'Where the hell have you been?' Kypov shouted at him across the few metres that separated them, and the breath spouted white from the Major's mouth. 'Why were you not here?'
'I asked what happened.' Rudakov said. He despised these army men, in particular those who had lost their units in exchange for secondment to M V D camp detachments.
'You should have been here.'
'Will you tell me what happened or not… Major Kypov?'
They were all the same, all noise and sparrow fart, and if the man only knew the idiot scene he c u t…
'My fire exploded.'
The fight had fled the Major. His hands hung simply by his trouser pockets, ungloved, and Rudakov could see that they trembled.
'More.'
'The fire had been lit before I came to the office. My orderly put more coal on for me. After he had gone I was standing in front of the fire, my back to it. There was a sort of an explosion, not very loud, the flames took my back. I was alight. My orderly had to roll me on the floor. He pulled me out, he saved my life.'
'What have you lost?' i could have lost my life…' and the indignation was rich again in the Major's voice.
'What have you lost in the fire?'
'The administration files that I kept, some of the convicts' files.'
'They were not in the safe?'
'You have seen my safe. It could not hold half the papers that were in my cupboard.'
The men who worked around the building acknowledged a secret circle that surrounded their camp Commandant and their camp KGB officer. None broke into the circle. They threaded a wide path round them.
'Then you will have to inform Moscow.'
'And what are you going to do?'
'Try to find out why, to find how, to find who. That is what I am going to do, Comrade Commandant. And you, you should get to your quarters, and get out of those clothes.
The Commandant should not be an object of ridicule to his prisoners.'
There was a fleck of amusement at the corner of Captain Rudakov's mouth. He considered whether Major Kypov's commendations, so preciously framed, had perished. He walked to his own office. An accident or an attack, he wondered, and stamped the snow from his walking shoes on the steps of the main Administration doorway.
The line edged forward towards the food hatch.
Holly heard only occasional talk about the burned office because the job of the men around him was to get the food inside their guts, get the warmth into their throats.
A line creeping forward, and a rabble of men leaving the hatch and hurrying for the first bench place they could find.
And hungry men are pliable men, hunger wins submission, hunger is the tool of Major Vasily Kypov, hunger is the whip of the Commandant of Camp 3, Zone 1. But Holly and eight hundred with him had a roof over their Kitchen, and there would be a roof over Hut 2 when the freezing night came.
Kypov had no roof, and the thought carried a first-found peace for Holly, lifted him from the line of men who straggled across the dirt-smeared floor boards. You did it well, Holly, bloody well.
Byrkin had been a Petty Officer in the Navy.
In the evenings in Hut 2. he had twice pulled Holly to a corner to tell him of his innocence.
Now he staggered towards Holly, making a path between the tables and benches and the backs of sitting men that flanked him on one side, and the waiting line on the other.
Byrkin would have been tall when he was in the Navy, but the camp had bent his back and plucked his hair from a smoothed scalp. His hands shake and his balance is cruelly uncertain, a fly wheel that has lost its rhythm.
Byrkin had twice found out Holly to tell him of the sailing of the frigate Storozhevoy from the naval harbour at Riga.
Mutiny by the men, and what could a Petty Officer do if the Ministry in Moscow determined that the sailors of the Storozhevoy should not be freed from their conscripted service after four years at sea, that they should serve another year, what could a Petty Officer do? Not Byrkin's fault that the mutiny disease had swept the cramped quarters of the lower decks. He had been locked in a cabin, a prisoner with the officers when the bombers came on a low-clouded November afternoon. Seven years before, and the memory still with him, bleeding him. A memory of imprisonment below the water line as the high explosive had silenced the engines of a fighting frigate, marooned its escape to Swedish waters. Fifty men dead before the turbines of a Krivak class frigate with a displacement of 3 800 tons were halted. And more to die before the firing squad, and few who did not wear the gold rings of the officers to escape the penalty of imprisonment. One unguarded remark by Byrkin, one remark that had been carried back by a man with innocence on his face to those who would judge Byrkin. What did the Ministry expect, how did they think the men would react?
What insensitivity from the Ministry! Ten years in the Dubrovlag for the private expression of a Petty Officer who was a captive in a cabin while the high explosive bombs rained on to the armour plate of the Storozhevoy.
They said in Hut 1 that he was mad. The zeks did not know of the bitter trial of the breakdown. Byrkin's balance was lost, and each step that he took was an agony of effort and fear.
Holly saw him, heard his shrieking wail as a shoulder lifted from the bench and caught square on the underneath of Byrkin's enamel soup bowl. The opaque yellow liquid floated high beside Byrkin's face then splashed on his tunic, onto the shoulder of the man who had nudged him, onto the boards of the floor. It was Byrkin who shouted. A howl of protest, of despair. The man who rose from the bench seemed to offer a grudging apology, but Byrkin would not have seen the gesture as he scrabbled on the floor for his slice of black bread. Holly looked into Byrkin's eyes witnessing the suffering. What price against that suffering was the pleasure that the Commandant had no roof to cover his office? Holly had felt pleasure, allowed it to cocoon him.
Where did that pleasure stand on the scale against the misery of a man in the Kitchen whose soup was spilled, whose bread was soggy from the floor's snow water?
Poshekhonov was beside Holly. Always Poshekhonov seemed to be close to him. , 'Only happens to someone like Byrkin. He's doomed, damned. Mark me, Englishman, he'll go to the wire.'
'He's sick,' said Holly. The tranquillity had gone from his face. He moved forward to close the gap again with the tunic back in front of him and his lips were dented white where the teeth had bitten at them.
'Sick? Of course he's sick. Sick like everybody. What do you expect, a nice neat psychiatric ward? He's better here, better with us than at the Sebsky… '
'I don't know of the Sebsky.'
'For one who intends to stay a long time with us, Englishman, you know little of us. In Moscow is Kropotkin Lane.
At Number 23 is the Sebsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. Ask Feldstein, our little revolutionary. He shits himself each day that they will send him there. Friend Byrkin would get robust treatment at the Sebsky. Even this place is better than some, Englishman.'
They were at the hatch. Soup in a bowl, hot water in a mug, bread on the tray.
'Will you sit with me, Englishman?'
There was a wintry smile on Holly's face.
'Find a place for two of us, I'll come to you.'
Holly took his tray and walked briskly back along the line of men who waited for their food. He saw ahead of him the bowed back of Byrkin, hunched head in hands with an empty bowl in front of him on the table. Holly's movement was very quick, sudden, and few would have seen the gesture. His soup bowl snaked from his tray, tipped, tilted, the liquid ran steaming to the bowl in front of Byrkin. And Holly was gone, moving to where a space waited for him beside Poshekhonov.
Adimov had seen. One of the few, but he had seen. He sat with a frown of puzzlement on his forehead, then turned back to join again the talk around him.
'Where's your soup?' Poshekhonov asked Holly as he sat down, squeezing himself over the bench. i had it on the way here – little enough of it.'
'You shouldn't do that. You get more goodness if you take it slowly. There was a man here once, he could take half an hour to drink a bowl of soup, big as an ox. Didn't matter if it was stone cold, still took it sip by
