The Industry of Souls Page 2

  * * *

  I was five weeks making my way to Myshkino, the village in which I now live, travelling mostly by jumping freight trains, sleeping crouched up in box-cars parked in sidings or hiding in track-side maintenance huts. From time to time, I was moved on by railway officials or the transport authorities but usually I was simply ignored. They did not know who I was but they certainly knew what I was without asking for my papers. Some were sympathetic and gave me a few kopeks: others were antagonistic, punched and kicked me and stole the kopeks. Most were apathetic and paid me no heed whatsoever.

  For food, I begged. Knowing instinctively the importance of appearing at least reasonably presentable, for a tramp in any society gets short shrift at all times, I managed to wash myself now and again in the public conveniences in stations, keeping my beard down to a trim stubble with a pair of nail scissors I filched from a street vendor’s stall in Kazan. My clothes, however, suffered on the journey and, by the time I had walked the thirty kilometres from Zarechensk to Myshkino, I looked more like a hobgoblin than a human.

  With difficulty, for no one would offer the information to a vagabond, I found Frosya’s house around midday, opened the gate in the low fence and made my way up the path to the porch. I knocked on the door but there was no answer so, cupping my hands, I peered in a window. The living room was tidy, with comfortable furniture, a carpet and a radio on a table. Exhausted, I lowered myself down in the shade by the door and dozed fitfully, awaiting her return from wherever she was.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ were Trofim’s first words when he found me at about five o’clock, hunched on the steps of the porch, my arms hugging my legs to my chest, my chin resting on my knees.

  I woke from my semi-slumber and squinted at him in the afternoon sunlight. He was of average height, with dark hair and a handsome face, and dressed in a mechanic’s overalls. I could smell the syrupy scent of warm gearbox oil on his clothing.

  ‘You look like a thief who’s found nothing to steal,’ he added.

  Slowly, I got to my feet and cast a quick glance at my reflection in the window. My face was grey and rough with several days’ stubble, my hair short but not to the extent of still being a criminal’s crop: it had had five weeks to grow. My jacket was soiled and my shirt, an old-fashioned clerk’s shirt with the collar missing, was grimy about the neck. My trousers looked as if I had slept in them which, save one or two nights, I had and the leather of my boots was cracked for lack of polish and too frequent soakings in the rain.

  ‘Go on!’ he exclaimed, waving his hand at me as he might a mangy cat routing round the garbage pail, dismissive rather than belligerent. ‘Otvali!’

  ‘My name is Alexander,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Fine!’ Trofim replied. ‘Otvali, Alexander!’

  I felt weak and leaned against one of the posts holding up the roof over the porch. I had not eaten for several days except for some handfuls of wheat I had snatched in a field not yet harvested.

  ‘Are you are the husband of Efrosiniya?’ I asked, my voice hoarse and consequently not much louder than a whisper.

  He looked at me, suddenly very suspicious, and said with no small degree of defensive menace, ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘And was your wife’s mother Tatyana Antonovna?’

  He was immediately on the offensive, glared at me and said, ‘Poshol k chortu!’

  ‘I will go to hell,’ I responded, my voice quiet with fatigue, ‘but first I must speak to your wife.’ I sucked on my own spittle to lubricate my mouth. ‘I have come from Kirill Karlovich.’

  Trofim stared at me for a long moment then, his demeanour utterly changed, he stepped quickly forward, taking my arm and guiding me towards an upright chair under the window. It was the very same chair in which I still frequently sit on the porch on a warm evening, which over the years has become somehow shaped to my body, or my body has become formed to its curves and peculiarities.

  ‘Frosya!’ he called urgently as he let go of my arm. ‘Frosya! Come quickly!’

  In a few seconds Frosya appeared, her sleeves rolled up. Her hands and forearms were wet from doing the laundry in a tub behind the house. She must have been in the house all along without my knowing. Her face was blushed from the effort of scrubbing. When she saw me, she stopped in her tracks. A dog, sauntering down the village street, spied me and started to yap.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ she asked, her voice barely audible over the dog’s noise. Trofim bent to pretend to pick up a stone. The dog fell silent and slunk off.

  ‘Sosnogorsklag 32,’ I told her.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Trofim asked.

  I looked at him and said, ‘After I have given you my message, I am going to hell.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Trofim began to explain. ‘When I first saw you…’

  I raised my hand to silence him and smiled weakly.

  ‘Sosnogorsklag,’ Frosya mused quietly.

  ‘Not a pretty town, I’ll bet,’ Trofim remarked soberly.

  ‘Labour camp number 32 was not in the town,’ I informed him, ‘but some way out. South of Pasn’a. Not far from Vojvoz.’

  ‘I think,’ Frosya said, ‘you must have come from hell.’

  She came forward, then bent over me and kissed my cheek. As she did this morning, when she entered my room and gave me my present, she smelled of soap.

  It was the first kiss I had experienced in many years, since that terrible, unforgettable winter which I have never been able to excise from my mind.

  ‘Get some water,’ Trofim suddenly ordered her, as if coming to his senses. ‘Make some tea. Prepare a bed.’ Turning to me, he said, ‘You will stay here. With us. For as long as you wish.’

  I stayed that night, promising myself I would leave the next morning: but the night turned into a week which evolved into a month that metamorphosed into two decades, the remnant of my life.

  * * *

  Folding the letter once more and returning it to my pocket, I sat on for a short while, gazing out from the leafy parasol of the silver birch. From this vantage point, I had as usual a fairly panoramic view of the village.

  The house is on a slight rise with most of the buildings below, on the gentle incline that goes down to the river and the road which crosses it by way of a concrete bridge. Now, in high summer, the gardens are a blaze of colour. Sunflowers stand against walls, smaller blooms in front of them. Where there are no flowers, there are vegetables.

  In front of Trofim’s porch are several rows of raspberry canes and a patch of herbs and small onions. Between the house and the woodland up the slope behind it, Trofim’s plot is filled with cucumbers and marrows trailing on the ground, beans hanging like plump green fingers from a trellis of sticks, tomatoes tied against stakes, dark-leaved potatoes with their tiny white blossoms and rows of cabbages. The ranks of carrots, beetroots and radishes are protected from marauding birds by a thin black netting suspended from poles like a miniature, transparent Bedouin tent.

  Beyond the gate, across the lane, stands a quaint little house made of age-blackened wood with a fretwork boarding around the eaves over the porch which is as deep as a room. The chimney leans precariously but has done so for at least a decade. I cannot look upon the house without being reminded of the world of Pasternak and Dostoyevsky.

  The property is owned by a widow, Vera Dorokhova, whom the villagers refer to behind her back as The Merry Widow for she has been happiest since her spouse disappeared into the forest one January winters ago, not to be found until the spring when his half-thawed body, gnawed by foxes, was discovered beside a woodsman’s hut in which he had taken shelter. A lathe operator in a small engineering works which turned out tractor wheel bearings at Zarechensk, his wife may have been Vera but his mistress was Madam Vodka under whose instruction, as people put it, he frequently beat her and generally made her life miserable. In the first few years of my residency in Myshkino, the sight of him returning from work, his clothing powdered with iron filings and his
shoes trailing the odd shiny turning like a weak spring embedded in the rubber soles, sent involuntary shivers down my spine. Had I the hackles of a dog, they would have been instantly erect but not on account of his cruelty to Vera Dorokhova: I had seen far worse cruelty than anything he could have devised, sober or sozzled. It was because, at a distance, he reminded me of a brute I had known called Genrikh.

  Since Madam Vodka’s lover was planted in the graveyard by the church at the other end of his village, I have been haunted by a newer ghost in the form of his widow. She watches out for me and I watch out for her. Despite my being 20 years her senior – twenty years today, as it happens – she has a yearning for me, a longing she will only satisfy by getting me to the altar down the road. That I am past caring for women, that I have been past caring for them for decades, does not seem to put her off. Perhaps she has developed a macabre taste for burying men. I do not intend to find out.

  One of Trofim’s cockerels crowing in the distant brought me back to my senses and I glanced at my watch. It was time for me to go, to set off on my constitutional, to go and meet all those who would pass the time of day with me and who, according to Frosya, were keen to talk to me, to see me on my birthday.

  My daily walk is important to me: I may be old and becoming frail but I like to keep myself fit and my daily neighbourhood perambulation sees I stay in good condition, body and brain.

  As Kirill always said, a fit man fights and therefore survives whilst a weak man wails and goes to the wall.

  2

  I first met Kirill in the primary shaft chamber on Gallery B of the coal mine six kilometres from Sosnogorsklag 32 labour camp.

  After descending for two levels, the wire mesh door of the lift cage was opened by a shifty little man not over one and a half metres tall whose large skull with its bulbous forehead and huge hands were out of all proportion to the remainder of his body.

  ‘Get out! Get out!’ he squeaked in a falsetto voice. ‘Line up! Line up! You!’ He pointed at me then at the rock face behind me. His arms were short and also incongruous. ‘Mr. Soft Hands! Form a rank! Form a rank!’

  I moved back. The dozen or so other new arrivals joined me, chivvied onto parade by the miniature martinet.

  ‘Silence! No communication!’ he shrilled again.

  The cage door was slammed across, the safety bar swung down into place and the cage began its descent down the mine shaft, the cables humming, the grease on the guide wheels sucking.

  Standing with my spine pressed to the rock, I studied the subterranean world into which I had been plunged, no wiser nor any more blessed than a kitten, surplus to the breeder’s requirement, dropped onto the carpet to the sound of water being run into a pail.

  The main shaft contained two cages, one for the transportation of miners and the other for trucks of coal. The passenger cage had a sliding door to it but the truck cage door had been welded shut. Gallery B was mined out and was now used, I discovered from a board bolted to the rock, as a storage area. From the roof were suspended bare 60 watt light bulbs protected from breakage by wire baskets and hanging at five metre intervals. I could see them disappearing down the perspective of the gallery which ran off at right angles to the shaft, curving gradually out of sight as the tunnel turned to the left. Water dripped with melancholic monotony from a pipe overhead into a puddle below but, when I pressed my hands against the rock behind my back, I was surprised to find it dry and cool.

  From a side chamber a little way down the gallery appeared three men who came towards us. As they passed under a light, their faces were momentarily illuminated from above, casting strange shadows downwards across their features.

  ‘Attention! Attention!’ squealed the little man. All his orders seemed to be repeated. The men drew closer. He waited until they were not ten metres away then he shouted, ‘You! Mr. Soft Hands! Stop shuffling! Stop shuffling!’

  I was standing quite still. He was blustering for effect.

  ‘Shut up, troglodyte!’ said the tallest of the men. The martinet stepped aside and gave a semi-salute.

  Despite his prison cropped hair, the grimy coating of coal dust blotching his skin as if he were in the early stages of leprosy, his grey and filthy uniform, he cut a handsome figure. His eyes, surrounded by two circles of comparatively clean skin, were filled with humour, his lips just touched by the faintest of wry smiles.

  ‘Number off,’ he commanded.

  We each announced ourselves by our prison numbers. Mine was B916. Our voices sounded dull in the flat acoustics of the shaft chamber.

  ‘Good!’ he exclaimed and he ran his eye over us. We might have been auditioning for some macabre play. ‘So you are all new to the gulag,’ he divined accurately. ‘New to the concept that Labour is Dignity.’ There was an unmistakable sarcasm to his voice. ‘Has anyone here less than twenty years?’

  I glanced along the line. No one put up their hand or stepped forward.

  ‘In that case,’ he said with a grandiloquent and ironic sweep of his arm, ‘welcome to the rest of your lives. And take a word of advice. Do not dream of the day of your release. Do not think about it for if you do, it will not come. Like the kettle you watch, it will not boil. Men go mad thinking about the past, the future. Here, there is no then and no next. There is only now. Live for now.’ He paused to let his words sink in. ‘There is no point in being morbid about it. Do that and you die. Inside.’ He put his hand on his chest. ‘In your heart. The blood will still pump but the spirit will be dead. The spirit is what they want to kill. Not the body. The body has a use.’

  The cage sped by, heading upwards, the steel guide wheels hissing on their well-greased rails. A draft of fetid air preceded it.

  ‘You at the end,’ he said: it took me a moment to realise he was addressing me. ‘You come with me. The rest…’

  The other two men divided the remainder of the group amongst themselves.

  ‘So, B916, what is your name?’ he enquired as I followed him along the wide tunnel.

  ‘Alexander Bayliss,’ I told him.

  He stopped and studied me.

  ‘A good Russian name for the start. But the other? And your spoken Russian? Not so good. A curious accent.’

  ‘I’ve only picked it up recently,’ I admitted.

  ‘So where do you come from, comrade?’

  ‘I’m English.’

  ‘Ah!’ he wagged his finger at me. ‘So you are the Englishman.’ He held out his hand and I accepted it. This was the first time I had shaken a friendly hand for months: most hands I had come across had either pointed accusingly at me or slapped my face. ‘I am a Work Unit leader and you are joining my team.’ We walked on, passing a side gallery piled to the roof with crates and boxes. ‘My name is Kirill Karlovich Balashov. They call me Kirill. And you? Alexander is a bit of a mouthful. Do you know the diminutive for Alexander? It’s Shurik. So, from now on, you are Shurik.’

  I nodded my head. At the next offshoot, we turned right and, in a short distance, arrived at a table upon which had been placed rows of kit.

  ‘Take one,’ Kirill said. ‘Don’t worry about anything but the metal hat and the gloves. If they fit, you’ll be all right. If they don’t you’ll spend twenty-odd years with your hat falling into your eyes or tipping off the back of your head.’ He grinned then added more seriously, ‘They must fit. Your life may depend upon it one day.’

  I gathered up one of the piles. It consisted of a thick gauge aluminium hat, a pair of heavy duty gloves, a small hand axe and a ball-headed hammer, both attached to a worn leather belt. The hat fitted, the gloves did not. Kirill swapped them for a tighter pair then reached over to one of the other piles and removed a small battery-powered lamp from it.

  ‘Not everyone gets one of these,’ he said. ‘You are a lucky one.’ He flicked the switch. It did not come on. He thumped it on the table then against the palm of his hand. ‘No battery,’ he declared then, finding another lamp, he snapped open the reflector and unscrewed the bulb. ‘Get a sp
are. Best be on the safe side. You don’t say much.’

  ‘What is there to say?’ I replied and, nodding at the lamp, added, ‘Except thank you.’

  Kirill laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. His teeth were white and pure against his besmirched face.

  ‘We’ll get along just fine. I can’t stand blabbermouthers. Put your kit on.’

  When I was dressed, we returned to the main shaft, passing the other new arrivals heading for the store chamber. At the cage door, we halted. Kirill pressed a button to summon the cage. A tinny electric bell rang far above our heads.

  ‘This is Gallery B,’ he explained. ‘B for Beria who banged us in here.’ He smiled. ‘Two down from the surface. We are working at present on Gallery L.’

  ‘L for Lenin who invented Dignified Labour,’ I suggested.

  For a moment, he looked at me and I felt a twinge of fear. He might, it suddenly occurred to me, have been testing me. Trust no one. That was the motto of the gulag: trust no one until you were so intimate with them that you knew the given names of every louse living in their pubic hair. Even then, you should still be wary. Yet I had no need to worry. Kirill exploded into laughter.

  ‘L for Lobanov who…’

  The cage arrived, the noise drowning out Kirill’s metaphor. We stepped into it and descended at increasing speed, decelerating so quickly at our destination that I felt my legs bend and my head swirl. Kirill put his hand under my armpit to steady me.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said. ‘We all do. Unless you’re the troglodyte.’ He leaned conspiratorially towards me. ‘You ever wonder how the little bastard got so small?’

  He opened the gate and we stepped out into Gallery L. Another prisoner carrying a wooden box got in and the cage rose out of sight.