The Lost Souls of Angelkov by Linda Holeman Read Free Book Online Page B

money to his mother. He also asked him to look out for his mother should she need help.
I will not be returning to Chita. My life is elsewhere
, he wrote, signing it
Timofey Aleksandrovitch Kasakov
, knowing it would be the last time he used this name.

    Over that winter, sharing a drafty hut with ten snoring, coughing, flatulent men, he heard stories about their lives as prisoners in distant
katorgas
, working to cut timber or, like his father, in the mines. From those who were released or those who had escaped, he understood, for the first time, that Siberia was its own prison, and grew anxious for the spring.
    He left on the day the last crusty mounds of snow were melting in the shadows beneath the spruce trees, setting off for the next major town, Novosibirsk.
    As he travelled the slick, muddy spring roads, Timofey—Grisha now—fought not to think of Kolya. Most days he didn’t, but occasionally he’d see a thin, fair-haired boy and his heart would give one painful thump. Once he passed a man trudging down a narrow road, merrily playing a tune on a rough wooden
svirel
—a peasant flute—and this also caused a dark pain.
    If he spent the night in a village hovel and could not avoid thinking about his little brother and how he’d betrayed him, he would take out the little flute with
Tima
—his own former name—carved clumsily onto its side. Kolya had made it forhim as a gift. He couldn’t play it, but his brother could. Then he would drink a bottle of cheap vodka so he could sleep without the familiar nightmare. If he was on the road when he thought too much of Kolya, he’d whip Felya to a gallop, fleeing from his thoughts.

    He was a week east of Novosibirsk when he was surrounded on the road by a crew of rough-looking men in grey tunics. They questioned him and asked for papers.
    Papers? What papers?
    Papers that showed he owned the horse, they told him. You don’t look like the kind of young man who could afford such a horse as the well-fed Don. You’ve stolen it, they told him, and pulled him off. He fought them, but all it earned him was two broken fingers and a ringing in one ear that lasted ten days. They threw him into the back of a cart with three other men. The men in the cart said nothing as he was chained in beside them. But as they jolted and bumped through the night and most of the next day, the man beside him told how a nearby work camp had suffered a loss of men from dysentery. The low government officials who had broken his fingers and temporarily partially deafened him were arresting any able-bodied men they could find on the road that day in order to meet the required quota of cut timber.
    Grisha cursed his bad luck. At first he was most angry over the loss of Felya, hoping whoever owned him next wouldn’t mistreat him. He didn’t imagine the false arrest would come to anything more than a week or two of hard work, and then he would be on his way again, although this time on foot. He was used to hard work. But when he arrived at the campdeep in the forest of conifers, and saw the haunted expressions on the sallow, lined faces of the other men, and the chains securing them to their wheelbarrows and saws, he felt a deep thump of dread.
    As the first weeks passed, all he could think of was his father. His father, at the time not as young and strong as Grisha, had survived in worse conditions for over a year, farther north, in the mines. At least Grisha was outside, breathing clean air. In the thick taiga of summer the men found berries and occasionally wild mushrooms to supplement the meagre rations they were given after twelve hours of cutting trees. He was allowed to keep what he brought with him, apart from his knife. In his sack Grisha still had a few of his books, the crucifix and the prayer wheel, and the
svirel
from Kolya.
    During the following winter, Grisha watched men all around him die from overwork, cold, malnutrition and illness. All night, every night, men coughed and moaned and