intimate and familiar ululation of the klaxon, denoting the first arrest or perhaps the first man carried on a stretcher into the back of an ambulance. By the end of the evening the medics would be throwing them into the back like an engineer shovelling coal into the firebox of a runaway train.
We walked along Terrace Road towards the railway station. Troops of girls, smeared with make-up, already drunk, lurched from side to side along the pavement, into the road, cars swerved and pipped their horns eliciting rude gestures from the girls. ‘We have such girls in my country too,’ said Uncle Vanya.
The streets cleared of the few remaining tourists, they were hurrying to their cars now, eager to return to the safety of the caravan and tonight’s Ludo ration. We walked towards the railway station, that iron lung that breathed in the people fed with the oxygen of hope, and exhaled them later, bitter, soul-weary, disbelieving; and all exemplifying Sospan’s assertion that belief in promised lands is defeated by the fact that we take our pain with us in our suitcase. Character is fate, as both Sospan and Heraclitus have said.
The coaches of the midnight train to Shrewsbury lay stretched out beside the platform in a maroon ribbon. Along the side were rectangles of electric light in that heartbreaking deep yellow that comes only from bulbs belonging to railway companies. Uncle Vanya beheld the train with glittering eyes. ‘Ah, my friend Louie! I can never look at a train without tears. Come, we must drink!’
We went into the buffet. On the counter a tea urn shone, the array of tubes and flasks and steam reservoirs evoked the innards of a ship’s engine room, or a lost property office in which had been deposited the instruments of a silver band. We took teas and sat at a shaky wooden table next to the window that looked out on to the platform. Sitting on an adjacent table was a group of actors from
Uncle Vanya poured the last of the vodka into the tea and we drank. ‘So much of my life has been spent in train compartments. Those of the Stolypin car were no bigger,’ he pointed to the train. ‘Ten people would share it if you were lucky; but it could be twenty or even thirty. On my way to Kolyma I spent two months in a train compartment like this, and that was by no means a record.’
‘Why did they send you to the camps?’
‘Which time? I was sent two times. The last time for murdering my wife. And the first time, who knows? The question is meaningless; it implies there was a “why?”. There was no such thing. They threw the dice, your turn came, you went. In the early years, when the secret police came, a man might naturally ask for a reason. What have I done? But soon we learned not to ask because the question was stupid. It rested on the old-fashioned bourgeois belief that one must do something wrong to be arrested. You see? Of course, there is always a reason written down on your file, and through the endless interrogations you will eventually agree to it, whatever it is, even if it makes no sense. I was twenty, I had been working for a year as a junior card-typist in the Museum Of Our Forefathers’ Suffering. And then I was denounced for being a diversionary wrecker. I got ten years. Denouncing was a very useful method of getting rid of someone you didn’t like. Or who was perhaps a rival, not that I was a rival to anyone. Men were denounced by their adulterous wives in order to remove them from the scene. Neighbours were denounced so others could move into their apartment. One day someone did it to me and still to this day I do not know who, nor why. But it does not matter. I say this merely as a register of fact. I do not complain. No matter how bad one’s fate, there is always someone with a worse one. Throughout my time in the camps I was haunted by the fate of a woman whose story I heard. She had been suckling her baby one afternoon when she received a visit from the NKVD. They told her to get her coat and come down to the police station to answer a few questions. She asked what about the baby, and they told her to leave the child since she would only be gone ten minutes. She tried arguing but they were very insistent; they assured her the questions were a formality and would not even last ten minutes. They refused even to let her take the baby round to a neighbour. So she put the child in his cradle and went with the policemen. In the station she was charged as an enemy of the people and shipped off to Lubyanka for further questioning. From there she joined the long rail caravans to eastern Siberia. She left her baby that afternoon in an empty apartment in Hughesovka and never saw it again. Throughout my years of servitude I meditated upon this story, and wondered: is it the most tragic of all? As a cartographer of the human heart would she have been the greatest? But who is to say? In the monastery of Slovetsky they had a crooked cupboard inside which it was impossible for a man or woman to stand up or sit down, impossible to find any position of ease or comfort; whichever position you adopted you were forced by the crooked walls and low ceiling to adopt a pose that quickly became unbearable agony. They would lock a prisoner in this cupboard overnight. In the morning he would be completely insane. How can one measure the extent of his suffering during that night? An entire lifetime of agony condensed into the space of a single interminable night. Is it worse than the unending nightmare, spread out over many years, of the little girl of eight who was so demented by hunger that she ate a grain of rye from a cowpat? Stealing from the Collective, even its dung, is a terrible crime and grievously did she answer for it: ten years’ penal servitude. Is that night in the cupboard worse than those ten terror-filled years for the uncomprehending girl?’
At the table across from us the actors stood up and left, leaving Rwpert alone, smoking a doleful cigarette. We joined him and poured some rum into his cold tea. He looked at us warily and tried to lose the camp affection that had hallmarked his previous demeanour.
‘If you’re worried we might be two toughs looking for some fun at your expense,’ I said, ‘you could be right. My friend here has spent many years in a Siberian labour camp and he was denounced by an actor. He doesn’t like actors.’
Rwpert swallowed hard.
‘He especially doesn’t like ones called Rwpert.’
‘That was the name of the man who denounced me, I spit upon the bones of his mother,’ said Vanya.
Rwpert decided not to ask how we knew his name but he saw clearly that it was not a good sign.
‘When we arrived,’ said Uncle Vanya, ‘there was no camp. Just a railway line that ended in a buffer in the middle of the snow and tundra. “Where is the camp?” we cried. “This is it,” they laughed. “If you don’t want to die you had better build some shelter.” So we did. We walked ten miles to find water and five to find wood.’
‘All because of a man called Rwpert,’ I said.
‘I curse the bones of his mother and her mother too.’
‘All the time he was in that camp, during those odd hours when he was not mining the gold beneath the frozen wastes, he was thinking of how he would revenge himself upon all the people in the world called Rwpert.’
‘I spell my name with a “w”; it’s a very rare form of it.’
‘We know,’ I said. ‘The man who denounced him spelled it the same way. He was from Hughesovka which was founded by Welsh people and has the highest incidence of Rwperts who spell their name with a “w” of anywhere in the world.’
‘Oh shit,’ said Rwpert.
‘In Siberia, during the long bitter years incarcerated with the dregs of Soviet criminal society, he learned so many ways of killing a man, so many ways of inflicting torment, that sometimes it takes him all day to decide which to use.’
‘Please don’t kill me,’ Rwpert said softly. ‘I have a sickly child. We love her very much but the expense of looking after her is difficult to meet. With me gone, I’m not sure how my wife could manage. Please, beat me if you must, but do not kill me. And if you must beat me, please not on my face. I know it’s not much to look at these days, what with these accursed cigarettes, the cheap make-up and the late hours, but for all that it is my meal ticket; if you bruise my face I will not be able to work. I am sorry about the evil done to you by this other Rwpert, but please think of my child.’
I looked across to Uncle Vanya who was weeping. ‘You poor man, you poor brother in suffering, I bless the sacred bones of your dear mother,’ he said.
I took out the photograph of Gethsemane in the school nativity play and showed it to Rwpert. ‘If you tell me about this picture we will not hurt you.’
Rwpert looked at Uncle Vanya.
