Sami and I walked away from hangar and monastery, away from the faithful and the dilapidated village, into the forest. He was quiet again, steeling himself for the journey ahead. Among the spruce and pine, in the cold dappled sunlight, we found a small lake skimmed with wafer-thin ice. Across it skated water beetles like minute balls of mercury. Columns of vapour rose out of the woods like the smoke from bonfires. A crow’s caw echoed from the far shore. Within a few weeks the water would be frozen solid and the ice reach as far as the Barents Sea.
Solitude had brought the first Russians to Solovki for religious retreat, then in exile, then under arrest. Today most came and went as they pleased. Few were in danger of being imprisoned or worked to death. Nevertheless they were trapped, by their unwillingness to face the past, by a deceitful and disingenuous national narrative. The Russian Revolution had enslaved generations. When it collapsed, an inner circle of trusted St Petersburg friends had refashioned its lies to empower and enrich themselves.
Memorial – the organisation behind ‘Last Address’ – had once built the only monument to political prisoners executed on Solovki. But within days its stone slabs had vanished.
So too did the telephone of the wind.
Last year an elderly visitor to the archipelago – no one had asked his name – set an old rotary telephone on a tree stump on a rise of wooded land to the east of the monastery. No wires connected it to a network. The handset was cracked and broken. Yet every morning the man left his timber-frame hotel and trekked out to the woods to talk on it. After three days he began to invite other visitors to use the phone, offering them the chance to speak with old friends. One or two put the receiver to their ears and heard nothing. Most chose to ignore him, tightening their scarves around their heads and hurrying back to the safety of the monastery. Then he told a monk, who had joined him on the rise of land, that he was speaking to angels. That night the phone vanished. In the morning the old man also left the island, never to return.
17
London Road
‘There’s something I need to say, like to get it out,’ said Sami.
We were back on the mainland at Kem. We were parting again. Sami was heading north on the ‘Arktika’ to Murmansk. My southbound train was due an hour later, bound for St Petersburg and out of Russia. Around us on the platform hawkers sold smoked fish from wooden flats, boiled potatoes and bottles of beer. Yawning rail travellers shuffled between them in their slippers, stretching legs and stiff backs, opening their purses to buy punnets of late season chernika berries and home-made cabbage pies.
There’s an old Russian custom of sitting together in silence for a minute before starting a journey, but we had no time. ‘You should get on board and find a seat,’ I said. The train only stopped for ten minutes and it was packed. In a window I saw half a dozen African faces, looking out of place at this end of the world. Sami had met them in St Petersburg, linking up as travellers do, and heard about the Arctic route. He’d arranged to travel with them on the so-called London Road. After the twelve-hour ride to Murmansk, another train would take them to the Norwegian frontier. Rumour had it that the Russian border guards there were letting migrants pass through without checking for visas, in effect dumping them on Europe.
‘It’s another loan, yeah?’ he insisted as he pocketed the notes.
I nodded. ‘Go on, Sami,’ I said as the locomotive sounded its warning whistle.
‘Rightfully so. Rightfully so,’ he muttered but he could neither step off the platform nor let go of the train. He gripped the carriage door handle and tried to speak. I’d rarely seen him at a loss for words. I wondered how many partings he’d had to face; from his mother then father, from fellow travellers with whom he’d shared a night, a ride, a hope. All had been left behind, all apart from hope.
‘What did you want to say, Sami?’ I asked.
‘It’s… whatever,’ he finally replied. ‘You are the word man. You say it.’
In his hesitation, Sami had blocked the carriage door. A grumbling passenger tried to push past him. When Sami stepped out of his way, the man, who was drunk, took a swing at him but slipped and fell onto the platform. Somehow his leg ended up under the train and an officious despatcher stormed towards us.
‘Get on. Get on,’ I hissed then turned my attention to the drunk. By the time the despatcher reached us, Sami was gone.
The whistle sounded again as we pulled the drunk back onto his feet. He wheeled around, pointed up at the Africans and demanded – as far as I could tell – their arrest. Now a policeman appeared and the hawkers crowded around to see if he would club the man or at least drag him away. But the slamming carriage doors shook the drunk to his senses. His manner shifted from open hostility to sheepish submission. He begged his pardon and hauled himself up the steps as the train began to move. Both despatcher and policeman left him to be someone else’s problem. I watched the ‘Arktika’ until the red tail lights vanished beyond a glade of stunted birches on its long journey to the Arctic Circle.
The 875-mile Murmansk railroad line had been built over twenty months by tens of thousands of labourers, navvies and POWs. Along it thousands of political prisoners were sent north to the camps and – during the Second World War – millions of tons of Allied supplies transported south from the Barents Sea railhead. To this day Murmansk remains the largest transit point in the Arctic but, as I later learned, Sami never reached it.
Across the world refugee routes are ever-shifting, traffickers and opportunists exploiting need and inequality for profit, even for political ends. Russia’s 1,300-mile-long northern frontier with Norway and Finland is among the country’s most strategic, guarded by the army, the KGB and the Border Service. Along its length nothing happens without Moscow’s approval. The Kremlin alone decides which roads to open and close in the heavily militarised region.
On the train Sami learned from the other Africans that Norway had closed its crossing points to foot travellers. In response some 5,500 Afghans, Iranians and Pakistanis had cycled into Kirkenes, until bicycles too were banned. So instead of heading to Murmansk, and freewheeling a Raleigh into the passport-free Schengen zone, he and the other Africans got off in Kandalaksha, a place best known for its fish plants and while-you-wait deportation orders. In that city local officials, hotel owners and drivers worked together with criminal gangs to manage the migration business. Package deals cost between $500 and $2,000, depending on individual need. Payment was in cash only. No proof existed of the involvement of the Russian state, yet – immediately after Helsinki had voiced support for NATO – some 1,500 refugees were despatched across its border as a warning. The Kremlin wanted to remind the Finns that over eleven million foreigners lived on Russian territory, a vast pool of potential migrants who could be used to flood Europe.
Neither Sami nor I had expected him to become a geopolitical pawn. In Kandalaksha, he and the other Africans sank their money into a decrepit beige Lada and joined a convoy of rust-buckets for the 120-mile drive to Finland. Twice on the journey the Soviet-era wreck stalled and had to be push-started by the five men with the single Gambian woman at the wheel. Once, Sami caught sight of a deer herd cantering across the red and brown tundra.
As the cars neared the border his breath quickened. He knew that he mustn’t panic. He knew that he had to be invisible at the last frontier. But with so much at stake, fear threatened to overwhelm him. He thought he didn’t stand a chance.