Ice Road, page 5
There’s no way of knowing. What we do know, though, is that if we die we won’t go like those others, walking across the ice. Comrade Schmidt has made this clear. He will not walk. None of us will. We will not walk, he says, because that would mean leaving the weak behind, and this he will never permit. Such courage. Comrade Schmidt is a true leader: a true Communist.
Pity he’s not in command of an ice ship.
There I go again. At home, such sarcasm would have got me smacked. Not here. Which is a comfort, I suppose. My husband is far away, back in Leningrad: not even his voice can reach me here. I peer out, out at the long, low line of the horizon. In truth, I still think that it’s been good to get away. I might even like him better when I return.
When I return, not if. I am improving. I might even become an optimist. And I’m changing in other ways. I’ve learned to interest myself in the radio report of our Congress. There’s not much else to do, of course, but that’s not the only reason. I can read, you see, and if you can read you can also try discussing. Not that I have. Not yet, you understand. The people around me are far too smart.
But I can listen. That’s possible. And I can think. Although what I think I keep to myself. Take our city’s leader: Sergei Mironovich Kirov. If I happen to find myself worrying about him, I keep that worry quiet. I may have conquered the alphabet but I am still ignorant. What do I know of power? Of conquest? Of position? I should not have opinions: I should not judge. What I should do instead is watch.
I was watching my compatriots last night when the radio talked about Comrade Kirov. Rumours were that he was going to stand for the post of General Secretary but no, he didn’t. Stalin must have liked that. He is to reward Sergei Mironovich by making him the last but one to speak: the place of honour just before our father, Stalin. I was watching when they told us this: I saw my fellow Leningraders swell with pride. I heard their cry: ‘Long live our Mironych.’
And I? I am a stupid woman. What I thought was: careful, Sergei Mironovich. Kirov, who is such a powerful speaker, coming just before Stalin, who is not.
Will Kirov rein himself in? Does he understand that no good can come from outshining a powerful man?
Can the Dead Speak (1)?
Can the dead speak? Can their cries be heard? Have those countless serfs and prisoners of war who died in the building of Peter’s folly been speaking out through his city’s marshy foundations? Is it their suffering that makes the city so unquiet? Or is it just this place? This St Petersburg, Peter, Petrograd, and once more born again: this Leningrad. Russia’s Paris. Its Venice. Its Prague. This ‘rotten slimy’ city as Dostoyevsky called it.
Yet what, in 1934, would Leningrad care about Dostoyevsky’s opinion? The city has a much more modern detractor. A dangerous enemy by anybody’s standards. A man who sits at the centre of his country. Russia’s leader, whom his friends call Koba. Born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, now changed into that man of steel: Joseph Stalin.
Stalin has never liked the city. How he applauded the decision in 1918 to move Russia’s capital to Moscow and how fiercely he resisted any suggestion that, with the Civil War over, it should move back. What would Stalin care about a Paris, a Venice, or a Prague? He’s a Georgian, a country boy, his references to east not west. Not for him the egotistic self-regard of the city’s famed intelligentsia, its boasting of its music, art and poetry. Stalin likes folksongs, he likes the technical brilliance of V. I. Repin or the solidity of a realist poster, and he likes his language plain, ordinary and clear. When he looks to history, the history he most embraces is the medieval world, and when he looks to the imagination what stirs him are not those constructivist flights of fancy that fuelled a revolution, but the picturesque folksongs of illiterate tribal bards.
And now, as Stalin sits broodingly behind the Kremlin’s walls, sucking up power, and as he waits for his 17th Congress to begin, his distrust and dislike of Leningrad seem only to increase. No matter that he recently scored a victory over the city, that by slow politicking, enticement and manoeuvre, of which he is the master, he has made Leningrad ditch Zinoviev for his friend Kirov.
Sergei Mironovich Kirov, Stalin’s choice. Born Sergei Kostrikov, and then renamed after a saint and a Persian warrior. Kirov, Stalin’s friend, is no Leningrader. He doesn’t even like the place. It’s too cold for him, too damp. He’s from the Urals: he’s a real Russian, a real muzhik, a son of the soil, at home in Russia’s Muslim east, not its ersatz Europe. But just as Kirov learns to tolerate Leningrad, so are the people of Leningrad beginning to realise that having Kirov at their head could be good for them. For Kirov throws his heart into everything he does and Stalin likes Kirov.
Kirov means so much to Stalin that, when Kirov dies, Stalin will drop everything and rush to Leningrad and, emerging from the train, will, without removing his gloves, slap the face of the boss of Leningrad’s secret police. And later, white and shaking, he’ll bend over his friend’s coffin and kiss him on the forehead and, later still, will carry Kirov’s ashes to Red Square, mounting the mausoleum, not last as is his habit, but first, his head turning side to side, sharing his grief with the crowd. Stalin’s tribute to his friend.
But at the moment there is no need for grief. Kirov is very much alive and Stalin, solicitous about his health, sends him telegrams of greetings, posts him books and signs them with affection, invites him to his Moscow residence and his holiday home in Sochi by the Black Sea. He, a man so ashamed of the imperfections of his skin that few are allowed to see him naked, is even prepared to take a sauna in the presence of Sergei Mironovich. For Kirov is Stalin’s man. His ally, the one Stalin put in charge of the Soviet Union’s most ambitious project to date: the building of a canal to join the Baltic to the White Sea. One and a half years it took to dig out the 227 kilometres, and when, in July 1933, Stalin sailed the canal for days on end, it was Kirov who stood beside him. A triumph for Soviet Russia. Who cares that it was built on prison labour and never deep enough to take anything but the most shallow bottomed ship? A triumph it was for Kirov and at the same time Koba gave to his Kirov another gift: this pesky Leningrad.
Kirov: Stalin’s trusted man. But even a Kirov sometimes breaks rank. As he did when Stalin made it clear that, since the two five-year plans were finally bearing fruit, he knew what the next step should be. The grip of the rich peasants, the kulaks, Stalin said, has been broken. Food is flowing into the cities. So why not end bread rationing, make it freely available? Who could dream of resisting that?
Who? None other, it seems, than the very same Sergei Mironovich Kirov who sees it as his job to take Leningrad’s side and who thus tells his General Secretary of the workers’ fears that the end of rationing will bring a rise in the cost of bread. As if anybody is better qualified than the General Secretary to know what the proletariat fears!
And there is worse, or so the rumour goes. Can it be true? Did Kirov stand up to his Koba once before? Did he actually invoke the name of Lenin to argue against the execution of Ryutin? Did he say, as Lenin once had said, that we Bolsheviks must not go down the Jacobin path to self-destruction, that we must never kill our own?
Watch out, Kirov. Don’t you know that tides both wax and wane? Lenin’s body lies restless in a mausoleum he never wanted, and when the gods are restless, man must suffer. For if Lenin is God, then Stalin is his high priest. Who would dare invoke the name of God against his priest, his pope, his Grand Inquisitor? If Lenin was immortalised by death, Stalin is still alive: if Lenin is a God, Stalin is a Man, and while gods pronounce, Man must act; while gods judge, Man must make his own mistakes.
Watch out, Kirov. These are dangerous times. The 17th Party Congress is on. Never mind you chose not to stand against the leader: you thought of it and now they – your enemies – are everywhere. Be on your guard. Look left, look right – and look both ways when crossing Red Square in case the onward momentum of a government limousine, or a government initiative, should run you over. And if they do, they’ll take your city, and the people who live in it, down with you.
Part Two
The Rescue
I will start over again, and change my life’s pattern,
Will put my naiveté to shame.
(Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The Snow Will Begin Again)
The Orphan
She weaves in and out of the crowd, thinking to herself: small. She makes herself small. Small is better: small stops her being noticed.
It’s cold. So very cold.
Everywhere she looks around the railway station there are people walking, or seated, or sprawled on the ground, sleeping with their mouths wide open. All of them bundled up, their breath steaming out of their open mouths like some beast she must once have known or been told about but has long since forgotten. She sniffs the air. She smells: stale breath and roasted chicken; rotting sores and the vinegar of pickled vegetables. The sour whiff of eggs. She’s hungry but this food is not for her. Not here. Not in open view.
She is a whole world in herself. Completely self-sufficient. A world where only some things matter. Not many. She can name them if she has to: food, warmth, somewhere to lay her head when she is weary. Everything else, the stuff of the life she had once led, its memories and its bonds and even the language she once used, are now dispensable. And vanishing.
Her thoughts are plain. Clear. She thinks: trains. They matter. They keep you moving. They take you away from danger. But trains can also bring on danger. You can drop on the rails and be sliced into pieces. You can freeze. Or, just as dangerous, you can run into a uniform.
Time was when the trains were stuffed with uniforms. Two to each carriage. Hard men, looking out for the bezprizornie , the homeless kids, like her. You could know them by the red stars on their caps, by their swagger and the swinging of their guns. And then: trouble. You must jump.
Not as many uniforms these days.
Or kids. Once they swarmed the railway stations, hungry like her, elbowing her out of the way. Pushing, shoving: some of them were strong. They would steal your bread or knock you off a moving train if you didn’t hold on tight. But no longer. These days she is mostly alone.
What happened to the others? She doesn’t know. Finding out means sticking around, asking questions. Talking. All dangerous. She doesn’t put herself in danger, not on purpose, not unless there is something to be gained. And anyway she really doesn’t care. Without the others there is more food, better places to sleep.
Much more food. Recently, yesterday perhaps if she knew what yesterday was, she had experienced a sensation she didn’t fully understand, at least not at first. Then she had remembered. Full – that’s what she felt. No nagging ache to keep her going: no sharp edge that stopped her from sleep. Full, she wanted to lie down. Close her eyes. Relax.
Full is dangerous. It makes you less aware. It makes you soft. Time to move on. To run. Running. She is good at that.
She wasn’t always. Once in the hungriest time, they caught up with her, first trapping her, then holding her and finally sending her on a different journey. A thousands versts she must have travelled, shut up with the others. A thousand. She heard them saying that. A number that stuck even if it has no meaning. All she knows is that she didn’t like it there in the thousands. Too cold. The steppe’s no good: you need a city to survive. She came back. Slowly. Working her way forward, so as not to be caught again. Oh, she was good at what she did. At surviving.
She mustn’t stay out in the open, she needs to find a train. A goods train? They are the best. Not so many uniforms. Too many red stars on the other ones. Red. For danger. But no, tonight there are no goods trains except the one, over there, and that is guarded. Something special being taken. Not that one then. Not worth the risk . . .
On any other night, she would go away and come back when things had moved on. But not tonight. Something’s happening in the city. Things moving too fast. Not good. Not good for her. Even this station. It’s crowded, much more crowded than it should be.
Crowds can give safety but they can also be dangerous. They attract uniforms, call them close. Something in her tells her: wait. Leave another time. But she cannot listen to that voice, for it has come too late. She survives by deciding and then acting. She has to leave. Tonight. She has already decided. She can’t delay. She’ll take a passenger train. That is her decision. This is how she always makes decisions. She thinks out the one thing, then the other. In order. Slowly and with care. Then she decides and she doesn’t have to think.
To choose a train is a simple thing. She only has to watch out for the movement of the samovars, and to use her eyes to follow the coal trucks jolting down the track, to see the engine already belching, the wheels steaming, the long aprons running backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards as if they are important.
There. That’s the one there on a platform at the end. That one. She will get on that.
Where is she going to? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t care. Another place. That’s all that matters. And why is she going? What does it matter? She’s going, that’s all. Moving on. Instinct told her to and on instinct is how she exists.
On balance she decides she likes a crowded station. That way she can flitter, like a shadow, between the groups and not be noticed. That’s the trick. To make as if she isn’t there. To disappear. She walks. Not fast. Not slow. Queues of women. Crying babies. Why do they bother? Won’t they just shut up?
There: she is almost by the platform. This is the hard part. Only people with a permit allowed. She sticks out. Careful. Two fat boots, thick coats, fur helmets over there. Red stars. Danger.
Danger but she has to take a risk. The city is too busy. Something happening. Something that won’t like her. Now is the time. She has to go.
A long apron. A porter. She falls in step with him. On his other side, there’s a red star but he’s looking the other way and doesn’t see her. The porter’s different: he knows that she is there. She knows he knows, she saw his eyes on her. He, however, gives no sign of it. She knows his type which means she knows he won’t give her away. He’ll boast about it later – how he didn’t call the authorities. ‘I didn’t have the heart,’ he’ll tell his fat cow of a wife. Probably thinks she’s grateful. Grateful. Huh! People like that don’t fool her. They’re like all the rest: they just don’t want to draw trouble, even somebody else’s, to themselves.
She uses him. That’s what he’s there for. For cover until they’ve passed the uniforms. Then, as the train belches steam, she leaps, holding tight to her small satchel by its leather straps, going between two carriages, leaping up. Hidden. Holding on.
And waits.
She is woken when her satchel falls. It jolts down but not all the way. She has wound the strap around her wrist and now, as the bag drops into the darkness of the rushing rails and is almost carried away, it tugs at her. She thinks: a bad mistake. She fell asleep. Not holding on.
She grabs for the door. She can barely move: her limbs and her fingers brittle. Cold. So very cold. It burns. Something, she doesn’t know what, tells her to tighten her grip, even though every muscle in her body is aching to let go. Danger. She has watched this happen. Once, when she was travelling on another train, she saw another child let go. She watched as he fell on to the tracks. Soundlessly and without a trace that she could see because the train went rushing on. But before he fell she saw his face. She saw how the muscles round his jaw grew slack, how his eyes sagged and, without even being able to name it for herself, she knew what she was seeing. He was giving up, that’s what, and in doing so she saw relief.
A rush of air. Is it her turn? Is she also falling? The relief moves in on her. She feels herself go limp.
The air is warm. The end, rushing to meet her. Yes, here it comes.
But. She is going up, not down. She feels: arms. She smells: the acrid, clinging stink of makhorka tobacco. She hears a voice:
‘What have we here?’
She closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to know.
The Scholar
It was dark when Boris Aleksandrovich left for work and dark on his way home and in between there has passed one of those thick, grey, winter days, glutinous not only with fog but also with murky speculation as to what effect Sergei Mironovich’s refusal to stand for General Secretary might have on Leningrad. Now, arriving outside his front door, Boris Aleksandrovich stops a moment, and lets wash over him those exquisite velvet notes that issue from Ilya’s violin.
Boris Aleksandrovich often listens like this – sneakily and from a distance – to his youngest son’s playing and when he does he always finds himself conjuring up an image of grace and power and beauty completely at odds with the reality of that clumsy, bespectacled, fat boy who would be sure to dissolve into helpless stutters should Boris Aleksandrovich make the mistake of addressing him directly. Perhaps Lina’s right, Boris thinks, as he pushes open the door: perhaps they should have let Ilya study in Moscow rather than making him stay at the Leningrad Conservatory.
He steps into the hallway, and as he does he finds himself pulled back into his own childhood when, coming home from school, he would be met by this same, unmistakeably pungent tang of cabbage soup and stewing marrow bones. In those days, this aroma only ever signified one thing – soup: but now it presages something much more complicated, for nowadays his mother only ever cooks like this either when they’re expecting guests or when something has disturbed her. Boris Aleksandrovich sighs. Since he hasn’t invited anyone to supper, the smell means there’s trouble brewing. He bends down and removes his galoshes as quietly as he can. Not quietly enough, however. The music stops abruptly and in mid-coda, Ilya sensing, as he often does, that Boris Aleksandrovich must be back.
