Polar Star (14 page)

“They’ll follow me.”

“But they’ll be one or two instead of twenty, and you’ll be able to keep moving. You don’t understand; you’re dead here already.”

“Out there I’ll be as good as dead.”

“That’s what will save you. Believe me, I know how their minds work.”

Arkady couldn’t deny the truth of that; the line between “them” and Pribluda was fine enough.

“Just two or three years,” the colonel said. “With the new regime, everything is changing—though not all for
the best as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, give them a chance to forget you and then come back.”

“Well, it was a good act,” Arkady said, “but you got me out too easily. You made a deal.”

Pribluda killed the engine, and for a moment there was no sound except the settling of snow, all those tons of flakes gently blanketing the city.

“To keep you alive.” The colonel was exasperated. “What’s wrong with that?”

“What did you promise?”

“No contact, not even the possibility of contact between you and her.”

“There’s only one way you could promise ‘not even the possibility of contact.’ ”

“Stop playing the interrogator with me. You always make everything so difficult.” Under his cap Pribluda had little eyes driven deep as nails. It was a strange place to find embarrassment. “Am I your friend or not? Come on.”

Each red railroad car bore a golden hammer and sickle and a plaque that read
MOSCOW-VLADIVOSTOK
. Pribluda had to carry Arkady up the high steps of the platform to a “hard class” section. Exotic families in skullcaps and brilliant scarves camped on bedrolls, their berths occupied by new appliances still in packing cases—goods they could buy only in Moscow. Brown children peeked through curtains rolled up like bunting. Women opened bundles, releasing a buffet’s smell of cold lamb, kefir, cheese. Students heading for the Ural Mountains stacked skis and guitars. Pribluda talked to the conductress, a top-heavy woman wearing what looked like an airline captain’s cap and a short skirt. Returning, he stuffed into Arkady’s overcoat a through ticket, an envelope of rubles and a blue work pass.

“I’ve made arrangements,” Pribluda said. “Friends will take you off in Krasnoyarsk and put you on a plane for Norilsk. You’ll have a job as a watchman, but you’d
better not stay too long. The main thing is, once you’re above the Arctic Circle you’ll be too much trouble to bring back. It’s just for a few years, not a lifetime.”

Arkady had never hated anyone as much as he once had Pribluda, and he knew Pribluda had loathed him in return. Yet here they were, as close to friends as each other had alive. It was as if everyone traveled the world in the dark, never knowing where he was going, blindly following a road that twisted, rose and fell. The hand that pushed you down one day helped you up the next. The only straight road was … what? The train!

“I meant it about the promotion,” Arkady said. “That’s good.”

On the platform a row of conductresses were raising batons, signaling that the express was ready to leave. Ahead, the locomotive released its air brakes and a tremor ran the length of the cars. Still the colonel lingered.

“You know what they say?” He smiled.

“What do they say?” Arkady wondered. Pribluda was not known for humor.

“They say some waters are too cold even for sharks.”

If the hospital had left Arkady dazed, the motor yard in Norilsk made him numb. To keep from freezing, trucks were left running all night on Siberian diesel fuel, the cheapest on earth. Or else fires had to be carefully set under the engine block but away from the fuel line. The problem was that the surface was actually a thin cover of moss and dirt over permafrost, and as the frost around the fires melted and refroze, the ground became an icy swamp.

One night in his second month on the job, Arkady was building a fire in the black space under a Belarus earth-mover, a ten-wheeler the size of an iron house, when he saw figures approaching from opposite sides of the yard. Truck drivers wore boots, quilted jackets, caps. These
two were in overcoats and hats and stepped daintily across the rutted ice. The one skirting a coal pile picked up a pickax and carried it with him. Theft of construction equipment, the sacred property of the state, was not unusual; that’s why there were watchmen like Arkady. If you want it, take it, he thought. The two men stood in the shadows and waited. The temperature was ten degrees below zero and Arkady began to freeze. It felt like burning on a spit. He stuffed a glove in his mouth to keep his teeth from chattering. In the dark he saw the two men shivering, arms folded, hopping in place, their breath crystallizing and drifting to the ground. Finally, on wooden legs, they gave up and gathered at the fire in the oilcan. The one with the pickax held it up and carefully peeled his fingers back; when the ax dropped and bounced smartly off his knee he didn’t seem to feel a thing. The other was so cold he cried tears that froze in waxy stripes down his face. He tried to smoke, but his hands were shaking too hard to get out one cigarette, and half the pack spilled into the can and onto the ice. Finally, slowly, as bent and unsteady as if they were walking into violent wind, they moved away. Arkady heard one fall: a muffled impact and an agonized curse. A minute later he heard car doors shut and an engine start.

Arkady dragged himself on his elbows to the burning can. He emptied kerosene into the fire and vodka into himself, and in the morning he didn’t return to his hostel. He went to the airport and boarded a plane east, farther into Siberia, like a fox heading for deeper woods.

He was pretty safe. With the Siberian labor shortage, any strong back got double pay with no questions asked for laying railroad ties, sawing ice or slaughtering reindeer, because Siberian managers had their quotas too. A man carving ice with a chain saw, his face encased with frost, might be an alcoholic, a criminal, a bum or a saint. What were the odds? Once the quota was fulfilled, then a local apparatchik would check names against a list of
persons in whom the militia or the KGB had an interest. But each of these work camps was a minuscule dot in a landmass twice the size of China. That was why workers were so prized: Siberia’s mere fifteen million inhabitants facing an envious one billion Chinese! By the time any agent of State Security arrived Arkady was gone.

The interesting thing was that although Irina was Siberian he never saw a woman like her, not in all the villages and work camps that he passed through. Certainly not among the Uzbeks or Buryats, nor among the women who tended cement mixers like so many milkmaids around a cow. Nor among the Young Komsomol princesses who came to pose on tractors for six months and then flew home, having fulfilled their lifetime quota of volunteer labor.

Yet when he cared to, he could stand on the duckboards of a work camp and be sure that the next woman to jump from a truck to the mud, jacket open, scarf around her hair, lunch pail in hand, would be Irina. Somehow she had returned, and through a trail of incredible coincidences had arrived at the very same place he was. His heart would stop until she landed and looked up. Then he would be sure that Irina was the next one. It was like a children’s game.

So he didn’t think of her.

At the end of his second year, escaping the Border Guard on Sakhalin, he crossed to the mainland and boarded a southbound train, reconnecting with the red Trans-Siberian Express after all this while. But this time he rode the platform because he smelled like a fishnet. At dusk he arrived at Vladivostok, the “Lord of the Ocean,” the major Pacific port of the Soviet Union. Under tall, fluted streetlamps well-fed, well-dressed people filled the sidewalks. Motorcycles raced buses. Across from the terminal a statue of Lenin pointed to the Golden Horn, Vladivostok’s bay, and on the rooftop above Lenin’s
steel brow glowed a welcome in neon script:
FORWARD TO THE VICTORY OF COMMUNISM
!

Forward? After two years of exile, Arkady had ten rubles in his pocket; the rest of his money was back on the island. A seaman’s hostel was only ten kopeks a night, but he had to eat. He followed the buses to the Shipping Administration, where a board displayed the status of every civil vessel that claimed Vladivostok as its home port. According to the board, the factory ship
Polar Star
had put to sea that day, but when Arkady wandered to the docks he saw it still taking on cargo and fuel. Floodlit gantries lifted barrels that had passed inspection by the Border Guard, army veterans outfitted by the KGB in navy-blue uniforms. Their dogs sniffed each barrel, although how the animals could smell anything over the dockside odors of diesel fuel and the ammoniated steam of refrigeration plants was hard to understand.

In the morning Arkady was the first man into the Seamen’s Hall, where a clerk admitted that the
Polar Star
was still in port and still needed a worker on the factory line. He took his work pass behind a steel door to be stamped by the Maritime Section of the KGB. On the desk were two black phones for local offices and a direct red phone to Moscow. Arkady was surprised because for coastal fishing there were no such precautions. The black phones were no danger, he felt, unless they called Sakhalin. If anyone bothered to check his name on the red phone, this would be as far as he got.

“There are Americans,” warned the KGB captain in charge.

“What?” Arkady had been watching the phones.

“There are Americans on the boat. Just be natural, friendly but not overfriendly. Better to say nothing at all, in fact.” He stamped the work pass without even reading the name on it. “I’m not necessarily saying hide.”

But isn’t this what Arkady did, hide? First in the deep faraway of the psycho ward. Then, after Pribluda revived
him, in Siberia and on the ship, carrying on inert and semidead?

Now, asleep in his narrow bunk, he asked himself,
Wouldn’t it be good to be alive again?

Zina Patiashvili had swum back. Maybe he could, too.

10
In the morning, showered and shaved, Arkady took the long walk to the
Polar Star
’s white wheelhouse and the cabin of the fleet electrical engineer for advice.

“You’re lucky,” Anton Hess said. “You caught me between going off duty and coming on. I was just making coffee.”

His accommodations were no larger than a crew cabin, except that they were for one man rather than four, leaving room for a desk and a wall map that appeared to show every Soviet fishing fleet in the North Pacific. On a rubber pad on the desk was, instead of a samovar, a coffee maker, the sort that might grace a Moscow apartment.

Hess had the sort of look Arkady had once seen on submariners returning from a polar voyage. Eyes red and
sprung, step shuffling and uncertain. The little man’s hair was stiff and wild, as if attacked by a cat, and his sweater reeked of pipe tobacco. The coffee dripped in greasy black drops. He poured out two mugs, added a generous amount from a cognac bottle, and gave a mug to Arkady. “Confusion to the French,” he said.

“Why not?” Arkady agreed.

The coffee delivered a kick to his heart, which started beating anxiously. Hess sighed and allowed himself to sink in slow motion into a chair, from where his eyes fixed wearily across the room on a waist-high vertical glass tube with a stand and cord for the radiation of ultraviolet rays. Sunlight. Vitamin D. During winter in Siberia they would ring children around tubes like this.

Hess’s pale face smiled. “My wife insisted I bring it. I think she wants to believe I’m in the South Pacific. Good tea?”

Tea for coffee, French for Americans. Hess had an ease for misleading that struck Arkady as appropriate.

There was no such thing as a fleet electrical engineer; it was a title of convenience that allowed an officer of the KGB or of naval intelligence to move from ship to ship. The question was which of these agencies the amiable Anton Hess belonged to. The best indicator was Volovoi, who was the political officer and who regarded Hess with both respect and animosity. Also, these days the KGB tended to be a strictly Russian club, where a name like Hess was a liability. The navy tended to promote competence, with the exception of Jews.

On the map Alaska yearned toward Siberia. Or was it the other way around? Either way, Soviet trawlers dotted the sea from Kamchatka, across the island arc of the Aleutians and down to Oregon. Arkady hadn’t appreciated before how well the American coast was covered. Of course, in Soviet-American joint ventures Soviet trawlers functioned as processors; each fleet shared its company of American catcher boats. Only a great factory
ship like the
Polar Star
could operate independently with its own family of American boats. The red dot for the
Polar Star
was about two days north of Dutch Harbor and nowhere near other fleets.

“Comrade Hess, I apologize for bothering you.”

Hess shook his head, exhausted but indulgent. “Not at all. Whatever I can do.”

“Very well,” Arkady said. “Let’s say that Zina Patiashvili did not accidentally stab, beat and throw herself overboard.”

“You’ve changed your mind.” Hess was delighted.

“And let’s say we investigate. Not a real investigation with detectives and laboratories, but with the meager resources we have on hand.”