The Toymakers(46)
He was still gazing at the stick figure when a boot came down and ground it into the earth. Jekabs looked up to see a limping prisoner standing imperiously above.
‘You don’t sit with us, friend. Why do you never sit with us?’
Jekabs said not a word.
‘What makes you think you’re better than me, carpenter? Your kind have always thought yourselves better than everyone else …’
Jekabs Godman had heard it said before, even though the place he had been born and raised was in the heart of the Russian Pale. The blood of Abraham, the blood of Isaac, was in his father’s family and this did not, in itself, make him of the faith – but that had never stopped men like this forcing themselves into his face, telling him there was but one god, that his was false, that the ills of the world rested squarely on his shoulders.
If he focused hard, perhaps the man would go away. Jekabs reached down to pluck more woodland detritus from the pile. His hands moved of their own volition, lining up three more soldiers to stumble haphazardly with the wind.
The convict leant down and snatched them up. His face was pockmarked with the craters of old cankers, pointed and precise. ‘You can be my friend, toymaker,’ he said – only, now, one hand was cupped around his balls, the stubby protrusions tight against his trousers.
‘Please,’ said Jekabs Godman, and refused to wince when the torrent of phlegm caught him on the side of his jaw.
Downwind from the barn a cauldron of fire was burning. A cry went up – ‘Chichikov!’ – and the prisoner, torn between Jekabs and the fire, at last chose the flames.
‘It was like that every night,’ Jekabs continued, beckoning Cathy to sit with him. ‘They’d come and they’d goad and, if ever one of us goaded back, that was it, we’d feel their fists, their boots – or worse. And I came to know: that was what was waiting for me in the east. More men like Chichikov. More nights like this. Two thousand of them between me and any chance of home. Those nights seemed enormous, yet tiny as a life. But later, when I dared look, that man, that Chichikov, he was sitting with others of his kind, and in the horseshoe of earth between them my three pinecone figurines gambolled backwards and forwards, colliding and spinning around each other while the bastards brayed. Tonight, those rapists and killers seemed like children, the same children I would have welcomed to my stall. I didn’t know it then, but I had learned – no, discovered – something that night, something it would take me long months to understand.’
That night, somebody tried to run. He made it three miles but wasn’t brought back. ‘And let that be a lesson to you all,’ said one of the outriders as he returned from the hunt, haloed in the orange and reds of the border fires. The lesson was: no more second chances. Look around you – this wild, white expanse, this tundra and taiga to which we’re bound, this is your second chance.
‘Three months can pass in the moment between one breath and the next. We continued east, beneath the glowering eyes of Cossack fortresses, lined up against the old Khanates of the south. Two days of marching, one day of forced rest: that was the pattern of my life, every step one step further from home. But at least I had something to cling to now – not memories, not hope, because what use were they? No, I had my pieces of pinecone, the long nights I spent whittling my soldiers and setting them to march in the snow. Every night they were taken from me. And every night, there they were, the killers, playing again. Some nights they were so engrossed they didn’t steal anyone’s ration, didn’t force themselves on any of the weaker men when the outriders couldn’t see. And I would remember it for ever: Chichikov, the lowest of all men, sleeping soundly, untroubled by dreams, one of my pine-bark ballerinas curled up snugly in his fist.’
Slowly, the old world faded. Memories of real life imploded, replaced only by the march. Jekabs watched the steppes, mountains and deep forests glide by, unable to absorb the vastness of the world. Every river forded was another river away from home, every barren plain another expanse in which his son, his wife, had ceased to exist. He could bear it all, all except those nights in the transit prisons when, shaven and deloused, he sweltered in the cells and had no curls of bark with which to make his soldiers. On those nights he sank into himself. He tried to hold his wife Sofiya, his son Kaspar in his mind, but all too easily their visages slipped away, replaced by Chichikov, Grigoryan, Grisha, all of the others who harried him and pressed up against him in the night.
Somewhere along the way, his wife gave birth. He marked the occasion by making a doll out of larch wood and leaving it on the trail for some peasant farmer to find. Perhaps they would make a gift of it to one of their children. Jekabs was a father for the second time, but whether he had another baby boy or been blessed by his first girl he might never know.
‘It was December by the time we reached the timber camp we were to work, high above the Amur river. We came out of the forest and there it sat, our new home sitting on an escarpment shorn of all trees …’
As Jekabs spoke, the winter exploded. The whiteness remained on the edges of Cathy’s vision – but here, here in the centre, was the valley of blackened stumps of which Jekabs spoke, and in its basin a small township of timber shacks. Ahead of Cathy, the convoy began to wend down the hill.
‘There’d been something reassuring about the march. I hadn’t realised it until then, but that march had become life. But there, at the bottom of the escarpment, well that was the future, cold and unknown …’