The Industry of Souls

by Booth, Martin

  The shaft chamber was not like that in Gallery B. A railway line ended here in a loop. Men stood around in the glare of three bare lights which did not hang from the roof but were mounted on the rock wall. Stripped to the waist, they were caked in coal dust, striped like zebras where their sweat had coursed in runnels over their skin. They wore their metal hats squarely on their heads. The air was surprisingly warm and there was quite a breeze blowing from the depths of the mine. Along the roof ran cables, pipes and a square, galvanised iron ventilation duct, air whistling out through a poorly sealed joint.

  ‘He was crushed?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘It was his first day. At the time, the mine only went down to Gallery P. For the Politburo which pisses on us all. That was where he was headed. P is over two kilometres down. The last hundred metres … He didn’t brace himself like the old hands.’ He squeezed his palms together. ‘Phapp! He went from one metre eighty-seven to what you see now in less than two seconds. Thirty-nine centimetres he lost. His balls got caught between his thighs. He went from a bass to a soprano.’

  ‘How could he have survived?’ I said.

  Kirill slapped me on the back and replied, ‘What do you think? Is the moon made of marzipan? No, it’s just my joke. A story we tell to get his goat up. His real tale is much funnier. Let’s go. I’ll tell you as we walk.’ He looked at my hands. ‘Put your gloves on.’

  We set off along the gallery, keeping to one side of the railway track. Every fifty metres or so, chambers had been hollowed out on either side of the gallery. Some were shallow and empty, others filled with boxes. One had a door fastened across the entrance with a picture of a globular cartoon terrorist’s bomb nailed to the panelling.

  ‘The troglodyte,’ Kirill said, ‘was a trapeze clown in the Moscow State Circus. One of a troupe called the Flying Fedeyevs or something like that. All of them were dwarfs or not much bigger. They jumped and chased each other across a mesh of wires about ten metres up, scampering around like monkeys, playing the fool, bursting bladders of water, throwing talc. The children liked them. The troglodyte was the boss clown.

  ‘Anyway, some years ago, the circus went on tour to Czechoslovakia, giving performances at Prague, Decin, Ostrava, Brno. And Breclav. You know where that is?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘Ten kilometres from the Austrian border. The little bugger couldn’t resist it. There was the usual brigade of KGB stoolies and minders along on the tour, occupied watching who did what to whom, where and why, and noting it all down for the files. But he still thought he could outsmart them. So, you know what he did? I will tell you.’

  A rumbling sound reached us. A light rocked from side to side far down the tunnel. Kirill took my arm and pulled me to one side. A train of ten trucks laden with lumps of coal and rock juddered by, towed by a much dented and scratched electric locomotive driven by a man who gave Kirill a cursory wave as he passed. Kirill nodded in reply.

  ‘For the climax of the act, the troglodyte dressed up as a gorilla. Blacked face, hairy suit. He swung about scratching his belly, tickling his armpits and beating his chest. The big top tent had been erected close to the railway station. He had worked out that he could swing from rope to rope across the tent, out of the big door through which they brought in the larger acts, over the guy ropes, along a heavy telephone wire to the railway line and drop onto a train heading south.

  ‘The show began. It was a matinée. That was his first mistake. If he had moved at night, he might have stood an outside chance. He’s not one of nature’s brightest candles. Anyway, he’s up there, monkeying about. He hears a train whistle. It’s going the right way. He’s off. The minders don’t realise he’s done a runner until he doesn’t return through the big door to take a bow and throw a bag of talc. They unholster their Makarovs and set off in hot pursuit. By the time they get outside the tent, he’s well on his way down the telephone line. They run after him, taking a pot shot or two at him to impress their officers but they miss and they can’t get near the telephone line because it’s over the other side of a tall railing fence.’

  The gallery widened, the rails dividing into two to provide a passing place with a short siding running into a side tunnel. From ahead came the faint, insistent but unidentifiable sounds of machinery.

  ‘At last,’ Kirill recounted, ‘he gets near the train. All he has to do is swing from the telephone line to a trackside cable and then jump. The comrade brothers are going berserk. If he gets away, they’re bound for Siberia. The troglodyte gets to the train, swings out from the phone line and grabs the cable. The momentum of the swing will carry him onto the train. He swings. Next he knows, he’s in a prison ward of the local hospital with his hands bandaged, his head aching and his eyelashes gone.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Why don’t birds get fried on power lines?’ Kirill asked. ‘He short circuited the telephone system with the railway high voltage supply. Like any cautious trapeze artist, he didn’t let go of one hold until the next was firm.’

  The noise in the gallery grew louder until it was almost deafening. The air tasted of coal dust. Ahead was the working face, men bent to hydraulic-powered drills, water spraying onto the bits where they wormed into the coal seam. Behind them, others shovelled coal into a row of parked trucks, jammed pit props into place with lump hammers and laid another section of track.

  ‘Welcome to hell!’ Kirill shouted, his mouth close to my ear.

  * * *

  Imagine this.

  It is a rest break, one and a half kilometres down. There are six of us, and Kirill. We are Work Unit 8, gathered in one of the side chambers six hundred metres back from the coal face, lounging on piles of sacks or sitting on boxes. At the face, the explosives team is setting the charges.

  Around me, in the gloom cast by a single light, are my fellow workers, my comrades in coal, Kirill’s boys. From my perch on a crate of drill parts, I look from one to the other of them, observe their faces and the bend in their bones, share in their exhaustion, their aching muscles and tired souls.

  Leaning against a pit prop under the light is Avel. Avel the Aviator, we call him. He is slightly shorter than I am with pointed features. His chin is sharp, his ears flat against the side of his narrow head and his fingers, despite the manual work we do, slender: they might be a pianist’s or a violinist’s. Before he fell foul of the system, arousing some jealousy or enmity in a colleague who shopped him to a cadre who passed his name on down the line, he had been a fighter pilot in the Soviet Air Force.

  Even when they came for him, beat his shins with canes and imprisoned him for a crime he did not realise he had committed, he remained a dedicated Communist, a Party man through and through. In his early months in the mine, he had accepted his lot with the sangfroid of the unquestioning zealot. A mistake had been made but he was not going to complain: this was his fate, his sacrifice for Mother Russia. After all, he reasoned, someone had to mine coal.

  As a pilot, he had actively fought the American Aggressor in Korea, at first as an advisor to the Chinese and North Korean air forces but, later, as a combat flyer. From late in 1950 to the summer of 1952, he had flicked and jived his MiG-15 in the deadly aerial ballet of dog-fights with American F-80 Shooting Stars and F-86 Sabres, being twice shot down and having to bale out. His had been a simplistic world of speed, sky and the red fire button on his control column spitting bursts of 37- and 23-millimetre calibre cannon shells at an overt enemy.

  Now, as I watch him, he has changed. No longer a devoted follower of Marx and Engels, he has seen the error of their ways and his own.

  He stands under the light for a purpose: none of us tries to rob him of his place. He might have been an air ace with eight kills to his name but he has the heart of an artist. With his dexterous fingers, he passes his time carving chess pieces out of coal and shale. Admittedly the shale chess-men, being grey, are not as white as they might be and are sometimes hard to distinguish from their opponents, but they are better than nothi
ng. At this moment, as I watch him, he is concentrating on a black rook, turning a fragment of coal in his hand, shaping the battlements of the little tower with an awl he has fashioned from a broken drill bit.

  Across from Avel, Kostya fumbles with his lamp. It is some weeks since we were last issued with batteries and his is the only one still charged: however, the bulb is ill-fitting and flickers irritatingly. He is intent on trying to repair it, wrapping single strands of copper wire round the base in the hope he might increase the diameter of the thread.

  Although we are an informal band, only two of us are perpetually known by nicknames, myself and Kostya, which is short for Konstantin.

  Poor Kostya! He was the one who felt imprisonment the hardest at first. Avel had possessed the freedom of the skies, but only saw it from the cell of a cockpit, surrounded by switches and dials, levers and gauges, buckles and belts. Before the darkness, as he put it, Kostya had been a warrant officer in the Soviet Navy, in charge of his own mess deck. For him, the world was huge, a vastness of empty ocean and sky which he could cross for days without seeing anything other than clouds, flying fish and the tail fin of a diving whale.

  During his eight years in the service, he had been based in Vladivostok and sailed the Pacific and Indian Oceans in a frigate, stationed in Archangel and traversed the Atlantic watching out for American submarines from destroyers, and assigned to a battleship whose home port was Odessa and aboard which he had sailed the Mediterranean and the South Atlantic. He had been to Cuba and smoked an Havana cigar in Havana, to Shanghai where he had dined on snake, to Bombay where he had seen dead bodies being eaten by vultures on the top of a funereal tower and to Naples where he had taken a tour round Pompeii and caught a dose of the clap. Kostya has more stories than the rest of us but he keeps them suppressed for the sake of his sanity.

  Ylli, who sits hunched up on a box, his eyes closed, is the only other foreigner working in the mine. His name means Star. He is an Albanian who came to the USSR as an engineering student. For two years, he lived frugally in a foreign students’ hostel and studied hard, rose to the top of his class and thereby engendered the envy of his peers. It was his girlfriend who turned him in when he beat her by one mark in a mechanics test upon which depended placement in the next term’s seminar groups.

  They came for him at dawn, snapped the handcuffs on him, bundled him into a car and drove him straight to prison without even touching base in the KGB cells. He was beaten up a few times, questioned about subjects of which he was utterly ignorant, beaten again for his insolent non-compliance, accused of nothing, held for a month then transported east without so much as a rigged trial. He is a natural pessimist, and it is not unusual for him to fall into an incommunicative sulk every so often, his pessimism and the gulag getting the better of him: no doubt, he cannot quite rid himself of memories of the bleak, historic shores of his native Albania, basking under a Mediterranean sky, the sea unchanged since Julius Caesar crossed it to fight Pompey, the villages unscarred since Ali Pasha raided them for tribute.

  Lying on a pile of tarpaulins farthest from the mouth of the side chamber, which luxury we take in turns, is Titian. Once a mathematics teacher, he is a cultured man of quiet intellect and charm who, in the sorry and typical catalogue of betrayal which put most of us here, was grassed on by a pupil to whom he gave low grades. It was foolish of him and he knew it at the time: the boy’s father was a Party official of some standing in the town. Yet he still gave the youth a D because that was all he was worth in the race for academic honours. In the race for personal survival, he was a certain A++.

  Titian’s eyes are closed but he does not sleep. None of us sleep in rest breaks. If we did, we should be all the more tired when we returned to our labours.

  Look closely. His lips are moving silently. He is not praying for release, or escape, or death, nor is he losing his mind. In fact, he is reciting a poem to himself and I think I know which one for, from the timing of the movement of his lips, I can tell it is a poem constructed in four couplets and his favourite is so written.

  It is by the Korean poet, Yi Yuk-sa, who was arrested in Peking by the Kempetai, the Japanese secret police, who tortured him to death in 1944. Entitled The Peak, it goes

  Lashed by the bitter season’s blast,

  At last I am driven to the north.

  I stand upon the sword sharp frost,

  Where senseless horizon and flat land meet.

  I do not know quite where to kneel

  Nor where to place my fretting steps.

  There is nothing to do but close my eyes

  And think of the steel rainbow of winter.

  Next to me, perched on the end of a crate marked Track ties and assorted fittings, is Dmitri who has, in his time, been a Soviet army conscript, a cook, a stevedore, the janitor of a block of sumptuous apartments for the exclusive use of the nomenklatura and a shopkeeper. With an irrepressible sense of humour, often scatological, and a treasury of stories, most of them either risqué or risky, depending upon your political standpoint, he comes from what is now known once again as St. Petersburg. He survived the Fascist siege towards the end of which he was reduced to surviving solely on soup, made by boiling algæ gathered from the Moika canal, where it joined the Fontanka canal just north of the Mikhailovskiy Castle, his belt and the leather straps from an old wooden trunk he had long since burnt for fuel.

  Unlike the others, who were betrayed into the gulag, Dmitri put himself there. It was a slip of the hand, a momentary aberration, a miscalculation of infinitesimal insignificance but it did for him. A woman entered his shop, which sold household articles, one Thursday afternoon to purchase a colander: of course, when I say it was Dmitri’s shop, he was not the proprietor but the manager for the establishment belonged to the state. The colander was made of pressed aluminium and cost one rouble, 15 kopecks. He had wrapped the item up in brown paper, tied it about with cord with a loop that she might carry it more easily and given her change for a five rouble note. As he was counting out the change, his wife dropped a glass preserving jar. It shattered, glass flying in all directions. For five seconds, ten at the most, his attention was diverted and he lost count. The woman checked her change: she had received 3.35. not 3.85. She did not make a fuss, just gave Dmitri a sour look and demanded fifty kopecks. He apologised profusely and stumped up. Twelve hours later, he was in a cell being accused of anti-Socialist sentiments, of undermining the principles of Socialism, of harbouring greed and capitalist tendencies.

  Despite his self-betrayal, Dmitri is an optimist. He survived the Nazis and a stretch in the army so the gulag is, for him, just another tribulation life has chucked in his way. He will, he is convinced, get through it.

  Penultimately, there is Kirill.

  From my first day down the mine, we have been good friends. He is about my age, tall enough to have to duck in many of the side chambers where the coal seam is narrow or the nature of the rock overhead demands the use of extra thick pit props and cross-members. Even now, sitting on a barrel gazing down the main gallery in the direction of the coal face, he gives off a sense of authority, a certain charisma which commands respect and might, in other circumstances, occasion fear.

  This is hardly surprising for he was an officer in the local militia before he arrested a young official called Nikolai Georgievich Krivopaltsev for corruption and fell from grace. It was not until after he had signed the charge sheet, slammed the cell door shut, turned the key and filed the arrest papers that he discovered his prisoner was the nephew of Innokenty Ivanovich Andronikov, First Secretary of the Communist Party for the entire region.

  Upon making his discovery, Kirill immediately returned home, kissed his wife and two-year-old daughter, patted their Borzoi bitch and sat down on the porch of their house in the twilight of a late summer evening to await the inevitable. It was two hours in coming.

  And finally, there is me.

  Alexander Bayliss, bachelor, graduate of English Literature from the University of
Durham, one-time representative of Scott, Pudney (Steel Stockholders) & Sons, Ltd., of Doncaster, England, arrested in Leipzig whilst on a trip to buy scrap iron, charged with espionage (erroneously, as it happens), accused of being an enemy of the Soviet peoples and reported tragically killed when my car was struck by a lorry on a bridge over the River Elbe. I was presumed drowned.

  My trial, such as it was, was held in camera. It was short, efficient in the extreme and utterly irrelevant. I was dressed in prison clothing, taken to a corridor and seated on a bench alongside an assortment of other miscreants, some innocent, some foolish, some guilty. We were ordered to look to the front, not attempt to communicate at all with each other and to edge forwards as the queue shortened.

  The court was nothing more than a large room. The judges – there were, I recall, three of them – sat behind a scratched table on a dais a few inches higher than the bare floorboards. On the wall above them hung a portrait of Stalin, his moustache prim and bristling, his piggy eyes glinting. I was marched in and stood on a low pedestal. The presiding judge shuffled some papers, looked up, stared at me for a moment then made his pronouncement speaking, for my convenience, in heavily accented English although I had acquired a reasonable smattering of Russian during my interminable and pointless interrogation.

  ‘B916, Bayliss Alexander,’ he said in a bored monotone and without taking a breath. ‘You are charged under Section 6 of Article 58 of the Criminal Code. The charge is that you are suspected of espionage against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Your sentence is twenty-five years of hard labour.’

  With that, he stamped and signed several sheets of foolscap one of which was handed to me by a clerk. I looked at it. The rubber stamp was smudged. It was triangular and contained the letters SVPSh. I enquired what it meant and was told it was an acronym meaning I was accused of making contacts which might have led to my being suspected of espionage.