Through Every Human Heart

 

 

 

 

Janice Brown
has published five teenage novels and many short stories. Born in Paisley, she now lives in Central Scotland. She has taught Creative Writing in schools and colleges. She began writing her first adult novel,
Hartsend
while studying for her PhD in English Literature at Glasgow University. She and her husband have three grown up children and five grandchildren.

 

 

 

 

By the same author

 

Hartsend

 

 

 

For young adults

 

Sweet n' Sour Summer

Missing!

Bad Company

Relative Danger

A Dangerous Place

First published in Great Britain and the

United States of America 2015

Sandstone Press Ltd

PO Box 5725

One High Street

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9WJ

Scotland.

 

www.sandstonepress.com

 

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

 

© Janice Brown 2015

 

The moral right of Janice Brown to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

 

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

 

 

ISBN: 978-1-910124-49-9

ISBN e: 978-1-910124-50-5

 

Cover design by Rose Cooper, Valencia, Spain

Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

 

 

 

 

To Iain and Ruth Laing with love

My thanks to Graeme Cuthbertson and Ewen Maclean for all their help.

 

 

 

 

‘Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.'

 

Alexander Solzhenitzyn,
The Gulag Archipelago

As they drove on through the gathering dusk, Feliks could still taste the bananas, still smell them on his fingers. He wanted to share the wonder of bananas with the woman beside him but it was impossible. Dina was concentrating on the road, cornering most carefully, never exceeding the speed limit, her hands always in the right position, as if trying to prove herself the perfect driver, to show herself in perfect control of this one thing when the rest of her world was in chaos. She hadn't spoken a word for a long time now, apart from monosyllables in the store at the petrol station.

Even if she got over her anger and began speaking to him again, she wouldn't understand his enthusiasm. Safely packaged in their own smooth skins, highly nutritious, protected from dirt and germs, simple to open, simple to eat, bananas seemed to him to be the embodiment of honesty, almost miraculous in their simplicity and flair. He'd had them at home as a child. Specially imported at Christmas, they were green, hard and bitter. ‘You have to be patient, darling. Just a little longer.' But they were so exotic one couldn't wait, even though one still remembered last year's stomach pain.

He glanced over at her. No, she would take bananas for granted, like everything else in her life. In the West everything was taken for granted. Pure water, warm beds, freedom to say what you believed, and as many bananas as you wanted, flown in or shipped in, whichever it was, from their tropical home. He tried to supply the name of the tropical country, but his brain was too tired.

I could live in such a country. I could bear that. I would sit in my backyard all day from dawn to sunset and live on bananas.

He'd watched her relax in the store at the petrol station, glad of her sandwich, and afterwards, blowing like a child on the too-hot soup in its cardboard cup. Her face seemed to soften for a few moments, and he'd felt again how she seduced one's attention – the unsettling, demanding vulnerability that she herself seemed so unconscious of. Now her lips were set in a grim little line.

Since their first meeting he'd been running around like a headless chicken. He'd seen these often enough back home. Fresh from the axe, comical, tragic, the most absurd of sights in an absurd world. Well, this particular chicken had now done something. He'd tried to be heroic. Quite literally he'd given it his best shot.

 

I don't want to be a hero. I don't want anyone's worship. I don't want to meet anyone's needs or make their dreams come true.

So what do you want, Feliks?

A small house with a banana tree in the garden. Is that too much? One small house, one tree, out of the entire world?

You want your own tree? What would you do, piss on it like a dog? Because that's what you are, Feliks, a dog. A lame, headless chicken of a dog, in need of a tree to piss on.

‘What's the matter?' Janek asked.

‘It's cold in here,' Lazslo told his boss. It was true, but it was a different sort of cold altogether that was chilling his soul. Memories from his childhood had ambushed him the moment they'd stepped out of the sunlight into this small mountain church, into the sweet-sick smells of tallow and incense, and dust under old pine benches. Twenty years flew from him, like startled sparrows from a bush. He was a child again, in short trousers and a shirt too tight around the neck, staring at a coffin which held what had been his grandfather, the first corpse he'd ever seen. He felt again the rising panic, the desperate desire to escape out into the June sunshine where some of his classmates were joyously, noisily kicking a ball against the poplar trees around the square. When he'd tried to pull free, Grandmother's fingers had tightened on his.

Janek shrugged. ‘You're right. We won't linger, I was simply curious.' He turned back to the frescoes.

Was this what they'd come to see? Clothed in sombre red and blue, with no gold to speak of and hardly any silver, all of the saints wore the same strained expression, as if they knew exactly how bad they'd looked when new, and how little faith they would inspire now that so many centuries had come and gone. In other regions, tourists came to visit and admire frescoes. There was no shortage of them. Only a few monasteries still functioned as such of course. Most were museums, though he'd heard of one being turned into a hotel with a gourmet restaurant. This place was too unimportant to matter to anyone.

Certainly Janek had made no attempt to find any human representative of the monastic community, though there were signs of life. A single candle burned at the front of the church. The white cloth on the altar looked clean. A brown clay vase held wild flowers: yellow pulsatilla and white marguerites. He looked up at the ceiling. Plain plasterwork, no coffered wood or intricate designs.

So why were they here? For six hours with only one short break, he had driven from the capital through lush fields of barley, into forests of black, white and grey poplars, then aspen, loud with birdsong, and finally among pines trees on increasingly tortuous, and often shade-free mountain roads. Janek had slept for the latter part of the journey, or pretended to, waking in a strange mood as they neared their destination. He'd become oddly animated, talking rather a lot without saying anything of significance. He was city born and bred, and kept asking statistical questions about the countryside, most of which Lazslo couldn't answer.

The older man turned round. ‘Now, my dear, aren't you going to ask me why we've come to Tavcaryeva?'

‘Why have we come?'

‘To dig up a corpse. There, I knew that would take your fancy. Confess yourself intrigued.'

‘I'm intrigued.'

‘Of course you are. Even in our line, we don't dig up corpses every day. Now, what do you suggest we do with this corpse once we've brushed off the worms and fat white spiders? Come to that, what shall we do with the worms?'

When his boss was in a mood like this, no answer was right. He had long ago learned to look diffidently into the air. Sometimes Janek let it pass, and sometimes he didn't.

‘Oh don't agitate yourself, our corpse is alive. Shall we?'

 

Outside, it had somehow become late afternoon. Their path went along a brief avenue of not very tall white poplars, then under a low stone archway into a walled kitchen garden, larger than he expected. It was south facing, criss-crossed by elderly and very gnarled fruit trees, plum and apple he recognised, their fruit still forming. Between them two Angry Birds darted suddenly, one after the other, in well-practised zigzags, from one side of the orchard up into the same tree, their gold heads and black wing feathers etched clear against the pale peach breasts. The light itself here seemed golden, almost dreamlike, though after a moment he detected a faint smell of something like creosote on the air. There was a large compost heap against the far wall, and four long raised beds. He guessed the planks had been recently re-coated. He couldn't quite make out what was growing in the reddish soil. Potatoes, beets, onions, he supposed, though this high up, everything would need a fair bit of manure. The winter would be cold. He could hear the squawking and clucking of hens somewhere beyond the high wall. Chicken for supper, perhaps. Not so very bad.

‘There he is,' Janek said.

The priest was young, about his own age, bearded, strongly built. He was in clerical garb, but had stripped to the waist, working with a spade in a row of small but healthy-looking purple cabbages.

As they came closer, the man straightened.

‘How are you, Feliks?' Janek said.

Lazslo looked more closely and felt something inside him rip apart.

No one spoke. A loose cloud of Large Copper butterflies flew gaudily round about them then flew on. The leaves on the fruit trees were completely motionless, as if they were too preoccupied with sunlight to do anything but breathe.

Finally Janek said, ‘The monastic life must agree with you, Feliks. I see you've developed a fine pair of biceps, whatever else you've been up to.'

‘And what have you been up to? Still licking my father's ass?'

The spade sliced into the ground with a blow that would have severed a spine. Janek made a slight tutting sound.

‘Come now, don't be like that. We've come an exceedingly long way. I thought you'd be glad to see some visitors from outside. And I was sure you two would be overjoyed at seeing one another again. Father Konstantin has given us the use of his room,' he added. ‘We'll wait for you there, Feliks. Don't be too long. Lazslo?'

Barely able to see his surroundings, Laszlo followed. Every moment of the way he listened and hoped and kept hoping. But there were no footsteps behind him, no movement, no calling of his name.