‘Greetings, greetings, I am Kholopov, Ivanovich Kholopov. I was sergeant here. I am your guide, if you wish.’

He had a thin dirty face and his lips were never still, working continuously. He looked smelly. I knew he would be, I knew exactly how he would smell, but I had no need to get that close.

‘I know the camp well, I know everything about it, I have been here nearly thirty years. I worked here, I was sergeant of the guards.’

I took off one glove and fished out a few coins from my coat pocket. I didn’t bother to count them. He held out his hand, his glove worn through on the palm, and I dropped them into it without touching him.

‘Thank you, thank you kindly. What would you like to see – the kitchen, the offices, the punishment cells, the graveyard, the huts, the bathhouse? It is all empty, all available.’

‘Everything. Show me everything.’

That puzzled him. ‘Of course, of course, I can show you every hut, every bunk. Only there are very many and it will take time—’

‘I will tell you when to stop.’ I noticed now that he had a twitch in his left cheek.

‘With pleasure, it is pleasure. Please follow me.’

We crunched through the snow together, slowly because of the curious way he hobbled. He told me about the building of the camp in the 1930s, initially by the first prisoners sent to it who lived – and often died – in holes in the ground until the huts were up. He described its expansion, then its gradual contraction after the death of Stalin until its closure in the Gorbachev era, by which time it housed only a few politicals, as he called us.

‘But when Comrade Gorbachev let the prisoners go the authorities forgot about us, the guards and administrators. We stayed, we had nowhere to go. How can we go anywhere? Where could we go? There is no work for us here but we cannot afford to move. Unless they open the camp again.’ His laugh became a prolonged cough. ‘We have pensions but they are a pittance, which is why we have to beg from generous visitors such as yourself.’

We reached the first of the huts inside the inner wire. The number one was still just visible in faded white on the wooden door. ‘We can go in if you want but there is nothing there, nothing to see. They’re all the same. In this block there are numbers one to thirty-nine, the rest are in the other block. Twenty prisoners to a hut but sometimes there were more. They are all the same, the huts. So were the prisoners. Over there are the camp offices and the punishment cells and the bathhouse and the sick bay and our own quarters. They are more interesting. These are just huts.’