Free Trans-Siberian Express by Warren Adler Page B

screamed. Suddenly the convicts began to sing, yell, stamp their feet and clap their hands, drowning out his cries. But it was the humiliation of his exposed body that finally subdued his spirit. He felt degraded, broken. His courage drained from him. They held his body down on the cold metal floor, pinning it to the iciness as they spread-eagled him and piled their bodies over him until he could not move a single muscle. His brain was alert to the terror of it.
    “Think of yourself as a pillow,” he heard Shmiot say. “A nice comfortable pillow. A man that does not share with his fellows is no longer a human being, just an object. Right?”
    Godorov heard the chorus of affirmative replies, and tried a last lunge to free himself, but it was impossible. He could do nothing but surrender to Shmiot’s authority. It was impossible to fight them on both sides of the iron grating. There was simply no place to hide. He cursed his weakness, the uncontrollable temper that had landed him in this hell.
    “Please,” he heard himself bleat. “Let me up. You can have my suit. Give me back my clothes.” The icy metal had already begun to eat into his spine and the bouncing of the train was torture to every nerve.
    “Please,” he begged. The only response was a kick in the face from Shmiot’s heavy shoe.
    “Save me,” he remembered crying repeatedly, and then silently, as he fell into a state of semiconsciousness.
    It was only later that he could reconstruct the scene, as bits and pieces of it floated up from his subconscious. He never determined how many hours or days they kept him pinioned to the metal floor. Someone had blindfolded him and stuck a gag, a filthy sock, in his mouth. The sound of metal clanging was the opening of the compartment door as a small group of convicts filed out to the toilet. There were also smells of food and strange chewing sounds.
    He was too numb with pain to feel hunger. He knew even then that if he survived—and many times on that dark journey he longed for the peace of death—he would remember Shmiot as he had first seen him, munching arrogantly on a carrot.
    He was not even sure of the exact moment when they released him, since his body had finally lost all power of feeling. Platinov told him later that the men had simply moved to one side, one at a time, as if they had finally become bored with the game. It was Platinov who had propped his frozen body up into a sitting position, rubbing his back in an effort to start the blood circulating again. Platinov dressed him in what was left of his clothes. Someone had stolen his coat.
    Platinov had described the journey later, the endless delays, the long days along the sidings waiting for another train to hook on to, then the interminable vibrations again as the train crawled over the track, a relentless nightmare of moving and never arriving. Platinov had counted ten days and nine nights.
    Finally, they reached their destination. The compartment door was opened and the guards clubbed the prisoners on the shins to get them to move out of the train.
    “You,” they screamed at Godorov. He remembered their cries of frustration at his inability to move, and the sound of their clubs against his shins as they prodded him to stand. When they discovered that he could not get up, they lifted him and were annoyed at his inability to stay on his feet. It would have been much easier to deal with a dead man.
    It took him months, in a substandard prison hospital, to regain even partial movement, but when he was fit enough to stand and move one leg in front of the other, he was sent back to the work prison. By then, of course, it was apparent that he would never regain full use of his once-strong body.
    “I thought you were dead,” Platinov had told him, when he had come back. Godorov was assigned to kitchen work.
    “See how lucky you are,” Platinov told him cheerfully, his round boyish face still innocent under layers of grime and coal dust. “You might