‘What have you say?’ his father prompted him.
The child swallowed, stared up at me and brought his hands round from behind his back. He held out a small package wrapped in red paper.
‘Well, Stas?’ his mother urged.
‘Alexander Alanovich Bayliss,’ he uttered, his voice not much louder than the drone of the inebriated wasps, ‘merry birthday.’
‘Not merry birthday!’ Komarov exclaimed. ‘It is happy birthday.’
The little boy grinned sheepishly. I stooped to accept his present.
‘Thank you very much, Stanislav Yurievich,’ I told him. ‘And you may be sure I shall have a merry day.’
It was, in part, a lie. I knew I should not actually be unhappy. That much was the truth. But later on, I considered, when the sun started to dip, then my day might take on a different mien.
The package was easily opened. Within was a small cardboard box. I opened this to discover, protected by flakes of cotton wool, a carved model of a wealthy land-owner’s kibitka about ten centimetres long. It was perfect down to the smallest detail. The runners under the sleigh curved perfectly, the sides were finely cut and decorated and, beside the sleigh-driver’s seat, a whip stood up in the air, a thin twine of leather curling away from it as if caught in mid-motion. I turned the model over appreciatively in my hand.
‘When Shurik was a little boy like you,’ Katya said to Stas, ‘if he had lived in Russia, he would have travelled to school every day in a sledge like that.’
‘How did you go to school?’ the child queried, drawing courage from his mother’s presence.
In truth, I do not remember for I have chosen to forget, and time has aided me in my deliberate neglect, but it is the role of an old man to entertain the young so I lied again.
‘When I was six,’ I said, ‘I went to school in an omnibus. Later, when I was older, I went in a train.’
Stas thought about this: I might just as well have told him I was taken to school in a gondola set with amethysts, mounted on wheels and drawn by a pair of white unicorns. He walks to the school in the village and, although he has travelled on a bus to Zarechensk, he has never seen a train except in pictures or on the television.
‘It was a toy, a hundred years ago,’ Komarov explained, pointing to the model.
‘How did you get it?’ I enquired.
Komarov smiled and replied, ‘Like the mill, like the press, my great-great-grandfather made it.’
I was deeply touched. These people were not giving me a gift so much as parting with a treasured and, I was sure, a valuable heirloom.
‘What can I say? It is exquisite. I am deeply honoured. Yet, surely, you should keep this, for Stas, for his son, for the future…’
Komarov put his hand on my shoulder.
‘My dear friend,’ he said, ‘we are the honoured. That you have chosen to live here, with us, for – how long is it now?’
‘Too long,’ I teased him.
‘Many years. It must be twenty for I was eleven, or twelve, when you arrived.’ He paused to gather himself as if to make a speech. ‘You chose to live amongst us, after all we had done to you, after all the years of hate, after the pain.’
‘Enough!’ I complained. ‘You did nothing to me, Komar. Nothing.’
‘But the Russians,’ Katya begins, ‘the Soviet…’
‘Are you those people?’ I replied. ‘Are you the chosen eunuchs of the Supreme Soviet? No. You are not. Like me, you are just common people going about your lives caught in the common mesh of history.’ I glanced upwards at the wasps receiving their liberty. ‘Like them, but without the sting. And as for this hate of which you speak?’ I shrugged dramatically and cast an obvious theatrical glance about the shed. ‘I do not see it. As for the pain, well, that was in my muscles, not in my heart.’
‘The common mesh of history,’ Komarov reiterated. ‘I like that. You were always good with words, Shurik. When I was a boy…’
‘The less said about your boyhood,’ I announced, ‘the better. I remember you as a rumbustious little sod. Quick to answer back, full of irrepressible impertinence. I am sure you would not wish your son to hear of his father’s waywardness. Or your wife, come to that.’
‘I learnt from you,’ Komarov said.
‘Rubbish!’ I retorted. ‘You merely came to your senses, realised there was more to life than standing in the fields killing jays. Remember that?’
‘I remember,’ he admitted. ‘You shamed me.’
‘You shamed yourself,’ I said. ‘You knew you were doing wrong.’
‘And can you recall what you said to me?’
I thought for a moment before speaking and saw, once again, a well-built twelve-year-old with a small bore shotgun standing at the edge of the forest with a dozen jays dead at his feet, their azure plumage catching the sun and speckled with black clots of congealing blood.
‘I think I said that for every beautiful thing a man destroys, two ugly ones are born. You were good at arithmetic, looked at the ground and the message sank in.’
‘It scared the hell out of me,’ Komarov confessed.
‘It was meant to. Teach the father and you teach the son.’
I looked down at Komarov’s little boy and put my hand out. ‘Stas, shake my hand.’
He was cautious again. Katya nudged him. He slowly brought his small hand out and I took it in mine. It was lost between my fingers.
‘There,’ I said, ‘the old world passes on the future to the new.’
Not looking at their faces, for I knew they were sad, I returned the kibitka to its box.
Komarov could not let it go. He had to ask me, as he has done before in what he has decreed to be moments of gravity.
‘Do you forgive us, Shurik?’
‘Forgive you? For what?’
Komarov avoided my eye and said, ‘You know, Shurik.’
I sipped the kvas. The sun, cutting through the door and striking the jug, had warmed the contents. It was smooth, like honey brought to blood heat.
As for what it is Komarov knows I know, it is this: his father, Vladimir Nikolaevich, was for six years the nachalnik – which is to say, the commandant – of a forced labour camp near Ust’ Olenëk. I was never held in that camp but that is of no concern to Komarov. It is enough that I was in the gulag and that his father was a part of the apparatus that held me there.
‘Komar,’ I said, ‘are you a religious man?’ It was a rhetorical question and I answered it immediately. ‘No. Like me, you give no truck for gods and angels and yet you know the text as well as I do. The soul that sinneth,’ I quoted, ‘it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him. The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, chapter 18, verse 20.’
For a Russian from peasant stock who possesses nothing more than a small house his grandfather built, a hundred apple trees and a derelict car which cannot move for lack of a new rear axle, Komarov is exceptionally well-read. When most of his peers sit around the long winter fires playing cards, roasting chestnuts or their toes, watching television or lying cosseted under the blankets with their wives, Komarov reads. This, he claims, is why his friends have four children but he has only one to show for ten years’ of marriage: and he has spent long nights forsaking his wife’s love, seeking to come to terms with the burden his soul has carried, of which I am a constant reminder.
‘Horace,’ he parried, ‘wrote in his Odes, Delicta maiorum immertius lues.’
‘I know my Horace,’ I rejoined and translated the quotation. ‘Though without guilt, you must atone for your father’s sins. Do you believe that? If this were the case,’ I argued, ‘the sins of men would be passed on, multiplying with every generation until the whole world was full of nothing but sin.’
‘You have been in the gulag, Shurik,’ Katya almost whispered.
‘That, my dear Katya, was not the whole world. It was a small blot on the landsca
pe west of the Urals and up towards the Arctic Circle, a few kilometres from a coal mine. If you had been with me in the gulag, you would agree with me that the world is not full of evil. Even there, there was friendship, love, compassion. True, human goodness.’
For a long moment, she looked at me with such puzzlement. She cannot understand my stoicism, cannot come to terms with the fact that I bear no grudges and have simply, as she sees it, shrugged off a quarter of a century hacking coal out of the frozen north to feed the power stations of the temperate south.
‘Stas,’ I said, to break the tension of this awkward moment for us all, ‘will you take this box home for me and ask Frosya to put it in my room? If I carry it with me around the village, I may drop it.’
The child nodded gravely and, accepting the box containing the miniature sleigh, went off with Katya in the direction of Frosya’s house.
‘I have not told this to you before, Shurik,’ Komarov said, watching his wife and child turn through the gate and start off up the lane.
‘Said what?’
‘I have never told you this,’ he ignored my question, ‘because I have not wanted you to think I was using it as an excuse.’
‘An excuse? For what? What are you going on about, my friend?’
‘For…’ He had to choose his words. ‘For the Soviet Union, as it was. For my father.’
‘No man, Komar,’ I insisted, ‘has to excuse his father. I’ve said this many times to you. Believe it, believe me!’ I raised my finger to drive home the point. ‘Himself? Yes! His father? Never!’
‘Let me tell you, Shurik, this story,’ he went on undaunted by my brief didactic outburst. ‘It is true. I swear it on Stas’ head. On March 5, 1953, the radio announced the death of Stalin. Maybe he died a few days before. Who can tell? That was the official date of his death. All over the Soviet Union, people gathered in the streets, in the town squares, around the local Party offices. In Moscow, people died, hundreds of them crushed to death in the mass of people on the streets, mourning, wondering about their futures. My father was on leave from his posting. Of course, I was not there. I was not yet born. But my mother – he had married her only the year before – told me he was distraught.’
Komarov turned and emptied another sack of apples into the mill. The rubber ball sound resounded in the shed. An apple bounced free and I picked it up, tossing into the gaping maw at the top of the machine.
‘The next day,’ Komarov continued, ‘my father went to Zarechensk. They had opened a book of mourning in the Party office there. He inscribed his name.’
He set the mill in motion. The apples rolled down, slid into the teeth of the mill and were split apart. The sound of each apple breaking open was a sharp click, like a bone being snapped. The air filled with the tart tang of the raw juice. From between the rollers oozed a mush of apple flesh which dropped heavily into the tray beneath.
For several minutes, Komarov evenly revolved the handle. Not until the last of the apples in the funnel had passed through the mechanism did he stop, sweat beading on his brow.
‘Just before my father died, three years ago, I visited him,’ he went on. ‘He lived in Volgograd, in a small apartment they wanted him to leave after my mother died. It was winter, the street full of slush.’
He dug the wooden spade into the apple mush and swung a load onto the press where it bounced on the layer of straw.
‘In the apartment, my father was sitting before the fire. It was an old building, once a mansion but now divided into little flats. Not one of your concrete Khruschev cubes. The roof was sloping, the windows big, the eaves deep. A real house, from the old days of Russia. So he had a fireplace in his room. I touched his shoulder but he did not look up. In his hands, he held a small doll, one of those little mannequins in peasant clothing children like to play with. It was of a man dressed in a cap, like Lenin but without the beard.’
He threw another shovel of pomace onto the cheese of straw.
‘A doll?’ I queried.
‘I thought maybe it was my sister’s, from when she was a child. My mother kept such things after the measles killed her. But it was not. It was older. “What is this?” I asked my father in a friendly way and reached down to take the doll. But he gripped it fiercely and tore it from my fingers. Something sharp jabbed painfully into my thumb.’
‘What was it?’
‘The doll,’ Komar said, ‘was stuck with pins. Like a voodoo charm. Dress-maker’s pins, old-fashioned hat pins, safety pins. Even a hypodermic needle.’
He looked at the rollers in the mill. Apple juice was dripping from it. Tears appeared on his cheek.
‘“What is this doll?” I asked him again, a little angry. My finger was beaded with dark red blood for the pin had gone in deep. “Tell me.” My father said nothing. I was afraid, for a reason I could not explain even now. I thought he was going senile. Suddenly, he jumped up from his chair and threw the doll onto the fire. It was only a few coals, hardly any flames, but the material of the doll’s costume quickly ignited. I said nothing. My father turned and faced me. It was then I knew he would soon die. He stared into my eyes and he said, “That’s the last of him.”’
‘Of whom?’ I asked.
‘He told me later,’ Komarov explained, ‘when I put him to his bed. As he grew older, my father saw what Stalin had done to Russia and he was ashamed. He had, in his feeble way, been sticking pins in what he thought was Stalin.’
‘You mean,’ I said, ‘he had forgotten in his dotage that Stalin was dead.’
Komarov looked at me, a terrible weary sadness in his eyes. He wiped a tear from under his eye with his finger, leaving an apple pip adhering to his cheek.
‘Stalin is not dead,’ he replied quietly. ‘He is still here, with us. Just as all evil men are. We cannot be rid of them, no matter how many dolls we torture and throw on the coals.’
‘If evil men remain,’ I said, ‘then so do the good.’
Komarov could not hold back his tears now. He stood next to his weeping apples, the goodness of the orchard seeping into the bucket, and sobbed. This big bear of a man, who could carry the whole of the Russian winter on his back and hurl it into the sea, stood with his shoulders hunched, his head bowed and his tears soaking into his black beard. I stepped to his side, careful not to slip on gobbets of mashed apple strewn on the ground, took my handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped his face for him as if he were my son.
‘Remember this, Komar,’ I told him, ‘The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. And, if the years have taught me anything, it is a wisdom of sorts.’
‘You are a truly good man,’ Komarov said, straightening and blinking his eyes to be rid of the last of his tears.
‘No, my dear friend Komar,’ I replied, ‘I am not. I am just a realist.’
I folded my handkerchief, finished my glass of kvas and, biding him farewell with a wave of my hand, set off down the path. Looking back from the gate, I saw him bending his back to another sack of apples and heard the rumble of fruit falling into the mill.
It occurred to me, as I reached the lane, that I did not own the model kibitka but merely held it on loan. In a few years, when I am dead, Frosya will return it to Komar and it will re-enter the cavalcade of his family’s history, where it should be, but with the added tale attached to it of how, once upon a time, it was given for a year or two to the Englishman who lived down the lane, who forgave those whom he never met.
* * *
From Komarov’s house, the lane drops slowly down a gentle slope past other houses. Some have little fences between them and the thoroughfare, others nothing but a strip of unguarded land.
The first belongs to Yelyutin, the village carpenter: the whine of his electric jigsaw was just audible from the rear of his property as I passed by, not unlike the sound of the wasps in the cider shed. He has for over a week now been cutting out new facing boards for Andryukha, the baker. A sallow man with a compl
exion not unlike that of his dough, he has made good money in recent years because he has taken to heart the doctrines of elementary capitalism.
In the old days, no Russian village ever had its own bakery. Everybody made their own bread. Russian stoves were constructed to accommodate the weekly bake. Housewives dedicated their Saturdays to the task, kneading and moulding the loaves with a piece of zakvaska, a block of the previous week’s dough which served in lieu of precious and expensive yeast. With the coming of Communism, domestic bread-making died out and loaves were mass-produced in state-run bakeries. Andryukha’s father, a forester, had been plucked by the Party from his shady glens and sent to work in a co-operative bakery in 1941: his son had followed in his footsteps but, when the red flag ceased to fly, and the bakery was privatised, half the work-force were dismissed as surplus to requirements.
Taking a leaf out of the new management’s book, Andryukha privatised himself, erected an extension to his house, purchased three old stoves, built two wood-fired ovens out of fireproof lining bricks purloined from his former employers and set up his own small bakery.
Within a month, he was in business. His bread was good, tasting and smelling like the loaves everyone imagined the grandmothers of Myshkino had baked in the good years before memory. Now he not only sells bread to the villagers but he also bakes pastries and buns which he hands over every morning to a callow youth called Durov who takes them on a superannuated motorcycle to Zarechensk. There, in the bus depot or railway station, he hawks them to waiting passengers or patrols the platform, offering up his flat wicker tray of goodies to open carriage windows. For his pains, he is allowed to keep fifteen percent of all he earns. As a result of his business acumen, and Durov’s reluctance to ask for a bigger percentage, Andryukha has bought a three-year-old Volkswagen and is having his house repaired and extended.
Beyond that lies Izakov’s home, set back from the lane and closed up: the shutters have been drawn across the windows since last summer, as if it was mid-winter all the year round. The chimney is cold. No smoke has risen up the flue for over two years for Izakov and his wife have departed Myshkino.
The Industry of Souls Page 6