The Industry of Souls (20 page)

‘In truth,’ I replied, ‘not so deeply. I am unused to soft beds and lying down without my clothes on.’

‘That is how they try to break you,’ she declared, turning from the table to sweep the diced meat into a pot on the stove. ‘A man who can never undress has no sense of himself. He loses his identity if he cannot, just once in a while, survey his naked body and be familiar with it.’

I was quite taken aback by her perspicacity and would have carried on the conversation were my feet not growing cold.

‘Do you have my boots?’ I enquired.

‘Trofim has taken them to be repaired,’ she answered. ‘They are falling to pieces.’ She cleared a space at the end of the table. ‘Sit here.’

I obeyed her and watched as she sliced some fresh bread and placed it before me on a plate.

‘Did you bring all your possessions from the gulag?’ she asked.

‘Everything.’

‘You lost nothing on the way? Or were forced to sell it?’

‘Quite on the contrary,’ I told her. ‘I gained a few items, like the scissors.’

‘I see,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘So everything you own is in your bedroom. All your clothes…’

‘Except my boots,’ I cut in, my feet getting colder still.

She poured me a glass of warm milk from a pan on the edge of the stove.

‘You need this to build you up,’ she instructed. ‘We must gradually increase your strength. Now,’ she opened a drawer, removing a knife, a fork and a spoon which she put on the table in front of me. ‘These are yours,’ she said, ‘to have in your room. You do not need to use them. We have plenty. But you must keep them.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because,’ she retorted, ‘a man who has no personal cutlery has no dignity.’

I have never forgotten that gesture, that first debt.

And yet, I suggest, a man’s passing, his last cavort in the tango of life, before he switches partners for the waltz of death, should be of his own choosing.

The track was tempting. If I stepped that way, towards distant Gorelovo, all my troubles would be solved. I would be able to choose now. No need to put off the moment that was coming, later, as the sun starts to dip.

I felt in my pocket. The letter was there, crisp and neat as a warrant of execution.

Once, many years ago, when I was no longer regarded as a newcomer to the village and still had sufficient strength in my legs, I did venture down the track but not alone.

That year was possessed of a balmy autumn. Spring had come early and the summer had lasted weeks longer than usual. When autumn finally came, the sun was still warm, the days cloudless and the nights not chilled until the early hours for the earth had stored up the heat of the long, dry months. The forests seemed to sigh with relief, grateful autumn was finally arrived and the effort of summer was done with. The leaves changed quickly but, because there was no frost to cut them free, they drifted down of their own accord, the trees remaining dressed for well over a fortnight in their glorious copper and fiery coats.

‘We should not waste this magnificence,’ Trofim declared one morning as we sat under the weeping silver birch, breaking our fast. ‘A year such as this comes only once a century.’ He produced a cracked leather-bound almanac he had recently picked up in the market at Zarechensk and thumbed his way back through it. For days, he had been absorbed in reading its contents. ‘The last was in 1918.’

‘In that case,’ Frosya argued, ‘you are wrong. This will be the second time in a century. So it must be only once in fifty years. On average.’

‘You’re a pedant,’ Trofim chided her.

‘And how do you intend not to waste it?’ I enquired.

‘I?’ he replied. ‘Not I. We. You and me, Shurik. We are going on an expedition.’

Frosya threw her hands in the air and said, ‘I thought you were over expeditions.’

‘Is a man ever tired of living?’ Trofim rejoined forcefully. ‘So long as true-blooded men have breath in their bodies and bounce in their balls, they never tire of expeditions.’

‘So I’m to prepare for it?’ Frosya asked. Trofim nodded eagerly and took hold of her hand. ‘And how long for?’

‘Three days?’ he suggested, looking at me.

I shrugged, having not the least idea what he was talking about.

Throughout the remainder of that morning, Frosya busied herself preparing two Soviet army knapsacks, putting in them bread, cheese, a jar of pickled cabbage, some smoked fish and a dozen hard-boiled eggs. Trofim, in the meantime, went to our neighbour, Sergei Petrovich, and borrowed two ancient shotguns and a box of black powder cartridges which should have been in a museum. By midday, all was ready. Trofim instructed me what to wear and inspected me on the porch.

‘Are the trousers thick material?’ he asked, bending to test the cloth between his finger and thumb and nodding approvingly. ‘Is your jacket warm? Lower extremities well catered for?’ He gazed at my feet where I was wearing a pair of his own ex-Soviet army marching boots. Once through his inspection, he handed me one of the shotguns and a knapsack to the base of which was strapped a rolled blanket.

‘We’re staying out then?’ I conjectured.

Trofim gave me a smirk befitting a mischievous ten-year-old who, fully aware of the concepts of right and wrong, had been caught red-handed with his fingers in the sugar jar. Frosya kissed first him, then me.

As she put her lips to my cheek, she whispered, ‘Don’t let him wear you out, Shurik. Be firm with him.’

‘I’m not quite sure what we are doing,’ I replied.

‘Playing at boys,’ she responded.

We walked down through the village, crossed the river, passed the church and headed off down the track. It was, as now, overgrown. Trofim led the way, pushing through the small, opportunist bushes which grew in the light but never reached above shoulder height because the forest deer were forever browsing on them. For at least fifteen minutes, Trofim did not speak. He walked staunchly ahead, forging a path I followed with the unquestioning obedience of a gun dog.

Finally, we arrived in a small clearing which had probably been a passing place for the timber lorries. Here, Trofim halted and stood quite still.

‘What do you hear, Shurik?’ he asked after a long silence.

I concentrated on listening to the forest.

‘Birds and bees,’ I replied. ‘Maybe there is a hive around here.’

‘What do you not hear?’ It was a rhetorical question. He smiled at me, the smile of a man whose soul was at peace with itself and the world. ‘Birds and bees,’ he reiterated. ‘No bombs, no bullets.’

‘No Beria, no Bulganin,’ I added.

As I spoke, I saw Kirill’s face grinning from behind its mask of coal dust and I realised that, long before the gulag opened its maw and swallowed him whole, he must have walked down here on just such a day in just such an autumn, and thought just the same thoughts. A wave of love swept over me at this realisation. In every tree, in every drifting leaf, in every muted bird call, I sensed his presence and, for the first time since arriving in Myshkino, I came to understand why he had wanted me to come here.

It was not simply to tell Frosya of his love for her, his life and death. More, it was that, by being here, I was his ambassador, keeping his presence alive in a place he had never wanted to leave. So long as I was in Myshkino, so was he, by proxy.

For the duration of the afternoon, we followed the track. After some distance, it started to twist and turn, keeping to the contours of the land which became hilly, rising and falling in dales. At the bottom of each valley we encountered a boggy strip of marsh. Once or twice, we came upon the rusting girders of a bridge, the timbers long since rotted away and crossed on them, waving our arms out to maintain our balance. Most often we had to hop from sod to sod or run over the compact sponge of humus, our boots oozing the water out and releasing a scent of peat and fungi. At a trickling brook, Trofim filled a much-dented aluminium water bottle.

Just as the sun went down, we reached the area of timber extraction. The thick deciduous forest gave way suddenly to a vast expanse of young trees sprouting up above a dense jungle of briars, ferns and bushes. The track, coming out of the trees, ended in a wall of what appeared to be impenetrable vegetation.

‘Where do we go now?’ I asked, my voice quiet.

There was a certain solemn grandeur about the forest that seemed to dictate we did not speak loudly. It was as if we were in the cathedral of a host of wood sprites and nymphs.

‘We leave the ways of men,’ Trofim replied, just as softly, ‘and follow the ways of beasts.’

Keeping to the edge of the forest, we had not gone one hundred metres when there appeared a narrow path vanishing into the vegetation. Trofim nodded at it and we set off to take its course. Just as the dusk started to deepen, we reached the remains of the sawmill.

‘We stay the night here,’ Trofim announced, pointing to a leaning shack.

*   *   *

‘Is this where they found Vera Dorokhova’s husband?’ I enquired, leaning the shotgun against the wall by the door and lowering the knapsack from my back.

‘No!’ Trofim exclaimed dismissively. ‘That drunken old sot never got this far. They found him less than an hour’s walk in from the edge of the village fields. You know what they said?’

I shook my head and eased my shoulders. The knapsack was not heavy but it had restricted my muscles. My arms were tired from carrying the shotgun.

‘They said he only got that far because his tank reached empty.’ He mimicked holding a bottle to his mouth and made gulping noises. ‘No vodka pumps in the forest…’

We prized open the door of the shack and entered. It was gloomy within, the roof leaning with a large hole in the centre. A pile of ammoniac black guano in one corner suggested the shack might be a winter roost for bats.

‘This is our base camp,’ Trofim announced grandly, unrolling his blanket and folding it on the bare earth floor. ‘From here, we go out into the unknown.’

‘I suspect,’ I said, ‘this is not exactly the unknown.’

‘No,’ he admitted, standing up and placing our guns against the wall. ‘I have been here many times before. This shack is older than the saw-mill, older than anyone I know. Even you.’ He winked and unbuckled the flap of his knapsack. ‘They say the shack was built by my namesake.’

‘Namesake?’

‘Trofim the Bear-slayer,’ he replied with a hint of pride. ‘In the last century, about a hundred years ago, there lived in Myshkino a huge man. A giant. Legend has it he was two metres sixteen in his bare feet. Once, he was working in the fields around the village, in my field, as it happens, where the chicken run is now, when a bear which had been wounded by a careless hunter charged out of the trees and attacked him. They wrestled and fought like two men contesting the ownership of a horse. Or a woman. The villagers ran to his assistance, with guns and pitchforks – but what could they do? The two fighters were rolling about. At last, the fight subsided and Trofim stood erect. The bear lay dead. He had rammed his huge fist down its gullet and choked it to death.’

‘And, presumably,’ I suggested, ‘Trofim was uninjured.’

‘On the contrary! His forearm was badly mauled where the bear’s teeth had bitten him and his belly was shredded to the muscle by the bear’s hind claws. That’s what bears do. They grip with their forelegs, bite with their jaws and rip your guts out with the back legs.’

‘He died of his wounds?’

‘Do heroes die?’ Trofim responded with counterfeit incredulity. ‘Of course not! He lived into this century. My grandfather met him. He still had the dents on his forearm from the bear’s teeth and, when he took his shirt off to chop wood or mow hay, his stomach looked like a zebra’s. All stripes.’

‘How is it,’ I asked, spreading out my own blanket, ‘that the shack survived the timber felling operation?’

‘The lumberjacks used it as a drinking club,’ he answered. ‘After all, it was Trofim the Great’s lair so it seemed a suitable place for manly pastimes.’

‘I thought he was called Trofim the Bear-slayer.’

‘Whatever,’ his namesake replied tersely.

Gathering a supply of fallen branches and twigs, we lit a fire on the bare earth in the centre of the shack. The smoke eddied about a bit then, as if finding its escape, drifted through the hole in the roof. Trofim produced a pan and we heated the water he had collected from the stream. It tasted faintly of earth but it warmed us.

For an hour or so, we lounged about our fire. Every now and then, far off, an owl hooted or a fox called. I was just beginning to get drowsy, the exertion of the afternoon catching up on me, when Trofim stood up, glanced at his watch by the light of the fire, scratched his hair and collected his gun.

‘Time to go,’ he announced quietly.

‘Go!’ I exclaimed. ‘Go where?’

‘To show you the wonders of the forest, Shurik. Leave your gun. One will be enough.’ With that, he eased open the door and stepped out. ‘Are you coming?’

I got to my feet, my muscles stiff. At the door, I stepped out to find Trofim outlined against a full moon rising over the horizon of the forest. It was huge, filled a third of the sky, and was dull orange as if the light playing upon it was not that of the hidden sun but the meagre flames of our little campfire. I could see every crater on its surface as easily as I could have seen the pits and lines of my own face in a mirror.

‘It’s like seeing a portrait of the history of time hung upon a black wall,’ Trofim said.

For five minutes, we watched as the moon rose a degree or two higher, shrinking to a brilliant white orb. Trofim did not once take his eyes from it: he stood as if in silent worship.

‘Just think,’ he finally broke his silence, ‘of all the other men who have looked upon that celestial face. Every human that has ever lived has gazed upon it and wondered. Not just Copernicus and Galileo, Tycho Brahe and Leonardo da Vinci. Ordinary people. Proletarians. Peasants and presidents.’

‘Kings and kulaks,’ I added.

Trofim turned his back on the moon. Risen higher now, it rode just over his shoulder.

‘When she was a little girl,’ he said, ‘Frosya used to gaze at the moon and wonder if her father was on it, looking down at her. Her mother, you see, told her that Kirill was living on the moon.’ He balanced the shotgun under his arm. ‘What lies parents tell, eh, Shurik! Yet it was the truth, in a way. For all it was worth, he might just as well have been on the moon. And how could you tell a little girl about the gulag? When the Luna 2 moon probe landed up there, Frosya was ten. She asked her mother, when it returned, would it bring him back?’