wear a badge.
Three and a half years later, the Panthers that had stormed through Bazar and the Ukraine came home in defeat.
Emaciated, servile, exhausted, Stepan and Ilya Holovich found themselves herded with a hundred thousand others into the Displacement Camps. The majority, the huge majority, were to be shipped back in the same closed trains to the Motherland of Russia. The minority, the tiny minority, succeeded in persuading the American authorities that they should not be returned.
In 1947 Stepan and Ilya Holovich arrived with no money and no luggage at London's Tilbury docks on a freighter from Bremen. Stepan Holovich had sunk to his knees to kiss the rain-soaked paving of the quayside. From a single room in Kingston-upon-Thames which he rented and where he lived with Ilya, he repaired watches and clocks. When the local doctor, confounded by the sparrow size of his patients, informed the couple that they were to become parents, Ilya Holovich had dropped her lined and weary face to her chest and wept, and Stepan Holovich had jumped up from his chair and then scratched between his thin grey hair and laughed. A fortnight later the buff OHMS envelope had been delivered which announced the granting of the natur-alization papers. They were British citizens by the time that Ilya Holovich entered Kingston General Hospital for a difficult confinement. That it was difficult was of no surprise to the duty obstetrician. A woman of that physique had no business producing 8 lb 7 oz babies.
They called the boy Mikhail.
In the year that the child first went to a nursery school his father anglicized the family name. It was his hope that whereas an essentially Ukrainian background would rule behind the front door of their home, his son could become assimilated into the society that had adopted his flotsam parents.
Michael Holly was an unremarkable boy growing up in the suburbs of south-west London.
That is perhaps the start of the road to the perimeter path of ZhKh 385/3/1.
A man stood, rakish and upright, and stared at the fences.
The night pressed down on the flood of the arc lights, the line of lamp clusters rested on the outer fence of wood planks.
The snow gathered in a thin cloak on his tunic's shoulders and he made no attempt to scatter the fall. Those who walked the perimeter path went behind him, and no one spoke to the man who gazed at the wall that held him. He communed in a solitude, and much of his face was hidden by the quilted balaclava, and his mind was blocked to those who passed him. When the bell sounded and the ghost figures pitched from the huts to form the lines at the Kitchen, he remained, his attention held all the time by the upper strands of wire and the topmost line of the wooden fence.
From the corner of the compound the raised machine-gun and its minder watched and bided their time.
In the dining area of the bare brick Kitchen there was a stirring in the pool of lethargy. This was Sunday evening, the end of the one day of the week when the Factory was idle. The zeks had rested, they had reinforced their strength by spending the daylight hours on their bunks. They had written the letters that would be read during the week by the camp censors, that would be passed or slashed or shredded.
They had read from the paltry choice of books in the Library. They had dreamed of somewhere that was beyond the fence. They have been revived. Sunday is a hypodermic dose to the zeks.
There was a spatter of life and talks in the queue that Holly joined and that stretched twice around the inside walls of the Kitchen. For the first time in the day he heard men laugh freely.
At the far end from the door was a hatch at waist height, the level at which a man will naturally hold his steel tray.
The man who ladles the food into the steel bowl on the tray cannot see the face of the man to whom he gives the food.
He is blind to him and cannot therefore offer the favour of increased rations to a friend, reduced rations to an enemy.
Except that Adimov and his fellow barons will speak their names, and the cook will respond, which is the way of survival. Their bowls will be brimming, they will head the queue for the sprat of meat or fish that floats in the soup gruel. There is a rule, there will be a path around it. That is the way of Camp 3, it is the way of all camps in the Dubrovlag.
Adimov had not looked at Holly, he was far to the front of the slow-moving line with his cronies, the iron men of the huts, Feldstein stood half a wall's length ahead of Holly, beyond conversation.
The soup was a mash of wheatmeal flour and groats.
There was a skim of grease that shone in the fluorescent light of the Kitchen. A square of grey fish floated like a hostile iceberg, all but submerged. A tight chopped stalk of a cabbage plant. Different to Lefortovo, back in the dark ages from the second floor of the hospital block at Vladimir. Hot water to drink and rye bread to chew.
Holly found a place at the end of a table, extra room was made for him. He sat down, he smiled.
'You are the Englishman… the one who insists on his English name… I am Poshekhonov, from Hut z. I sleep close to the stove.'
Holly looked across the table at the stubby, round-faced little fellow who breathed a cheerfulness that was alien here.
He could have been a bank manager from the High Street of Twickenham, he could have sold insurance policies or slashed-price holidays to Benidorm.
'Pleased to meet you – I'd rather it were elsewhere.'
'The way you look at your food you are new to the camps. You have to close your eyes, close your nose, close your guts, you swallow it down. You throw the bread on top of it, the bread is the cork. The bread holds, it below till you're ready to shit. You don't eat like this in London?'
'Not everyday…'
Holly lifted the steel bowl to his mouth, tipped and tilted it, swallowed and felt the lukewarm drip in his throat and then the rising sickness, and he clamped his mouth shut, and swallowed again. More from the bowl.
'You have to feed, you must feed,' said Poshekhonov sombrely, and then his laughter broke again. 'There is some goodness in the food. They even say there is protein, but that may be propaganda.'
Holly thought he would choke. He bit at his lip and swallowed again. is this the worst?'
'Not the worst and not the best, this is everyday.'
Poshekhonov leaned across the table and slapped at Holly's shoulder. 'You will get used to it. How long do you have to learn to love our food? I once had two weeks to learn to love everything, two weeks until I was to be shot. The two men sentenced with me, they killed them, they spared me. Since that day I love to eat, I love all the food. Life here is very beautiful, to me any life is preferable to death. You understand me, Englishman?'
'Holly… yes, I understand you.'
Only the grease lay at the bottom of the bowl. Holly took the bread and tugged it between his fingers and wolfed it to his mouth. Tasteless and dry, it suffocated the revulsion.
The man next to him winked in a fast act of conspiracy, a runner bean of a man who then extended his hand to Holly and their fists gripped in a distant greeting, but there were no words. The camp was not a place of easy friendships. It was a place where men weighed and evaluated before they extended kindliness. They have learned to co-exist, they have learned to live without a colleague. He wiped the scattered crumbs on his tray to a neat heap and then pinched them between his fingers and gobbled them. The meal had done little to staunch the hunger pains in his stomach.
Hunger would be the battle. But they survived, all of these men in the Kitchen hut had found a track of survival. And so, too, would Holly…
'Englishman, you have not asked me why I am here
…' The disappointment was flushed on Poshekhonov's face.
Holly stood up. Around him the benches emptied. When the food was finished, the tables cleared.
'Because it is not my business. Nor your business why I am here.'
'Easy, Englishman, you cannot be an island, not in this place. The man who can live here is the one who reaches out to his fellows.' Poshekhonov had gripped Holly's arm.
'They have the guns and the dogs and the wire, they have their norms of output in the Factory, they have their regulations and their camp regime. They seem to have everything.
