Robert Harris: Archangel

Throughout it all, he didn't know if the Boss was still alive, or if the Boss was talking. But it didn't matter: Papu Gerasimovich Rapava, at least, would hold his silence.

Why? Was it loyalty? A bit, perhaps - the memory of that reprieving hand. But he wasn't such a young fool that he didn't also realise that silence was his only hope. How long do you think they'd have let him live if he'd led them to that place? It was his own death warrant he'd buried under that tree. So, softly, softly: not a word.

He lay shivering on the floor of his unheated cell as the winter came and dreamed of cherry trees, the leaves dying and falling now, the branches dark against the sky, the howling of the wolves.

And then, around Christmas, like bored children, they suddenly seemed to lose interest in the whole business. The beating went on for a while - by now it was a matter of honour on both sides, you must understand - but the questions stopped, and finally, after one prolonged and imaginative session, the beating stopped as well. The Deputy Minister never came again and Rapava guessed that Beria must be dead. He also guessed that someone had decided that Stalin's papers, if they did exist, were better left unread.

Rapava expected to get his seven grams of lead at any moment. It never occurred to him that he wouldn't, not after Beria had been liquidated. So of his journey, in a snowstorm, to the Red Army building on Kommissariat Street, and of the makeshift courtroom, with its high, barred windows and its troika of judges, he remembered nothing. He blanked his mind with snow. He watched it through the window, advancing in waves up the Moskva and along the embankment, smothering the afternoon lights on the opposite side of the river - high white columns of snow on a death march from the east. Voices droned around him. Later, when it was dark and he was being taken outside, he assumed to be shot, he asked if he could stop for a minute on the steps and bury his hands in the drifts. A guard asked why, and Rapava said: 'To feel snow between my fingers one last time, comrade.'

They laughed a lot at that. But when they found out he was serious they laughed a whole lot more. 'If there's one thing you'll never go hungry for, Georgian,' they told him, as they pushed him into the back of the van, 'it's snow.' That was how he learned he had been sentenced to fifteen years' hard labour in the Kolyma territory.

KHRUSHCHEV amnestied a whole bunch of Gulag prisoners in fifty-six, but nobody amnestied Papu Rapava. Papu Rapava was forgotten. Papu Rapava alternately rotted and froze in the forests of Siberia for the next decade and a half- rotted in the short summer, when each man worked in his own private fever-cloud of mosquitoes, and froze in the long winter when the ice made rock of the swamps.

They say that people who survive the camps all look alike because, once a man's skeleton has been exposed, it doesn't matter how well-padded his flesh subsequently becomes, or how carefully he dresses - the bones will always poke through. Kelso had interviewed enough Gulag survivors in his time to recognise the camp skeleton in Rapava's face even now, as he talked, in the sockets of his eyes and in the crack of his jaw. He could see it in the hinges of his wrists and ankles, and the flat blade of his sternum. He wasn't amnestied, Rapava was saying, because he killed a man, a Chechen, who tried to sodomise him - gutted him with a shank he'd made from a piece of saw. And what happened to your head? said Kelso.

Rapava fingered the scar. He couldn't remember. Sometimes, when it was especially cold, the scar ached and gave him dreams.

What kind of dreams?

Rapava showed the dark glint of his mouth. He wouldn't say.

Fifteen years...

They returned him to Moscow in the summer of sixty-nine, on the day the Yankees put a man on the moon. Rapava left the ex-prisoners' hostel and wandered round the hot and crowded streets and couldn't make sense of anything. Where was Stalin? That was what amazed him. Where were the statues and the pictures? Where was the respect? The boys all looked like girls and the girls all looked like whores. Clearly, the country was already halbway in the shit. But still - you have to say - at least in those days there were jobs for everyone, even for old zeki like him. They sent him to the engine sheds at the Leningrad Station, to work as a labourer. He was only forty-one and as strong as a bear. Everything he had in the world was in a cardboard suitcase.

Did he ever marry?

Rapava shrugged. Sure, he married. That was the way you got an apartment. He married and got himself fixed up with a place.

And what happened? Where was she?

She died. It was a decent block in those days, boy, before the drugs and the crime.

Where was his place?

Fucking criminals...

And children?

A son. He died as well. In Afghanistan. And a daughter.

His daughter was dead?

No. She was a whore.

And Stalin's papers?

Drunk as he was, there was no way Kelso could make that question casual and the old man shot him a crafty look; a peasant's look. Rapava said softly, 'Go on, boy. Yes? And Stalin's papers? What about Stalin's papers?'

Kelso hesitated.

'Only that if they still existed - if there was a chance - a possibility -'You'd want to see them?' 'Of course. Rapava laughed. 'And why should I help you, boy? Fifteen years in Kolyma, and for what? To help you spin more lies? For love?'

'No. Not for love. For history.' 'For history? Do me a favour, boy!' 'All right - for money, then.' 'What?'

'For money. A share in the profits. A lot of money.

The peasant Rapava stroked the side of his nose. 'How much money?'

'A lot. If this is true. If we could find them. Believe me: a lot of money.

THE momentary silence was broken by the sound of voices in the corridor, voices talking in English, and Kelso guessed who this would be: his fellow historians - Adelman, Duberstein and the rest - coming back late from dinner, wondering where he'd got to. It suddenly seemed overwhelmingly important to him that no one else - least of all his colleagues - should know anything at all about Papu Rapava.

Someone tapped softly on the door and he held up a warning hand to the old man. Very quietly he reached over and turned off the bedside lamp.

They sat together and listened to the whispers, magnified by the darkness but still muffled and indistinct. There was another knock, and then a splutter of laughter, hushed by the others. Maybe they had seen the light go out. Perhaps they thought he was with a woman - such was his reputation.

After a few more seconds, the voices faded and the corridor was silent again. Kelso turned on the light. He smiled and patted his heart. The old man's face was a mask, but then he smiled and began to sing - he had a quavering, unexpectedly melodious voice -Kolyma, Kolyma,

What a wonderfiul place!

Twelve months of winter

Summer all the rest...

AFTER his release, he was this and no more: Papu Rapava, railway worker, who had done a spell in the camps, and if anyone wanted to take it further - well? yes? come on, then, comrade! - he was always ready with his fists or an iron spike. Two men watched him from the start. Antipin, who was a foreman in the Lenin No. 1 shed, and a cripple in the downstairs flat called Senka. And they were as pretty a pair of canaries as you could ever hope to meet. You could practically hear them singing to the KGB before you were out of the room. The others came and went - the men on foot, the men in parked cars, the men asking 'routine questions~ comrade' - but Antipin and Senka were the faithful watchers, though they never got a thing, neither of them. Rapava had buried his past in a hole far deeper than the one he'd dug for Beria.

Senka died five years ago. He never knew what became of Antipin. The Lenin No. 1 shed was now the property of a private collective, importing French wine.