The Industry of Souls (29 page)

It was a late August afternoon, not unlike today’s. The leaves were just considering turning from the dark green of summer to the russets and browns of autumn. The chickens in the pen beyond the vegetable plot were beginning to return to their roosts in the ramshackle hen-house Kirill had made on his last leave before history in the form of a KGB squad caught up with him. Others were flapping in their ungainly fashion into the oak tree above the hen-house. Suddenly, they all started to kick up a boisterous palaver. Trofim arrived just in time to see a fox heading into the trees with a hen in its teeth. He ran after it, throwing a heavy stick at it, but the missile fell far short and the fox sprinted away in a blizzard of off-white feathers.

When he came back to the house, Trofim was furious and all for borrowing one of Sergei Petrovich’s shotguns. He set off for our neighbour’s house but discovered Sergei was absent on a hunting trip in the forest.

‘Never mind,’ Frosya stated stoically when he came back empty-handed. ‘The fox should live and we have plenty of chickens. We can spare him one.’

His anger abating, Trofim begrudgingly agreed but, the next night, a cockerel went. He constructed a heavy wooden cage trap, baiting it with a live hen. Sure enough, the following morning, the door was down and a fox’s snout was to be seen testing the air between the bars which he had already started to maul. Hoisting the cage onto his barrow, Trofim set off down the path with it heading for the gate. His intention was to throw the whole thing in the river and drown the occupant.

‘So you have him,’ Frosya remarked as he reached the porch where she and I were sitting peeling beetroots.

‘The thief is in the dungeon,’ Trofim replied triumphantly.

‘And his punishment?’ I asked.

‘Ten years without the right of correspondence,’ Trofim replied grimly.

I knew that euphemism: in the old days, when men were afraid to sneeze in case atishoo sounded like Stalin, it was the official court declaration of a sentence which inevitably led, within the hour, to a firing squad in the prison yard and a hastily excavated pit in the woods ten kilometres out of town.

Frosya put down her knife and went across to peer into the trap.

‘He is so magnificent,’ she said almost wistfully. ‘Come, Shurik, look at him.’

I joined her and bent close to the bars. The fox was in its autumn colours, its coat a rich red-brown, its nose as black and shiny as an officer’s polished leather pistol holster. The tip of its brush was dark and it had a white streak on its chest. As my face came into its view, it flattened its ears and snarled.

‘Must you kill him?’ Frosya asked, returning to her chore. ‘Surely he will have learnt his lesson, being trapped. Now he will keep away from us.’

‘And do what?’ Trofim rejoined. ‘Go after Arseny’s chickens instead of ours? Or Roman’s ducks? Besides, do criminals learn? What of the recidivist?’

Frosya shrugged. Both Trofim and I knew that shrug.

‘Could you not take it far off into the forest and let it go?’ I suggested.

‘Then he would die,’ Frosya said, ‘more slowly than if you threw him in the river. He would be out of his home range, competing with local foxes. They would chase him, attack him, wound him, tear his leg off.’

She dropped a peeled beetroot into a pail at her side and, for a fleeting second or two, I was back in Hut 14 and Genrikh was doing his stuff.

Trofim stood with his hands on the shafts of the barrow. He could sense the hidden admonishment in her words.

‘If you want to drown him,’ she continued after a pause, ‘you can’t do it in the trap. The trap will float. If you weight it, you’ll not be able to lift it to drop it off the bank. Or over the parapet of the bridge. You’ll need to take the fox out and put him in a sack.’

Trofim thought for a minute and lowered the barrow onto its legs.

‘Very well, I shall keep the fox until Sergei returns. Then I shall borrow his gun.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘Bang! Finished. Quick, clean, no pain.’

‘No correspondence,’ I said.

Frosya started on another beetroot and observed, ‘Sergei will be away three weeks. Masha told me. You can’t keep the fox in the trap that long.’

At this, I could see Trofim was getting cross but he suppressed his anger.

‘I’ll sort something out,’ he grunted and, turning the barrow round, stomped off along the path, going back the way he had come.

All afternoon, Trofim stayed away from the house. We saw him on occasion heading into the village but Frosya made no attempt to call to him. At dusk, he appeared on the porch with his arms akimbo.

‘Right!’ he said sharply. ‘Come and see.’

We followed him to a patch of beaten earth in the middle of the vegetable garden, about halfway between the house and the chickens, where there stood a wire run about four metres long, two high and three wide with a wooden hutch at one end and a basin of water sunk in the ground at the other.

‘Satisfied?’ he growled.

Frosya smiled and put her hand on his arm.

‘It’s good,’ she declared. ‘It will do and, when the fox has gone, we can use it to raise chicks.’

‘Won’t he dig himself out?’ I wondered aloud.

‘There’s five gauge mesh under the earth,’ Trofim replied curtly. ‘He’s not going anywhere.’

Within a week, the presence of the fox was shown to have benefits. For the whole summer, the vegetable plot had been regularly visited by a number of the feral cats which lived around the village. Not only had they liberally used it as a feline latrine, spraying the cabbages and defecating on the radishes but they had fought with Murka, bloodily ripping her ear. Nothing Trofim could do dissuaded them from visiting: pepper had no effect and a salutary fistful of gravel only worked if you caught them in the act. However, the scent of the fox drove them away. What was more, the rats which habitually lived around the chickens also seemed to diminish in numbers and the rabbits which came in from the fields to denude the carrots disappeared completely.

Frosya stopped by the fox run regularly throughout the day. At first, the animal remained in the hutch during daylight but, growing used to her visits, it started to come out to laze in the sun. She gave it water, fed it scraps and, when one of Roman’s ducks was hit by a passing lorry, she presented it with the mangled carcass. In a fortnight, she was able to briefly stroke it.

Her familiarity with the fox irked Trofim. He kept his annoyance under control until one evening when, on his way to lock the chickens up, he discovered Frosya sitting in the run with the fox lying at her side as she ran her fingers along its side.

‘Bring it in the house, why don’t you!’ he exclaimed peevishly.

‘He’s not a pet,’ Frosya answered calmly, ‘he’s a wild animal.’

Yet, when Sergei returned, Trofim did not approach him for the loan of his shotgun.

I visited the fox from time to time and it grew accustomed to my presence, too. Ever since the day it was released into its run, I felt a strange kinship with it. It was in prison, as assuredly as I had been and I was certain, in its own way, it felt as I had felt. Even dozing in the shade of the hutch, a luxury I had rarely been afforded in Sosnogorsklag 32, I could sense its heavy heart, its inner misery which did not show on the outside but which I knew dwelt far within the creature’s soul. Perhaps, I wondered, it dwelt in its mind in a wondrous forest, lingering in dark corners of its canine subconscious just as the marvellous garden had done in my own.

‘It is time,’ Frosya declared one evening in late October, ‘to let the fox go.’

‘Let it go?’ Trofim replied incredulously. ‘You mean kill it? I could cure the pelt and we could sell it. Fox fur is fetching a good price in Zarechensk. Or you can have it,’ he added with a certain sardonic touch to his voice. ‘Your coat needs a new collar.’

Frosya ignored his remark and said, ‘I mean let him go. Not kill him. He will do us no harm.’

Trofim snorted. ‘No harm? The minute it’s out of that run, it’ll be through the hen house like a rabbit down a row of radishes.’

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he realised what he had said, understood what Frosya’s plan had been all along and grinned sheepishly.

‘If I am wrong,’ Frosya said, ‘if the fox takes so much as a mouthful of feathers, you can fetch Sergei’s gun and sell the pelt.’

The next day, the air chilly and the sunlight crisp, Frosya went to the run to bade the fox farewell. I followed her, entered the run for the first time and watched as the creature brushed against her legs, sniffing at the leather of her boots and raising its nose to catch her scent. She squatted down, the fox rubbing against her thigh and nuzzling her fingers for a titbit. She gave it an egg, warm from the nesting box. It took it delicately in its sharp teeth, not cracking the shell until it was a few paces off: then, holding the egg between its paws, it capped it at its pointed end with the expertise of a cook and lapped the contents.

‘Do you think, Shurik, he is now – how shall we put it? Politically educated?’

I smiled and answered, ‘Do you think I am?’

She laughed lightly and the fox, alerted by her laugh, stopped lapping and cast a quick, cautious glance at us.

‘If he is not,’ she reached out and stroked the animal’s back to reassure it, her fingers drawing lines in the creature’s fur which had thickened up for the coming winter, ‘his coat will soon adorn someone else. In Moscow.’

The fox finished the egg, sat on its haunches and licked its muzzle. Frosya stepped back and we left the run, leaving the door open. At the edge of the vegetable plot, we halted and watched the fox.

For a minute or two, it remained where it was, its tongue wiping the last vestiges of yolk from its whiskers and licking traces of albumen off its front paws.

‘Do you recall the day they left your cage door open?’ Frosya asked quietly.

I made no reply, but I could remember it. Standing to attention in front of the commanding officer’s desk, he handed me the release document.

‘Prisoner B916,’ he announced laconically. ‘You are hereby released from your imprisonment. You have served your sentence. A travel warrant is arranged for you. You will be taken to the railway terminus at thirteen hundred hours. Collect your belongings from your hut, report to the quartermaster at eleven-thirty hours.’

He hammered several purple rubber stamps onto the document, initialled them and held it out to me. I took it in silence.

‘Have you nothing to say?’

‘Thank you, Grazhdanin Nachalnik,’ I replied, nonplussed.

‘Where do you intend to go?’ he enquired.

I folded the document. My mind was quite blank. The inconceivable, the one thing none of us ever gave thought to except in the darkest of moments, for fear of creating a void of hope in our souls, had happened.

‘Will you go home?’ the
nachalnik
enquired.

I made no response. Home was not a concept with which I was familiar any longer. He grew angry.

‘
Ubiraisya
!’ he exclaimed impatiently. ‘Go on! Bugger off!’

As I crossed the compound, my head was swirling with near panic: yet, underlying it, I felt a terrible sadness creeping over me like night moving inexorably across the tundra and, beneath that, I realised home, for me, was Hut 14. I could recall nowhere else. Memories of my early life a quarter of a century before had faded, like photos of the dead. A few names lingered but I could put no faces to them, no sound of a voice, not even a familiar location.

The only voice I heard clearly was Kirill’s.

‘Look!’ Frosya said softly.

Quite suddenly, the fox had tensed. His ears were pricked and tuned to the main chance. His eye was bright.

‘He has seen his future,’ I whispered.

Frosya took my hand in hers, gripping it tightly. The fox looked at the open door, pressed his belly to the ground and started to slink slowly towards it. At the threshold, he halted and put just his nose over the wooden sill.

I had done much the same at the gate of Sosnogorsklag 32, had stopped at the white line over which no one could pass until counted off, waited a moment, tested the air as if I might smell the catch. Yet there was none. The guard by the door of the rundown prison bus shouted, ‘You! Get a fucking move on!’ And I remember, for a moment, I had not realised he was addressing me for it was the first time in 26 years that I had been addressed by a guard without his using my number.

The fox put one paw over the sill, tentatively, like a swimmer testing the temperature of the sea before stepping into the waves. I looked down. In my mind’s eye, I could see my foot lift, go forward, cross the line.

‘He’s going,’ Frosya murmured.

The fox, realising the coast was clear, moved warily out of its gaol and stood on the path, the sun glistening on its fur.

‘Will he run for it?’ Frosya pondered quietly.

‘No,’ I told her. ‘He’s no fool.’

Sure enough, the fox did not sprint for cover but made its way leisurely along the path towards the chickens. Its brush trailed behind it, swaying up and down to its step that had an almost jaunty pride about it which, in the same circumstance, my own had not for I was tired and afraid of what my future might hold whilst the fox was ready for whatever eventuality might arise. The hens, seeing it coming, took to the oak tree in a cacophony of annoyed clucking. The fox ignored them and kept going until it reached the edge of the forest. There, for a brief moment, it paused: and in my mind I, too, paused before putting my foot on the lower step of the prison transport.

‘What is he thinking?’ Frosya mused.

‘He is savouring,’ I said, ‘the wonder of his liberty.’

Then he was no more, dissolved into the shadows of the trees as old as time.

‘Are you sad he’s gone?’ I asked.

‘No. I am happy. For him,’ she half-whispered.

The door of the house opened and Frosya came out, walking swiftly over to check up on the samovar. Behind her, I could hear scrubbing as Trofim laboured to shift the grime of the garage from beneath his fingernails.

From the other end of the village, I heard a vehicle approaching. I could tell from the sound of the engine it was diesel powered. Yet this was no stuttering, smoke-belching Russian motor. This was a smooth-running, well-lubricated, expertly-maintained foreign machine. It was in a low gear and I could imagine the driver swinging the wheel from side to side to avoid the potholes and ridges in the lane.