The Industry of Souls (32 page)

Authors: Martin Booth

‘A good one!’ Tolya congratulates me.

Across the fire from me, Romka is tuning his
balalaika.
Frosya and Katya, Komarov’s wife, appear from the direction of a table set up by the river bank. They each carry a tray of glasses filled with
sukhoye
, a dry sparkling wine not unlike champagne. They hand them out to everyone, even the older children. I receive mine last. As soon as the trays are put away, Romka strums a few chords by way of a drum roll of sorts.

‘Ladies and gentleman!’ Trofim proclaims rather grandly. ‘A long time ago, over twenty years, I came back from a hard day’s slog at the office…’

‘You never slogged hard at the office,’ Tolya shouts. ‘You could tell from the state of the buses.’ He makes blurting noises with his lips, imitating a poorly maintained engine.

‘A hard day’s skive at the office,’ Trofim concedes, ‘to find a scarecrow on the porch. I thought Tolya had put it there. It was,’ he takes his revenge for the interruption, ‘dressed in his latest fashion.’

Laughter greets this turning of the tables. Tolya raises his glass in acknowledgement of this attack upon his sartorial tastes, but he does not drink from it.

‘Coming up the path to my house,’ Trofim goes on, ‘you can all imagine my surprise when it moved.’

The fire gives his face a ruddy glow. The glass in my hand is cold and wet with condensation.

‘I was all for putting it out in the vegetable plot,’ he continues, ‘let it earn its keep but – well, everybody, you know Frosya. A soft heart and a loving mind, except where I’m concerned. So, we made up a spare bed and the damn thing’s lived with us ever since.’

There is a brief ripple of laughter around the fire. Frosya gives me a quick look, studies my glass to see it is charged. Trofim’s tone changes, the jocular replaced by the sober.

‘That day,’ he says, ‘Frosya and I simultaneously gained two things we lacked in our lives. We acquired in one stroke of the brush of heaven both a son and a father. From that moment on, our lives were enriched beyond our wildest dreams and, I hope you will all agree with me, our village became a different place. So, my friends…’ He looks around and everyone stands. ‘…I ask you to drink to Alexander Alanovich Bayliss, the Englishman of Myshkino whom we all call Shurik.’

‘Shurik!’ they echo him, holding their glasses up, catching the light of the burning log in the centre of the fire which has suddenly flickered into life.

Nodding appreciatively, I accept the toast, raising my glass to them in mute gratitude for their friendship and then, at last, unable to resist it any longer, I turn.

I can see no one. Yet they are there, as sure as the fire is hot, the
sukhoye
is chilled and Frosya is loving.

And I raise my glass to them, to the past, to times you would think I should rather forget and yet which I cannot because I do not wish to. For, if I forget the past, I forget them – Work Unit 8 in Sosnogorsklag 32 – and that would not be right.

‘What are you thinking?’ Frosya asks.

‘Do you really want to know?’ I reply.

‘I think I do already,’ she answers, smiling at me with such love it takes my breath away.

The darkness is silent again. They have departed now, gone their ways into hushed oblivion whence I shall join them soon enough.

‘I have spoken with Vera Dorokhova,’ Frosya continues. ‘Tomorrow, we shall start to tidy up the Izakov house. Now,’ she picks up her stick, ‘the next lot of potatoes should be done. Are you having one, Shurik?’

I decline and walk a little way from the fire towards the bank of the river. On the far side, Bratan stands watching the party. The moon is rising over the forest. It has not yet broken above the tree line but there is a pale glow where it will soon come into view.

Sipping my glass of wine, I think back over my day. In my imagination, I revisit my stroll around Myshkino, in much the same fashion as I used to stroll around my miraculous garden in the long gulag nights. One by one, I revisit Komarov’s cider shed, the school, Myshkino Motors, the church, the forest and the house where, once more, I meet the cousin I did not, until Geoffrey Grigson’s letter arrived, remember existed. I see him walk up the path, come towards me, unsure of himself. Finally, I see the envelope on the table.

After the embassy vehicle had driven down the lane and the dust had settled on Frosya’s marigolds, I emptied the envelope onto the table. It contained, as Grigson had said it did, my parents’ death certificates, the Khruschev letter, some correspondence to my mother on headed notepaper from several government ministries, a sympathetic letter from an under-secretary at Buckingham Palace expressing the Queen’s regret, and my mother’s will. I unfolded the document, typed on crisp legal stationery. One clause stood out from the rest, underlined in red crayon and initialed by both my mother and, I presume, her lawyer. It read,
In the event that my only child, Alexander David Bayliss, be not found alive on the centenary of my birth, then, at that time, the residue of my estates shall pass to Michael Ridley Tibble and his brother, Stephen Peter Tibble, or to their rightful heirs and descendants.
Attached to the last page of the will was a statement of account dated three months ago. My mother’s estate, at that time, was valued at just over £412,000.

By hunting me down, my cousin has forfeited an inheritance of a considerable sum of money. That, I consider, is the sign of a true man.

The moon is just up. It is peering over the tops of the trees, the craters as clearly defined as the ruts in the lane.

Standing by the river, with Bratan snuffling in the new moonlight, I have made a decision. I shall write to my cousin and request that, from my inheritance, a sufficient sum of money be set aside to re-equip Myshkino school, with another sum to be placed in trust to provide two scholarships per annum for pupils to travel and see the world, that they, like me, can come to understand that there is evil and there is goodness, to learn the lesson that if you kill something of beauty, two uglinesses spring up in its place. The balance after these deductions shall be divided equally between my two cousins.

Or, not quite.

I shall also request that my cousin orders one of those Land Rover vehicles. It will be dark red, have a plush leather interior and air conditioning. Along the side, in both the English and Cyrillic alphabets, I shall have painted the words
Myshkino Taxis.

Also by Martin Booth

FICTION

Hiroshima Joe

The Jade Pavilion

Black Chameleon

Dreaming of Samarkand

A Very Private Gentleman

The Humble Disciple

The Iron Tree

Toys of Glass

Adrift in the Oceans of Mercy

CHILDREN’S FICTION

War Dog

Music on the Bamboo Radio

POETRY

The Crying Embers

Coronis

Snath

The Brevities

Extending upon the Kingdom

The Knotting Sequence

Devil’s Wine

The Cnot Dialogues

Meeting the Snowy North Again

Killing the Moscs

NONFICTION

Carpet Sahib: A Life of Jim Corbett

The Triads

Rhino Road

The Dragon and the Pearl: A Hong Kong Notebook

Opium: A History

The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle

EDITED BOOKS

The Book of Cats
(with George Macbeth)

Contemporary British and North American Verse

The Selected Poems of Aleister Crowley

THE INDUSTRY OF SOULS.
Copyright © 1998 by Martin Booth. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Booth, Martin.

The industry of souls / Martin Booth.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-24203-4 (hc)

ISBN 0-312-26753-3 (pbk)

I. Title.