THREE WEEKS LATER
Standing on deck, officer Genrikh Duvakin used the tips of his teeth to pull off his coarse mittens. His fingers were icy numb, slow to respond. He blew on them, rubbing his hands together, trying to restore circulation. Exposed to the biting wind, his face was deadened-his lips bloodless and blue. The outermost hairs in his nose had frozen, and when he pinched his nostrils, brittle hairs broke like miniature icicles snapping. He could tolerate such minor discomforts because his hat was a miracle of warmth, lined with reindeer fur and stitched with the care of someone who appreciated that the wearer’s life might depend on the quality of their work. Three long flaps covered his ears and the back of his neck. The earflaps, tied tight under his chin, gave him the appearance of a child wrapped up against the cold, an effect compounded by his soft, boyish features. The pounding salt air had failed to crack his smooth complexion, while his plump cheeks had proved resilient to poor diet and lack of sleep. Twenty- seven years old, he was often mistaken for younger: a physical immaturity that did not serve him well. Supposed to be intimidating and fierce, he a daydreamer, an unlikely guard on board a prison ship as notorious as the Stary Bolshevik.
Roughly the size of an industrial barge, the Stary Bolshevik was a workhorse vessel. Once a sea-battered Dutch steamer, it had been bought in the nineteen thirties, renamed and customized by the Soviet secret police. Originally intended for colonial exports-ivory, pungent spices, and exotic fruits-it now ferried men destined for the deadliest labor camps in the Gulag enterprise. Toward the bow there was a central tower four stories high that included living quarters for the guards and crew. At the top of the tower was the bridge where the captain and crew navigated, a close-knit group autonomous from the prison guards themselves, willfully blind to the business of this ship, pretending that it was no responsibility of theirs.
Opening the door, the captain stepped out from the bridge, surveying the stretch of sea they were leaving behind. He gestured down to Genrikh on deck, giving him a nod and announcing:
– All clear!
They’d passed through La Perouse Strait, the only point on the journey where they neared Japanese islands and risked international contact. Precautions were taken to ensure that the vessel appeared to be nothing more than a civilian cargo ship. The heavy machine gun rigged to the center deck was dismantled. Uniforms were hidden beneath long coats. Genrikh had never been entirely sure why they took such efforts to conceal their true nature from the glance of Japanese fishermen. In idle moments, he wondered if there were similar prison boats in Japan with similar men to him.
Genrikh reassembled the machine gun, screwing it back together. Rather than the gun pointing outward, he directed the barrel downward at the reinforced steel hatch that led to the hold. Belowdeck, in the darkness, cramped on bunks like matches in a box, was a cargo of five hundred men-the first convict-laden voyage of the year from transit camp Buchta Nakhodka on the south of the Pacific coastline to Kolyma in the north. Though both ports were located on the same stretch of coastline, the distance between them was vast. There was no way to reach Kolyma by land: it was accessible only by plane or ship. The northern port of Magadan served as the entry point for a network of labor camps that had spread like fungal spores up along the Kolyma highway into the mountains, forests, and mines.
Five hundred was the smallest prisoner cargo Genrikh had ever supervised. At this point in the year under Stalin’s rule the ship would have held four times as many in an attempt to ease the backlog at the transit camps built up over the winter as the zek trains, the prisoner-filled wagons, continued to deliver but the ships remained docked. The Sea of Okhotsk was only passable when the ice floes melted. By October it was frozen again. A mistimed voyage meant being encased in ice. Genrikh had heard of ships that had ventured too late in winter or left too early in the spring. Unable to turn back or reach their destination, the guards had made good their escape, trekking across the ice, dragging sleighs loaded with canned meats and bread while the abandoned prisoners were left in the hold to starve or freeze, whichever came first.
Today no prisoners would be allowed to starve, or freeze, nor would they be summarily executed, their bodies tossed overboard. Genrikh hadn’t read Khrushchev’s Secret Speech condemning Stalin and the excesses of the Gulags. He’d been too scared. There were rumors that it was designed to flush out counterrevolutionaries, a ploy so that people might let their defenses slip and join in the criticism, only to be arrested. Genrikh wasn’t convinced by this theory: the changes seemed real. The long-established practice of brutality and indifference with no accountability had been replaced by confused compassion. At the transit camp prisoners’ sentences were hastily reviewed. Thousands destined for Kolyma had been suddenly granted their freedom, returned to civilization as abruptly as they’d been taken from it. These free men-since most of the women had been granted freedom in the amnesty of 1953-had sat on the shore, staring out at the sea, each clutching a five-hundred-gram chunk of black rye bread, a freedom ration, intended to sustain them until they reached home. For most, home was thousands of miles away. With no possessions, no money, just their rags and their freedom bread, they’d stared out at the sea, unable to comprehend that they could walk away and not be shot. Genrikh had shooed them from the shoreline, as if they were pesky birds, encouraging them to make the journey home but unable to tell them how that journey was possible.
Genrikh’s superiors had spent the weeks panicking that they were going to be brought before a tribunal. In an attempt to show how much they’d changed, they had issued extensive reviews and overhauls of regulations, frantic signals to Moscow that they were synchronized with this new fashion for fairness. Genrikh had kept his head down, doing as ordered, never questioning and never offering an opinion. If he were told to be tough with prisoners he’d be tough. If he were told to be nice he’d be nice. As it happened, with his baby face, he’d always been better at being nice than tough.
After years of shipping thousands of political prisoners convicted under Article 58, men and women who’d said the wrong thing, or been in the wrong place, or known the wrong people, the Stary Bolshevik had a new role-to carry a more select cargo, only the most violent and dangerous criminals, men for whom everyone could agree: there was no question of them ever being released.
In the pitch-black belly of the Stary Bolshevik, among the stinking bodies of five hundred murderers and rapists and thieves, Leo lay on his back, resting on the narrow, rickety top bunk-his shoulder pressed against the hull. On the other side was a vast expanse of sea, a mass of freezing water held back by a steel plate no thicker than his thumbnail.
SAME DAY
The air was stale and putrid, boiled by the shuddering coal engine secured in an adjacent compartment. The convicts had no access to the engine, but its heat seeped through the timber partition wall, a crude addition to the ship’s original design. At the beginning of the journey, when the hold had been freezing cold, prisoners had fought for the bunks nearest the engine. Within days, as temperatures soared, those same prisoners were fighting for bunks farther away. Divided into a grid of narrow passageways, with high rows of wooden bunks on either side, the subdeck cargo hold had been transformed into an insect hive, infested with prisoners. Leo had a top bunk, a space he’d fought for and defended, prized for its elevation from the vomit and shit slopping on the floor. The weaker you were, the lower you were-as if they’d been shaken through a filtering process, separating into Darwinian layers. Lanterns that had for the past week emitted a dim, sooty glow-like stars seen through city smog-were now out of kerosene, creating darkness so complete that Leo couldn’t see his hands even as they scratched his face.
Tonight was the seventh day at sea. Leo had counted the days as carefully as he could, making the most of infrequently permitted toilet visits in order to regain some sense of time. On deck, with a mounted machine gun directed at them, prisoners queued to use the hole intended for the anchor, a drop straight into the ocean. Trying to
