. More material from Dzers-zhinsky Street that he must assess. By the time that he felt ready to bring Holly before him, he had spent three clear days shut in that office with the door closed to all inquiries.

The Captain was a young man, not yet past his twenty-eighth birthday.

There were those in the dim corridors of Headquarters who said that his rise had been too fast. Rudakov knew the pitfalls, knew of the knives that waited for him. The KGB officer responsible for the security, both physical and spir-itual, of the camp was a man on trial. It was his strength that he recognized the testing-ground. He had been on trial before. Aged only twenty-four he had held down the post of KGB officer attached to the 502nd Guards Armoured Division stationed at Magdeburg in the German Democratic Republic. He had learned there how a full colonel could wince and supplicate in his presence. He had felt the power of his position when he had taken a bottle to the room of any major and propositioned for information on the talk in the mess when he, the KGB's ears, was not present. He had seen the tremble jelly of a captain's chin and known it was his uniform and the blue unit tabs that won it. He was roller-coasting towards a high-rise career and now they had sent him to this stinking backwater to test further his resolve and capability. If he won here too, if he came back from Barashevo without a stain of the shit and slime of this place on his tailored khaki uniform then the road upwards and onwards was clear to him. The Captain was an egocentric man, one who believed in the great blueprints of life. He reckoned in a destiny that was mapped for his career. Fate had thrown the dice. Twin sixes had fallen, rocked, rolled for him to see them. Mikhail Holovich had been sent to Camp 3, Zone 1.