Chernayev was with Holly, and Feldstein. The girl was close to Holly, ignored and uncomplaining.
The loudspeakers barked at them from high on the walls.
'… The gates have been opened. You must go immediately to the gates. You have two minutes. There will be no further opportunity to leave the compound before the intervention of the military… '
Kypov with his parade-ground shout.
'… You have this last chance. Go immediately to the gates with your hands on your heads. You will not be harmed. You have two minutes.'
Holly looked around him, watching for the first man to rise. One man close to him with the cough of consumption, one with a crutch and an amputated right leg, one with the tremble of a disease that was incurable, one who could not see without grotesque owl spectacles.
Who would be the first, Holly?
Why don't the buggers move? They can't fight. They're helpless bloody food for the tank gun… why don't they go? Holly thought of a second hand ticking on a watch face, jerking through the movements of revolution. Two minutes only.
'You can go… Any of you who want to go. There is no shame in going…' Holly shouted.
They gazed back at him. Dumb cattle, quiet.
'Who are you to tell them that they can go?' Chernayev hissed. 'You think that you pull every string, Holly?'
Holly pitched himself forward towards the nearest part of the sitting mass. He dragged at the man with the consumptive cough, and the grip of his hands was flailed away. He pulled at the man with the amputated right leg and felt the crutch end spear into his stomach. He tugged at the man who could barely see and found only a weight that was dead to him. No man moved.
Holly caught at the tunic of the girl.
'You go, Morozova, you go.'
'No.' She looked up into his face, and there was a calmness and a sureness.
'Why…?'
'You called through the wall of the cell, you called "Don't please them with your tears". To walk through the gate is to weep.'
Holly shook his head. 'Feldstein, you go, you are not a fighter.' it is better to lie down in front of the tank than to walk out now.'
Holly leaned against the doorway, and covered his face.
No man should see him. God, how were they so brave? He had unleashed that bravery. Easy enough to burn the Commandant's hut, to poison the garrison's water, to cut through the two fences of barbed wire. Nothing when set against the courage of sitting cramped on the floor of the Kitchen when safety beckoned through the opened gate. He felt the girl against him. He felt her arm slide surely round his waist.
'There has to be a time when we go through the gate.'
She had a small, husky voice. 'Not when they tell us, when they bribe us. In our own time we go through.'
Clumsily Holly slipped his own arm around the girl.
Through her tunic his fingers found the hard rib bones, played on them, climbed them. 'Before you were here, before t h a t… what did you do?'
'I was a pianist.'
'When this camp no longer exists as a prison for a pianist, that is the time to go to the gates. When it is destroyed, when the camp is as if it had never been. When there is no place here for a pianist.'
His cheek rested on the top of her cap. He heard the struggling whine of an engine, the clanking of tracks biting on ice and tarmac. The coming of the tank. The roar spread through the compound, through the Kitchen, through Holly, through the girl who was against him.
Byrkin ran round the corner wall of the Kitchen. Panting, pointing towards the gulf of the opened gate.
'You hear it, Holly?'
'I hear it.' His arm fell from Morozova. 'Are you ready for it?'
Byrkin grimaced. 'As we'll ever be.'
Holly turned towards the girl, searching her face for weakness. Only the sweet brown eyes, only the mouth firm in defiance. When he broke away, her hand tried to check him, for a moment, and then her grip was broken.
Together, hugging the shadow of the huts, sprinting on the open ground, Holly and Byrkin came to Hut 4. They crawled forward over the frozen mud, beneath the floorboards. Holly smelt the paraffin, saw the bottles, the strips of torn blanket, the unlit torches, the boxes of matches.
And all the time the coming thunder of the tank.
'Left side, behind the turret, right?'
'That's where it is… I heard it said once that when they went into Budapest they even had "Petrol" written on the screw cap.'
Level with them was Hut 3, fifty yards away. If the tank came straight through the gates it would bisect the open space between the two huts.
Holly reached out and took a handful of blanket. He felt sick from the smell of paraffin.
|
The troops who would follow the tank into the compound were gathered in two squads on either side of the approach to the gates. A little way apart from them was Kypov. Apart because he was not in command. He might wear his helmet, he might carry a pistol in his hand, but would not feel the sweet joy of participation in the first assault. He would be used later, as a gauleiter to administer prisoners already broken and defeated. His own men of the MVD guard were a full hundred metres further back with orders not to advance or in any way impede the attack by the regular troops. A bitter pill.
He was astonished to see the Colonel General approaching him.
'You are not in command?' asked Kypov.
'My colleague can manage adequately.'
'A strange decision.'
'Perhaps… I haven't much stomach for this fight.'
'None of us can choose our duty,' Kypov shouted above the thunder of the tracks.
Adimov heard the muffled sounds of the tank through the reinforced wall of his SHIzo cell. He lay where they had tossed him, in a sludge of dull pain. The sergeant in the Guard House had exacted the full toll from his ribs, his kidneys, the flesh at the fall of his stomach.
'Old man, next c e l l… I told them the tank was coming
… I gave them warning… '
A faint voice. 'Perhaps it was better if they had not known.'
'They have a better chance to fight it.'
'The harder they fight, the harder they will be smashed.'
'I tried..
'However long you are in the camps, wherever you are sent, you will be known for what you have done.'
Adimov closed his eyes, and his cell was filled with the crescendo of the tank's advance.
'He's tall, dark-haired. Usually in a group of three or four.
Very straight in the back, that's the give-away. Once the tank's in, nail him.'
The Adjutant crawled away across the roof of the Administration building, leaving the four marksmen to prepare for their work.
When he peered over the low parapet wall he saw the tank charging at the gates, full speed for the engine of 130 horse power.
They lay on their stomachs in the doorway of the Kitchen. A daft place to be, but neither would miss the entrance of the tank into the compound.
'Are you afraid?' Morozova asked.
'Wetting my pants, darling,' said Poshekhonov.
The tank loomed between the open gates. Above the engine howl they heard the noise of splintering wood as it took the right side gate-post in its rush. Poshekhonov reached for the girl, pulled her underneath his body. Shit, she felt good. Everyone who was near the doorway heard Poshekhonov's laughter, and thought a madness had taken him.