Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

He turned to ask the sergeant if they were in the right place.

The last clear thing Garlinski saw was the fist of the sergeant, knuckles spider-webbed with scars, as it slammed into his face.

He sprawled on to the floor, nearly blinded by the pain. Blood from his broken nose poured down the back of his throat and, propping himself up on one elbow, he retched as he struggled to breathe. Dimly, Garlinski watched as the sergeant removed his tunic and belt and hung them on the door handle. Then the man rolled up the sleeves of his thin, brown cotton shirt, the armpits of which were already darkened with sweat.

The sergeant’s smile had vanished. His face now appeared almost blank, as if he were only half aware of what he was doing. He reached down, took hold of the front of Garlinski’s coat and hauled him to his feet.

‘Wait!’ called Garlinski, peppering the sergeant’s face with blood. ‘There must be some mistake. I am a hero of the Soviet Union!’

Without a word of explanation and, using nothing more than his fists, the sergeant beat Peter Garlinski to death, as he had done countless others in the past.

He left the body lying on the floor, removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood off his hands. He studied a few new cuts on his knuckles. It was always their teeth that caused those.

Then he put on his tunic and belt and departed from the room, leaving the door open.

A few minutes later, two men dragged away Garlinski’s body, while a third mopped down the floor with a bucket of soapy water. Bubbles, poppy red, sluiced along the gutters and were gone.

In the dove-grey light of dawn, with darkness still clinging to the western sky, Pekkala and Kirov set off towards Berlin.

Although it was still cold, the breeze blowing up from the south was not as bitter as it had been the night before. Slowly, as they marched along, the warmth returned to their bones. They thought longingly of food they did not have and of the wheezy stove and battered chairs at their office on Pitnikov Street.

‘I knew it wouldn’t work,’ said Kirov.

‘What wouldn’t work?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Me giving you orders.’

‘Maybe you should have tried a little harder,’ suggested Pekkala.

Kirov turned to him. ‘Do you mean it might have worked?’

Pekkala thought about this for a moment. ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘but it would have been interesting to watch.’

They soon came across a railway track, which appeared to be heading directly towards the city. They followed it, timing their strides to the laddering of sleepers and smelling the oily creosote with which the wooden beams had been painted.

Through eyes bloodshot with fatigue, Pekkala watched the rails flow out on either side of him, like streams of mercury, converging in the distance. His memory tilted back to when he’d walked along another set of tracks which had been sutured across the earth.

In that moment, the mildness of that spring morning peeled away, leaving behind a world of bone-white snow and ice-sheathed trees and silence so profound that he could hear the rush of blood through his own veins. The cold slammed into his bones, and his heart seemed to cower behind the frail cage of his ribs.

He was back in Siberia again.

The tracks which he recalled were those of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which skirted the edge of the valley of Krasnagolyana, home to the labour camp of Borodok.

For much of the year, what few wagon trails criss-crossed that lonely forest lay deep beneath the snowdrifts or else were so clogged with mud that no one, not even the long-legged reindeer, could make their way along them.

During those seasons, the railway became the only means of crossing this vast landscape. It marked the boundary of Pekkala’s world. The land he roamed belonged to the Gulag of Borodok, whose trees he marked for cutting with red paint. Beyond the tracks lay the territory of Mamlin Three, another camp, where experiments were carried out on behalf of the Soviet military. At Mamlin, inmates were submerged in icy water until their hearts stopped beating. Then they were resuscitated with injections of adrenalin administered directly into their hearts. The procedure was repeated, with longer and longer intervals between the stopping of the heart and the adrenalin injections until, finally, the patient could not be revived. These experiments were designed to replicate the conditions of pilots brought down in the sea. Other tests, using extremes of high and low pressure, produced a steady flow of cadavers, which were packed into barrels of formaldehyde and sent to medical schools all across Russia.

For Pekkala, to walk across those tracks meant certain death if he was ever caught. But he was drawn to them in spite of the danger. At night, he stood back among the trees, while the carriages of the Trans-Siberian Express rattled past. He caught glimpses of the passengers, bundled in coats and asleep or staring out into the darkness with no idea that the darkness was staring back at them.

Until that memory finally stuttered to a halt, like a film clattering off its spool, he could not bring himself to step beyond the confines of the rails.

The first rays of sunlight glimmered faintly on the tracks. A moment later, the world around them ignited into a million coppery fragments as tiny stones out in the fields beyond, puddles of dirty water and even the powdery condensation of their breath caught the fireball’s reflection.

‘What’s that?’ asked Kirov, pointing up ahead.

Pekkala squinted at some strange, segmented creature, leaning up against one of the telegraph poles which ran beside the tracks. As he looked, it seemed to move, bowing out slightly in the centre and then settling back into its original shape. ‘Whatever it is,’ he whispered, ‘I think it is alive.’

Just then they heard a voice, calling out faintly across the empty fields.

At first, the two men could not even tell its source.

Then it came again, and they realised it was coming from the creature by the telegraph pole.

It was calling for help.

Without a moment’s consultation, the two men set off running, unsure what they would find but drawn by the exhausted terror in that voice.

Not until they were standing practically in front of it did they fully understand what they were seeing.

A man had been hanged by a rope from one of the crooked spikes used by linemen for climbing to the wires above. But his life had been saved by a boy, who had placed himself beneath the man’s feet so that the victim’s neck did not bear the full weight of the noose.

It looked as they had been there all night, or even longer.

The man’s hands had been tied behind his back. He wore heavy wool trousers and thick-soled boots, but only a flannel shirt above the waist. If he’d ever had a coat, it had been taken from him. Even though he was not dead, the noose had tightened on his throat and he was half-choked, breathing in short gasps like a fish pulled up on to a river bank.

The boy was tall and skinny, with a thick crop of ginger-red hair cow-licked vertically at the front. What strength he had was almost gone, and fatigue had made his pale skin almost translucent. His white-knuckled hands gripped the man’s trouser legs in an attempt to hold him steady.

While Kirov climbed the pole to cut him down, Pekkala took the boy’s place, settling the man’s boots upon his own shoulders and feeling the sharp heel irons dig into the flesh above his collarbone.

Carefully, they lowered the man to the ground, cut the rope from around his neck and propped him up against the dirty rails to let him breathe.

The boy sat down on the ground and stared at the men, too tired even to thank them except with the expression in his eyes.