forage cap whose peak was pulled down over her eyes. An elf and an urchin, she had seen Holly. He stared back at her. Two people on opposite platforms and when the trains come they will go their different ways and not meet again. And the railway track that divided them was lines of men in uniform who cradled machine-pistols, who held tight to dragging dogs.
He saw a name printed across the right side of her tunic.
He knew her only as Morozova. Why one girl in a crowd?
Why one girl who possessed only a hidden face and a printed name?
Poshekhonov was at Holly's side, chuckling from the side of his mouth.
'Hard for you young bastards… old buggers like me, we've forgotten what it's like. Not that thinking about it helps. Tie a knot, boy, that's the best.'
He remembered her. Standing beside the rails at the junction at Pot'ma she had held the baby of an exhausted mother, and she had smiled at him. He could not see if she smiled now that her mouth was hidden by her scarf.
'Don't look at those beasts,' Poshekhonov said. 'That's the slime at the bottom of the can. They'd eat a man… You don't believe me? I tell you, I'd rather go without than have that lot screw me. They're shit, in Zone 4 they're not women as we'd know them, just shit.'
The column moved on. Holly surprised himself, he turned his head to watch the women cross the path. He thought he saw the girl again, but he could not be sure.
The gate stood in front of them. The girl was gone from his mind, swept aside by the burned-out office at the end of the Administration block. They had done quite a good job, Holly could see that, in containing the fire. Only the Commandant's room was wrecked, gutted. He told himself that the office would have been an addition, built onto the end of what had before been an exterior wall of brick and therefore powerful enough to hold back the spread of the flames.
'You know, Holly, there was a man here once who told me an extraordinary thing about women…' Poshekhonov babbled as a stream runs over rocks.'… he said that a girl he knew once used to do it while in a handstand position.
Can you believe that, Holly? I never quite knew whether to believe him. Standing on her hands with her back against the wall, and she wanted him to run at her. I could never believe that… Shit, I've wanted to…'
Holly saw the blackened uniforms of the guards as they moved amongst the debris of the office that they had retrieved. Some still threw buckets of snow into the small flames that lived. There was the rich stench of charred wood, and the python hiss of water on embers. Dark on the snow, beneath the windows, were items of furniture and crumpled photograph frames and scattered wisps of paper.
He wondered whether he were pleased, excited, whether he was proud.
Poshekhonov tugged at Holly's arm, demanded further attention.
'I never knew whether I should believe that man… but, you know, he gave me great pleasure. He implanted the thought in me, the thought of this woman with her handstand. She changes for me each day – she is blonde and she is dark, young and mature, fat and thin – it doesn't matter.
Extraordinary pleasure.'
'Does the sight of the Commandant's hut flattened, busted, does that give you pleasure?' Holly asked.
They stood waiting their turn to go through the gate.
Ranks of five and the counting again, and the calling of names, and across the compound the beckoning presence of the low-built Kitchen.
'Why should that give me pleasure?'
'Because at worst they are hurt, at best they are inconvenienced.'
'And if they are hurt, does that help me? Does that shorten my sentence? Does it soften my mattress…'
'I don't know.'
Holly was withdrawn, private. He felt no call to share the small purseful of glory. To his left three guards had taken the strain on a rope that ran tight and stretched to the building. He heard the command, he heard the men's feet slither in the snow as they pulled. With a shriek the last beams of the roof collapsed and pitched down.
'Kypov's office is nothing. Now the handstand, that's different. I could kiss the man who told me that, two years of happiness he's given me. All I wish is that I could find out whether it's possible.'
Holly smiled drily. 'Anything is possible if you have the will.'
'I have the will, I'm short of the bloody woman… '
Poshekhonov turned to Holly to have the satisfaction of seeing his joke shared. Holly no longer looked at him, he stared back at the stunted ruin that had been the office of the Commandant.
That morning Captain Yuri Rudakov had taken his wife to the shops at Pot'ma.
By the standards of the Dubrovlag she had a nice home, a two-bedroomed bungalow on the outer edge of the village.
With no children, two bedrooms was a privilege. Two bedrooms and the best furniture that could be made in the Factory. But she hated this place. Hated it for its bleak isolation and petty preoccupation with the work of fences and confinement. She admitted to no friends amongst the small clutch of camp officers' wives at Barashevo. She had no companion in this snow wilderness with its circles of wire. She had been brought up in the sophistication of inner Moscow, and she had travelled to European Germany. She was an outsider and feared by the wives of the other officers of Camp 3 because her husband was KGB and because his reports could break and crush the career of any man, however senior. She urged on the days until the chance of their transfer away, she wrote waspy letters to her mother three times a week, and whenever possible she badgered her Yuri to take her to the shops at Pot'ma.
They were little enough, those shops. But to be in Pot'ma, to walk along Leninsky Prospekt, that was bliss. And when she went to Pot'ma she had the whole and unchipped attention of her man, and when he drove their car and walked with her in front of the shops he had no files, no papers. It was a victory for her each time that she wrested him away from his desk and his teleprinter and his uniform.
The life of the camp consumed their married life, oppressed her from her hour of waking until the time she fell asleep.
And each third Sunday of the month was the evening that she detested, when she must take the political studies lecture for Camp 3, Zone 1. It was her duty, Yuri had said. She had trained as a teacher, and was the daughter of a Colonel of KGB and a probationer member of the Party, it was her duty to participate in the re- education of prisoners. And they stank, stank like cattle carcases outside an abattoir.
And they had eyes, bright and pricking eyes that shredded her clothes and burrowed to the soft underwear she had purchased in the Centrum store on Magdeburg's Karl-Marx-Strasse. There were some who were clever, some who were stupid, and none who cared for the lecture that would take her forty-five minutes to read and three evenings to prepare. Yuri had said it was her duty. At times she believed she could make her hard man into a piece of putty, but not when he spoke of duty. Duty was his life. Duty was the bastard world of the Dubrovlag.
Elena Rudakov sat beside her husband, and on the back seat of the car, in plastic bags, was a new nightdress of flannelette and two shirts for Yuri to wear at home and two kilos of turnips from the open market and a small rug to go in front of the stove in their living-room. He had even been attentive, Yuri, and that was rare. He had talked of a new prisoner – too much to hope that he would speak of anything other than the camp – a prisoner who was an Englishman. Guarded talk, because she was never fully in his confidence, but he had spoken of a prisoner who was special and different. He drove slowly because the rough road was always treacherous in winter and insufficiently sanded, but the inside of the car was warm and the sky alive in blue beyond the windows.
She was almost happy, almost at peace, until they saw, together, the high column of the black smoke.
She was left to take the car home. The spell was broken, the pool was rippled from its serenity by the way he snapped instructions to her and then ran to the Administration block. She could have kicked a dog. He had not kissed her or looked back, just sprinted across the snow.
The sight was a hammer blow to Yuri Rudakov.
The end of the Administration block was a grotesque mess.
Only the smoke now, because the flames had been suffocated. Smoke that rippled and soared.
He saw Kypov, a comedy clown with a soot-smeared face and the back of his uniform singed and brown from collar to knee-boot. There were no thoughts in his mind, no precon-ceptions, only the demand for information.
Empty words. 'What happened?'
