‘I suggest,’ Ylli said, ‘that you bet on the likelihood of a mouse appearing during the next rest period. When the blasting team blow the charges, the little buggers sometimes show their heads.’
‘What do you say?’ Titian offered. ‘If a mouse appears, Shurik gets the jerky, if no mouse turns up, you get the tobacco.’
Vachnadze thought about it for a moment before his face broke into a grin and he held his hand out.
‘Done!’ he stated.
Titian slapped his hand against Vachnadze’s and the bet was sealed.
In the next rest period, he quit his own work unit and joined us in a small side chamber quite empty of stores. We all stood in the semi-darkness alert, watching the entrance to the chamber for a mouse to enter or run by. The leader of the team setting the charges blew the long blast on his whistle, the lights flickered, there was the customary dull thump and thickening of the air.
‘That’s it,’ Vachnadze declared. ‘It was odds on no mouse would turn up. You get plenty of them in the summer months, but not so many in the winter.’ He pointed to the roughly hewn roof of the chamber. ‘It’s December up there, comrades.’
I put my hand in my clothing and tugged the packet of makhorka free of the lining where I had secreted it. It was forbidden to bring tobacco down the mine.
‘What’s that?’ Kirill remarked in an off-hand manner, pointing to the rear of the chamber. As our leader, he had kept himself aloof from the business of the wager.
Kostya switched on his lamp. Cowering against the rear wall was a grey mouse, its whiskers quivering and its tail straight out behind it.
‘A mouse!’ exclaimed Dmitri. ‘A bloody mouse!’
Vachnadze stared at the rodent with a mixture of annoyance and disbelief. Its beady eye shone in the lamp light: then it was gone, running for cover in a crack in the rock.
‘Some you win, comrade, some you lose,’ Titian remarked with a smirk he could not control.
Vachnadze handed over a package and stomped out of the side chamber. I replaced the makhorka in my clothing and shone my lamp around to see if I could catch sight of the rodent but it had vanished.
Six hours later, as we queued for the cage to lift us to the December night above, shuffling on our padded jackets in readiness for the sub-zero temperatures awaiting us, each of us chewing on a wadge of the jerky, I noticed Dmitri was holding his thumb in the palm of his hand.
‘Problem?’ I asked.
Unfurling his fingers, I saw the coal grime was darker than usual and shiny. He was bleeding from a gash behind his thumb nail.
‘No problem,’ Dmitri said.
‘Drill bit?’ I enquired. ‘If it is you’ll need to clean it well. The grease they come in…’
‘No, no drill bit,’ he cut in then, whispering, added, ‘Those little buggers have quite a bite.’
3
I have always thought myself to be safe here in Myshkino.
Not from enemies, you understand. I have no concern for them now. Most, if not all, of them have died off, or been demoted, or sacked from whatever service bound them by its codes of hate and fear. The gulag is shut for the likes of me and, until I join a crime gang in St. Petersburg and peddle dope, or attempt a coup in Moscow which fails for lack of commitment or lousy planning, it will remain closed. The only wire that holds me in now is that which also encloses Trofim’s chickens which, from time to time, I enter with a bowl of scraps or a handful of corn: the key to their door hangs by a length of string from a hook by the back door.
As I totter towards eternity, a crusty old cove in a tidy jacket in a small village in the middle of Russia, you would think I was beyond care, beyond the reach of elements that might shake my security. What, you would think, could possibly happen to the old boy now. He’s been through hell’s kitchen – and the adjacent pantry, too – and has still come out with a smile in his heart. What, you could surmise, could possibly test him further.
Until this last week, I would have agreed with the conjecture. I thought I was done with earthquakes of the soul twenty years ago when the gates of the camp swung open and I was cast adrift, a remnant of human flotsam to wash up on Frosya’s shore. Time’s passage, winter storms, angry words and aching bones held no terror for me now. I was not afraid of them. They could not affect me. But fate, carrying in its basket the disconnected fragments of a long-forgotten past – that was a different matter altogether. Believe me.
As the dawn broke this morning, to turn the eightieth page of the chronicle of my trespass upon earth, I woke to discover the relentless clock taking me closer to being tested yet once more and, as the day drew on, I sidled inexorably nearer to the moment when fate was to knock its gavel on the block and, pointing at me with a finger like a malformed talon, shriek, ‘Decide! Decide!’ And, just as it was in the gulag or down the mine, I knew I should have no choice but to square up to the inevitable, take what chance served to me and dance to the pipes of fortune.
In truth, I thought, I would rather face death than five o’clock on this sunlit day, the sky dotted with fair weather cumuli, the world at peace with itself and the harvest in the fields half done. Over towards Stargorod, the wheat is already gathered in and the barns are blizzarded by sparrows and finches. Here in Myshkino, they are still gleaning the stubble rows or filching from the uncut ears. The apples in the orchards are early this year, some already suitable for picking, the first of the ripe fruit falling into the grass which, every morning, glitters with dew bedecking the webs of field spiders. Butterflies vie with Stepanov’s bees for the bounty of the blossoms.
At least, where death was concerned, I considered, I was prepared, have been so for most of my life.
As I brushed my white and – at last – gradually thinning hair, I studied myself in the mirror. Make no mistake, mine is a face that has seen the action. Gazing into my own eyes, I could spy the past slipping by not in detailed pictures but in moments of love and hatred, terror and joy, elation and depression. The lines on my forehead are furrows you could plant seeds in yet they are not frowns of disgruntlement or cantankerous age but channels of experience, rails to guide me into my thoughts. My cheeks are slightly pink, a sort of healthy glow such as one sees in the faces of children or old men like me who might, if their minds were weak, revert to infancy, spending their days drooling, fingering their privates and waiting for the god to beckon.
Even as the bristles scarified my scalp and tidied my not-too-short locks, for an old man with hair slightly longer than decency dictates has a certain dignity, I could see particles of that past which I have so long denied, to such an extent that now it is little more than a series of disjointed shards of time, like badly edited film, connected by short breaks of darkness.
There was a dog, possibly an Old English setter with a liver and white coat, running under trees the ground beneath which was a carpet of what might have been bluebells. It must have been spring-time although of what year, or of my life, there was no way of telling. A woman in an ankle-length, dark skirt and lace-trimmed, long-sleeved cream blouse called after the dog but it ignored her and scampered on. I could not make out the features of her face nor could I hear so much as a whisper of her voice nor the faintest of yaps from the dog. This was a silent film. A flash of time’s void and a house appeared across a wide lawn. The roof was indistinct, the windows nothing more than glass oblongs reflecting a grey sky, the chimneys squat but vague although the upper section of one of them might have consisted of a pattern of double twisted bricks. All that was plain to see was a rampant wisteria hung with lilac bunches of flowers like gossamer grapes. Another flick of black and I was moving down a street, turning a corner and facing a shop the window of which was filled with colourful objects although I was not certain quite what any of them were save three. These were tall, narrow-necked glass bottles with ornate stoppers, each a metre high. One contained liquid red as a blood ruby, the second hyacinthine blue and the third chartreuse green. Above these hung a sign upon the polish
ed black background of which were painted, in gold leaf shadowed with deep vermilion, two indistinct letters and a name I could read as clearly as I saw my own visage in the mirror.
That was enough! Be gone! I had seen sufficient to know what I am and what, as the afternoon drew to an end, I had to decide.
* * *
The lane outside Frosya’s and Trofim’s house is not surfaced but merely a dirt track about three metres wide running down the hill towards the centre of the village. The house is, with the Merry Widow’s, the last habitation before the forest begins. In winter, the lane is either a glassine slope of ice upon which Trofim throws the ashes from the fire to give the soles of his valenki some purchase, or a morass churned up by feet, Spitsin the pig farmer’s horse and cart and the occasional motor vehicle. Now, in summer, it is a dusty track made uneven by the winter’s traffic. When it rains, the wheel ruts act as gutters and the hoof-prints as little pools from which, when the sun reappears, swallows and swifts come to dip their beaks and sip. The verges, where the lane runs unevenly along the edge of people’s vegetable plots or flower beds, are rank with grasses and wild flowers visited by bees from Stepanov’s hives and wild bees’-nests in the forest or butterflies drifting across the world on the currents of their trade winds.
I stepped gingerly along the lane. At my age, a twisted ankle is no laughing matter. It could be the death of me.
A few years ago, Trofim made me a walking stick out of a length of hazel, with a carved boss shaped like an eagle’s head and occasionally, so as not to hurt his feelings, I carry it about with me, but I refuse to rely upon it. I needed no stick in the gulag, when I was often bowed by the burden of my labours, and I will not depend upon one now. Today, being my birthday, I left the thing behind. It was not a matter of pride: it was a matter of surrender. I will not – I have never – surrendered, not to circumstance, not to man and certainly not to the tyranny of time.
Halfway down to the village, on the left of the lane, is Komarov’s property behind which extends his orchard of about a hundred apple trees, many of them far more gnarled and decrepit-looking than I, but all considerably more fruitful.
As I advanced, making my way cautiously over the rock-hard ruts, I heard a rhythmic squeaking. It emanated from a large shed twenty metres to the right side of the house, approached by a path neatly lined with smooth stones collected from the bed of the river. Against the side of the building were piled hessian sacks tied with twine, dark stains upon them.
Drawing still nearer, the sound suddenly stopped to be followed by a noise akin to a man dropping a load of rubber balls into a wooden bucket. It had a curious music to it, somehow primeval like the throbbing of drums in the jungle or distant thunder in imaginary mountains and meant Komarov was hard at his seasonal work.
It had been my intention to make Komarov my first call on this auspicious day but, as he was clearly busy at his toil, I decided to move on. It was not yet mid-morning: there was plenty of time. Yet it was not to be for, just as I reached the gate and passed through it, Komarov appeared at the door of the shed and, seeing me, shouted out.
‘Shurik! Where are you going?’
‘On my rounds,’ I said. ‘As usual.’
‘Your rounds?’ he echoed, then he remembered. ‘Your rounds! As usual! Today is your day, my friend. Nothing usual about it! Come!’ He waved his hand, frenetically beckoning to me.
‘I don’t want to interrupt you.’
‘Interrupt me? You won’t. I can work and talk. Would welcome it.’ He looked towards his house and called out, ‘Katya!’ There was no reply so he shouted louder. Komarov has a deep booming voice which can carry half a kilometre. ‘Katya! Shurik is here.’
I turned back through his gate and started up the path. Had I my walking stick with me, I should have trailed it against the round, grey stones like a boy running his ruler along a fence. Old men have puerile ways and I am no exception.
‘Happy birthday, Alexander,’ Komarov said somewhat formally, stepping out from the shade of the shed.
‘Thank you, Komar,’ I replied.
His nickname is an ironic play upon his surname: komar means mosquito. It is most inappropriate for Komarov is a big bear of a man, with a full black beard just starting to grey, hands the size of dried herrings and a laugh so jovial one would think it could draw nails from wood.
‘Shurik, step into my lair,’ he invited me, shaking my hand, his fingers softer than at any other time of the year. ‘Enter the den of the happiest man in the world.’
‘It is that month,’ I remarked.
The interior of the shed was cool and dark, but not without light. There were cracks in the roof through which sunlight was filtering, spaces between the boards of the walls. Indeed, the building is less of a shed and more of a temporary shelter. Against the far wall was piled firewood for the winter and split lengths of kindling next to three bales of straw the size of steamer trunks, the topmost cut open and trailing stalks on the earthen floor. Yet the function of the shed is not as a store or a winter byre. Komarov keeps no sheep or cows.
In the centre of the structure stood a tall contraption made of wood. At the top was a square funnel below which, projecting from a sturdy oak casing, were two large wooden wheels, one connected to a crank with the other acting as a governor. Both engaged several toothed wooden gear wheels and a pair of stone rollers set only a few millimetres apart. Below this was an oblong tray. All the wood was either grey with age or blackened with usage. This is Komarov’s pride and joy, the one thing for which he is envied not just in the village but in the entire district. It is his apple mill.
‘There she is,’ Komarov declared. ‘My once-a-year lady friend. The only whore who can steal me from my wife’s bed.’
‘How old is this machine?’ I enquired.
He laughed and said, ‘If she was a woman, she’d be past bedding and if I was her age I’d be past trouncing her. She is…’ he thought for a moment ‘…just over 150 years old. My great-greatgrandfather made her. Every square centimetre of the timber used in her came from trees growing within a five kilometre radius of the village. Of this very house. The same with the press.’
He moved around the mill to the other side of the shed. The apple press stood against the wall, a massive wooden screw thread holding the pressing plate in mid-air.
‘You know what I call this?’ Komarov asked, resting his hand on the suspended plate.
I shook my head and said, ‘Komar, you have told me. Every year when it is time to harvest your orchard, you tell me. And every year I forget.’
‘The right of an old man, Shurik. This top part, which presses the fruit, is called the bull and this…’ He touched the bed beneath, made of elm planking stained to ebony by year upon year of juice. ‘…is the cow. Sex,’ he added, ‘is everywhere in the agricultural life.’
Upon the cow was piled a half-made cheese of pomace, alternate layers of straw and mashed fruit. Yellow and black striped wasps hovered lazily in the air around it, drunk on a surfeit of apple flesh. I followed one as it flew unsteadily up to the rafters to become entangled in a spider’s web.
Komarov, seeing my eyes tracing the wasp, said, ‘Watch now what happens.’
The wasp started to struggle to free itself. The more it endeavoured to free itself, the more enmeshed it became. Suddenly, the owner of the web appeared on the scene. It was a big, dark grey spider with a leg span of at least eight centimetres. Pausing at the edge of its web, it placed its two forelegs upon crucial strands.
‘He’s testing the tension,’ Komarov observed, ‘judging the size of his captive.’
With a sudden rush, the spider crossed the web to within a centimetre or two of the wasp. It paused again.
‘Now he knows,’ Komarov declared. ‘Watch what he does, Shurik.’
The spider, far from leaping on the wasp and sinking its poisoned fangs into it, stepped back one arachnidian pace and began to snip the threads of its own web. The wasp was loosened but was
still ensnared. The spider moved round, still cutting the net of the web. Finally, the wasp dangled at the end of a single strand. The spider reached it and severed it. The wasp fell to the ground, still threshing about to get free of its bindings.
‘So much for the grey wolf of my rafters,’ Komarov stated, ‘and the stripped tiger of the forests.’ He stamped his foot down. ‘Even when they are soporific, the spider knows better than to take on a wasp’.
From a lip in the rim of the cow, juice dribbled into a wooden pail large enough to bathe a baby. It was a dull, cloudy amber.
‘Try it,’ Komarov suggested. ‘Go on! Have a sip of the whole of the summer concentrated in a thimble.’
I held my finger under the trickle and sucked my skin. The juice was sweet but had an edge to it.
There was a movement at the entrance to the shed. Katya, Komarov’s wife, was there with a tray bearing three glasses of kvas, made from the apple juice. The liquid was the faint golden colour of raw plasma.
‘Happy birthday, Shurik,’ she said and, placing the tray in the sunlight on the edge of the cow, kissed me lightly. ‘Eighty years. Such an age. Just to think, you were born in the year of the October Revolution.’
She handed the glasses round and raised hers to me.
‘To you, Shurik,’ she declared. ‘With thanks to God for you being amongst us.’
I nodded politely, accepted the toast and sipped the drink. It was sweet and I imagined it tasted of warm days and meadows. A small shadow edged across the square of bright morning sunlight upon the earth by the door.
‘Stas is here,’ Katya announced. ‘Come, Stas. Uncle Shurik is here and you know what this day is.’
Into the shed stepped a small, tow-headed boy of about five. He was a handsome child, already showing his father’s strength but still in possession of his mother’s softness. I sensed he wanted to hide behind the bulk of the apple mill but had been instructed not to.
The Industry of Souls Page 5