The Industry of Souls (16 page)

Dmitri pointed to the three sacks where they stood against the side of the table.

Leaning over and peering into one of them, he remarked, ‘Staple stuff. Did they give you tea? Coffee?’

‘No, comrade,’ said Kostya.

‘You’ll need one or the other. You’ll be working long hours. Some of it heavy work. A stimulant will be essential.’

No one replied to this: we were not about to apprise him of the fact that we usually worked longer hours than he could imagine with little more than a hunk of bread and a bucket of water to sustain us.

‘You,’ he pointed to Ylli, ‘go to the fourth tent down, say Dr. Solovyov sent you and ask for half a kilo of coffee. Bring it back here.’

For a moment, Ylli stood quite still. We were all of us in a state of inanimation. Perhaps it was the thought of coffee which rooted us to the spot: perhaps it was the fact of one of our number being given the instruction to go and get something without so much as queue to join or a crowd to jostle.

‘Well, what are you waiting for? Clearance from Moscow? Get on with it,’ Dr. Solovyov snapped, his impatience plainly evident.

Ylli darted out.

Kirill, not one to beat about the bush, asked, ‘Why have we been brought here, comrade doctor?’

Ylli returned with a small tin. No sooner had he entered than we could smell the coffee. Feeling the glands at the back of my mouth tighten and begin to salivate, I tried to work out how long it had been since I had last tasted coffee, and failed.

The kettle was boiling by now. Titian, having discovered a battered and smoke-stained coffee pot, tipped a liberal amount of grounds into it, added water and stirred it vigorously with a bent aluminium spoon. Taking some dented mugs down from the shelf and blowing the dust off them, he filled them with piping hot coffee and handed them round.

With each of us grasping a tin mug of black coffee, Dr. Solovyov settled back in his chair.

‘You are here,’ he commenced, to a chorus of appreciative slurping, ‘to partake in one of the most astounding scientific discoveries yet made in the whole of the Soviet Union, possibly in the world this century. Your part in this venture is to excavate, under my direction and that of Dr. Nedelko. You will be shown what to do in the morning.’

‘How long shall we be here?’ Kirill questioned.

‘Meteorological reports suggest we have ten days at the most. It has been decided to make as much use as we can of this temporary and uncharacteristic break in the weather pattern. It won’t be long before it’s back to blizzards as usual. We have to work as quickly as we can, but that is not to say we sacrifice care. Everything we do – you do – must be conducted with scrupulous attention to detail and orders.’

‘What are we to dig for, comrade?’

Dr. Solovyov drained his mug of coffee. He drank with the speedy ease of a man accustomed to such luxury. The rest of us had only been sipping at ours, savouring every drop.

‘Follow me and I’ll show you.’

We gulped down the rest of our coffee and hurried out of the tent. As we approached the guards’ billet, they gathered up their rifles but Solovyov waved to them not to bother. They sat down again and watched us go by.

The sun, which had been up for less than six hours, never rising higher than twenty degrees from the horizon, had set by now. In the afterglow of evening, the first stars re-appearing, we trudged after him along the bank of the river. It was clear that it was not a permanent feature of the landscape. The banks were sheer and freshly cut. This was a watercourse which came and went every year. When the ice thawed and the summer rains came, this river would change course and the bed would become a dry gully like that in which we had stopped to rendezvous with the half-track.

‘I might have guessed we’d be digging something. What do you reckon it’ll be?’ Kostya thought aloud as we walked along a mud bank.

‘I think,’ Ylli declared, ‘we’re going to dig out a satellite. I’ve heard they sometimes come down in the north. I think a satellite has crashed to earth and we are to be the poor sods sent to recover it.’

‘Start praying you’re wrong,’ said Avel.

‘Why?’ Ylli responded. ‘What can a defunct satellite do to you?’

‘Kill you,’ Avel replied. ‘Slow and sure. Some of them have little nuclear reactors in them. If one of them’s cracked open you’ll have radioactive shit all over the place.’

‘In that case,’ I reasoned, ‘the good doctor would be wearing protective clothing.’

‘And he isn’t!’ exclaimed Ylli. ‘You ever seen kit like his coat?’

‘No,’ Titian said. ‘It’s nothing like that. The camp’s semipermanent. That tent’s not just gone up. It’s been there a while. A year or two even.’

‘How do you know?’ Dmitri queried.

‘For one,’ Titian explained, ‘the turves outside were cut last summer. The grass roots are virtually non-existent or brittle as glass which means they dried out before being frozen in the autumn. If they were recently cut, the roots would be alive. Second, I turned my palliasse over.’

It was a trick every prisoner learned. As soon as you were assigned a new bunk, you turned the mattress, poked about in the cracks of the frame. There was always the off-chance that the previous occupant had left behind a razor blade, a few grams of coarse Ukrainian tobacco or some other contraband neither the guards nor his fellow prisoners had come across.

‘And what did you find?’

‘Mosquitoes.’

‘
Mosquitoes
!’ Ylli exclaimed.

‘Dead mosquitoes. A whole drift of the little buggers. Enough to fill a cook’s ladle. That tent’s been sprayed with insecticide. You don’t get mosquitoes in the winter. So the tent’s been there at least since last summer.’

Dr. Solovyov stopped at the edge of a sheet of ice jutting out from the muddy shore and pointed through the fading daylight to the far bank.

‘What do you see, comrades?’

We looked at the earth bank, the evening sky above it. I could just make out Andromeda and the galaxy bearing its name.

The doctor switched on a torch, directing the beam at the earth bank about three metres from the rim. In the frozen soil was a dull white streak.

‘What do you think that is, comrades? I shall tell you. It is the remnant of the largest mammal ever to roam the land. What you are looking at, comrades, is the last two metres of the right tusk of a female hairy mammoth.’

With that, he snapped the torch off with all the showmanship of a ringmaster in the Russian State Circus.

*   *   *

We were reluctant to retire to our beds that night. The freedom of being able to loll about the stove without being jostled by the
blatnye
and our fellow
zeks
was one to savour as long as possible. Somehow, even our rations tasted better.

For long periods, we did not speak. The oil lamps glimmered and, way out on the dark landscape, an Arctic fox barked intermittently, sounding like an old man with a rough cough.

‘At least it’s not a satellite with a strontium-90 payload,’ Avel observed, putting down his latest chess piece, a bishop he had started shaping from a lump of anthracite he had carefully selected for its consistent density from the fuel box and polished with a square of discarded cloth he had discovered under his bunk.

‘What’re they after, though?’ Ylli pondered, ever suspicious of the seemingly most innocuous motives of officialdom. ‘I mean, what can you learn of use from a dead elephant?’

‘This isn’t just an exercise in scientific progress,’ Kostya answered, ‘not just a search for knowledge. It’s for the glory of the USSR. It’s a piece of jingoistic oneupmanship. The next time Solovyov goes to an international symposium, he’ll stand up and declare, “We in the Soviet Union have dug up a mammoth.” The Americans will get cross. They’ll start searching Alaska like crazy. You know of the Space Race. What we are doing is contributing to the Mammoth Race.’

‘That may be true. Probably is,’ Titian concurred, ‘but they’ll find much of use. For example, what the animal ate.’

‘Who cares what a dead elephant ate ten thousand years ago!’ Dmitri retorted.

‘From its diet,’ Titian began to expound, the academic in him coming to the fore, ‘we can tell what the environment was like, what plants grew here, what the climate was like…’

I let my mind wander for a moment, losing the thread of their conversation. It was several minutes before I was jolted back to the present by Kirill holding out the pot of coffee which had been simmering on the stove plate.

‘What are you thinking, Shurik?’ he asked as he refilled my mug.

‘I was wondering,’ I replied, ‘if in ten thousand years, someone else will come along over the tundra and dig me up: and I was trying to guess what conclusions they might draw from their find.’

Kirill laughed quietly and ran his eye disapprovingly up and down me.

‘Judging by you, Shurik, they’ll have a pretty poor opinion of modern man. Dressed in grimy clothes, with lice in what little hair he has not shaved off, crabs on his bollocks, dirt under his fingernails with a mulch of cabbage and potato in his guts.’

‘With coffee,’ I added, raising my mug in thanks and sipping from it.

‘That’ll confuse them,’ Avel said. ‘A shitty diet with a luxury tropical plant added to it.’

‘This all pre-supposes you’ll be buried just under the surface,’ Dmitri remarked. ‘What if you buy it half a kilometre down on Gallery D.’

‘D for Dzerzhinsky, first Chief of the Cheka,’ Kirill butted in.

‘Or they chuck you in a pit of quicklime?’ Kostya added.

‘In that case,’ Dmitri said, ‘the secret of your belly and your balls will be safe for eternity.’

Avel opened the door on the stove. The heat of the fire seared out. I could feel it burning my face. He tossed in some anthracite, first checking for any useful pieces he might carve, and slammed the door shut with his foot.

‘They’ll learn nothing of the truth,’ Titian said after a few moments, holding his hands out to the stove which, now the anthracite was catching, was beginning to glow a dull orange around the firebox. ‘Nothing of the real history of this place. Of us. All they will have to judge us by will be a few artefacts which they will interpret in the light of their own time. If they have no prison camps, how will they know of life here, now? They cannot. History is a lie. It never happened. We only think it happened as we believe it did.’

‘And what of books?’ Ylli argued.

‘Books rot,’ I said.

‘Or can be burned,’ Avel added.

‘What does it matter? History is written by winners, not losers,’ Titian remarked. ‘You don’t read history books filled with defeats and failures. Only victories and successes.’

Dmitri leaned back, his chair creaking as he tipped it onto its rear legs.

‘History. Death. Quicklime. Winners and losers. Who gives a shit!’ he rebuked us. ‘We’re the losers. History’s fucked us up good and proper. And who cares if we go into a pit of acid or the incinerator at the top of shaft K – for Khruschev, King of the KGB. Listen: three men are walking through the countryside. It’s a sunny day. One’s called Titian, one’s called Ylli, one’s called Shurik.’

He paused and scanned his assembled audience, grinned and winked. Kirill and I exchanged looks: Dmitri, ever indomitable, ever laughing when the odds were long or the dice loaded.

‘They talk of this and that,’ he started. ‘Rounding a corner in the road, they come across a field of sheep. One of the sheep has seen sweet, new grass on the side of the road and stuck its head through the fence to eat it. But it’s got its forequarters stuck between two posts. The three of them stop and gaze at the sheep. “I wish that was Tatania Alexandrovna, the farmer’s wife,” says the first one, wistfully. “No,” exclaims the second with a dreamy look in his eyes, “I wish it was Ekaterina Vasilyevna, the nurse at the clinic.” “I wish it was dark,” says the third.’

To punctuate the punch line, he slapped his hands together. His palms cracked like a pistol shot.

‘Who’s who?’ Ylli asked after our chuckling had subsided.

Dmitri grinned again and said urbanely, ‘My friend, which one would you like to be?’

For a while longer, we sat about the stove, laughing and talking and listening to Dmitri as the Arctic fox wandered off, its barking fading away. Ahead of the others, I lay on my bunk and tugged the blanket up to my chin, the last I heard being Avel’s chuckle and Dmitri’s voice before I drifted off into a sleep which, for the first night in more years than I could recall, was utterly without dreams.

*   *   *

The first day, we dug an oblong trench on the top of the bank, six metres by four and down almost as far as the carcass. The next day, excavation began in earnest.

Our spades and pick-axes put aside, we were handed triangular bricklayer’s trowels with which we were instructed not to dig but to scrape the soil back, bit by bit. It was frozen solid but, as soon as it was opened to the air, it became friable and crumbled quite easily: it was like digging in compacted crushed ice. Dr. Solovyov and his colleague, Dr. Nedelko, stood over us every moment we were at our toil, guiding us, watching the ground as we edged, centimetre by centimetre, down to the mammoth. Even the guards and the two expedition staff – Spasskiy, the half-track driver and a cook-cum-jack-of-all-trades called Fedin – assembled at the edge of the trench to observe developments.

Halfway through the second day, the southerly wind picked up. Nedelko studied his thermometer.

‘We need ice,’ he ordered Fedin. ‘Get to it.’

‘Ice?’ Ylli repeated incredulously from the bottom of the trench. ‘The dirt down here’s frozen solid.’

‘But as you uncover it, comrade,’ Solovyov explained, somewhat impatiently, ‘it may thaw. That we cannot allow. The mammoth must stay well below zero at all times.’

In one of the supply tents there was an ice-making machine. Fedin started it up. A black puff of diesel scarred the sky before it reached the top of the river bank to be diffused by the wind. It seemed a gross and cynical violation of the ancient landscape to so pollute it and for the reason of making ice in one of the coldest places on the planet.

At around noon, I was first to expose the mammoth. The beast was lying horizontally on its side and I uncovered it at a point midway between its legs and about halfway down its body from the spine. Everyone crowded round at my discovery.