“Your father will reach the gates of hell first, lad,” the sailors laugh, “don’t be in a hurry.”
As we cross the Arctic Circle my shipmates baptise me in a tub of sea water. The cold takes my breath away but they revive me with tumblers of vodka.
The Barents sea is always choppy. Water sprays onto the ship and freezes. From morning till night I break ice on the deck, spars and rigging. The worst task is cleaning up after coal has been loaded. The sailors like their ship to shine so I have to swill coal-dust off the decks and then wash it out of every nook and cranny with the point of a wet cloth. The incessant rain soaks my oilskins and weighs me down as I work.
“If you don’t pull your weight, boy, you’ll be off at the next port,” the bosun growls. He turns to the other sailors: “Anyone who makes fun of this lad will get a punch in the face. Understood?”
We sail to the Spitzbergen port of Barentsburg, where there is a Soviet mining concession. Convicts work the mines. Barentsburg is foreign territory and therefore off-limits to a son of an Enemy of the People. When the other sailors have gone ashore for the evening I stand on deck looking at the stars and the lights from the port. Only the distant bark of a dog or a drunken shout breaks the silence. It seems that somewhere below the horizon a fire is burning, shooting flares into the heavens. Bars of green light stripe the sky, bending into weird forms. I feel sorry for the prisoners: their camp floodlights will blot out these northern lights.
Archangelsk is already cut off by the frozen White Sea so on our return voyage we unload our coal at Murmansk. The port is surrounded by logging camps. “Be vigilant,” warns the Wave’s political instructor before we disembark. “The camps are full of criminals and Enemies of the People.”
“Convicts slip letters between the logs,” the bosun whispers to me. “Sometimes one of them cuts off a hand and nails it to a log. They hope that someone abroad will see it and make a fuss.”
I’ve heard these camp stories before; they surprise me as little as night following day.
Our next voyage is to Igarka in Siberia. We sail via Franz Josef Land, taking supplies to the meteorologists who work on Rudolf Island in the far north of the archipelago. The shore is surrounded by ice floes which crash against each other so violently we can’t land. We unload our cargo onto an ice sheet and the meteorologists come to fetch it on dog-sleds. They wave and shout greetings, happy to see their first visitors for months. I envy them. The Arctic seems exciting and romantic; people have only been living there for the short time I have been on this earth.
At the mouth of the Yenisei we take a navigator on board to steer us around the river’s islands and shallows. We follow the river for hundreds of kilometres down to Igarka. Our political instructor again warns us to be vigilant as prisoners from the Norilsk camps work in the town. When I go ashore however, I find it hard to tell the difference between convicts and ordinary people. Some men come up and politely ask us to post letters for them so they can avoid the censor. We all agree. Later I drop four letters into a box in Archangelsk.
We sail back up the foggy Yenisei, through the Kara sea, and past the tip of Novaya Zemlya to Nar’ian Mar, where we have to deliver a Victory car to the local Party chief. The car drives us all mad. It gets in my way when I sweep the deck and its tarpaulin cover keeps wrenching loose and flapping like a dirty flag. When I try to fasten it down it resists me as though it were alive. Everyone is happy to see the last of the vehicle at Nar’ian Mar. It’s a mystery where the Party boss will drive, for there are no roads in the region.
The Wave leaves me behind at Archangelsk. It’s bound for the British Isles so they can’t take me. The night it sails I go to a bar and get as drunk as a piglet’s squeal. I wake up feeling sick but I have to get up and look for another post before the sea freezes over. As I drag myself out in the morning I see a sign in the hostel foyer: Radio-operator training college in Riga seeks applicants. Fare paid. I write and they accept me.
The boys travelling with me to Riga come from villages deep in the countryside. They’ve never seen a train before and are nervous of the iron horse. I laugh at the quaint way they speak: “Yesterday we were to a bar going, vodka drinking, with a soldier fighting.”
The Riga train amazes us with its clean toilets and polite conductresses. There aren’t even any cigarette butts on the floor. But beyond the window, war has left its traces in a desolate landscape of ruined buildings. We pass countless wrecks of German tanks. The people, in their grey padded jackets, look like the convicts of Igarka.
We can’t afford restaurant car meals so we buy baked potatoes and cucumbers from old ladies on station platforms. Some potatoes are still raw in the centre. The country boys are shocked. It would never enter their heads to cheat in this way. People from the north are more honest than us, perhaps because they never had serfdom. In Central Russia people are still afflicted with the slave mentality and will try anything on if think they can get away with it, even when there’s no point.
The outskirts of Riga are scarred with bombed factories; its centre is pitted with burned-out wooden buildings. We are surprised to find our college undamaged by war. It’s a six-storey former hotel with Anno 1905 embossed on its facade.
I quickly settle into the institute and soon enjoy the liking and respect of my fellows. The college is a friendly place. When a master punishes a boy by withholding his dinner the rest of us tip our dishes of porridge over the tables. Then we pick up our bread and walk out of the dining room. Perhaps not everyone wants to go along with this protest but they keep quiet in the face of our collective decision.
My best friend is a boy called Victor Rudenko. He comes from Kotlas, where his parents have been exiled as kulaks.[5] Victor has picked up criminal jargon and likes to show off by calling out to the other boys: “You over there with rickets!” or “You ugly bastard!”
Rudenko’s bravado backfires, and he becomes known as ‘Rickets.’
There are one or two petty dictators amongst the second year boys. Those of us who don’t have the sense to keep out of their sight are constantly sent out for cigarettes or to take messages to girls at the bookbinders’ college. I notice that some lads — most of them insecure boys from collective farms — actually enjoy this treatment. “For them life without servitude would be like life without cake,” says Rickets.
Rickets and I make friends with a Rigan, Valerka Polenov. Valerka is small and his shoulders are raised as though shrugging in bewilderment. He dresses carelessly with his cap pulled down over one ear. His hero is Lord Byron. Half the time Valerka is in a different world. He’s not even aware that people respect him. I never found out how he ended up in our college; he probably only comes because it’s next door to his house.
Valerka’s father is an administrator at the circus. In his spare time he makes records from x-ray films, engraving them with the songs of Vertinsky and Vadim Kozin. If you hold a disc up to the light you see a broken bone or vertebra. I drop in on Valerka’s father to borrow some of these records. To reach the offices I have to walk through the circus dwarves’ quarters. Seeing them close-up, I can’t understand why we laugh at them. Without make-up, in the middle of their family quarrels, swearing, drinking and fighting, the dwarves are just like the people in our barracks at home. They are no different to anyone else; you might as well look in the mirror and laugh.
I like college, but the place where I really feel I belong — for the first time in my life — is the town’s yacht club. When I see a notice in the papers appealing for new members I take a tram out to Lake Kish and present myself. They put me to work scraping paint and collecting rubbish. I throw myself into my tasks, hoping that my dedication to the job will prove my love for the sea. Everyone is busy preparing for the summer, cleaning and painting their yachts, which look like fragile, pretty toys. The friendship of the club is different to that of the institute; you don’t have to use your fists to win respect.
5
Kulaks were wealthy peasants who were shot or exiled to Siberia during the collectivisation period of the early 1930s.