hiding behind us. We owe nothing to the bastard that killed a guard who hadn't harmed him.'
Poshekhonov who had been a fraud said, 'The man who did this, he has destroyed Kypov, he has ruined Rudakov.
Perhaps not finally, but near to it. They have trouble in their camp, and what other camp has trouble? They have to call for more troops, for interrogators from outside. Now Moscow knows that this camp has trouble and they will ask why, why this camp alone? Did you see Kypov, like a bloody savage this morning? One man has beaten him. You could almost feel sorry for the pig.'
Adimov who was a killer said, 'It is not a man from Hut 2.
I know when a mouse farts in Hut 2. Huts 3 and 4 are closest to the pit, he'll have come from them… I had a letter taken out that night, a little creep from the perimeter guard, I've not seen him again. He'll have the shits, he'll be in the hospital… their man's not from our hut.'
Feldstein who considered himself the political prisoner said, 'I cannot support such an action as this. The boy who died was as oppressed as we are. All the conscripts are ignorant and captive. If we strike at them with violence then we only justify the repression tactics of the Politburo, of the fascists of the monolith. It will only be by non-violence that we win anything, by passive resistance. To attack them like this is to be as crude and vulgar as they are.'.
Chernayev who had not been a thief for seventeen years said, 'They can do nothing to us. One only they can shoot
… perhaps he would have died of pneumonia, or coronary exhaustion, perhaps anyway he would have run for the wire
… They can't do anything. But the man who killed the guard, I hope that man knows why the guard had to die.
Unless he knows why, then what he did was wasted.'
The voices around Michael Holly.
In the second rank two men fell, simultaneously, as if by signal. They were pulled back to their feet by the zeks of the same line. Blue, blood-drained faces, fingers that could not move, feet that could not be felt.
An old man screamed. A young man sobbed without shame. The snow fell on the compound.
Kypov paced alone around his prisoners.
The first twelve came back and one bled from the nose and another from the lip and a third was helped by others.
Another twelve were called, and the snow fell. Another twelve returned, and the snow fell. Another twelve were called…
No bell for lunch, no call for the Kitchen queue, no smoke from the iron stack on the Kitchen roof.
The guards shivered and their dogs moaned.
Holly stood straight, tried not to twist his face away from the snow flurries that were channelled between the bodies and over the shoulders of the men in front of him.
Why, Holly?
What's the justification, Holly? Eight hundred men lined in ranks in the snow, and the temperature sliding, and the snow settling, and the Kitchen idle. Why, Holly?
Because it's there…
There had once been a cartoon that he had seen in a London evening newspaper. A mountain of bodies, Asian and Caucasian and dead that were the casualties of the battle for South Vietnam's Khe Sanh, and on one side of the mountain was LBJ and on the other was Ho, and the caption read 'Because It's There'.
Everyone says you should fight them. Fight against a wrong, fight against an evil, fight against an injustice.
Everyone says that, until they are confronted themselves with wrong and evil and injustice. Different when you face it yourself… And because Holly fought, then Byrkin and Mamarev and Poshekhonov and Adimov and Feldstein and Chernayev stood in the snow and shivered and were cold to the marrow and their bellies scraped in hunger like a shingle' sea shore.
You have an arrogance, Michael Holly.
Perhaps.
You have a conceit when you put these poor bastards to the agony of a day frozen in line in the snow.
Perhaps.
And one man will die, Holly. Perhaps you… perhaps some man that you know. Perhaps some grey creature from another hut whose life has never crossed yours. Will you cry for him, Holly? Will you, when he goes to the bullet in the yard of the Central Investigation Prison at Yavas?
God… God, I don't know.
When you made the bomb to go with the coal, when you forced the shit into the water-mains pipe leading to the barracks, did you know of this?
No… No… Of course I didn't bloody know. How could I have known?
A man in his rank crumpled and slithered to the ground, and his companions pulled him back to his feet and tried to chafe his legs and cheeks and hands, and then Holly knew weakness, felt his knees cave, his strength slide.
He fought a war with proxy weapons. He used the hand-gun of the men of the compound, and he hadn't asked them, he hadn't won them to his flag.
A man is a better man if he fights. . You believe that, Holly?
I believe t h a t… I think I believe that. Anything is better than just surviving. And if you fight then some will be hurt, that is the way of fighting, and some will know why and some won't. And this is an evil place, this place should be destroyed. Even if another place rises afterwards, it should still be fought against.
Will you believe that, Holly, when they take a man to the yard at Yavas?
He watched Kypov striding his own perimeter, a short round figure made grotesque by the thickness and length of his greatcoat, made silly by the full wide cap.
Pray God I have the strength, to believe that.
In mid-afternoon the men who had not been questioned were sent back to their huts.
Internal Order knew the reason. The trusties reported that the interrogators had complained that the men who were being brought to them were too cold to talk, that their minds were as numbed as their feet and fingers.
Like rats after food the zeks struggled to get close to the central stove of the hut and the snow melted from their clothes and boots, puddling the floor. Beside the door Holly had scraped the snow from his tunic and trousers. Now he sat on his bunk, dangling his legs and listened to the skirmish of talk around the stove.
Feldstein came to his own bunk and shook his head with puzzlement.
'You know, Holly, there is a pride among the zeks tonight. You would expect it of the politicals, but not from the zeks… Nobody screamed at Kypov for deliverance.
There was no surrender out there. That was the strength of non-violence. Just standing there, dumb, and staring them out, that was incredible. I didn't think the zeks could behave like that.'
'And that matters?'
'Of course that matters. It shows them that we are people, not numbers. The more they believe we are people, then the more they will show respect towards us. Eight hundred numbers are simply an administrative question for them, eight hundred people is something else.'
'But they must find one to shoot.'
'I had forgotten… ' Feldstein spoke with a sharp sadness.
He flopped down onto his mattress.
From the door of the hut the names were called.
Those that came back said the interrogators were losing heart, were bored with battering at the silence wall. The questioning was sluggish, ill-informed, they said.
The dozen from Hut 2 came to the Administration block and the long internal corridor. Hanging out from each door was a KGB man, whores in a brothel and touting for a customer. Holly saw that their tunic collars were unfastened, that all pretence of smartness was abandoned. He wondered whether they would hit him… how he would respond if they did. He had never been hit in his life, least of all by a man with a rubber truncheon. They had
