Voitch
by Keith Davies
part 1
‘It is the Devil’s Arse — d’yavol skaya zadnitsa — and you must think with every breath: double woollen underwear, precise layers, puttees, felt under boots; scarves wound around your jacket, throat and face — company-issue greatcoat, snowshoes, ushanka, at least three pairs of gloves — and, always, your carbine greased, cleaned and loaded — cradled, slung, or close enough to be grabbed, shouldered, and fired in a second.’
‘Move with exact, deliberate care, every single time you operate the levers; attend to the telegraph, or effect repairs to ground frames and, if you venture outside to draw water, secure supplies, check or thaw points, become two men — one of you constantly watching the forest line and the route back — however short; the other intent on your task. Clear?’
The Trans-Sib Commissar paused not for dramatic effect but out of kindly concern, for he knew that nothing — no company manual, no imprecations, no set of ordinances — could prepare the keen young signalman for the white, illimitable madness, the appalling silence and brutal cold of Siberia or for its hellish summers when the tundra boiled with mosquitoes and the ground liquefied to a sodden mess.
The row of clocks on the panelled wall measuring time across zones from Balashika to Vladivostok ticked softly, and a log shifted in the grate. Outside, four floors below, the lamps were being lit, and glimmering buttery yellow. Trams bustled and clanged along the Moscow streets: workers hurried home in the soft spring rain.
The kid looked tough. He reckoned Voitch knew the risks: forty degrees of frost could shatter teeth: birch sap exploded; a second’s distraction meant snow blindness, disorientation and certain death; touching bare metal ripped flesh from fingers and palms.
But the file had Voitch assigned a year in Kasovo-Novy: the remotest government signal box on the route — nearly three hundred miles from even the tiniest settlement — and the Commissar added one final, solemn warning.
‘There may well be nights when you will not sleep — outside hacking ice, tethered to your cabin, blowtorching frozen points, repairing connecting rods — and then you could well meet yourself. He will have your face, memories, habits, and he will not leave. Siberians have a thousand names for their frost sprites, forest devils, witches and demons — they are simple people, far from progress, enlightenment and rational culture — Erlik, Chudo-Yudo, Moroz — but that’s the one that has them shitting themselves, even more than starving wolves: self-haunting; the persistent, illusory other self — utterly real, obliging, helpful or mocking — and, of course, impossible.
‘That’s when you telegraph for help, or if the ice has collapsed the wires or cracked the insulators — stop any train with fog detonators on the tracks. You must get out. There will be no disgrace or penalty — none.’
* * *
Signal and Telegraphy Box 2257 was found in impressive order when Voitch took up his assignment, one shatteringly pristine morning in the autumn of 1904.
Signalman Jurij wore his high-collared tunic and coat to hand over keys, tokens and report books to Voitch, as the 0-8-0 Izhitsa class locomotive’s crewmen unloaded grease and oil cannisters, paraffin, cartridges, detonators, bow saws, axes, and twenty ration bales — each one loaded with canned meat and cabbage soups; a thousand neatly-packed matches sealed in wax wrappers; forty-eight cans of meat and cabbage soup, fifteen pounds of oatmeal, rye and sugar; seven bricks of black tea and ten pounds of chocolate — stowing them carefully above the tappet locking hatches in the straw and felt-lined brick base below the lever frame.
Jurij — beaming affably, his face brick-red, wind-bitten, and sporting a luxurious beard — had barely twenty minutes to effect the changeover, as the Izhitsa’s driver gestured irritably at the dropping pressure gauge. After telegraphing news of the relief, they shook hands, and Jurij, already tasting the cucumbers, mint and apples in his Krasnogorsk suburban garden, offered some brisk advice as Voitch accompanied him back to the engine, the air around the boiler plates quivering from its heat.
‘I had a pleasant enough duty — a kind year: the snows stayed only from September to May. They say the tundra freezes to a thousand feet below us! Twice, it reached minus twenty-five but I was snug enough. Concentrate! Allocate your time with great care: cooking, tending the stove, chopping firewood, mending clothes, keeping lamps trimmed, writing reports, operating the telegraph and levers; move with precision outside — remember — feet and hands, feet and hands!
The double tracks curved away into the endless forest — larch, spruce, fir — all massed for a thousand miles.
‘What are those circular dents on the chimney cowl?’ asked Voitch.
‘Bears!’Jurij grinned. ‘They clamber onto the roof — especially if you fry reindeer meat or canned pork!’
There was no Comfort Class for company employees, but his bunk on the crew change train was clean, and the embroidered counterpane Voitch had slept under for nine nights nizhny uroven — downline — evoked pangs for the homely comforts he would miss so keenly.
With the supplies stacked, the crew re-boarded. The giant locomotive, barked, hissed, then reversed west — there was no passing loop at Ustroytsvo 2257.
Voitch watched it achingly for a moment, until it vanished, leaving a smudge of steam among the thinning trees. For some minutes the rails sang, carrying the Izhitsa’s fading vibrations — then there was only his own breathing, and the faint crackle of dead birch leaves in that terrible immensity.
Snow sidled down, stinging his face.
The silence claimed him.
Concentrate!
He found it worked best to compartmentalize tasks — and thought of them as closely-stacked transparent boxes, like so many glass fish tanks — allowing him to glance at multiple essentials as he worked: attending to telegraph requests for clearance, he could set his pocket watch against the chronometer. Writing up traffic and message records in the ledger, meant the upper frame set room’s stove was opposite him, and he would automatically check the height of the stove’s log stack alongside it.
When inspecting and greasing the lever frame links, he looked into the remaining supply bales, pencilling levels on the waxed cartons. Each time he locked and set the signal tappet levers — scarlet, blue, yellow or silver, with their bright brass grips — he instinctively glanced left to right, making certain all twenty-seven were checked, neutral, or blocked.
For company, he had the approaching tremor, then the splendid roar of freight and passenger services howling past, their engines and carriages frosted and fringed with icicles: at night, a zoetropic whirl of a gauntleted footplate crew, demonic in the firebox glare; elegant diners attended by waiters poised in white tailcoats; darkened sleeping sections; then the two red stabs of the tail lamps, punctuating the dark, narrowing, merging, suddenly obliterated.
There were the downline trains feeding the cities, their huge waggons seeded with hand-hewn brown, bituminous and coking coals, rumbling westward.
He saw little of the forest’s inhabitants other than their prints, and droppings staining the snow — when schedules left time to chop wood or circuit the signal box to clear icicles as winter deepened. In the evenings when he sat by the wood burner, eating stew, dunking rye bread in black tea, or grimacing as he downed the stipulated daily tot of lime juice: he often heard the crick-cricking of passing reindeers’ hooves and the gruff snorts they exchanged.
Sometimes he woke in the grey light that passed for night, and heard the far-off, sobbing howls of wolves.
Once, when he looked up from pushing home a lever, he saw a lynx saunter across both trackbeds. It moved like dappled liquid silver, pausing at the treeline to look directly back at him, its green eyes ablaze with utter indifference.
Each train was preceded by a jangle of bells and flickering telegraph needles to verify line clearance and signal setting. Voitch worked the levers in turn, locking them securely, noting traffic types and times; a purposive, orderly, calm, predictable routine.
Until one Sunday in late January 1905, when Father Georgy Gapon’s Saint Petersburg petitioners were met with four volleys of rifle fire from the Imperial Guards outside the Winter Palace, and Cossack cavalry hacked down fleeing workers with their sabres.
A thousand were killed or wounded, and the world turned upside down forever.
* * *
There followed four days’ silence, with points locked and signals levelled — Outer, Home or Routing — and all traffic sided.
Then the telegraph clattered into a frenzy — the box cabin reeked and fizzed with electrical ozone, each signalling seeming to cancel out the previous one:
All depots attacked. Riots in Petrograd.
Resume traffic: prioritize Imperial Units.
Do your duty — stand by!
Priority to Imperial troop and supply trains.
Then three days of nothing: the wires seemingly silent from Moscow to Vladivostok.
Voitch — now increasingly frantic — systematically checked the telegraph components — discs, needles, wiring, electromagnets — with the sickening, almost convulsive, dread that somewhere, on the Up or Down line, trains might be roaring towards double impact. The needles insisted both lines were clear: there were no coded bell rings to signify up or down line traffic; routine or specials.
Until: Stachka! Stachka! Stachka! Strike! Strike! Strike!
Sent in a burst of twenty minutes, at intervals of an hour for a further three days.
Baffled and fearful, Voitch took refuge in his logbook entries, polishing brasswork and checking his company-issue rifle; cleaning it from stock to muzzle, smoothing the bolt with oil until it slid home at fingertip pressure. Taking care to ensure the safety catch was snug and tight, he unscrewed the trigger guard, carefully setting it aside. If he had to shoulder and fire in freezing temperatures after removed his outer fur mittens — it should be possible to keep his gloves on — and react faster.
At first light on the morning of the fourth day: Order restored. Open Witch Breath on signal — prioritize specials from 04.45 tomorrow.
Voitch shuddered, and flinched at the order: this meant switching open a branch line a some three hundred and fifty yards east, winding three hundred bitter miles to Dykhanie Ved’my, a Reform Camp for madmen, heretics, intellectuals, dissidents, pamphleteers.
Rumours can penetrate even the outer walls of Hell: the White Guards were savages: appalling torture was inflicted on the wretched, starving prisoners; there were rumours of cannibalism and other horrors.
He slept fitfully, then rose and dressed by firelight, lit lamps in the gantry and prepared to set signals and switch points. The O4.45 howled past, and Voitch tried to blot out images of the wretched human freight contained inside each frost-caked, covered goods waggon, their doors chained and padlocked. He shut his eyes momentarily and saw the brake van pass. Planks had been crudely hacked out on either side, and the black snouts of heavy machine guns protruded.
Four more ‘Specials’ followed throughout the day; the last one at midnight.
That night the wind howled savagely, gnawing at the cabin, and Voitch had scant sleep, waking intermittently to check the levers, telegraph or fire.
Then the points jammed.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Keith Davies
