The Industry of Souls (9 page)

The classroom on the right was mine.

For the first ten years of my life in Myshkino, I taught in this school. I felt it was my duty to repay the community which had taken me in, believed I owed them an obligation. Besides, I was without money, could not pay my way with Frosya and Trofim and was reluctant to sponge off them. They were adamant that I was not a burden upon them but I knew otherwise. Life was hard for them and my presence made it no easier. I informed them that I could not – indeed I would not – remain with them if I was not able to contribute either to my upkeep or to the village as a whole. A meeting of villagers and the local cadre was convened, from which I was expressly excluded, the outcome of which was the suggestion that if I insisted on doing something then I could help out in the school.

I shall not forget my first day. I was excited by the thought and responsibility of teaching and yet I was also unaccountably alarmed at the prospect. That I had faced and survived KGB interrogation was by the way. I was far more terrified of the children than I ever was of an interrogator in a crisp uniform with a glowing cigarette held between his fingers and a revolver in a holster on his polished belt.

At half past eight, I walked into the classroom and made my way to the teacher’s desk on a low dais in front of a wall-mounted blackboard. I can clearly picture the room. The walls were painted off-white and the windows were open with early morning sunlight streaming in. Above the door hung a battery operated clock whilst over the blackboard were suspended a portrait of Stalin spotted with fly shit and a fading photograph of Red Square. At the far end of the room, opposite the blackboard, was a huge map of the USSR, at least three metres by two, printed upon cloth and varnished so that it shone like a piece of highly polished furniture in a palace. A notice-board beside the door carried a laminated card of rules to be obeyed by a good Communist child and a chart showing each pupil’s progress in the basic subjects.

The pupils, who ranged from six- to eleven-year-olds, stood up in silence. Every eye was upon me.

‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Please sit down.’

There was a scraping of chairs as the thirty or so children sat at their tables. Unnecessarily, for everyone in the village who had even the most infantile command of language knew it, I gave them my name and wrote it on the blackboard in both Cyrillic and English alphabets. They watched in silence as my hand moved the stick of chalk over the surface.

‘I am going to teach you English,’ I announced and, facing the blackboard once more, began to write
Good morning
upon it.

A chair screeched on the floor.

‘Alexander Alanovich,’ a voice said.

I was not taken aback: Frosya had prepared me well, warned me that the correct way for a pupil to address a teacher was by his first patronymic names.

I turned to find a boy had got to his feet, his hand raised in the air.

‘What is your name?’ I enquired.

‘Demyan Simonovich.’

‘And what can I do for you, Demyan Simonovich?’ I asked with all the refinement I could muster: yet, within, my very soul quaked with fear of this twelve-year-old.

He glanced about the room at his fellow pupils then said, ‘Were you an enemy of the people?’

I looked at him for what must have been five seconds before I smiled.

‘No,’ I told him quietly, looking him straight in the eye, ‘I was never an enemy of the people. I have only ever been an enemy of myself.’

He looked puzzled. A few of his classmates cast him bewildered glances and I realised he had been put up to questioning me. I moved round to the front of the teacher’s desk and leaned upon it.

‘You will not understand this, Demyan Simonovich. Perhaps not even when you are grown up. Sometimes, I do not understand it myself. All I can say, with all truthfulness, is that I have never been your enemy and I never will be.’ I ran my eyes over every up-turned face. ‘This is so for all of you. I shall always be your friend. Sometimes, I may be strict and make you do your studies, make you work hard. Yet I will never hate you, never disrespect you, never ever be your enemy.’

Demyan Simonovich sat down. Once more, there was silence then a girl at the back of the class rose from her table and walked down the room with her hands behind her back. Everyone watched her. She kept her head bowed with acute bashfulness. I felt for her, understood the courage she must have had to summon to leave her place. She reached the teacher’s desk and placed upon it a single red rose. I picked it up. The bud was only just opening and yet already it was giving off its perfume.

Standing by the door, the stink of the turpentine beginning to give me a mild headache, I wondered what became of her. Demyan Simonovich I know about: he left the school, joined the army, entered a staff college and reached the rank of captain before he was killed in Afghanistan, drawn and quartered by a gang of Mujaheddin who ambushed his tank. But the girl? Try as I might, I could not bring back her name.

There was a movement in my former classroom. I pushed open the door. The hinge needed lubricating.

All the tables and chairs had been piled against the far wall and covered in a canvas tarpaulin. Poised on a ladder in the centre of the room was a man in paint-smeared overalls, running a roller over the ceiling, dipping it in a tray balanced on the top rung. At the sound of the hinge squeaking, he peered over his shoulder, saw me and nodded a greeting. I did not know him: he was not from Myshkino but had been sent by the regional public buildings authority.

I passed on through the room and entered the store leading off it. The shelves were laden with books, rolled up posters, packs of exercise books and chalk, boxes of pencils and all the usual assortment of educational equipment. On the top shelf, sticking out into the room and covered with dust, was the vast map which used to hang on the back wall of the room, now redundant and superseded by history and the political whims of a world turning faster and faster by the week. I ran my fingers along the rows of books: Dickens and Swift leaned against Turgenev, Mark Twain and Jack London rubbed bindings with Zola and Pushkin. Pulling one of the posters out of its cardboard canister, I found it was a map of the night sky which I had drawn for an astronomy club I instigated amongst the pupils. In the corner, I had signed and dated it – 1980.

Returning it to the tube, I heard disembodied voices. There was not one to which I could put a name or a face, nor was I even sure of what they were saying: yet they were all young and eager, filled with the zealous vibrancy of children discovering wonders. They spoke in Russian, and in strongly accented English and, mingled with them, I heard a man’s voice, confident and filled with love and I knew it was my own.

4

In front of us, the pit head buildings loomed squat and foreboding in the crisp night air, only the lower third illuminated by the lights surrounding the marshalling and assembly yard. Close to the main door to the mine offices, the duty overseer and his sidekick had positioned themselves on a low platform under a brighter than average light. The guards, posted around the periphery of the mustering area, held their Simonov automatics across their chests or stomachs, stamped their feet and watched us from the shadows cast by the peaks of their
ushankas.
To our left, the mine stores and coal sorting sheds ran in a row behind which the slag heap rose like a mountain, darker than the overcast night sky itself. On the other side of the yard were the railway sidings, rows of coal trucks parked under intermittent lamps mounted on posts made of rusting steel girders painted grey. It was along this edge of the mustering area that most guards were stationed, to foil anyone who thought he might like to go for a runner.

No prisoner had attempted an escape for over three years and then, as Dmitri had put it, he had been slowly falling off his bicycle for weeks. He had had to have been: he made his break for it in the summer, during the white nights when the sun never set and the guards could see him three hundred metres off, sprinting over the uneven ground like a hare keeping one hop ahead of the hounds. They had made sport with him, firing deliberately wide, or short, turning him this way and that before the officer on duty took careful aim and brought him down with a single shot through his spine. He was still alive when they reached him to put a bullet through his skull with a revolver.

Yet that made little difference: someone had once tried it on, the precedent had been set and the intractable mind and policies of the mine authorities had been shaped.

Like the guards, we stamped our feet and shuffled about. Partly, this was to keep our circulation going but it also disguised our muted conversations. Talking on muster was forbidden but, like many of the rules, if you could break them and get away with it, you did. The attitude was dismissive for the mine managers could do little. If they trimmed your rations, you lost energy and the production quota was not met. If they put you in solitary, the quota was missed. If they shot you, they were another pair of hands short at the coal face. Everyone tacitly knew the status quo. Of course, it cut two ways: if you were sick, you worked until you dropped. As for the guards, they couldn’t care less. So long as no one took it in mind to make a dash for the coal trucks or headed for the gate on a suicide sprint, they didn’t give a toss.

A loudspeaker crackled and a metallic voice sputtered, ‘Work Units 25 to 49! Forward!’

Five lines of prisoners stumbled forward at a half run, heading for the building which housed the winding gear. Their feet thumped rhythmically upon the leaden, frozen slush coloured with coal dust. In the sidings, a locomotive loudly vented a rush of steam which lazily rose about three metres in the frigid air before, being robbed of its heat, it collapsed, the water droplets freezing and drifting down in strands. It looked like ectoplasm in faked photographs of Edwardian seances. Into the night sky, the locomotive funnel pumped billows of dense black smoke as the pistons took the strain and the wheels began to turn. The locomotive chuffed thrice then died: the crew were testing the axles had not become seized with ice overnight. Over the pit head, we could hear the cables whining as the cages dropped.

Dmitri beat his arms against his sides in time with the locomotive and let out a hiss of breath. Like the steam, it too rose a few centimetres then tumbled to vanish towards his feet.

‘There was this little polar bear,’ he began. ‘A baby, a cub, sitting on an ice flow five hundred kays north of Archangel. With its mummy and daddy bear.’

‘Was it an Armenian polar bear?’ Kostya interrupted.

For reasons we never divined, Dmitri had it in for Armenians. If it occurred to him, he would twist a joke to denigrate them, ridicule them or lambast them. His hatred was complete. If he met an Armenian, he ignored him completely. Ylli conjectured it was because he had caught a dose of the clap off an Armenian tart when he was serving his time in the army but it was only a guess. Kirill, more wisely, once confided in me that it was something to do with someone he had known in the army, who had scotched his being made up to corporal, but he did not elaborate.

‘They don’t have polar bears in Armenia,’ Dmitri replied, a hint of tired vexation in his voice. ‘As an ignorant sailor you wouldn’t have come across Armenia. Naval training won’t have mentioned it. They’ve got no coastline for you to go whoring along.’

‘So why don’t they have polar bears?’ Kostya wound him up.

‘You want to hear this,’ Dmitri addressed the rest of us, ‘or shall we continue with sailor boy’s geography lesson?’ He did not wait for our answer. ‘There’s a baby polar bear on the ice cap with his parents. He goes up to his mother and asks, “Am I a true-blooded polar bear?” “Why, certainly,” his mother tells him. “Absolutely pure polar bear?” “Yes.” “Not part grizzly bear?” His mother’s getting a bit short on patience by now. “You’re pure, 24 carat polar bear. If you don’t believe me, ask you father.” Baby bear trots across the ice to his father who’s sitting by an ice hole eating a seal. “Daddy,” says the bear cub, “am I a pure polar bear?” “No doubt about it,” Father Polar Bear replied through a mouthful of seal blubber. “You’re a dyed-in-the-wool polar bear from arse to ears.” “I’m not part panda bear? Or brown bear?” questions baby bear. “Out of the question,” his father tells him. “You are absolutely, one hundred and ten per cent, to the very core, a polar bear. So why do you ask?” “I wondered because,” says the baby bear, “I’m fucking freezing!”’

We chuckled amongst ourselves. The guards and overseers aside, it was too cold to laugh out loud: below −30°, the air could crack the enamel on your teeth.

In the two and a half decades – and a bit added on for good measure, to make me sure I was not going to trust in miracles or certainties – I was in Sosnogorsklag 32, I cannot recall ever hearing one of Dmitri’s jokes repeated. Where he got his fund of tales from remains a mystery to me. I cannot believe he remembered them all from the days before the gulag: most of us lost, either through deterioration of our minds or deliberate erasure, or had few if any pre-incarceration memories. I can only assume that he made them up, that he lay in his bunk and, whilst the rest of us were escaping into the universe of our dreams, he set himself a task to invent a new joke for his captive audience. In more ways than one.

‘I know how the cub felt,’ Ylli remarked to no one on particular.

‘You think this is cold?’ Dmitri responded. ‘This isn’t cold. This is cool. You’ve too much Albanian Mediterranean sun in your veins. Still,’ he added, ‘don’t worry. They’ll drain it out of you yet. As for cold…’

His eyes, squinting against the freezing air, narrowed further. I knew what was coming. Dmitri was going back to Leningrad, in 1942.

‘This is not cold,’ he continued quietly. ‘Cold is when you think you should be warm, when you are in your apartment but the stove is out, the windows are broken, you are wearing the curtains on top of your coat, and there’s no food on the table except what is left of your daily 125 grams of bread made out of rye flour and wood shavings. And a haunch of your neighbours’ tabby.’ He put his gloved hand on Ylli’s arm. ‘I hope, sincerely, in the name of whatever you hold dear, that you, my friend,’ he moved his head in a circle to indicate the whole of the pit head facilities and the lines of waiting
zeks
, ‘in this comparatively tropical adversity, will never know real cold.’