Trans-Siberian Express (8 page)

“And you are certain? Repeat it, please, Platinov.”

“He is the train manager at the Krasnoyarsk station. I saw him. I spoke to him.”

“You spoke to him?

“Yes. I asked him if there was a Moscow train on Thursday morning.”

“Did he recognize you?”

“No.”

Not to be recognized. That would be the final blow. He must be recognized, Godorov thought. That was essential. He had gone over it in his mind a thousand times. The confrontation. The instant recognition, the sound of his own name: “Godorov! You!” Then he would grasp Shmiot simultaneously by the windpipe and the testicles and draw his body into a kneeling position.

“You remember me, Shmiot?”

Of course he would remember and the terror that would come with recognition would be the sweetest moment of Godorov’s life, the one flicker of light in the bleak landscape of all those wasted years.

“There is no mistaking it, Platinov?”

He had grasped the poor man by the collar of his coat, shaking him. It was only then that Platinov had realized what Godorov planned, and his pale eyes opened wide.

“You’re crazy,” he hissed. “You’re crazy, Ivan Vasilyevich.” He wrenched himself free of Godorov’s grasp. “It’s over. What can it matter now?”

But it had never been over. Not if a person was reminded of it every moment of his life by the perpetual gnawing of the raw nerves, the hot flashes of pain. Platinov knew. Why else had he sought out Godorov immediately on his return, the very day that the train had pulled into the Sverdlovsk station? He pretended to be innocent, but Platinov understood. Why else had he noticed all the little details? How could he have dredged them up, if he had merely observed them casually? He had been a deliberate observer. And that idea softened Godorov toward the man who had been his old cellmate with whom he had lived in the special hell of those days, the Gulag. He squeezed Platinov’s arm.

As he stood up to go, Godorov saw the glint of the morning sunlight on the windows of Stalin’s gingerbread university. He remembered the first glimpse of Shmiot’s hated face, the imperious snarl, the cold eyes which blinked at the sudden light as the door opened and Godorov, the new prisoner, was thrust inside. The railway compartment had been specially constructed to house eight men in two tiers of shelf-like bunks. Instead, Godorov found twenty-eight men there, including himself. He was the last to enter, the last man to be pressed into the tiny metal cage by the guard who jabbed his buttocks as if he were the last pickle to be squeezed into a jar.

He had been delivered by the black maria from the Taganka jail. People often turned away from the sight of the black maria cars, those sealed, rolling prisons which moved, always deep in the night, from place to place in the crazy-quilt pattern of the mad prison bureaucracy. As hard as Godorov tried, as they all tried, he could never discover a logic to the strange movements, the transporting of convicts sometimes across the entire length of the Soviet Union. The prison bureaucracy used the black marias and the hated Stolypin—the specially constructed railroad cars—to carry the Zaks, the prisoners, through to the endless chain of prisons, mines and farms that snaked across the face of Stalin’s terrain.

Godorov had been in various cages of the system for two weeks and had somehow managed to keep his civilian suit, which his father had bought him to replace his lieutenant’s uniform after he had been released from the Army. He had been an artillery officer at Stalingrad; wounded and decorated, which made his parents proud. Their whole village in Georgia had turned out to welcome him home. Often in the cages of the Gulag he would remember that homecoming, the singing and dancing until the early morning, and the sweetness of Natasha’s body as it yielded its softness to him on that very first night, so wonderful a gift that he had actually shed tears of joy.

If he had been guilty of any crime, it was the crime of temper, for he had lost his self-control when confronted with the long delay in getting his work card. It was a silly thing really, and all he had done was break a few chairs and call the clerk an ass-kisser. Not that that was a special crime in itself, except that he had specified whose ass—Stalin’s—which sent the office into paroxysms of patriotic zeal. He was a criminal against the State. He went through the whole ordeal of administrative trial and sentence, as if it were some terrible nightmare from which he would soon awaken. Of course, he never had.

They had given him a “fiver,” five years, and he had learned quickly that they could easily tack on another five years for good measure. He had determined, therefore, to be as inconspicuous as possible, to move silently through the Gulag until the time had passed. He was only twenty-two. Surely Natasha would wait. What was five years? My God, five years! It would be endless.

He had jumped from the black maria to the metal step of the Stolypin that would transport him to the prison camp. Briefly, he felt the clean icy air of the night. Then he was inside the compartment, and the crush of bodies was unbearable. Clutching the paper bag that contained his civilian suit, he managed to squeeze into a spot near the closed compartment door. Looking up, he discovered a strange thing. Convicts were crammed into the bottom rung of bunks, arms, heads, legs, stuffed together like cast-off dolls in a garbage can. Even the baggage rack near the ceiling was lined with convicts. But on the top tier below the baggage, one man lay stretched out in comparative comfort. Shmiot! It was Godorov’s first view of him. His head was propped up on his palm and he was looking blankly into space, munching a carrot. A carrot! Godorov had looked at the man curiously, hardly comprehending why he should have the luxury of so much room, while the others were cramped together like sardines.

He felt the train move under him, felt it pick up speed, heard the clanking of the metal as the train strained against its couplings. He tried to sleep, but the surroundings were too uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It could have been hours or minutes later—he could never remember—except that at the first light of dawn he had seen Shmiot’s gaze alight on him. Then he pointed his finger at Godorov.

“The bag,” he said, smiling. Stupidly Godorov had turned his head around, as if the man might be addressing someone behind him. He felt a poke in his ribs, and turning, saw the round and innocent face of Platinov for the first time.

“He means you.”

“Me?”

“The bag,” Shmiot repeated.

“What does he mean?” Godorov whispered.

“He wants to see what’s in the bag.”

“That’s none of his business,” Godorov hissed.

“You’d better tell him.”

“Why?”

Platinov shrugged. “Because.”

“Show me the bag,” Shmiot repeated. Godorov noticed that the men in the compartment stirred. Some jumped from their high perches to take positions on either side of Godorov. Since there was room, they landed on top of the men below them. He is a prisoner like me, Godorov thought. But before he could protect his package, two grim prisoners had grabbed it from his hands and offered it to Shmiot.

“Goddammit, that’s mine,” he shouted, trying to stand up. One of the men kicked him down again and placed a heavy knee on his chest, pinning him to the floor.

“I’ll call the guard.”

“Well, well,” Shmiot said loudly, looking about the crammed compartment. “Call away.”

“Guard,” Godorov shouted, feeling his temper strain, the anger rise within him like the rumbling of a volcano. “Guard,” he shouted, “I am being robbed.” He watched as eyes turned away from him. “Help me,” he cried, struggling to free himself from the knee.

“Beautiful,” he heard Shmiot say. “It is a suit. Look, gentlemen, we have here a suit. Quite a tradable commodity, wouldn’t you say?” Shmiot’s eyes turned toward him, cold as flint.

“You bastard,” Godorov shouted. All this was still beyond his comprehension. He had not yet learned the pecking order of the prisons, the power of the thieves and murderers over the “white collar” convicts. What could he possibly know of such a life?

“Leave it alone,” Platinov said in his ear. “It won’t do you any good.”

Instead of quieting him, the whisper fed his anger. He managed to remove one arm that was pinned under him and, concentrating his energy into a tight balling of his fist, he moved his arm upward and smashed it into the softness of his captor’s unprotected crotch. The man’s agonized scream echoed in the compartment. Springing loose from the man’s weight, Godorov scrambled to where Shmiot sat, displaying the suit. He managed to get a grasp on Shmiot’s arm, but it was futile. He felt himself grabbed from behind and his arms were pinioned behind him.

“Nasty. Nasty,” Shmiot said, kicking Godorov in the stomach. He doubled up in pain. He could never remember whether it was the sudden loss of breath or his own will that caused him to remain silent. Again he gathered his energy as he recovered from the blow, then, head down, he lunged at Shmiot like a bull. His skull pounded into the man’s iron-hard torso, laying Shmiot flat against the outer wall of the bunk.

He felt hands tear at him harshly, pulling his body down to the floor again. Perhaps a half-dozen men held him now, as Shmiot stood up and watched him sullenly in the half-light.

“Strip him,” Shmiot said.

Godorov felt hands mauling his clothes, unbuttoning, pulling off his shirt and pants. He struggled, twisted, screamed. Suddenly the convicts began to sing, yell, stamp their feet and clap their hands, drowning out his cries. But it was the humiliation of his exposed body that finally subdued his spirit. He felt degraded, broken. His courage drained from him. They held his body down on the cold metal floor, pinning it to the iciness as they spread-eagled him and piled their bodies over him until he could not move a single muscle. His brain was alert to the terror of it.

“Think of yourself as a pillow,” he heard Shmiot say. “A nice comfortable pillow. A man that does not share with his fellows is no longer a human being, just an object. Right?”

Godorov heard the chorus of affirmative replies, and tried a last lunge to free himself, but it was impossible. He could do nothing but surrender to Shmiot’s authority. It was impossible to fight them on both sides of the iron grating. There was simply no place to hide. He cursed his weakness, the uncontrollable temper that had landed him in this hell.

“Please,” he heard himself bleat. “Let me up. You can have my suit. Give me back my clothes.” The icy metal had already begun to eat into his spine and the bouncing of the train was torture to every nerve.

“Please,” he begged. The only response was a kick in the face from Shmiot’s heavy shoe.

“Save me,” he remembered crying repeatedly, and then silently, as he fell into a state of semiconsciousness.

It was only later that he could reconstruct the scene, as bits and pieces of it floated up from his subconscious. He never determined how many hours or days they kept him pinioned to the metal floor. Someone had blindfolded him and stuck a gag, a filthy sock, in his mouth. The sound of metal clanging was the opening of the compartment door as a small group of convicts filed out to the toilet. There were also smells of food and strange chewing sounds.

He was too numb with pain to feel hunger. He knew even then that if he survived—and many times on that dark journey he longed for the peace of death—he would remember Shmiot as he had first seen him, munching arrogantly on a carrot.

He was not even sure of the exact moment when they released him, since his body had finally lost all power of feeling. Platinov told him later that the men had simply moved to one side, one at a time, as if they had finally become bored with the game. It was Platinov who had propped his frozen body up into a sitting position, rubbing his back in an effort to start the blood circulating again. Platinov dressed him in what was left of his clothes. Someone had stolen his coat.

Platinov had described the journey later, the endless delays, the long days along the sidings waiting for another train to hook on to, then the interminable vibrations again as the train crawled over the track, a relentless nightmare of moving and never arriving. Platinov had counted ten days and nine nights.

Finally, they reached their destination. The compartment door was opened and the guards clubbed the prisoners on the shins to get them to move out of the train.

“You,” they screamed at Godorov. He remembered their cries of frustration at his inability to move, and the sound of their clubs against his shins as they prodded him to stand. When they discovered that he could not get up, they lifted him and were annoyed at his inability to stay on his feet. It would have been much easier to deal with a dead man.

It took him months, in a substandard prison hospital, to regain even partial movement, but when he was fit enough to stand and move one leg in front of the other, he was sent back to the work prison. By then, of course, it was apparent that he would never regain full use of his once-strong body.

“I thought you were dead,” Platinov had told him, when he had come back. Godorov was assigned to kitchen work.

“See how lucky you are,” Platinov told him cheerfully, his round boyish face still innocent under layers of grime and coal dust. “You might have been assigned to the mines.”

“I was born under a lucky star,” Godorov had sneered, rubbing the small of his back, as if the gesture would stop the constant pain. The pain will help me never to forget, he told himself.

Even then he knew that hatred had kept him alive and that hatred would give his life a sense of mission. I will find him and kill him, he had vowed, feeling the beginning of the obsession that would dominate the rest of his life.

Nature did its work of compensation well. His hands and arms siphoned off the lost strength of his legs and back until he could crush a melon with a squeeze of one hand.

“Shmiot’s head,” he had said to Platinov. “I will crush his head like this.”

“Leave it alone, Ivan Vasilyevich,” Platinov pleaded.

“Never!”

At first, when he had been returned to the work prison, he had been disappointed that Shmiot was no longer there. It was odd, he thought, that he felt no animosity toward the faceless, foul-smelling men who had tortured him. They were mere instruments, following the protocol of the Gulag, where the thieves and murderers held sway with the cooperation of the guards with whom they did business. No form of protest would ever crack the system, he had learned. It had been that way from the earliest days of the Czars, and the best way to get along was to submit. Which he did, outwardly, while inside he nurtured and cherished the hatred that sustained him. And now he actually felt joyful, although his face had long ago lost its ability to smile. At last he was on the last leg of the journey, traveling toward the final glory, the culmination of his life’s yearning, the moment for which destiny had spared him.