The Industry of Souls (26 page)

‘I did not return,’ I reminded him.

‘You know what I mean. Stop playing the pedagogue.’

‘Who was the other?’ I enquired. ‘I don’t recall a fellow
zek.
’

‘He was before your time. Arrested in 1950, he was accused of anti-Soviet activities. Whatever the hell that meant! He can hardly have been an American spy or sabotaged the future of the USSR. He was a bus conductor. They sentenced him to thirteen years in the gulag and, during that time, he met a woman inside who was there for anti-social activities. She’d been a common whore in Moscow. They were both released round about the same time and wandered about before ending up in Myshkino. He built them a shanty on a scrap of rocky ground the commune had no interest in and earned a bit of money cutting timber in the forest. But he couldn’t adjust, not even with his wife’s love. And she did love him. Passionately, in her own way.’

‘The gulag had conditioned him.’

Yuri nodded and continued, ‘He hanged himself in the forest, just beyond the stile. It was my father who cut him down.’

A feeling of apprehension ran down my spine.

‘Which tree?’ I asked.

‘It’s not there now,’ Yuri replied. ‘It blew down in a blizzard, years ago. Only the roots remain. We chopped the rest of it up.’

‘And the wife?’

‘She was a mother by the time he killed himself, with a toddler. She stayed, grew a few vegetables, kept a nanny goat and some hens, like the rest of us. Her health was not good and she only worked spasmodically, cleaning offices in Zarechensk.’

‘Still here?’

‘No, she moved away in due course and died a year or two back.’

I tried to think who it could have been but arrived at no conclusion.

‘Who was he?’

‘He was Lubya’s father.’

So now, after all this time, I knew why, when I sat in my forest throne and surveyed the leaves, I never felt alone.

‘When you came,’ Yuri went on, ‘people thought it would only be a matter of time before they found you stretching your neck or blowing your head off with one of Sergei Petrovich’s shotguns. Yet you were different. It was as if the gulag had somehow strengthened you. You had not become demoralised by it, broken by it.’

I smiled and thought of Work Unit 8, conjured up their faces in my mind, took a mental roll call, heard Dmitri’s laugh and Kirill’s soft, authoritative voice, saw again the snow flurries eddying round our legs.

‘In you, Shurik, we saw that strength and were ourselves uplifted by it. We knew – at least, our imaginations told us – what you had been through, what things you had seen, things you had done. Where Milyukov was concerned – that was Lubya’s father’s name: the mother and child never used it after his suicide – we saw only despondency and surrender and it dragged us down. There, but for the grace of God and the KGB, went every one of us. Then you appeared that day, shambling along the road, and Myshkino changed.’

‘You make me sound like some kind of Saviour of the Steppes.’

Yuri chuckled and retorted, ‘Not quite so grand, old man. More a Harbinger of Hope.’

We arrived at the gate in front of Trofim and Frosya’s house. The marigolds were wilting in the heat of the late afternoon but Frosya had just turned on the tap by the wall and the water was running down little trenches cut in the sun-baked soil. In a matter of minutes, the plants would receive their succour, the leaves would perk up and the flower heads would stand erect again.

‘I shall see you later,’ Yuri said, somewhat mysteriously: then he took my hand, not to shake it but to hold it in both his. ‘Don’t forget, Shurik. You mean something to us. To Myshkino.’

He relinquished my hand and set off down the lane. I watched him until he had passed Komarov’s house at which point he turned up towards the school house. With him out of sight, I made my way up the path towards the house, my every step a conscious pace into the future.

10

Over about three months, we lengthened the mole hole by seventy-nine metres: then, in one day, we dug out over five metres. The coal seam we were following began to narrow and turn and, whilst the rock above remained firm, that beneath it became friable and richly fossiliferous. This made the coal easier to chip free from its surrounding matrix but it was still heavy going for the tunnel was less than one and a half metres high and three wide. Only one of us could work at the face at a time, back distorted and neck cricked, smashing the pickaxe sideways to lever the rock and coal loose.

We organised ourselves into a strict shift rota, based not upon time – for none of us possessed a watch – but upon effort. The worker at the coal face swung the pickaxe sixty times then surrendered the implement to the next man who started to labour at the rock as he moved to the sledge, waiting to tow it away. One person was usually absent with the second sledge, delivering the previous load to the central gallery and bringing back thirty centimetre square timber pit props when they were needed and fresh water, if he could find any. Usually, drinking water down the mine was stale and contaminated with dust. Two others loaded the sledge whilst the last two shovelled both coal and debris back from the face or shored up the roof. As soon as a complete cycle was achieved, we all downed tools for what we assumed to be fifteen minutes but which, subterranean time being beyond accurate computation, could have been anything up to twice that time. What usually set us to work again was a general consensus that our muscles were eased a bit.

In the rest periods, we lay about on sacks pilfered from the supply tunnel or sat with our backs to the wall, each sunk in his own private thoughts or making his own private escape.

I remember so very clearly, as if it happened only last week, the second rest break of that day towards the end of the third month in the mole hole. I had just finished my stint of chipping away at the under-belly of Mother Earth and was lying on my back on two sacks, my face staring at the roof of the tunnel. Set into the stone, as if engraved by someone working with a fine stonemason’s engraving awl, was the perfect outline of a leaf. It resembled a frond of fern and was so flawless it might have been deliberately placed there by an ancient child goddess with a propensity for pressing flowers.

Ylli, edging past me, knocked the bare bulb hanging by its flex from the row of pit props. The light oscillated briefly. In the changing shadows, the fossilised leaf seemed to twitch as it must have done tens of millions of seasons ago in a Triassic breeze.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Titian remarked, following my eye. ‘We’re two kilometres down in the middle of a forest, looking at a leaf that once heard the roar of dinosaurs.’

‘Reckon we might find one of those big motherfuckers of a lizard?’ Kostya mused. ‘Frozen in the coal like the mammoth was under the tundra.’

Titian embarked upon an explanation as to why that was unlikely but I paid him scant attention for the leaf above was sufficient for me. It was a ticket to leave the mine, leave the USSR, leave the pain and dust and smell of sweat for my garden. I turned on my side. Next to me, Avel had closed his eyes: from the look on his face, he was already shooting the clouds in his MiG-15.

In seconds, the others ceased to exist and I strolled along one of the gravel paths leading from the bridge over the pool to the temple to Athena on a grassy knoll.

From a distance, the temple looked to be a grand, imposing structure, circular with a surround of Corinthian pillars supporting the overhang of the domed roof at the top of which stood a statue of a Greek girl dressed in a flowing toga-like gown, one of her breasts bare. She was cut from marble, the white stone giving her firm skin a certain palpable translucency, the veins in the stone like the delicate blood vessels around her nipple.

My feet crunched crisply on the gravel which consisted not of sharp, grey granite chips but water-smoothed beach pebbles and tiny shells my every footstep ground to powder: and yet, whenever I next came that way, those shells I had crushed on my last walk had reconstituted themselves. Nothing was ever destroyed in my garden.

The temple, however, was not all it seemed to be for, as I approached it, it appeared to shrink in size until it was little bigger than a child’s garden play-house. By stretching out my hand, I could touch the statue, feel the smooth curve of the breast which, despite its diminutive size, perfectly fitted the palm of my hand. It was always warm, as if the statue was in reality a young girl only just turned to stone by some wicked spell: that, of course, was unlikely for there was no evil in the garden, nothing so malign as to transform a living creature into inanimate marble.

On this visit, as I approached the temple, I heard a strange music coming from within. It was liquid, flowing as if performed on a flute or bass clarinet, the notes not distinct but merged into each other. If warm syrup could have been transfigured into music, I thought, it would have sounded like this.

Curious to trace the source of the music, I entered the building. How this was achieved I do not understand: the building did not grow in size nor did I, like Alice in Wonderland, consciously shrink. Be that as it may, my fingers gripped the polished bronze door handle, I turned it and entered. Immediately, to my intense disappointment, the music stopped.

Inside, the temple was devoid of all furniture save one chair. Positioned under the very centre of the dome, it was an ornate, throne-like seat of the Louis XIV period, opulently upholstered with silks and velvets of the richest, indescribable hues which were less like colours and more like tangible textures devised to caress and cosset both body and soul. Around the walls was a frieze painted in pastels but I was unable to make out exactly what it depicted: the interior of the temple was in semi-darkness except for a circle of soft light in the centre of which the chair had been placed. Possibly, the frieze consisted of classical rustic scenes of maids drawing water, cows wandering lush valleys in low sunlight, castles on precipitous cliffs, hovels tucked away beside rivers running through oak woods.

I required no invitation but went directly to the chair and sat in it. The door closed. It did not swing quickly shut as it might have done on a spring or hydraulic hinge but slowly as if secured by an invisible hand.

At first, all was silent. I sat quite still in the chair, filled with expectation. How long I remained immobile I cannot say. It might have been minutes, it may have been hours: and I cannot say when the music began again. It did not suddenly commence but grew gradatim, fragment by fragment upon the very air. As the temple might fill with water so did it with sound which contained no scales, no defined or recognisable notes, no tune. There was no structured score to be followed.

Closing my eyes, I leaned back in the chair which seemed to envelope me, fold itself around and cocoon me. The music rose and fell like waves upon a vast ethereal ocean until, hours later, the concert came to an end. As it had begun, so it finished, the melody gradually melting away like ice on a summer’s day. I did not consciously hear it fade but came suddenly to the realisation that it was over.

Quitting the temple, and returning to my normal size as soon as I was out of the door, I found it was evening. The sun was setting over a copse of beech trees, the last rays golden through the shimmer of the branches. In the sky, a full moon was risen, casting a white gleam upon high, stratospheric clouds which, as I gazed up at them, darkened and became the fern leaf fossil over my head.

‘What was yours called?’

I turned my head. Kostya was leaning against the wall of the mole hole beside me, chewing on a piece of bread.

‘My what?’ I asked.

‘Your girl, Shurik! Your girl, the one you had. Jesus! Have you had others we’ve not heard about!’

‘My girl,’ I replied, thinking hard. I was still partly in the garden where there were no girls, only statues.

‘Yes! The little piece you shagged…’

‘Valya,’ I said.

‘Mine was Lena.’ He looked into the distance which was less that three metres away across the tunnel. ‘Tight as a keyhole.’

‘I’m amazed we managed it,’ Titian cut in.

‘Speak for yourself!’ Kostya retorted. ‘I was never lacking…’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Titian rejoined. ‘I’m not doubting any of our manhoods. But the thing is, our diet is pretty turgid…’

‘Shit, shit and more shit, some of it hot,’ said Ylli.

‘And mammoth,’ Avel added.

We all laughed except for Titian who was determined to make his point.

‘If your diet,’ he went on, ignoring the interruptions, ‘lacks vitamin E you can’t get an erection.’

‘A hard on,’ Kostya said. ‘We aren’t in anatomy class.’

‘In that case, we’ve all either lied like buggery to each other,’ Ylli said, ‘and not one of us has had his end away or, despite the crap food, we’re still getting vitamin E.’

‘Well, I’m getting vitamins a-plenty!’ Kostya announced proudly.

‘What about you?’ Titian asked me.

‘Truthfully, it would seem I’m getting my vitamin E,’ I told him.

Kirill, who had been lazing against a pit prop, joined the conversation and said, ‘You can be sure we’re getting the very basic needs we require. They don’t want to starve us. We might be
zeks
but we are also labour. We’re not here because we sabotaged socialism, because we sold secrets to the British or helped someone jump a ship for Rio. We’re here because the last Five-Year Plan, and the one before that, and the next one, needs so many tens of thousands of ants to see it through. We, comrades-in-coal, are nothing more than ants.’

‘We live like ants,’ Avel remarked. ‘Under the ground most of the time and coming up only to forage about for food.’

‘But with sufficient vitamins to fuck,’ Kostya said, with finality.

Dmitri, who had been lying on a sack, sat up and said quietly, ‘I hate all people, present company excepted. People can’t be trusted. They’ll rat on you, shit on you and do you in for a plate of porridge. They’ll steal what they don’t need and destroy what they do. People are the worst animals on earth.’

He spoke with such a conviction that it silenced us all for a moment: each of us, in his own way, looked for justification to this statement, and found it in his own experience.