Archive 17

“I may need to involve Major Kirov in this investigation.”

Stalin spread his arms magnanimously. “Understood, and the camp commandant has also been instructed to assist you in any way he can. He is holding the body, as well as the murder weapon, until you arrive at the camp.”

“Who is in charge there now?”

“The same man who was running it when you were there.”

“Klenovkin?” An image surfaced in Pekkala’s mind of a gaunt, slope-shouldered man with black hair cut so short that it stood up like porcupine quills from his skull. Pekkala had met him only once, when he first arrived at the camp.

Having summoned Pekkala to his office, Klenovkin did not look up when Pekkala entered the room. All he said was, “Remove your cap when you are in my presence.” He then busied himself reading Pekkala’s prisoner file, carefully turning the large yellow pages, each one with a red diagonal stripe in the upper right-hand corner.

At last Klenovkin closed the file and raised his head, squinting at Pekkala through rimless spectacles. “We have all fallen from grace in one way or another,” he said. There was a resonance in his voice as if he were addressing a crowd instead of just one man. “Having just read your history, convict Pekkala, I see that you have fallen further than most.”

In those first years of the Bolshevik government, so many of the prison inmates were in Borodok on account of their loyalty to Nicholas II that a man with Pekkala’s reputation as the Tsar’s most trusted servant could easily have led to an uprising in the camp. Klenovkin’s solution was to place Pekkala as far away as possible from the other inmates.

“You are a disease,” Klenovkin told Pekkala. “I will not allow you to infect my prisoners. The simplest thing to do would be to have you shot, but unfortunately I am not allowed to do that. Some benefit must be derived from your existence before we consign you to oblivion.”

Pekkala stared at the man. Even during the months of harsh interrogation leading up to his departure for Siberia, he had never felt as helpless as he did at that moment.

“I am sending you out into the wilderness,” continued Klenovkin. “You will become a tree-marker in the Valley of Krasnagolyana, a job no man has held for longer than six months.”

“Why not?”

“Because nobody lives that long.”

Working alone, with no chance of escape and far from any human contact, tree-markers died from exposure, starvation, and loneliness. Those who became lost, or who fell and broke a leg, were usually eaten by wolves. Tree marking was the only assignment at Borodok said to be worse than a death sentence.

Provisions were left for him three times a year at the end of a logging road. Kerosene. Cans of meat. Nails. For the rest, he had to fend for himself. His only task, besides surviving, was to mark in red paint those trees ready for cutting by the inmates of the camp. Lacking any brushes, Pekkala stirred his fingers in the scarlet paint and daubed his print upon the trunks. By the time the logging crews arrived, Pekkala would already be gone. The red handprints became, for most of the convicts, the only trace of him they ever saw.

Only rarely was he spotted by those logging crews who came to cut the timber. What they glimpsed was a creature barely recognizable as a man. With the crust of red paint that spattered his prison clothes and long hair maned about his face, he resembled a beast stripped of its skin and left to die. Wild rumors surrounded him-that he was an eater of human flesh, that he wore a scapular made from the bones of those who had vanished in the forest, that he carried a club whose end was embedded with human teeth, that he wore scalps laced together as a cap.

They called him the man with bloody hands.

By the time word of his identity leaked out among the prisoners, they assumed he was already dead.

But six months later, to Klenovkin’s astonishment, Pekkala was still alive. And he stayed alive.

When a young Lieutenant Kirov arrived to recall him back to duty with the Bureau of Special Operations, Pekkala had been living in the forest for nine years, longer than any other tree-marker in the history of the Gulag system.

Tucking Ryabov’s file into his coat, Pekkala turned to leave.

“One more thing before you go,” said Stalin.

Pekkala turned again. “Yes?”

Reaching down beside his chair, Stalin picked up a small shopping bag and held it out towards Pekkala. “Your clothes for the journey.”

Pekkala glanced inside and saw what at first appeared to be some dirty, pinkish-gray rags. He lifted out the flimsy pajama-type shirt and recognized a standard prison-issue uniform. A shudder passed through him as he thought back to the last time he had worn garments like this.

At that moment, the door opened and Poskrebyshev walked in. He advanced two paces, stopped, and clicked his heels together. “Comrade Stalin, I beg to report that Poland has surrendered.”

Stalin nodded and said nothing.

“I also beg to inform you that the Katyn Operation has begun,” continued Poskrebyshev.

Stalin’s only reply was an angry stare.

“You asked me to tell you …”

“Get out,” said Stalin quietly.

Poskrebyshev’s heels smashed together once more, then he turned and left the room, closing the double doors behind him with a barely audible click of the lock.

“The Katyn Operation?” asked Pekkala.

“It would have been better for you not to know,” Stalin replied, “but since it is too late for that, let me answer your question with a question of my own. Suppose you were an officer in the Polish army, that you had surrendered and been taken prisoner. Let us say you had been well treated. You had been housed. You had been fed.”

“What is it you want to know, Comrade Stalin?”

“Say I offer you a choice: either a place in the Red Army or the opportunity to return home as a civilian.”

“They will choose to go home,” said Pekkala.

“Yes,” replied Stalin. “Most of them did.”

“But they will never arrive, will they?”

“No.”

In his mind, Pekkala could see those officers, bundled in the mysterious brown of their Polish army greatcoats, hands tied behind their backs with copper wire. One after the other, NKVD troopers shoved them to the edge of a huge pit dug into the orangey-brown soil of a forest in eastern Poland. With the barrels of their guns, the NKVD men tipped off the caps of their prisoners, sending them into the pit below. As each Polish officer was shot in the back of the head, he fell forward into the pit, onto the bodies of those who had been killed before.

How many were there? Pekkala wondered. Hundreds? Thousands?

By nightfall, the pit would be covered up.

Within a few weeks, tiny shoots of grass would rise from the trampled soil.

One thing Pekkala had learned, however. Nothing stays buried forever.

“You have not answered my question,” said Stalin. “I asked what you would do. Not they.”

“I would realize I had no choice,” replied Pekkala.

With a scythe-like sweep of his hand, Stalin brushed aside Pekkala’s words. “But I did give them a choice!”

“No, Comrade Stalin, you did not.”

Stalin smiled. “That is why you have survived, and why those other men will not.”

As soon as Pekkala had departed, Stalin pushed the intercom button. “Poskrebyshev!”