The Industry of Souls (8 page)

‘Horace,’ he parried, ‘wrote in his Odes,
Delicta maiorum immertius lues.
’

‘I know my Horace,’ I rejoined and translated the quotation. ‘Though without guilt, you must atone for your father’s sins. Do you believe that? If this were the case,’ I argued, ‘the sins of men would be passed on, multiplying with every generation until the whole world was full of nothing but sin.’

‘You have been in the gulag, Shurik,’ Katya almost whispered.

‘That, my dear Katya, was not the whole world. It was a small blot on the landscape west of the Urals and up towards the Arctic Circle, a few kilometres from a coal mine. If you had been with me in the gulag, you would agree with me that the world is not full of evil. Even there, there was friendship, love, compassion. True, human goodness.’

For a long moment, she looked at me with such puzzlement. She cannot understand my stoicism, cannot come to terms with the fact that I bear no grudges and have simply, as she sees it, shrugged off a quarter of a century hacking coal out of the frozen north to feed the power stations of the temperate south.

‘Stas,’ I said, to break the tension of this awkward moment for us all, ‘will you take this box home for me and ask Frosya to put it in my room? If I carry it with me around the village, I may drop it.’

The child nodded gravely and, accepting the box containing the miniature sleigh, went off with Katya in the direction of Frosya’s house.

‘I have not told this to you before, Shurik,’ Komarov said, watching his wife and child turn through the gate and start off up the lane.

‘Said what?’

‘I have never told you this,’ he ignored my question, ‘because I have not wanted you to think I was using it as an excuse.’

‘An excuse? For what? What are you going on about, my friend?’

‘For…’ He had to choose his words. ‘For the Soviet Union, as it was. For my father.’

‘No man, Komar,’ I insisted, ‘has to excuse his father. I’ve said this many times to you. Believe it, believe me!’ I raised my finger to drive home the point. ‘Himself? Yes! His father? Never!’

‘Let me tell you, Shurik, this story,’ he went on undaunted by my brief didactic outburst. ‘It is true. I swear it on Stas’ head. On March 5, 1953, the radio announced the death of Stalin. Maybe he died a few days before. Who can tell? That was the official date of his death. All over the Soviet Union, people gathered in the streets, in the town squares, around the local Party offices. In Moscow, people died, hundreds of them crushed to death in the mass of people on the streets, mourning, wondering about their futures. My father was on leave from his posting. Of course, I was not there. I was not yet born. But my mother – he had married her only the year before – told me he was distraught.’

Komarov turned and emptied another sack of apples into the mill. The rubber ball sound resounded in the shed. An apple bounced free and I picked it up, tossing into the gaping maw at the top of the machine.

‘The next day,’ Komarov continued, ‘my father went to Zarechensk. They had opened a book of mourning in the Party office there. He inscribed his name.’

He set the mill in motion. The apples rolled down, slid into the teeth of the mill and were split apart. The sound of each apple breaking open was a sharp click, like a bone being snapped. The air filled with the tart tang of the raw juice. From between the rollers oozed a mush of apple flesh which dropped heavily into the tray beneath.

For several minutes, Komarov evenly revolved the handle. Not until the last of the apples in the funnel had passed through the mechanism did he stop, sweat beading on his brow.

‘Just before my father died, three years ago, I visited him,’ he went on. ‘He lived in Volgograd, in a small apartment they wanted him to leave after my mother died. It was winter, the street full of slush.’

He dug the wooden spade into the apple mush and swung a load onto the press where it bounced on the layer of straw.

‘In the apartment, my father was sitting before the fire. It was an old building, once a mansion but now divided into little flats. Not one of your concrete Khruschev cubes. The roof was sloping, the windows big, the eaves deep. A real house, from the old days of Russia. So he had a fireplace in his room. I touched his shoulder but he did not look up. In his hands, he held a small doll, one of those little mannequins in peasant clothing children like to play with. It was of a man dressed in a cap, like Lenin but without the beard.’

He threw another shovel of pomace onto the cheese of straw.

‘A doll?’ I queried.

‘I thought maybe it was my sister’s, from when she was a child. My mother kept such things after the measles killed her. But it was not. It was older. “What is this?” I asked my father in a friendly way and reached down to take the doll. But he gripped it fiercely and tore it from my fingers. Something sharp jabbed painfully into my thumb.’

‘What was it?’

‘The doll,’ Komar said, ‘was stuck with pins. Like a voodoo charm. Dress-maker’s pins, old-fashioned hat pins, safety pins. Even a hypodermic needle.’

He looked at the rollers in the mill. Apple juice was dripping from it. Tears appeared on his cheek.

‘“What is this doll?” I asked him again, a little angry. My finger was beaded with dark red blood for the pin had gone in deep. “Tell me.” My father said nothing. I was afraid, for a reason I could not explain even now. I thought he was going senile. Suddenly, he jumped up from his chair and threw the doll onto the fire. It was only a few coals, hardly any flames, but the material of the doll’s costume quickly ignited. I said nothing. My father turned and faced me. It was then I knew he would soon die. He stared into my eyes and he said, “That’s the last of him.”’

‘Of whom?’ I asked.

‘He told me later,’ Komarov explained, ‘when I put him to his bed. As he grew older, my father saw what Stalin had done to Russia and he was ashamed. He had, in his feeble way, been sticking pins in what he thought was Stalin.’

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘he had forgotten in his dotage that Stalin was dead.’

Komarov looked at me, a terrible weary sadness in his eyes. He wiped a tear from under his eye with his finger, leaving an apple pip adhering to his cheek.

‘Stalin is not dead,’ he replied quietly. ‘He is still here, with us. Just as all evil men are. We cannot be rid of them, no matter how many dolls we torture and throw on the coals.’

‘If evil men remain,’ I said, ‘then so do the good.’

Komarov could not hold back his tears now. He stood next to his weeping apples, the goodness of the orchard seeping into the bucket, and sobbed. This big bear of a man, who could carry the whole of the Russian winter on his back and hurl it into the sea, stood with his shoulders hunched, his head bowed and his tears soaking into his black beard. I stepped to his side, careful not to slip on gobbets of mashed apple strewn on the ground, took my handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped his face for him as if he were my son.

‘Remember this, Komar,’ I told him, ‘The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. And, if the years have taught me anything, it is a wisdom of sorts.’

‘You are a truly good man,’ Komarov said, straightening and blinking his eyes to be rid of the last of his tears.

‘No, my dear friend Komar,’ I replied, ‘I am not. I am just a realist.’

I folded my handkerchief, finished my glass of
kvas
and, biding him farewell with a wave of my hand, set off down the path. Looking back from the gate, I saw him bending his back to another sack of apples and heard the rumble of fruit falling into the mill.

It occurred to me, as I reached the lane, that I did not own the model
kibitka
but merely held it on loan. In a few years, when I am dead, Frosya will return it to Komar and it will re-enter the cavalcade of his family’s history, where it should be, but with the added tale attached to it of how, once upon a time, it was given for a year or two to the Englishman who lived down the lane, who forgave those whom he never met.

*   *   *

From Komarov’s house, the lane drops slowly down a gentle slope past other houses. Some have little fences between them and the thoroughfare, others nothing but a strip of unguarded land.

The first belongs to Yelyutin, the village carpenter: the whine of his electric jigsaw was just audible from the rear of his property as I passed by, not unlike the sound of the wasps in the cider shed. He has for over a week now been cutting out new facing boards for Andryukha, the baker. A sallow man with a complexion not unlike that of his dough, he has made good money in recent years because he has taken to heart the doctrines of elementary capitalism.

In the old days, no Russian village ever had its own bakery. Everybody made their own bread. Russian stoves were constructed to accommodate the weekly bake. Housewives dedicated their Saturdays to the task, kneading and moulding the loaves with a piece of
zakvaska
, a block of the previous week’s dough which served in lieu of precious and expensive yeast. With the coming of Communism, domestic bread-making died out and loaves were mass-produced in state-run bakeries. Andryukha’s father, a forester, had been plucked by the Party from his shady glens and sent to work in a co-operative bakery in 1941: his son had followed in his footsteps but, when the red flag ceased to fly, and the bakery was privatised, half the work-force were dismissed as surplus to requirements.

Taking a leaf out of the new management’s book, Andryukha privatised himself, erected an extension to his house, purchased three old stoves, built two wood-fired ovens out of fireproof lining bricks purloined from his former employers and set up his own small bakery.

Within a month, he was in business. His bread was good, tasting and smelling like the loaves everyone imagined the grandmothers of Myshkino had baked in the good years before memory. Now he not only sells bread to the villagers but he also bakes pastries and buns which he hands over every morning to a callow youth called Durov who takes them on a superannuated motorcycle to Zarechensk. There, in the bus depot or railway station, he hawks them to waiting passengers or patrols the platform, offering up his flat wicker tray of goodies to open carriage windows. For his pains, he is allowed to keep fifteen percent of all he earns. As a result of his business acumen, and Durov’s reluctance to ask for a bigger percentage, Andryukha has bought a three-year-old Volkswagen and is having his house repaired and extended.

Beyond that lies Izakov’s home, set back from the lane and closed up: the shutters have been drawn across the windows since last summer, as if it was mid-winter all the year round. The chimney is cold. No smoke has risen up the flue for over two years for Izakov and his wife have departed Myshkino.

At first, no one knew where they had made off to for they left suddenly, early one morning, a suitcase in each hand. A taxi from Zarechensk collected them. They bade no one good-bye. For several months, the old women gossiped about them and a number of rumours did the rounds: Izakov was involved with gangsters, had reneged on a debt, had run off with a younger woman. That his wife had departed with him seemed to have slipped from the common consciousness. Then, just as the first snows of winter began to fall, Father Kondrati received a letter which explained all. It bore three stamps with portraits of Elvis Presley upon them and a Denver, Colorado postmark. Izakov’s wife, it transpired, had a distant relative who lived in America and had invited them over to visit. They had gone and decided to stay the winter. The letter requested Father Kondrati arrange for the house to be looked after until the spring. One hundred dollars was enclosed to cover the costs. The priest steamed the stamps off the envelope, separated them and gave them as awards to the three children who had best learnt the catechism: such trophies from the West are much prized by the young these days. The money he passed to the Merry Widow. She tended the place for nine months, even keeping the garden trim through the next summer, but nothing more has been heard of the Izakovs. Now, the house is showing the first signs of abandonment. In another five winters, it will be unfit for habitation.

Opposite the Izakov house is the village school. It, too, is set back from the lane, an expanse of mown grass dividing them. In the centre is a bare patch of earth upon which the village name has been spelt out in pebbles collected by the children and set in cement. When I first came to Myshkino, there was a hammer and sickle above the name but it has been removed, the tell-tale cavities filled in with mortar. Next to the name is a flagpole from which used to hang the red flag of the USSR but which, for the last two years, has been supplanted by the white, blue and red flag of the new Russia. To the left of the building is a playground surfaced with concrete whilst to the right is a football pitch with two white goal posts devoid of nets.

The school is a trim, single-storey building constructed of brick under a sloping shingle roof. The walls are painted white with deep-set, metal-framed and triple-glazed windows which are protected by steel shutters. If it were not a school, one might suppose it to be the home of a well-to-do villager. The verandah on the front, running the entire length of the building and lined with plant pots, suggests it might still be a private house.

I made my way up the broad, stepped path to the school. It was easy going: the steps are low, designed for young children and old limbs. The shadow of the building was cool, as if the walls had retained a vestige of the winter snows.

Going up to the verandah, I found the main door was open. It being summer, the pupils are away on their holidays and the school is not in use: but, from the smell of turpentine, it was plain that someone was redecorating the classrooms.

The interior plan of the building is simple. A central corridor runs from front to back, off which there are two classrooms of equal size, two store-rooms, two lavatories (one for each sex), a teachers’ office and a room, formerly used by the local Party apparatchiks but now containing three rows of chairs, a slide projector and a television set.