Michael Dobbs - Winston’s War

He had celebrated the peace along with all the other soldiers, until the Bolsheviks had discovered that he and Moniek weren’t Russian at all and so didn’t fit into the Brave New System and its world of miracles. They knew it was truly a world of miracles, not only because the guys with the boots and rifle butts told them so but because their rabbi had always taught them that miracles would be beyond their comprehension. And nothing made sense any more. It was important in this new world to be internationalists, they were told, but apparently it was more important still to be Russians. Which they weren’t. So the angels with the boots and the rifle butts placed them once more in the service of the System and sent them off to labour camps, the gulags – Kolyma, Knyazh-Pogost, Sretenka, Yertsovo, Pomozdino, Shchelya-Yur, Solikamsk. An endless world of little miracles, often at thirty degrees below, filled with angels who in the morning would scream instructions – ‘anyone unconscious come out now or be left behind to freeze!’ – and saints who refused to distinguish between the living and the dead. They were all expected to work. They were herded from camp to camp, crammed into a metal-sided Stolypin rail carriage with room for twelve but often stuffed with thirty or thirty-five for days and even weeks on end. Mac remembered one carriage so filled with prisoners that for three days his feet hadn’t touched the floor. He had remained suspended between earth and heaven, hovering on angel’s wings, fighting for every breath, until an inspection had allowed them to sort the dead from the slowly dying and lay them on the floor of the carriage so that those who were left could complete the journey standing on the bodies. Pleas to offload the corpses were received with nothing but a beating. The paperwork had said that the Stolypin had started its journey with so many bodies, so that’s how many it must finish with. The journey lasted fifteen days.

Another time he had been thrown into a carriage of women, mostly withered old veterans but one or two with flesh still clinging to their bodies and so closely crowded that he’d had a continuous if inevitably crude form of sex with one of the younger ones for the best part of a week. It was his first time. Oh, what a lot he owed to this new world of miracles.

And so it went on, and on, and on, half starved then half beaten to death until their existence had been entirely forgotten and their names and origins wiped from any record. Nothing but entries on a transit sheet. Then, around the year of 1920 – who could be sure, time meant nothing, only suffering and food had meaning – he and little Moniek had found themselves in the gulag by the sea. Camp No. 3, Fourth Compound, Solovetsky Islands. On the other side of the world above the Arctic Circle. Intended for three hundred but housing more than four and a half thousand. The camp had grown and grown – another miracle. Only the number of latrine buckets had remained the same.

And Mac remembers, relives it all, no matter how hard he tries to obliterate it from his mind.

Moniek has almost died of fever on the endless journey. Mac drags him semi-conscious and rambling from the prison ship that has taken them there from Archangel, but there is no respite. Within hours of arriving they are set to work on the new harbour. Moniek, feverish, rambling in his mind, has never seen the sea before. The gently swelling water seems to him to be the new world he has been dreaming of, peaceful, embracing, infinite. He gives a quiet hurrah of joy, then begins to stumble into the surf. He doesn’t seem to notice that it’s barely above freezing. Now he turns around, he’s looking back like a guilty child, but the guards are laughing and waving him on – fish bait, they shout, go drink the ocean dry – and ignore him as Moniek struggles away from the shoreline, until all that can be seen of him is the back of his dark head bobbing in the distant swell.

That’s when the guards decided to lay a few bets as to which of them could give little Moniek a proper parting. A difficult job in the swell, but the fifth bullet had taken off the top of Moniek’s head like a ripe gooseberry.

It’s strange what a persecuted mind will do, how it tries to protect itself. Mac would always remember Moniek, but when he had finally found his way out of the gulags and obtained passage on a ship bound for anywhere, he couldn’t remember his own name. It had gone. Somehow the System had swallowed it up, robbed him of his identity, left him as nothing more than a number. When the ship eventually docked at a place called Tilbury, the official of yet another mamzer System had demanded a name from him – didn’t seem to care which – so he had called himself McFadden, after the ship’s captain. A good, stout, non-Jewish name.

And it’s what he still calls himself all these years later. He has long ago learned that being Jewish in this world is an invitation to a beating, or worse – even here in London. It’s not so much that he has forgotten he is Jewish, simply that he’s put it behind him, like taking off an old coat. Things are so much easier that way.

Now there is to be a Mrs McFadden. She is a shiksa , not kosher, but pleasant enough, a widow several years older than he who has been left with her own modest ground-floor apartment in West Hampstead and a desire which borders on the desperate to be married once more. ‘It could be war at any moment,’ she says, ‘and by then it might be too late.’ She’s right. So Mac has agreed, not because he loves her but for no more solid reason than that he doesn’t want to disappoint her. Anyway, as she says, if war breaks out London will be bombed and gassed until nothing is left, so it doesn’t make any bloody difference.

But – miracle of miracles – there isn’t going to be a war!

Chamberlain has come back from his mission to Hitler waving a little bit of paper ‘which bears his name upon it as well as mine’ and which promises peace, all in exchange for a chunk of an unfamiliar, faraway land which belongs to someone else. The world has gone quite mad. They believe Hitler. But Mac knows better. He knows dictators, knows the System, knows that the only signature you can trust is the signature they put on a death warrant or transportation order. He sighs. His leg feels as if it’s burning to the bone and the mud beneath his feet is now clinging, treacherous. He stoops to grab a sheet of wind-thrown newspaper to wipe the mess from his shoes. The page carries a huge photograph of Chamberlain back from his dealings in Munich and standing triumphant alongside the King and Queen on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Everything is floodlit, like a huge stage, and the crowd below is almost hysterical with relief and gratitude. Mac scrapes the mud from his feet and wonders if they are celebrating in Prague, too.

But maybe they are right. Perhaps there isn’t going to be a war – in which case he and Mrs McFadden will most certainly repent their marital rashness at leisure. But his nose tells him that war can’t be far off, he can smell it, in which case – what’s the point? Of hurrying? Of marriage? Of anything?

In the corner of the park he can see the crew of an anti-aircraft gun at their training. They seem to be making a hash of it, judging by the exasperated voice of their instructor. It’s rumoured there are fewer than a hundred of these guns to defend the entire capital – no wonder they’re praying there isn’t going to be a war. But Mac has long since lost any belief in a god. The rain has started again and the mud is back on his shoes, the damp worming its way through the welts. He pushes his aching body forward once more, head bowed, like the slave he once was. As he does so the flower in his buttonhole finally makes its escape and drops back to earth. ‘ Pshakrev! ’ He curses and throws away the soiled newspaper in disgust.