The Industry of Souls (31 page)

I got up from my chair, my head brushing against the twigs of the silver birch, the leaves not much bigger than petals stroking my hair. Moving round the table, I stood by my cousin’s chair. After a moment, he rose to his feet and faced me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Frosya watching me. I do not think I have ever seen her look so afraid, so terribly unhappy. Beyond her, Trofim was staring at his boots.

Opening my arms, I embraced my cousin, kissing him on both cheeks in the Russian fashion. He had not shaved since the morning and I felt the light scrape of his beard just as I had, all those years before, felt Kirill’s unshaven chin scour my lips. He tasted salty, too: the tears were dribbling down his face.

‘Cousin Michael,’ I said, holding him at arm’s length, ‘I know your love for me is great and I, not you, am the honoured one. You named your first-born son after me. Had I died in the gulag, you would have kept me alive through him. And I know what you are offering me and I am truly grateful for it.’

I let go of him and took a pace backwards. The sun had shone on the wall of the house all afternoon, the warmth now radiating off it. He watched me for a moment then shifted his gaze to survey Trofim’s ordered rows of beetroots and radishes, Frosya’s tall dahlias nodding their heavy heads as if exhausted from the long summer.

‘Have you lived here since your imprisonment in the … Since they released you?’ he asked hesitantly.

Referring to the gulag seemed to embarrass him. Perhaps, I thought, the mere mention of the word prompted feelings of guilt and I thought how, throughout his life, he must have been pained whenever the word appeared before him, like Banquo’s ghost at the feast of his everyday existence. And yet, what had he to be guilty about? Nothing. I was not his responsibility.

‘When I was let out,’ I told him, ‘I came here to repay a debt to a close friend, a fellow
zek.
’ I smiled. ‘It’s been a long time since I last used that word, an abbreviation of
zaklynchenny
which means prisoner in Russian. Frosya is his daughter. She and her husband took me in.’

He was confused, could not understand why I had not headed straight for Moscow, drummed my fists on the door of the British embassy, demanded succour and a passport, a plane ticket back to London and revenge.

‘Have you repaid your debt now?’ he ventured.

‘No,’ I said with a quiet assurance which I could see perplexed him, ‘I have not. I shall never be able to settle that obligation.’

Frosya must have caught the drift of our conversation for she sucked her breath in and turned away, looking up the hill towards the chickens, into the sun. Her shadow was lengthening across the ground, almost touching my shoes. In the distance, one of the cockerels crowed. It was a cracked, imperfect
cock-adoodle-doo
, the
adoo
missing. It must be, I thought, one of the young birds yet to assert his presence amongst the hens.

‘I know what you are offering me,’ I continued, ‘and I should like very much to meet your family, especially to meet the son who bears my name into the future, who will carry me with him long after I am nothing more than dust blowing across the steppe: but I cannot accept for I cannot leave here. This is my home.’

His face was a study in disappointment. He had, in his imagination, already taken me away to the genteel, damp, green shires of England. For a moment, I wondered if he was going to try and persuade me otherwise, yet he did not.

‘Were I to come with you,’ I added, ‘I should be in an unfamiliar land, without friends. Here – well,’ I remarked, smiling at him in the hope that this might help him to truly understand, ‘I’ve grown used to the seasons. If I was to live away from Myshkino, my old bones would not know when to start twingeing at the onset of autumn.’

He returned my smile and replied, ‘I understand.’

Yet I knew he did not – indeed, he could not – truly appreciate my feelings.

It was not just a reluctance to quit my friends: I was also afraid of leaving, afraid of what England might hold. I would be a stranger there, the thought of such alienation terrifying me. It was the same fear that had governed me upon my release from the gulag which had trained me to forget, never to think of what horrors the future might bestow. In the gulag, one lived only for the present: survival was not a matter of hanging on for years, but hours.

For just a moment, I felt an intense sadness that I had not at least sent a message to my mother, to let her know I was well, had made it through, had endured the nightmare. Yet it passed for I knew, had I done so, I would have been beholden to return to England, to face an unknown future for which I was unprepared. It is better she believed me alive rather than had confirmation of it for she was, after those gulag years, less than a vague memory to me and I had replaced her, over the long years, with Work Unit 8, then Frosya and Trofim and I should not have wished her to know I did not want to return.

Now, having trained myself to put aside the past like a unmemorable book, I cannot afford to indulge in such nostalgia. To go away now would be like fulfilling one of those forbidden dreams of how life was, as Valya put it, before the world ended. A trip down memory lane invariably leads to the embalmer’s gaudy paint box and the undertaker’s marble slab.

‘But I had to come to you,’ my cousin went on lamely.

‘I know,’ I replied, ‘and I am grateful and very glad indeed you have made the journey. It has been good to meet. Perhaps, you will return to Myshkino? With your family?’ I invited him. ‘There is a house down the lane in which no one lives. It is the property of one Averky Ilich Izakov but he and his wife have emigrated and now it is empty. I’m sure we could ready it for you.’

He brightened at the prospect. His dream had been shattered but now it was reforming, like all dreams do, into a different, altogether more enticing entity.

‘I should like that very much,’ he said with a sincerity that touched me: then, realising that he was accepting an invitation he might not be able to fulfil, he cast a glance at Grigson who preempted his question.

‘Quite easily,’ the diplomat assured him. ‘There should be no problem with visas but, if there should prove to be any glitch, we would be only too pleased to sort it out. I’m certain the Russian authorities would not put up barriers.’

Frosya turned to face me, her eyes rimmed with redness.

Going to her side, I kissed her on her cheek and said, in Russian, ‘Frosya, Mr. Tibble and his family are going to visit us. Do you think the Izakovs’ old ruin might be made temporarily habitable?’

She made no reply. She just looked at me and the tears welled up once more, running down her face unchecked. Trofim came over, put his arm around my shoulder. I felt his sudden strength, born of wielding hammers and twisting wrenches.

‘So, Trofim,’ I advised, ‘you and Tolya had better get a move on with that taxi of yours.’

For another hour, we sat under the tresses of the birch. The sun crept lower and the forest darkened into a black border between the warm earth and the cooling, fading sky. When we had eaten the liqueur raspberries, Trofim fetched a bottle of Komarov’s distilled cider and we drank a toast or two. I talked of my life in Myshkino, answered my cousin’s questions, told him of my days as a teacher, of the village, the villagers and their aspirations in the new Russia.

As the twilight began to deepen, Grigson announced that they had to leave and asked me to sign a few papers which he produced from his attaché case. Frosya fetched my pen from my room.

‘These are preliminary formalities,’ Grigson began to explain.

‘I don’t want to know,’ I interrupted him. ‘At my age, who cares? I don’t need for anything.’

Without bothering to read them, I signed each page as required, but in Russian. It was then I realised I had not signed my name in English for over forty-five years.

‘When would you like me to return?’ my cousin asked as we shook hands by the vehicle. The driver, a Muscovite, had opened the doors, the scent of warm leather mingling with the perfume of Frosya’s night stock, the plants opening their flowers, now the sun was down, in readiness for the evening’s little moths which had spent their day in the goat’s meadow.

‘Don’t leave it too long,’ I answered. ‘I’m an old man, I won’t last forever. Come next month. In the autumn. The forests are exquisite as the leaves fall.’

‘Very well,’ he declared. ‘Next month.’

As he climbed into the vehicle, Trofim suddenly spoke in English.

‘Sir, Mikhail,’ he addressed my cousin, ‘what is this car?’

‘A Land Rover,’ my cousin replied.

‘Lan’d Rover,’ Trofim repeated. ‘It’s very good.’

The Muscovite leaned out of the driver’s door and said in Russian, ‘Forget it, friend. It costs more than your entire village.’

I unpinned the medal from my lapel and handed it to my cousin.

‘Give this to your son. To Alexander.’

‘What is it?’ he wanted to know.

I was about to explain but Frosya, not to be outdone by Trofim’s brief venture into English, said, ‘It is the sign of a good man in Russia.’

12

The bonfire is dying down now, the ashes grey as newly spewed larva, the embers glowing like the heart of the world. The more substantial boughs flare every few minutes as a breeze fans them and, when one splits, it raises a display of sparks which rise into the sky and are lost amongst the stars. The thin smoke is delicately scented for some of the wood was donated by Komarov who has recently felled a diseased apple tree in his orchard, replacing it, as local custom demands, with a sapling initially watered with cider to – as Komarov puts it – give it legs.

All around the fire, people are sitting on chairs or benches which they carried into the field just after dark. Some talk, some laugh and joke, some stare at the fire, some at the sky, some at the black forest across the river where time is held captive. The children are here, too. The older ones tussle and chatter, the younger hold close to their parents because the night is dense outside the sphere of the firelight and they have been warned of the sprites which inhabit the shadows and snatch those that do not do as they’re told. A few have fallen asleep in their mother’s arms or curled up on the soft grass by her side, covered by a shawl.

I sit on my usual chair brought down for me from under the silver birch: it is the one to the shape of which I have grown accustomed over the years. I am wearing a thick woollen sweater which the Merry Widow has knitted for me as a birthday gift. Perhaps she is not so keen to bury me after all. At least, not in the ground. I suspect she would rather bury me in her somewhat capacious bosom or the folds of her bed. What does she see in me! I can hardly be a stud and she is still young enough – just – to want the occasional tupping.

My front is hot. The heat from the fire, even now that the flames have dropped and we have drawn our seats closer, is still intense, penetrating. If I were to sit a metre nearer, the wool on the sweater would scorch.

Frosya gets up and, with a long stick, rakes several potatoes out of the ashes, skewering them onto forks and handing them round. The skins are charred but the flesh inside will be soft, almost powdery and sweet. I recall another fire, under another sky long ago, and potatoes cooked in the ashes.

Trofim hands round bottles of Gigulovsky. He passes my chair, winks at me and hands me one.

Out of the darkness a voice says, ‘What I’d give for a Russian beer…’

It is so loud, I almost turn round.

Perhaps, I consider, just as all my present friends sit here in the warm light of the fire with me so, in the chilly darkness, linger all my past comrades in adversity.

I glance up. A meteor sparks briefly across the sky. I do not consider it to be a fragment of a far-off place, to which I may or may not aspire when I shuffle off this one.

No. It is Avel in his MiG-15, chasing after eternity.

‘So, Shurik,’ someone calls from across the fire. ‘It’s your turn. Tell us a story.’

‘I am no story-teller,’ I call back.

‘A man of your advanced years has a million stories,’ Yuri says and, as he did this afternoon, immediately realises he’s blundered again.

‘Don’t look now,’ Komarov says, ‘but your foot’s in your mouth, teacher.’

‘For a schoolmaster, you’ve a great taste in shoes,’ Father Kondrati remarks dryly.

Everyone laughs but I am not that easily let off the hook.

‘Come along, Shurik!’ Tolya demands. ‘Give us a tale.’

What shall I tell them? That I once ate a mammoth steak above the Arctic Circle? That I did not share my bucket of oily hot water with a man whose soul was frozen? Or shall I speak of Valya who, like me, right now, could smell burning apple wood?

There is another voice in the darkness. It is not as close as the other but comes from some way off, up by the tethered, belligerent goat.

‘Come along, Shurik,’ it chides me, ‘tell them a good one.’

‘Very well,’ I concede, but not just to Tolya.

I take a swig of the beer to lubricate my throat and place the bottle on the ground by my chair.

‘There was an Armenian,’ I begin, ‘who went on a tour of Belarus.’

In the darkness, there is laughter already. They know this one, my old comrades-in-chains.

‘He was driving along one day when he saw a man selling something at the roadside. He stopped and got out. The man had a tray of small, round black balls. “What are these?” the Armenian asked. “They’re learning pills,” replied the Russian. “How much are they?” the Armenian enquired. “Ten dollars each. Hard currency.”’

My! How they are laughing back there in the black corners of the night!

‘The Armenian bought two and promptly ate them. “Blessed Jesus!” he exclaimed. “They taste like goat shit.” “There you go,” replied the Russian. “You’re learning already.”’

Tolya weeps with mirth. Komarov spills his beer. Trofim splutters: I have caught him in mid-swallow.

Up the hill, the truculent goat bleats once.

Someone has passed it by on their way into the future.

The laughter subsides.