Gerald Seymour: Archangel

When you fall, fall limp.

When you hit, clutch your body with your arms, don't bounce with your legs.

Remember the wheels. When you've fallen, stay still, don't move.

Is there a guard box at the end of the train? Hadn't looked, had he? Is there a machine-gunner at the end of the train? But he'll be high, and looking forward, the windows and the carriages will be his watch.

Just remember the wheels.

The train's running slow. It can be done at this speed.

Leave it, and perhaps the gradient'll even out, the speed'l pick up.

Go now or you're lost, Holly.

Go.

The last effort. The last pushing pressure on the steel plate to create the space for his stomach and chest.

Past his eyes exploded the boots and ankles and shins of the big man sweeping towards the doorway of the compartment. And the smaller man was at Holly's back, his knee at Holly's shoulder blades and his fingers deep in the spare folds of Holly's overcoat, and he pulled and wrenched to drag Holly from the hole, and Holly knew his stale breath as he hissed and heaved to prise Holly clear. The big man beat on the door and shouted in the high nasal tone of the Caucasus, slammed his fist into the woodwork, demanded attention. The guard was running in the corridor. The big man turned and came fast towards Holly and caught his throat. Holly could not resist, and they squeezed him out from the hole and when his feet were clear the two men stamped together on the steel plate to flatten it back, and between his knees he could no longer see the whiteness of snow on the stones and the zebra flash of the sleepers. The bolt scraped in the door. The doorway gaped around the guard. The guard stood uncertain. His right hand was half hidden by the cover flap of the holster that he wore at his belt.

'Comrade…' wheedled the big man with the pleading of a comic. 'We need water. Please, Comrade, we have had no water…'

The guard stiffened in anger. He had been made to run, and they wanted water. 'Piss yourself for water.'

'How long till we can have water, Comrade?'

The guard was young, a conscript. Command did not come easily to him, He dropped his eyes. 'In two hours we are at Pot'ma Transit. There will be water there.'

The door swung shut, the bolt ran home. Beneath Holly the wheels quickened over the rails. He felt weak and drew his knees up to his chest to contain his body warmth. The men had gone back to the bunk shelf and their feet swung, threatening and powerful, beside his face.

Holly looked up at them, into their mouths, into their eyes. The tiredness had stripped his fury.

'Why?'

The big man picked his nose.

'You have to tell me why.'

The big man spoke slowly and without passion. 'Because of what would have happened to us. Because of what they would have done to us.'

'You could have said something…' Holly's voice tailed away, beaten by the new apathy that overwhelmed him.

The small man speared Holly with his gaze. 'For me it is myself first. Then it is myself second. After that it is myself third.'

'If you had gone we would have been taken again before the courts. They would say that we were your accomplices, they would say that we helped you. You are a foreigner, we owe you nothing.'

'A new charge, a new trial, a new sentence… For what?

For nothing.' The small man battered his fist into the palm of his hand.

'Your escape is not worth to us one single day more in the camps. How then can it be worth five more years?'

'I understand,' Holly said, little more than a whisper.

He rose stiffly to his feet, then bent and found the bolt where it had rolled against the compartment wall underneath the shuttered window. He placed it carefully into its entry, then stamped it down.

He walked to the wall of the compartment and dropped his weight against it and closed his eyes. He thought of the forest beyond the carriage walls, and the lights in small homes, and the unmarked snow.

The darkness of the long winter night had settled when the train came to an untidy halt at Pot'ma station. Holly joined the lines of men and women who formed files of fives beside the carriages and waited to be counted. The area was gaudily lit and the dogs on their short leashes yelped and strained the arms of their handlers. The dogs and the guards who cradled sub-machine-guns formed a ring around their prisoners. Captors and captives stood in dumb impatience for the roll-call to be finished.

That night they would be held in the Pot'ma Transit prison. Away to the north, curving smoothly, stretched a branch line that Holly could see illuminated by the arc lights. The two men with whom he had shared the compartment from Moscow stood away from him, as if by choice.

Holly started to murmur a tune, something cheerful.

Close to him was a girl who rocked a sleeping baby and, when she caught his glance, she smiled sadly and held the baby tighter to save it from the snow flurries.

A tiny girl, but her eyes were bright and large and caring, full of the compassion that should have been a stranger in the Pot'ma railway yards. Even here, she seemed to tell him in her silence, there could be some small love for another sufferer, for a baby. When the order came she reached down to help an older woman to her feet and passed her the well-wrapped bundle, then she turned her back on the men and was swallowed by the mass of female prisoners.

… It's just terribly bad luck, the Consul had said, it's the worst luck I've heard of since I've been here…

In ragged columns they were marched between a corridor of armed men to the lorries.

The western part of Mordovia is scattered with the Correctional Labour Colonies that are administered by the Ministry of the Interior in the distant capital. Mordovia is the cesspit into which are flushed the malcontents and malefac-tors of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Flat, desolate countryside, unbroken by hills, the plain of Mordovia knows the stinking heat of a windless summer and the cruel gales of frozen winter. A place without vistas, without the opportunity or charity of hope.

To the south of the camps is the main road from Moscow to Kuibyshev and ultimately to Tashkent. Bedfellow of the road is the railway line that runs from European Russia to the desert lands of Kazakhstan. Pot'ma is a hesitation on that journey, none would stop there without business with the camps. The driver of the long-distance lorry would tighten his hands on the wheel and urge his machine faster past the bleak terrain that marks fear and anxiety across the breadth of the Motherland. The passenger in the railway carriage would drop his head into his newspaper and avert his eyes from the window. The camps of Mordovia are known of by all citizens. To the north are the wild acres of the Mordovia state reservation. To the west is the Vad river.

To the east flows the Alatyn.

Inside the box of the rivers and the railway and the reservation, the territory is barren, swamp-infested, poorly inhabited. The planners chose well. And having made their decision they set out with a will to forge a network of rough roads through this wilderness that would link the stockades of wire. The camps are historic, as much a part of history as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili who was to take the name of Stalin. Iosif's tomb in The Kremlin Wall may be hard to find, but the camps remain as a headstone in perpetuity to his memory. Iosif may have been erased from the history books, but his camps still linger, refined and modernized, as a hallowed memorial to a life's work of elimination and retribution. They possessed a faint whiff of humour, those men who sat at the ankles of Iosif. Perhaps with the taint of a half-smile they named the camps of Mordovia after the pretty, sun-dappled forests around Moscow where they took their family picnics and holidays.