Beaky's Blather

It had begun with a single step, as everything does.  In a column, they shuffled towards the camp painfully on frozen feet. He had moved to the right a little and watched the guard. Later he’d stepped a fraction to the left. No response.  

Each day, in rags they assembled and trudged wearily along the frozen dyke between the quarry and the prison barracks. He had experimented with stepping a little out of line – to right or left – and then at last one afternoon, he saw someone else step out of line a little too. He thought it a small success.

As the Siberian winter bit deeper, most of the men drew closer for warmth and so, each morning and evening in the gloom, on the long walk to the quarry and back, each step he took to the side, now more obviously, separated him from the crowd.  Once, he thought, a guard’s eye had rested on him but he seemed not to react so perhaps it was coincidence.  

The guards’ lives, he recognised were not unlike their own,. They too rose early in the dark and mustered with the inmates in the frigid cold. They too trudged miserably with the column along the blasted dyke, above the frozen wasteland to the quarry.  Like the prisoners, they too dipped their shoulders into the penetrating wind and their body curled inwards as it stripped their warmth. 

Their uniforms were better, but designed more for parade than function in this desolate place. Their food might in theory be better perhaps but, made in the same kitchens from the same stores by the same prisoner cooks, were really little different.  But worst perhaps, the prisoner reminded himself, their sentence here was for life with no prospect of parole.

On the deepest day of winter, the sun barely rose above the horizon as on the wind-scoured parade ground concrete the prisoners assembled for daily role call. A guard, his clipboard tugging in the wind, called each name in a voice rendered thin by the blast.  The prisoners shivered, aching to move. Anything but this long wait in lines. They were approaching the moment when the weakest of them would sag to the ground and begin to die from cold. Some realised they were minutes from death. Only the long walk and the long quarry labour breaking stones would save them. 

At last the guard lowered the list and the columns of men turned in a ragged parody of a parade and moved towards the quarry.  The prisoner stepped to the side and watched as two others stepped aside too. He smiled at this success and in a voice, hoarse from cold and lack of use, he called, 

‘Bravo boys, bravo’.  

The prisoner would complete this long walk three thousand, six hundred and sixty five times before his release, but this, he decided, would be the best one. He was not alone.