Siberian Red

hip-length jacket called a telogreika . Sewn into the jackets were long, sausage-shaped lines padded with raw cotton. From the second truck, prisoners received matching trousers and, from the third, boots made of rubberised canvas. None of the clothing was new, but it had been washed in petrol to kill the lice and strip away some of the dirt.
    The guards who threw this clothing from the trucks had no time to think of sizes. Prisoners exchanged garments until they found what fitted 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 mineshaft had been cut into the mountain.
    The centre 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 mid-stride 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 wood stoves, 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 was guarded at night by an old soldier named Larchenko, who sat on a chair by the door reading a children’s book of fairy tales.
    Having eaten his rations, which consisted of a scrap of dried fish wedged between two slices of black bread, Pekkala found himself in a bunk near the centre of the main barracks block.
    After the long journey, the convicts were too exhausted to talk. Within minutes, most of them were asleep.
    Some time in the night, Pekkala woke to see a figure shuffling about between the rows of beds which lined the walls.
    It was the guard, Larchenko.
    At first, Pekkala thought he must be looking for something, the way the soldier moved so carefully across the splintery wooden boards. One of Larchenko’s arms was held out crookedly, as if it had been broken and then anchored in a cast. Blinking the sleep from his eyes, Pekkala lifted his head to get a better view.
    In the darkness of the barracks, Larchenko was still nothing more than a silhouette, turning and turning like a clockwork ballerina in a jewellery box.
    Then suddenly Pekkala