The Secret Speech - Страница 24

Genrikh crossed the deck, greeting Iakov with a nod of his head and gesturing at his pack of cheap cigarettes.

— May I?

Iakov offered the pack and a lighter. Nervous, Genrikh took a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled deeply. The smoke was coarse on his throat. He smoked infrequently and tried his best to pretend that he was enjoying the experience, sharing a mutual pleasure. It was imperative he made a good impression. However, he had nothing to say. Iakov had almost finished his cigarette. He’d soon be going back inside. The opportunity might not arise again, the two of them alone — this was the time to speak.

— It’s been a quiet voyage.

Iakov said nothing. Genrikh flicked ash at the sea, continuing:

— This your first time? On board, I mean? I know it’s your first time on board this ship, but I was wondering if, maybe, you’ve… been on other ships. Like this.

Iakov answered with a question:

— How long have you been on board?

Genrikh smiled, relieved to have solicited a response:

— Seven years. And things have changed. I don’t know if they’ve changed for the better. These voyages used to be something…

— How so?

— You know… all kinds of… good times. You know what I mean? Genrikh smiled to underscore the oblique innuendo. Iakov’s face was impassive:

— No. What do you mean?

Genrikh was forced to explain. He lowered his voice, whispering, trying to coax Iakov into his conspiracy:

— Normally, around day two or three, the guards—

— The guards? You’re a guard.

A careless slip: he’d implied he was outside the group and now he was being asked whether that was the case. He clarified:

— I mean me, us. We.

Emphasizing the word—we—and then saying it again for good measure.

— We talk to the urki, to see if they’re willing to make us an offer, a list of names, a list of the politicals, someone who’d said something stupid. We ask what they’d want in return for this information: alcohol, tobacco… women.

— Women?

— You heard of “taking the train”?

— Remind me.

— The line of men who take their turn, with the female convicts. I was always the last carriage, so to speak. You know, of the train of men, who took their turn.

He laughed:

— Last was better than nothing, that’s what I say.

He paused, looking out at sea, hands on his hips, longing to scrutinize Iakov’s reaction. He repeated, nervously:

— Better than nothing.

Squinting in the dim dusk light, Timur Nesterov studied the face of this young man as he boasted about his history of rape. The man wanted to be patted on the back, congratulated and assured that those times were the good times. Timur’s cover as a prison guard, as officer Iakov Messing, depended upon remaining invisible. He couldn’t stand out. He couldn’t kick up a fuss. He was not here to judge this man or to avenge those women. Yet it was difficult not to imagine his wife as a convict aboard this ship. In the past she’d come very close to being arrested. She was beautiful and she would’ve ended up at the mercy of this young man’s desire.

Timur tossed the cigarette into the sea, moving indoors. He was almost at the tower door when the guard called out after him:

— Thanks for the smoke!

Timur stopped, wondering at this muddle of manners and flippant savagery. To his eye, Genrikh was more like a child than a man. Just as a child might try to impress an adult, the young officer pointed up to the sky:

— Going to be a storm.

Night was closing, and in the distance flashes of lightning silhouetted black clouds — clouds shaped like the knuckles of a giant fist.

SAME DAY

LYING ON HIS BACK IN THE DARKNESS, Leo listened to the heavy rain pummeling the deck. The ship had begun to roll and pitch, lumbering from side to side. He traced the vessel in his mind, picturing how it might hold in a storm. Stubby, like a gigantic steel thumb, it was wide and slow and stable. The only section — aside from the steam funnel — that rose above deck was the tower where the guards and crew quarters were located. Leo took reassurance from the vessel’s age: it must have survived many storms in its lifetime.

His bunk shook as a wave thumped the side, breaking over the deck — a sloshing noise that carried with it a visual imprint — the deck briefly merging with the sea. Leo sat up. The storm was growing. He was forced to grip the sides of the bunk as the ship lurched violently. Prisoners began crying out as they were shaken off the bunks, cries echoing around the darkness. It had become a disadvantage to be so high. The wooden frame was unstable. The structure wasn’t secured to the hull. The bunks might fall, tipping their occupants to the floor. Leo was about to climb down when a hand grabbed his face.

With the wind and the waves, the commotion, he hadn’t heard anyone approach. The man’s breath smelled like decay. His voice was gruff:

— Who are you?

Sounding authoritative, he was almost certainly a gang leader. Leo was sure the man wasn’t alone: his men must be nearby, on the other bunks, to the sides, underneath. It was impossible to fight: he couldn’t see the man he was fighting.

— My name is—

The man cut him off:

— I’m not interested in your name. I want to know who you are. Why are you here, among us? You’re not a vory. Not a man like me. Maybe you’re a political. But then, I see you doing sit-ups, I see you exercising and I know you’re not a political. They hide in the corner and cry like babies about never seeing their families again. You’re something else. Makes me nervous, not knowing what’s in a person’s heart. I don’t mind if it’s murder and stealing, I don’t even mind if it’s hymns and prayers and goodness, I just like to know. So, I say again, who are you?

The man seemed entirely indifferent to the fact that the ship was now being tossed like a toy by the storm. The entire bunk was rocking: the only thing keeping it fixed was the weight of the people on it. Prisoners were jumping to the floor, scrambling over each other. Leo tried to reason with the man:

— How about we talk when this storm’s over?

— Why? There something you need to do?

— I need to get off this bunk.

— You feel that?

The tip of a knife touched Leo’s stomach.

Abruptly, the ship lifted up, a movement so sudden and powerful it felt as though the hand of a sea-god were underneath them, pushing them out of the ocean and racing them toward the sky. As suddenly the movement stopped, the velocity vaporized, the watery hand turning to spray, and the Stary Bolshevik fell, plunging straight down.

The bow smacked into the water. With the force of a detonation, the impact cracked through the ship. With a synchronized snap every bunk splintered and collapsed. For a second Leo was suspended in darkness, falling, with no idea what lay beneath him. He rotated so that he’d land facedown, pushing his hands out toward the floor. There was a crunch of bones breaking. Unsure whether he was injured, whether his bones had broken, he lay still, breathless and dazed. He didn’t feel any pain. Patting the ground underneath him he realized he had landed on another prisoner, across a man’s chest. The noise had been the man’s ribs fracturing. Leo searched for a pulse, only to find a splintered fragment of wood jutting out of the man’s neck.

As he staggered to his feet, the ship rolled to the side, then back the other way. Someone grabbed his ankles. Worried that it was the nameless, faceless gang leader, he kicked them away, only to realize that it was more likely someone desperate for help. With no time to put right that wrong, the ship rose up again, at an even sharper angle than before, rocketing toward the sky. The smashed bunks, now free to move, slid toward him, piling up. Sharp, lethal fragments pressed against his arms and legs. Prisoners unable to maintain their grip on the sloping floor tumbled down, knocking into Leo, an avalanche of wood and bodies.

Pushed down by the ragged wall of people and timber, Leo tried blindly, hopelessly, to find something to steady himself, something to grab on to. The ship was at a forty-five-degree angle. Something metallic caught him in the side of the face, Leo fell, tumbling, rolling, until he arrived against the back wall, against the hot timber planks that separated the convicts from the roaring coal engine. The wall was four deep with prisoners tipped from their beds, waiting for the ship’s climb to reverse and slip into the inevitable fall. Groping for anything fixed that they could hold on to, they feared being tossed forward into the unknown. Leo clasped the hull — it was smooth and cold. There was nothing to grip. The ship stopped its upward climb, perched on the crest of a wave.

Leo was about to be thrown forward. He’d be helpless, everyone behind him landing on top of him, crushing him. Unable to see anything, he tried to remember the layout of the hold. The steps up to the deck hatch were his only chance. The ship tipped into a freefall, accelerating down. Leo threw himself in the direction where he guessed the steps were located. He collapsed into something hard — the metal steps — and managed to clasp an arm around them just as the ship’s bow thumped into the water.