Death In Siberia by Alex Dryden

Author:Alex Dryden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780755373406
Publisher: Headline

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

BY THE LATE afternoon of the third day the old, slow-moving Rossiya had reached Yeniseiysk. During the course of the fading non-day, grey and heavy with rain clouds that never quite shed their contents, the ship had passed several small settlements. There was a torpor on board that fitted the lowering skies. The mood of the passengers hung motionless like the weather, mirroring its weight and presentiment. A calm before the storm.

On the east bank of the Yenisei the taiga was thick with a close weave of trees that stretched for thousands of miles, an incomprehensible wilderness of forest. The huge expanse contained one quarter of the world’s timber. Perhaps the endless, grim impenetrability of the forest also added to the heaviness of the passengers. People talked about the ‘Siberian Madness’ that afflicted the Russians who’d settled – or been forced as prisoners – up here. And in the mid-afternoon they passed the first of Stalin’s Gulag camps in the region, the first of several they would pass as the ship headed towards the Arctic Circle.

The great, bleak land of Siberia itself seemed to have effortlessly absorbed the millions of dead, however. It seemed to have no memory. But some of those women on board whom Anna had spoken to in the hold were the daughters of the survivors of the death camps and they did have memories, even if only at second hand. These women were the people who had never been able to escape the place of death, people with neither the money nor the permission to move elsewhere in Russia, outside the krai of Krasnoyarsk. Permanent exile was handed down from parent to child like a genetic default.

And it was known by one woman she had spoken to that even the Rossiya itself had once been a transport for the Gulag victims. They were packed tight, the woman had told her, locked in its cargo holds like so much freight. Some of them had frozen to death on the way, or starved or been beaten to death before they’d reached the camps.

After her interrogation by the Wolf, when Anna had gone below to the hold where the women were, there was a deep air of suspicion at first. No one – historically – wished to be associated with the accused or those under suspicion.

But finally one old woman who was returning to Igarka as she did every year for the summer work camp – a daughter of a Gulag victim herself, who had been released in 1976 – came up to her and offered her a chunk of bread and some jam from a tin.

‘What did the bastards want?’ she said gruffly.

‘The man who hired us, Ivan …’

‘That dog!’ she spat.

‘They say he’s disappeared,’ Anna said quietly.

‘Then good riddance.’

‘Some people saw me with him last night.’ She looked at the old woman. ‘He was trying—’

‘I can guess what he was trying. He’s a shit, that Ivan,’ the woman interrupted. ‘He’s no good and never was. God help him,’ She crossed herself four times in apparent regret at wishing him ill.

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