The Industry of Souls (14 page)

I grimaced and walked to the door, the sun bright in my eyes. I could do with sunglasses in my final years. Perhaps, I thought, Pavel could be put upon to bring me back a pair from Detroit so that I might look like an ancient version of the highway patrolman in the picture of the Buick.

‘Let me walk you as far as the bridge,’ Trofim offered. ‘That black bitch can rust a little longer.’

We set off down the road, passing two houses and Andryukha’s bakery which, it being late morning, was shut. Everyone purchases their bread early on, allowing the baker to make his pastries then take off for a day’s fishing on a wide meander a few kilometres up the river: in the autumn, the perfume of his baking bread mingles with the pungent odour of smoked fish. Alongside the bakery was parked the baker’s recently acquired red Volkswagen. Trofim jerked his thumb at it.

‘It’s a Passat,’ he announced knowingly, ‘a stolen car, of course.’ He shrugged, his hands opening out in supplication to inevitability. ‘The gangsters brought it in. I saw it just before Andryukha paid over his money. He asked me to check it – brakes, steering, clutch – wanted to be sure he wasn’t buying a wreck.’

‘And was he?’

‘No!’ His snapped his fingers to emphasise Andryukha’s good fortune. ‘It was as clean as a pin. Well serviced, well maintained, no rust, almost new exhaust pipe. In fact the owner’s handbook was still in it. So were his registration documents. Herr Gratz of Innsbruck will be missing his motor.’

We walked on in silence, the sun warm across our shoulders and our shadows short before us.

‘What were you thinking of?’ Trofim asked after we had gone some metres, breaking our silence.

‘When?’

‘When Tolya was telling his story. You drifted off. I could see it in your eyes. You were a million kilometres away.’

‘A million years,’ I replied but I did not elaborate.

‘Do you think of them often, Shurik?’

‘Increasingly so,’ I admitted. ‘As I get older, I think back to the past more than you would. It is the fate of the elderly, who have a somewhat limited future, to dwell in the history of their lives. Your turn will come, Trofim. Believe me!’

Ahead of us, the bus to Zarechensk pulled up and the gathering of men boarded it. The engine revved, a noxious cloud of dense diesel fumes belching from the exhaust to drift away over the river.

‘You have a future,’ Trofim said as the bus slogged past us, gears churning, to turn right at the junction by Andryukha’s place. ‘A long future. So! You are 80 today. But you are healthy. Doctor Levina told Frosya she had never examined a healthier man. Your heart’s as strong as an ox.’

‘That’s as may be,’ I answered.

We reached the bridge. As I do every day, I leaned on the parapet and gazed at the water below. It was as clear as glass. Fish flicked over the tumble of stones and lumps of weed-infested concrete, the remnants of the old bridge which collapsed in a storm eighteen years ago. The silver scales flashed on and off as they wove through the choreography of their piscine manoeuvres.

‘Have you made up your mind, Shurik?’ he asked, leaning next to me.

‘Not exactly,’ I confessed, watching the shoal of fish swerve with the precision of a well-trained regiment.

‘Is it so hard? If I were in your shoes, I should know what I should choose.’

He was thinking of advising me but that was something I could not allow him to do.

‘Do not tell me what I must or must not do.’ I sensed I was sounding curt when I did not want to be. ‘Forgive me, Trofim,’ I went on, moderating my tone, ‘but this is something I must decide, without any persuasion or opinion from you or Frosya. And with respect, my dear friend, you are not in my shoes nor can you ever be, thank god – if you believe in such an entity – for the world has moved on and I trust men will no longer tread the paths I have walked upon.’

‘I’m sorry…’ he began.

‘There are no apologies necessary. It’s just that…’

I paused. A kingfisher darted beneath the bridge, a tiny arrow of azure and orange dipping to the surface, its beak trailing the water. The fish broke ranks in panic.

‘In Sosnogorsklag 32,’ I continued, ‘Kirill and my other comrades, for that is what we were in those days - comrades in the true meaning of the word, not in the Party sense – were a team. A family, even…’

Trofim did not look at me but at the fishes below the bridge which were forming up again. A small fair weather cumulus moved swiftly across the sun, its shadow streaking over the meadows leading down to the river bank.

In my mind, I saw Ylli again, lying by the stove, feigning dead like a whipped dog. Avel was there carving his chessmen and Kirill was looking up at me as the last few sparks of life flickered in the furnace of his soul.

‘When I left the gulag,’ I said quietly, ‘I abandoned my comrades.’

‘You were getting your freedom!’ Trofim exclaimed. ‘They would get theirs, in time. When they saw you leaving, you were fulfilling their dreams, their hopes. If you could go so could they, one day. You were not just going for yourself, but for them.’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. That was – is – not the point.’ I turned and leaned against the bridge parapet, facing across the road and downstream. ‘I had nowhere to go, no one to go to, yet I had to leave and the truth is that I did not want to. We had been together so long, had survived together. That was it. We had survived, not alone but with each other’s love and support. Remember, I was in the gulag for longer than you and Frosya have been married.’

The cloud passed and the sun shone down brilliantly upon the river. Beneath us, the kingfisher returned for another attack, dived at the surface and flew off with a minnow twitching in its beak.

Trofim put his arm around my shoulder. He has started to do this of late and I like the closeness of his body, the smell of his sweat mingled with lubricating oil. It is, how can I put it, an honest smell.

‘Tell me, Shurik, why did you never go to Moscow, to the British embassy?’

I thought for a moment before I answered. It has been so long since I last asked myself the same question and yet, down through the years, I have never forgotten how it was for me in those weeks between stepping out of the gulag and arriving on Frosya’s porch.

Until I reached the village, I was terrified of that brave new world outside the gulag, where decisions crowded in like hoards of snatching beggars, where I had no friends and no one knew me.

‘I had to come here, for Kirill,’ I replied. ‘To tell you…’

‘But after that?’ Trofim asked.

‘After that,’ I mused, ‘it was different.’

Once in Myshkino, my life had changed and not merely because I found myself out of the gulag and amongst caring friends. Here, once I had divested myself of my responsibility to Kirill, I discovered an intense peace such as I had never known and to leave would have been to forfeit it.

For a while, I did toy with taking the train to Moscow, presenting myself at the embassy, a man walking in out of the deserts of history. Yet the more I mulled it over, the more foolhardy such a course of action seemed. For all intents and purposes, I was long dead: it was better for all concerned I stayed that way. I was, by then, more Russian than British and to be resurrected would only have caused trouble. The diplomats would have had to come to terms with my imprisonment whilst the Russians would have had to account for it. My parents, were they still alive, would have had to adjust to my reincarnation and I would have had to try and adapt to a country I no longer considered my own and a way of life which had become alien to me. Furthermore, I considered, I would have gained nothing I did not already have in abundance for, in Frosya and Trofim, I had my family and all I needed to have and to give was around me in Myshkino.

‘I owed my gratitude to you and Frosya and my allegiance to my comrades,’ I said at length, ‘not to my country. Friends are more important than flags, Trofim.’ I became momentarily pedantic. ‘You must remember that. It is a lesson for the future. And now,’ I went on, raising my arm and sweeping it across the fields and the forest beyond, the houses of the village, the river, the church and Myshkino Motors, ‘this is my country.’

Trofim tightened his hug for a moment then relaxed it.

‘I must get back to the black bitch,’ he announced. ‘We’ve got to get the engine out and rebuild the gearbox. I’ll see you this afternoon.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed pensively, ‘this afternoon…’

‘Are you worried?’

‘At my age?’ I retorted, yet I was and Trofim knew it.

‘Don’t be,’ he encouraged me. ‘Whatever happens, whatever you decide, we shall be with you.’

At the edge of the bridge, he halted with his back towards me.

‘Frosya and I have never regretted one hour of your being with us,’ he said, not looking round. ‘Not one, single hour.’

With that, he walked away up the hill towards the garage from which, distantly, I could hear the grinding wheel whining like a banshee once again.

6

It was about half-past four, with dawn still nearly five hours off. A gibbous moon, small and stark in the frigid air, hung just a few degrees above the invisible horizon.

The arc lights shone down upon the compound, casting almost perfect circles of brightness upon the frozen ground. Over the previous few days, an unseasonable wind from the south had partially melted some of the snow which was piled in rock-hard drifts where it had been shovelled or blown against the sides of the huts. In its place, the ground was covered in an uneven centimetres-thick sheet of rough ice upon which the overnight frost sparkled with a harsh, exquisite beauty. Close to the wire, delicate ice pencils about ten centimetres high, caused by the freezing air and wind eddying round the iron stanchions, stood erect like opaque perspex models of ornate gothic spires. The light, fractured by the ice, coruscated.

If it were not for the moon and the lamps on their iron gantries, the whole panoply of the heavens would have been visible.

‘Five-thirty’s one thing,’ Ylli complained in a whisper. His breath misted before his face and froze, the little syllables of steam dropping within a second of leaving his mouth to coalesce on the front of his padded coat. ‘Five-thirty I have grown used to. Five-thirty I accept. But four-thirty. Four-thirty’s another matter.’

Dmitri rubbed his gloved hands together and shuffled his feet.

‘What do you think it is, Shurik?’ he asked.

I slipped my tongue out between my lips and tasted the air.

‘Minus twelve. Maybe fifteen,’ I replied.

‘Spring’s coming then,’ Dmitri said in a tone of ironic anticipation. ‘Another few months and we’ll be lounging on warm rocks in the sun like lizards.’

He grinned and huddled his shoulders the better to close the gap between the collar of his padded
vatnik
and the bottom of the flaps of his
ushanka
where they were fastened under his chin by a leather thong tied in a double bow.

‘Another six months if we’re lucky,’ Ylli said, ever the pessimist, ‘and then there’ll be precious little lounging.’

‘You think there’s been a cave in?’ Avel mused apprehensively.

‘We’d be so lucky!’ Kostya exclaimed, smiling vaguely at the reminiscent of our brief, amorous liaisons in the Gallery R mole hole.

‘If there has, it’ll not be like the last,’ Dmitri remarked soberly. ‘That was small, nothing much more than a rock fall. One tunnel blocked. An inconvenience rather than a danger.’

‘That’s not how it was for the poor buggers who were trapped,’ Titian said grimly. ‘None of them got out. They just walled up the tunnel.’

‘It didn’t do more than slow production for the week by ten or fifteen per cent,’ Dmitri went on, preferring to ignore the fact that neither work unit had been rescued: there was no reason, in his mind, to dwell upon the fate of 14 other
zeks
who were no longer in the gulag. They had, one way or the other, got out and that was the end of it. ‘No, you mark my words, this is different.’ He thrust his gloved hands into his pockets and shivered, partly at the thought of what might lay ahead of us and partly at the fingers of air trying to probe his clothing, to wheedle themselves in through the material. ‘We wouldn’t be called out in the dead hours of the night just to clear a slide of stone. The first team down would do it. If it is worse, we’re not emergency crew trained. No,’ he repeated, ‘this is an altogether different business.’

I turned to see Kirill making his way across the ice from the administrative building. He was accompanied by three guards and the duty officer of the night. They walked slowly, clumsily, keeping their balance only with difficulty. The guards had their semi-automatic carbines slung over their shoulders, their warm knee-length
tulups
brushing against their shins. They, too, had pulled down the flaps on their hats.

It occurred to me how colourless the scene was. The ground was grey with ice, the snow off-white against the wooden huts which, in turn, were jet black in the shadows or graphite-black where the light touched them. It was as if the bleak winter had robbed the world of its colour, as if we were temporarily living in a black and white photograph. The only fragments of colour, the only objects in the entire scene to remind us this was reality, were the red flag with its yellow hammer and sickle hanging limply from its pole under a lamp beside the guard-house and the red stars on the guards’ hats.

As the little party drew closer, the six of us formed a line but the duty officer waved at us and ordered, ‘Gather round. Form a group.’

We exchanged suspicious glances. Such informality was rare in the extreme. Had this order been given during an exercise halt on a convoy across the taiga, in a clearing by the side of a road through the forest, we should have braced ourselves for the stutter of a Degtyaryov light machine-gun and a handshake with the ferry-man rowing us over the river into eternal oblivion.

Kirill nodded his assurance to us so we broke rank and encircled the duty officer, seven prisoners and three guards hunching together in the glacial, Arctic night.

‘Work Unit 8,’ the duty officer began rather pompously, ‘you have been chosen for a task which will go down in Soviet history. What you are to assist in the execution of is an honour for which I wish I had, myself, been chosen.’