Siberian Red by Sam Eastland Page B

he must have misunderstood. The temperature was below zero and all they had on were the same threadbare pyjamas in which they’d first boarded the train.
    Seeing that his words had no effect, the guard drew a pistol from a holster on his belt and fired a shot into the crowd.
    The entire group flinched. With the blast still echoing around the lumberyard, prisoners ran their fingers across their faces, down their chests and out along the branches of their arms, searching for the wound which every man felt certain he’d received.
    Only then did someone cry out, a sound more of surprise than pain.
    The crowd parted around one man, whose hands were clutched against his neck. With wide and pleading eyes, he turned and turned in the space which had been made for him.
    Nobody stepped in to help.
    Seconds later, the convict dropped to his knees. Slowly and deliberately, he lowered himself on to his side. Then he lay there in the dirty snow, blood pulsing out of his throat.
    The guard called out again for everyone to strip. This time, there was no hesitation. Filthy garments slipped to the ground like the sloughed-off husks of metamorphosing insects.
    While this was going on, three trucks pulled up at the entrance to the lumber yard.
    Following another order shouted by the guard, the naked prisoners formed a line. With shoulders hunched and fists clenched over hearts, they filed past the trucks one by one. From the first vehicle, each man received a black, 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