'You have no right to ask that of me.' is there no other place for you, no other place than this camp?'
'When I came here I thought there was; now there is no other place.'
'You have a home in England.'
'I used to have a home, but my home now is the camp.' in England there are people who love you.'
'Morozova, listen to me… I have found a new home, I have found new people to love. There is something that is sweet and wonderful in this place that I have never found before. This place, these people, they are a thing of beauty to me. I glory in this place and these people.'
'Are you afraid, Holly?'
'Be my witness, remember me.'
Her head lay against his chest, and her hair bobbed against his chin with the motion of her crying.
The jeep skidded to a halt as Rudakov stamped on the brake-pedal. It was a curious and confused creature that he had brought from Yavas, a pencil-thin man whose breath was foul. Rudakov had offered no explanation on the journey; the poor bastard was too timorous to ask for one.
They had driven in silence, and at reckless speed. Rudakov reached across., screwed up his nose, and unlocked the man's handcuffs. He jumped out of the jeep, opened the man's door, and pulled him viciously down so that the man staggered on the ice.
A tall, helmeted figure waited beside the gates. The Colonel General studied his watch, held it up to his face so that the thin light would fall on the dial. He nodded, he accepted.
Rudakov propelled his prisoner towards the gates. A soldier dragged them open, wide enough for one man to pass through. Rudakov pointed towards the Kitchen, and pitched the man into the compound.
The gate closed.
Rudakov walked to the Colonel General.
'I want a rifle.'
'Was that your bargain, one for one?'
'One for them all. Holly for all of them that are in the Kitchen.'
'He is a brave man, your Holly.'
'Just give me a rifle.'
The man hesitated in the doorway. He blocked some of the light that filtered from the arc lamps and from the flames into the Kitchen. He stopped as if he needed time to acclimatize himself. He had walked past a downed helicopter and a burnt-out tank, past huts that smouldered. He had come from the condemned cell. He had not understood the charge against him, now he did not understand the scene that greeted his return to the camp. He reached out with his hands in front of him like a blind man in a strange room.
The zeks watched his return, they waited on Holly. From the floor Holly looked at the man in the doorspace. He saw the frail shoulders. He saw the hungry fleshless face. He saw the scabs at the mouth. This was the spear in his side, the nail in his hand.
Holly stood up. He turned his back on the man, he reached down and lifted the girl and for a few moments he held her warm and loving against the mud of his tunic. Once he kissed her forehead, a light and gentle kiss, and she trembled against him.
'I will be your witness, I will never forget,' the girl said.
Feldstein came beside him. 'They can rebuild the huts, but the camp is broken.'
Chernayev was behind him. 'The word will be heard in every camp.'
Poshekhonov faced him. He tried to smile, wiping away the bright rivers from his face with the back of his glove.
'Remember the woman who did handstands; when you are in the compound, remember her… '
Holly walked out into the night. He wondered if they crowded the doorway to watch him go.
The fires were lower now, close to exhaustion.
A blackness around him.
God… I'm frightened.
What for, Holly? What was it for?
… I don't know…
Did you think you could beat them, Holly? Did you think you could win all on your own?
I don't know… Damn, damn, y e s… I know. We won.
We won against their helicopters and their tank and their wire.
Do they know that you won, Holly?
The bastards know. Certainly they know.
The searchlight beam exploded in his face. He was naked in the light. He was captured. They know that we won.
Lying on the roof of the Administration block, Rudakov fired.
One shot.
The noise echoed away, withered on the wind and in the snow. He saw the first of the zeks step out of the doorway of the Kitchen. The searchlight tilted up and away from the single prone figure, and found the spreading mass of men.
Away to his left the gates were opening, dogs were barking, there was the tramp of marching men.
Yuri Rudakov thought that he should have felt the clean draught of victory. He knew only the stale sweat- scent of despair.
Chapter 25
The first passengers off the Aeroflot dribbled through into the Zurich concourse. Alan Millet rummaged through his mind for the description that Century had given him. He looked at his watch again. He took a step nearer the glass
'Arrivals' door. He was hot, yet he shivered. He felt as a mourner does who arrives too late at the wicket gate of a country churchyard and hears the singing of a distant hymn.
He had opened the file on Michael Holly. He would close that file. That he should seal it, bind it shut, had been an obsession with him since the end of February when the first outline of events in the Dubrovlag had reached Century House. A brief message from a man called Carpenter at Foreign and Commonwealth. 'Your man's dead. They've informed the Embassy that he was shot during a camp riot.
They buried him in the Camp cemetery. We've tried to get a bit more, but they're not giving…' A telephone call from a girl in the Soviet section of Amnesty. Nice of her to have remembered him. 'We get this material through from the camps – sometimes we take it as gospel, sometimes we're a bit cautious. The word is that an Englishman was involved in leading a riot at Barashevo, and that he was killed just before the rebellion folded. It's pretty thin, but that's all I have.' A visit to a small house in Hampton Wick and a doorway conversation with an old man whose face was scarred and aged, and behind whom an invisible woman inquired in a frail quaver who the visitor was. 'We know no more than you, Mr Millet. It is your job to find out what happened to our boy. It was you that sent him.'
After Carpenter's call he had swivelled round on his chair and gazed for some time out of the window over the dismal flow of the Thames. After the Amnesty message he had cleared his desk, locked his drawer, gone home. After the visit to Hampton Wick he had paced the streets through the squall showers until mid-evening.
There was a young man next to him now, wearing jeans and an aggressive red shirt under an open lightweight suede jacket. A girl stood beside him, with high, wide cheekbones and a trail of golden hair onto the shoulders of her blouse.
They too were waiting for a passenger.
She was smaller than he had expected.
She wore tight black trousers, a yellow jersey, and a blouse that was clean and had once been white. She had large round brown eyes. Her dark hair was cut short against her scalp. Her face was pale. She came boldly to the sliding door, but when it opened she hesitated, as if this were the final step to the new world, courage had fled her. She looked for a friend.
