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“Let’s just say I’m a scientist.” The Military appreciated secrecy.
Pavlov had been screened three times before getting his rail ticket. He had been cleared because he was the leading authority on computers, because he was married to a Heroine of the Soviet Union waiting for him in Siberia, because there was no reference to his Jewishness on his papers.
He returned to his documents while the general unwrapped a mildewed cigar and his wife started eating sunflower seeds, blowing the husks on the floor. There were three agents already on the train, none with JEW on their passports, each with an ineradicable strain of Jewishness in them; each a fanatic, each a possible martyr.
Martial music poured through the loudspeakers as the train picked up speed through the outskirts of Moscow. It became an anthem to which Pavlov supplied the words:
If I forget you, O Jerusalem
let my right hand wither away;
let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.
The door opened and the missing passenger entered. A powerful man with polished cheeks, black hair thinning; built for the outdoors – hunting moose in the taiga, breath frosting the air; incongruous in his dark blue suit, uncomfortable beneath any roof. He breathed fresh air into the compartment, greeted them breezily, said his name was Yosif Gavralin and swung himself into the berth above Pavlov.
Pavlov wondered what rank he held in the K.G.B. He thought he must feel vulnerable in the upper bunk. A single upwards thrust of a knife.
The general sucked unsuccessfully at his cigar. Smoke dribbled from its fractured stem. “Cuban,” he said with disgust, giving it to his wife who squashed it among her sunflower husks.
* * *
In the next compartment, Harry Bridges, an American journalist almost trusted by the Russians, read the carbon copy of the story he had filed that morning to New York via London. He read it without pride.
It was a description of the Communist Party leader’s departure for Siberia which a messenger had taken to their office in a penitentiary-style office block in Kutuzovsky Prospect to telex. It was uninspired, dull and hackneyed. But it would be published because it announced that the paper’s Moscow correspondent, Harold Bridges, was the only Western reporter – apart from correspondents of communist journals like the Morning Star – permitted to cover the Siberian tour.
But at what cost?
From his upper-berth Harry Bridges glanced speculatively at the English girl lying on the lower-berth bunk across the compartment. Somewhere on this train there was a story better than the speeches of which he had advance copies. Any story was better. The girl, perhaps – the only possibility in the compartment they shared with a train-spotter and an Intourist guide. Once Bridges would have looked for stories: these days they were handed to him. Once he would have instinctively asked himself: “What’s a young English girl with a hyphen in her name and fear in her eyes crossing Siberia for?”
No more. There were a lot of answers Harry Bridges didn’t want to find out; so he didn’t ask himself the questions. Just the same old instincts lurked so he smiled at her and asked: “Making the whole trip?”
Bridges’ assessment of Libby Chandler was half right: she didn’t possess a hyphen but she was scared. She nodded. “But not as far as Vladivostock. No foreigners are allowed there, are they?”
“A few.” Bridges didn’t elaborate because he was one of the few allowed inside the port on the Bay of the Golden Horn, a closed city because of its naval installations.
Some said Harry Bridges had sold his soul. He didn’t contradict them; merely reminded himself that his accusers were the correspondents harangued by their offices for missing his exclusives.
A girl attendant knocked on the door to see if they were settled. They said they were but she couldn’t accept this. She tidied their luggage, tested the lamps and windows, distributed copies of Lenin’s speeches. Through the open door came the smell of smoke from the samovar she tended.
Bridges clipped the carbon of his first dispatch into a springback file and consulted the advances. Yermakov attacking the dissidents at Novosibirsk, the Chinese at Irkutsk, the Jews at Khabarovsk.
They’ll have to do better for me than that, Bridges decided. Not only would Tass give the speeches verbatim so that every paper in the States would have stories through A.P. and U.P.I., but the weary rhetoric wasn’t worth publishing. He needed an interview with Yermakov.
He stuck the file under his pillow and lay with his head propped on one hand. In the old days he would have mentally recorded everything in the compartment including the names, occupations and ages of his fellow travellers. He had always done this when flying in case the plane crashed and he was the sole survivor with the story: the names of the crew – in particular the stewardesses – and the credentials of the passenger next to him.
The train-spotter was filling his notebook with figures. The dark-haired Intourist girl with the heavy, sensuous figure was shuffling papers beneath him, rehearsing her recitation for a tour of a hydro-electric plant.
He caught the glance of the blonde English girl and they exchanged the special smiles of travellers sharing experience. He passed his pack of cigarettes to her but she refused. He bracketed her as twenty-two years old, University graduate, the defender of several topical causes, apartment in Chelsea (shared).
But what was she scared of?
Unsolicited, the professional instincts of Harry Bridges began to surface. “Are you breaking your journey?” he asked.
“Three times,” she said. She didn’t elaborate.
“Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and Khabarovsk, I suppose. They usually offer you those. In fact they’re the only places they’ll let you off.”
The Intourist girl made disapproving sounds.
Bridges said: “Anyway, you’re travelling in distinguished company.”
“I know. I didn’t know anything about Yermakov being on the train.”
“So we’ll be together for at least a week.”
She looked startled. “Why, are you breaking your journey as well?”
“Wherever he stops” – Bridges pointed in the direction of the special coach – “I stop.”
“I see.” She frowned. She should have asked why, Bridges thought. Total lack of curiosity appalled him.
The train-spotter from Manchester joined in. “It’s going to be difficult to know when to go to bed and when to get up. They keep Moscow time throughout the journey.”
It was too much for the Intourist guide. “We sleep when we’re tired. We get up when we wake. We eat when we’re hungry.” She reminded Bridges of an air stewardess sulking because her affair with the pilot had run into turbulence.
“And we drink when we’re thirsty?” Bridges added. He grinned at the girl. “Would you like a drink?”
“No thank you.” She reacted as if he’d asked her to take her clothes off; it was out of character.
“Well I’m going to have one.” He slid off the bunk into the no-man’s-land between the berths. No one spoke.
He closed the door behind him and stood in the corridor hazed with smoke from the samovar. Frowning, he realised that he had set himself an assignment: to find out what the girl was scared of.
* * *
The serpent face of the pea-green electric locomotive of train No. 2 with its yellow flashes, red star and weather-proofed picture of Lenin nosed inquisitively through the fringes of Moscow. The driver, Boris Demurin, making his last journey, wished he was at the controls of an old locomotive for the occasion: a black giant with a red-hot furnace and a smoke-stack breathing smoke and cinders: not this sleek, electric snake.
For forty-three years Demurin had driven almost every type of engine on the Trans-Siberian. The old 2-4-4-0 Mallets built at Kolumna; S.O. classes from Ulan-Ude and Kransnayorsk; towering P-36 steam locos, E classes now used for freight-switching; American lease-and-lend 2-8-0’s built by Baldwin and ALCO for the United States Army which became the Soviet Sh(III); and then the eight-axle N-8 electrics renumbered VL-8’s.
Time had now begun to lose its dimensions for Demurin. He was prematurely old with coal dust buried in the scars on his face and he lived in a capsule of experience in which he could reach out and touch the historic past as easily as the present.
The capsule embraced the slave labour that had helped to build the railway; the corrupt economies which had sent trains charging off frost-buckled track; the life and times of Tsar Nicholas II who had baptised the railway only to die by the bullet beside it; the Czech Legion which had converted the coaches into armoured cars after the Revolution; Lake Baikal which had contemptuously sucked an engine through its ice when the Russians tried to cross it to fight the Japanese.
The railway’s heroes, its lovers and victims, peopled Demurin’s capsule. At seventeen he had stood on the footplate of a butter train bound for Vladivostock carrying 150 exiles to the gold and silver mines, with soot and coals streaming past his face: now, nearly half a century later, he was an attendant in a power house.
He scowled at his crew, bewildered by the fusion of time. “How are we doing for time?”
His second-in-command, a thirty-year-old Ukranian with a neat, knowing face and a glossy hair style copied from a 1940 American movie still, said: “Don’t worry, old-timer, we’re on time.”
The Ukranian thought he should have been in charge. Demurin’s rudimentary knowledge of electric power was notorious, and on this trip he was merely a symbol of heroic achievement. “Be kind to him,” they had said. “Get him there on time on his last journey.” If you fail, with Yermakov on board, they had implied, prepare yourself for a career shunting fish on Sakhalin island. The Ukranian, whose ambition was to drive the prestige train between Moscow and Leningrad, intended to keep the Trans-Siberian on time.
Demurin wiped his hands with a cloth, a habit – no longer a necessity. “Steam was more reliable,” he began. “I wonder …”
The Ukranian groaned theatrically. “What, old-timer, the line from St. Petersburg to the Tsar’s summer palace at Tsarskoye Selo?” But, although he was half-smart, he wasn’t unkind. He patted Demurin’s shoulder, laughing to show that it was a joke. “What do you remember, Boris?”
“In 1936 I was on the footplate of an FD 2-10-2 which hauled a train of 568 axles weighing 11,310 tons, for 160 miles.”
The item had surfaced like a nugget on sinking soil. He didn’t know why he had repeated it. It bewildered him all the more.
The Ukranian thought: That’s what Siberia does for you.
“Did you know,” Demurin rambled on, “that when Stalin and his comrades travelled on the Blue Express from Moscow to the Black Sea resorts they had the train sprayed with eau-de-cologne?”
The Ukranian didn’t reply. You could never tell what nuance could be inferred from any comment about a Soviet leader, dead, denounced or reinstated. All the carriages were crawling with police: it was quite possible that the locomotive, as well as the coaches, was bugged. He stared uneasily at the darting fingers of the dials.
Demurin was silent for a few moments. Silver birches flickered past the windows. Time had overtaken him, the trains had overtaken him. Timber, coal, diesel, electric. What next? Nuclear power? He smelled the soot and steam of his youth, stared round a curve of track with snow plastering his face. He stayed there for a moment, a year, a lifetime, before returning to the electrified present.
“Mikhail,” he said, “make sure we have a smooth journey. Make sure we keep to time. You understand, don’t you?”
The Ukranian said: “I understand.” And momentarily the smartness which masked knowledge of his own inadequacies was nowhere visible on his neat, ambitious face.
* * *
It was 10.10. The train was gathering speed and it would average around 37 m.p.h. It would traverse 5,778 miles to Vladivostock, pass through eight time zones and, without interruptions, finish the journey in 7 days, 16½ hours. It would normally make 83 stops, spending 13 hours standing at stations. It would cross a land twice the size of Europe where temperatures touched –70°C and trees exploded with the cold. It would circumvent Baikal, the deepest lake in the world, inhabited by fresh-water seals and transparent fish that melt on contact with air. It would skirt the Sino-Soviet border where Chinese troops had shown their asses to the Soviets across the River Amur, where the threat of a holocaust still hovered, until it reached the forests near Khabarovsk where the Chinese once sought Gin-Seng, a root said to rejuvenate, where sabre-toothed tigers still roam. At Khabarovsk, which claims 270 cloudless days a year – no more, no less – it would disgorge its foreigners who would change trains for Nakhodka and take the boat to Japan. The train had 18 cars and 36 doors; the restaurant car boasted a 15-page menu in five languages and at least a few of the dishes were available.
In a small compartment at the rear of the special coach a K.G.B. colonel and two junior officers occupied themselves with their own statistics: the records of every passenger and crew member. The colonel had marked red crosses against fourteen names; each of those fourteen was accompanied in his compartment by a K.G.B. agent. As the last outposts of Moscow fled past the window the colonel, whose career and life were at stake, stood up, stretched and addressed his two subordinates. “Now check out the whole train again. Every compartment, every lavatory, every passenger.”
The officers walked respectively past Yermakov who stared at them closely, communicating apprehension which made them feel a little sick. He had just remembered that, in the old days, it was considered unlucky to travel on the Trans-Siberian on a Monday.
FIRST LEG (#ulink_7625a397-f537-5582-a7b4-f9eb7ae8000a)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_74a5deb7-79c2-5cff-9bca-b049106503c2)
The kidnap plot was first conceived by Viktor Pavlov in Room 48 of the Leningrad City Court at Fontanka on December 24, 1970.
On that day two Jews were sentenced to death and nine to long terms of imprisonment for attempting to hi-jack a twelve-seater AN-2 aircraft at Priozersk airport and fly it to Sweden en route to Israel.
At the back of the courtroom, which seated 200, Pavlov listened contemptuously to the details of the botched-up scheme. When he heard the evidence of one of the accused, Mendel Bodnya, revulsion burned inside him like acid.
Bodnya told the court that he had yielded to hostile influence and deeply regretted his mistake. He thanked the authorities for opening his eyes: he had only wanted to go to Israel to see his mother.
Bodnya got the lightest sentence: four years of camps with intensified regime, with confiscation of property.
Pavlov’s contempt for the other amateurs was tempered by admiration for their brave, hopeless idealism.
The woman Silva Zalmanson in her final statement: “Even now I do not doubt for a minute that some time I shall go after all and that I will live in Israel.… This dream, illuminated by two-thousand years of hope, will never leave me.”
Anatoly Altman: “Today, on the day when my fate is being decided, I feel wonderful and very sad: it is my hope that peace will come to Israel. I send my greetings today, my land. Shalom Aleikhem! Peace unto you, Land of Israel.”
When the sentences were announced Pavlov joined the disciplined applause because he had cultivated the best cover there was – anti-Semitism. A woman relative of one of the defendants rounded on him: “Why applaud death?” He ignored her, controlling his emotion as he had controlled it so often before. He was a professional.
He watched impersonally as the relatives climbed on to the benches weeping and shouting. “Children, we shall be waiting for you in Israel. All the Jews are with you. The world is with you. Together we build our Jewish home. Am Yisroel khay.”
With tears trickling down his cheeks an old man began to sing “Shma Yisroel”. The other relatives joined in, then some of the prisoners.
Viktor Pavlov sang it too, silently, with distilled feeling, while he continued to applaud the sentences. Then the local Party secretary who had collected the obedient spectators realised that the hand-clapping had become part of the Zionist emotion. Guiltily, he snapped, “Cease applause.” Another amateur, Pavlov thought as he stopped clapping: each side had its share of them: the knowledge was encouraging.
At 11 a.m. on December 30, at the Moscow Supreme Court, after a sustained campaign of protest all over the world, the two death sentences were commuted to long sentences in strict regime camps and the sentences on three other defendants reduced.
While the Collegium of the Supreme Court was deliberating the appeals Pavlov waited outside noting the identity of a couple of demonstrators. With their permission he would later identify them to the K.G.B. at their Lubyanka headquarters opposite the toy store. They would be locked up for a couple of weeks for hooliganism and his cover would be strengthened.
The Jewish poet, Iosif Kerler, was giving interviews to foreign correspondents. The Leningrad verdict, he told them, was a sentence on every Jew trying to get an exit visa for Israel. But Pavlov knew there was no point in laying information against Kerler: the police had a dossier on him and there was nothing poetic about it. Nor was there any point in informing on the Jewess from Kiev who was telling correspondents about her son dying in Jerusalem: the K.G.B. had her number, too.
No, the information had to be new and comparatively harmless. Pavlov had an arrangement with a Jewish schoolteacher who didn’t mind a two-week stretch during the school holidays. He wore a piece of white cloth pinned to his lapel bearing in Hebrew the slogan NO TO DEATH with a yellow, six-pointed Star of David beneath it. He meant well but he was over-playing his hand; it was like laying information against a man walking across Red Square with a smoking bomb in his hand. A pretty Jewess had also agreed to serve a statutory two-week sentence. Pavlov would report that she had been chanting provocative Zionist slogans; although she had been doing nothing of the sort because, like Pavlov, she had little time for pleas and protests; Israel was strength and you didn’t seek entry with a whine. Pavlov stared at her across the crowd; she stared back without recognition; she, too, was a professional.
Among the correspondents Pavlov noticed the American Harry Bridges. Tall, languid, watchful. He had the air of a man who had the story sewn-up. He didn’t bother interviewing the demonstrators and managed to patronise the other journalists. Pavlov admired him for that; at the same time he hoped he would rot in hell.
When the success of the appeals was announced the demonstrators sang and shouted their relief. Viktor Pavlov felt no relief; now the amateurs had even lost their martyrdom. They had perpetrated an abortion: he was conceiving a birth.
* * *
Viktor Pavlov belonged to that most virulent strain of revolutionaries: those who don’t wholly belong to the cause they are fighting for. He was fighting for Soviet Jewry and he was only part Jewish.
Sometimes his motives scared him. Why, when so many full-blooded Jews advised “Caution, caution” did he, a mongrel, call for “Action, action”? What worried him most was the sincerity of his conviction. Was the scheming and inevitable brutality merely a heritage? – a family tree planted in violence? And the right of the Jews to emigrate to Israel: Was that merely a facile cause?
Passionately, Viktor Pavlov sought justification. He found it mostly in the richness of his Jewish strain of blood. So deeply did he feel it that it sometimes seemed to him that it had a different course to his gentile blood.
His great, great grandparents had been Jews born in the vast Pale of Settlement in European Russia where the Tsars confined the Jews. After the murder of Alexander II the Jews became scapegoats and Pavlov’s ancestors were exiled to Siberia to one of the mines which produced 3,600 pounds of gold loot a year for Alexander III.
The persecution of the Jews continued and Viktor Pavlov found deep, bitter satisfaction in its history. Scapegoats; they were always the scapegoats. In 1905 gangs like the Black Hundreds carried out hundreds of pogroms to distract attention from Russia’s defeat – its debacle – at the hands of the Japanese. Followed in 1911 by the Beilis Case when a Jew in Kiev was accused, and subsequently acquitted, of the ritualistic murder of a child.
By this time the Jewish blood that was to flow in Viktor Pavlov’s veins had been thinned. His grandmother, Katia, married a gentile, an ex-convict who helped to build the Great Siberian Railway and became a gold baron in the wild-east town of Irkutsk.
Here Pavlov’s soul-searching got waylaid. His great grandfather lived in a palace, brawling, whoring and gambling and using gold nuggets for ashtrays. He was a millionaire, a capitalist, and thus an enemy of the revolutionaries – a White Russian. Most of the Jews were Reds.
Pavlov allowed his great grandfather to retreat from his deliberations; across Eastern Siberia during the Civil War where he was finally shot by the American interventionists who were not always sure which Russians they were supporting – Reds or Whites.
Pavlov concentrated on World War I. Scapegoats again. The Tsarist government, trying to explain its shattering defeats by the Germans, blamed traitors in their midst. Jews, naturally.
Then, after the Revolution, the Jews came into their own. The Star of David in ascendancy; but too brilliantly, too hopefully, a shooting star doomed to expire. The Jews were among the leaders of the October Revolution and, with an optimism which had no historical foundation – bolstered by the Balfour Declaration in November, 1917 – they anticipated the end of persecution. They were Russians, they were Bolsheviks, they were Jews.
Even V. I. Lenin lent his support in a speech in March, 1919:
