The Industry of Souls (3 page)

One of Trofim’s cockerels crowing in the distant brought me back to my senses and I glanced at my watch. It was time for me to go, to set off on my constitutional, to go and meet all those who would pass the time of day with me and who, according to Frosya, were keen to talk to me, to see me on my birthday.

My daily walk is important to me: I may be old and becoming frail but I like to keep myself fit and my daily neighbourhood perambulation sees I stay in good condition, body and brain.

As Kirill always said, a fit man fights and therefore survives whilst a weak man wails and goes to the wall.

2

I first met Kirill in the primary shaft chamber on Gallery B of the coal mine six kilometres from Sosnogorsklag 32 labour camp.

After descending for two levels, the wire mesh door of the lift cage was opened by a shifty little man not over one and a half metres tall whose large skull with its bulbous forehead and huge hands were out of all proportion to the remainder of his body.

‘Get out! Get out!’ he squeaked in a falsetto voice. ‘Line up! Line up! You!’ He pointed at me then at the rock face behind me. His arms were short and also incongruous. ‘Mr. Soft Hands! Form a rank! Form a rank!’

I moved back. The dozen or so other new arrivals joined me, chivvied onto parade by the miniature martinet.

‘Silence! No communication!’ he shrilled again.

The cage door was slammed across, the safety bar swung down into place and the cage began its descent down the mine shaft, the cables humming, the grease on the guide wheels sucking.

Standing with my spine pressed to the rock, I studied the subterranean world into which I had been plunged, no wiser nor any more blessed than a kitten, surplus to the breeder’s requirement, dropped onto the carpet to the sound of water being run into a pail.

The main shaft contained two cages, one for the transportation of miners and the other for trucks of coal. The passenger cage had a sliding door to it but the truck cage door had been welded shut. Gallery B was mined out and was now used, I discovered from a board bolted to the rock, as a storage area. From the roof were suspended bare 60 watt light bulbs protected from breakage by wire baskets and hanging at five metre intervals. I could see them disappearing down the perspective of the gallery which ran off at right angles to the shaft, curving gradually out of sight as the tunnel turned to the left. Water dripped with melancholic monotony from a pipe overhead into a puddle below but, when I pressed my hands against the rock behind my back, I was surprised to find it dry and cool.

From a side chamber a little way down the gallery appeared three men who came towards us. As they passed under a light, their faces were momentarily illuminated from above, casting strange shadows downwards across their features.

‘Attention! Attention!’ squealed the little man. All his orders seemed to be repeated. The men drew closer. He waited until they were not ten metres away then he shouted, ‘You! Mr. Soft Hands! Stop shuffling! Stop shuffling!’

I was standing quite still. He was blustering for effect.

‘Shut up, troglodyte!’ said the tallest of the men. The martinet stepped aside and gave a semi-salute.

Despite his prison cropped hair, the grimy coating of coal dust blotching his skin as if he were in the early stages of leprosy, his grey and filthy uniform, he cut a handsome figure. His eyes, surrounded by two circles of comparatively clean skin, were filled with humour, his lips just touched by the faintest of wry smiles.

‘Number off,’ he commanded.

We each announced ourselves by our prison numbers. Mine was B916. Our voices sounded dull in the flat acoustics of the shaft chamber.

‘Good!’ he exclaimed and he ran his eye over us. We might have been auditioning for some macabre play. ‘So you are all new to the gulag,’ he divined accurately. ‘New to the concept that Labour is Dignity.’ There was an unmistakable sarcasm to his voice. ‘Has anyone here less than twenty years?’

I glanced along the line. No one put up their hand or stepped forward.

‘In that case,’ he said with a grandiloquent and ironic sweep of his arm, ‘welcome to the rest of your lives. And take a word of advice. Do not dream of the day of your release. Do not think about it for if you do, it will not come. Like the kettle you watch, it will not boil. Men go mad thinking about the past, the future. Here, there is no then and no next. There is only now. Live for now.’ He paused to let his words sink in. ‘There is no point in being morbid about it. Do that and you die. Inside.’ He put his hand on his chest. ‘In your heart. The blood will still pump but the spirit will be dead. The spirit is what they want to kill. Not the body. The body has a use.’

The cage sped by, heading upwards, the steel guide wheels hissing on their well-greased rails. A draft of fetid air preceded it.

‘You at the end,’ he said: it took me a moment to realise he was addressing me. ‘You come with me. The rest…’

The other two men divided the remainder of the group amongst themselves.

‘So, B916, what is your name?’ he enquired as I followed him along the wide tunnel.

‘Alexander Bayliss,’ I told him.

He stopped and studied me.

‘A good Russian name for the start. But the other? And your spoken Russian? Not so good. A curious accent.’

‘I’ve only picked it up recently,’ I admitted.

‘So where do you come from, comrade?’

‘I’m English.’

‘Ah!’ he wagged his finger at me. ‘So you are the Englishman.’ He held out his hand and I accepted it. This was the first time I had shaken a friendly hand for months: most hands I had come across had either pointed accusingly at me or slapped my face. ‘I am a Work Unit leader and you are joining my team.’ We walked on, passing a side gallery piled to the roof with crates and boxes. ‘My name is Kirill Karlovich Balashov. They call me Kirill. And you? Alexander is a bit of a mouthful. Do you know the diminutive for Alexander? It’s Shurik. So, from now on, you are Shurik.’

I nodded my head. At the next offshoot, we turned right and, in a short distance, arrived at a table upon which had been placed rows of kit.

‘Take one,’ Kirill said. ‘Don’t worry about anything but the metal hat and the gloves. If they fit, you’ll be all right. If they don’t you’ll spend twenty-odd years with your hat falling into your eyes or tipping off the back of your head.’ He grinned then added more seriously, ‘They must fit. Your life may depend upon it one day.’

I gathered up one of the piles. It consisted of a thick gauge aluminium hat, a pair of heavy duty gloves, a small hand axe and a ball-headed hammer, both attached to a worn leather belt. The hat fitted, the gloves did not. Kirill swapped them for a tighter pair then reached over to one of the other piles and removed a small battery-powered lamp from it.

‘Not everyone gets one of these,’ he said. ‘You are a lucky one.’ He flicked the switch. It did not come on. He thumped it on the table then against the palm of his hand. ‘No battery,’ he declared then, finding another lamp, he snapped open the reflector and unscrewed the bulb. ‘Get a spare. Best be on the safe side. You don’t say much.’

‘What is there to say?’ I replied and, nodding at the lamp, added, ‘Except thank you.’

Kirill laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. His teeth were white and pure against his besmirched face.

‘We’ll get along just fine. I can’t stand blabbermouthers. Put your kit on.’

When I was dressed, we returned to the main shaft, passing the other new arrivals heading for the store chamber. At the cage door, we halted. Kirill pressed a button to summon the cage. A tinny electric bell rang far above our heads.

‘This is Gallery B,’ he explained. ‘B for Beria who banged us in here.’ He smiled. ‘Two down from the surface. We are working at present on Gallery L.’

‘L for Lenin who invented Dignified Labour,’ I suggested.

For a moment, he looked at me and I felt a twinge of fear. He might, it suddenly occurred to me, have been testing me. Trust no one. That was the motto of the gulag: trust no one until you were so intimate with them that you knew the given names of every louse living in their pubic hair. Even then, you should still be wary. Yet I had no need to worry. Kirill exploded into laughter.

‘L for Lobanov who…’

The cage arrived, the noise drowning out Kirill’s metaphor. We stepped into it and descended at increasing speed, decelerating so quickly at our destination that I felt my legs bend and my head swirl. Kirill put his hand under my armpit to steady me.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said. ‘We all do. Unless you’re the troglodyte.’ He leaned conspiratorially towards me. ‘You ever wonder how the little bastard got so small?’

He opened the gate and we stepped out into Gallery L. Another prisoner carrying a wooden box got in and the cage rose out of sight.

The shaft chamber was not like that in Gallery B. A railway line ended here in a loop. Men stood around in the glare of three bare lights which did not hang from the roof but were mounted on the rock wall. Stripped to the waist, they were caked in coal dust, striped like zebras where their sweat had coursed in runnels over their skin. They wore their metal hats squarely on their heads. The air was surprisingly warm and there was quite a breeze blowing from the depths of the mine. Along the roof ran cables, pipes and a square, galvanised iron ventilation duct, air whistling out through a poorly sealed joint.

‘He was crushed?’ I asked incredulously.

‘It was his first day. At the time, the mine only went down to Gallery P. For the Politburo which pisses on us all. That was where he was headed. P is over two kilometres down. The last hundred metres … He didn’t brace himself like the old hands.’ He squeezed his palms together. ‘
Phapp
! He went from one metre eighty-seven to what you see now in less than two seconds. Thirty-nine centimetres he lost. His balls got caught between his thighs. He went from a bass to a soprano.’

‘How could he have survived?’ I said.

Kirill slapped me on the back and replied, ‘What do you think? Is the moon made of marzipan? No, it’s just my joke. A story we tell to get his goat up. His real tale is much funnier. Let’s go. I’ll tell you as we walk.’ He looked at my hands. ‘Put your gloves on.’

We set off along the gallery, keeping to one side of the railway track. Every fifty metres or so, chambers had been hollowed out on either side of the gallery. Some were shallow and empty, others filled with boxes. One had a door fastened across the entrance with a picture of a globular cartoon terrorist’s bomb nailed to the panelling.

‘The troglodyte,’ Kirill said, ‘was a trapeze clown in the Moscow State Circus. One of a troupe called the Flying Fedeyevs or something like that. All of them were dwarfs or not much bigger. They jumped and chased each other across a mesh of wires about ten metres up, scampering around like monkeys, playing the fool, bursting bladders of water, throwing talc. The children liked them. The troglodyte was the boss clown.

‘Anyway, some years ago, the circus went on tour to Czechoslovakia, giving performances at Prague, Decin, Ostrava, Brno. And Breclav. You know where that is?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘Ten kilometres from the Austrian border. The little bugger couldn’t resist it. There was the usual brigade of KGB stoolies and minders along on the tour, occupied watching who did what to whom, where and why, and noting it all down for the files. But he still thought he could outsmart them. So, you know what he did? I will tell you.’

A rumbling sound reached us. A light rocked from side to side far down the tunnel. Kirill took my arm and pulled me to one side. A train of ten trucks laden with lumps of coal and rock juddered by, towed by a much dented and scratched electric locomotive driven by a man who gave Kirill a cursory wave as he passed. Kirill nodded in reply.

‘For the climax of the act, the troglodyte dressed up as a gorilla. Blacked face, hairy suit. He swung about scratching his belly, tickling his armpits and beating his chest. The big top tent had been erected close to the railway station. He had worked out that he could swing from rope to rope across the tent, out of the big door through which they brought in the larger acts, over the guy ropes, along a heavy telephone wire to the railway line and drop onto a train heading south.

‘The show began. It was a matinée. That was his first mistake. If he had moved at night, he might have stood an outside chance. He’s not one of nature’s brightest candles. Anyway, he’s up there, monkeying about. He hears a train whistle. It’s going the right way. He’s off. The minders don’t realise he’s done a runner until he doesn’t return through the big door to take a bow and throw a bag of talc. They unholster their Makarovs and set off in hot pursuit. By the time they get outside the tent, he’s well on his way down the telephone line. They run after him, taking a pot shot or two at him to impress their officers but they miss and they can’t get near the telephone line because it’s over the other side of a tall railing fence.’

The gallery widened, the rails dividing into two to provide a passing place with a short siding running into a side tunnel. From ahead came the faint, insistent but unidentifiable sounds of machinery.

‘At last,’ Kirill recounted, ‘he gets near the train. All he has to do is swing from the telephone line to a trackside cable and then jump. The comrade brothers are going berserk. If he gets away, they’re bound for Siberia. The troglodyte gets to the train, swings out from the phone line and grabs the cable. The momentum of the swing will carry him onto the train. He swings. Next he knows, he’s in a prison ward of the local hospital with his hands bandaged, his head aching and his eyelashes gone.’

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Why don’t birds get fried on power lines?’ Kirill asked. ‘He short circuited the telephone system with the railway high voltage supply. Like any cautious trapeze artist, he didn’t let go of one hold until the next was firm.’

The noise in the gallery grew louder until it was almost deafening. The air tasted of coal dust. Ahead was the working face, men bent to hydraulic-powered drills, water spraying onto the bits where they wormed into the coal seam. Behind them, others shovelled coal into a row of parked trucks, jammed pit props into place with lump hammers and laid another section of track.