The Industry of Souls (10 page)

The loudspeaker fizzled again.

‘Work Units 1 to 24! Forward!’

We set off at the regulation jog, passed the overseer and his sidekick who counted off the units, and in through the wide door over which hung the sign that mocked us every day of our lives.

Labour is Dignity.

At the cage door, we gathered in groups by unit, keeping close together to ensure we all stepped into the same cage together.

‘Prepare to descend!’ ordered another loudspeaker, screwed crookedly to a girder overhead and caked in grime.

We removed our
ushankas
, replacing them with our aluminium helmets. Those of us with lamps tested the batteries, little lights going on and off like candles during Mass in a monastery.

‘Where’re we going?’ Avel enquired, shouting above the noise of the winding gear.

Kirill held up an aluminium disc the size of a saucer into which had been stamped the letter R.

‘R for Rasputin,’ he called back, ‘who Rogered the Royals.’

The cables started to vibrate. A strong breeze of warm, feisty air swept over us as the cage came into view and the wire doors clanged open. An overseer by the cage held up a disk similar to Kirill’s and we pressed forward, competing with the other work units heading for the same gallery.

I managed to get in ahead of my team, to find myself squeezed against the rear of the cage. The doors were swung shut, an electric bell rang discordantly and the cage set off, plunging down the main shaft. By the light of the two bulbs hanging from bare sockets in the cage ceiling, I could see the walls of the shaft rush by, wires and pipes snaking faster and faster as we fell more and more quickly. A strong wind blew upwards past my face and, as we neared our destination in the penultimate gallery of the mine (S for Stalin who sold us into slavery), I closed my eyes and mouth, pinching my nostrils. We all did. The cage nearing the bottom the shaft kicked up a lot of dust in which, mine legend had it, diseases unknown to medical science also lurked, living on the decayed corpses of those of us who had not lived to see the end of a shift.

The cage slowed and stopped, bouncing for thirty seconds on its steel cables. At over two kilometres depth, the cables were as elastic as a rubber thong. Finally, the cage was opened and we stepped out. Ahead stretched Gallery R, disappearing in the perspective of lights which looked, I thought, like a necklace of ever-diminishing translucent pearls. Under other circumstances, it might have been almost beautiful.

*   *   *

Like most of the levels in the mine, Gallery R was not a single entity but consisted of a central tunnel from which a maze of side galleries diverged following the route of a number of coal seams. Some of these side galleries were substantial but others were what the miners called mole holes: and it was to one of these we were assigned.

About one hundred and fifty metres long, it followed a narrow coal seam running at right angles to the main tunnel. Not only was the seam it traced constricted but it was also thin, the gallery not much more than one and a half metres high in places and never above two metres from rock floor to ceiling. These restrictions meant that only one work unit could operate it at any one time.

On first being allocated the Gallery R mole hole, we had groaned with dismay but Kirill had dispelled our concerns, as he always did as leader, by pointing out the advantages as well as the setbacks.

‘So,’ he had said, ‘we’re going to be furry little bastards for a bit. And we all know what a mole hole means. It means crouching and crawling, hauling and heaving. No drilling, because the seam’s too small, therefore no explosives. This is pick and shovel time.’

‘And getting the black crap back?’ Kostya muttered. ‘Wooden sledges!’

Kirill gave him a look that silenced him and went on, ‘I’ve been talking to Kochetov. His unit had it last. It’s true it’s a bugger, with no lighting. We’ll have to do something about that to avoid depending upon our lamps. But there are advantages. First, because the seam’s small, we don’t get a fixed quota. We just hack out what we can and deliver it to the main gallery, tipping into any truck that happens to be going by. No one checks our tally. We can do one sledge a shift or we can do one hundred. Who’s to know? Second, the overseer never visits. He can’t be bothered playing hunchback for three hundred metres to inspect a coal face no bigger than a baker’s basket. Kochetov said they never saw him. Not once in a month. Third, we’re on our own. No other work unit is involved. We’re our own masters. There’s no breaks for dynamiting, but so what? We can rest when we like, work when we like. So long as we don’t slack right off, and we keep our eyes peeled, we’re safe.’

Within the first two days, we had the gallery sorted out. Kirill managed to filch a socket and a four hundred metre roll of electric cable from a store which, when no one was looking, Ylli tapped into the main power supply line in the main tunnel. We ran the line all the way to the coal face and rigged ourselves a light. It was against the rules for mole holes to have electric light but no one could see it for the tunnel dipped and turned after leaving the main thoroughfare and if, by some chance, the overseer did decide to inspect us, we would claim it was there when we arrived. Admittedly, the bulb was dim for the cable was substandard and a good fifty per cent of the power was lost on the way from the connection but it was better than relying upon battery-powered lamps. The wooden sledges were cumbersome but Kostya managed to purloin some strips of steel which he screwed to the runners. By the time he was done, we must have had the only smooth sliding sledges in the mine.

The work was hard. The short-handled picks we were issued with had to be swung horizontally for there was insufficient height to bring them down over our heads. When the steel hit the face it often shattered the coal, sharp fragments flying out to pepper our skin: having no goggles, we had to close our eyes with each impact. Two of us hacked at the coal face, two shovelled the cut coal and rock into the sledges and two hauled it away. The seventh member – we rotated the responsibility – kept a fictitious tally and watched out for the overseer. Setting ourselves a target of twenty sledges a shift, which was a fraction of what we normally produced from a primary gallery, we worked steadily, pacing ourselves and generally taking it easy. By the eighth day, we were settled into our routine and plainly getting away with it. Kostya was even wondering aloud how easily Kirill might be able to swing a longer stint in the mole hole without arousing suspicion from the overseers and the other leaders of the work units.

I can still recall, as if they were a dream from which I had just woken, the events of the second half of our fourteen-hour shift on that memorable day.

We had been working for three or four hours when Kirill, who was shovelling coal into the sledges, suddenly stopped. We downed tools and watched him.

‘Avel,’ he whispered, after a few minutes, ‘Shurik! Check the pit props. Dmitri, go down the tunnel, have a listen. Titian, go with him. Kostya, go down to the main tunnel and work your way back. Ylli, watch the coal face.’

Avel and I quickly inspected the pit props we had installed at the start of that shift then began working backwards from the digging. Everything seemed in order. There was no splintering, no buckling, no movement at all that we could detect. We returned to Kirill and gave him the thumbs up. Kostya came back, shook his head and shrugged. No one spoke. Kirill needed silence.

‘Do you hear that?’ he asked in not much more than a whisper, after several minutes during which the only sound I could hear was Ylli’s breathing and my own heart pounding like a kettle drum.

We looked from one to the other. I could see the wells of fear opening their maws in Ylli’s eyes.

Of the seven of us, Ylli was the one most afraid of our shared subterranean existence. For most of the while, he suppressed his terror, deceiving himself that there was no need for concern, pretending there was nothing more above our heads than a few metres of loose earth, tree roots and the burrows of Arctic foxes. Yet on occasion, when a prop sighed, a fine shower of gravel spattered down, a stone dislodged itself or Kirill stood motionless, listening – then he had to take a grip on his nerves, lie all the harder to himself, win the argument between logical reason and the basic instinct to see the sky and feel the wind, even if it blew through tangled strands of rusty barbed wire.

‘You know what that is?’ Kirill continued, his eyes now closed. ‘That’s the music of sempiternity. It is the cantata of creation, the symphony of all the souls trapped in the earth, all the dead creatures that have ever lived.’

Kostya gave me a quizzical look and put his finger to his forehead, tapping the skin lightly. I could see him mouth,
Is he losing it
?

Kirill said quietly, ‘Shurik, put your ear to the rock.’

I did as he bade but, for a moment, I could discern nothing save my own pulse: then, I heard it. It was a minute squeaking, no louder than a mouse on the surface of the moon.

‘You can hear it now, can’t you, Shurik?’ Kirill asked in a faraway voice.

I nodded. The others put their ears to the rock walls of the mole hole.

The squeaking changed in pitch to a brief, low, barely perceptible vibrant hum which ended in an abrupt click. There followed several seconds of silence then a minute whine, not unlike that of a mosquito or a violin being tuned in a heavily padded box a hundred kilometres away.

‘The language of dinosaurs played by the orchestras of time,’ Kirill whispered.

‘What does it mean?’ Ylli enquired in a small voice verging on the jittery.

Kirill opened his eyes and said, ‘There’s nothing we can do about it. Forget it.’

‘Forget it?’ Ylli retorted. ‘All this poetic shit about earth music and dinosaur orchestras! What you mean is the rocks’re shifting and there’s going to be a cave in.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Kirill replied, his voice calm and even. ‘But even if there is, what are you going to do about it? Run for the surface and get shot as an escaper? Complain to the General Administration of Camps?
Dear Commissar for Camps
,’ he mocked,
‘I am serving twenty years in Sosnogorsklag 32 where the coal mine is collapsing on me. Please transfer me to an open cast pit. Your obedient servant, Ylli the Albanian.
We can do nothing. This is our fate. If destiny has decreed that we get buried alive under two kilometres of Soviet rock, so be it.’

‘Stuff fate!’ Ylli responded, his anger rising as his awareness of his impotence increased in exponential relation to his mounting anguish.

We were all silent for a moment then Dmitri picked up his shovel, running it into the pile of cut coal.

‘You can’t stuff fate,’ he remarked. ‘What’s to be will be.’ He dropped the shovel-load in one of the sledges. ‘This is a good one. A true story. There was once a man cycling through the countryside on his way to market, his bicycle loaded with onions, when he reached a railway crossing. The bar was coming down. A train was on the way. After a minute, a farmer with a goat arrived and tethered the goat to the bar while he lit a cigarette. Then another farmer arrived with a mule and cart laden with maize on the cob. They are all going to market.’

He thrust his shovel into the coal and deposited another five kilos in the sledge.

‘Where?’ Kostya enquired obtusely.

‘Where?’ Dmitri echoed.

‘What kind of market?’ Kostya went on.

‘What kind of market?’ Dmitri exploded: he was not used to having his stories disrupted so resolutely. ‘What’re you talking about?’

The rest of us joined in, temporarily dispelling Ylli’s fear, drawing his mind away from the capricious fainéance of the earth.

‘What kind of market?’ Titian repeated.

‘What does it matter?’ Dmitri replied.

‘Livestock?’ I ventured. ‘Vegetable? Fruit?’

‘Slave-girl?’ Kostya added facetiously.

‘It was a market!’ retorted Dmitri. ‘It’s a story, for fuck’s sake! Who cares?’

‘Where?’ Kostya reiterated with stolid determination.

‘What do you want to know for?’ Dmitri snapped. ‘Armenia has no interest for sailors.’

‘Ah! So it’s Armenia!’ Avel exclaimed.

‘Where else?’ I said. ‘Dmitri doesn’t know any other countries.’

Dmitri gave me a sharp look and spat on the coal to clear the dust from his throat.

‘Just before the train came,’ he went on, ‘a Party official drew up in his car. When the train rattled over the crossing, at 100kph, it startled the mule which kicked the cycling onion-seller on the shin. He, being angry with the pain, slapped the mule’s rump. The mule-driver jumped down from the cart to scuffle with the cyclist and the mule, no longer reined in, reversed the cart into the car, denting the front, smashing the head lamp. The Party official climbed out of the car – someone was going to pay for damage to an official vehicle. The farmer, seeing a fight develop, came to try and stop the trouble. The crossing bar rose and the goat had his neck stretched. Now that,’ he ended, slapping his hand on the shaft of the shovel with finality, ‘is what I call fate.’

Even Ylli laughed, albeit nervously, at the monstrosity of the tale.

‘And that’s a true story?’ Avel asked incredulously.

Dmitri smirked and said, ‘In Armenia, anything can happen.’

‘What became of the people?’ I asked.

‘They all wound up in the gulag,’ Titian said. ‘The onion-seller got five years for inciting a riot, the mule-driver got ten for being negligent in charge of a cart, the official got fifteen for allowing damage to Party property and the farmer got twenty years for associating with three others who were enemies of the people.’

We returned to cutting and carting coal and had almost filled our self-imposed quota for the shift, with three hours to spare when, suddenly, there was a rumble like distant thunder and the rock all around us briefly vibrated. As one, we froze. Ylli’s face went white under its layer of coal dust and sweat. Fragments of rock spattered down from the ceiling, bouncing on the floor. In less than ten seconds, it was over.