He worried, and drowsed on his bed. When he awoke the problems were still there to be worried about, more concrete, more complex and interconnected hour by hour. He would have liked to talk about them with the night man, and because he could not, their evening conversations languished, and became one-sided and single-track. They talked about almost nothing but the towel; Manning’s continued failure to provide himself with one provoked ever more pained and eloquent admonitions.
‘You want to exert yourself, you know,’ the night man would say. ‘Make a formal complaint through the proper channels. If that doesn’t work, make another complaint. Take it up to the central administration, if necessary. You’ve got rights, you know, son. We’re not living under the cult of personality now. It’s not healthy, wiping your hands on that little handkerchief all the time. Ah, you’re all the same, you youngsters – you just won’t make the effort.’
On some days Manning was resolved to say nothing that might incriminate anyone. On other days he made up his mind to tell the whole truth and save his skin as best he could. Then there were times when he settled on a more pragmatic approach. He would say nothing incriminating until it definitely became clear from the course of the interview that this was doing him more harm than good. But by then, of course, he would have destroyed his credit. He became obsessed with the fear that even if he told his questioners the truth they would not believe it, or would not accept it as being complete, and would go on pressing him for information which he did not have.
After a while he found it difficult to keep track of the days. The warders were taken off his section, replaced by fresh men, and then brought back, according to some rota that he could not follow. The night man was off for five nights, back for four, then off for three. Some days Manning was taken to the bath-house, at a time when no one else was using it, and allowed to take a supervised bath. Twice this happened on a Tuesday. After his third bath it took him an hour to work out that it was not a Tuesday at all this time but a Monday.
In the bath-house he was always issued with a towel to dry himself, but each time it had to be handed in again, in spite of his protests. He did his best to keep the handkerchief in his cell clean, and to get it dried out, but his face and hands became chapped, and the chaps became sores.
‘I told you it was a disgusting habit,’ said the night man, shaking his head. ‘Let this be a lesson to you, son.’
Then he got some form of stomach trouble, and had to shout for the warder two or three times an hour to take him to the lavatory. The smell of his motions drove even the night man away, in spite of his cigarette. He ran a temperature, and his anxieties boiled up inside his head. They seemed like vessels driven round in a maelstrom, spinning and swirling and colliding, appearing, and disappearing, changing their shape entirely. He asked repeatedly to see a doctor, and eventually one came. But by that time the fever had subsided. All the same, it was a pleasure to see someone who wasn’t a warder. And afterwards a series of orderlies arrived in his section, bringing a tonic for him to take, an ointment for his sores, a stack of English classics in Russian translation with half their pages torn or missing – and a towel. He lay on his bed feeling very low, taking the tonic three times a day after meals, listlessly reading the books, and planning how to make the towel last. The weather was fine. The tiny patch of sky he could see through the high window was blue every day, and the cell became uncomfortably hot in the afternoons. His anxiety about what he would say when he was questioned faded from his mind, and became entirely forgotten. He settled into a quiet round of unhappiness, sweeping out his cell and exercising once a day, bathing once a week, dreaming of his mother’s house and talking about it each evening to the night man. The night man listened only perfunctorily; now that Manning had got a towel he had rather lost interest in him.
It was the night man who woke him one morning at dawn, switching on the light in his cell while the high rectangle of the window was still pale grey.
‘Clothes on, son, and get your belongings together,’ he said, in his companionable voice. ‘I want you outside in the corridor ready for transfer in two minutes.’
38
The night man took him out of his private section and through the main body of the prison, unlocking and re-locking each door they passed through. They crossed an open yard, the night man silently leading the way. Slopping along in his unlaced shoes, Manning had some difficulty in keeping up with him. In the grey half-light he could see odd groups of men in prison overalls slouching away towards the other side of the yard – perhaps on their way to the kitchens to start preparing breakfast. The air was cold. Manning shivered.
They went into a large office with a stone floor, and a bare electric bulb shining down on ugly brown tables and filing cabinets. There were a number of men in the room, some in uniform, some wearing civilian clothes; some sitting down at the tables, some standing with their hands in their overcoat pockets.
‘Hallo, Paul,’ said one of them in English. Manning had difficulty for a moment in distinguishing which of them had spoken. Then he saw; it was Sasha. He opened his mouth to reply, but his vocal chords seemed to be inert.
A man sitting at a table pushed a slip of paper and a pen across to Manning.
‘Sign this,’ he said.
Manning signed, blindly. It could have been a fictitious deposition, or his own death warrant. The man slid a rough brown paper parcel across to him and opened it briefly for him to see. Manning caught a glimpse of his tie, his watch, and a pile of loose change. The man pulled out a pair of shoe laces and tossed them to Manning.
‘Lace up your shoes,’ he said.
Fumblingly, Manning crammed the laces through the holes, conscious of nothing but the indifferent gaze of everyone in the room. Then one of the men in civilian clothes opened the door for him, and he was taken out into a dark, echoing archway. A picket door was unlocked with a tremendous clatter. Manning looked round to see if he could see the night man among the figures about him, to say good-bye, but in the poor light he couldn’t pick him out. He stumbled as he stepped through the picket.
They were in the street. A modest Pobyeda saloon stood at the kerb, and they got into it, one man on either side of Manning on the back seat, and Sasha next to the driver.
Sasha at once turned round and gazed at Manning in the twilight. He compressed his lips, then leant over and squeezed Manning’s hand.
‘It’s good to see you, Paul,’ he said in Russian. He sounded moved, and he was blinking awkwardly. Manning nodded back, for some reason still unable to say anything. Sasha looked away.
‘Was it bad in there?’ Sasha asked. Manning began to shake his head, then nodded once. Suddenly he was seized by the dawn coldness, and began to shudder violently. Without a word Sasha struggled out of his overcoat and pulled it round Manning’s shoulders.
‘All right?’ said the driver.
‘All right,’ said Sasha.
The car moved off, and drove slowly up the empty street. They passed women sweeping the gutters, and at the corner a dozen people waiting for a bus, their faces all turned the same way in expressionless expectation.
‘We’re going to Sheremetyevo,’ said Sasha. ‘You have a seat booked aboard the 8.30 a.m. flight to London.’
‘I’m being deported?’
‘Yes. You’ll be at London by half past ten. We collected all your stuff from your room and packed it up – it’s in the boot. Your thesis and all your notes are in the small brown case. Is there anything you want me to collect from anywhere else to send on later?’