The Industry of Souls (22 page)

‘Gygulevskoe,’ said Kostya.

‘What’s gygulevskoe?’ I asked.

‘Russian beer,’ Titian replied. ‘The best.’

Ylli grinned and said wistfully, ‘What I’d give for a beer.’

‘Dream on!’ exclaimed Dmitri. ‘The only thing that looks like beer round here is your piss. And you can’t drink that. It’s flat.’

Kirill fumbled in his clothing and, pulling out three thin cardboard boxes rather like large pencil cases, declared, ‘I think, when I get out of here, I’ll become a
blatnoi.
As a law enforcer, I learnt a lot about the criminal mind but I was straight and made an honest crust. Next time around, I’ll cross the road and earn a dishonest loaf.’

He handed the boxes round. I opened one. Inside, packed tightly together, were six dried herring.

‘Where did these come from?’ I enquired.

‘Ask not and thou shalt be pleased,’ Dmitri intoned.

‘Two and a half each,’ Kostya marvelled.

‘But they’re salty,’ Avel commented.

Kirill nodded to me and indicated the door. I knew what he had in mind and slipped out of the igloo. The snow was still falling as heavily as before and there was no sound save the mutter of my companions and the minute reptilian hiss of flakes colliding.

Hanging from a bracket in the twilight under the next truck were five galvanised steel, ten-litre fire buckets. I checked one. There was no hole in the base and the handle was firm. Unhooking it, I set off along the train, moving from the dim areas of light into near darkness before arriving beneath the next lamp.

Suddenly, ahead of me in the gloom, I saw what I took to be a guard and was about to duck down when the figure saw me, stepping slowly back out of sight between two trucks on the adjacent track. For a moment, I pondered upon my situation but realised that if this had been a guard he would have challenged me, not slunk out of sight. I went on, not looking at the figure as I passed: it was probably another
zek
on the lam or a look-out for another work unit which had decided to skive.

At last, I came close to the locomotive. It was fired up, the cab glowing like the entrance to a furnace. Three or four men sat crouched about the open firebox like sentinels to the underworld. They were talking in low voices. Keeping my head down, I passed them by. Beneath the locomotive, the heat of the firebox and the shower of embers raked out each time a new load of coal was thrown in had thawed the snow. Water dripped all round from snow falling on the casing of the boiler.

I had thought to collect this melt-water but it did not reach the ground. The air was so cold, it froze in long icicles from the locomotive chassis. Cursing my luck and stupidity, I kept down considering my options. The best was to fill the bucket with snow and place it under the locomotive for the fire to melt it: but, I guessed, it would be frozen to an icy slush before I reached the igloo. I was about to despair when I saw a small brass tap connected to a copper pipe running the length of the locomotive, heading towards one of the huge pistons that powered the driving wheels. The tap itself was shut but the copper pipe was not covered in snow or icicles: it must, I therefore reasoned, be hot. I did not dare remove a glove to test it by touch. Instead, I dropped a pinch of snow upon it. It instantly liquefied.

Watching the cab, I placed the bucket under the tap and, very carefully, inched it open. There was a brief hiss of steam then a trickle of water which tumbled noisily into the bucket. I quickly turned the bucket on its side so the water did not rattle onto the base. In a few minutes, I had five litres of scalding water.

Setting off for the igloo, I reached the point where the figure had stood. This time, so as to be on the alert in case the man was a
zek
and readying to steal the bucket of water, I looked into the space between the trucks where he had stepped. He was still there. I briefly nodded a friendly greeting. He raised his hand and I plodded on. When I reached the igloo, the water was still hot. We ate the dried fish then drank our fill, the water tasting metallic.

Organising a look-out every quarter of an hour to see how the blizzard was progressing, we lay back in the comparative comfort of our igloo, occasionally talking or just resting with our own thoughts.

‘Tell me, Shurik, have you ever been to Volgograd?’ Kirill asked me, shifting himself over the snow floor and sitting by my side.

‘Never,’ I told him. ‘The only parts of the Soviet Union I have seen are the inside of several detention centres, a few prison courtyards, bleak forests spied through the cracks in a box car door and the road between the camp and the mine.’

‘When this is over,’ he said, ‘and a new moon shines in our sky, you must come with me. We shall sit by the river, drink vodka, eat caviar. The sturgeon in the Volga give the best caviar. Not black. Grey, like the eyes of an old cat past its mousing days.’

He leaned back against the snow wall, a little flaking onto his shoulder like dandruff, quick to vanish into the material of his coat. Titian poked his head out of the entrance and brought it back in, his hair speckled with huge flakes.

‘Still coming down like the ash of a million freezing fires,’ he said. I wondered if he was quoting from some unknown poem by Yi Yuk-sa.

‘Downstream from the city,’ Kirill continued, closing his eyes, ‘the river turns south east, crosses desert and marshland to Astrahan and the Caspian Sea. Upstream, it runs beside hills, north of Kamysin. It’s beautiful there. The forests come down to the river and you can walk in peace for kilometre after kilometre. Sometimes you see no one, just vessels passing. The crew wave to you. I know a place…’

His voice trailed off and I made no comment. When a man is living inside himself, it is best to leave him be. One word at such a time can shatter a fragile world.

‘We’ll go there,’ he declared after a long silence, opening his eyes and looking straight at me. ‘You and me, Shurik, I’ll show you. Then, after, we shall take the train to Zarechensk then the bus and go to Myshkino.’

It was the first time I heard of the village. Kirill uttered the name with such a sense of love and mystery, I found my mind beginning to try and draw in wayward strands of my imagination to shape it in my mind.

‘Myshkino?’

‘It is where my family comes from,’ he said. ‘Where I came from before the hand on the shoulder and the machine pistol barrel in the belly. My wife lives there now. At least, I suppose she does: she has no reason to leave for we have a small house there, once my father’s. In Myshkino, she is amongst friends, can grow vegetables and keep hens. Maybe a goat. Survive. And she has my daughter…’

It was the first time Kirill had ever mentioned his family. I felt immensely privileged to be sharing this knowledge.

‘I did not know…’ I began.

‘My wife is called Tatyana Antonovna. She is – or was – a school teacher. For young children. My daughter,’ he closed his eyes to see her the better, ‘is called Frosya. It is short for Efrosiniya.’

‘How old is she?’

‘When I was arrested, she was two. Now,’ he thought for a moment, ‘she is sixteen, seventeen perhaps.’

‘Tell me about Myshkino,’ I asked.

‘Myshkino?’ he answered thoughtfully. ‘Myshkino is the real Russia. It is a village of maybe two hundred people. It has a church, a forge, a carpenter’s shop, several farms – all you would expect of a small community in the middle of the world, far from machines and rancorous men who plot. A small river runs through the middle of the village and all around, beyond the fields, there is forest crawling with animals.’

‘And what do the people do?’

‘What do they do?’ Kirill laughed. ‘What can they do? In the summer they collect in their harvest and build their stacks of firewood, in the winter they toast their feet and talk of the summer. You would like it there, Shurik.’

He fell silent again. Titian checked the snow was still coming down. Dmitri, who had fallen asleep, started to snore. Kirill closed his eyes once more and I too dozed off to be woken a short time later by Kostya kicking the soles of my
valenki.

The snow had thinned considerably. We could see ten trucks down the train. Kirill gave orders and we set to with our shovels. In twenty minutes, we had cleared our allocated trucks of snow and there was no remaining sign of the igloo.

‘Typical!’ Ylli exclaimed as we finished the job. ‘We clear the last four trucks but no one was sent to do the rest.’

By now, it was not long to go to midnight. The sky was still clouded but there were breaks appearing in it.

‘As soon as the clouds disperse,’ Kostya observed, ‘the temperature’ll drop another ten degrees. If we’re not back in the camp by then…’

We shouldered our snow shovels and set off in the direction of the locomotive, making heavy work of it through the snow which was now getting on for two and a half metres deep, nearly 40 centimetres deeper than when I had filched the boiling water. With every step, we sank in to our thighs.

Nearing the locomotive, I caught sight of something sticking up from the snow ahead of us. For a moment, it was hard to define its shape: then, just as I recognised it, Kirill gave a shout and started as best he could to stride out for it. I followed, the others in my trail.

Standing proud of the snow was the torso of a man. His head was shaven in the prison fashion and he was utterly naked, as chilled as a side of beef in a cold store.

‘Allah have mercy!’ Ylli murmured. Dmitri, never the religious one amongst us, half-heartedly crossed himself in the close proximity of death.

We gathered in a circle around the corpse. The skin had gone waxen, even more so than the usual prison pallor, the ears almost translucent and the whole surface was covered in a fine dusting of exquisite crystals of ice. In the middle of the face, the glazed eyes stared sightlessly ahead above slightly-parted lips drawn into a thin, emotionless smirk.

‘What the hell happened?’ Kostya began. ‘You think some of the
blatnye
…?’

‘No,’ Kirill pronounced, ‘this was no killing. Revenge has not raised her bloody hand here.’

‘What about theft?’ Kostya conjectured.

‘What can you steal from a naked man?’ Titian mused quietly.

‘Except life,’ Avel said.

‘They’ve taken his clothes,’ Kostya suggested.

‘No,’ said Kirill. ‘When they dig him out, they’ll find his clothes in a pile round his feet.’

There was no need for further explanation. We just stood like mourners around a vertical grave, our heads bowed not so much in sympathy or respect, nor against the cold, but simply because it seemed vaguely appropriate.

‘What do we do with him?’ Dmitri asked.

‘Nothing,’ Kirill answered. ‘What can we do? He’s dead meat. Let’s just move on. Say nothing. Pretend we never saw him. He won’t care.’

As we filed off along the line of the trucks, one by one, I realised that the dead man must have been the lurker in the shadows.

‘I saw him,’ I confided in Kirill as we reached a gap in the trucks through which we turned towards the mustering area. ‘When I went for the water. I thought he was a guard…’

‘And now you regret not having stopped to talk to him,’ Kirill said astutely.

‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘I could have offered him a mouthful of the water in my bucket. Maybe that is what he was looking for…’

‘In nothing but his skin?’

‘He had his clothes on,’ I replied.

Kirill put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t think about it. You could have done nothing. You were only an observer before the fact. He was already dead when you saw him.’

‘He raised his hand to me.’

‘Not his body, Shurik. His soul. He has been a dead man for weeks. It was only a matter of time. No one could have talked him out of it, reasoned him out of it.’

‘I still feel responsible,’ I said.

‘You are not,’ Kirill said, a little sharply. ‘You are responsible for the living.’

We reached the mustering area where the other work units were massing, shuffling into lines under the arc lights. The guards started counting heads.

The body was discovered whilst the count was going on and was taken past us by two guards who carried it between them, stiff as a board: it looked like a lifeless shop store dummy waiting to be dressed in the latest fashions. There was no attempt made at decorum, to cover the corpse: in death, it had as little privacy as it had had in life.

‘Do you know the poetry of Anna Akhmatova?’ Kirill asked me as the body was tossed into the back of a parked truck, keeping his voice down so as not to be heard by the guards who were wandering about between the ranks.

‘No,’ I said.

‘She wrote one line I saw inscribed on the wall of a cell I was held in,’ he remembered, ‘in Kiev. Such a line…’

‘How did it go?’

‘It was such a time when only the dead smiled,’ he quoted, ‘joyful in their peace.’

The count over, the guards ordered us forwards. We set off, heading toward the mine gates.

‘Now is such a time, Shurik, my friend. Now is just such a time.’

Half an hour later, we were marching along the road to the camp, struggling through the deep snow, forgetting the man we had left behind, his dead eyes staring unseeing at the featureless iron flank of a truck full of coal.

*   *   *

‘Two minutes,’ a voice muttered in the darkness.

I turned over in my bunk, the topmost of the tier of four, taking care to hold the blanket fully to my chin. With our returning to the camp so late, the stove had not been lit and the air inside Hut 14 was well below freezing. Beneath me lay Avel, Titian and Ylli whilst across the narrow space between the rows lay Dmitri, on my level, with Kostya and Kirill beneath him. The bottom bunk was unoccupied: Korotchenko had been transferred a few months before and the accommodation supervisor seemed to have overlooked the fact.

A usually reticent and self-possessed White Russian from Irkutsk, we had pondered on his departure. He had informed us that he was being sent to a timber camp in the far north, towards the Finnish border, but we had our doubts. Only a fortnight before his transfer was announced, we had been sitting round the stove when he had suddenly started to talk. At first, no one listened. Everyone had a story to tell and most were basically the same, variations on a theme with minute twists of fate to differentiate them: life was normal, there was a knock on the door in the middle of the night, someone had a bright torch, a car was waiting, the interrogation was followed by a swift trial and a slow train journey and – here we were, miners all!