I imagined that the man had fallen from grace and been sent to this Siberian prison camp. Such things were not at all rare in the Soviet Union back then. Vicious struggles were going on within the government, the party, and the military services, and Stalins pathological suspiciousness pursued the losers without mercy stripped of their positions, such men would be tried in kangaroo courts and either summarily executed or sent to the concentration camps, though finally which group was the more fortunate only a god could say. An escape from death led only to slave labor of unimaginable cruelty. We Japanese prisoners of war could at least hope to return to our homeland if we survived, but exiled Russians knew no such hope. Like the others, this man would end with his bones rotting in the soil of Siberia.
Only one thing bothered me about him, though, and that was that he now knew my name and where to find me. Before the war, I had participated (all unknowingly, to be sure) in that secret operation with the spy Yamamoto, crossing the Khalkha River into Mongolian territory for espionage activities. If the man should leak this information, it could put me in a very uncomfortable position. Finally, however, he did not inform on me. No, as I was to discover later, he had far more grandiose plans for me.
I spotted him a week later, outside the station. He was in chains still, wearing the same filthy prison clothes and cracking rocks with a hammer. I looked at him, and he looked at me. He rested his hammer on the ground and turned my way, standing as tall and straight as he had when in military uniform. This time, unmistakably, he wore a smile on his face- a faint smile, but still a smile, one suggesting a streak of cruelty that sent chills up my spine. It was the same expression he had worn as he watched Yamamoto being skinned alive. I said nothing and passed on.
I had one friend at the time among the officers in the camps Soviet Army headquarters. Like me, he had majored in geography in college (in Leningrad). We were the same age, and both of us were interested in making maps, so we would find pretexts now and then for sharing a little shoptalk. He had a personal interest in the strategic maps of Manchuria that the Kwantung Army had been making. Of course, we couldn't have such conversations when his superiors were around. We had to snatch opportunities to enjoy this professional patter in their absence. Sometimes he would give me food or show me pictures of the wife and children he had left behind in Kiev. He was the only Russian I felt at all close to during the period I was interned in the Soviet Union.
One time, in an offhand manner, I asked him about the convicts working by the station. One man in particular had struck me as different from the usual inmate, I said; he looked as if he might once have held an important post. I described his appearance. The officer-whose name was Nikolai-said to me with a scowl, That would be Boris the Manskinner. You'd better not have anything to do with him.
Why was that? I asked. Nikolai seemed hesitant to say more, but he knew I was in a position to do him favors, so finally, and reluctantly, he told me how Boris the Manskinner had been sent to this mine. Now, don't tell anyone I told you, he warned me. That guy can be dangerous. I'm not kidding--they don't come any worse. I wouldn't touch him with a ten- foot pole.
This is what Nikolai told me. The real name of Boris the Manskinner was Boris Gromov. Just as I had imagined, he had been a major in the NKVD. They had assigned him to Ulan Bator as a military adviser in 1938, the year Choybal-san took power as prime minister. There he organized the Mongolian secret police, modeling it after Beria's NKVD, and he distinguished himself in suppressing counterrevolutionary forces. They would round people up, throw them into concentration camps, and torture them, liquidating anyone of whom they had the slightest suspicion.
As soon as the battle of Nomonhan ended and the Far Eastern crisis was averted, Boris was called back to Moscow and reassigned to Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland, where he worked on the purging of the old Polish Army. That is where he earned the nickname Boris the Manskinner. Skinning people alive, using a man they said he brought with him from Mongolia, was his special form of torture. The Poles were scared to death of him, needless to say. Anyone forced to watch a skinning would confess everything without fail. When the German Army suddenly burst across the border and the war started with Germany, he pulled back from Poland to Moscow. Lots of people were arrested then on suspicion of having colluded with Hitler. They would be executed or sent to prison camps. Here, again, Boris distinguished himself as Beria's right-hand man, employing his special torture. Stalin and Beria had to cook up their internal-conspiracy theory, covering up their own responsibility for having failed to predict the Nazi invasion in order to solidify their positions of leadership. A lot of people died for nothing while being cruelly tortured. Boris and his man were said to have skinned at least five people then, and rumor had it that he proudly displayed the skins on the walls of his office.
Boris may have been cruel, but he was also very careful, which is how he survived all the plots and purges. Beria loved him as a son. But this may have been what led him to become a little too sure of himself and to overstep his bounds. The mistake he made was a fatal one. He arrested the commander of an armored battalion on suspicion of his having communicated secretly with one of Hitlers SS armored battalions during a battle in the Ukraine. He killed the man with torture, poking hot irons into every opening- ears, nostrils, rectum, penis, whatever. But the officer turned out to be the nephew of a high-ranking Communist Party official. Whats more, a thoroughgoing investigation by the Red Army General Staff showed the man to have been absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing. The party official blew up, of course, nor was the Red Army just going to withdraw quietly after such a blot on its honor. Not even Beria was able to protect Boris this time. They stripped him of his rank, put him on trial, and sentenced both him and his Mongolian adjutant to death. The NKVD went to work, though, and got his sentence reduced to hard labor in a concentration camp (though the Mongolian was hanged). Beria sent a secret message to Boris in prison, promising to pull strings in the army and the party: he would get him out and restore him to power after he had served a year in the camp. At least this was how Nikolai had heard it.
So you see, Mamiya, Nikolai said to me, keeping his voice low, everybody thinks Boris is going back to Moscow someday, that Beria is sure to save him before too long. Its true that Beria has to be carefuclass="underline" this camp is still run by the party and the army. But none of us can relax. The wind direction can shift just like that. And when it does, anybody who's given him a tough time here is in for it. The world may be full of idiots, but nobody's stupid enough to sign his own death warrant. We have to tiptoe around him. Hes an honored guest here. Of course, we cant give him servants and treat him as if he were in a hotel. For appearance sake, we have to put chains on his leg and give him a few rocks to crack, but in fact he has his own room and all the alcohol and tobacco he wants. If you ask me, he's like a poison snake. Keeping him alive is not going to do anybody any good. Somebody ought to sneak in there one night and slash his throat for him.
Another day when I was walking by the station, that big sergeant stopped me again. I started to take out my pass, but he shook his head and told me to go instead to the stationmasters office. Puzzled, I did as I was told and found in the office not the stationmaster but Boris Gromov. He sat at the desk, drinking tea and obviously waiting for me to arrive. I froze in the doorway. He no longer had leg irons on. With his hand, he gestured for me to come in.
Nice to see you, Lieutenant Mamiya. Its been years, he said cheerily, flashing a big smile. He offered me a cigarette, but I shook my head.