Us Conductors (43 page)

THE NEXT MORNING
I went to work and I pushed a wheelbarrow full of rocks.

BY DECEMBER, MOST OF OUR
living took place in the dark. The few hours of daylight seemed illusory, like silver dreams. We shivered on the road, staring into the circles of our lamps. Sometimes I lifted my eyes and was surprised by an orange sky, a pink sky, my lamplight disappearing into air. But mostly it was darkness, with fine falling snow, temperatures that vacillated and plunged. Men were dying faster. Bigfoot tripped in the ice and tore off two of his toes. He spent two weeks in paradise, in the infirmary, with a hot woodstove and clean white sheets and a nurse who brought him double portions of food, like a hallucination.

He was discharged on a starless morning. The moon always seemed so unkind. Crouched with me, chewing on bread that was nearly frozen, Bigfoot said, quickly, without adornment, “I feel as if I am doomed.”

IT WAS INTO THIS PLACE
, into this moonlight, that there came a man in a green uniform.

I was returning from a day’s work, passing through the gate, when a guard called my name. The word cut through the cold and the darkness like a dart. Each of us has these experiences, three or four times in our lives, when the instant itself feels like a messenger.

“Termen!” shouted the guard.

I walked stiffly toward him, across the crushed snow. “Yes?” I said, through my scarf.

Beside the guard, a man in a green uniform sat on a wooden bench. His greatcoat was unbuttoned. He had black hair and thin lips, a simple face except for the large round nose. I had never seen him before.

“This is Termen,” the guard said.

The man in the green uniform mildly considered me, from my face down to my ragged boots. He gave the guard a small nod.

The guard flicked his glove. “You can go.”

I pursed my lips, looking between the soldiers.

The Cossack came for me as we were rising the next morning. Someone was banging the pot by the stove and we were all turning on our sides and getting up from our bunks, holding our heads in our hands, wrapping ourselves in cloths. Those who had not slept were staring dead-eyed at their knees.

He appeared beside me and put his hand flat at the nape of my neck. “Let’s go,” the Cossack said.

I gave a start. “What? Where?”

“Now.”

He brought me to the major’s room. The office was empty. I stood with the Cossack against the wall. A piece of dried sausage sat on a plate. A picture sat in a frame. I noticed the sleeve of a
78 resting on a bookshelf. A cartoon of a fish at the bottom of the ocean, its lips in an O, a speech bubble with a music note.

The major came in with the man in the green uniform. They both appeared tired. They were holding steaming tin mugs.

“Good, Yemelya, thanks,” said the major.

The Cossack saluted and left us.

The major and the man in the green uniform sat down.

“L-890, Lev Sergeyvich Termen. Fifteenth of August, 1896.

Yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” said the major, nodding. He consulted the sheet in front of him. “This is Senior Lieutenant Lapin. Tomorrow he will be taking you back to Moscow.”

My voice failed.

“He is already making the journey. After five months at Susuman he has been reassigned, the lucky clod. So he has been ordered as your escort.”

“Why am I leaving?” I breathed.

The major shrugged. “You can ask whomever meets you at the other end.”

I didn’t know what to say. So many times in my life, now, I had been told I was going away. The major and the man in the green uniform, Lapin, were staring at me across the desk. I was grimacing—this wide, strained grimace, tears welling in my eyes. I had understood that I would die in Kolyma. I had understood that I would eke out a knife-edge of life and clasp an old lover’s memory to my chest and then die one late afternoon, under a vaulted sky, crumpling into my bootprints.

I felt as if my heart were clutched in someone’s hand. “All right,” I said finally.

I went out to join my brigade. We worked through the dark morning, in clear air, until around midday a blizzard seemed to
rise up from the ground, raw white, and we shoved our wheelbarrows through the smoke-like snow, pulled planks skidding across the ice, felt our faces raked by wind, and the thought I kept having was that I was abandoning these men, my partners, betraying their stooped silhouettes as I dreamed of a hot green locomotive that would carry me westward, from Vladivostok to Moscow, through valleys. In the thick of the storm I could not make out any living things but I pushed my cart of gravel, my last cart of gravel, for the making of roads.

I did not tell Bigfoot until after dinner that night, as we were parting. Near the entrance to his barrack, I said, “I am leaving in the morning.”

He simply stared at me.

“I said I’m—”

      “I heard you.”

We faced each other.

      “To Moscow,” I said.

      “I thought you had eight years.”

      “It is a transfer.”

      “To Moscow.”

      “Yes.”

Bigfoot lowered his eyes. He scraped his boot against a small snowbank sprinkled with soot. I had lost him. He looked at me again but he was hunched differently. His eyes were guarded, peering out from his bearded face. His lips were torn from the cold.

“All right,” he said.

“You’ll be all right,” I said, self-conscious that I had repeated his words.

He tipped his chin very slightly.

“We will meet up again, when all this is over. For vodka. For a feast.” I took a deep breath. “With your wife. Maybe we will go for a holiday together.”

I had lost him. He was not looking at me, not really. He looked so desperately sad.

“Maksim,” I said, “you are a good friend.”

“You also,” he said to me, but I would not accept this gift.

I returned quietly to my own barracks, lay in my bunk. I wondered whether this was a ruse, and Lapin would shoot me when we passed away from the camp.

Or whether I would be shot in Moscow, a hero’s welcome.

I lay there, unable to fathom that I would never lie there again. I thought of Bigfoot in his own bunk, staring at the knotted wood, with different thoughts.

Then Nikola came. He was very quiet. “Expert,” he muttered.

I turned. His face was level with mine. Nikola’s beard was long, curling at the edges. His black hair was smeared against his forehead. His eyes seemed to be reading my own, left to right. He shifted and I heard a rustling sound, like straw.

“What is it?” I murmured.

He rustled again. He was lifting something. He pushed a large bundle onto the bunk beside me. I reached with my hand—long bristles, fur. “What—” I said. I sat up as best I could. It was a coat. Twice-folded, scattered with tiny twigs and flakes of dry leaves. “What is this?”

“Fox,” said Nikola.

“I don’t understand.”

“For your journey. Take it.”

“Where did this come from?”

“A hiding place,” Nikola said. He gazed at me from under his tangled eyebrows. “Take it,” he whispered. “Now, before the others see.”

I slid the coat to the other side of the bunk. Nikola nodded. His mouth twitched.

“Wait,” I said. He stopped where he was, at the edge of shadow. “Why are you doing this?”

Nikola pushed out his lips—out and sideways, a rough red streak. He was smiling under that sunken look. “Gratitude,” he said, softly, as if it was my name.

He tipped his head again. He went away.

The man in the green uniform took me in the morning. As the work crews trooped through the gates, we set off along a different road. I felt as if there should have been buds on the trees, tufts of green grass through snow. There were none of these things. It was all winter. I wore my fox-fur coat and walked with Senior Lieutenant Lapin. “You must be happy to be leaving,” he said.

“I am very, very happy,” I said, ducking my head to the moon.

WE WERE ALREADY ON
the ship when the sun came up. It was a ship like the
Tovarishch Stalin
, steaming from Nagayevo back to Vladivostok. The boat was almost empty, because we were making the return journey. Few come back. I sat with Lapin in the closed upper deck. It still did not feel real. I tried to forget the dripping hold beneath us, where the prisoners would later be brought together, like hideous friends.

We did not linger in Vladivostok. Lapin led me to a train. He clambered into the heated officers’ carriage, tipping his cap. I was led away to an empty cattle car. I quickly came to understand that with his coat, Nikola had saved my life. I sat with other prisoners, uncrowded in the carriage, but for three weeks the car was raked by the winter. It was a killing cold. There was room enough to sit and lie and stand, so we behaved like human beings, humane and reasoning. We exchanged weary jokes, the
ten of us, rare conversation. We proposed that God existed and that he was a son of a bitch. But gradually a man named Roma froze to death, turning the same colour as the floor. Gradually a man named Timur died, I believe of thirst. We would gather by one side of the car, cupped hands upraised, hoping for the lucky flick of a melting icicle. This was living, I thought. Waiting under an icicle, counting every second.

The train stopped twice a day. They gave us bowls of food, cups of water. They allowed us to urinate, like workmen, into tundra.

Sometimes Lapin appeared. He said to me, “You’re still here.”

As we made our way west, Timur and Roma remained beside us, growing hard as stone. And I felt myself softening, thawing, warming in my fur coat. My life was growing larger. As we approached Moscow, something in me was stirring. I did not want to acknowledge it; it was easier to be a ruin, inert. The tiniest stone, which cannot be broken into smaller pieces. We passed through villages, past train platforms and silos. The train dragged the dead men to the city and the air was changing, like the introduction of an electric charge. I took it in slow breaths. I stared at civilization, uncomprehending. I huddled in my coat. I was no longer dead. I was roaring on a steamtrain toward the capital, propelled by outside forces. I was in play. I was Lev Sergeyvich Termen, conducted.