Beside the church is the village cemetery, a mixture of ancient graves protected by leaning iron crosses and more recent, stark headstones. Of Father Mikhail’s house only a raised platform remains. The house was, in the harsh years of the 1930s, gradually dismantled, cannibalised to repair the other houses in the village or cut up for fuel. Its destruction also lent the villagers some credibility in the equivocal eyes of the GPU officers who visited from time to time, checking up on everyone’s Stalinist zeal.
Three years ago, with the church reconsecrated, Father Kondrati was appointed to the living. He is not yet thirty-five but, with his rampant beard, his black robes and his tall priest’s headgear, not to mention his small circular spectacles sardonically reminiscent of those Leon Trotsky wore, he looks much older and distinguishedly patriarchal.
It was late morning as I approached the church, making my way slowly up the knoll from the bridge over the river. He was in front of the main door, sweeping the area of baked earth with a peasant’s twig broom like a witch’s sky chariot. It was not until I was quite close that he caught sight of me, stopped his labours and settled himself on the bench under the walnut tree.
‘Shurik, it’s good to see you,’ he greeted me as I moved under the shadow of the tree.
‘You always say that,’ I responded, ‘as if it is a miracle I’ve survived to see another sunrise.’
He smiled. I knew this not from the curve of his mouth, hidden in his facial foliage, but the sparkle in his eyes.
‘Every day is a miracle,’ he replied in the firm voice of a man certain of his god and his facts, ‘whether or not you or I are in it.’ He gazed about himself in the patronal fashion of a man of the cloth. ‘Is it not a fine day?’
‘Yes, it is a fine day,’ I agreed.
The meadow pasture on the church knoll has been mown and the hay collected in. Over by the tree line, where a track disappears into the forest, a horse was standing with its head down, grazing upon the sweet new growth that has pushed up since the mower did its work.
‘And it is your 80th. birthday which makes it…’ he paused to work out the sum. Like many men for whom eternity is a certainty and therefore not an object of fear, he is obsessed with the mathematics of time. ‘Twenty-nine thousand, two hundred days!’ he exclaimed.
‘Give or take a few, Father,’ I reminded him. ‘You must account for leap years.’
He looked sheepish for, although he is well educated in the ways of the church and the wiles of the sinner, he is not in those of Pythagoras, Euclid and their brothers in numeracy.
‘Add another twenty. Or so,’ he said then, raising his hands as if he was about to bless me, added, ‘Whatever! It is an extraordinary length of time. Our Lord in heaven obviously believes you have a purpose here on earth, to keep you with us for so long.’
I did not make a comment for I do not share his sentiments, do not believe in merciful gods of love and a panoply of omniscient charitable guardian angels for I have been in a place on their earth, in their creation, where they had no power: and this was no time for either argument or reasoned debate.
‘What will you do with your day?’ he went on.
‘What I do with every day. Live through it, experience what it brings, suffer its pains, or those which twinge my joints when the weather’s damp or cold, and rejoice at its little pleasures.’
He looked at me with a sadness I could almost touch.
‘I know where you learned this,’ he said, as if he was privileged with the information.
‘It is not a lesson taught just in the gulag, Father,’ I assured him. ‘It is presented to every human at some stage in their existence. A few heed it. A minority skip it and play truant from life’s little university. Most ignore it. In the gulag, however, one has no choice but to attend every class and pay attention for the teacher is a cruel master who will brook no slackers, no daydreamers, no skivers.’
‘You do not regret those…’ he paused again, to search for an appropriate word which, he hoped, would not upset me: little does he know that nothing disturbs me now. What is past is past. As Frosya says, you cannot unwind the wool of destiny.
There was a squeaking overhead, shrill and almost metallic. The priest welcomed the distraction for he felt uneasy pursuing the direction in which he had steered out conversation.
We looked up. Two squirrels were contesting in the high branches, defending what they hoped would be their winter store.
‘Indeed, the world is one of conflict, Shurik,’ the priest observed with a sigh of resignation. ‘We cannot escape it and must come to accept it. Men fight for nations and squirrels fight for nuts.’
‘There is little difference between the two. It is only a matter of dimension. The size of a walnut against the size of the world. Ultimately, the prize is one of possession.’
‘You should be a preacher,’ Father Kondrati remarked. ‘You have the gift of making complexities simplistic.’
‘No,’ I disagreed. ‘I simply see plain truths and comment upon them. It requires no skill and only a limited vocabulary.’
One of the squirrels, as if to prove the crux of our conversation, gnawed an unripe walnut free of its stalk. Gripping the nut, which was almost as big as its head, the squirrel headed off along a branch. The current overlord of the tree was incensed at the usurper’s gall and set up a piping chitter as it chased its enemy. The thief faced about but was now at a disadvantage. It had its booty in its jaws but it needed its teeth for defence.
‘What are we to see?’ Father Kondrati said. ‘The battle of the titans of Myshkino.’
‘We are about to see two of nature’s prettiest idiots lose all,’ I replied.
The owner of the tree attacked, running along the branch, its tail up and quivering with indignation. The would-be usurper dropped the walnut which fell, hit a bough, was deflected sideways, ricocheted off Father Kondrati’s hat and bounced across the beaten earth forecourt to the church. Free of its burden, the squirrel squared for the attack. There was a rapid scrabble. The monarch of the tree was overpowered, lost its grip, dropped to the bough below, admitted defeat and, scampering along it, launched itself into the air to land on the shingles of the church roof. After a glance back at the victor, the vanquished creature ran to the dome, skirted it and disappeared.
‘Everyone a loser,’ Father Kondrati declared, reaching up to ensure his headgear was not dented. ‘One squirrel loses its proprietorial rights, the other loses its bounty and the tree loses a chance to spread its seed. The nut,’ he added, in case I had not grasped the image, ‘is unripe.’
Looking at the dome, I considered how many men I must have seen in the gulag years driven from their rightful places to die, in the name of politics and ideology, and then thought of how Dmitri had once told me of the thousands who had perished in the name of religion and theology, gilding the dome of St. Isaac’s cathedral in St. Petersburg. Apart from the literally hundreds who fell to their deaths from the scaffolding, or slipped from the walls, there were many who were poisoned, who died a most terrible death, in the most appalling agony, for the gold leaf on the dome, one of the largest in all of Russia, was applied with liquid mercury which the labourers handled without gloves, wiping the sweat from their brows with fingers impregnated with mercury, breathing air in which mercury misted, drinking from tainted buckets through lips lightly silvered and as deadly as a cobra’s kiss.
And I thought, why should I regret the gulag years when it was simply my bad luck to be caught up in them, just as it was the ill fortune of tens of thousands of peasants to be enrolled and miserably perish for the glory of God.
History is filled with men who were just unlucky: I was one of their number but now, I am not.
I have learnt the lesson. Not that of forgiveness. I forgive nothing. Nor that of stoical surrender: had I surrendered, I would be now a broken man, a ghost on legs with a cigarette in one hand and missal in the other. Nor was it the lesson of hate. One cannot hate one’s destiny.
> The lesson I have learnt is to accept, not with docility but with understanding. I have learnt, in short, to come to terms with the inevitable.
Father Kondrati stood up. He whistled to the horse which raised its head, stopped its grazing and started to walk towards the walnut tree.
‘My friend,’ he said, ‘I must be off. I have a sick man to visit on the road to Zarechensk.’ For a long moment, he watched the horse drawing nearer then, without my bidding, he put his right hand upon my head, his touch light. ‘May Our Lord,’ he prayed, ‘bless you on this your birthday, may he keep you safe and guide you through the tribulations of life and may you rest in the everlasting grace of his love.’
I did not want to hurt his feelings so I thanked him. He went over to his horse and, hitching up his robes, swung himself into the saddle, straightening his hat which had slipped a degree or two askew.
‘Good-bye, Shurik,’ he called.
‘God speed you,’ I called back and waved.
When he was gone, the staccato tattoo of hooves on the roadway lost in the shift of the breeze in the branches of the walnut, I sat alone and pondered my predicament.
In a few hours, I was going to be visited by what I anticipated would be a spruce young man in a well-tailored pair of smart trousers, with the crease perfect down his shins, highly polished shoes, a white shirt so brilliant it might have been laundered in concentrated sunlight, a black blazer with gold buttons and a dark blue tie upon which, I imagined, would be embroidered the crest of the University of Oxford. Or Cambridge. One of the two. He was going to arrive before Frosya’s house in a dark and official-looking vehicle the paintwork of which would be as polished as his shoes. Certainly, it would not be anything like Myshkino’s future taxi. Accompanying him, there would be a man whom I envisaged would look perhaps not a little unlike myself.
And, when he arrived, I should meet both my past and my future simultaneously and have to cast my die.
* * *
From the realm of St. Lazarus, whom Jesus returned from the dead, I headed further up the knoll towards the woodland domain where immortal Sylvanus, with his caprine horns and hoofed hind legs, eternally trills his syrinx.
Starting a hundred metres behind the church, a track enters the forest by a permanently half-open ramshackle iron gate. The hinges are long since seized and the brackets are rotted through. Any attempt to swing it wide or close it now would snap it off. In winter, the track is a bleak, monochromatic avenue stretching for a kilometre or so to its first corner, the snow a mass of signatures of bear, deer, and fox. Now, in high summer, it is a dark, leafy tunnel filled with the shy song of invisible birds and shadows forever on the move as evanescent breezes zigzag through the trees. The track itself is a tangle of undergrowth and rank grasses which has not been disturbed for over a decade.
The original track was centuries old, nothing more than a meandering pathway through the forest to the east, used by both hunter and hunted. Eventually, it reached Gorelovo although I have never met anyone who has done the entire journey. Then, thirty years ago, it was widened to take timber trucks to a two thousand hectare area of felling where a sawmill was established on the side of a valley overlooking a river of black water which flowed sluggishly through the forest. The enterprise lasted less than a decade, the sawmill was abandoned and the track left to grow over, bushes and small trees taking advantage of the sunlight. Where once the twenty-litre diesel engines of the logging trucks roared and spewed now only the thunder of summer storms and the whisper of birds’ wings breaks the quiet symphonies of the trees.
Passing through the gate, I walked for about fifty metres then halted. The track went on ahead, the undergrowth becoming more dense but, to the right, a footpath veered off to circumambulate through the trees, keeping roughly parallel to the edge of the forest where it meets the fields of Myshkino.
Looking down the overgrown track, I considered how I could go that way. Take the long route to nowhere. Disappear. The ground was firm. I would leave no footsteps. By dusk, the grasses and bushes I would have had to push aside would have reasserted themselves and there would be no sign of my passage.
In this way, I could vanish into the forests like the Merry Widow’s husband. I would, however, do a better job than he had. Once gone, I would stay gone. There would be no half-gnawn legs and arms to be carried back, no chewed finger stumps to be chanted over by Father Kondrati, or wept over by Frosya. As I arrived in Myshkino, unannounced and out of the blue yonder or, more accurately, out of the black night of the gulag, so should I leave. That way, my sojourn in the village would become nothing more than a ripple in the pool of time.
It would be selfish of me. They would miss me and mourn my disappearance, would want to have had a lavish funeral for me, my bier draped in black cloth and strewn with white flowers, pulled by two black horses with plumes on their foreheads: or I might be towed to eternity by the Myshkino Cab Company. I do not want them to fuss and go to any expense over me but, when the time comes, they will. Be sure of that. My wake will be remembered for generations.
Considering all they have done for me, they deserve far better than to have me walk out on them, a deserter from reality who can no longer face the barrage of life’s artillery. They owe me nothing. I am the debtor here. For, in the final analysis, I am not one of them but just one of a million bums cast out of the gulag to be swept along by a tide he neither understood not swam with: yet they took me in and loved me, clothed me and housed me, gave me purpose and self-respect.
One tiny cameo has stuck with me through the years. On my second day in her home, I came upon Frosya in her little kitchen, cutting up some meat. I approached the room silently, for I had no footwear other than the boots I had brought with me from Sosnogorsklag 32 and they were nowhere to be found.
She sensed my arrival in the door and, not looking over her shoulder, said, ‘Good morning. Did you sleep deeply?’
‘In truth,’ I replied, ‘not so deeply. I am unused to soft beds and lying down without my clothes on.’
‘That is how they try to break you,’ she declared, turning from the table to sweep the diced meat into a pot on the stove. ‘A man who can never undress has no sense of himself. He loses his identity if he cannot, just once in a while, survey his naked body and be familiar with it.’
I was quite taken aback by her perspicacity and would have carried on the conversation were my feet not growing cold.
‘Do you have my boots?’ I enquired.
‘Trofim has taken them to be repaired,’ she answered. ‘They are falling to pieces.’ She cleared a space at the end of the table. ‘Sit here.’
I obeyed her and watched as she sliced some fresh bread and placed it before me on a plate.
‘Did you bring all your possessions from the gulag?’ she asked.
‘Everything.’
‘You lost nothing on the way? Or were forced to sell it?’
‘Quite on the contrary,’ I told her. ‘I gained a few items, like the scissors.’
‘I see,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘So everything you own is in your bedroom. All your clothes…’
‘Except my boots,’ I cut in, my feet getting colder still.
She poured me a glass of warm milk from a pan on the edge of the stove.
‘You need this to build you up,’ she instructed. ‘We must gradually increase your strength. Now,’ she opened a drawer, removing a knife, a fork and a spoon which she put on the table in front of me. ‘These are yours,’ she said, ‘to have in your room. You do not need to use them. We have plenty. But you must keep them.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because,’ she retorted, ‘a man who has no personal cutlery has no dignity.’
I have never forgotten that gesture, that first debt.
And yet, I suggest, a man’s passing, his last cavort in the tango of life, before he switches partners for the waltz of death, should be of his own choosing.
The track was tempting. If I stepped that wa
y, towards distant Gorelovo, all my troubles would be solved. I would be able to choose now. No need to put off the moment that was coming, later, as the sun starts to dip.
I felt in my pocket. The letter was there, crisp and neat as a warrant of execution.
Once, many years ago, when I was no longer regarded as a newcomer to the village and still had sufficient strength in my legs, I did venture down the track but not alone.
That year was possessed of a balmy autumn. Spring had come early and the summer had lasted weeks longer than usual. When autumn finally came, the sun was still warm, the days cloudless and the nights not chilled until the early hours for the earth had stored up the heat of the long, dry months. The forests seemed to sigh with relief, grateful autumn was finally arrived and the effort of summer was done with. The leaves changed quickly but, because there was no frost to cut them free, they drifted down of their own accord, the trees remaining dressed for well over a fortnight in their glorious copper and fiery coats.
‘We should not waste this magnificence,’ Trofim declared one morning as we sat under the weeping silver birch, breaking our fast. ‘A year such as this comes only once a century.’ He produced a cracked leather-bound almanac he had recently picked up in the market at Zarechensk and thumbed his way back through it. For days, he had been absorbed in reading its contents. ‘The last was in 1918.’
‘In that case,’ Frosya argued, ‘you are wrong. This will be the second time in a century. So it must be only once in fifty years. On average.’
‘You’re a pedant,’ Trofim chided her.
‘And how do you intend not to waste it?’ I enquired.
‘I?’ he replied. ‘Not I. We. You and me, Shurik. We are going on an expedition.’
The Industry of Souls Page 15