sent as forced labourers to Germany; Mostovskoy could hear the women screaming as the train moved off. He himself had been locked into a small service compartment. His guard was quite polite, but whenever Mostovskoy asked a question, his face took on the expression of a deaf-mute. At the same time, it was clear that all his attention was focused on Mostovskoy. He was like an experienced zoo-keeper watching a box that housed a wild animal being transported by rail.
When the train entered Poland, Mostovskoy had been joined by a Polish bishop – a tall handsome man with grey hair and full, boyish lips. Immediately, with a marked accent, he had started telling Mostovskoy about the current executions of the Polish clergy. Mostovskoy had begun to abuse Catholicism and the Pope, and the bishop had fallen silent. From then on he had answered Mostovskoy's questions brusquely and in Polish. A few hours later, at Poznan, he had been taken off the train.
Mostovskoy had been taken directly to the camp, without visiting Berlin… Now it seemed that he'd been here for years, in this block for prisoners of special interest to the Gestapo. They were better-fed here, but their good life was that of guinea-pigs in a laboratory.
The orderly would call a man to the door; a friend would offer him some tobacco in exchange for a ration of bread and the man would return to his place on the bedboards, grinning with satisfaction. The orderly would then call another man who was telling a story – and the friend he'd been talking to would never hear how the story ended. The following day a kapo would walk up to his place on the boards and tell the orderly to collect his belongings. Someone else would then beg Keyze, the hut orderly, for permission to occupy the now-empty place.
Mostovskoy had even got used to the conversation here – a terrible mixture of the lists for the death camps, the gas ovens and the camp football teams: 'The Marsh team's the best – the bog soldiers. And Sick-bay's not bad. The Kitchen team's got some fast forwards. The Poles have got no defence at all…' He had grown equally accustomed to the countless rumours that spread through the camp: either about the invention of some new weapon or about rifts between the National Socialist leaders. These rumours were invariably both comforting and false – the opium of the camps.
4
Snow fell early in the morning and lay there till noon. The Russians felt a joy that was steeped in sorrow. Russia herself was breathing over them, spreading a mother's shawl beneath their poor exhausted feet. The barracks, with their white roofs, looked like the huts in a Russian village.
The orderly, a Spanish soldier called Andrea, came up to Mostovskoy and addressed him in broken French. He said that a clerk he knew had seen Mostovskoy's name on a paper, but his boss had taken the paper away before he'd had time to read it.
'My fate hangs on that bit of paper,' thought Mostovskoy. He was glad to find this thought left him so calm.
'But it doesn't matter,' murmured Andrea. 'We'll still be able to find out.'
'From the commandant?' asked Gardi, his huge black eyes shining in the half-light. 'Or from SS officer Liss?'
Mostovskoy was amazed at the difference between Gardi by day and Gardi by night. During the day he talked about the soup and the new arrivals, drove bargains with his neighbours and recalled the piquant, garlic-flavoured dishes of his homeland. The Russian soldiers all knew his favourite saying:
One evening the Soviet officers and commissars in the special block had been laughing at Gardi, joking about whether or not he had observed his vow of chastity. Gardi had listened unsmilingly to the jumbled fragments of French, German and Russian. Then he had begun to speak himself, and Mostovskoy had translated. In the name of their ideals the Russian revolutionaries had gone to penal servitude and the scaffold; why then should they doubt that for a religious ideal a man might renounce intimacy with women? After all, it was hardly comparable to sacrificing one's life.
'Tell us another,' Brigade Commissar Osipov had muttered.
At night, while everyone was asleep, Gardi became another man. He would sit there and pray. It would seem then that all the suffering in this penal city could dissolve in the black velvet of his ecstatic, bulging eyes. The veins would stand out on his brown neck and his long, apathetic face would take on an expression of obstinate and sombre happiness. He would go on praying for a long time and Mostovskoy would fall asleep to the sound of his quick, low whispering. After an hour or two Mostovskoy usually woke up. By then Gardi would be sleeping his usual turbulent sleep. It was as though he were trying to reconcile his two different selves: he would snore, smack his lips, gnash his teeth, let out thunderous farts and then suddenly begin a wonderful prayer about the mercy of God the Father and the Virgin Mary.
Gardi often questioned Mostovskoy about Soviet Russia, never once reproaching him for his atheism. He would nod his head as he listened to the Old Bolshevik, as though approving the closing down of churches and monasteries and the nationalization of the huge estates that had belonged to the Synod. Finally Mostovskoy would ask irritably:
With his usual smile, as though he were talking about ragout or tomato sauce, Gardi would say:
The other Russian prisoners-of-war in the special block were not exempt from work. It was only late in the evening or during the night that Mostovskoy was able to talk to them. The sole exceptions were Brigade Commissar Osipov and General Gudz.
Someone Mostovskoy did often talk to was Ikonnikov-Morzh, a strange man who could have been any age at all. He slept in the worst place in the whole hut: by the main door, where there was a freezing draught and where the huge latrine-pail or
He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons. He never once caught cold, even though he would go to bed without taking off his rain-soaked clothes. And surely only the voice of a madman could be so clear and ringing.
He had first introduced himself by walking up to Mostovskoy and staring silently into his face. 'What's the good news then?' Mostovskoy had asked. Then he had smiled mockingly as Ikonnikov said in his sing-song voice: 'Good? But what is good?'
These words took Mostovskoy back to his childhood, to the days when his elder brother would come home from the seminary and discuss questions of theology with their father. 'That really is a hoary old question,' he said. 'People have been puzzling over it ever since the Buddhists and the early Christians. And we Marxists have pondered it too.'
'And have you found any answer?' asked Ikonnikov in a voice that made Mostovskoy laugh.
'The Red Army are finding an answer right now,' said Mostovskoy. 'But there's something rather unctuous, if I may say so, in your tone of voice. You sound like a priest or a Tolstoyan.'
'That's hardly surprising,' said Ikonnikov. 'I used to be a Tolstoyan.'
'You don't say!' exclaimed Mostovskoy. The strange man had begun to interest him.
'Do you know something?' said Ikonnikov. 'I'm certain that the persecution of the Church by the Bolsheviks was beneficial to the Christian ideal. The Church was in a pitiful state before the Revolution.'
'You're a true dialectician!' said Mostovskoy. 'I too in my old age have been allowed to witness the miracle of the Gospel!'
'No,' replied Ikonnikov with a frown. 'For you, the end justifies the means – and the means you employ are inhuman. I'm no dialectician and you're not witnessing a miracle.'
'So what can I do for you?' snapped Mostovskoy.
'Don't make fun of me.' Ikonnikov was standing to attention and his mournful voice now sounded tragic. 'I didn't come over here just to make you laugh. On the fifteenth of September last year I watched twenty thousand
