Town of Devochka of the Siberian Territory, did not match his title. It was not tiny, but it was small, about the size of a freight elevator. There was one wall with a window. The window faced an open plane of tundra and a distant vision of
The town was built on steel legs driven into the permafrost and heated by huge pumps. This kept the buildings from freezing in the winter, when the temperature went down to about 100 degrees below zero, and sinking in the summer, when temperatures rose well over 100 degrees and a sickly rotting smell permeated everything. When the first buildings had been constructed in 1950, the warm air they gave off caused the permafrost beneath them to soften. The buildings sank.
Fyodor Rostnikov looked out of the lone window in his office. Behind him bookshelves covered the wall. File cabinets were lined up on the right. On the wall to his left was a single piece of art, a realistic painting, as tall as a man, of a steel girder in a field of green grass. A very small man was craning his neck back and holding onto a workman’s cap as he looked up at the top of the girder, where a glittering, white, multifaceted diamond glowed.
“My wife did it,” Fyodor said, looking at Porfiry Petrovich, whose eyes were on the painting. “Her name is Svetlana. We have two children, a boy, eighteen, and a girl, ten. The girl has what they call mild autism.”
“When did you come here, Fyodor?”
“You may call me Fedya.”
They were seated in wooden chairs in front of the steel desk, cups of tea within easy reach on little wooden mats that looked Japanese.
“Fedya.”
“My mother and I came here forty-two years, four months, and eight days ago to be with her husband. I was raised in this very building.”
Fedya looked around as if he had never noted his surroundings before.
“He is dead, mining accident. She died of cancer just two years ago. Anything else you want to know?”
He ran his flattened fingers over the right side of his bearded chin.
“You no longer hate our father?”
“I’m not venerating his memory,” said Fedya.
“And me, you hate me?”
“I did for a very long time and then I realized one day that what he had done to me and my mother was not your fault. I resented, yes, but no more. It took too much time and energy.”
Porfiry Petrovich nodded and drank some tea. Both men knew why the information was being provided. The brothers had to work together for a few days. Actually, it had to be seven days at most because of the deadline the Yak had given him.
“The murder,” said Rostnikov.
“Which one?”
“There have been more besides the Canadian?”
“Hundreds that I know of. There may have been more. There’s no way of knowing the total number of people who simply died in the mine or while constructing the mine and these buildings. Record keeping was terrible. We’re not Germans. All the possible murders are buried with whatever records exist. Mind if I pace?”
“No.”
“Would you be more comfortable removing your leg?”
“Yes, but it’s not worth the effort of taking it off and putting it back on. It supports me but it does not comfort me. I was able to talk to my old, shriveled leg.”
Fedya nodded in understanding and began to pace, pausing from time to time to look out the window.
“Tsar Nicholas ordered diamond expeditions to Siberia in 1898. No diamonds were found. Every one of the eighteen men who came to the Yakuntia Basin perished. It was not till Stalin ordered expeditions back to Siberia to find diamonds in 1947 that some success was achieved, but the cost was great-not that Stalin cared. Your only son is named Iosef?”
“Yes.”
“For Stalin?”
“Yes. It was a mistake. I have made and continue to make many of them,” said Porfiry Petrovich. “My son is not one of those mistakes.”
“He could change his name,” said Fedya, looking out the window.
“Stalin did not own eternal rights to the name.”
“What does Iosef do?”
“He’s a policeman. He works with me.”
“Runs in the family. Our father, you, me, and your son.”
“It’s possible.”
“The winters,” Fedya said, resuming his pace. “Then as now, seven months of winter. Steel tools became so brittle that they broke like dry kindling. Oil froze solid. Rubber tires exploded. Then, when that first summer came, the top layer of permafrost melted, created a muddy, fly-infested swamp as big as half the countries in Africa.”
“And people died?” said Porfiry Petrovich.
“Hundreds. And all of them and all of us, until the fall of the man of steel, were happy to be here. We had a doctor, medical supplies, books to read, a job to do-a very dangerous job but a job-but most of all we had. .”
“Food,” said Porfiry Petrovich.
“Food,” agreed his brother, almost spilling what remained of his tea. “And warm bedrooms.”
“Murders,” Porfiry Petrovich said.
“Madness, fights, jealousy,” said Fedya.
“Isolation here can be maddening. In 1953 a man, a small man, went mad in the mine. He had a pick. He screamed and imbedded the tool’s sharp point in the head of three people, the back of two people, the stomach of another and, worst of all, he came out of the mine and used his pick on two children, one a little boy and the other a little girl. The alcoholic security guard shot the madman. The children were on the way to wait for their father, who was the wild man’s first victim. You know where this is going, don’t you?”
“The ghost girl,” said Rostnikov.
“The ghost girl. She began appearing in the mine a month or two later. She’s been seen at least nine times since 1963, probably more. There may have been people who did not want to be ridiculed, but ridicule would not have come easily to those who claimed to have seen her.”
“She killed people?”
“Let us say, she was proximate when people died.”
“You believe in this ghost girl?”
Fedya stopped pacing and sat in the chair facing his brother. He lowered his voice and said, “No, but that is said only in the relative privacy of this office which, as far as I can tell, is clean of microphones. In here, I’m an atheist. Out there with the people who live here and work the mines, I am an agnostic. Some of these good and not-so-good people have families that have been here four generations. They are the families of criminals sent to this Gulag. They have developed their own lore. I respect it or I cannot do my job. So, as someone said, ‘Sometimes the prospect of two and two equaling five has a definite attraction.’ ”
“Dostoevsky,” said Porfiry Petrovich.
“I know,” said his brother. “You want to talk to more people or you want to go into the mine?”
“Both. People first. Mine later.”
“I have from time to time kept track of you,” said Fedya. “Curiosity. Even in so remote a spot as this, it is remarkable what a security officer can access with a computer-even information about a Chief Inspector of Police in Moscow.”
“And I, I confess, have from time to time kept track of you. It is remarkable what a Chief Inspector of Police in Moscow can, with a telephone, discover about a security officer at a remote mine in Siberia.”
“Yes, the mine. We must not in our nostalgic journey forget about why you are here. Your man Karpo is
