Some of the dogs were voicing outside, having heard the screams.
'Two.'
I hoped one of the guards didn't come in.
'Three.'
But he'd got the message, was crawling now, his big calloused hands reaching ahead of him and dragging his body after. He could at least have tried to get up, for God's sake, at least put on a show.
I watched to make sure he kept moving, then went over to the stove, where two or three of the men gave me room.
'Christ,' one of them said, 'You know who he is?'
'Of course. Mickey Mouse.'
'Could you teach me that?'
I swung the pick again, brought down stones, working my way along the vein.
'Could I teach you what?'
He was young, not more than twenty, light in his body, hunched, defensive; I'd noticed the way he walked, head down, glancing from side to side as if he expected trouble. 'What you did to Gradov.'
'Who's he?'
'The big guy in the hut.'
'Oh. What's your name, son?'
'Babichev.'
'Christian name.'
'Alex.'
He'd stopped work, was giving me the whole of his attention, and I glanced along the pit at the guard. 'Keep working, Alex,' I said, and swung my pick again and caught the glint of nickel.
'Yeah.' He saw the change in the vein too. 'You've struck,' he said.
'Looks like it. Why do you want me to teach you things like that?'
'I get picked on. You know?' He turned his face to me, his cheeks pinched from the weather, the cold, the misery, his eyes in a permanent flinch. 'There's no women here.'
'You haven't tried protecting yourself?'
He swung his pick. 'You don't understand. I'm not a big guy.'
'But you've got muscle.'
'Oh, sure. Yeah, I've tried hitting, a bit, but they like that, they like me to struggle, you know? They come at me two at a time, see, sometimes more. You don't know what it's like.'
I got the pans from the trolley and we started hammering the iron wedges into the vein. 'All right,' I said, 'I'll give you one or two of the basics. But it's not something you can pick up in five minutes.'
With a quick shivering laugh: 'Okay, but we've got more than five minutes to spare in this place, right? Rest of our lives.'
By the third day I knew more about Gulanka.
The twelve-foot-high reinforced steel fencing with its inward-curving scimitar frieze was bolted to the rock face of the massif with half-inch-thick iron strips; the rock face itself was sheer, and floodlit by night. The thirty war-trained pit-bull guard dogs could be unleashed within a second by their handlers from quick-action snap cleats, and they understood the command to kill; they were fed the minimum rations to keep them hunting fit and their staple diet was fresh red meat from the goats that were farmed at the side of the camp. The gates under the enormous archway where the trains came in were routinely manned by dogs and sentries, but were impenetrable anyway and fitted with foot-long, one-inch diameter bolts. When a train came through with supplies or prisoners and took away nickel and waste, the guards were trebled and armed with Chinese assault rifles, and every inmate of the camp was confined to quarters until the train had left and the gates were bolted again.
At night the main thousand-watt floodlights were supplied with current from three huge stationary diesels that ran from six in the morning until midnight, when the floods were switched off, to leave marker lights along walkways and around the buildings. A shifting roster of fifty guards was on duty through the clock. Most buildings outside the hutment area were out of bounds, but inmates could walk along the fence if they wanted to and look through it.
Most of the supplies for keeping 700 men alive came in by train from Khatanga, on the river from the estuary opening into the Arctic Ocean, but in the short summers there were a few crops raised in the camp, mostly corn and potatoes.
No prisoners were ever released from Gulanka: they were brought here, without exception, to serve a life sentence. When they died – rarely past middle age – their bodies were sent by train to their relatives, if they could afford the one-million-ruble fee for this service. Mostly they were buried here outside the wire, with nothing to mark their grave. There were two priests at the camp, one Catholic and one Russian Orthodox, but they were drunk half the time, shacked up with a wood-burning stove and free rations of vodka and magazines from Moscow to read.
The rest, for most of the year, was snow. It was borne in from the coast on gale-force winds, to drift and pile against the fence and between the wooden hutments, sometimes bringing the crews out of the mines to clear emergency gangways through it. In summer the sun was seen on good days, and you could take off your coats and hoods and scarves and mittens, and sometimes even bare your arms to feel the warmth.
In winter, which lasted from September to May, wood smoke hung across the camp in a permanent fog except when the winds cleared it for a day or two. Half the inmates suffered from lung trouble, and emphysema was commonplace, the leading cause of death.
Outside the camp there were only the mountains and the snows, with at night the vast silence concealing and then revealing, as the wind shifted, the voicing of the wolves.
'They feed them meat,' Igor told me. 'It's to keep them near the camp.'
'You mean people escape?'
He cast his milky eye at me, his huge knife stopping its work on the pit prop. Today the snow was too heavy to allow crews to reach the mines, and we'd been detailed to the timber shop. Igor was one of the few ageing inmates I'd seen here, but he wasn't given light duties: he was as gnarled as an oak with a voice coming out of a barrel, and for this I respected him as a survivor.
'Escape? Well, yes, but none too often. Last year there was a character who tried it, croaked a guard one night and put on his uniform next day and went out with a mining crew and buried himself in the snow till evening – you can keep warm that way if you're well wrapped up. Then the same night we heard the wolves howling, a real chorus this time, and a search party went out and found a few scraps of this poor bugger left on the bones.' He worked his knife again. 'There's a big pack out there, twenty or thirty of 'em with a huge dominant male. You think the wire's something to get through? Try getting through the wolves. That's why they feed them, so they're never far away.'
I finished a pole and started on another one. The wood was seasoned, pine-scented, the slivers coming away clean under the knife. The guard was at the other end of the shed near the door, out of earshot if we kept our voices low.
'Have there been any other attempts?'
'To escape?'
'Yes.'
'Some. People get wire fever, in this place. They'll run at the fence sometimes, yelling their heads off. Those are the new ones in, been here only weeks. Could catch up with you – you never know what you'll do, the first weeks, never know yourself till Gulanka gets to you. Them as gets the fever gets put under special guard for a time, because it's after that they try and escape. You interested in escaping? Say no and you'll be lying in your teeth.' He swung his head to check on the guard, then looked back at me. 'What would you say's the easiest way of getting out of this place?'
'The train.'
'Right. It's kind of obvious, ain't it? We had a character try that one. He'd been a rich man, back in the city, in the mob, name was Nyazov, I knew him well, he was in my hut.' The 'city' was Moscow. Everyone talked about the 'city', a shining paradise at the end of the railroad line. 'He bribed the guard who was taking roll call. Tell you something – before they let a train come through those gates we're all confined to quarters and then roll's called, and if only one of us out of six or seven hundred doesn't answer his name – isn't seen to answer his name – the hunt's up, and until he's found they won't open them gates. You know Colonel Kalentsov? The commandant? He's been in charge here for twenty years, and takes pride in the fact that in the last twenty years no one's ever got out of Gulanka.' With a shrug, 'He's not a bad skipper, though, never touches the vodka, never -'