'Tell me of another time that you laughed.'
'There were the underpants… next to our compound is the women's camp and past that is the small camp for men, Camp 3, Zone 5. The underpants were there… This man had a tenner, he didn't give a shit for them. He found a man in the hut who had just had a visit and his wife had brought new, clean pants, white pants. The tenner got the pants -1 don't know how, not for gold would I give up clean pants – and he made a flag of them, and then he painted on the symbol of the United Nations, he smuggled some blue paint out of the workshop. He was an intellectual, shit knows how he knew the symbol. It was in December, the tenner said it was the Human Rights Day set aside by the United Nations, and he flew his flag from the roof of his hut. What was funny was that they didn't know what to do. The warders wanted to rip down the flag, but he said that was treason because the government of the Soviet Union observed Human Rights Day, because the government of the Soviet Union was a member of the United Nations. The warders had to send for the officers, the officers sent for the Commandant, and the flag flew all morning… in the afternoon they pulled it down. The flag, the pants, was trimmed in black ribbon, they didn't know why. It was very funny, really.'
'And again you won nothing.'
'There is no victory. Not even for the politicals, for the intellectuals. Those with the brains don't win. They still rot in Perm.'
'Tell me.'
They were underneath the watch-tower again and this time the guard leaned through his window as he peered down at the two men beneath him whose shoulders wore a snow mantle and whose heads were close as lovers'.
'The politicals went on hunger strike at Perm in '74 and
'76… this is only what I heard. They said they were prisoners of conscience and they shouldn't be made to work. They said that the heaviest work was given to them.
The strike started at Camp 35, it spread to 36 and 37. It lasted a month and then they sent a man from Moscow to negotiate. The prisoners were given everything they demanded, they started to eat again. So what happened? The leaders were transferred to Vladimir, to Chistopol. They took back what they had given, nibbled it back. They didn't even have anything to laugh about, they had nothing.'
'Perhaps some pride,' Holly said thoughtfully.
'Perm lives on. And after some man has put shit in the water-mains, our camp will live on.'
The bell sounded. The call for all prisoners to be in their huts. In a few minutes, after the hut lights had been doused, the warders would enter the gate in pairs, and the dogs would run loose and sniff under the stilted huts before being called to heel.
'Thank you for your time, Chernayev.'
A hoarseness captured Chernayev's voice. They were near to the door of Hut z. The light from a window brimmed onto their faces. The snow was matted across their clothes. An old thief who was hoarse and frightened. 'Don't play with them, Holly. Don't think they are fools. Be careful, all the time be careful…'
Holly saw there were tears running on Chernayev's cheeks.
The arrival close to midnight in four jeeps of the interrogators from KGB was a bitter pill to Yuri Rudakov. They came with the arrogance of an outside elite, loud-voiced and heavy-booted in the corridors of the Administration block.
Of course, he himself could not have tooth-picked through the stories of eight hundred men. Of course, he had known that an investigation on this scale must be boosted by fresh faces and fresh minds. But the manner of their coming had wounded him. A dozen men who could be spared from their own camps and from headquarters at Yavas, because there they had achieved the quiet life that enabled them to be sent to ZhKh 385/3/1. He had believed he had the quiet life until the office of the Commandant had burned, until the water of his garrison had been fouled. In their presence he had survived their cool politeness, yet he had read in the cold of their faces the contempt that they felt for a Political Officer who must call in help to suppress a spreading anarchy.
In the privacy of his office, deep in self-pity, he stared at the uncurtained window, at the lights and the wire and the darkened huts.
The Superintendent of Public Health had suggested that the faeces were introduced to the pipe two nights before the obvious outbreak of the dysentery epidemic. The red band men, Internal Order, had provided him with the lists of those whom they thought they remembered seeing outside the huts on that evening. Not many names – some worked in the Library, some had cleaning duty in the Kitchen, some who walked on the perimeter path. No prisoner was allowed into a hut other than his own. There were few places for them to go after darkness, few names on the lists…
Some who had walked on the perimeter path… Holly, Michael Holly… Internal Order said he had been out that night… and that evening before the arrival of the KGB interrogators he himself had seen Holly before the bell…
Holly who circled the perimeter, a tiger in a cage. He wouldn't have known of the water-mains, wouldn't have known the routing of the pipes, and wouldn't have known the drill for the filling of the coal buckets for the Administration. But in the morning twelve new men would be siphoning the prisoners into groups for interrogation, hard interrogation with the fist and rubber truncheon. Rudakov thought of the hours that he had invested in Michael Holly, thought of the prize he could win himself if he was able to unlock the loyalties of Michael Holly.
The light blazed down from the ceiling, and the central heating pipes were tepid behind him, and the arid lists of names littered his table. The small, bitter hours for Yuri Rudakov.
He said aloud, 'No way any of those bastards get their hands on Holly, not on my Holly.'
His words bounced back from the walls, and from the photograph of Comrade Andropov and from the reproduction print of Lenin and from the filled ashtray and from the unwashed coffee mug, bounced back and mocked the Captain of KGB.
Holly lay on his back on his bunk and listened to the recitation of the words. The words were spoken quietly, privately, by Anatoly Feldstein, as if from them he could draw a strength.
The hut was silent, free from movement and sound. Only the rhythm of the words that comforted the young Jew.
I will go out on the square
And into the city's ear
I will hammer a cry of despair…
This is me
Calling to truth and revolt
Willing no more to serve
I break your black tethers
Woven of lies…
'Who wrote that, Anatoly?'
'I didn't know you were awake…'
'Who wrote it?' it was written by Yuri Galanskov. He read it to a group in the Mayakovsky Square in Moscow. That was after Sinyavsky and Daniel were sentenced. They gave him seven years. He was at Camp 17, it's ten kilometres from here.' it's beautiful, beautiful and brave.'
'They murdered him. He had an ulcer. They told his mother that he wasn't ill, just 'a hooligan who shirked his work', that's what they called him. The ulcer burst, he developed peritonitis. They sent a doctor from Moscow, eventually, but too late. They murdered him.'
'Good night, Anatoly.'
Holly turned his back on Feldstein, lay on his side, pulled his blanket over his head, tried again to sleep.
Chapter 10
In the night a guard died at the Central Hospital.
Nineteen years old. A swarthy boy before the sickness found him. A conscript from a village of fishermen near the Black Sea's city of Sukhumi. A soldier of the M V D killed by a perforation of the intestine and severe haemorrhage from the gut.
