The Industry of Souls (25 page)

‘A fine day to be a horse,’ I said, touching its shoulder which was hot from the sunlight. ‘The air is warm, the sky is blue, the grass is sweet and mankind has turned to a new mule.’

The horse snuffled through its nostrils and I could smell the strong odour of grass sap on its breath.

‘Ah! You don’t know,’ I went on. ‘You’ve not heard! Well, Bratan, let me tell you. In Myshkino, the old forge at which, you were once shod, is now in a garage for the repair of self-propelled carts. Furthermore, it will soon provide vehicular travel for all the villagers, obviating the need for a saddle to be strapped to your old back and a steel bit to be shoved between your teeth.’

‘However,’ a voice replied, ‘you do not need to be concerned for your hooves because they can still provide a shoeing service.’

I looked round the bulk of the horse to find Yuri walking towards it with a bundle of new-mown hay under his arm.

‘Good afternoon, Yuri,’ I said.

‘Happy birthday, Shurik! You still talking to my ancient nag?’

‘We old folk must stick together,’ I justified myself. ‘Besides, in real terms, he and I are the oldest inhabitants of the village. I have to find someone to talk to on my own level.’

Yuri threw the straw down, cutting the tarred twine binding it with a sickle-bladed, hooked hoof knife, rolling the cord up and pocketing it so that the horse did not ingest it.

‘It’s certainly true you won’t get an ordered or intelligent conversation out of youngsters these days,’ he said ruefully. ‘The inhabitants of the classroom are not what they were in your day. And that day was not so long ago.’

Yuri touched the horse behind its left fetlock and it obediently lifted its leg so that he might inspect the hoof.

‘Has he a problem?’ I enquired.

‘No, not really. He had a cut in his sole. He does it on purpose. To get sympathy.’ Yuri looked up at the horse which had turned its head so that one eye surveyed its master. ‘Don’t you?’ The horse tossed its head dismissively. ‘Have you seen the stones in the river?’ he went on, speaking to me again. ‘Smooth as marbles. But he had to find the sharp one. However, I managed to purchase some veterinary mercurochrome in Zarechensk. Now that there are so few horses about, the medicines are cheap.’ He studied the hoof and continued, addressing the horse more than me, ‘You old folk are always getting minor ailments. We ought to have you…’

Yuri stopped himself but he knew the damage had been done. He is not a man who always thinks first before speaking. Like any teacher worth his salt, his brain has to be quick to counter the mercurial minds of his pupils but this can lead to a perceived social ineptitude and
faux pas
of the first order in adult company.

‘Shot?’ I suggested.

‘I’m … I’m sorry, Shurik. That was stupid…’

‘No, it was not,’ I assured him. ‘You cannot harm me with words, Yuri. Not careless ones, nor those spiked with malice. And yours are neither. You simply suffer from the mutable demands of your profession.’

‘Profession!’ he rejoined, lowering the horse’s leg and moving round its head to check the next, glad to take the opportunity to turn the conversation. ‘You have no idea, Shurik.’ He instructed the horse to raise its leg. It slowly obeyed. ‘In the old days, when I went to the village school and, later, when you taught in it, we studied. Some applied themselves hard, some not so. We did our sums, learnt our tables and theorems. πr
2
. The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. We chanted our spellings, recited patriotic verses, read our admittedly doctored history books and knew where to find Celjabinsk and Iskatelej on a map of the USSR even if we had not a clue what went on there. But now! The hypotenuse and the geography of Russia can go hang themselves. The little bastards don’t know what the hell’s going on in the Kremlin – and don’t care! – but they can reel off the main cities of California and give you the name of Tom Cruise’s cat.’

‘Tom Cruise?’ I questioned.

‘A film star,’ Yuri informed me. ‘The boys worship him and the girls adore him. He is an action hero film star. Young, handsome…’

‘And he is a cat lover?’ I asked facetiously.

Yuri shrugged, turned his attention to the horse’s hoof and found another stone embedded in the mud around the frog. Unfolding the hoof knife once more, he flicked it out and moved to the horse’s hindquarters.

I looked down the meadow, across the river in which there is a line of stepping stones and up the other side to the village. The sun was beginning to lower now. The hour was drawing on.

The horse’s hoof checked out, Yuri folded his knife up and patted the horse on its flank. It whisked its long tail at him and took a few steps to the hay, arching its neck down to smack its lips at the fodder. Without speaking, we set off walking slowly down the field. We were halfway to the river before either of us spoke.

‘Do you remember Lyuba?’ Yuri asked.

I racked my brain for a minute. Over time, the memory of all my pupils has faded into a common blur except for Romka and he is only kept alive by my seeing him whenever I visit the garage.

‘A small, diffident girl,’ Yuri prompted me. ‘Her mother had a withered arm. The child had no father.’

He spoke as if the lack of a parent was an accepted biological certainty, like the mother’s deformity.

‘Just vaguely. They lived in a small hut a little way down the Zarechensk road.’

‘That’s her. A quiet child, under size for her age, withdrawn into herself.’

‘How old was she?’

‘Nine or ten when you first saw her.’

‘That must have been in ‘78. Did not the others call her Water Snail?’

‘Because she always retreated into her shell,’ Yuri explained. ‘You know what became of her?’

‘I have not the slightest notion,’ I replied.

‘She is now a librarian in the University of Minsk where she lives in a small apartment with her pet Samoyed. Twenty-eight years old, rather pretty but as yet unmarried.’

‘The way you talk,’ I responded, ‘you might be lining her up for someone. Or fancying her for yourself. You would not be the first. That’s the oldest pit a teacher in his middle years can tumble into.’

Yuri ignored my flippancy.

‘Do you not want to know how I have discovered these facts?’ he went on.

‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’

‘They are printed on the back cover of her first book of poetry. Good stuff it is, too. The critics love her. The book has a foreword by Yevtushenko. And do you remember Ivnev?’

‘The name rings no bell for me.’

‘His father was a labourer, worked on the railway. Track maintenance, fence painting. Nothing too taxing for the brain. You know what’s become of him?’

‘I assume,’ I answered, ‘he is still working on the railway.’

Yuri was slightly annoyed at my continual jibing and said, ‘Not him! Not the father. The son. Ivnev is now a journalist in Moscow working for CNN, a world-wide American television company. I saw him the other night.’

‘You saw him?’ I responded, allowing a degree of scepticism to creep into the words. ‘Where?’

‘In Zarechensk,’ he continued, picking up on my dubiety, ‘and before you get clever with me, it wasn’t in the bus station or a bar. I saw him at my sister’s place. My brother-in-law’s cousin lives in Germany and gave them a satellite television. He was on the American news, clear as the nose on your face. Along the bottom of the screen was his name.’

We reached the river bank and the stepping stones beside which were hoof-prints in the mud. Yuri squatted down to inspect them.

‘Is this where the horse picks up stones?’ I enquired.

‘It could be,’ Yuri responded. ‘The children sometimes amuse themselves by throwing pebbles at the stepping stones. Some shatter into sharp splinters.’

All his talk of children had set my mind wandering.

‘Do you know what happened to little Raisa?’ I asked at length, as Yuri washed his hands in the river, scaring away a number of small fish which darted for the cover of the mid-stream weeds.

‘Your favourite,’ he replied, straightening up. ‘A round, truly Russian face, always smiling.’

‘And clever, quick on the uptake.’

‘She went to study nursing in Kiev. Then she emigrated. Now she works in a hospital in Canada, sends money back to her parents. Every month, sure as the moon rises, fifty dollars arrive. So,’ he added, ‘you do remember some of them.’

‘Names are coming back to me,’ I admitted, ‘because you have oiled the cogs of memory.’

‘Do you remember Davidov?’

‘There were several.’

‘Davidov, son of the panel beater in the Zarechensk bus garage. He is now an engineer in Germany, working for Mercedes Benz.’

‘He was always crazy about cars,’ I remarked.

‘And Lado? Remember him? The boy who played with matches and burned Rysakov’s hay rick to the ground. He’s studying to be an architect in Moscow. And Ninochka, with her incredible blond hair, a mass of tight curls. You know, they used to say her family was descended from ancient Greeks who sailed up the Volga and got lost. Last month, she was appointed as a simultaneous translator to the Russian mission to the United Nations.’

Yuri put his foot on the first of the stepping stones. They are large, flat and firmly set on the river bed which, at this point, is shallow for once there was a ford here, before the bridge was built. I followed him and he paused three stones out, offering me his hand.

‘I am not one of the children,’ I reproved him. ‘Old and doddery I may be but I’m not yet derelict.’

He smiled and carried on across the river. Some of the stones in the middle, where the current splashes over loose rocks just under the surface, were slick with water and I took, as I do every day now, great care not to slip.

‘I trust the Styx will be as easy to cross when the time comes,’ I commented as I reached the far bank, now accepting the offer of his hand to help me up the step from stone to shore. I have, of late, had to make a quick and undignified clamber to get ashore.

Side by side, we started off slowly up the slope towards the village, the houses above set against the sky. Ahead of us, close to the path, a billy-goat was tethered to a stake and chewing on a clump of weeds. To the right, I could see the Merry Widow’s laundry hanging on a line, a drift of smoke lifting from a short chimney at the end of her house as she fired her baking oven. Farther down, in a corner of the field near to the river, someone had erected a large pile of wood for a bonfire.

‘You are a devil of a man, Yuri,’ I exclaimed. ‘Your damned talk of Davidovs and Ivnevs has set my mind off.’

‘Don’t you want to remember those days? Were they that bad?’

‘No,’ I shook my head, ‘of course not. They were good, golden times. Yet, recently, I have tried not to dwell in the past. A penchant for nostalgia is a sure sign that the Grim Reaper is running the whetstone over his scythe.’

‘Do you know why those children have been so successful?’ Yuri remarked.

‘Because they are lucky,’ I replied. ‘Because the wheels of fortune have turned well for them.’

‘That’s not true,’ Yuri responded. ‘They have done well because you were their teacher.’

‘I can hardly see how four years in the occasional company of an old
zek
can shape an entire life.’

‘You didn’t shape their lives, you opened them up. Before you came, their teachers were men and women of narrow vision who towed the Party line, preached the Party gospel and sang the Party hymns of praise. They were not small-minded because they were dolts but because that was the only way they could survive. Then you arrived and the world expanded.’

The goat stopped its munching and looked at us with shrewd hircine eyes brimful with mischievous evil. With like minds, we stepped off the path to detour the creature. Its curlicued horns invited injury.

‘Few,’ I quoted, ‘have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers. Those are the words of Joshua Reynolds.’

‘He was an artist, was he not?’ Yuri rejoined. ‘For painting that may be true but not for life. And if you are going to be sententious, Shurik, I can be too. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell when his influence stops: the words of Henry Brooks Adams.’

‘I taught English and a little elementary mathematics, the latter very badly.’

‘And astronomy,’ Yuri reminded me.

‘I hardly taught that. It was merely an interest I had.’

At that moment, the goat decided to charge us, its head down and horns out. At the end of its tether, it was brought to an abrupt halt. Yuri laughed at the animal which backed off with a look of humiliation on its face.

‘You broadened horizons, Shurik,’ he continued. ‘Before you stepped into the classroom, the sky was just a black space with lights and the world ended just beyond my horse. You gave them a new language, a whole new universe to explore.’

So as not to lose face, the goat had another but half-hearted lunge at us but we were now well out of its range and besides, it stopped itself before it reached the extent of the rope.

‘What are you getting at, Yuri?’ I wanted to know.

‘Just that the people here admire you.’

‘I know.’

‘You have made a poet of a timid child and an architect of an infant arsonist. Two people survive into their old age because their daughter, whom you taught, supports them.’

‘You will tell me next that Komarov’s apples swell, Trofim’s tomatoes ripen and Vera Dorokhova’s bread rises because of my presence.’

‘Don’t be facetious, old man,’ Yuri chastised me. ‘You know exactly what I mean.’ He paused and looked back across the river to where Bratan was still standing, head down to the hay. ‘They are afraid, you know…’

He left the remainder of his sentence hanging in the air and we walked on up the hill to the road not far from Frosya’s house. Several of the Merry Widow’s hens had flown from the coop by her woodpile and were scratching about in the dust, looking for seeds or grasshoppers.

‘You taught the children English, yes,’ he said at length. ‘And maths and their way about the stars, yet you gave them so much more. What you brought to Myshkino was humanity. You may not realise it, even now, but you are to this day only the second person ever to return here from the gulag.’