As he walked away from Adimov and towards Hut z, Holly slapped his body with his arms, trying to beat some warmth into his skin. Just once he looked back, and then not at the man that he had left but at the small, shadowed space beneath the watch-tower. Above the shadowed space was a watch-tower and a guard and a machine-gun. A machine-gun, and the targets would be at point-blank range. Nowhere else, Holly, nowhere else. He slammed the door of the hut behind him and felt the heat waft across him, and there was a shudder in his breath. Ignoring the questioning glance of Feldstein, he climbed onto his mattress and turned to the wall.
Long after the lights had been switched off, and the warmth of the stove had waned, the hut was a chilled and dark place.
The old ones said that it was always coldest in Mordovia when the winter was close to running its course. A hundred men lay on their mattresses in Hut 2, and those that were lucky had found sleep, and all were wrapped tight in their blankets and had discarded only their boots for the night hours.
Anatoly Feldstein had not found sleep.
It was the hunger that made it hardest to drift into the dream world that was an escape. The hunger caught at his stomach. The hunger had stripped the flesh from his bones and those bones made him believe that he lay on a bed of stones rather than a mattress of waste straw.. The bones gouged into his body, pressed on his organs and nerves. And when he was exhausted, the bitterness welled in him, and sleep was even harder to achieve.
Above him Adimov was asleep. Regular, grunted waves of breathing. He'd be counting, his mind playing at a cash-register… who owed him money, who owed him tobacco, who owed him food… The criminals could always sleep…
That was the cruelty of the Dubrovlag, to leave a man such as himself in the company of these animals. Pig- headed, imbecile criminals who were the fodder on which the camps fed. They could have moved Feldstein, could have sent him to Perm where they had gathered the dissidents.
Not that the regime at Perm would be different to Barashevo
… same stinking food, same stinking huts, same stinking regime. .. but he would have been with friends. The people at Perm were all together. Chained in a common purpose, weren'tthey? Camp 35 and Camp 36 and Camp 37 were the homes of the people that Feldstein yearned to be with, the camps of Perm where the Article 72. men rotted their lives away. Article 72 – Especially Dangerous Crimes against the State – was the net that pulled in the hard bedrock of the • dissidents, that consigned them to Perm that lay 400 kilometres to the east of the Dubrovlag. Almost an insult, for a dissident not to be imprisoned at Perm. They were the elite, and Anatoly Feldstein was committed to a camp of criminals.
He thought of the men in the hut. Adimov was a thug, Poshekhonov was a fraud, Chernayev was a thief, Byrkin was a fool, Mamarev was an informer. Those were Anatoly Feldstein's companions. That was the knife-edge of real cruelty.
And there was Michael Holly.
Holly should have been the friend of Feldstein.
Holly should have been different to the herd. Holly who tossed on the bed close to him and sometimes cursed in the tantalizing unknown of a foreign language. Holly should have been the colleague of a political activist. Holly knew the meaning of freedom, had grown to manhood in its company.
Yet Holly barely acknowledged the existence of Anatoly Feldstein – Feldstein the dissident, the Prisoner of Conscience, the victim of the abuse of Human Rights.
Could Holly ever know what it took in courage to be an opponent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Could he know what it meant to breed the fear that this day or this month the lift would come? The lift and then the interrogation, the interrogation and then the imprisonment?
Could Holly know what it meant to fight from within?
There were few enough allies. Forget the students at the University and the trainees at the laboratory. Don't look for a pillar from your mother and father and grandmother, from your brothers and sisters.
Holly should have known, Holly had lived in liberty.
Feldstein rolled on his mattress, listened to the night sounds of the hut. He heard the scrape of the springs of Holly's bed.
'Holly… you are awake?' A whisper, a pleading for contact.
'I'm awake.'
'Sometimes we are too tired to sleep.'
'You can't sleep if somebody talks to you.'
A hesitation. 'I'm sorry, Holly…'
'I didn't mean that, Feldstein… I take it back.'
'When you came here, to Russia, when you did whatever you had to, did you think it might end in a place such as this?'
'No.'
There was a rough laugh from Holly.
'Did you know of such places as this?'
'Vaguely… I didn't have the names and the map references.'
'The people of Britain, they don't know about such places as Barashevo?'
'There are a few who tell them, not many who listen.'
'If you had known this place waited for you, would you have done what you did?'
'I don't know… Christ, Feldstein, it's halfway through the night…'
'You have to know that answer.'
'I have to sleep… I don't know.'
'All of us knew, everyone in my group. Can you understand that? We knew what faced us, we knew of this camp and a hundred other camps. We knew when we started…'
'Some day they'll strike you a medal.'
'Why will you not talk of this, Holly?'
'Because I want to sleep… damn you, Feldstein, because talk doesn't help. Talk wins nothing.'
'Only through talking can we win. Only that way do we succeed.'
'What has your talking won you?… Sakharov is exiled, Shcharansky and Orlov in camps, Bukovsky and Kuznetsov booted out. Bloody marvellous talkers all of them. Talked their bloody heads off, and won them nothing.'
'There is no other possibility, Holly.'
'Then you are doomed. For fifteen years you've been pushing round paper, collecting fifty people to stand in Pushkin Square, burying the White House in cables. You've filled the camps again, Feldstein, and nobody cares. million people go to work each morning in London and they're thinking of the bird next to them, whether they can afford a Music Centre, how much it's going to cost to get to Spain in the summer. They couldn't give a damn about you
… nor about me, nor about anyone else who's plastered in flea-bites and sores and working his arse off in Mordovia.'
'We knew when we started on our journey that it would bring us here.'
'What do you want of me, Feldstein?'
'We chose the weapon against them that hurts them most, we took the weapon of legality. We demanded the rights that are owed to us through the Constitution.'
'Feldstein… Christ, I admire you. I admire all your colleagues. You are all bloody marvellous. What I am saying… Christ, I'm tired… I'm saying you're not winning anything. When they put you in here and they throw the bloody key away, then you're beaten. Nobody listens to the shout of Anatoly Feldstein. You can lift the bloody roof, and nobody hears you. That's not winning…'
'When we have a hunger strike… '
'Then they save on the food. They don't give a shit.'
'What is your way, Michael Holly?'
'I don't know.' A quaver of evasion.
'You have a different way to our way.' The glint of sarcasm.
'I don't k n o w… but if you fight to win, then you use the weapons that bring victory…'
'And non-violence is not such a weapon?'
