25

The train creaks to a halt. Andrei stirs, and shifts his swollen legs. If he turns his head a little to the right he can see through a chink in the wooden slatting. He can taste the air.

Outside there is a platform, bathed in bluish light. There’s a low wooden shed, not much more than a shack. Someone is walking up the platform in heavy boots. Andrei can hear their tread but he can’t see the figure. There is a sudden ringing clang. His heart jumps, then settles. They are only testing the wheels. He’s sure that’s all it is.

All around him, men stir. Old Vasya groans. He’s probably not that old, but with his yellow skull-like head and huge eye sockets, he looks a hundred. He has dysentery; probably amoebic dysentery, Andrei thinks. The pail in the corner of the truck brims and reeks.

There is never enough water for Vasya to drink. His tongue is cracked and swollen.

‘What’s going on?’ murmurs Kostya.

‘Don’t know. Just a halt, I think. We’re at a station.’

‘What can you see?’

‘The platform. A shed. Some birch trees.’

It had seemed like a miracle when he had met Kostya again, in the ‘bread-van’ that took him to the railway station. Kostya had got twenty-five years.

‘You only got ten! You lucky sod. I thought they’d stopped handing out tens. The rest of us are all halves and quarters.’

A ‘half’ was fifty years, and a ‘quarter’ twenty-five. Why sentence a man to fifty years when there was no chance he could survive that long? For the same reason, Andrei supposed, that they did everything else.

When the prisoners were offloaded at the railway station – in a special area screened from the public – he saw how pale Kostya was. The dead-white look you get from being locked away from the light for months. All the men were blinking in the winter sun as the guards lined them up and crammed them into the trucks. Vitamin deficiencies, as well as lack of exposure to light, Andrei thought. What a rabble they look. If he saw himself coming along the street, he’d probably cross over to the other side.

‘Stick close,’ said Kostya. ‘We’ll get ourselves sorted. It’s good to have a doctor on board.’

Once they were in their truck – a cattle truck lined with wooden plank beds all the way up to the ceiling – Kostya began to organize them. There was no argument about electing him as their foreman. They needed someone who could speak up, who knew their rights and yet wouldn’t antagonize the guards. It was bitterly cold in the truck.

‘We’ll have to get this stove lit,’ said Kostya, but there was no sign of the guards. Andrei spread out his blanket and rolled himself up. He would get some sleep. He didn’t feel the cold as much as some of them; his Siberian upbringing must have seen to that. He had his padded jacket, too. He had done a deal with one of the guards after he was sentenced and knew that his winter overcoat wasn’t likely to be much good for ‘corrective labour’. It was a good overcoat. Anna had saved up her wages for months, and surprised him with it. But the padded jacket was thicker, and very little worn. As long as he could hold on to his things he would be all right. He needed padded trousers but God knows where they could be obtained. Maybe the camps issued some kind of work uniform.

The clanging sound runs up and down the train.

‘Maybe this is it. Maybe we’re there,’ says one of the men uneasily. Old Vasya moans loudly.

‘I wish he’d shut the fuck up. He’ll have the guards in,’ someone hisses angrily.

Old Vasya has scurvy as well as dysentery. There are petechial haemorrhages all over his body. Several of the men have bleeding gums, but Vasya is by far the worst, probably because he’s not absorbing what nutrients there are in the soup. It is even more salty than the Lubyanka swill.

‘Do they think we’re animals?’ the men mutter in disgust as their bowls are filled.

Probably, Andrei thinks. If you treat a man like an animal, then you have to believe that he is one. He’s learned that the guards hate it if you look directly into their eyes. It can lead to a beating.

There is supposed to be absolute silence when the train is at a halt. The logic must be that if civilians heard human noises coming out of a cattle truck, they might get uneasy. But it’s so cold that Vasya can’t help groaning.

‘Can’t someone shut that bugger up?’

The moon shines on outside. Andrei puts his face as close as he can to the chink in the slats, and snuffs up the air. There is a smell that tantalizes him. It is so near, so familiar. He breathes more deeply, and suddenly the smell hits a part of his brain that almost remembers it.

A charking sound comes from Vasya, then stops. After about half a minute, it begins again, louder and more agonized.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’

‘He’s dying,’ says Andrei. ‘Let me get near him.’

There’s nothing he can do. Old Vasya is lying on his back, with his nose jutting towards the roof of the van. His mouth has fallen open like a cave. It stinks of decay, as if he has already begun to rot from within. Andrei takes his wrist. A pulse flutters, and then jumps. Vasya’s trousers are sodden with liquid faeces. He’s been like that for a while, because a couple of days ago he lost the strength to go to the bucket. The charking noise begins again, rising in pitch, then dying back.

Andrei takes his hand. There’s nothing he can do. The hand is limp, and already cold. The sound will go on for a little while longer, and then it will stop.

In the morning, when the guards have heaved Old Vasya’s body out of the van, Kostya persuades them to bring water with disinfectant in it so they can wash down the floor.

‘We’ve a doctor in here and he says there’s a risk of infection. We could all be going down with it.’

The word ‘infection’ works. Andrei watches the guards jump to it. They are terrified of lice, too. ‘You’ll all be fumigated once you get where you’re going,’ one of them announces, as if this is a reward. I must remember this, Andrei thinks. They are afraid of typhoid epidemics, because disease doesn’t know which is the prisoner and which is the guard.

‘Who’s the doctor, then?’ asks the old guard they call Starik, the one in charge of their van.

‘I am,’ says Andrei.

The guard’s eyes find him in the gloom, and assess him. ‘Name?’ he asks.

‘Alekseyev, Andrei Mikhailovich.’

‘Right.’

The guard’s eyes rove over the rest of the men. You have to watch yourself these days. These aren’t like the prisoners you got back in the thirties. Most of these men are war veterans and they know how to handle themselves. You have to act accordingly.

‘Right,’ he says again. ‘Full disinfection will be ordered at the next halt. Any noise, you’ll find yourselves in the punishment cell.’

For of course, even on a train travelling the breadth of Russia and on to Siberia, there has to be a punishment cell.

At that moment Andrei remembers the smell that filled his nostrils the night before, when he pressed them to the gap where icy air poured in. It seemed all the sharper in contrast to the fetid air of the cattle car. His brain comes alive, remembering, recognizing. It was the smell of the taiga. It was the cold, wild air of home.