‘In my quarters,’ said Ushakov, ‘I have a radio set. It is called a Telefunken. Is there any one of you who knows this make of set well enough to do a repair job?’ I knew the Telefunken, because we had one at home — a German make, I think, made under licence in a factory at Wilno for the Polish market. Men turned their heads to see who might step forward. There was a full minute of silence and nobody made a move. I knew the set, but could I repair it? If I could, there was the exciting prospect of hearing some news from the outside world, from which I had been cut off for nearly eighteen months. I had a sudden panic that somebody else would get the job. I stuck up my hand and called out. An N.C.O. stepped up and took my name and my place of work. ‘I will send for you when I want you,’ said the Commandant.
It was to be a fateful decision, launching me into the last and most extraordinary phase of my stay at Camp 303. In this isolated community of between five and six thousand men under sentence and a battalion strength of officers and men, there was but one woman. The defective Telefunken was to be the means of my meeting her, and, so far as I knew, I was the only prisoner who ever talked to her.
The following afternoon as I worked in the ski shop, the Commandant’s messenger, a moon-faced private named Igor, called for me. ‘The Commandant wants you,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’ As we left, the other men in the shop called out, ‘Find out how the war’s going,’ and ‘Get us some news from Poland,’ and so on. I waved my hand. I confess I felt nervous as I walked away from the ski shop, across in front of the big gate, past the officers’ mess to the Commandant’s house standing on the other side of the camp at the northwest corner of the parade ground. It was, like all the other buildings, built of logs with the typical porch opening south to keep the wind and snow away from the front door. As I stepped inside I saw it differed only from the style of the prisoners’ barracks in having an inner skin of smooth plank walls, a wooden ceiling and floor, and a stove stackpipe that went all the way up through the roof. For windows it had, not glass, but the same peculiar tough fish-skin stuff which was fitted in all the other buildings. The most that could be said for this skin was that it was windproof and let in light. It could not be seen through.
Igor ushered me in. Ushakov stepped forward towards the door, dismissed Igor and motioned me in. ‘I have come to look at the set, Gospodin Polkovnik,’ I said in Russian, using the old Russian style of respectful address to a Colonel.
‘Yes, of course. I will show it to you.’ He stepped past me and out through the door I had just entered, looked around and came back in.
The woman sat in front of the stove, which had been placed so that it protruded through the partition which divided the home into two rooms, so heating both halves. The Colonel murmured a conventional introduction to his wife. I bowed and said something formal and she smiled with a small inclination of her head. I found myself staring at her. She was the first woman I had met since I left my wife and my mother in Pinsk. I felt awkward and ill at ease, painfully aware of my ugly clothes, my beard and my long hair which curled over the neck of my jacket. I could not take my eyes off her.
She stood up and I saw she was tall for a woman. She wore a long thick skirt and a dark woollen cardigan over a white, flower-embroidered cotton blouse. Her brown hair, tightly plaited and wound in the Russian style halo-wise around the head, had a live, well-brushed sheen, and I was struck by the clearness of her skin. I was never much good at guessing women’s ages, but I think she would have been nearing forty. She was not beautiful but she had that quiet quality of essential womanliness, a way of holding herself, an ease of moving, a way of looking at one, that would demand attention anywhere. I came out of my fleeting trance to find her blue eyes regarding me in a look of frank pity and sympathy. And I turned my head away and saw Ushakov standing in the doorway between the two rooms looking at me in that preoccupied and detached manner of his. ‘Let me show you the radio,’ he said.
The inner room was their bedroom and his office combined. Along one wall nearest to the stove was a heavy wooden bunk, at the head of which was a cupboard in which I could see his uniforms hanging. Near it, against the wall farthest from the door, was a solid wooden chest. The bed was to my left as I walked in through the partition door, the chest immediately in front of me. The part of the room to my right was Ushakov’s office. Hanging on the wall was a big contour map of Eastern Siberia — an extraordinary production in that instead of place-names there were only numbers. There was also a plan of the camp and a coloured portrait of Joseph Stalin. On a bench under the all-seeing eye of Stalin was the radio, a brand-new, battery-operated Telefunken.
Ushakov gave me a Pushki cigarette, fetched over a kerosene lamp and set it down on a bench near me. I took the back off the set and began running my fingers along the leads, suspecting a loose connection somewhere. Ushakov asked me questions about the set, where it was made, what it cost, how it worked. Hesitantly, I inquired where he had got it. ‘I happened unfortunately,’ he answered, ‘to be in charge of troops in Poland in 1939, and I acquired it there.’ My mind seized on the use of the word ‘unfortunately’. It tied in with the theory which the prisoners expressed that even to be commandant of a camp in Siberia was in the nature of a punishment. I had the impression then, later to be strengthened, that Ushakov owed his appointment to Siberia to some indiscretion during the Polish campaign.
He went back to the fire and sat down on the polished bench with his wife. I worked on, unhurriedly checking the circuit. After about half-an-hour, I was aware that she was busying herself in the next room, and then he called me to the fire, while she poured out two mugs of tea, saccharine sweetened. The Colonel drank first and then gave his mug to me. I went back to the radio, and as I worked I surprised myself with the thought that I was not going to rush this job, that this was my most pleasant experience since my arrest and that I must make it last. When Igor came to collect me, I explained that checking all the leads and valves was a slow business. ‘Very well,’ said Ushakov, ‘you must come again. I will send for you.’ He gave me another cigarette and I went off with my escort.
‘What’s the news?’ they called out to me when I got back.
‘I haven’t got it going yet,’ I said, ‘but I’ll tell you what’s happening when I do.’
Igor fetched me again the next day. As I fiddled with the set, they both talked to me. Ushakova was interested in my family, impressed by the fluency of my Russian. I told her my mother was Russian.
‘What did you do to get sent here?’ This was the Colonel.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘You have twenty-five years, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
There was a pause and then she spoke. ‘Twenty-five years is a long time. How old are you?’ I told her I was 25.
The three-cornered conversation was interspersed with odd silences. They sat close together on the bench, I was on my haunches looking over the top of the Telefunken. Surprisingly, Ushakov asked me if I thought Russia would be involved in another war. The last war for Russia, as far as he was concerned, was that of 1914. I mentioned Finland and Poland. ‘Ah,’ he replied, ‘that wasn’t war; it was liberation.’ I wondered if he believed it. I popped my head up over the top of the radio and looked at him. He was looking up at the ceiling and his face was expressionless. He returned to the question of Russia being involved in war.
‘In Poland,’ I said, ‘it was common knowledge that Goering came to us to get us to give the Germans a corridor through which they could attack Russia. Germany is ready and the attack is inevitable.’ I gabbled it out fast. I expected to be told I was talking too much. But neither Ushakov nor his wife made any comment.