“So where is it, your point of destination? In the taiga? In some godforsaken place? I was only assigned to look after them on the railroad! I brought them halfway across the country. Six months squandered on the rails! And you don’t want to accept them in your own city. That’s not our way, not the Soviet way.”
“Want to, don’t want to… The only thing I’ve wanted since winter is a good night’s sleep!” Kuznets spits thickly and loudly by his feet, and looks off somewhere to the side, but his eyes truly are dazed and red. “You think because you’re sensitive and pretty you’re the only one in Siberia who should get a break? I receive a dozen barge loads every week, sometimes two. Where should I find escorts for all of them? So look here, Ignatov, as your superior officer, I order you to go aboard and deliver the entrusted cargo in the quantity of – you yourself know how many heads – to the place where the future labor settlement will be founded.”
“I’m not yet under your direction!”
“Well, consider yourself under it as of now. Or do you need a little piece of stamped paper? I’ll obtain it quickly, don’t think I won’t. Just don’t hold it against me later, my dear man…” Kuznets raises his reddish eyes, the black pupils like little needles, at Ignatov.
Ignatov slaps his hands on his knees: I’m done for! He takes off his peaked cap and wipes his sweat-soaked forehead. This might be Siberia but the heat is hellish.
They’re standing on a steep, high riverbank and can see everything from here. The dark blue cupola of the sky is reflected in the river’s broad mirror, which breathes with a slight ripple. The Yenisei’s water is dark, heavy, and lazy. The green left bank rears up in the distance. Bony berths stick out of a lopsided pier like fingers. There’s a stir by the pier as people swarm, dogs bark fervently, escort guards shout, and bayonets gleam in the sun. Exiles are being loaded onto a low, wide barge.
Kuznets takes an ivory cigarette case out of his jacket.
“Here, this one’s better.”
Ignatov initially refuses, then grudgingly accepts one. Kuznets’s cigarettes are good, expensive.
“You lost a lot along the way – four hundred heads. Did you starve them or–”
“If they’d been fed better, I’d have brought more!”
It’s too bad he’s lit the cigarette. The aromatic smoke is stuck in his throat; it’s not pleasing.
“And wasn’t there an escape on your train?” Kuznets winks unexpectedly, hiding a smirk in the flourishes of his rounded black mustache. “And he wants to teach me what’s the Soviet way and what’s not…”
Ignatov flings his unfinished cigarette into the river.
“Well, now you understand,” Kuznets concludes in a superior tone. “Fine, don’t get steamed up. There’re lots of kulaks here, no harm done. They’ll dig the land there, plant wheat.” He nods at a long chain of soldiers carrying armloads of shovels, saws, and axes wrapped in old rags, plus crates bristling with other tools. “There’s a large, natural stock of them, you can see it yourself. You won’t even be able to blink before they multiply.”
Lots of tools are being loaded on the barge, and there’s even a couple of sturdy utility carts with wooden wheels. (In the taiga? Are they going to harness elk to it? Ignatov wonders cheerlessly.) Equipment, sacks with provisions, bunches of kettles – everything’s being piled on the flat roof, wrapped in tarpaulins, and tied with ropes. They’re working in unison, the way they always do. The escort guards up on the roof hold their rifles horizontally. You can’t miss from there if anything happens. One waves his arms, commanding. The others walk around, occasionally glancing down from on high at the deportees swarming beneath them. They’re driving people somewhere below. They crawl along the gangway like ants and disappear, disappear into the bowels of the hold. The dogs’ agitated barking carries after them from the shore. They’re raging, the bastards. Are they fed human flesh or something?
“What, you can’t wait to go back?” Kuznets notices Ignatov’s gloomy gaze. “Yes, our life’s harsh here. But don’t you worry – you’ll deliver your people and I’ll let you go home to your wife’s warm side.”
“I’m not married,” Ignatov tells him coldly.
During loading, it turns out that the exiles won’t all fit on the barge. They’ve packed more than three hundred into the hold – so tightly they can scarcely breathe – and this violates all the guidance and regulations by greatly exceeding the allowable limit (the barge has settled low and heavy in the water), though several dozen are left outside even so.
Kuznets has suggested they transport the oldest and frailest on deck – the old ones, he says, won’t jump overboard – but Ignatov won’t budge on this, not for anything. One escape is enough for him. That Kuznets is a son of a bitch after all. Of course he knew one barge wouldn’t be enough. Did he hope they’d all fit? Or that Ignatov, from inexperience or pity, would agree to take people in the open air?
A second barge has already arrived at the pier and attached its blunt snout of a bow to a berth; it will take the second batch. Criminals, explains Kuznets. Judging from all the dogs barking, the convicts are already close by – they’ve been somewhere on the high shore waiting for Ignatov’s barge to cast off.
“You fall asleep or what!” the official on the pier rasps at Ignatov. “Go on, out! You’ve created a line here, you Trotskyite…”
“Up yours,” Ignatov snarls at him. “And yours, too.” (That’s for Kuznets.) “Do what you want but I’m not taking people in the open air. I’m the one responsible for them after all.”
“Screw it,” says Kuznets, waving him away. “Give me the excess, for the launch. And take the barge away right now – get it out of my sight.”
For the excess, they select the weakest, most tired, and unlikeliest to escape. Kuznets himself points a finger, taking many of the Leningrad remainders and several gray-haired peasants. They’re rounded up into Kuznets’s roomy launch, into a hold for storing fish. Kuznets is supposed to leave the next night, follow Ignatov’s barge, and catch up to it somewhere around the mouth of the Angara. In addition, he’s demanding Ignatov assign someone very reliable to watch over the group and report any trouble. They have three days’ journey ahead and who knows what might happen. Ignatov smirks and gives him Gorelov.
“I’ll take people, yes, I will,” Kuznets declares, “but I’m not shouldering your responsibility, Ignatov. You’ll be accountable for them during the trip, remember that.”
Coward.
Kuznets takes the “Case” folder anyway, just for now, “to have a read.” Ignatov feels relieved when he passes it into Kuznets’s sun-browned hands. It takes a load off his mind.
They finally head out. The motorized barge moves off along the channel like a large black cucumber, cutting the Yenisei in two. It creeps heavily and slowly under its excessive weight. The motor wheezes and sputters, belching thick smoke from its large-striped stack again and again. High waves extend in both directions like straight white mustaches.
The barge’s name is Clara. The long, neat letters were painstakingly traced out on its rounded bow at one time, but the paint flaked off and was eaten away by rust long ago, so now it’s barely visible on Clara’s dark brown side. More recently, someone decided to give her a surname and painted an unprepossessing, slightly leaning “Zetkin” below. But those letters have peeled off, too, almost erased by the waves.
First of all, Ignatov checks the doors of the huge hold in which his batch of people has been housed; the hold extends the entire length of the barge, and there are doors at the bow and stern. The doors in the bow are useless so were boarded up long ago, meaning that passengers – exiles and political prisoners shipped on the barge before 1917 and then exiles and criminals who are transported now – are loaded in and out only through the stern. Which is proper because fewer doors mean fewer anxieties. Ignatov feels the fat boards, digs his fingernail at the half-rusted clamps fastening them, and tugs at the metal girders that crisscross them. Sealed off well, solidly. You couldn’t knock it out from inside, no matter how you tried. He puts a watchman there, just in case.