The Industry of Souls (30 page)

Without hurrying – for who hurries at my age except towards the grave? – I turned my chair round and self-consciously straightened my jacket.

The hour had, at last, come.

*   *   *

The vehicle was large and dark green, an hybrid between an African game safari truck and a saloon, with wide diameter tyres on silvered wheels shaped like three pointed stars. The windows were tinted and, on the right hand corner of the bonnet, was a short, chromium-plated flagstaff with a tiny crown surmounting the top. Beneath it, a flag was furled in a white canvas sleeve.

It did not stop at the gate but passed slowly by, rocking gently over the ruts in the lane, the suspension smooth. I tried to make out the occupants but they were mere shadows through the tinting of the glass. A little way beyond the edge of Trofim’s plot, it halted and turned round. On the rear door was mounted a spare wheel in a black cover upon which was the stylised drawing of a mountain peak, the word
Discovery
printed beneath it in script.

Back once more at the gate, it halted, facing down the lane towards the village. The engine fell silent. A man stepped down from the driver’s door, opening the passenger door. At the same time, a tall young man in his thirties with a trim moustache and wavy hair, dressed smartly in immaculately laundered grey trousers and a dark blue blazer, came round the rear of the vehicle and stood deferentially to one side as a second passenger alighted. He was in his late middle age, balding and very slightly stooping. He wore a charcoal suit with a light pink cotton shirt, a maroon cravat knotted at his throat.

For a few moments, they stood by Trofim’s gate whilst the driver removed a small attaché case from the front seat and handed it to the younger man. They exchanged glances then started forward, the driver swinging the gate open but not following them as they made their way up the path.

Trofim met them in front of the house. There were brief introductions before they proceeded on round the corner of the house and across to the birch tree under the canopy of which I was seated at the table. The samovar domestically bubbled. A wasp, perhaps having abandoned Komarov’s cider press, hovered over the pastries. Frosya, standing by my side, flicked it away then rested her hand on my shoulder, giving it a slight squeeze.

‘We love you, Shurik,’ she whispered. It might have been a plea.

The younger man with the attaché case came briskly up to the table, holding out his hand. I stood up, Frosya’s hand slipping from my shoulder.

‘Mr. Bayliss,’ he greeted me in perfect Russian, ‘how do you do? I’m Geoffrey Grigson, deputy head of mission at the Moscow embassy.’

‘Mr. Grigson,’ I replied, taking his hand. His fingers were firm, not too hard in their grip but resolute, confident. ‘I’m well, thank you. Please,’ I indicated the chair next to me, ‘do sit down.’

He ignored my suggestion, placing his leather case on a different chair. There was a gold crown embossed just above the polished brass clasp.

‘I am sure you realise who this is, from my letter,’ Grigson said, urbanely. ‘May I introduce Michael Tibble?’

The older man stepped forward. He was almost reticent, plainly ill at ease and unsure of himself. His face was grave, his eyes meeting mine then, for a moment, diffidently eluding them before returning to almost bore into me. Taking my hand, he held it rather than shook it.

‘It is so very good to meet you at last,’ he said in English. His voice was soft, kindly but in the detached way of a doctor at the bedside of a sickly child. ‘I have thought long about this moment.’

‘Welcome to Russia,’ I replied, in English. ‘And to the village of Myshkino. Do you speak Russian?’

‘I’m afraid I do not,’ he answered and I had the distinct feeling he was somehow afraid of me: certainly, he was in awe of me.

‘Very well,’ I declared. ‘Whilst you and I speak, let us communicate in English but, if I talk to the others, it will be in Russian. I hope you will not mind. They may understand what we are saying but they are not sufficiently fluent in English to reply.’

He nodded and said, ‘Of course, I quite understand. I am, I regret, a typical Englishman, reasonably articulate in my own language but ignorant of all others except a smattering of schoolboy French.’

I introduced Frosya first to Grigson then to Michael Tibble. Trofim guided everyone to seats, Tibble sitting opposite me across the table, Grigson at his side. Frosya fussed about at the samovar, serving tea and putting small plates before each of us.

‘So,’ I said at last, when the tea was poured and the cups steamed up into the shafts of late sunlight coming through the branches of the birch, ‘you must now tell me. How are we…?’

‘I am your aunt’s son,’ Tibble interrupted, eager to get the information out as if he was confessing to his interrogator. I had seen others behave just so before an overseer or a KGB inquisitor: speak fast, get it over with quickly. ‘Your father, Alan, had a much younger sister called Marion who married Arthur Tibble, my father. He was a tailor, in Leicester. They had two children, myself and my younger brother, Stephen.’

‘Then we are cousins,’ I remarked, trying to recall him but with little success.

‘Yes,’ he said. There was a distinct sense of relief in his voice. His confession, as it were, was being believed.

‘And now, if I may, let me ask you a few more questions,’ I continued. ‘My father, what became of him?’

Tibble looked afraid once more, embarrassed by the fact that he possessed the knowledge I was after.

‘Your father,’ he began, ‘was my uncle. I knew him…’

‘Mr. Tibble,’ I cut in, ‘do not be concerned for me. I am asking these questions out of curiosity. Nothing more. Your answers will not upset me, will not disturb me. I am – how shall we put it? – merely filling in a few potholes in the road of my life. After an existence such as mine has been, there are probably as many as in the lane.’ I smiled to put him at his ease: he half smiled back at me and picked up his tea cup. He needed desperately to do something with his hands. ‘As you will by now know, having driven from Moscow, there are many potholes in Russian roads so it follows that there may be just as many in the roads of a man’s life in Russia.’

‘Your father died in 1968,’ he said quietly. ‘He had been ill for a short while, then pneumonia set in. He was in no pain…’

‘And my mother?’ I enquired.

‘Aunt Bea…’

He paused and sipped his tea, putting the cup down on its tiny saucer. The china chimed for his hand was unsteady. This meeting was, I realised, and contrary to my expectations, far more of a tribulation for him than it was for me. I had expected to be the one who was afraid and yet now, faced with this man and the trim diplomat next to him across the table at which I have sat for years, I was quite composed, at ease with myself and the whole world. My heart was not beating more than marginally faster than usual. I felt calm and strangely serene.

‘My mother’s name was Beatrice,’ I confirmed.

‘Aunt Bea died in 1986. She was eighty-eight, living in a nursing home in the West Country.’

‘Did you know her well?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was her favourite, so to speak. After you went missing, she … She needed a son,’ he added bleakly, almost guiltily.

‘And was she ill also?’

‘No, she passed away in her sleep after a tiring day trip to a matinée performance in the local theatre, with a dozen of her friends from the retirement home. Aunt Bea found a great delight in the theatre.’

Give all the detail you can, I thought. The more the merrier. Detail gives veracity.

‘Thank you, Mr. Tibble,’ I said. ‘I am very grateful to you.’

A weight seemed to lift from him. He picked up his tea cup again but, this time, his hand was steadier. His confession had been heard and found credible.

At that point, I too sipped my tea but not because I had to find a diversion: it was simply that I was thirsty. Grigson snapped open the flap of his attaché case and handed me a manila envelope.

‘The Foreign Office thought you might like these,’ he said. ‘They are copies of your parents’ death certificates, your mother’s final will and testament in addition to some of the correspondence which has accrued over the years.’

I accepted the envelope but did not open it.

‘Aunt Bea’s will,’ Tibble volunteered, ‘mentions you.’

At this juncture, he clearly expected me to remove the contents of the envelope, which was not sealed down: yet I did not for I had no desire to open such a Pandora’s box of personal history. My history, I considered, looking around me at Trofim’s vegetables, Frosya’s flowers, the Merry Widow’s house and, over to the side, the field with the belligerent goat tethered in it, was here, not in some faraway place represented by a few documents in an official envelope.

‘I would rather not read these papers at present,’ I said.

‘Perhaps you should,’ Tibble suggested tentatively. ‘You see, Aunt Bea – your mother, that is – never really accepted that you were dead.’

‘She believed,’ Grigson interrupted, ‘that you had been involved in a spying mission, had been caught and imprisoned. For years, she wrote letters to successive Foreign Secretaries every time there was a Cabinet reshuffle, to members of Parliament, to the Russian ambassador. She even wrote to Khruschev.’

‘Did she receive an answer?’ I enquired.

‘Much to everyone’s astonishment, she did. A personal one, at that,’ Grigson declared.

‘It’s in the envelope,’ Tibble said.

I handed the packet to Frosya and said, in Russian, ‘This, dear Frosya, you must read. There is a letter in here from Khruschev. No doubt,’ I added to Grigson, still speaking in Russian, ‘it denies all knowledge of my existence? I was simply drowned after my car went into the Elbe.’

‘Near Torgau,’ Grigson responded, also in Russian. ‘That was the official Moscow line. It was doubted, naturally and, to be truthful, the file was left open until the mid-Sixties. Reports from operatives and moles were received from time to time to the effect that you had at least not been drowned but, with an absence of concrete proof one way or the other, London finally concurred with the Russian statement and the dossier was no longer active. Moscow remained, of course, resolute. Your mother was, however, adamant that you had been working for MI5 and chased the matter for years. She wanted you exchanged for agents we had caught, demanded acknowledgement of your alleged espionage role and actually petitioned the Queen to have you awarded a medal. To be frank, your mother caused a bit of a ruckus and was regarded, according to inter-departmental correspondence, with no small degree of sceptical annoyance.’ He hesitated for a moment then went on, ‘I apologise now, on behalf of Her Majesty’s government…’

I put my hand up and said, ‘Mr. Grigson, there is no need for that and, as for a medal,’ I added, touching my lapel, ‘you can see I received one after all.’

Grigson smiled and replied, ‘For meritorious service to the Soviet Union. Not exactly the medal your mother had in mind.’

Frosya held the letter out, a look of near wonderment on her face.

‘It is from Khruschev!’ she exclaimed.

‘What does it say?’ I asked.

‘What do you expect?’ Trofim replied sarcastically, reading it over her shoulder. ‘A railway voucher to Sosnogorsklag?’

‘It denies you ever existed,’ Grigson stated, bringing our conversation back to English. ‘The usual regrets but nothing more.’

‘Yet now,’ Tibble said, ‘we know Aunt Bea was right all along.’

‘I am curious to know how you discovered my whereabouts,’ I said.

‘Since the collapse of the USSR, KGB archives are now open to scrutiny,’ Grigson explained. ‘An historian going through the files stumbled upon yours a little over a year ago and contacted the embassy. They forwarded the report to London in the diplomatic bag and a senior secretary with a lot of years under his belt remembered the brouhaha your mother had kicked up. From there, it was just a matter of research, going through registration of births and deaths to trace relatives. Finding your cousin, we passed the information on to him.’

‘When I received the information,’ Tibble carried on, ‘I contacted a society which looks into the matter of people who were lost in the gulag. They traced you. I then contacted the Foreign Office…’

‘…and here we are!’ Grigson explained.

Frosya returned Khruschev’s letter to the envelope taking, I noticed, a peek inside as she did so: then she checked everyone’s cup, refilling them and handing round her
vatrushki.
Tibble took one and placed it upon his plate but made no effort to eat it. I helped myself to two and set about consuming them. Frosya’s pastries are the best in the village. Even Andryukha the baker has begrudgingly admitted as much.

‘Tell me, Mr. Tibble, what is your job?’ I asked.

‘I am an accountant,’ he answered, ‘with my own practice. Tibble and Partners. I have two boys…’ He reached into the interior pocket of his suit jacket and removed a brown leather wallet from which he extracted a colour photograph, handing it to me across the table. It showed two young men standing next to a woman wearing an ankle-length flower print dress.

‘This is your family?’ I surmised.

‘My wife, Rosemary,’ Tibble continued, ‘and my sons. Simon is on the left. He is the younger and works with me in the firm. My older son has just graduated from university.’

‘What did he study?’ I enquired.

‘Chemical engineering,’ Tibble said.

I looked at the photograph once more but did not see this stranger’s family: instead, I saw Frosya as a little girl beside her mother.

‘What is your older son’s name?’ I asked.

Frosya put her hand on mine. She had understood the conversation and, with her intuition, saw where it was going. I gave her a quick glance, saw the fear in her eyes once more, and smiled to alleviate it.

‘Alexander,’ he replied quietly. ‘Aunt Bea requested it. She did not want your name to die.’ He picked his
vatrushka
up. It was no longer a pastry but a punctuation mark in the paragraph of his emotions. Yet he still did not put it to his lips. Instead, he returned it to his plate and continued, ‘Simon is soon to be married and Alexander…’ He gave Grigson a quick look as if he was about to enter upon an argument and wanted to be sure of his allies before he opened his mouth. ‘My wife and I wondered if you would like … We would be honoured…’