ask.”
“And how did you know that?” asked Pekkala.
“Because you’d never have told me, Inspector.”
They climbed aboard just as the train began to move.
The railroad siding slipped away into the grainy air. In the distance the grove of trees seemed to disintegrate, atom by atom, until it too was gone.
If anyone even noticed the absence of the knife-cut man, nobody mentioned it. With a shuffling of feet, the space he had once occupied was filled, as if he’d never been there at all.
As wagon #6 swayed rhythmically from side to side, with the clatter of its wheels like a heartbeat echoing across the countryside, the atmosphere inside it was almost peaceful.
“Poskrebyshev!”
“Yes, Comrade Stalin.”
“Have there been any messages from Pekkala?”
“No, Comrade Stalin. He has not yet arrived at the camp.”
“You must keep me informed, Poskrebyshev.”
“Yes, Comrade Stalin.” Poskrebyshev stared at the gray mesh of the intercom speaker. Some of the tiny holes were clogged with dust. There had been a particular tone in Stalin’s voice just then, an anxiety almost bordering on fear. I must be mistaken, he thought.
Ten days after its departure from Moscow, ETAP-1889 passed through the town of Verkneudinsk.
This was the last civilian outpost before the train’s course diverted from the Trans-Siberian Railroad onto a separate track that would bring it to the Borodok railhead.
Peering through the opening, Pekkala spotted two men standing outside a tavern which adjoined the Verkneudinsk station. Faintly, he heard the men singing. Tiger stripes of lamplight gleamed through bolted window shutters, illuminating the snow which fell around them.
Afterwards, while the train pressed on into a darkness so utter it was as if they’d left the earth and were now hurtling through space, the singing of those two men haunted him.
The following morning, the train arrived at Borodok.
One final time, the prisoners climbed from their wagons, past shouting guards and dogs on choke-chain leashes, and were herded into a lumberyard where thousands of logs had been stacked as high as double-storied houses, waiting to be shipped to the west on the same train which had delivered the prisoners. The air smelled sour from the wood, and piles of shredded bark steamed in the cold, melting the snow around them.
In one corner of the yard, behind a wire fence, stood a mountain of metal fuel drums, each one marked DALSTROY.
Pekkala wondered if those drums were already full, with dead men tucked like fetuses inside, or if they had been set aside for the prisoners who stood around him now.
A guard climbed up on top of the log pile. “There are many rules at Borodok!” he shouted, hands cupped around his mouth. “You will know what they are when you have broken them.”
The convicts stared at him in silence.
“Now strip!” commanded the guard.
Nobody moved. The convicts continued to stare at the guard, each one convinced that he must have misunderstood. The temperature was below zero and all they had on was the same threadbare pajamas in which they’d first boarded the train.
Seeing that his words had no effect, the guard drew a pistol from a holster on his belt and fired a shot into the crowd.
The entire group flinched. With the blast still echoing around the lumberyard, prisoners ran their fingers across their faces, down their chests and out along the branches of their arms, searching for the wound which every man felt certain he’d received.
Only then did someone cry out, a sound more of surprise than pain.
The crowd parted around one man, whose hands were clutched against his neck. With wide and pleading eyes, he turned and turned in the space which had been made for him.
Nobody stepped in to help.
Seconds later, the convict dropped to his knees. Slowly and deliberately, he lowered himself onto his side. Then he lay there in the dirty snow, blood pulsing out of his throat.
The guard called out again for everyone to strip. This time, there was no hesitation. Filthy garments slipped to the ground like the sloughed-off husks of metamorphosing insects.
While this was going on, three trucks pulled up at the entrance to the lumberyard.
Following another order shouted by the guard, the naked prisoners formed a line. With shoulders hunched and fists clenched over hearts, they filed past the trucks one by one. From the first vehicle, each man received a black hip-length jacket called a
The guards who threw this clothing from the trucks had no time to think of sizes. Prisoners exchanged garments until they found what fit them, more or less.
It began to snow. Large flakes, like pieces of eggshell, settled on their hair and shoulders. Before long, a blizzard was falling sideways through the air.
In ranks of three, the convicts set off walking towards the camp, leaving behind the man who had been shot. He lay upon the dirty snow surrounded by a halo of diluted blood.
A short distance away, Borodok’s tall stockade fence of sharpened logs loomed from the mist like a row of giant teeth.
The gates were opened, but before the prisoners could enter, a man with a bald head and a jagged-looking tattoo on his hand rode out on a cart piled with emaciated corpses. Wired around the left big toe of each body was a small metal tag. Together, they flickered like sequins on a woman’s party dress. The cart was a strange-looking contraption, its wheel spokes twisted like the horns of a mythical beast and its flared wooden sides decorated with red and green painted flowers foreign to Siberia. The horse that pulled this cart wore a white mane of frost, and long white lashes jutted from its eyelids like ivory splinters. The tattooed man did not even glance at the convicts as his cart jostled out into the storm.
Then the prisoners marched into the camp.
Once they were inside the stockade fence, the only view of the outside world was the tops of trees in the surrounding forest. Beyond the barracks, administrative building, kitchen, and hospital, the camp dead-ended against a wall of stone. There, on rusted iron stakes, snarls of barbed wire fringed the rock where a mine shaft had been cut into the mountain.
The center of the compound was dominated by the statues of a man and a woman, mounted on a massive concrete platform. The man, stripped to the waist, held a book in one hand and a blacksmith’s hammer in the other. The woman clutched a sheaf of wheat against her concrete dress. Both of them were frozen in midstride as they headed towards the main gates of the camp.
Engraved into the base were the words LET US HEAL THE SICK AND STRENGTHEN THE WEAK!
The statue had not been there on his last visit to the camp. Pekkala wondered where it had come from and what it was doing there. He wondered, too, what possible comfort a Gulag prisoner could draw from such an exhortation.
Like giants bound upon some journey without relevance to man, the statues appeared to stride past the barracks huts, whose tar-paper roof tiles winked like fish scales in the sunset.
The prisoners were ordered straight to their barracks, which were large, single-room buildings with bunk beds fitted one arm’s length apart. Bare wooden planks made up the floors and ceiling. The heating in the barracks came from two woodstoves, one at either end. Prisoners measured their seniority in how close they slept to those stoves. The room smelled of smoke and sweat and faintly of the bleach used to wash down the floors once a month. The barracks were guarded at night by an old soldier named Larchenko, who sat on a chair by the door
