Child 44 - Страница 32

For the past few weeks she’d sat idle in their apartment, knowing full well he’d been weighing up whether he’d made the right decision. Should he have spared her life? Was she worth the risk? Was she pretty enough, nice enough, good enough? Unless every gesture and glance pleased him she’d be in mortal danger. Well, that time was over. She was sick of the powerlessness, the dependency upon his good will. Yet now he seemed to be under the impression that she was in his debt. He’d stated the obvious: she wasn’t an international spy, she was a secondary-school teacher. In repayment he wanted a declaration of her love. It was insulting. He was no longer in a position to demand anything. He had no leverage over her just as she had none over him. They were both in the same dire straits: their life’s possessions reduced to one suitcase each, exiled to some far-flung town. They were equals as they had never been equal before. If he wanted to hear about love, the first verse was his to sing.

Leo brooded over Raisa’s remarks. It seemed that she’d granted herself the right to judge him, to hold him in contempt while pretending that her hands were clean. But she’d married him knowing what he did for a living, she’d enjoyed the perks of his position, she’d eaten the rare foods he’d been able to bring home, she’d bought clothes from the well-stocked spetztorgi, stores restricted to state officials. If she was so appalled by his work, why hadn’t she rejected his advances? Everyone understood that it was necessary, in order to survive, to compromise. He’d done things that were distasteful — morally objectionable. A clear conscience was, for most people, an impossible luxury and one Raisa could hardly lay claim to. Had she taught her classes according to her genuine beliefs? Evidently not, considering her indignation at the State Security apparatus — but at school she must have expressed her support for it, explained to her students how their State operated, applauded it, indoctrinated them to agree with it and even encouraged them to denounce one another. If she hadn’t she would’ve almost certainly been denounced by one of her own students. Her job was not only to toe the line but to shut down her pupils’ questioning faculties. And it would be her job to do it again in their new town. As far Leo was concerned, he and his wife were spokes in the same wheel.

The train stopped at Mutava for an hour. Raisa broke the day-long silence between them.

— We should eat something.

By which she meant that they should stick to practical arrangements: it had been the foundation for their relationship this far. Surviving whatever challenges they had coming, that was the glue between them, not love. They got out of the carriage. A woman was pacing the platform with a wicker basket. They bought hardboiled eggs, a paper pouch of salt, chunks of tough rye bread. Sitting side by side on a bench they peeled their eggs, collecting the shell in their laps, sharing the salt and saying nothing at all to each other.

The train’s speed dropped as it climbed towards the mountains, passing through black pine forests. In the distance, over the tree tops, the mountains could be seen jutting upwards like the uneven teeth in a bottom jaw.

The tracks opened out into a clearing — sprawled before them was a vast assembly plant, tall chimneys, interconnected warehouse-like buildings suddenly appearing in the middle of a wilderness. It was as though God had sat on the Ural Mountains, smashed his fist down on the landscape before him, sending trees flying, and demanded that this newly created space be filled with chimneys and steel presses. This was the first glimpse of their new home.

Leo’s knowledge of this town came from propaganda and paperwork. Previously little more than timber mills and a collection of timber huts for the people who worked in them, the once modest settlement of twenty thousand inhabitants had caught Stalin’s eye. Upon closer examination of its natural and man-made resources he’d declared it insufficiently productive. The river Ufa ran nearby, there were the steel- and iron-processing plants in Sverdlovsk only a hundred and sixty kilometres east and ore mines in the mountains, and it had the benefit of the Trans-Siberian railway — vast locomotives passed through this town each day and nothing more was added to them than planks of wood. He’d decided that this would be the ideal location to assemble an automobile, the GAZ-20, a car intended to rival the vehicles produced in the West, built according to the highest specifications. It’s successor, currently under design — the Volga GAZ-21–was being upheld as the pinnacle of Soviet engineering, designed to survive the harsh climate with high ground clearance, enviable suspension, a bullet-proof engine and rust-proofing on a scale unheard of in the United States of America. Whether that was true or not, Leo had no way of knowing. He knew it was a car only a tiny per cent of Soviet citizens could afford, far beyond the financial reach of the men and women employed in its assembly.

Construction on the factory began some time after the war and eighteen months later the Volga assembly plant stood in the middle of the pine forests. He couldn’t remember the number of prisoners reported to have died in its construction. Not that the numbers were reliable anyway. Leo had only become actively involved after the factory had been completed. Thousands of free workers had been vetted and transferred by compulsory writ from cities across the country to fill the newly created labour gap: the population rising fivefold over the space of five years. Leo had done background checks on some of the Moscow workers transferred here. If they’d passed the checks, they were packed up and moved out within the week. If they failed, they were arrested. He’d been one of the gatekeepers to this town. He was sure that this was one of the reasons that Vasili had picked this place. The irony must have amused him.

Raisa missed this first glimpse of their new home. She was asleep, wrapped up in her coat, her head resting against the window, rocking slightly with the motion of the train. Moving to the seat beside his wife and facing in the direction they were travelling, he could see how the main town was latched onto the side of the vast assembly plant as though it was a tic sucking on the neck of a dog. First and foremost this was a place of industrial production, a distant second, a place to live. The lights of apartment blocks glowed dim orange against a grey sky. Leo nudged Raisa. She woke, looking at Leo, then out of the window.

— We’re here.

The train pulled into the station. They collected their cases, stepping down onto the platform. It was colder than Moscow — the temperature had dropped by at least a couple of degrees. They stood like two evacuee children arriving in the country for the first time, staring at their unfamiliar surroundings. They’d been given no instructions. They knew no one. They didn’t even have a number to call. No one was waiting for them.

The station building was empty except for a man seated at the ticket booth. He was young, not much more than twenty. He watched them intently as they entered the building. Raisa approached him.

— Good evening. We need to get to the headquarters of the militia.

— You’re from Moscow?

— That’s right.

The man opened the door of his ticket booth, stepping out onto the concourse. He pointed out of the glass doors towards the street outside.

— They’re waiting for you.

One hundred paces from the station entrance was a militia car.

Passing a snow-capped stone carving of Stalin’s profile, chiselled into a slab of rock like a fossilized impression, Raisa and Leo moved towards the car, a GAZ-20, no doubt one of the cars produced by this town. As they got closer they could see two men sitting in the front. The door opened, one of the men stepped out, a middle-aged man with broad shoulders.

— Leo Demidov?

— Yes.

— I’m General Nesterov, head of Voualsk’s militia.

Leo wondered why he’d bothered to meet them. Surely Vasili had given instructions to make the experience as unpleasant as possible? But it didn’t matter what Vasili had said — the arrival of a former MGB agent from Moscow was going to put the militia on their guard. They wouldn’t believe that he was merely here to join their ranks. They almost certainly suspected an ulterior agenda and presumed that, for whatever reason, he’d be reporting back to Moscow. The more Vasili had tried to convince them otherwise, the more suspicious they would’ve become. Why would an agent travel hundreds of kilometres to join a small-scale militia operation? It didn’t make sense — in a classless society the militia were near the bottom of the heap.

Every schoolchild was taught that murder, theft and rape were symptoms of a capitalist society, and the role of the militia had been ranked accordingly. There was no need to steal and no violence between citizens because there was equality. There was no need for a police force in a Communist state. It was for this reason that the militia were nothing more than a lowly subsection of the Ministry of the Interior: poorly paid, poorly respected — a force comprised of secondary-school dropouts, farm workers kicked off the kolkhoz, discharged army personnel and men whose judgement could be bought with a half bottle of vodka. Officially the USSR’s crime rates were close to zero. The newspapers frequently pointed out the vast sums of money the United States of America was forced to waste on crime prevention with its need for gleaming police cars and police officers in crisp, clean uniforms visible on every street corner, without which its society would crumble. The West employed many of their bravest men and women fighting crime, citizens who could’ve better spent their time building something. None of that manpower was squandered here: all that was needed was a ragtag group of strong but otherwise useless men who were good for nothing more than breaking up drunken brawls. That was the theory. Leo had no idea what the real crime statistics were. He had no desire to find out since those who knew were probably liquidated on a regular basis. Factory production figures filled Pravda’s front page, the middle pages and the back pages too. Good news was the only news worth printing — high birth rates, mountain-top train lines and new canals.