In Siberia by Colin Thubron

smashed. A river lisped over slag. I passed factories ringed with barbed-wire and searchlights, as if this were the only architecture anyone could remember, and every other street dribbled into a tundra hung with skeletal shutes and pit-wheels.
    Here the only superfluity is coal. It lies in heaps along the roads, and litters every compound. The streets are laid on coal-dust. When it rains, the puddles shine black. It hazes the air and it worms under your fingernails. Eventually, it eats your lungs.
    The cars make a wandering trickle between the pot-holes on Lenin Street. Cloth cap in fist, his statue still looks across Lenin Square at the Miners’ Palace of Culture. The pool in front is awash with vodka bottles. Everywhere on ministerial facades the carved insignia survive: red stars and crossed hammers, torches and banner-dripping spears. Along the rooftops leftover slogans set up an archaic clamour. ‘To the masses of Vorkuta!’ ‘The Miners are the Guardians of Labour!’ There is no will either to remove or to replenish them. One by one their letters are dropping off.
    I came upon some barracks built for convict miners which no one had bothered to demolish. The weed-sown earth crept half-way up their wooden walls, and the aisles where their bunks had been were filled with rubble. Sometimes the prisoners were packed so closely that they could barely turn in their sleep. At the end of each barracks the life-saving stoves had collapsed in cascades of brick, and garbled English graffiti spattered the walls from a later age. ‘Lucky Streik’, ‘Kiss my Ais….’
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    A young girl stands in Lenin Square. It is almost deserted. Shelooks about fifteen, but her black skirt barely descends below her hips, and her stockings stop half-way up her bruised thighs. How many days a year in Vorkuta can she dress like this? She appears pathetically tired and young; perhaps it is her first time. Jobs are hard in Vorkuta. But the palm of one hand is pressed against her cheek, as if to deny her presence here. Then a middle-aged man strolls up and says something. Haltingly, she follows him along the pavement. Her fingers keep slipping behind to pull down her skirt, to no avail. The man hails a car beneath the statue of Lenin, and she climbs tentatively in. By now her hand covers half her face.
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    My hotel was huge, half ruined and the only one left: a monument to Stalin which rang with my footsteps. Four policemen gazed stonily from an office across the hall, and concierges still slumped at their corridor desks. In the cavernous dining-room canned dance-music played for nobody.
    I walked in the streets without knowing where to go. I wondered vaguely if I were being followed. The sallow people wandering the pavements could be thinking whatever you ascribed to them. It was oddly quiet. A populace of old men sat remote in the arid squares, and spoke with me in dislocated phrases and half-smiles. They were Latvians and Ukrainians, exiled long ago, and were taking the air with reticent surprise.
    For it was warm, with a dense, midsummer stillness. By eight o’clock in the evening the sun was still high, and at eleven the sky held a limpid, refracted light, as if it were illuminating the town through black gauze. But not one in ten windows was lit. Lost in its suburbs, I had a fantasy that the past, like something viscous and unreconciled, was leaking back in, inhabiting abandoned rooms, reclaiming the factories. Those who had died here far outnumbered the living. They had built the city in chains, and lie beneath it. Yet at midnight people were still walking their mongrels in the roads, and reading newspapers.
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    Next morning I found a cheery Ukrainian to drive the twenty-mile noose-road through the mines. Vorkuta was a wonderfultown, Vasil said, because it was close to the Urals, and you could hunt. He’d lived here thirty years, and life had been splendid. ‘You should see the rivers and