‘I wonder,’ Kostya thought aloud when they were out of earshot, ‘what mammoth must have tasted like. To the cavemen hunters.’
The five of us exchanged looks. We knew what Kostya was thinking. Kirill scratched his nose.
‘Too risky,’ Titian declared. ‘What if it died of some disease transferable to humans?’
After a long silence, Kirill said softly, ‘What does it matter? We’re zeks. We’re dead men anyway.’
The cut Kostya took came from what would have been, were the mammoth a beef steer, topside. It was a substantial piece of meat weighing about four kilos.
‘How are we going to do it?’ I asked as we tossed earth on the layer of ice.
‘Make a stew?’ Avel suggested. ‘We’ve got cabbage and potatoes.’
‘No,’ Kirill decided, ‘we roast it. That’s what the cavemen would have done. They had no cooking utensils.’
That night, we erected a simple spit over a hearth of smooth river stones outside our tent, fuelling the fire with anthracite and timber obtained by chopping up a rations supply crate. Solovyov and Nedelko paid us no heed. They were in their tent and seemed not to have their suspicions aroused by our fire al fresco. The guards ignored us and, shortly after dark, went to Fedin’s tent for a game of cards.
Dmitri, as chef d’éléphant, caked some potatoes in mud and placed them around the fire to bake. The meat took some hours to cook and it was late by the time it was ready for eating.
We sat in a circle round the flames, balanced on boxes and barrels, except for Ylli who incongruously lolled back in one of the deck chairs. The flames danced upon our faces and hands, giving them a ruddy, primeval glow.
As Dmitri’s knife pierced the meat, a delicious aroma wafted over us, stirring memories of our former lives which were, it seemed then, as far removed from the present and lost in time as those of the cavemen we imitated. The mammoth joint itself was hard on the outside and crusted with burnt tissue but within it was well cooked, rare only in the very centre. We held our plates out as Dmitri sliced off generous portions and served them.
I cut into my share. A pink, bloody gravy oozed from it as the knife severed the tissue which, to my surprise, flaked almost as if it was fish. I spiked a piece with the blade of my knife, hesitating as I carried it to my mouth: we were all vacillating for one reason or another. It was Kirill who, as usual, decided for us.
‘What have we to lose, my friends?’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, we finish burying the past and return to the future.’
‘Screw the future!’ Ylli muttered.
‘From the primeval to…’ I began.
‘To Sosnogorsklag 32,’ said Kostya.
Together, we opened our mouths, like men taking part in some bizarre blood brothers’ oath-taking ceremony, and ate.
The mammoth meat was gamey, rich, and mouth-watering. It was not at all tough, almost dissolving in the mouth. The juice which seeped out of it as we bit into it was slightly salty.
We chewed without speaking, lost in thought. It was not that we were overawed by the thought of what we were consuming but more that we did not have the vocabulary, the means of expression at our command, to speak. It was as if, by eating ancient meat, we had been temporarily transmogrified into primitive men with no language other than grunts and grimaces.
When we had consumed the joint, we ate the potatoes and sat back satiated, the heat of the fire playing on us.
‘Only one thing needed now to complete the banquet,’ Titian announced. He rose from his seat and walked to a snow drift behind the tent, returning with a bottle in the bottom of which were two of three centimetres of good quality vodka. ‘Courtesy, albeit unwittingly, of Dr. Solovyov.’.
There was only sufficient for a thimbleful each. We held our mugs up in silent tribute to the mammoth and drank. The vodka was chilled and scoured my throat like carbolic.
Until after midnight, we all sat round the fire, drinking what was left of the coffee. Titian recounted bawdy tales of his student days at the University of Leningrad, Avel regaling us with stories of bravery in the skies above the 38th Parallel, of how he had engaged US Air Force F-86 Sabres and F9F Panthers over the Yalu River in his MiG-15, and Dmitri entertained us with a gamut of his jokes, filling our throats with laughter and our hearts with happiness. They seemed funnier than usual, I suspect because the vodka had gone to our heads, unaccustomed as we were to liquor, but I can remember not one of them now.
I kept my silence and thought how strange destiny was, that it should have brought me into the companionship of such a motley crew and given me such friendship in circumstances which were, I considered, as brutal as the world in which the mammoth had lived.
Glancing from one to the other of them brought to mind a definition of friendship although I could not place its author. A friend, it went, is one soul inhabiting two bodies. Yet here, in this bleak place of adversity and pain, we were not two but seven. And what we had between our disparate selves was something men who lived in comfortable amenity would treasure beyond health or wealth.
Later, as the fire died and the others took to their bunks, I sat a while longer outside the tent with the embers dying at my feet, the ice in the river crackling before me, the stars brilliant over my head and a taste of roast meat lingering in my mouth for the first time in years.
7
The unassuming church of Saint Lazarus stands on a grassy knoll across the river from the village with a fine, spreading walnut tree shading the main door. When I first came to Myshkino, it was in a state of semi-dereliction. One of the side chapels remained in use by a few old crones who hobbled up there once a week, or on feast days, to light a candle stub and chant a while, but the bulk of the interior was used in good years to store excess grain from Myshkino Motors’ barn and, for the rest of the time, winter fodder, firewood, communal agricultural tools and spare parts for the village tractor which were locked in the seventeenth century vestment chest. In there, they were secure from thieves and moisture for the lid was a tight fit and the chest weighed at least five hundred kilos when it was empty, the hasp fashioned from iron a centimetre thick.
There was no village priest. The post had been vacant almost since the Bolshevik uprising. In 1919 the incumbent, a young man not long ordained called Father Mikhail, prophesied the future course of Russia. He was, in retrospect, exceedingly accurate in his vision but he kept it to himself. One spring day, he conducted the service, led the prayers, sang sturdily and gave the blessing: the next day, he was gone. His small tied cottage behind the church was empty, the fires in the stoves out and his wardrobe bare. For weeks, the villagers prayed for his safe return, scoured the countryside for his body and put out tentative feelers as far away as Voronezh. Six months later, they learnt from a deserter fleeing south that he had renounced his faith and joined the White Guard. He was never heard of again.
No other priest arrived as a replacement. The villagers kept the church going as long as they could but, in the face of the ravages of the weather, time and socialist dogma, it fell into decay and underwent its secular utilitarian transformation.
As the world changed, however, and the rolling clouds of Communism started to thin, the villagers gradually turned back to the church. There was no outward manifestation of this: it happened in their hearts and minds, far away from the tentacles of the Party and the KGB. Eventually, there arose a determination to restore it. At first, the excuse was that the building had a cultural connotation which should not be ignored. Religion, it was argued, was not the point. The church was a part of the village – and Russia’s – heritage. After all, it was argued at a meeting with officials in Zarechensk, churches in Leningrad and Moscow had been preserved or restored to show to foreigners the history, the traditions, the grandeur of the Soviet past. The precedent had been set. That the chance of foreign tourists ever coming to Myshkino was about as great as a cake of cheese become a commissar was ignored.
I attended the meeting, with some reluctance. I wanted to
keep my head well below the parapet. Certainly, the local officials had as little idea as to my own personal history as they had of the church itself but that was immaterial. In my mind, I saw them cast as overseers and, the night before the meeting, I suffered terrible nightmares in which I was dragged through a coal mine not unlike a darkened church, impaled upon an ornate altar and cut through with a compressed air-powered rock drill.
‘Don’t worry!’ Victor Ivanovich, the village spokesman, assured me on the way to Zarechensk. ‘You won’t have to speak. You’re just coming along to swell the ranks.’
‘Like deer in the forest when the wolves are about,’ his wife, Tamara, remarked. ‘Safety in numbers.’
Her choice of metaphor did nothing to calm me and, as we climbed the steps into the local Party offices, my knees felt suddenly weak.
The meeting got under way with Victor Ivanovich stating the case. The local cadres, under the chairmanship of the local Party secretary, listened with the patience of officials who knew where their power lay. Tea was served. Cigarettes were handed round, the Ukrainian makhorka tobacco smoke dense and grey and, for me at least, unpleasantly familiar. Others joined in the parley. The current use of the church was discussed, alternative storage for the contents mulled over. Costs were bandied about. I sat in the back row, sipped my tea and kept my eyes down.
Suddenly, a voice from the front said, ‘Comrade! You! At the back! Old man! What do you remember of those days?’
At first, I did not realise I was being addressed: then Trofim jabbed his finger into me.
‘Shurik! The secretary’s speaking to you,’ he hissed.
A tsunami of terror washed over me. I looked up, slowly. If I had been closer to the front, to the table behind which the officials sat, he would have seen the abject horror in my eyes and suspected something. In a split second, I lived again the handcuffs, the KGB interrogators, the circus dwarf in Gallery B. B for Bulganin who had buggered us all.
‘What do you remember of the old days, when the church was a church?’
Trofim, understanding my fear, nodded encouragement to me. I rose unsteadily to my feet, holding on to the back of the chair in front to keep my balance.
‘Very little, comrade,’ I replied, trying to contain the waver in my voice and control my knees which were quaking unrestrainably. Even addressing him as comrade was a crime: as a former zek, I should have called him grazhdanin for, being a miscreant, I could never be his comrade, only his fellow citizen. ‘I was,’ I did a quick calculation, knowing that the nearest I kept to the truth the less likely I was to snag myself up with lies, ‘only three or four when the priest left.’
‘But you remember afterwards? The villagers kept it going for a while, we understand.’
‘My parents were not very devout,’ I answered, wondering whether or not to add that they were, by their impiety, good Communists, but I decided against it. ‘I only went to the church with my grandmother and then not very often.’
‘Do you remember what the interior was like?’ the secretary quizzed me.
I was, slowly but surely, being snared. Yet I had to answer.
‘Not very well, comrade secretary,’ I admitted. ‘I remember it was always dark. There were candles lit – not very many – and a small red lamp hung from the roof. There were some icons and the wall behind the altar was painted with pictures.’
At one end of the table, a young woman clerk frantically scribbled in shorthand as I spoke. The very movement of her pen across the paper of her pad sent a shock of fear through me. She might have been recording my confession to crimes the conduct of which I was not even able to imagine.
‘Anything else?’
‘I remember the smell,’ I lied. ‘Always very musty.’
I made to sit down, thinking my interrogation was over.
‘Comrade,’ the secretary asked, ‘what is your name?’
The clerk looked up. Her pen was poised. This was for the official record. This was going into the Myshkino dossier.
The blood must have drained from my face. My head swum and I fought to keep myself in check.
‘Alexander…’ I began.
‘He is my uncle,’ Trofim called out. ‘He is one of the schoolmasters in our village.’
‘Ah!’ The secretary brightened up. ‘Tell me, comrade teacher, what is your opinion as to what should be done with the church?’
I looked down at my knuckles. They were white as they gripped the metal stay of the chair.
‘Just tell him!’ Trofim muttered. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
‘Safety in numbers,’ whispered Tamara, sitting in front of me, not helping the situation much.
It was plain I had to say something. Silence would have roused suspicion and might have undermined the villagers’ case, bringing them untold trouble in the form of petty bureaucratic hassling for months to come.
‘I think,’ I commenced, gathering my thoughts, ‘the restoration of the church would be beneficial to the community. It will bring a sense of awareness of the past in our young people. Is it not the case that, when the Revolution overthrew the old order, the palaces of the Tsar and his nobles were not destroyed, nor their treasures looted and dispersed, but retained in their grandeur for they belonged to the Soviet people. To the proletariat.’ I began to warm to my speech, despite myself. ‘So it is to this day that we, the Soviet people, may visit such places as the Winter Palace in Leningrad or the Terem Palace in the Kremlin to see and understand our cultural heritage. The preservation of our past is important to us, it gives us identity.’
I paused. All the officials were looking at me with an intensity that unnerved me and yet, at the same time, it bolstered my spirit.
‘When the French overthrew their monarchy,’ I continued, ‘they destroyed everything. Palaces were looted, libraries destroyed, paintings burned. That was because they are a barbarian race. But we, the Soviet people, did not do this. We are civilised and realised the cultural importance of our past. Certainly, we removed the monarchy but we did not destroy that which made us.’
‘And how do you regard the restoration of the church in Myshkino?’ the secretary asked.
‘I consider it the restoration of a facet of the past which will give continuity to the future. A man lives by his history and what he was is what shapes what he shall become.’
There was a long silence. The officials looked at me and I looked at the floor as I slowly lowered myself onto my chair. I felt drained, afraid and alone. Trofim took hold of my hand and pressed it between both of his: his skin was warm against mine which was chilled for want of blood.
For some minutes, there was a muted discussion amongst the officials. The villagers remained apprehensively silent. Every so often, one of the officials glanced up at me, tickling the hairs on the nape of my neck.
At last, the secretary declared that he and his colleagues would retire to consider their decision. More tea was served. I spilled half mine on the floor for I could not prevent my hands from shaking. The others gathered round me, murmuring their congratulations on my speech. Victor Ivanovich told me he could never have put the case so succinctly, so sententiously. After half an hour, the officials returned, the secretary coming across the room to me.
‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘you are a most eloquent orator. I am sure you are just as effective a teacher. You are a credit to your village and to the Soviet people.’
I smiled politely and mumbled some suitably humble reply but, all the while, a rip tide of triumph was surging through me. The music of revenge, the exquisite rhapsody of retribution was playing in my soul. A thousand trumpets blared the fanfare of ironic victory. I had beaten the entire system, the order which had thrust me into a quarter of a century of oblivion, which had tried to destroy my spirit, to eradicate my humanity, to demolish my love of my fellow men, to quench all hope and which had caused the death of Kirill.
‘Comrades,’ the secretary addressed us from in front of the table, ‘we have reached our decis
ion. The church of Saint Lazarus in the village of Myshkino may be restored.’ He drew himself up: he was about to prove to us what a generous man he was, worthy of his exalted position and his right to drive and fornicate in an official car. ‘I have contacted the regional authorities responsible for such affairs and they have agreed a grant of four thousand roubles to assist with the restoration programme.’
The villagers applauded, we left the meeting and returned home where I was feted as being the saviour of the church.
Now, the church stands upon its knoll looking as if seventy-five years of socialism were little more than a thunderstorm in the night. The wooden walls are painted white, the classic Russian onion-shaped dome on the single tower painted deep royal blue with gold stars spattered about it, all of them with six irregular points. Boris, who was responsible for them, had little concept of geometrical perfection but he was the only one of us who had the courage – some said stupidity, others temerity – to balance on a plank suspended by two ropes from the base of the iron cross at the apex. The window frames are painted in the same deep blue.
Inside, the church is simple. Two of the wooden pillars holding up the dome are decorated with frescoes adequately copied from a guidebook to the Monastery of the Transfiguration of Our Saviour at Yaroslavl. Red, blue, gold and ochre predominate, the paintings looking like the two dimensional portraits of a particularly gifted but artistically ignorant child. There are five icons in the church. Two are modern copies but three are genuinely ancient. Where they came from, no one is prepared to say even today in the liberal world of dollars and gangsters, but the rumour is that they were stolen from another church over a hundred kilometres away by a secret posse of villagers who went off icon-hunting one weekend just as the restoration was nearing completion. A brass candelabra capable of holding thirty-six candles is suspended by a chain from a pulley system. That, too, was stolen but from a scrapyard, not another house of worship. Only the little oil lamp with its glass cowl the colour of freshly spilt blood and the silver censer are original to Saint Lazarus. They were kept secreted away over the years by one of the old women who continued to use the side chapel and were only discovered when her son, inheriting her house, had to climb into the loft to replace some rotten joists and found them wrapped in moth-chewed lengths of velvet stuffed into a wall cavity.
The Industry of Souls Page 14