The Industry of Souls (6 page)

I could sense the machinations of his mind shift into motion, the gear wheels of thought beginning to churn.

‘You got it on you now?’ the Georgian enquired.

‘I’ve got it where I can get it,’ I replied, sliding my hand over my waistband.

‘What do you want for it?’

I caught Titian’s eye. He was willing me to refuse to trade, to up the stakes, to play the game.

‘I haven’t thought,’ I said. ‘What do you have?’

‘Dried fish,’ Vachnadze answered. ‘Not the usually salty shit we get in the stew. Not crushed into dust. Whole fish. Head, gills, tails – the lot.’

I pretended to give his offer consideration then rejected the offer.

‘Salted fish makes me thirsty,’ I complained.

‘And dried meat,’ Vachnadze continued.

‘What meat?’ Avel asked, joining in the conversation.

‘He doesn’t want cat,’ Kostya butted in.

‘Some beef, some reindeer,’ Vachnadze declared. ‘Good quality jerky. Tough but you can chew it or boil it.’

‘How much do you have?’ I asked.

‘Enough,’ Vachnadze assured me. ‘How much tobacco do you have?’

‘Why trade?’ Titian suggested. ‘You’re said to be a gambling man, Georgian. Make a bet. What do you say, Shurik?’

Vachnadze looked at me for confirmation of my agreement and I knew then he was hooked.

I nodded my agreement and said, I hoped not too nonchalantly, ‘Why not? I shan’t be smoking it. It seems a fair risk.’

The wager was made: forty grams of
makhorka
against two hundred and fifty grams of jerky. Then, of course, the question arose as to what the bet would be based upon. A few ideas were mooted – how many trucks full of coal would be carted in the next shift, how many times the lights would dim when the dynamite was detonated, how many drips of water would fall from a certain cracked pipe in a certain length of time. These were all discarded. What constituted a truckful of coal? It could be manipulated. Who would count the dimming of the light, which was not finite? How could we time the drips when none of us possessed a watch?

The quandary was answered by Ylli who had taken no part in the discussion at all so far. Indeed, for the preceding few days he had hardly spoken to any of us when down the mine and I had assumed he was in one of his periodic huffs. Yet it was all part of the grand design. Ylli was our ringer.

‘What have we in the mine, which is unpredictable, often seen, easily counted and does not require timing?’

Everyone looked at him.

‘Well what?’ said Vachnadze testily.

‘Mice,’ replied Ylli.

It was true. There were mice in the mine, as far down as the very bottom-most gallery. They lived by nibbling crumbs of bread the prisoners accidentally dropped, seeds carried in the mud on the soles of our boots and the packaging of machine parts: it was even rumoured they gnawed sticks of dynamite.

‘I suggest,’ Ylli said, ‘that you bet on the likelihood of a mouse appearing during the next rest period. When the blasting team blow the charges, the little buggers sometimes show their heads.’

‘What do you say?’ Titian offered. ‘If a mouse appears, Shurik gets the jerky, if no mouse turns up, you get the tobacco.’

Vachnadze thought about it for a moment before his face broke into a grin and he held his hand out.

‘Done!’ he stated.

Titian slapped his hand against Vachnadze’s and the bet was sealed.

In the next rest period, he quit his own work unit and joined us in a small side chamber quite empty of stores. We all stood in the semi-darkness alert, watching the entrance to the chamber for a mouse to enter or run by. The leader of the team setting the charges blew the long blast on his whistle, the lights flickered, there was the customary dull thump and thickening of the air.

‘That’s it,’ Vachnadze declared. ‘It was odds on no mouse would turn up. You get plenty of them in the summer months, but not so many in the winter.’ He pointed to the roughly hewn roof of the chamber. ‘It’s December up there, comrades.’

I put my hand in my clothing and tugged the packet of
makhorka
free of the lining where I had secreted it. It was forbidden to bring tobacco down the mine.

‘What’s that?’ Kirill remarked in an off-hand manner, pointing to the rear of the chamber. As our leader, he had kept himself aloof from the business of the wager.

Kostya switched on his lamp. Cowering against the rear wall was a grey mouse, its whiskers quivering and its tail straight out behind it.

‘A mouse!’ exclaimed Dmitri. ‘A bloody mouse!’

Vachnadze stared at the rodent with a mixture of annoyance and disbelief. Its beady eye shone in the lamp light: then it was gone, running for cover in a crack in the rock.

‘Some you win, comrade, some you lose,’ Titian remarked with a smirk he could not control.

Vachnadze handed over a package and stomped out of the side chamber. I replaced the
makhorka
in my clothing and shone my lamp around to see if I could catch sight of the rodent but it had vanished.

Six hours later, as we queued for the cage to lift us to the December night above, shuffling on our padded jackets in readiness for the sub-zero temperatures awaiting us, each of us chewing on a wadge of the jerky, I noticed Dmitri was holding his thumb in the palm of his hand.

‘Problem?’ I asked.

Unfurling his fingers, I saw the coal grime was darker than usual and shiny. He was bleeding from a gash behind his thumb nail.

‘No problem,’ Dmitri said.

‘Drill bit?’ I enquired. ‘If it is you’ll need to clean it well. The grease they come in…’

‘No, no drill bit,’ he cut in then, whispering, added, ‘Those little buggers have quite a bite.’

3

I have always thought myself to be safe here in Myshkino.

Not from enemies, you understand. I have no concern for them now. Most, if not all, of them have died off, or been demoted, or sacked from whatever service bound them by its codes of hate and fear. The gulag is shut for the likes of me and, until I join a crime gang in St. Petersburg and peddle dope, or attempt a coup in Moscow which fails for lack of commitment or lousy planning, it will remain closed. The only wire that holds me in now is that which also encloses Trofim’s chickens which, from time to time, I enter with a bowl of scraps or a handful of corn: the key to their door hangs by a length of string from a hook by the back door.

As I totter towards eternity, a crusty old cove in a tidy jacket in a small village in the middle of Russia, you would think I was beyond care, beyond the reach of elements that might shake my security. What, you would think, could possibly happen to the old boy now. He’s been through hell’s kitchen – and the adjacent pantry, too – and has still come out with a smile in his heart. What, you could surmise, could possibly test him further.

Until this last week, I would have agreed with the conjecture. I thought I was done with earthquakes of the soul twenty years ago when the gates of the camp swung open and I was cast adrift, a remnant of human flotsam to wash up on Frosya’s shore. Time’s passage, winter storms, angry words and aching bones held no terror for me now. I was not afraid of them. They could not affect me. But fate, carrying in its basket the disconnected fragments of a long-forgotten past – that was a different matter altogether. Believe me.

As the dawn broke this morning, to turn the eightieth page of the chronicle of my trespass upon earth, I woke to discover the relentless clock taking me closer to being tested yet once more and, as the day drew on, I sidled inexorably nearer to the moment when fate was to knock its gavel on the block and, pointing at me with a finger like a malformed talon, shriek, ‘Decide! Decide!’ And, just as it was in the gulag or down the mine, I knew I should have no choice but to square up to the inevitable, take what chance served to me and dance to the pipes of fortune.

In truth, I thought, I would rather face death than five o’clock on this sunlit day, the sky dotted with fair weather cumuli, the world at peace with itself and the harvest in the fields half done. Over towards Stargorod, the wheat is already gathered in and the barns are blizzarded by sparrows and finches. Here in Myshkino, they are still gleaning the stubble rows or filching from the uncut ears. The apples in the orchards are early this year, some already suitable for picking, the first of the ripe fruit falling into the grass which, every morning, glitters with dew bedecking the webs of field spiders. Butterflies vie with Stepanov’s bees for the bounty of the blossoms.

At least, where death was concerned, I considered, I was prepared, have been so for most of my life.

As I brushed my white and – at last – gradually thinning hair, I studied myself in the mirror. Make no mistake, mine is a face that has seen the action. Gazing into my own eyes, I could spy the past slipping by not in detailed pictures but in moments of love and hatred, terror and joy, elation and depression. The lines on my forehead are furrows you could plant seeds in yet they are not frowns of disgruntlement or cantankerous age but channels of experience, rails to guide me into my thoughts. My cheeks are slightly pink, a sort of healthy glow such as one sees in the faces of children or old men like me who might, if their minds were weak, revert to infancy, spending their days drooling, fingering their privates and waiting for the god to beckon.

Even as the bristles scarified my scalp and tidied my not-too-short locks, for an old man with hair slightly longer than decency dictates has a certain dignity, I could see particles of that past which I have so long denied, to such an extent that now it is little more than a series of disjointed shards of time, like badly edited film, connected by short breaks of darkness.

There was a dog, possibly an Old English setter with a liver and white coat, running under trees the ground beneath which was a carpet of what might have been bluebells. It must have been spring-time although of what year, or of my life, there was no way of telling. A woman in an ankle-length, dark skirt and lace-trimmed, long-sleeved cream blouse called after the dog but it ignored her and scampered on. I could not make out the features of her face nor could I hear so much as a whisper of her voice nor the faintest of yaps from the dog. This was a silent film. A flash of time’s void and a house appeared across a wide lawn. The roof was indistinct, the windows nothing more than glass oblongs reflecting a grey sky, the chimneys squat but vague although the upper section of one of them might have consisted of a pattern of double twisted bricks. All that was plain to see was a rampant wisteria hung with lilac bunches of flowers like gossamer grapes. Another flick of black and I was moving down a street, turning a corner and facing a shop the window of which was filled with colourful objects although I was not certain quite what any of them were save three. These were tall, narrow-necked glass bottles with ornate stoppers, each a metre high. One contained liquid red as a blood ruby, the second hyacinthine blue and the third chartreuse green. Above these hung a sign upon the polished black background of which were painted, in gold leaf shadowed with deep vermilion, two indistinct letters and a name I could read as clearly as I saw my own visage in the mirror.

That was enough! Be gone! I had seen sufficient to know what I am and what, as the afternoon drew to an end, I had to decide.

*   *   *

The lane outside Frosya’s and Trofim’s house is not surfaced but merely a dirt track about three metres wide running down the hill towards the centre of the village. The house is, with the Merry Widow’s, the last habitation before the forest begins. In winter, the lane is either a glassine slope of ice upon which Trofim throws the ashes from the fire to give the soles of his
valenki
some purchase, or a morass churned up by feet, Spitsin the pig farmer’s horse and cart and the occasional motor vehicle. Now, in summer, it is a dusty track made uneven by the winter’s traffic. When it rains, the wheel ruts act as gutters and the hoof-prints as little pools from which, when the sun reappears, swallows and swifts come to dip their beaks and sip. The verges, where the lane runs unevenly along the edge of people’s vegetable plots or flower beds, are rank with grasses and wild flowers visited by bees from Stepanov’s hives and wild bees’-nests in the forest or butterflies drifting across the world on the currents of their trade winds.

I stepped gingerly along the lane. At my age, a twisted ankle is no laughing matter. It could be the death of me.

A few years ago, Trofim made me a walking stick out of a length of hazel, with a carved boss shaped like an eagle’s head and occasionally, so as not to hurt his feelings, I carry it about with me, but I refuse to rely upon it. I needed no stick in the gulag, when I was often bowed by the burden of my labours, and I will not depend upon one now. Today, being my birthday, I left the thing behind. It was not a matter of pride: it was a matter of surrender. I will not – I have never – surrendered, not to circumstance, not to man and certainly not to the tyranny of time.

Halfway down to the village, on the left of the lane, is Komarov’s property behind which extends his orchard of about a hundred apple trees, many of them far more gnarled and decrepit-looking than I, but all considerably more fruitful.

As I advanced, making my way cautiously over the rock-hard ruts, I heard a rhythmic squeaking. It emanated from a large shed twenty metres to the right side of the house, approached by a path neatly lined with smooth stones collected from the bed of the river. Against the side of the building were piled hessian sacks tied with twine, dark stains upon them.

Drawing still nearer, the sound suddenly stopped to be followed by a noise akin to a man dropping a load of rubber balls into a wooden bucket. It had a curious music to it, somehow primeval like the throbbing of drums in the jungle or distant thunder in imaginary mountains and meant Komarov was hard at his seasonal work.

It had been my intention to make Komarov my first call on this auspicious day but, as he was clearly busy at his toil, I decided to move on. It was not yet mid-morning: there was plenty of time. Yet it was not to be for, just as I reached the gate and passed through it, Komarov appeared at the door of the shed and, seeing me, shouted out.