Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

I did not tell Bigfoot until after dinner that night, as we were parting. Near the entrance to his barrack, I said, “I am leaving in the morning.”

He simply stared at me.

“I said I’m—”

“I heard you.”

We faced each other.

“To Moscow,” I said.

“I thought you had eight years.”

“It is a transfer.”

“To Moscow.”

“Yes.”

Bigfoot lowered his eyes. He scraped his boot against a small snowbank sprinkled with soot. I had lost him. He looked at me again but he was hunched differently. His eyes were guarded, peering out from his bearded face. His lips were torn from the cold.

“All right,” he said.

“You’ll be all right,” I said, self-conscious that I had repeated his words.

He tipped his chin very slightly.

“We will meet up again, when all this is over. For vodka. For a feast.” I took a deep breath. “With your wife. Maybe we will go for a holiday together.”

I had lost him. He was not looking at me, not really. He looked so desperately sad.

“Maksim,” I said, “you are a good friend.”

“You also,” he said to me, but I would not accept this gift.

I returned quietly to my own barracks, lay in my bunk. I wondered whether this was a ruse, and Lapin would shoot me when we passed away from the camp.

Or whether I would be shot in Moscow, a hero’s welcome.

I lay there, unable to fathom that I would never lie there again. I thought of Bigfoot in his own bunk, staring at the knotted wood, with different thoughts.

Then Nikola came. He was very quiet. “Expert,” he muttered.

I turned. His face was level with mine. Nikola’s beard was long, curling at the edges. His black hair was smeared against his forehead. His eyes seemed to be reading my own, left to right. He shifted and I heard a rustling sound, like straw.

“What is it?” I murmured.

He rustled again. He was lifting something. He pushed a large bundle onto the bunk beside me. I reached with my hand — long bristles, fur. “What—” I said. I sat up as best I could. It was a coat. Twice-folded, scattered with tiny twigs and flakes of dry leaves. “What is this?”

“Fox,” said Nikola.

“I don’t understand.”

“For your journey. Take it.”

“Where did this come from?”

“A hiding place,” Nikola said. He gazed at me from under his tangled eyebrows. “Take it,” he whispered. “Now, before the others see.”

I slid the coat to the other side of the bunk. Nikola nodded. His mouth twitched.

“Wait,” I said. He stopped where he was, at the edge of shadow. “Why are you doing this?”

Nikola pushed out his lips — out and sideways, a rough red streak. He was smiling under that sunken look. “Gratitude,” he said, softly, as if it was my name.

He tipped his head again. He went away.

The man in the green uniform took me in the morning. As the work crews trooped through the gates, we set off along a different road. I felt as if there should have been buds on the trees, tufts of green grass through snow. There were none of these things. It was all winter. I wore my fox-fur coat and walked with Senior Lieutenant Lapin. “You must be happy to be leaving,” he said.

“I am very, very happy,” I said, ducking my head to the moon.

WE WERE ALREADY ON the ship when the sun came up. It was a ship like the Tovarishch Stalin , steaming from Nagayevo back to Vladivostok. The boat was almost empty, because we were making the return journey. Few come back. I sat with Lapin in the closed upper deck. It still did not feel real. I tried to forget the dripping hold beneath us, where the prisoners would later be brought together, like hideous friends.

We did not linger in Vladivostok. Lapin led me to a train. He clambered into the heated officers’ carriage, tipping his cap. I was led away to an empty cattle car. I quickly came to understand that with his coat, Nikola had saved my life. I sat with other prisoners, uncrowded in the carriage, but for three weeks the car was raked by the winter. It was a killing cold. There was room enough to sit and lie and stand, so we behaved like human beings, humane and reasoning. We exchanged weary jokes, the ten of us, rare conversation. We proposed that God existed and that he was a son of a bitch. But gradually a man named Roma froze to death, turning the same colour as the floor. Gradually a man named Timur died, I believe of thirst. We would gather by one side of the car, cupped hands upraised, hoping for the lucky flick of a melting icicle. This was living, I thought. Waiting under an icicle, counting every second.

The train stopped twice a day. They gave us bowls of food, cups of water. They allowed us to urinate, like workmen, into tundra.

Sometimes Lapin appeared. He said to me, “You’re still here.”

As we made our way west, Timur and Roma remained beside us, growing hard as stone. And I felt myself softening, thawing, warming in my fur coat. My life was growing larger. As we approached Moscow, something in me was stirring. I did not want to acknowledge it; it was easier to be a ruin, inert. The tiniest stone, which cannot be broken into smaller pieces. We passed through villages, past train platforms and silos. The train dragged the dead men to the city and the air was changing, like the introduction of an electric charge. I took it in slow breaths. I stared at civilization, uncomprehending. I huddled in my coat. I was no longer dead. I was roaring on a steamtrain toward the capital, propelled by outside forces. I was in play. I was Lev Sergeyvich Termen, conducted.

THERE’S A STORY I heard in America, at a party, about a silver aeroplane that was skimming the country, five thousand metres up. It flew across a vast and quiet landscape, Utah or Ossetia, until it abruptly exploded. The aeroplane splintered into pieces. A woman came spinning out of this shattering blast. She did not have a parachute. Her hair whipped around her. She fell five thousand metres and landed on the snowy earth, alive, unhurt.

After a motionless moment she must have sat up. There would have been trees, birds, thin clouds.

At the prison called Marenko, all of us were this woman.

WE TELL STORIES AFTER COFFEE, sometimes. We sit in the dormitory, propped on pillows. Usually they are stories of Marenko itself, folklore passed down among the engineers. The time an electrician named Dubinski was found to be keeping a dog, a tiny brown dog, in the closet behind the radio laboratory. He had taught him to wag his tail at the sight of copper wire. The dog was allowed to stay but Dubinski was not.

Or the cleaner who was also a painter, hiding oil portraits at the foot of the east staircase. When he was discovered he was transferred to the design office.

The story of Yegor, who fell in love with one of the free employees. (There were many stories like this.) This woman worked at the checkpoint for the top-secret section, waiting all day for visitors with white or orange passes. It was the most boring of jobs, and Colonel Yukachev had forbidden these attendants from bringing books or puzzles. “You must be watchful!” he boomed. (“He was fatter, then,” Rubin said.) Smitten and moony, Yegor wanted nothing more than to linger beside his sweetheart, trading double entendres — or, dare to dream, a kiss. But to approach the checkpoint you had to wield a pass; and so Yegor set about devising secrets, prototype ideas, bringing any conceivable project before Yukachev and asking, with false ambivalence, whether it “really ought to be kept under seal.” The story’s ending is obvious: the woman was suddenly transferred to another facility; Yegor found himself on the hook for three impossible rocket prototypes.