The Industry of Souls (28 page)

‘You’ve cut yourself shaving, Shurik,’ he said.

‘Cut myself having a close shave,’ I replied, touching my cheek. The blood was clotting now, tacky like half-dried glue.

It was then I realised how kismet had been manipulating me. Had I refused Kostya’s request, I would now be hundreds of metres away in the main gallery: had I not questioned the nationality of Dmitri’s KGB officer, I would like as not be dead.

‘You go up the hill,’ Kirill suddenly said, his voice a little louder, insistent. ‘Go past the school on your right, and a house in front of an orchard with a tumble-down shed next to it. At the top…’ He took a long hissing breath. ‘You’ll go, won’t you, Shurik?’

‘Go where?’

‘Go to Myshkino.’

‘Myshkino?’ I had to think for a moment before I realised what he was talking about. ‘Your village? You’ll be going there yourself.’

‘No,’ he answered. ‘Not me. You.’

‘They’ll dig you out,’ I said and I realised I was stroking his face. It was like caressing fictile sandpaper.

‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Not me. You.’

‘Think of your wife,’ I encouraged him. ‘When this is all over…’

‘Tanya Antonovna is dead.’

The light went out, plunging us in total darkness. It happened so quickly, I was startled. Then it flickered and came on again.

‘When we were under the coal truck…’ I began.

‘I was lying, Shurik. To you and to myself. In the gulag, lies are often better than truths.’

‘When did she die?’ I said. ‘And how could you know?’

‘She has been dead two years. I was told.’

Assuming the camp officials had informed him of the fact, I said, ‘Forget it! That’s just a way they have of demoralising you.’

‘They did not tell me,’ Kirill muttered. ‘I heard from a man from Zarechensk. It was influenza…’

‘Then think of your daughter,’ I almost pleaded.

‘I think of her every day,’ he murmured. ‘Every day, Shurik.’

I gave him a drop more water. Bubbles formed at the side of his mouth, tinged with pink and I suppose I knew then he was dying but I could not accept it, would not allow him to surrender.

‘You’ll be out of here. Give them twenty minutes.’ I said, almost frantically. ‘Breathe slowly, evenly.’

I stroked some water over his brow.

‘I’ll go to my wife,’ he murmured, ‘but you, Shurik. You must go to Frosya.’

His throat rattled and he swallowed, his eyes screwing up with pain. When he opened them again, he stared at me.

‘Can you hear them coming?’ he asked.

I listened hard. No sound came to us down the mole hole and I shook my head. The light dimmed further then brightened once more.

‘It’s my turn to escape,’ Kirill said. His voice was weak yet resolute, firm. ‘Not for me a railway yard in a blizzard, eh, Shurik? They won’t find me frozen solid, standing up like a stiff prick on its wedding night.’

He smiled again. A light shower of dust fell upon us from some movement in the roof. I splashed more water across his face and he blinked.

‘You’ll get out of here, Shurik. One day. But for me, I shall go the way of the mammoth hunters.’

‘Don’t talk. Conserve your energy,’ I said.

Kirill closed his eyes and I thought he might be heeding my advice but, after a moment, he opened them and spoke again.

‘Will you do something for me, Shurik?’

‘Of course,’ I replied.

My face was above his and I looked down into his eyes. They were as deep as wells in the dim light.

‘Help me escape, Shurik. Put me out of my misery.’

‘The rescue team’ll…’ I started.

‘No,’ Kirill said, his voice louder, insistent so as to silence my objection: then it subsided, the effort too great. ‘I’ll not make it to the surface. And if they do dig me out and get me to the sick bay, then what? My spine’s severed. They’ll shoot me like a dog run over in the street. This is the gulag, Shurik. This is the USSR.’

A spasm ran through him then which I could feel pass from his face into my fingers, touching the raw fibres of my nerves like a hot needle.

‘You felt that, Shurik,’ Kirill whispered then, after a pause, added, ‘If you kill me, Shurik, I shall have won. The victory of self-determination. And the gulag will have lost.’

‘How can I?’ I pleaded with him.

‘Because you love me, Shurik. Because, if you kill me, you shall share in my victory.’

I turned away from him. The dim interior of the mole hole grew misty through my tears, as if a molten dust was rising before me. From the distance, muted by the tunnel, came the sounds of men approaching. I could hear Dmitri’s voice, urgent and coaxing.

‘They’re coming, Shurik!’ Kirill said urgently. ‘Be quick! Do it for love!’

‘I can’t.’

‘Do it, Shurik. You must. Do it for love.’

For a moment, I looked at him. He was crying, tears slipping down the side of his head, coursing round his ear, making a channel of white skin in the clinging grey dust.

‘For love, Shurik. For love.’

Bending, I kissed him on the side of his face. He tasted of coal dust and salt tears. The stubble of his unshaven beard was rough on my lips.

Glancing around, I saw one of the shovels lying half buried under the stones and gravel I had excavated. I picked it up, shaking it free of the rubble and weighing it in my hand as a man might test the balance of an axe before felling a tree.

‘When you see Frosya, Shurik, tell her it was good.’

‘Tell her what was good?’ I asked.

‘To die with a friend, Shurik,’ Kirill said, his voice suddenly calm, resigned, almost seraphic. ‘To die at the hand of a man you know.’

Averting my eyes, I turned round on my knees and, with all the power I could muster, swung the blade of the shovel at Kirill’s head. It struck him firmly just behind the ear. The bone cracked loudly, like a small explosion, and an ooze of blood trickled out and down the stones. Kirill sighed, like a tired man easing himself into his favourite chair in front of the stove after a long day’s grind.

11

She must have been looking out for me as I walked up the field with Yuri for, when I entered my room, I discovered that Frosya had laid out my clothes for me. On the bed, as neatly organised as if by the best trained of butlers, were lined up a white, freshly-ironed shirt, my best dark trousers and a smart jacket which had belonged to Trofim’s father. My shoes, on the floor below the trousers, were as highly polished as a Cossack lancer’s riding boots. On the table stood the chipped blue enamel basin filled with hot water, a thin skein of steam rising from it and catching the sunlight striking in the window. Beside it, she had arranged my razor, brush and block of shaving soap. A crisply laundered towel was draped over the back of the chair.

I took my time, shaving slowly and carefully, making certain I did not nick myself. Just as the skin on the back of my thighs is loose and gets trapped between the mattress and the edge of my bed, so do the lines of my face offer ample opportunity for daily, if involuntary, self-mutilation. And I wanted to look my best.

As I wiped my face clean with the towel, the material pleasantly scourging my skin, I happened to glance up at the framed monochrome photograph hanging above my books. It is faded at the edges, where the silver oxide has begun to deteriorate, but the central portion is still sharp and clear. It shows a young man in a trim uniform standing smartly erect beside the front mudguard of a truck. In the background appears what might be a barracks. He is smiling at the camera with an almost cheeky grin, his hands clasped before the buckle of his belt from which hangs, on his right side, a leather holster. The butt of his side arm is just visible. Everything about him speaks of pride and hope.

It is the photograph taken of Kirill on the day he passed out from the militia training academy.

Once a day, not necessarily in the morning when I rise, I look at his picture and, divine supplication not being a part of my life, I think of him. There is no point in prayer, in asking some fictitious deity to protect him. He’s long since been incinerated, or dumped in an unmarked pit of alkali somewhere near the Arctic Circle, and that’s the end of it: Kirill will not be found, millennia hence, lying with the dinosaurs. And yet, by thinking of him, I keep him near me. The flesh dies as easily as a fallen petal rots, but love endures like stone.

Outside, I heard someone run up the path from the lane, their boots clattering on the porch. There was a brief muffled conversation followed by light and hurried footsteps approaching my room across the floorboards.

‘All right, Frosya,’ I pre-empted her. ‘I’m nearly ready.’

‘Romka’s just been,’ she said urgently. ‘Trofim had a call from Zarechensk. They drove through there ten minutes ago.’

I opened the door. She took a pace or two back and ran her eye over me.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Do I do you proud?’

‘You look…’ She came forward, put her hand on my arm and kissed me. ‘Handsome,’ she declared at last. ‘Handsome and distinguished and … And dignified.’

‘I have my knife and fork,’ I remarked, smiling at her.

Frosya did not acknowledge my little irony but said solemnly, ‘You have always done us proud, dear Shurik.’

Her fingers began to quiver, ever so slightly. I knew what was going through her mind. It had pestered her all day. Whilst I was out walking, she must have had a miserable time wondering.

‘Don’t be afraid, Frosya,’ I calmed her, talking her hand. ‘Be brave.’

She gazed momentarily into my face then averted her eyes as if she might find the truth there and discover it was not the truth she sought.

‘Have you decided, Shurik?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘I have more or less decided.’

‘More or less?’ she asked fearfully.

‘More or less,’ I confirmed. ‘How can I be sure, a hundred percent certain? I am not a soothsayer.’

‘But what if…?’

‘Life is filled with what ifs,’ I interrupted her. ‘Neither you nor I can do a thing about them.’ I placed my hand over hers to comfort her. ‘Dear Frosya,’ I said, ‘allow me this much, that you trust me not to be, at least on this one occasion, the old dolt you know I am.’

She steeled herself. For a moment, her lips went into a narrow line as she told herself to be stalwart. Then, disengaging her hand from mine, she touched the lapel of my jacket and said, her voice not quite breaking, ‘I’m a foolish woman.’

With that, she brushed past me into the room and, opening the bottom drawer of my chest, removed a thin, oblong cardboard box from it. I deliberately keep the box in there, with other objects I no longer need and a few garments now too big for my wasting frame, because I dislike it. It reminds me of the boxes Kirill produced beneath the coal wagon: ever since quitting the gulag, I have assiduously avoided the consumption of desiccated fish.

Tossing the box and lid onto my bed, Frosya turned towards me. From her fingers dangled a gold-coloured medal shaped like a star, in the centre of which was a hammer and sickle. The counterfeit gold has tarnished and, in one place, flaked off to reveal the base metal beneath.

‘I nearly forgot your medal.’ Very carefully, so as to ensure it was not on crookedly, she pinned it to my lapel, smoothing down the material and straightening my shirt collar. ‘We were so thrilled the day you were awarded it. Do you recall that day?’

‘Yes. The children in the school sang a song for me. A rather embarrassing song, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Embarrassing!’ Frosya retorted. ‘It was nothing of the sort.’

‘It sang praises.’

‘You deserved praises.’

‘For what? For being a teacher?’ I considered my words and added, ‘Perhaps, at times, the classroom was akin to a battlefield, but…’

‘For surviving,’ Frosya said. ‘For being in Myshkino and surviving.’

In silence, she led me by the hand out to the umbrella of the silver birch. I walked slowly, perhaps more slowly than usual, for I felt suddenly tired.

The table was laid with her best crockery, two plates of
vatrushka
pastries and a bowl of Trofim’s raspberries soaking in some kind of liqueur. On an upturned barrel, on loan from Komarov, stood an ancient, charcoal-fired samovar bubbling and hissing like a leaky steam train. Half a dozen chairs circled the table.

Trofim appeared, running up the garden, struggling out of his overalls as he went.

‘They’ll be here in twenty minutes!’ he called out, stopping for a moment to hop about as he extracted his legs. ‘Are you ready, Frosya?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, stressing the pronoun, ‘we are ready.’

Once out of his overalls, Trofim came to the table and surveyed the spread.

‘Everything set?’ he enquired eagerly.

‘Yes,’ Frosya repeated, somewhat irascibly, ‘everything is set. Except you.’

He made to pick up one of the pastries but Frosya pushed his hand away and briefly glowered at him.

‘Get washed and changed,’ she ordered. ‘You look and smell like a mechanic.’

‘I am a mechanic,’ he retorted, ‘and it’s the smell of work.’

‘Honest toil,’ I butted in, taking his side to annoy Frosya.

‘Honest, yes,’ she conceded curtly, ‘but filthy dirty.’ She pointed at his hands. ‘Look at your nails!’ She scolded him as if he were a ten-year-old. ‘Make sure to scrub them.’

Trofim briefly studied the clouds scudding over the village.

‘And you, Shurik, are you ready?’ he asked turning to me.

His excitement was abated now, replaced by concern. I could feel a certain trepidation lingering behind his words.

‘Yes,’ I confirmed, ‘I am ready.’

For a moment, Trofim studied my eyes, trying to put himself into my soul and learn my secret. I returned his gaze and let a hint of a smile out. He grinned and put his hand on my shoulder.

‘You old fox!’ he exclaimed then he ran towards the house.

‘He hasn’t called you that for a long time,’ Frosya remarked. ‘Do you remember?’

‘Indeed, I do,’ I answered.

Frosya followed her husband into the house and I turned my chair around so that, instead of facing the table, the lane and Myshkino beyond the garden, I looked up the slope towards the chicken run by the forest and recalled the time, years before, when Trofim caught a dog-fox.