The Industry of Souls (12 page)

‘Of course, you never had one!’ Kirill replied. ‘They don’t serve them in the cells.’ He lowered his voice. ‘A
blini
is – how do I describe such a simply thing? – flat, round. Made of batter…?’

‘Thin,’ I cut in, ‘usually circular with a ragged edge, like a piece of pale yellow fabric. Like an edible table mat.’

‘That’s it! Exactly! If you had paper other than to wipe your arse on, you should be a poet, Shurik. Such command of language!’

‘So what’s in it?’

‘You want to know?’ He wagged his finger at me, playing the KGB inquisitor. ‘These are dangerous thoughts, comrade. They can drive a man crazy.’

‘Are they a state secret?’

‘No, but you can die from them.’ For a moment, he was serious. ‘Do not forget, just as you must never look forward to your release, so must you never let your thoughts dwell on food. If you want to run for the cover of your soul, dream of other things.’

I tightened the twine and the rip in my coat closed up.

‘So, are you going to tell me the secret?’

Kirill glanced around as if he was in possession of a piece of real information any secret agent would be pleased to pass onto his spymaster in the hope of promotion and a comfortable desk job back at HQ.

‘Flour, yeast, water, butter, salt, sugar, milk, frying oil. And eggs!’

‘In what quantities?’

‘I didn’t get a look at the formulæ,’ Kirill answered conspiratorially. ‘Only the basic plan. But,’ he closed his eyes, ‘you serve them very hot, with a ladleful of melted butter, sour cream, dried fish and caviar.’ He licked his lips as if tasting a final smear of butter and opened his eyes.

‘Look on the bright side of the street, Kirill,’ I told him. ‘We get dried fish in our rations. That’s a start.’

He laughed. I bit off the remaining length of twine from my coat and spat out the hairs of the cord adhering to my tongue.

‘You’ll make it, Shurik,’ he declared, slapping my shoulder. ‘If you can laugh when the world is black, you’ll make it. The man who sees the funny side survives.’

Down at the far end of the hut, there were raised voices. Kirill peered down the aisle between the bunks. Several of the men whose bunks were at that end of the hut – which was to say, the warm end near the stove – were arguing. Others climbed down from their bunks, joining in the altercation.

‘It’s the
blatnye
,’ Kirill remarked with obvious loathing.

The shouting grew louder. The argument was getting heated. Kirill nodded to me and we quit our bunks to see what was going on. In the middle of a circle of men, two of the
blatnye
were yelling at each other, waving their hands and fists but holding back from physical confrontation. The other
blatnye
egged them on or took the side of the larger of the two. The rest of us, the
ideinye
, political prisoners who had had their hands caught in the wheel of fortune rather than trying to filch it, merely observed: one did not join in the affairs of the
blatnye.

‘Who are they?’ I asked Kirill.

‘The little one’s called Styopa,’ he replied, keeping his voice down to avoid being dragged into the melée, ‘a pickpocket from Leningrad, specialised in sailors coming out the navy yards. The big one’s Kabanov. They call him Kaban. An appropriate name.’

‘Why?’

‘Kaban means boar. You ever seen anyone who looks more like a pig?’

‘What is he sitting in here for?’ I enquired, using the gulag vernacular.

‘He was a pimp in Moscow. When his girls grew tired or their cunts grew loose, he killed them.’

‘How long did he get?’

‘Ten years,’ Kirill said. ‘For killing girls you’ve duped onto their backs then rubbed out, you get ten. For standing on the wrong street corner with your hands in your pockets, you get twenty-five. That’s Soviet justice for you, Shurik!’

There was no animosity or angst in his voice but neither was there resigned acceptance. This was the way it was for all of us. We could do nothing about it: we just did the best we could in the circumstances. Better to smile than sulk was one of Kirill’s mottoes.

‘So where is it?’ Kaban the Boar bellowed. ‘You’ve got my fucking…’

‘It’s not me!’ Styopa screamed back. ‘Ask Shifrin! Ask Novikov!’ He spun round looking for another target for his accusation and pointed at one of the
ideinye
, a man called Zverev with a bright scar on his face. ‘Ask old Two Mouth here!’

Zverev went white, the scar all the more livid against his paling skin.

‘Zverev!’ Kaban roared. ‘He was down at the other end, playing with himself.’

The
blatnye
parted and Genrikh came forward. Immediately, the two protagonists shut up.

‘What’s going on?’ Genrikh asked with quiet menace.

Neither Kaban nor Styopa replied. The former looked at a point midway between Genrikh’s eyes and belt, the latter contemplated the top of the table.

‘Who’s up to what?’ Genrikh spoke slowly, enunciating each word carefully, as if speaking to an idiot child.

‘Styopa’s stolen,’ Kaban answered.

‘Stolen what?’

‘A piece of dried herring. It was under my blanket.’

Genrikh faced Styopa.

‘Where’s the herring?’

‘I didn’t take it. It must have fallen down the cracks in the boards. Or he’s eaten it and forgotten. Or some fucking enemy of the people,’ he cast a quick sideways glance at the assembled
ideinye
, looking for Zverev, ‘lifted it.’

‘Lifted it?’ Genrikh said in an almost insouciant tone. ‘You mean the best dipper in Leningrad has a rival in the ranks of the run-and-hides?’

Styopa made no response.

‘So, let me get this straight,’ Genrikh began his soliloquy. ‘Kaban’s hungry and angry, Styopa’s met his match amongst the spies and stoolies, and a bit of fish has vanished down a hole. The question is,’ he turned his head to survey the other
blatnye
, ‘which hole?’

Like a snake striking, his arm flicked out to grasp Styopa by the throat, hauling him across the floor. He rammed his face into Styopa’s.

‘What did we have for rations tonight, Pasha?’ he asked.

‘Stew,’ informed one of the
blatnye
behind him.

‘Fish or flesh?’ he went on, still nose to nose with Styopa.

‘Flesh.’

‘What did we have tonight, Styopa?’

‘Flesh,’ hissed Styopa through a restricted windpipe.

‘Say, “We had flesh stew for supper, comrade Genrikh.”’

As Styopa spoke, Genrikh inhaled hard, like a man pulling on an expensive cigar. His hand shifted round to the back of his captive’s neck, preventing him from moving away.

‘Now we need an independent opinion,’ Genrikh declared and he looked at me. ‘You, English!’ he ordered. ‘Come here.’

‘Take care,’ Kirill whispered.

I had no other choice and stepped forward.

‘Yes, comrade,’ I said.

‘Comrade! That’s rich!’ Genrikh retorted but he made nothing more of it. ‘Put your head here,’ he commanded me, pointing to the air a few centimetres from Styopa’s face.

I did as I was bid. Genrikh jammed his index finger hard into Styopa’s ribs. The pickpocket inhaled sharply then let his breath out as the pain subsided.

‘So, English,’ Genrikh demanded, ‘what do you smell? The sea or the field?’

There was no alternative but to tell the truth. Had I lied, I would have been quickly accused of being an accessory: besides, Genrikh had made his mind up.

‘The sea,’ I admitted. ‘I can smell fish.’

The words were hardly out of my mouth when Genrikh gave the nod. Two of the
blatnye
seized Styopa by the shoulders, pinioning his arms and thrusting him face down on the table. Another grabbed his legs, swiftly binding them at the ankle with a belt. Unable to move, a fourth
blatnoi
tugged Styopa’s right arm out from his side and held it there. In one fluid movement, Genrikh twirled round and brought a short-handled axe down on Styopa’s wrist. It went clear through to jam in the table. The severed hand jumped away from the forearm, the fingers scrabbling as if it had suddenly received a life of its own and wanted to make its getaway. Styopa passed out.

Genrikh prized the axe out of the table and said, ‘Stick it in the ashes.’

The
blatnye
manhandled Styopa to the stove. Dark, heavy drops of blood stained the boards of the floor. They opened the little door to the fire and thrust his arm into it. There was a hissing sound as the glowing embers cauterised the stump.

‘Don’t think about it, Shurik. You could do nothing,’ Kirill quietly reassured me as we returned to our end of the hut. ‘Consider it just another lesson in the long semester of our university education. Remember it well, my friend,’ he added grimly. ‘Not only the man who laughs survives.’

5

The building began life as the stables on a stud farm owned by a landowner who was killed by revolutionaries in the winter of 1917, a local detachment of them using it as a temporary billet for several weeks whilst they denounced, drove out, rounded up and eventually shot the local gentry. For a while it was abandoned then altered to be used as a fodder store for the village. With communisation, it was further adapted to become the local grain store.

It is a wooden building with a steeply sloping shingle roof, two small windows which are perpetually shuttered and a barn door set in one end. The only part of the structure made of brick and stone, for even the footings are constructed of seasoned oak as hard as iron, is the stove and chimney which are original: the stove is massive and once kept the stallions warm through the deepest of winter.

When the unimaginable happened and the universe moved on, the red flag lowered from the flagpoles of the entire nation, if not removed from the hearts of all the people, and the barn was no longer communally owned but put on the market, Trofim and Tolya bought it.

As young men, Trofim and Tolya were conscripts together in a tank regiment in the Soviet Army. Whilst serving their time in the far-flung corners of the kingdom of the red bear, they were trained as battlefield mechanics and engineers, learning every skill from stripping a gearbox to heavy duty welding. By the time they were released back into civilian life, there was little they did not know about the various incarnations of the internal combustion engine and the vehicles into which they were put.

Both returned to the village of Solntsevo, the other side of Zarechensk, whence they had come, and were employed as mechanics: Trofim was sent to work in the bus garage in the town, Tolya assigned to the agricultural vehicles depot just outside it. In the exogamous tradition of their village, they sought a bride from ‘over the arches of the bridge’, as the saying went, from the neighbourhood rather than from their own village, and ended up marrying girls from Myshkino.

For years, as they travelled into Zarechensk every day, as Tolya laboured in the dusty wheat fields of summer repairing a combine and Trofim stood in an inspection pit under a leaking sump, they jointly entertained a dream of which even their wives were ignorant. It was a fantasy without hope of fulfilment for there was no chance for it to ever realise itself in a world of collectivised farming and state control. As Tolya put it when he knew there was no one around to shop him, the Party not only ran the farmers and the farms, it also told the crickets when to chirp and the birds when to sing.

Yet their day came and their offer for the old barn was accepted by the state. Now they are the proud proprietors of a garage, repair shop and forge which they have grandiosely named Myshkino Motors. Not only that. The sign which hangs above the barn door is painted in both Cyrillic and English alphabets. It was Pavel, Tolya’s brother, who persuaded them to have a bi-lingual sign in a part of Russia where the chances of there ever appearing a Westerner – apart from myself, who does not count – were about as slim as finding a toad on a mountain top. Pavel had emigrated to America at the first opportunity after the end of Communism and, returning with wild tales of life in Detroit where, having been a vehicle mechanic in the Soviet air force, he also worked in a garage, he filled their heads with capitalist plans of expansion and development. As Russia grew richer, Pavel insisted, it would become a vehicle owning meritocracy, which is how he described Detroit, and every town would need a dealership. It was his plan to set up a chain of such franchises across Russia, selling both Russian and foreign cars to the newly motorised driving classes. Those who got in early would make a killing. It was time to prepare, to be ready.

Trofim and Tolya had spent all their money on tooling up their former barn and had scant reserves to squander on a further fantasy, but they agreed to hang a sign out in readiness for Pavel’s Vehicular Revolution.

At first, the villagers scoffed at the sign. It was a waste of paint. Over the months, however, the garage became known far and wide because of its idiosyncratic notice. Curious farmers brought their tractors in for servicing or their bent ploughs for straightening and welding. Car owners in Zarechensk drove over. When Father Kondrati commissioned a new wrought-iron cross for the arch over the graveyard gate, the word got out. Myshkino Motors was the place to go.

Within two years, Trofim and Tolya took on an apprentice to train up and help them with their increasing work load. They also employed a part-time smith who operated an old forge and even shoed the occasional farmer’s nag, filling the barn with the stench of horse shit and scorched hoof. Pavel kept their hopes, and his own, alive by periodically sending them showroom brochures of the latest American cars from which they tore the pictures to pin on a notice board next to the tool racks. Where some garages have pin-ups of semi-naked girls, Myshkino Motors had Chryslers, Fords and Oldsmobiles hanging from the wall. The most recent they have received shows a highway patrolman standing by the side of a shining Buick saloon, his revolver slung low like a cowboy’s, his eyes almost insectile behind close-fitting sunglasses.

As I approached the garage, I could hear the sounds of mechanical activity. Someone was using a grinding wheel, the whine rising and falling as he moved it to and fro across a metal surface. When the noise dropped, it was replaced by hammering and the shrill of music on a cheap radio with a tinny speaker.