The Industry of Souls (7 page)

‘Shurik! Where are you going?’

‘On my rounds,’ I said. ‘As usual.’

‘Your rounds?’ he echoed, then he remembered. ‘Your rounds! As usual! Today is your day, my friend. Nothing usual about it! Come!’ He waved his hand, frenetically beckoning to me.

‘I don’t want to interrupt you.’

‘Interrupt me? You won’t. I can work and talk. Would welcome it.’ He looked towards his house and called out, ‘Katya!’ There was no reply so he shouted louder. Komarov has a deep booming voice which can carry half a kilometre. ‘Katya! Shurik is here.’

I turned back through his gate and started up the path. Had I my walking stick with me, I should have trailed it against the round, grey stones like a boy running his ruler along a fence. Old men have puerile ways and I am no exception.

‘Happy birthday, Alexander,’ Komarov said somewhat formally, stepping out from the shade of the shed.

‘Thank you, Komar,’ I replied.

His nickname is an ironic play upon his surname: komar means mosquito. It is most inappropriate for Komarov is a big bear of a man, with a full black beard just starting to grey, hands the size of dried herrings and a laugh so jovial one would think it could draw nails from wood.

‘Shurik, step into my lair,’ he invited me, shaking my hand, his fingers softer than at any other time of the year. ‘Enter the den of the happiest man in the world.’

‘It is that month,’ I remarked.

The interior of the shed was cool and dark, but not without light. There were cracks in the roof through which sunlight was filtering, spaces between the boards of the walls. Indeed, the building is less of a shed and more of a temporary shelter. Against the far wall was piled firewood for the winter and split lengths of kindling next to three bales of straw the size of steamer trunks, the topmost cut open and trailing stalks on the earthen floor. Yet the function of the shed is not as a store or a winter byre. Komarov keeps no sheep or cows.

In the centre of the structure stood a tall contraption made of wood. At the top was a square funnel below which, projecting from a sturdy oak casing, were two large wooden wheels, one connected to a crank with the other acting as a governor. Both engaged several toothed wooden gear wheels and a pair of stone rollers set only a few millimetres apart. Below this was an oblong tray. All the wood was either grey with age or blackened with usage. This is Komarov’s pride and joy, the one thing for which he is envied not just in the village but in the entire district. It is his apple mill.

‘There she is,’ Komarov declared. ‘My once-a-year lady friend. The only whore who can steal me from my wife’s bed.’

‘How old is this machine?’ I enquired.

He laughed and said, ‘If she was a woman, she’d be past bedding and if I was her age I’d be past trouncing her. She is…’ he thought for a moment ‘…just over 150 years old. My great-greatgrandfather made her. Every square centimetre of the timber used in her came from trees growing within a five kilometre radius of the village. Of this very house. The same with the press.’

He moved around the mill to the other side of the shed. The apple press stood against the wall, a massive wooden screw thread holding the pressing plate in mid-air.

‘You know what I call this?’ Komarov asked, resting his hand on the suspended plate.

I shook my head and said, ‘Komar, you have told me. Every year when it is time to harvest your orchard, you tell me. And every year I forget.’

‘The right of an old man, Shurik. This top part, which presses the fruit, is called the bull and this…’ He touched the bed beneath, made of elm planking stained to ebony by year upon year of juice. ‘…is the cow. Sex,’ he added, ‘is everywhere in the agricultural life.’

Upon the cow was piled a half-made cheese of pomace, alternate layers of straw and mashed fruit. Yellow and black striped wasps hovered lazily in the air around it, drunk on a surfeit of apple flesh. I followed one as it flew unsteadily up to the rafters to become entangled in a spider’s web.

Komarov, seeing my eyes tracing the wasp, said, ‘Watch now what happens.’

The wasp started to struggle to free itself. The more it endeavoured to free itself, the more enmeshed it became. Suddenly, the owner of the web appeared on the scene. It was a big, dark grey spider with a leg span of at least eight centimetres. Pausing at the edge of its web, it placed its two forelegs upon crucial strands.

‘He’s testing the tension,’ Komarov observed, ‘judging the size of his captive.’

With a sudden rush, the spider crossed the web to within a centimetre or two of the wasp. It paused again.

‘Now he knows,’ Komarov declared. ‘Watch what he does, Shurik.’

The spider, far from leaping on the wasp and sinking its poisoned fangs into it, stepped back one arachnidian pace and began to snip the threads of its own web. The wasp was loosened but was still ensnared. The spider moved round, still cutting the net of the web. Finally, the wasp dangled at the end of a single strand. The spider reached it and severed it. The wasp fell to the ground, still threshing about to get free of its bindings.

‘So much for the grey wolf of my rafters,’ Komarov stated, ‘and the stripped tiger of the forests.’ He stamped his foot down. ‘Even when they are soporific, the spider knows better than to take on a wasp’.

From a lip in the rim of the cow, juice dribbled into a wooden pail large enough to bathe a baby. It was a dull, cloudy amber.

‘Try it,’ Komarov suggested. ‘Go on! Have a sip of the whole of the summer concentrated in a thimble.’

I held my finger under the trickle and sucked my skin. The juice was sweet but had an edge to it.

There was a movement at the entrance to the shed. Katya, Komarov’s wife, was there with a tray bearing three glasses of
kvas
, made from the apple juice. The liquid was the faint golden colour of raw plasma.

‘Happy birthday, Shurik,’ she said and, placing the tray in the sunlight on the edge of the cow, kissed me lightly. ‘Eighty years. Such an age. Just to think, you were born in the year of the October Revolution.’

She handed the glasses round and raised hers to me.

‘To you, Shurik,’ she declared. ‘With thanks to God for you being amongst us.’

I nodded politely, accepted the toast and sipped the drink. It was sweet and I imagined it tasted of warm days and meadows. A small shadow edged across the square of bright morning sunlight upon the earth by the door.

‘Stas is here,’ Katya announced. ‘Come, Stas. Uncle Shurik is here and you know what this day is.’

Into the shed stepped a small, tow-headed boy of about five. He was a handsome child, already showing his father’s strength but still in possession of his mother’s softness. I sensed he wanted to hide behind the bulk of the apple mill but had been instructed not to.

‘What have you say?’ his father prompted him.

The child swallowed, stared up at me and brought his hands round from behind his back. He held out a small package wrapped in red paper.

‘Well, Stas?’ his mother urged.

‘Alexander Alanovich Bayliss,’ he uttered, his voice not much louder than the drone of the inebriated wasps, ‘merry birthday.’

‘Not merry birthday!’ Komarov exclaimed. ‘It is happy birthday.’

The little boy grinned sheepishly. I stooped to accept his present.

‘Thank you very much, Stanislav Yurievich,’ I told him. ‘And you may be sure I shall have a merry day.’

It was, in part, a lie. I knew I should not actually be unhappy. That much was the truth. But later on, I considered, when the sun started to dip, then my day might take on a different mien.

The package was easily opened. Within was a small cardboard box. I opened this to discover, protected by flakes of cotton wool, a carved model of a wealthy land-owner’s
kibitka
about ten centimetres long. It was perfect down to the smallest detail. The runners under the sleigh curved perfectly, the sides were finely cut and decorated and, beside the sleigh-driver’s seat, a whip stood up in the air, a thin twine of leather curling away from it as if caught in mid-motion. I turned the model over appreciatively in my hand.

‘When Shurik was a little boy like you,’ Katya said to Stas, ‘if he had lived in Russia, he would have travelled to school every day in a sledge like that.’

‘How did you go to school?’ the child queried, drawing courage from his mother’s presence.

In truth, I do not remember for I have chosen to forget, and time has aided me in my deliberate neglect, but it is the role of an old man to entertain the young so I lied again.

‘When I was six,’ I said, ‘I went to school in an omnibus. Later, when I was older, I went in a train.’

Stas thought about this: I might just as well have told him I was taken to school in a gondola set with amethysts, mounted on wheels and drawn by a pair of white unicorns. He walks to the school in the village and, although he has travelled on a bus to Zarechensk, he has never seen a train except in pictures or on the television.

‘It was a toy, a hundred years ago,’ Komarov explained, pointing to the model.

‘How did you get it?’ I enquired.

Komarov smiled and replied, ‘Like the mill, like the press, my great-great-grandfather made it.’

I was deeply touched. These people were not giving me a gift so much as parting with a treasured and, I was sure, a valuable heirloom.

‘What can I say? It is exquisite. I am deeply honoured. Yet, surely, you should keep this, for Stas, for his son, for the future…’

Komarov put his hand on my shoulder.

‘My dear friend,’ he said, ‘we are the honoured. That you have chosen to live here, with us, for – how long is it now?’

‘Too long,’ I teased him.

‘Many years. It must be twenty for I was eleven, or twelve, when you arrived.’ He paused to gather himself as if to make a speech. ‘You chose to live amongst us, after all we had done to you, after all the years of hate, after the pain.’

‘Enough!’ I complained. ‘You did nothing to me, Komar. Nothing.’

‘But the Russians,’ Katya begins, ‘the Soviet…’

‘Are you those people?’ I replied. ‘Are you the chosen eunuchs of the Supreme Soviet? No. You are not. Like me, you are just common people going about your lives caught in the common mesh of history.’ I glanced upwards at the wasps receiving their liberty. ‘Like them, but without the sting. And as for this hate of which you speak?’ I shrugged dramatically and cast an obvious theatrical glance about the shed. ‘I do not see it. As for the pain, well, that was in my muscles, not in my heart.’

‘The common mesh of history,’ Komarov reiterated. ‘I like that. You were always good with words, Shurik. When I was a boy…’

‘The less said about your boyhood,’ I announced, ‘the better. I remember you as a rumbustious little sod. Quick to answer back, full of irrepressible impertinence. I am sure you would not wish your son to hear of his father’s waywardness. Or your wife, come to that.’

‘I learnt from you,’ Komarov said.

‘Rubbish!’ I retorted. ‘You merely came to your senses, realised there was more to life than standing in the fields killing jays. Remember that?’

‘I remember,’ he admitted. ‘You shamed me.’

‘You shamed yourself,’ I said. ‘You knew you were doing wrong.’

‘And can you recall what you said to me?’

I thought for a moment before speaking and saw, once again, a well-built twelve-year-old with a small bore shotgun standing at the edge of the forest with a dozen jays dead at his feet, their azure plumage catching the sun and speckled with black clots of congealing blood.

‘I think I said that for every beautiful thing a man destroys, two ugly ones are born. You were good at arithmetic, looked at the ground and the message sank in.’

‘It scared the hell out of me,’ Komarov confessed.

‘It was meant to. Teach the father and you teach the son.’

I looked down at Komarov’s little boy and put my hand out. ‘Stas, shake my hand.’

He was cautious again. Katya nudged him. He slowly brought his small hand out and I took it in mine. It was lost between my fingers.

‘There,’ I said, ‘the old world passes on the future to the new.’

Not looking at their faces, for I knew they were sad, I returned the
kibitka
to its box.

Komarov could not let it go. He had to ask me, as he has done before in what he has decreed to be moments of gravity.

‘Do you forgive us, Shurik?’

‘Forgive you? For what?’

Komarov avoided my eye and said, ‘You know, Shurik.’

I sipped the
kvas.
The sun, cutting through the door and striking the jug, had warmed the contents. It was smooth, like honey brought to blood heat.

As for what it is Komarov knows I know, it is this: his father, Vladimir Nikolaevich, was for six years the
nachalnik –
which is to say, the commandant – of a forced labour camp near Ust’ Olenëk. I was never held in that camp but that is of no concern to Komarov. It is enough that I was in the gulag and that his father was a part of the apparatus that held me there.

‘Komar,’ I said, ‘are you a religious man?’ It was a rhetorical question and I answered it immediately. ‘No. Like me, you give no truck for gods and angels and yet you know the text as well as I do. The soul that sinneth,’ I quoted, ‘it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him. The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, chapter 18, verse 20.’

For a Russian from peasant stock who possesses nothing more than a small house his grandfather built, a hundred apple trees and a derelict car which cannot move for lack of a new rear axle, Komarov is exceptionally well-read. When most of his peers sit around the long winter fires playing cards, roasting chestnuts or their toes, watching television or lying cosseted under the blankets with their wives, Komarov reads. This, he claims, is why his friends have four children but he has only one to show for ten years’ of marriage: and he has spent long nights forsaking his wife’s love, seeking to come to terms with the burden his soul has carried, of which I am a constant reminder.