The Industry of Souls (21 page)

A drift of smoke from the roof of the shack washed across the moon, momentarily blunting the edge of the craters. I cast my mind back to the gulag days and saw, as clearly as I did the moon over Trofim’s shoulder, a colourless night upon which hung a red flag and through which Kirill walked in the company of three guards with their rifles slung over their shoulders, red stars emblazoned on their hats.

Trofim set off through the undergrowth. He moved with a certain stealth, holding branches for me to prevent them swishing noisily back and stepping cautiously when approaching an area of dry twigs. I did my best to imitate him yet still made a good deal more noise than he did but he made no comment.

After ten minutes, we reached all that remained of the timber felling operations, a skeletal frame of rusty girders which had formed the basis for the saw-mill. Here and there, a few sheets of corrugated iron remained bolted to it. In the centre, partially covered in ground ivy, a circular saw bench stood slightly askew on a platform of rotting planks as thick as railway ties. Halfway up the frame was a platform, once the saw-mill director’s inspection platform. Clearing creepers from the lower rungs of an iron ladder, Trofim began to ascend to the platform.

‘We have the best seats in the house, Shurik,’ he whispered as he beckoned me to follow him.

Once on the platform, we sat with our legs dangling into mid-air, our arms resting on one of the rails. All around us, bathed in brilliant moonlight, the new growth of trees prodded up from the undergrowth. A hundred metres to our left was a stack of felled trunks, abandoned by the loggers and now black and rotting, whilst in front of us glimmered a large pool.

‘Just as on the moon,’ Trofim murmured, ‘we have a sea of tranquillity. There was always a clearing here because a spring rises out of the ground at this point. When the timber was being cut, they diverted the water away and the pool dried up. Now, there are no men, except you and me, and things are as they should be, as they always were.’ He carefully laid the gun on the platform by his side, making sure the metal breach did not clang against the iron. ‘Now, we don’t talk. We don’t move. We just watch.’

Within minutes of our falling silent, an owl landed on the girders above us, whoo-whooing strenuously. Its presence was our endorsement. Not a minute later, a deer materialised from the undergrowth and, with delicate steps, approached the pool. After raising its snout to test the air, twisting its ears to catch the slightest threat, it dipped its head and began to drink. The ripples fanned out across the still black surface, breaking into lines of coruscated moonlight. When it had drunk its fill, it stepped back. We could hear the suck of its hooves as it pulled its feet out of the marshy ground. Satisfied it was safe, it began to browse upon a bush until, quite suddenly, it was gone. No branches thrashed or twigs snapped. It simply dematerialised like a wraith.

The moon slid behind a cloud. Trofim touched my arm and nodded slowly over to his left. A dark shadow was moving towards the pool from the direction of the wood pile. The cloud moved on and there, in the full moonlight, stood a bear.

It was a young male, about three-quarters grown and yet already immensely powerful. Walking on all fours, its head was thrust forward in an almost belligerent fashion. The moonlight shimmered on its fur as if the creature were dusted with powdered diamonds. Its wet snout and eye glistened. Every movement it made was filled with the surety of its supremacy.

At the water’s edge, it stopped yet, unlike the deer, it did not bother to glance around but immediately dipped its muzzle and started lapping noisily.

‘This is how men were,’ Trofim whispered under cover of the bear’s drinking, ‘before Adam sharpened a stone and cut himself upon it.’

When the bear had slaked its thirst, it sat back on its haunches on the soggy bank of the pool and proceeded to lick its front paws, running them over its snout as a cat might. Its toilet done, it swung round onto all fours and sauntered towards a bush into which it started to nuzzle, bending branches and grunting.

‘Blackberries,’ Trofim murmured.

For a while, the bear feasted on the bush, guzzling so noisily that, when I shifted my position to ease my legs which had begun to grow numb from the edge of the metal platform pressing on a nerve in my thigh, and a rusty bolt in the platform mounting squeaked, the creature paid not the slightest heed. At last, having gorged its fill, it returned to the pool, lowering its head to the surface once more.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Trofim’s hand reach for the gun, feeling along the stock until his fingers touched the metal of the breech, cold in the moonlight. Very slowly, he lifted the weapon off the platform to bring it over the railing, the butt fitting into his shoulder.

‘Watch!’ he said quietly, and he aimed the shotgun at the bear.

The bear stopped drinking. It raised its head, turning it from side to side. Moving quickly, with an agility belied by its ungainly shape, it set off for the cover of the bushes. I could hear its paws padding on the waterlogged soil. At the edge of the cover, it halted and turned, standing on its hind legs. It looked like a man in an overcoat several sizes too large.

‘Don’t shoot it,’ I whispered, not raising my voice for fear that the bear, on hearing it, might decide to come for us.

The bushes parted and the bear disappeared. Trofim put the gun down.

‘I would not shoot him,’ Trofim said, no longer keeping his voice down. ‘Russia has killed enough.’

He stood up and rubbed his legs: like mine, they must have grown stiff. We descended the ladder, Trofim going across to the pool to fill his water bottle. Taking no care to be silent now, we headed off back to the shack, put more wood on the fire and boiled the water, making tea which we drank in turns from a small mug Trofim produced from his pack. Warmed, we lay under our blankets on the earth as the smoke billowed up to the hole in the roof and the moon moved across the sky.

‘Why did you raise the gun?’ I asked.

‘To tell him I was there,’ Trofim replied.

‘Why not just shout? Kick the platform? Clap your hands?’

‘I did not want to disturb his peace,’ Trofim said. ‘I just wanted to let him know I was there, had the power but was not going to use it. And this he understood and left in his own time. If I had alarmed him, he would have run, terrified, and feared me forever more.’

A log on the fire shifted, sending a scatter of sparks upwards. Some made it through the hole in the roof, others fell to die on the earth floor.

‘How much better,’ he continued, ‘to let your adversary know your strength rather than prove it for him. Animals appreciate such a demonstration. They are sophisticated, obey the laws of nature. Only men break nature’s laws to supplant them with their own.’

I turned on my side to face him. He was leaning against his knapsack, staring at the fire. The flicker of the low flames danced upon his skin and shone in his eyes.

‘Consider this, Shurik, how we insult the bear by associating ourselves with him. As strong as a bear, we say. Russia is the Bear, the Americans say. But have you seen a more noble animal?’

He punched the pack to make it a more comfortable shape and lay his head against it.

‘And what do we do to this noble beast? We catch it, pull its claws out, file down its teeth and make it dance in Red Square to amuse the tourists.’ He spat into the fire, his spittle hizzling on the embers. ‘When I see a bear, Shurik, I am ashamed and put in my place.’

I dozed off and on that night. The ground was hard and my back, despite twenty-five years of exhausted sleep on a palliasse in the gulag, had grown accustomed to a bed. Yet it was not just the discomfort that kept me awake: as I lay there, I recalled that night I sat outside the tent, the stars above me, a taint of vodka on my breath. And mammoth. And, before me, just such a fire keeping the night and cold at bay.

Our expedition was taken a long time ago now. Trofim was younger then, employed by the state and unburdened by the proprietorial cares of Myshkino Motors: I was happy, free of the gulag, settled in my life with him and Frosya, no longer haunted by demons and unafraid of the uncertainties of the future.

8

During the day, whilst we were toiling underground in the mole hole, a blizzard rolled down from the north. By the time we surfaced into the night, a metre and a half of snow had fallen, inundating the surface crews. No sooner were we out of the cage and counted, work unit by work unit, than we were issued with snow shovels and told to report to the marshalling yards.

The wind which had heralded the blizzard had dropped by now but, in its vanguard, snow was still densely falling in heavy, lazy flakes which pirouetted to the ground. The locomotives in the yard had tried to make a getaway but could not and the snow plough, which usually cleared the branch line to the mine, was engaged in keeping the main line free until another could be sent up from the south.

‘If hell were to freeze over,’ Avel observed as we stood with our shovels waiting to be assigned a task, ‘this is what it would be like.’

He was right. The lights around the pit head mustering ground and the sidings were only visible if you were close to them. The others were invisible in the falling snow, even as a distant glow. The sounds of the winding gear, the whining of the steel cables and the clatter of machinery and the cage doors were all muffled to nothing much more than an undercurrent of muted sound like the far off wailing of demented, disappointed souls. Even the loudspeaker system was useless for the sound of the overseer dropped within metres to the ground, as if frozen like the steam from our breath.

After ten minutes stamping our feet and huddling close together for mutual warmth, Kirill appeared from the gloom.

‘Track six,’ he said. ‘Dig out the rear four trucks of the train and keep them clear.’

‘Keep them clear!’ Ylli explained. ‘For how long?’

‘Until the snow eases,’ replied Kirill as if this was the most obvious fact in the world.

‘It could snow like this for days,’ Kostya said.

‘Months,’ Dmitri added.

‘And what’s the point?’ Ylli went on. ‘The locomotives can’t get out until the snow plough gets here. And then what? It’s not just snowing here. God’s dumping the shit all over the land. The blizzard could be two hundred kilometres across and as many deep. We clear four trucks that can’t go anywhere.’

Kirill’s eyes were black in the shadow of the lowered peak of his
ushanka.

‘So you’ve a choice then, Ylli,’ he remarked. ‘You can dig the trucks out as the bastards want, or you can refuse and be shot – on the assumption that the guards in the firing squad can see you through the snow – or you can do a runner into the night, hitch a ride on the snow plough, commandeer it to Moscow and complain to the Politburo personally that this was a dumb-arsed order and they ought to get their thinking straight.’

We trudged across the mustering ground and over the tracks. Four trains of fully laden coal trucks stood idle, thatched with snow and looking like uniform rows of peasants’ cottages with the windows shuttered and the fires gone out. Crawling under one of the trains we reached track six, turned left and made our way to the end of the row of trucks parked there. The last one had a dim red oil lantern burning in a bracket and casting a pink glimmer upon the snow piling up against the buffers.

‘So where do we put it?’ Titian mused aloud. ‘We dig the snow off this truck and then what? If we put it by the track, it’ll pile up and freeze into a rock-hard wall we’ll have to chip out. If we put it too far over it’ll block the next line.’

‘Dump it on the far line,’ Kirill decided. ‘Let the surface crews shift it. It’ll be their pigeon by then and we’ll be down in the snug of the mole hole. No one’s going to know who was responsible for what. They weren’t taking notes of which work unit was assigned which task. The overseer was merely ticking off the tracks as he allocated the work.’

We set to on the last coal truck, working our way forward but, by the time the penultimate truck in the train was more or less dug out, the last was under another twenty centimetres of fresh snow. What was worse, every now and then a load avalanched off the top of the truck and either filled in our previous labours or fell upon us, freezing our faces and even bowling us over under the weight. After half an hour, Kirill disappeared into the blizzard for a while then, reappearing like a spectre, called us together.

‘May I make a suggestion, comrades?’ he began as we crowded together close to the side of the third truck. He spoke with the urbanity of the chairman of a Party meeting. ‘This is frankly a bloody waste of our energy. Nothing can be done until the snow abates. I suggest we dig ourselves in and wait.’

‘For what?’ I ventured. ‘If we are found slacking…’

‘Don’t worry, Shurik. We shan’t be. The overseers are ensconced round the stove in the admin. office. The guards’ve hunkered down in the pit head building and the guard-house. Half the
zeks
have taken cover in the coal sheds and a number have even gone back down the shaft to Gallery B. Those left in the sidings are doing bugger all.’

‘So we get cutting,’ Kostya said and, raising his shovel, he trimmed out a block of snow the size of a small box.

Following his example, we cut loose blocks of snow and built a wall along the side of one of the trucks, Kostya filling in the gaps with compacted snow slammed in with the flat of his shovel. When one side was done, we did the other and both ends, leaving just a crawl-hole at one end. As we worked outside, Ylli worked within, flattening the snow that had drifted under the truck so that it made a smooth floor over the granite hard core of the track. In ten minutes, we had a truck-roofed igloo.

It was dark inside but both Avel and Titian had their lamp batteries charged so we switched one on. Within a surprisingly short space of time, the air heated up and we were able to remove our
ushankas.

‘Shame we’ve nothing to eat,’ Dmitri remarked.

‘And it looks like we’ll not get any tonight, either,’ Titian added. ‘By the time the blizzard lifts and we’ve trudged back to camp…’