Siberian Red

the usual effects of overwork, malnutrition and despair, the few who remained continued to exert a powerful influence.
    Klenovkin blamed the White Russians for the fact that he had never received the recognition he deserved. All the commandants who had started out at the same time as he did were senior executives now. They lived in comfort in the great cities – Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad. They ate their lunches in fine restaurants. They took their holidays at resorts on the Black Sea. Klenovkin had none of these luxuries. The nearest restaurant, a rail station café serving kvass and smoked caribou meat, was more than 800 kilometres away.
    The only sign Klenovkin had ever received from Dalstroy that they appreciated him at all was an ashtray, made of pinkish-white onyx, which he had been awarded for fifteen years of service to the company. And he did not even smoke.
    The way Klenovkin saw it, he had been left here to rot among these Siberians – ‘Chaldons’ as they called themselves. To Klenovkin, they were all the same – a dirty and suspicious people. They trusted nobody except their own kind. I could live a dozen lifetimes here, thought Klenovkin, and I would still be a stranger to them. Every time he heard that train departing from the Borodok railhead, it was all he could do not to run down there and jump aboard.
    But it was impossible. What held him back were not the guards and the stockade fence but paperwork, quotas and fear. As far as Klenovkin was concerned, he was as much a prisoner as any convict in the camp.
    But now, perhaps, all that was going to change.
    As much as he had hoped never to set eyes on Pekkala again, Klenovkin knew that if anyone could get to the bottom of Ryabov’s murder, it would be the Emerald Eye.
    So Klenovkin had made up his mind to endure the presence of the unearthly Finn, who had somehow survived in a place where death had been a virtual certainty.
    However, thought Klenovkin, addressing the voices in his head, which had been clamouring at him ever since he’d learned that Pekkala was on his way, I am not simply going to grovel at the feet of a man who was once my prisoner. I must maintain some shred of dignity. I will remind him, in no uncertain terms, that I command at Borodok. The Emerald Eye can do his job, but only as my subordinate. I will be in charge.
    The Commandant looked out at the statues in the compound, hoping to match the seriousness on the faces of those workers with a steely expression of his own.
    When the concrete sculpture had arrived, six years ago, Klenovkin assumed that he was at last being recognised for his years of loyal service to Dalstroy. No other camp had statues like this‚ and even if the motto did not seem entirely relevant to men imprisoned at a gulag, nevertheless it was a sign to Klenovkin that he had not been forgotten.
    Klenovkin had the statues installed in the centre of the compound. The work had barely been completed when he received an inquiry from the University of Sverdlovsk, asking if he had by any chance seen a statue of a man and a woman which had been commissioned as the centrepiece of the university’s new Centre for Medical Studies. Apparently, the statues had been placed on the wrong train and nobody seemed to know where they were.
    Klenovkin never answered the letter. He tore it up and threw it in the metal garbage can beside his desk. Then, overcome with paranoia, he set the contents of the garbage can on fire.
    In the years which followed, Klenovkin had often found inspiration in the determined faces of that nameless man and woman.
    Today, however, the hoped-for inspiration was not there. Wind-blown snow swirled through the compound, filling the eye sockets of the half-naked figures so that they seemed to stagger blindly forward into the storm.
    Klenovkin was snatched from his daydream by the sound of the outer door creaking open. Hurriedly, he returned to his desk, sat down and tried to look busy.
    *
     
    Pekkala stepped into the warm, still air of the Commandant’s waiting room. A lamp was burning on a table. In the corner, a potbellied iron stove sighed as the logs crumbled inside it. Beside the stove, another guard, wearing a heavy knee-length coat sat on a rickety chair with his boots up on the windowsill. Pekkala recognised this man as the same one who had opened fire on the prisoners when they first arrived at the Borodok railhead. The guard stared sleepily at Pekkala, his eyes as red in the lamplight as