Every day, the camp supervisors do a little more to corrupt the prisoners and destroy their integrity. Snitch on your bunkmate, and you get an extra piece of bread. Volunteer to be an executioner, and you can avoid being sent out logging. Turn traitor, and you may even get yourself a pair of felt boots.

Without warm clothes, prisoners will fall victim to frostbite on their feet and hands as early as November. And that means death from gangrene because nobody in the camp can perform an amputation.

All prisoners, without exception, are beaten in the transit camp to show them what awaits them if they disobey orders. Many die from the beatings alone, from broken ribs or internal injury. Elkin was lucky that he only lost half his teeth.

Realizing that he needed to escape without delay before the winter cold set in, Elkin managed to persuade another prisoner—a young, strong fellow—to join him.

When they were sent out to the forest with a team to collect wood for brooms, they attacked the guard, tied him to a tree, and took his uniform and his gun.

Then they spent thirty days wandering about beside the railroad line. They couldn’t bring themselves to approach any settlements because they knew the peasants would not hesitate to hand them over to the authorities. The reward for capturing escapees was too tempting: they would receive a sackful of grain.

Before long, the cultured Elkin was forced, like it or not, to become a bandit. He and his companion had to eat, so they went into the first village they found and announced that they were going to carry out a search and confiscate any surplus grain. The chairman of the village Soviet brought them off with a bribe, a sack of food, and the fugitives ran back into the forest.

They did this several times until one day, they had the luck to rob an official carrying cash. They split the money and went their separate ways. Elkin set off for Moscow, and his companion decided to try to get to Finland.

A few days later, Elkin had read in the paper that his companion had been captured and shot.

4

Nina sewed the money to pay for the ship into Elkin’s coat, and the Belovs gave him a bundle of food for the journey.

Only Nina went to the railroad to see him off so as not to attract unwanted attention.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she told him, “and I’ll probably get to Berlin a few days before you since you still have to think how to get from Poland to Germany. From the sixth of November on, I’ll come to the station every day at midday and wait for you under the main departures board.”

Everything was going much better than Elkin could have hoped. Thanks to Nina, he had almost immediately got ahold of money and a train ticket to Minsk, but he sensed that everybody was glad to see him leave. The Belovs were afraid he might get them arrested, and Nina was anxious not to annoy Mr. Rogov.

Elkin had never felt so lonely before in his life.

Nina felt ashamed in his company and kept talking about the great future awaiting him in Germany.

“You’ll soon find your feet,” she said, “and then you can rebuild Mashka. A man with your talent will be worth his weight in gold in Europe.”

But Elkin did not feel like doing anything. Ever since that first robbery, when a small, bearded Finn had fallen at his feet with a plaintive cry, “Have mercy on us!” something inside him had been destroyed.

Nobody commits evil for the sake of evil, he thought, except for out-and-out psychopaths. People always had their reasons for wrongdoing. They committed crimes to survive both in the camps and outside. And everybody fell into the same trap, even Nina, who had got hold of an enormous sum of money from somewhere and now seemed to be in hiding from the police.

So, which of us is responsible for evil? Elkin wondered. Every one of us, I suppose, in our own small way.

He and Nina walked along past boarded-up dachas. Overhead, the sky was overcast. Alongside the fence, the grass was reddish brown, and at the bend in the road stood a rusty sign announcing, “Danger! Beware Trains!”

“Who’s helping you cross the border?” Nina asked, jumping over a huge puddle that covered the whole path. “Are they smugglers? Do you know them well?”

“We did business together once,” Elkin said. “I ordered them one or two things for Moscow Savannah, but they weren’t very happy about it. Books are heavy things and less profitable than powders and perfumes.”

The train only stopped at the platform for a couple of minutes.

“Goodbye and God bless,” said Nina. “Don’t give up! Everything will turn out all right for us, you’ll see.”

She really is an extraordinary woman, thought Elkin with affectionate sadness. No matter what fate threw at her, she always landed on her feet and expected others to do the same.

And that was the spirit of Russia itself. The country had an incredible capacity for survival, an ability to adapt to anything on earth.

Elkin gazed into Nina’s face, flushed with emotion as if for the last time, and held her hand, unable to release it from his hard, calloused palm.

The whistle blew, and the train began to move. A song carried from the open window:

All around us lies the steppe,

The road stretches far away.

“Goodbye,” said Elkin, and grabbing hold of the handle, he mounted the footboard.

Clattering over the rails, the train passed gloomy huts, sparse coppices, and endless fields.

There’s no need for regret, thought Elkin. Everything was as it had always been. Russia was a steppe. Once in several decades, it produced a layer of fertile soil, but then the whirlwinds descended, crushed it into dust, and carried it away to the four corners of the earth. That was the purpose of the steppe: to bring forth fresh winds and the seeds of new growth.

5

Elkin was struck by the sheer quantity of well-dressed people in the streets of Minsk. Here and there among the crowd, he could see colorful shawls, new fur coats, and sometimes even the odd fedora. It was clear that the border was close by and trade was brisk.

The fresh snow was pitted with the marks of women’s high heeled shoes. Elkin stared at them lovingly. How many years had it been since he had seen such a thing in Moscow?

All around, people were shouting Russian, Belarusian, and Polish. The houses here were wooden like the houses in Russia, but their roofs were covered in red and black slates in the Polish style. Soviet banners, prepared for the latest anniversary of the revolution, fluttered in the breeze. On a nearby bench, Red Army soldiers sat beside fine-looking Jewish men with side locks.

After wandering for a while, Elkin found his way to Nemiga, a narrow street lined with low buildings with cluttered stores on the ground floor and living quarters up above.

Elkin found the house he was looking for and knocked at the padded door. A young man with closely cropped hair, dark eyes, and a crooked chin came out.

“What do you want?” he asked in Belarusian.

“I’m here to see Rygor,” replied Elkin.

The young man glanced to each side and then took Elkin through into a room piled high with packing cases full of goods.

“Stay here,” he said and disappeared into the back room.

Elkin waited for more than an hour. Eventually, he could stand it no more and went out into the corridor.

A narrow metal staircase led up to the floor above, and up above, he could hear voices speaking in Polish.

“They’re running out of confiscated goods. So, what have we got right now?”

“Ribbed tricot, French marquisette, velveteen—with and without silk—wool broadcloth…”

The Poles were cashing in on all sides on the Bolshevik economic experiment. As soon as certain goods began to disappear from the USSR, there was a tremendous surge in contraband items. In the villages on the Polish border, people were hard at work concocting mascara, making brassieres from poor-quality imitation silk, and even printing false consignment documents for all sorts of institutions. Nobody was concerned by the poor quality of these goods; they were still better than what was available in the USSR.

At last, there was a clatter of boots on the staircase, and Rygor, a plump man with a curly beard, came down from the floor above.

“Well, just look who it is!” he exclaimed in Russian on seeing Elkin. “So, what brings you here?”

Elkin explained he needed to get to Poland without delay.

Rygor scratched his head thoughtfully. “Well, you could set off tonight if you like. But I have to warn you, there’s shooting on the border at the moment.”

“What? Why?” asked Elkin in alarm.

“Russkies behaving like beasts, that’s what. Now, they’re waging war on well-off peasants. Our men don’t want to give up their produce, so they’re hiding in the forest. Folk around here are desperate and still armed to the teeth after the war. So, partisans are killing Red Army soldiers like pigs and then running across to Poland to escape arrest. My friend, Piatrus Kamchatka, is setting out to the border today, and he can take you with him.”

According to Rygor, Piatrus was an experienced smuggler. “For three years now, he’s been taking gold and artworks over to Poland. He brings all sorts of things back in to the country, from microscopes to toilet paper. He’s as strong as an ox. One time, he was asked to take a crippled old woman across the border. And what do you think he did? Took her over on his own back!”

Rygor asked for a hundred rubles for putting Elkin in contact with his friend.

“For God’s sake, I can’t give you that much!” said Elkin.

Rygor shrugged. “Well, so long as you’re no bourgeois, you can stay here, can’t you?”

With a heavy heart, Elkin handed over the money. Now, he might not have enough to pay a guide from the sum allocated by Nina for his passage across the border.

“Anyone with any sense is selling their possessions and getting out of the land of the Soviets,” said Rygor, putting the money in his pocket. “Piatrus can take you as far as Rakov—it’s what you might call the smugglers’ capital. I’ll be going there myself in three weeks. It’s a good little town, Rakov. For a population of seven thousand, it has one hundred and thirty-four shops, nighty-six restaurants, and four official brothels.”

6

Ales, the young man with the crooked chin who had opened the door to Elkin, took him to a village on the border.

They traveled for a long time along bad roads. It was a frosty night, and the cart jolted them mercilessly as it went over the frozen ruts.

Eklin tried to ask Ales about the smugglers and about the situation at the border, but the young man merely pulled a face and spat on the ground.

“Ask Piatrus,” he said.

All the way, he sang songs about the “Russkies” who had drawn up their borders without consulting the local peasants and about the wrath of the people, which was bound, sooner or later, to overtake the interlopers. The Belorussians had lived for many years between the devil and the deep blue sea, suffering all sorts of misery from both the Poles and the Russians, who kept sending armies sweeping through their land.

Elkin sensed that Ales saw him as an enemy too, as one of the “Russkies.” He found it hard to believe how he could be considered guilty of crimes of which he had no knowledge. But as far as Ales was concerned, ignorance of the plight of Belorussia was tantamount to approval of the injustices being done to his country.

Dusk was falling by the time they reached the village.

With trepidation, Elkin gazed at the clapboard houses with their dark blue window frames. Snow lay on their thatched roofs, and columns of smoke drifted from their chimneys.

Ales led the horse into a yard surrounded by a pole fence.

“Out you get!” he commanded to Elkin.

Clenching his body against the cold, Elkin jumped down. The icy puddles crunched beneath his feet.

An old woman wearing a checked dress and a padded jacket came out to meet them. She spoke to Ales rapidly in Belorussian. All Elkin could understand of their conversation was that Ales was going on farther while Elkin was to wait for Piatrus there.

The old woman took him inside the house where it was hot and smoky. Several hens were settling down to roost before an enormous stove.

“Won’t you take off your coat?” asked the old woman as Elkin sank, exhausted, onto a bench.