Archive 17 (27 page)

A sigh drifted over the intercom. “Go home. You are no help at all, Poskrebyshev.”

Poskrebyshev gestured rudely at the intercom. Then he went home for his supper.

I
T WAS AFTER DARK WHEN
Kolchak’s sled returned from the east, having found nothing that resembled the cliff Tarnowski had described.

Grim and silent, Kolchak remained on the tracks, staring into the darkness while he waited for Tarnowski to come back.

At last Tarnowski appeared. He and the Ostyak were half frozen. Together with the reindeer, they looked more like ghosts than living things under their crust of snow. Tarnowski stumbled off the sled and collapsed by the fire, where his clothes immediately began to steam. “I found it!” he said, the words barely decipherable through his locked jaw and chattering teeth.

For the first time Pekkala had seen, Lavrenov smiled. In that moment, the years of prison life, which had drained the blood from his face, deadened his eyes, and creased his skin like a blunt knife drawn through butter, all fell away. For a moment, he looked young again.

Kolchak pulled Tarnowski aside. “Did you do as I told you? Did you travel past the place before you turned around?”

“Yes, just as you ordered, Colonel. The Ostyaks do not know where it is hidden.”

“All right,” he said, releasing his grip upon Tarnowski’s arm. Then he nodded with approval. “Very good, Lieutenant.”

The Ostyaks brought out the rabbits they had shot. Keeping one for themselves, they handed the other to Kolchak.

The Ostyaks skinned their rabbit. Slicing the flesh from its bones, they ate it raw, tearing at the rose-colored meat.

Kolchak watched them with a combination of hunger and disgust.

Seeing that the colonel was about to give up and go hungry, Pekkala borrowed a knife from one of the Ostyaks and used it to cut two wide strips of bark from a white birch tree. He curled one of them to form a cylinder and laced it together with the piece of string which served as a belt for his quilted trousers. He sewed the other piece of bark around the base to form a container and filled it with snow. Next Pekkala gathered some stones from the railroad tracks and put them in the fire. When the stones were hot,
he scooped them from the flames and let them fall into the container, immediately plunging his hand into the snow to stop the skin from burning. In a couple of minutes, the snow in the container had melted. By shifting the stones back and forth from the fire to the snow, Pekkala was able to boil the water in less than half an hour. When the meat was cooked, Pekkala divided it among the four men. They sat by the fire, puffing clouds of steam as they devoured the scalding shreds of flesh.

From the other side of the fire, the Ostyaks watched and whispered to each other.

After the meal, Kolchak leaned over to Pekkala. “You are shivering,” he said.

Pekkala nodded. Even this close to the fire, he had to clench his teeth to stop them from chattering. The quilted
telogreika
jacket he had been issued was already several generations old when he arrived at Borodok. It had been repaired so many times that there were more patches showing than original cloth. These
telogreikas
were efficient only until they got wet. After that the only hope was to dry them over a fire or to wait for a layer of ice to form over the outer surface of the cloth, which would then act as a windbreak. Pekkala’s jacket was so old that neither option worked. The cotton padding had been soaked and dried so many times that it no longer retained the heat of his body. In his daily life at the camp, Pekkala had always been able to retreat to the kitchen and warm up next to the stove, but this journey had chilled him to the bone.

“Here,” said Kolchak, unbuttoning his own jacket and handing it to Pekkala. “Take it, Inspector. It’s the least I can do in exchange for a cooked meal in this wilderness.”

“Much as I would like to, I cannot accept it.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll just end up freezing instead.”

“Look!” Kolchak opened the flap of his jacket, revealing a fur
vest he was wearing underneath. “I will be fine, and I need you alive, Pekkala. There are too few of us left as it is.”

Gratefully, Pekkala traded garments. He had not even done up the buttons before he felt the warmth trickling through his veins.

“Don’t worry, Pekkala,” said Kolchak, slapping him on the shoulder, “it won’t be long before you’re wearing decent clothes again, sleeping in a bed instead of on the ground, and eating with a knife and fork, all in the company of friends.”

Pekkala nodded and smiled, but the mention of friends sent a wave of sadness through his mind as he thought of Kirov and the potted plant jungle he had made of their office, the meals he had prepared each Friday afternoon, the pleas for Pekkala to buy his coats from any other place but Linsky’s. It twisted in him like a knife that he had never been able to thank Kirov for the time they’d spent working together.

Pekkala was jolted from these thoughts by one of the Ostyaks, who approached him wearing the blood-smeared pelts of the rabbits tucked into his belt. The man squatted down beside Pekkala and picked up the container he had used for boiling the meat. “You made this?” he asked, carefully shaping the unfamiliar words with his thin and sunburned lips.

Pekkala nodded.

“Where did you learn how?” asked the man.

“I taught myself. I had to. I used to live here.”

“Lived? In the camp?”

“No,” explained Pekkala, taking in the forest with a sweep of his arm. “Here.”

The Ostyak smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No man lives here.”

Pekkala pressed the flat of his hand upon the pelt he had cut from the rabbit. Then he raised his arm, like a man about to take an oath, showing his palm and fingers red with the gore of the dead animal.
“Do you remember me now?” he asked. “I used to be the man with the bloody hands.”

For a moment, the Ostyak only stared at him. Then he made a noise in his throat, got up, and walked away. The Ostyak sat down among his friends and they began another whispered conversation, glancing now and then towards Pekkala.

He wished he could explain to them that the one man they really had to fear was nowhere near this forest.

How distant Stalin must seem to them, thought Pekkala. How safe they must feel in their hideaways out on the tundra, with only wolves and each other for company. But Stalin would learn of their betrayal, and he would bring his vengeance down upon them. Perhaps not for a year, or several years, but he would never forget. And what the Ostyaks could not fathom, even in their nightmares, was that Stalin would hunt them to extinction. He would tear their world to pieces, rather than let them go free.

At last, the exhaustion of the day began to overtake him. As Pekkala’s eyes drooped shut, the last thing he saw was a gust of sparks from the fire, skittering away across the snow as if some phantom blacksmith were hammering hot steel upon an anvil.

A
LL NIGHT
, Gramotin marched through the forest.

It was no longer snowing. The moon appeared through shredded clouds, filling the forest with blue shadows.

When the candle burned out in Gramotin’s lantern, he threw it away and pressed on, following the blurred furrows of the Ostyak sleds, which he found that he could see by moonlight.

As Gramotin scrambled through the drifts, his energy began to fade. From his pocket, he removed a
paika
ration he had taken from the kitchen the day before. Gnawing into the tough, gritty bread, he felt guilty. The truth was, although Gramotin stole these rations all
the time, normally he never actually ate them. Instead, he would give them out to those convicts whose conduct irritated him less than usual on that particular day.

Gramotin’s reasons for handing out the bread were complicated, even to himself. In his years as a sergeant of the guards at Borodok, he had learned that the best way to rule effectively over the prisoners was to be known as a man who could, on occasion, exhibit faint signs of humanity, instead of living as a sadist every minute of his life. These acts of generosity, small as they were, gave the inmates of Borodok hope that if they did as they were told, they might, as a bare possibility, receive treatment slightly less than barbaric.

Ruling over the guards was a more complicated proposition. Kindness did not work on them. They were like a pack of dogs who would obey Gramotin as long as they felt he was more dangerous than they were. The minute they saw any weakness in him, they would either close in for the kill or else abandon him completely, as they had done back on the road.

It was the first time they had ever challenged his authority. Clearly, they did not expect him to return, or else they would never have taken such a risk. Gramotin knew that the only way to win back their respect was to do the one thing they refused to do themselves.

The fact that he might become lost did not bother Gramotin. Neither did he dwell upon the fact that the Comitati would probably butcher him when he finally caught up with their group. The only thing Gramotin cared about now, as he stumbled onward into the darkness, was his reputation.

S
EDOV WAS HAVING
a dream.

In it he was a child again, reliving the moment when his mother caught him hiding in the woodshed and eating a pot of homemade plum jam which he had stolen from the cupboard. The theft had
been spontaneous and the young Sedov realized only once he got to his hiding place that he had nothing with which to eat the jam. So he used his fingers, which soon became a sticky mass of tentacles.

From the pocket of her apron, his mother whipped out the large handkerchief which she always kept ready for such occasions, licked at it ferociously, and advanced upon him, saying, “You mucky boy!”

Sedov winced while his mother scraped away the jam stains around the corner of his mouth.

“Who is going to want that jam,” she shouted, “after you have been sticking your dirty hands in it?”

“Some other mucky boy, I suppose.”

Now, in this dream, Sedov was back in the woodshed and his mother was scrubbing away at his face with her coarse, spit-dampened handkerchief. “Stop it!” he protested. “I can wipe my own face!”

Waking with a shudder, Sedov was amazed to find himself still breathing.

It was morning. The sun had come out, glistening on the ice-sheathed branches of the trees.

A large dog was standing right in front of him. It had been licking his face. It had a shiny black nose and a long, narrow muzzle which was white around the sides and brown along the top. Its ears were thickly furred and set well back on its head. It was the eyes which most impressed Sedov. They were a warm yellow-brown and looked intelligent.

The dog seemed as startled as Sedov. It jumped back and growled at him from a safe distance.

Sedov noticed three more dogs lurking about at the edge of the clearing. Then it dawned on him that these were not dogs at all. They were wolves.

“Mother of God,” he whispered to himself.

The wolf, whose raspy tongue had translated in Sedov’s dream
into the handkerchief of his long-dead mother, took another step back and growled at him again, jowls quivering above its teeth.

The other wolves stepped nervously from side to side, whining as they waited to see what would happen next.

Sedov knew he did not have the strength to fight them off. He doubted he could even stand. All he could manage was to raise one hand and feebly shoo them away.

No sooner had Sedov’s hand flopped back into his lap than the wolves turned and fled into the forest. In a matter of seconds, they had vanished among the trees.

Sedov had not expected such a good result and, in spite of his predicament, allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation. It was then that he heard the creak of footsteps in the snow. Looking up, he glimpsed what appeared to be a snowman dressed in rags, struggling towards him with a rifle slung across its back.

The man stopped in the clearing. His gaze wandered from the ruins of Pekkala’s cabin, to the hoof marks of the reindeer, to the canary-yellow patches in the snow where men and animals had relieved themselves.

When he finally noticed Sedov, the man let out a cry. As he struggled to remove his rifle, he tripped and tumbled over backwards. Instead of scrambling to his feet again, he just lay there, panting clouds of vapor, overcome with exhaustion.

“Gramotin?” croaked Sedov.

Gramotin lifted his head. Frozen breath had turned his hair into a mane of frost. “Sedov? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Where are the others?”

“Gone.”

Gramotin clambered up until he was resting on his knees. “And they left you?”

“I am wounded,” explained Sedov.

From the trees above, water dripped from melting icicles, sprinkling like diamonds upon Gramotin’s head.

“They shouldn’t have left you.” Gramotin’s voice rose with indignation. He limped over to Sedov and flopped down beside him.

“A wolf licked my face,” remarked Sedov. “I thought it was a dream.”

“A wolf?” Gramotin looked around nervously.

“Where are the other guards?”

Gramotin leaned over and spat. “There are no others. Only me. The rest all ran away.”

“Cowards,” muttered Sedov.

“Looks like we’ve both been let down.” Although Gramotin would never have admitted it, he was glad to have run into Sedov, as opposed to any of the others. Tarnowski either would have killed him by now or would have died trying and Lavrenov would be wheedling some deal to save his life. Pekkala, being a Finn, would probably have vanished like a ghost. But Sedov was not like those men. There had always been a certain gentleness about him, which Gramotin could not help admiring, even as he despised this fatal weakness in Sedov’s character. Men like Sedov did not usually last more than a few months in the camp. The ones who tended to live longest were men more like himself, who showed a minimum of compassion for those around them and who lied and cheated and stole. If they did not arrive at Borodok that way, they soon learned how to behave that way if they wanted to survive. Sedov had been the exception. Not only had Sedov endured, but he had never lost that fundamental goodness which he brought with him to the camp. It was not in Gramotin’s nature to tolerate goodness. At Borodok, it represented a useless appendage, like that of an animal doomed to extinction, and it was in Gramotin’s nature to attempt to beat it out of Sedov, year after year, with a relentless cruelty that astonished even himself.