the Seventh Day Adventists. There are some who have corruptly manipulated the production of state factories for their own personal gain, there are some who have covertly passed on the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And there are some who are traitors. They are all criminals, those who live in the barracks huts of the camps, and those who will join them when the train reaches the platforms of Barashevo.
It had been a luxury, the journey from Moscow to Pot'ma., Only three to share a compartment. And a luxury, too, had been the cell on the second floor of the hospital block at Vladimir. And luxuries are temporary.
There were fifteen of them in the compartment, crammed and squashed for three hours since their loading from the Transit gaol. Difficult to move, hideous to breathe in the shuttered carriage. The tight smell of men who have not washed their bodies or known clean clothes. All together, elbows in ribs, knees in calves, packed tight and swaying with the motion of the train as it struggled north.
When he had woken from a faint sleep on the ice cold floor of the cell, Holly had known that the lice had found him. Creeping little bastards in the hair of his head and his stomach, and he had gouged with his fingernails at the flesh under his clothes. The men who sat or lay near to him on the floor had watched with a curiosity that a man who was held in the Transit gaol at Pot'ma should concern himself with such a small matter as the pin-sharp biting of the louse. Only an old man with his white hair cropped short and worn as a Jew's cap had spoken to Holly with the wry grin of experience at his mouth. They were nothing, the lice at Pot'ma, the old man said. At the Transit at Alma-Ata there were bugs that saturated the walls of the holding cells, red and fast with their crawl, with a bite like scissors. And at the Transit at Novosibirsk there were rats, great grey pigs, a tail as thick as your little finger, and the men in the holding cells slept in a laager in the centre of the floor and changed the watch in the dark hours so that always some men guarded the edge of their perimeter. So, what were a few lice? Holly had talked with the old man and realized only later that when he spoke all those who were within earshot had listened and tried to learn about him from his words. He was the outsider, he came from beyond the corrals of the big camp, from beyond the wire of the little camp. Though he spoke in Russian, the language that his parents had given him, he was from without the walls that bounded their experience. They examined him with their eyes and ears. They might have wished to touch him. They were without hostility and without friendship. They were interested in an object to which they had not before been exposed.
There had been eighty men in the cell trying to sleep away the cold of the night.
There had been fifteen men in the compartment of the train trying to endure the rattling movement on the rails.
And the train had stopped. They heard the barking of the dogs, the shouting of orders, and they waited because that is the lot of prisoners.
For how long, Holly? For fourteen years.
In the cell at Pot'ma Transit the old man had kissed him, the door was opened, the guards were calling names. Holly and the majority were to travel, the old man waited for another transport to another destination. He had kissed Holly, wetly on each cheek, and he had not cared who had seen him, and he had whispered in Holly's ear. In the Dubrovlag, he had said, pity for others is always possible, but self-pity is never possible. He had pulled Holly's ear then and crackled a laugh, and Holly had slapped his shoulder in a kind of gratitude.
The wind swept aside the foetid air of the compartment as the door was unbolted. The guards who waited below them stamped their feet, beat down the snow beneath their boots.
Some from the carriage could jump down and then slither into the lines they must form. Some must be helped.
Beyond the platform stood the camp. An outer gate was open, an inner gate was closed. They stood in three rows of five, to be counted and then marched forward. On the ice one man fell and was scooped back to his feet by those who were behind him. Not really a march, not even a brisk tramp, but a shuffling movement forward towards the opened gate.' Holly saw the high wooden fence of vertical overlapping boards and above it the rise of steep angled roofs and in the corners were watch-towers built up on stilts with the platform reached by open ladder. They kept the dogs close to the prisoners.
Put on a show, Holly…
He walked with his back straight and his shoulders firm.
And the other men saw him, and some would have sniggered at the fall that would follow such arrogance, and a few would have suffered in the knowledge that defiance brings only pain and punishment, and for one or two or three the young man who ambled erect in the first rank was a donor of comfort.
It was not the proper way of things that one man should walk as if with indifference towards the opened gates of Camp 3 at Barashevo, and the guards watched him, and the dogs eyed him. Self-pity is never possible; do not forget that, Holly. Sejf-pity is unacceptable.
The gates were pushed shut behind them. A beam cracked down into its sockets. More shouting, more orders. To Holly's right, lights glowed from the warmth of the Administration block where the windows were misted and the scent of coal smoke billowed from a brick chimney. The inner gates opened. In front of him Holly could see the expanse of the snow-draped camp. He had reached the Correctional Labour Colony in the Dubrovlag with the designated administrative title of ZhKh 385/3/1. He had arrived at Camp 3, Zone 1 (Strict Regime). He thought it was a Sunday, the eighth day after the death of a man in the Coronary Care unit of the Hammersmith Hospital.
The inner gate closed behind the new intake of prisoners.
From the window of the Administration block overlooking the open ground of the camp close to the inner gates, the Major watched as the prisoners were again lined in fives and counted, a necessary formality because this marked their passing from the charge of the M V D transport guard into the hands of the M V D Correctional Labour Detachment.
He was a short man, barrel-built, and his physique was suited to the paratroop unit he had been a part of before his transfer from the active service troops of the Red Army, to the mind-twisting boredom of Ministry of the Interior camp supervision. Paratroops were the elite while those seconded to M VD work were the latrine cleaners of the armed forces.
But a duty was a duty, a posting could not be evaded by a Major who had been turned down for promotion to Colonel. He would serve out his uniformed days as Commandant of Camp 3, Zone i.
The paratroop regiment that he had left eighteen months before was now bivouacked in a concrete and brick school house on the outskirts of Jalalabad and dominated the low ground of an Afghan valley. This was where his heart lay, where the helicopters waited to lift men into mountain combat, and the radio chattered the co-ordinates for Ilyushin strikes. He was an activist, with bluff red cheeks under his stunted pig eyes to prove his love of the outdoor life. Zone i was in its way as much of a prison for the Commandant as for the eight hundred men to whom he played a vague mutation of God and Commissar. Far from his paratroops, far from their mortars and machine- guns and rocket-launchers, far from their special camaraderie, he worried like a dog with freshly stolen meat over the in-cessant and aching problems of the camp's discipline and routine.
The little parade that he witnessed through the steamed window of the Administration block was a wound to him.
The conscript troops of the MVD could not entirely be blamed for the ill fit of their uniforms, for their slouched shoulders, for their callow and chilled faces. They were not the cream or they would not have found their way to this worthless place. Scum in uniform… he yearned for a parade ground of his former troops, for the whip crack of their rifle drill, the unison stamping of their marching boots.
And the prisoners were worse, the worst. No feet picked up, just a slovenly shuffle in the snow… as if they knew that their scraping passage festered in the mind of the Major. But he tried. He strove through all his waking hours to impose a smartness and snap on Camp 3, Zone 1, that he knew had never been present before, and that during the night hours when he was alone he doubted he would ever achieve.
He was Major Vasily Kypov, thirty-three years of service behind him, and three more to endure before the blessed release of retirement.
A young man stood a pace behind him, young enough to have been his son, and his breath played the sweet stale smell of the cigarette smoker's mouth across the Major's nostrils. The same uniform, but without the silver wings and blue tabs instead of red. A Captain in KGB he might be, the power in the kingdom of Zone 1, feared by the superior in rank and the inferior in fortune, but the Major had demanded that inside the Administration block in the mornings he should wear his uniform. Such were the victories available to the Commandant in his skirmishes with his Political Officer.
The Captain smoked imported Marlboro cigarettes. They were sent to him in packages of ten cartons from
