believe me, and thaw themselves out a little as well.”
“What’s the reason for thawing out the bodies?”
“It’s the only way they can get them into the barrels.”
By the time the Comitati reappeared, the breadline had begun to move again, but no sooner had Pekkala begun distributing the rations than a fight broke out among the prisoners.
Pekkala had been so focused on handing out the bread that he did not see who started it.
Those convicts not involved fell back from the commotion, leaving an old man, whom Pekkala immediately recognized as Sedov, down on one knee and wiping a bright smear of blood from his nose.
Above him stood Tarnowski. With fists clenched, he circled the old man like a boxer waiting for his opponent to raise himself up before knocking him down once more.
Pekkala remembered what Klenovkin had said about the Comitati turning against each other. From what he could see, it appeared to be the truth.
Sedov climbed shakily to his feet. He was upright for only a second before Tarnowski smashed him again in the face. Sedov spun as he tumbled, his teeth limned in red, but no sooner was he down than he began to get up again.
“Stay down,” muttered Pekkala.
Melekov grunted in agreement. “They never learn. I told you.”
As he watched the Old Believer struggle to his feet, Pekkala could stand it no longer. He walked towards the door which led out to the compound.
“What are you doing?” barked Melekov.
“Tarnowski’s going to kill him.”
“So what if he does? He’ll kill you as well if you get in his way.”
Pekkala did not reply. Opening the flimsy door, he strode into the compound and pushed his way into the circle where the fight was taking place.
Tarnowski was just about to strike the old man another blow when he caught sight of Pekkala. “Get out of the way, kitchen boy.”
Pekkala ignored him. Turning to help the injured man, he was astonished to see that the place where Sedov had been lying was now empty. The only thing remaining was some splashes of blood in the snow. The Old Believer seemed to have vanished into the crowd.
“Look out!” shouted a voice in the crowd.
Glancing at the blur of dirty faces, Pekkala caught sight of Savushkin.
Too late, Pekkala spun around to meet Tarnowski.
That was the last thing he remembered.
On the other side of the country, Poskrebyshev had just arrived for work.
As he did every day, he entered the Kremlin through the unmarked door that led directly to an elevator, which was also unmarked. This elevator had only two buttons, UP and DOWN, and brought him directly to the floor on which Stalin’s office was located.
Poskrebyshev prided himself on following exactly the same path to work, even down to where he placed his feet, this side or that side of cracks in the pavement.
From the moment Poskrebyshev left the small apartment, which until last year he had shared with his mother, up to the instant he sat down at his desk, he found himself in a pleasant haze of predictability. He liked things to be in their place. It was a trait Poskrebyshev shared with Stalin, whose insistence on finding things just as he had left them was even more acute than his own.
Entering his large, high-ceilinged chamber, Poskrebyshev hung up his overcoat, placed his paper-wrapped lunch on the windowsill, and sat down at his desk.
He noticed, from the tiny green light on the intercom, that the Boss had already arrived. It was not unusual for him to come in early. Stalin often could not sleep and sometimes spent the whole night in his office or wandering the secret passageways that ran between the walls of the Kremlin.
Poskrebyshev’s first task was always to fill in his personal logbook with the time he had arrived. In all the years he’d worked for Comrade Stalin, he had never been absent or late. Even on the day he discovered that his mother had died in her sleep, he left her lying in her bed, made his lunch, and went to work. He did not call the funeral home until he arrived at the Kremlin.
With a movement so practiced it was practically unconscious, he slid open the drawer to retrieve his logbook.
What took place next caught him so completely by surprise that at first he had no idea what was happening. The desk seemed to shudder, as if the Kremlin, perhaps the whole city of Moscow, had been seized in the grip of an earthquake. Then the desk began to move. It slid forward, the sturdy oak legs buckling, and crashed to the ground. Documents, stacked and ready for filing, slid across the floor in a cascade of lavender-colored telegrams, gray departmental reports, and pink requisition slips.
When everything finally stopped moving, Poskrebyshev was still sitting in his chair, still holding on to the drawer.
Then, from somewhere in the rubble of his collapsed desk, the intercom crackled. It was Stalin. “Pos-” he began, but he was laughing so hard that he could barely speak. “Poskrebyshev, what have you done?”
Then Poskrebyshev realized he had fallen victim to another of Stalin’s cruel jokes. The Boss must have come in early and sawed the legs of his desk completely through, so that even the slightest movement would bring the whole thing crashing down.
“Poskrebyshev!” Stalin snorted through the intercom. “You are such a clumsy little man!”
Poskrebyshev did not reply. Setting aside the drawer, he retrieved his phone from the floor and called maintenance. “I need a new desk,” he said.
There was another howl of laughter from the other room.
“He did it again?” asked the voice from maintenance.
This was, in fact, the third time Stalin had sabotaged Poskrebyshev’s desk.
The first time, Stalin had sawed off the legs completely, so that when Poskrebyshev arrived for work, he found that the desk came up only to his knees. The second time, Poskrebyshev walked into his office and saw only his chair. The desk appeared to have vanished until, one month later, he received a letter from the regional commissar of Urga, Mongolia, thanking him for the unusual and generous gift.
“Just get me a new desk,” Poskrebyshev growled into the phone.
When Stalin’s voice crackled once again over the intercom, his laughter had vanished. This sudden disappearance of good humor was another of Stalin’s traits, which Poskrebyshev had learned to endure. “What is the news from Pekkala?” Stalin demanded.
With the toe of his boot, Poskrebyshev pressed down on the intercom button. “None, Comrade Stalin. No word has come from Borodok.”
Pekkala woke up on a stone floor. He was freezing. As he looked around, he realized he was in a small hut with a low roof made of rough planks and a wooden door which fitted poorly in its frame. Wind moaned around cracks in the door, which was fastened with a wooden block set across two iron bars. In the corner stood a metal bucket. Otherwise, the room was empty.
He realized he must be in one of the camp’s solitary confinement cells, which were perched up on high ground at the edge of the camp, where they were exposed to a relentless freezing wind.
Pekkala climbed stiffly to his feet. His jaw ached where he’d been hit by Tarnowski. With one hand against the wall to steady himself, he walked over to the door.
Peering through the gaps in the wooden planks, Pekkala saw only bare ground scattered with twigs, broken branches, and yellow blooms of lichen like scabs upon the stones. Below, down a narrow, meandering path, lay the tar-paper rooftops of the camp.
He was hungry. By now the shuddering emptiness Pekkala felt in his gut seemed to be permanent. Thinking about food made him remember it was Friday, the day Kirov used to prepare a meal for him before they both left the office for the weekend.
Prior to his instatement as a commissar in the Red Army, and his subsequent appointment as Pekkala’s
