Siberian Red

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 he had shared with his mother until the year before, up to the instant he sat down at his desk, Poskrebyshev 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 practised 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-coloured telegrams, grey 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 realised 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 only came up 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 humour 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 realised 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 realised 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,