Ice road, p.1
Ice Road, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part One - Beginnings
The Chelyuskin
A Pretty Girl
Irina
An Understanding
Two Men
Radio Link
Can the Dead Speak (1)?
Part Two - The Rescue
The Orphan
The Scholar
The Nightclub
The Middle of the Night
To School
The Sinking
Anya
On the Ice
The Meeting
Luck
Celebration (1)
Celebration (2)
The Stinging
Part Three - History
Celebration (3)
The Man Upstairs
Kirov
Shadows
1 December
Love
Burial
A Joke
Can the Dead Speak (2)?
Part Four - Under the Red Wall
The Seal
Another Woman
The Black Crow
Memory (1)
The Cell (1)
The Queue (1)
The Cell (2)
The Queue (2)
Moscow
Kolya
Article of the Law
Part Five - Personal Fates
Celebration (4)
Bagrat and Timur
The Institute
The Party
A Parade of Ghosts
The Appointment
Memory (2)
Can the Dead Speak (3)?
Part Six - What Lies Ahead
Domestic Life
Celebration (5)
The End of Spring
On the Neva
Married Life
Visitors (1)
The Announcement
Departures
Air Raid
Memory (3)
A Promise Delivered
Survival
To War
The Orphanage
Visitors (2)
To Live
To Die
And Live Again
Darkness
The Road of Life
Acknowledgements
An Honourable Man
Also by Gillian Slovo
MORBID SYMPTOMS
DEATH BY ANALYSIS
DEATH COMES STACCATO
TIES OF BLOOD
FAÇADE
CATNAP
CLOSE CALL
EVERY SECRET THING
THE BETRAYAL
RED DUST
BLACK ORCHIDS
Plays
HONOR BOUND TO DEFEND FREEDOM
(with Victoria Brittain)
Ice Road
GILLIAN SLOVO
Hachette Digital
www.littlebrown.co.uk
Published by Hachette Digital 2009
Copyright © Gillian Slovo 2004
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be oterwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN : 978 0 7481 1562 4
This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE
Hachette Digital
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DY
An Hachette UK Company
To Andy. For everything. Always.
Part One
Beginnings
No path to see: the snow has drifted across each bush, across each steep, and all the world is buried deep.
(Aleksander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin)
The Chelyuskin
Out here on deck my breath is turned to ice but I won’t go in, at least not yet. It’s good to be alone. Away from all the others. It’s quiet. And cold, of course, but that goes without saying in the Arctic.
I know I’m risking frostbite and I know I should go in and I will soon, but I am trying to make sense out of what it is that has happened to me. I’m no storyteller. I look only to the facts. Or, if not to the facts, at least to the essentials.
My name is Ira, Irina Davydovna Arbatova to be exact. Davyd after my father, Arbatov after my husband, although the less said about him the better.
My father’s name was Davyd Grigoryevich Pashin. He’s dead. He died twenty-nine years ago when I was still a child. He didn’t die alone. The menfolk in my family hardly ever do. They always follow trends. In my father’s case this meant he breathed his last in 1905 on Bloody Sunday, in Winter Palace Square in the city of Petrograd (as it was then called).
My father was only one of many killed that day, that’s why I say he didn’t die alone. But maybe he was alone – at least in spirit.
I know he wouldn’t have been singing hymns like the rest of them. He never sang in public. He had an off-key singing voice of which he was ashamed. I know, as well, that he didn’t set out from home that day with the intention of taking part in any kind of demonstration. My father wasn’t political. He wasn’t much of a joiner of any kind, or so my mother tells it. She further says – to anyone who bothers to stick around and listen – that my father was an ineffective man who often got himself caught up in urges he didn’t really understand. He liked crowds, my mother says; by all accounts he was a little simple, and he must have got carried along with this one. The way my mother tells it – although I don’t know how she knows, she wasn’t there – is that on this, his last day on earth, my father was clumsy – like every other day, my mother always adds. Having lived through the gunfire, he tripped on the cobbles, falling into the path of an army detachment which, satisfied by the blood they’d spilled, was just then riding out.
The horses’ hooves caved in my father’s skull and passed by and so he died, this unimportant man who was born, and who lived, and who perished, all before the onset of our revolution. His death was a trifling thing, a part of a past now so completely done away with that it cannot be got back (and a good thing too or so they say). But it was also an unnecessary death, careless in fact – which was just like him, my mother always says – and it left my family fatherless when I was five.
I am now thirty-four years old. As old as our century. I was born at the moment of its birth although, come to think of it, now that they’ve moved over to the Gregorian calendar, that’s no longer true. Well, never mind. Many other things are also no longer true and the commonplace that I was born at the turn of the century will do.
And now I find myself in the Arctic, on the Chelyuskin.
There was no design to my coming here. That’s the way it always goes with the likes of me: things either happen or else they don’t. Usually the second. So while the others on the boat might have had to compete for their places (they probably even had to take a test), I didn’t. No, with me, it was an accidental meeting in the Smolny that brought me to this place. This set of places.
It started with a man, which is often the way.
In this case, the man’s name was Boris Aleksandrovich – Boris Aleksandrovich Ivanov – and he came upon me in the broom cupboard.
I had every reason to be in that cupboard. I’m a cleaner: I’m in and out of there all day. I never did find out, though, what it was that could have brought Boris Aleksandrovich Ivanov there.
A man and a woman in a cupboard must sound suspicious. It isn’t. Nothing irregular happened, nothing that could have caused a scandal. ‘Course it didn’t: Boris Aleksandrovich is a true gentleman.
Hold on a minute – I’m not thinking straight. What I really meant to say was that Boris Aleksandrovich is a true revolutionary and, besides, he has his hands full with his important job, that brainy wife of his, his children and his mistress: why would he even look at me? In fact, until the moment when he came upon me in that cupboard, Boris Aleksandrovich and I had had little contact. We nodded to each other, of course, when we passed in the corridor, but that’s just what everybody does. We had no reason to do anything else, not until that day at the Smolny, when fate made him open the door so unexpectedly that I had no chance to wipe my face.
I hardly ever cry. Crying is a luxury. I don’t have time for tears. And I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to cry in front of an important man like Boris Aleksandrovich.
Not that he was harsh. Not at all. That’s not Boris Aleksandrovich’s way. He’s a kind man. A controlled one. He wasn’t cross, he was embarrassed: that big bear of a man standing there, looking at his feet. I wasn’t surprised. Our leaders have confidence enough to put the whole world in their scales and weigh each separate part of it, but shove a tearful woman in their path and they always turn to jelly. Which is what happened to Boris Aleksandrovich.
I’m not an educated woman but this I do know: no good can come from the softening up of someone who’s in power. So seeing him standing there like that I thought: trouble.
I grabbed my bucket and made to go.
But before I could make good my escape, Boris Aleksandrovich told me (without lifting his eyes) that it had fallen to him to find stewardesses for the Chelyuskin expedition (the many different things that cross ou r leaders’ desks!) and did I want to be one?
‘The Chelyuskin,’ I said. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a ship,’ he said, ‘a scientific expedition, that will travel along the coast of Siberia and through the Arctic Circle and round, the first time this has ever been achieved. You must have read about it in Pravda, haven’t you?’
Well, you know, I didn’t like to say I couldn’t read, I didn’t want to make it worse. So I said something like:
‘Oh yes, now you mention it,’ and he asked me again.
It was an offer, not an order. I could have turned it down. At any other time, I would have done. One thing life has taught me: it’s best to keep out of the limelight and away from crowds – if you don’t a horse might run you down. I should have made some excuse, said no, thanks but no, and quickly walked away. I didn’t though. I suppose the thought of getting away if only for a short time, both from home and from the endless polishing at the Smolny, was too tempting. Before I had time to come to my senses I heard myself saying yes.
That was all it took, that one, stupid ‘yes’, and I had to carry through. I couldn’t make my way upstairs, the central stairs at that, all the way to the third floor, and walk along that creaking corridor, and knock on Boris Aleksandrovich’s door all to tell him that I’d changed my mind. ’Course I couldn’t. For a man as important as Boris Aleksandrovich to put my name on the list was dangerous enough: asking him to go to the trouble of explaining why he was removing it would really be tempting fate.
And so I found myself standing on the Chelyuskin as the bridges of Leningrad were lifted to let us pass.
I am not a woman given to much enthusiasm, and I have never expected life to have its high points, but that day in July 1933 and that moment when we steamed down the Neva heading for the gulf will always be my summit.
They opened up the bridges in the day. Even now, I can hardly credit it. The bridges opening up for me! Me who had never left the city! I smiled that day, I have to say, I really did smile.
And it wasn’t just the bridges that saluted us. There were sailing boats as well – tiny, white sheathed things they were, dipping and rising as our ugly Chelyuskin ploughed through the waters of the Neva and out to sea. There were horns that sounded, other ships honouring us. There were ceremonies. Slogans. Speeches. Crowds cheering. There were ribbons and garlands and hands uplifted. I saw Boris Aleksandrovich and his daughter in the crowd and I even saw my husband.
That pleased me. My husband, Fyodor Maksimovich Arbatov, having to watch me leaving him. That brute, Fyodor, powerless, as I sailed away.
And it got even better. Out on the ocean our political commander, Comrade Schmidt, called us together to make a speech. I’ve heard a lot of those in my time, and I can’t promise to remember everything he said. But one thing did stick. We are all equal, he said: each of us matters; together we will make history. I’ve heard those words before – who hasn’t? – but this time they felt real. And they weren’t grand words spoken about far more important people. They were about me.
It was far-fetched, unbelievable, but I did find myself half-believing it. Why not believe a man who believes himself so well? Whether this makes any difference in the long run is not for me to say, but I took advantage of his goodness and went to the Red Corner where, along with some illiterate sailors who’d come on board in Murmansk, I learned what it is to read. And almost what it is to write.
I, Ira – Irina Davydovna Arbatova – halfway educated. My husband won’t like it. If, that is, we get out of here alive.
Oh dear: that ‘if’ is part of what’s forbidden. I heard so yesterday. Through the walls of the cabin I was wiping down I heard Comrade Schmidt say as much. ‘Comrades,’ I heard him saying, ‘we must guard against defeatism.’ I knew exactly what that means. It means no ifs allowed and here I am, a few hours later, bringing one out. My husband’s right. I am a stubborn woman. I might be able to read but I still can’t learn.
Far away as he now is, my husband still manages to exert his influence. It’s as if, even standing here, I can hear his voice. I certainly know what he’d be saying. He’d be jeering at me, asking if I think that when the ice field takes us down, as it most surely will, it will give a toss about whether I can read or write. And, of course, he’s got a point. The ice doesn’t care. It just is.
If we do go down, though, and if I do die, I know that my last moments will be spent thinking about the things I’ve learned on board. Thinking about those first days. Those long summer days. The smooth seas. The green coast of Norway. The noisy welcome when we docked in Murmansk. The speeches delivered in our honour. We were to pass through seas I’d never even heard of. Now, of course, I can both name and almost spell those seas. So many of them: the Barents, the Kara, the Laptev, the East Siberian, the Chukchi, the Bering Strait, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Sea of Japan and finally to Vladivostok. Oh, we had ambitions.
Or maybe we were just bewitched.
The likes of Comrade Schmidt don’t believe in magic. They’re practical men, persuaded by their material world, their facts and figures, their quotas and their targets. If there’s one thing they know, it’s that men break boundaries and not boundaries that break men. Their thinking power is what drives them forward – or so they think.
But I know differently. I’ve watched them. That’s what I do: I watch. And I was watching as winter drew in, the ice escalating, the horizon lengthening, I saw the Arctic courting them, offering herself up, and I saw them carried away by her scale and beauty. In short, I saw them fall for her.
Before deep winter set in, I would come across them standing out on deck as I am doing now and I could tell by their faraway gazes that they had been hypnotised by those sunsets the colour of amber and sunrises the colour of blood. Watching, I began to see what they could not: that they, like me, were changing. The points, and dots, and the numbers, and who knows what else, they put down in their notebooks no longer had the same effect. I knew that by the way they looked, the things they said and, more importantly, the things they didn’t say. They didn’t talk about the shortening of the days, the darkening of the nights, the hissing of the ice as it pressed against our bow. They couldn’t talk of these. They were enchanted. The Arctic had got them prisoner. And so it was that they didn’t even think of turning back. Not until it was too late.
They don’t know any of this. Clever they may be, but they’re also dreamers who plan to change the world but who, on waking, say they never dreamed a thing. We are men of action is what they always say: duty drives us on. We have scientists to relieve, they said; supplies to offload; measurements to take, we can’t turn back. And so they tore themselves away from the view and took their measurements and offloaded their supplies. But ignorant as I know I am, I knew they were really only halfway present. And then, as if to prove me right, we suddenly got stuck.
That was some time ago and we are still stranded. Surrounded by ice which keeps on moving in. We can’t push through: not until winter’s over and that’s some three months off.
To save power, the heat is on for two hours and off for two. That’s lesson number one: without fuel you die. Without food as well. Our cooks are careful. Counting all the time. Checking how much it is that we’re allowed to eat.
But I trust Comrade Schmidt and I believe him. So when we are rescued and when we return, will I say that I enjoyed myself?
Have I enjoyed myself? Hard to say. Enjoy is not a word that comes easily to me. And, to be honest, it has been a bit icy.
But despite the cold, I continue to stand out here on deck, and now I find myself thinking about Leningrad and about Boris Aleksandrovich who was the one to bring me here, and I can’t help but wonder whether Boris Aleksandrovich ever thinks of me.
A Pretty Girl
