The Industry of Souls (11 page)

‘We’re okay, comrades,’ Kirill said softly. ‘Don’t worry.’ He glanced at Ylli. ‘Are you all right?’

Ylli was rooted to the spot, turned to stone with the fear he was doing his utmost to suppress. I realised then that he must have lived with the terror of this moment every day since arriving in the camp. Avel put his arm round his shoulder.

‘Everything’s fine,’ he reassured him. ‘If it was serious, the power would have failed. Look, the light’s still on.’

Ylli moved his eyes and stared at the bare bulb. Very slowly, a smile crept across his face. Kirill patted his cheek.

‘Good boy!’ he said gently. ‘We’re all just as shit scared as you are.’

Titian, who had been on sledge duty, appeared running down the tunnel, ducking where the roof dipped down.

‘There’s been a rock fall in Gallery N,’ he reported breathlessly. ‘A big one! We’re instructed to stay put, do nothing. Down tools. The cages’re being used for emergency crews. Nobody’s going to the surface until they get things straight up there.’

Kirill, who had experienced a mine collapse before and knew the ropes, gave out his orders. I was sent to the main shaft to refill our canteens with drinking water before the supply was switched off. Dmitri came with me but vanished down another shaft to return with three loaves of bread stashed under his coat. Ylli and Avel inspected the pit props along the entire length of our mole hole: Kirill knew they were sound but he wanted Ylli to share his confidence and the only way to do that was to give him the task of checking.

‘That’s it for now, comrade moles,’ Kirill said as we all reassembled at the end of our tunnel. ‘All we do is wait.’

For some time, we sat about and talked but, as time passed, we grew weary of conversation and retreated one by one into our thoughts. Avel set about carving another chess piece whilst Dmitri and Kostya flicked pebbles of coal against the far wall of the tunnel in a game of pitch-and-toss. Titian recited poetry to himself under his breath. Kirill dozed and Ylli lay on the ground, on his side, stifling his fear. As for me, I leaned against the rock and, allowing my mind to go blank, turned my head to one side so as not to miss the opening bars of the next rhapsody of the rocks.

I must have drifted off for the next thing I remember was being gently shaken. I came to immediately, adrenalin sluicing through me. Yet it was not the rocks but Titian touching me on the shoulder. The others were silent, alert and looking down the tunnel.

‘What is it?’ I whispered.

Titian leaned towards me and murmured, ‘Someone’s coming.’

Very slowly, we all stood up. I could just hear footsteps approaching. They were slow, soft, careful footsteps, redolent with stealth. Dmitri picked up a shovel. Ylli grasped the broken shaft of a pick that had cracked the day before.

‘
Blatnye
?’ I muttered.

There was not a single one of them who was not above murdering a political prisoner for fifty grams of bread, a pair of
valenki
with holes in the soles and a spare lamp battery. Our only defence against them was to stand united in the face of their onslaught: the team spirit of a work unit counted for more than just productivity and the meeting of quotas to avoid ration cuts.

‘Could be,’ Kirill answered softly. ‘Not the overseer, that’s for sure.’

Glancing around for a weapon, my eye settled on a two kilo lump hammer we used to smash the larger nuggets of coal which would not fit in the sledge. It would be of little use against a determined
blatnoi
and his razored shiv but at least it would show intent. I would go down fighting.

We waited.

The footsteps halted. There was a shuffling sound.

‘It’s all right,’ Dmitri whispered. ‘It’s just someone coming down for a shit in what he thinks is a disused tunnel.’

No sooner had he spoken than the shuffling ceased and the footsteps began again.

‘Damn quick crap!’ Kostya observed, raising one of the shovels to waist height as if it was a pikestaff.

It was now apparent that there was more than one set of footsteps. Whoever was approaching, they were coming in numbers.

A little way from the coal face, the tunnel turned a 30° bend. Just beyond it, the footsteps halted again. We could pick out the incomprehensible undertones of a brief, muted conversation. By now, I thought, they would have seen the faint gleam of our forbidden bulb and it occurred to me that, when they came round the corner, we would be at a disadvantage. They would see us as clearly as actors on a stage but they, beyond the reach of the light, would at best be as disembodied faces in the twenty rouble seats.

The conversation stopped. The footsteps recommenced. They were advancing.

With every nerve primed and ready, we stood our ground. Suddenly, the footsteps were louder. They had turned the bend and could behold us now but we could not yet see them.

Gradually, as ghosts manifesting themselves upon the black void of the grave, or as figures looming out of a jet black mist, the figures slowly materialised. They were dressed in the same prison issue clothes as ourselves and they carried the same aluminium hats.

‘Are they
blatnye
?’ Avel murmured.

I did not respond. There was something indefinable about them which counteracted any sense of intimidation or menace.

Yet still no one spoke, challenged them or told them to sod off.

Kirill put down the pick axe he had chosen to defend himself. The steel head briefly rang on the stone by his foot. It was then I noticed the approaching figures were unarmed.

‘Who are you, comrades?’ Kirill called out with a certain courtesy. It was not a challenge for identification but a request for an introduction.

‘Work Unit 91,’ came the reply, the voice barely audible in the confines of the mole hole.

‘91!’ exclaimed Titian under his breath.

‘How many are you?’ the voice asked.

‘The usual seven,’ Kirill answered back.

‘So are we,’ came the response.

‘You know what 91 is, don’t you?’ Titian said, keeping his voice low. ‘Any number prefixed by 9 or 11?’

Dmitri nodded and said, ‘Women.’

We put down our weapons as the leader of the work unit approached Kirill. She was a thin, sinewy woman possibly in her late thirties, her hair cut close as was our own: indeed, they all had cropped hair, their bodies made shapeless by their clothing. For some curious reason, their faces were cleaner than ours.

‘My name,’ she said, holding out her hand, ‘is Dusya.’

Kirill took it but, instead of shaking it, raised it to his lips and, bowing his head, lightly kissed her fingers.

‘I am Kirill,’ he introduced himself. ‘This is Work Unit 8.’

The remainder of us just stood around like embarrassed schoolboys at their first dance. It had been so long since any of us had addressed a woman that we were temporarily at a loss. Above ground, the women were held in a separate camp two kilometres from our own and although we occasionally saw them at the muster by the pit head, we never spoke to them or gave them any thought. It was beyond all expectation that we would ever meet them.

Dusya smiled and said, ‘Such gallantry!’

Kirill smiled back and asked, ‘What’s happening?’

‘There’s been a roof collapse on N,’ Dusya confirmed Titian’s report. ‘Two work units trapped.’

‘Do they have much of a chance?’

She grimaced and said, ‘Not a lot. The emergency teams’re there burrowing like rats. They’ve gone ten metres in but…’

There followed an awkward silence. Somewhere, a few hundred metres above us, men were slowing dying, the air about them growing foul with the stink of their own sweat and dread. I glanced at Ylli. His face was drawn and I knew he was fighting the panic which was trying to engulf him.

One of the women stepped towards me, easing her way past Dusya. She was, I reckoned, in her mid-twenties. Her hair, or what remained of it after the scissors had wreaked their havoc, was blonde under its coating of black dust and her eyes dark blue.

‘I am Valya,’ she said, stopping within my reach. ‘Who are you?’

For a moment, I could say nothing. No words came. Just looking at her eyes was like leaving the mine and travelling to a far and peaceful country.

‘I am Shurik,’ I replied at last.

She took my hand, pulled me very gently towards her.

‘Come and talk to me,’ she invited.

We walked a little way down the mole hole and around the bend. Where the roof lowered, she swept the rock floor clear of pebbles with her boot and sat down. I joined her, leaning my back against the side of the tunnel. In the meagre glow coming from around the corner, her features faded. Her spiky, short hair disappeared and her face seemed to glow almost ethereally.

‘Where are you from, Shurik?’ she enquired.

‘I am English,’ I said.

She looked at me for a moment, assimilating the information, then she took a square of damp cloth from her pocket and started to wipe the coal dust from my forehead. When she had washed my entire face, and without so much as another word, she kissed me. Her lips touched mine, her tongue just licking at the edge of my mouth. Two figures came towards us round the corner, momentarily blocking out the faint light. Titian and one of the other women stepped over our legs and disappeared into the gloom. I could hear their footsteps receding until they reached the next dip in the tunnel.

Valya took my hand and pressed it inside the waistband of her regulation issue trousers, undoing the top button to ease my access. Her belly was warm and exquisitely soft, the muscles tight with the labour of working in the mine, her pelvis angular with the bone not far under the skin.

‘When did you last touch a woman?’ she asked in a whisper.

‘I do not remember,’ I replied and it was the truth.

‘No man has touched me since…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Well, no man has touched me who loved me since before the world ended.’

She pulled my vest out from my trousers and stroked her fingers along my sternum. Her nails were broken short and a rough patch of skin on the ball of her thumb teased my skin, snagging the hairs on my chest.

‘Push your hand down,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t be afraid, Shurik.’

I moved my fingers slowly over her skin, down the flat surface of her belly, slipping them between her legs. Even the muscles on the inside of her thighs were tensioned by her years of cutting and carting coal. She moved her fingers, searching for me in the folds of my clothing. There was an urgency about her movements and yet she did not hurry.

‘Have you been to Zagorsk, Shurik?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I answered.

‘Do you know where it is?’

‘No,’ I admitted again.

She laughed lightly and said, ‘North of Moscow. Not far. An hour’s drive, no more.’

‘Is that your home?’

‘Does it matter any more?’ she answered, her fingers stroking the base of my belly.

At the end of the tunnel, the light went out. It might have been Kirill unscrewing the bulb for the sake of modesty or it might have been the power supply failing. I gave it no thought.

‘You and me, Shurik,’ she whispered in the Stygian subterranean night. ‘Let us go to Zagorsk.’

For a while, we explored each other’s invisible bodies, testing each other, touching and kissing. Valya pulled her vest over her head and pressed my face into her breasts. They were small, smooth and firm, the nipples hard against my tongue. Finally, removing her trousers as well as my own, she moved over and sat across me, her thighs solid against my own.

‘Can you do this?’ she enquired quietly as she lowered herself onto me.

‘I think so,’ I said, feeling her moist and warm against my groin.

She guided me into her then and put her arms around my neck for I was still sitting against the tunnel wall. Very gradually, she started to rise and fall. I put my hands about her waist to steady her but she did not need my assistance.

‘Can you see them, Shurik?’ she suddenly asked, her voice disembodied in the darkness.

‘See what, Valya?’ I replied.

‘The houses,’ she answered, her voice whispering as if she was praying. ‘The houses with their green walls. And the windows of the
izba
with their carved frames. And the sky reflecting in the black glass. The snow on the roof. The drift of smoke.’

She started to move more urgently, pushing herself down lower on me.

‘Can you smell it, Shurik? They’re burning apple wood. And pine. Someone is roasting chestnuts.’

I could feel her sliding onto me, withdrawing herself almost from me then dropping once more, her belly brushing against my own. Her hands slipped down to my shoulders, her long fingers gripping me.

‘Listen, Shurik! Listen! In the church of St. Sergius. They’re chanting.’ She rose and fell, her breath coming in sharp gasps. ‘Chanting. Chanting. Chanting. Can you hear them, Shurik! Shurik!’

‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘I can hear them.’

For just the most fleeting of moments, that lasted no longer than the lifespan of a meteor burning across the heavens between Merak and Muscida, I was far away with Valya: and I could scent the smoke of burning apple wood drifting over a landscape of deep snow, and smell the perfume of chestnuts roasting on a stove plate, and hear a patriarch intoning in a church in which the icons glistened on the gloomy walls like predatory angels, the glow of the incense in the censer like the gleam in the eye of a cruel and vindictive god.

*   *   *

That night, as I was sitting on my bunk trying to sew a tear in my coat, Kirill hoisted himself up beside me.

‘So, Shurik,’ he enquired, ‘are you a happy man?’

‘How do you mean?’ I replied. ‘Am I happy because I have survived another day, happy because I have twine to mend my coat, or happy because I was screwed by a scrub-headed girl thousands of metres under the ground?’

‘Any of those,’ Kirill retorted.

‘Then, yes, I am a happy man,’ I conceded. ‘I could be happier…’

‘It’s better to count your eggs and plan your omelette than dream of getting a few more and making a plateful of
blinis.
’

‘What is a
blini
?’ I asked.