The Toymakers(47)

That night, on a stump by the barrack walls, one of the camp superiors put shackles around Jekabs’ ankles and bound them with chain to the ones around his wrists. For the next six years they would stay that way, the chains relaxed only so that Jekabs could swing an axe or pull a hacksaw. Once the work was done, he was returned to the barrack house, where men made catcalls from the corners and crowed openly about which of the newcomers would be dead by morning, which in another man’s bed, which would flee first.

‘They came for me on the seventh night. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, we called them, the aides-de-camp. They’d been prisoners too, but they were here for life – and lifers, well, they had privileges over the rest of us men. I wish I could tell you that they never beat me. I wish I could tell you that they didn’t sell the timber I’d brought in to the other gangs and have me flogged for shirking. I wish I could tell you that the night I woke to find Ursa Major in bed beside me didn’t happen, but this was the end of the earth and I am not here to lie. They came for us all. Any man they found wanting. Any man too soft for this world.’

The days were short this far north, but the work was long. The sun, when it came at all, barely roused the forest. Jekabs joined a work gang, where an old hand named Manilov showed him the rudiments of the hacksaw and axe. The first week was gruelling, the second an ordeal. By the third, Jekabs could feel his muscles hardening. Yet a vast hollow was opening inside him, and no amount of hard bread or thin soup could fill it. At least on the trail there had been forage. Here, his body was a chasm, and he himself was falling into it. On the cusp of the fourth week, he stopped on the sled trail, because the big black arc of the woodland was revolving. He could not tell the difference between the plain and the sky. It was only the threat of Ursa Minor’s birch rod lash that drove him on. In the days that followed, as his body accustomed itself to dizziness and retching, he dreamt up good reasons to freeze to death. Across the timber, he scratched out good reasons to stay alive. How craven he felt, for his children were not among them. Somewhere on the march he had passed through a veil; now he was working in some other world, where his children did not exist, except as figments of his imagination. Nothing as perfect as Kaspar, his firstborn, his son, could exist in a world which permitted this system of katorga to exist. Out here there was but one reason to stay alive: to spite that piece of you – that powerful piece whose influence grew day on day – which wanted nothing more than to lie down in the snow and wait for the end.

‘Cathy, can you be brave?’

The world morphed around Cathy again, and the only thing that stopped her from panicking was looking back to see Papa Jack still there, turning the crank handle of the toy that had spirited all of this into being.

When the world reappeared, she was out in the woods, and around her the men in shackles were working in teams to drag timber into the thawed river and send them sailing downstream.

‘I have to go now,’ said Jekabs, his hand slipping out of hers.

‘Go?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But remember, all of this happened in the very long a—’

Jekabs did not finish the sentence, for at that moment two figures appeared from behind and, wresting him off his feet, dragged him into the trees. Cathy shrieked his name, hurried after. The world turned to mist around her, and then she was in the trees, Jekabs pinned on the earth with Ursa Major and Ursa Minor above him. She shrieked again, but her voice could not be heard, not in this world that was nothing but memory given form. ‘We know what you are,’ Ursa Major was bawling. ‘We know what you do. Trading for supplies with those little stick soldiers of yours. Well, who made them currency? We’re the only currency there is …’

They had torn Jekabs’ coat off, made gashes in his shirt, when another cry came out of the trees – and there appeared Chichikov, his comrades Grigoryan and Grisha at his side. ‘Hands off the toymaker,’ Chichikov leered – and, when the Ursas only laughed, there was no second warning. Chichikov came forward, an axe in his hand, and the only thing that stopped blood being shed in the forest that day was the patrol who chanced across them, sending even the Ursas Major and Minor scattering into the trees.

That night, Jekabs Godman found himself lashed to a stump on the forest’s edge, forced to face the night and all its howling demons. But he was not alone. For, his back still raw from the birch rod lash, there was Chichikov, staked to a stump beside him, and there was Grisha and there Grigoryan, all of them together.

The night was vast. Sleep came, but the cold always woke them.

‘Why?’ Jekabs breathed, when he could stand the silence no more. ‘Why do that … for me?’

Beside him, Chichikov reached into his pocket and produced one of Jekabs’ soldiers, plundered from him many nights before. ‘Have you any idea?’ he replied, his voice raw through the blisters. ‘When I line up your soldiers, toymaker, I’m a boy again. I’m with my papa and he’s lining up soldiers too. I’m in front of that fire, in Petersburg where we used to live, or I’m in the Gardens of Mars fighting with sticks. I’m … not here, and …’

Cathy imagined him about to say ‘I’m not me’, but the sentiment was too much for a man like Chichikov. He hawked up phlegm, spat it into the snow.

‘No, toymaker, they won’t touch you, not again, not while we still live …’