Frosya threw her hands in the air and said, ‘I thought you were over expeditions.’
‘Is a man ever tired of living?’ Trofim rejoined forcefully. ‘So long as true-blooded men have breath in their bodies and bounce in their balls, they never tire of expeditions.’
‘So I’m to prepare for it?’ Frosya asked. Trofim nodded eagerly and took hold of her hand. ‘And how long for?’
‘Three days?’ he suggested, looking at me.
I shrugged, having not the least idea what he was talking about.
Throughout the remainder of that morning, Frosya busied herself preparing two Soviet army knapsacks, putting in them bread, cheese, a jar of pickled cabbage, some smoked fish and a dozen hard-boiled eggs. Trofim, in the meantime, went to our neighbour, Sergei Petrovich, and borrowed two ancient shotguns and a box of black powder cartridges which should have been in a museum. By midday, all was ready. Trofim instructed me what to wear and inspected me on the porch.
‘Are the trousers thick material?’ he asked, bending to test the cloth between his finger and thumb and nodding approvingly. ‘Is your jacket warm? Lower extremities well catered for?’ He gazed at my feet where I was wearing a pair of his own ex-Soviet army marching boots. Once through his inspection, he handed me one of the shotguns and a knapsack to the base of which was strapped a rolled blanket.
‘We’re staying out then?’ I conjectured.
Trofim gave me a smirk befitting a mischievous ten-year-old who, fully aware of the concepts of right and wrong, had been caught red-handed with his fingers in the sugar jar. Frosya kissed first him, then me.
As she put her lips to my cheek, she whispered, ‘Don’t let him wear you out, Shurik. Be firm with him.’
‘I’m not quite sure what we are doing,’ I replied.
‘Playing at boys,’ she responded.
We walked down through the village, crossed the river, passed the church and headed off down the track. It was, as now, overgrown. Trofim led the way, pushing through the small, opportunist bushes which grew in the light but never reached above shoulder height because the forest deer were forever browsing on them. For at least fifteen minutes, Trofim did not speak. He walked staunchly ahead, forging a path I followed with the unquestioning obedience of a gun dog.
Finally, we arrived in a small clearing which had probably been a passing place for the timber lorries. Here, Trofim halted and stood quite still.
‘What do you hear, Shurik?’ he asked after a long silence.
I concentrated on listening to the forest.
‘Birds and bees,’ I replied. ‘Maybe there is a hive around here.’
‘What do you not hear?’ It was a rhetorical question. He smiled at me, the smile of a man whose soul was at peace with itself and the world. ‘Birds and bees,’ he reiterated. ‘No bombs, no bullets.’
‘No Beria, no Bulganin,’ I added.
As I spoke, I saw Kirill’s face grinning from behind its mask of coal dust and I realised that, long before the gulag opened its maw and swallowed him whole, he must have walked down here on just such a day in just such an autumn, and thought just the same thoughts. A wave of love swept over me at this realisation. In every tree, in every drifting leaf, in every muted bird call, I sensed his presence and, for the first time since arriving in Myshkino, I came to understand why he had wanted me to come here.
It was not simply to tell Frosya of his love for her, his life and death. More, it was that, by being here, I was his ambassador, keeping his presence alive in a place he had never wanted to leave. So long as I was in Myshkino, so was he, by proxy.
For the duration of the afternoon, we followed the track. After some distance, it started to twist and turn, keeping to the contours of the land which became hilly, rising and falling in dales. At the bottom of each valley we encountered a boggy strip of marsh. Once or twice, we came upon the rusting girders of a bridge, the timbers long since rotted away and crossed on them, waving our arms out to maintain our balance. Most often we had to hop from sod to sod or run over the compact sponge of humus, our boots oozing the water out and releasing a scent of peat and fungi. At a trickling brook, Trofim filled a much-dented aluminium water bottle.
Just as the sun went down, we reached the area of timber extraction. The thick deciduous forest gave way suddenly to a vast expanse of young trees sprouting up above a dense jungle of briars, ferns and bushes. The track, coming out of the trees, ended in a wall of what appeared to be impenetrable vegetation.
‘Where do we go now?’ I asked, my voice quiet.
There was a certain solemn grandeur about the forest that seemed to dictate we did not speak loudly. It was as if we were in the cathedral of a host of wood sprites and nymphs.
‘We leave the ways of men,’ Trofim replied, just as softly, ‘and follow the ways of beasts.’
Keeping to the edge of the forest, we had not gone one hundred metres when there appeared a narrow path vanishing into the vegetation. Trofim nodded at it and we set off to take its course. Just as the dusk started to deepen, we reached the remains of the sawmill.
‘We stay the night here,’ Trofim announced, pointing to a leaning shack.
* * *
‘Is this where they found Vera Dorokhova’s husband?’ I enquired, leaning the shotgun against the wall by the door and lowering the knapsack from my back.
‘No!’ Trofim exclaimed dismissively. ‘That drunken old sot never got this far. They found him less than an hour’s walk in from the edge of the village fields. You know what they said?’
I shook my head and eased my shoulders. The knapsack was not heavy but it had restricted my muscles. My arms were tired from carrying the shotgun.
‘They said he only got that far because his tank reached empty.’ He mimicked holding a bottle to his mouth and made gulping noises. ‘No vodka pumps in the forest…’
We prized open the door of the shack and entered. It was gloomy within, the roof leaning with a large hole in the centre. A pile of ammoniac black guano in one corner suggested the shack might be a winter roost for bats.
‘This is our base camp,’ Trofim announced grandly, unrolling his blanket and folding it on the bare earth floor. ‘From here, we go out into the unknown.’
‘I suspect,’ I said, ‘this is not exactly the unknown.’
‘No,’ he admitted, standing up and placing our guns against the wall. ‘I have been here many times before. This shack is older than the saw-mill, older than anyone I know. Even you.’ He winked and unbuckled the flap of his knapsack. ‘They say the shack was built by my namesake.’
‘Namesake?’
‘Trofim the Bear-slayer,’ he replied with a hint of pride. ‘In the last century, about a hundred years ago, there lived in Myshkino a huge man. A giant. Legend has it he was two metres sixteen in his bare feet. Once, he was working in the fields around the village, in my field, as it happens, where the chicken run is now, when a bear which had been wounded by a careless hunter charged out of the trees and attacked him. They wrestled and fought like two men contesting the ownership of a horse. Or a woman. The villagers ran to his assistance, with guns and pitchforks – but what could they do? The two fighters were rolling about. At last, the fight subsided and Trofim stood erect. The bear lay dead. He had rammed his huge fist down its gullet and choked it to death.’
‘And, presumably,’ I suggested, ‘Trofim was uninjured.’
‘On the contrary! His forearm was badly mauled where the bear’s teeth had bitten him and his belly was shredded to the muscle by the bear’s hind claws. That’s what bears do. They grip with their forelegs, bite with their jaws and rip your guts out with the back legs.’
‘He died of his wounds?’
‘Do heroes die?’ Trofim responded with counterfeit incredulity. ‘Of course not! He lived into this century. My grandfather met him. He still had the dents on his forearm from the bear’s teeth and, when he took his shirt off to chop wood or mow hay, his stomach looked like a zebra’s. All strip
es.’
‘How is it,’ I asked, spreading out my own blanket, ‘that the shack survived the timber felling operation?’
‘The lumberjacks used it as a drinking club,’ he answered. ‘After all, it was Trofim the Great’s lair so it seemed a suitable place for manly pastimes.’
‘I thought he was called Trofim the Bear-slayer.’
‘Whatever,’ his namesake replied tersely.
Gathering a supply of fallen branches and twigs, we lit a fire on the bare earth in the centre of the shack. The smoke eddied about a bit then, as if finding its escape, drifted through the hole in the roof. Trofim produced a pan and we heated the water he had collected from the stream. It tasted faintly of earth but it warmed us.
For an hour or so, we lounged about our fire. Every now and then, far off, an owl hooted or a fox called. I was just beginning to get drowsy, the exertion of the afternoon catching up on me, when Trofim stood up, glanced at his watch by the light of the fire, scratched his hair and collected his gun.
‘Time to go,’ he announced quietly.
‘Go!’ I exclaimed. ‘Go where?’
‘To show you the wonders of the forest, Shurik. Leave your gun. One will be enough.’ With that, he eased open the door and stepped out. ‘Are you coming?’
I got to my feet, my muscles stiff. At the door, I stepped out to find Trofim outlined against a full moon rising over the horizon of the forest. It was huge, filled a third of the sky, and was dull orange as if the light playing upon it was not that of the hidden sun but the meagre flames of our little campfire. I could see every crater on its surface as easily as I could have seen the pits and lines of my own face in a mirror.
‘It’s like seeing a portrait of the history of time hung upon a black wall,’ Trofim said.
For five minutes, we watched as the moon rose a degree or two higher, shrinking to a brilliant white orb. Trofim did not once take his eyes from it: he stood as if in silent worship.
‘Just think,’ he finally broke his silence, ‘of all the other men who have looked upon that celestial face. Every human that has ever lived has gazed upon it and wondered. Not just Copernicus and Galileo, Tycho Brahe and Leonardo da Vinci. Ordinary people. Proletarians. Peasants and presidents.’
‘Kings and kulaks,’ I added.
Trofim turned his back on the moon. Risen higher now, it rode just over his shoulder.
‘When she was a little girl,’ he said, ‘Frosya used to gaze at the moon and wonder if her father was on it, looking down at her. Her mother, you see, told her that Kirill was living on the moon.’ He balanced the shotgun under his arm. ‘What lies parents tell, eh, Shurik! Yet it was the truth, in a way. For all it was worth, he might just as well have been on the moon. And how could you tell a little girl about the gulag? When the Luna 2 moon probe landed up there, Frosya was ten. She asked her mother, when it returned, would it bring him back?’
A drift of smoke from the roof of the shack washed across the moon, momentarily blunting the edge of the craters. I cast my mind back to the gulag days and saw, as clearly as I did the moon over Trofim’s shoulder, a colourless night upon which hung a red flag and through which Kirill walked in the company of three guards with their rifles slung over their shoulders, red stars emblazoned on their hats.
Trofim set off through the undergrowth. He moved with a certain stealth, holding branches for me to prevent them swishing noisily back and stepping cautiously when approaching an area of dry twigs. I did my best to imitate him yet still made a good deal more noise than he did but he made no comment.
After ten minutes, we reached all that remained of the timber felling operations, a skeletal frame of rusty girders which had formed the basis for the saw-mill. Here and there, a few sheets of corrugated iron remained bolted to it. In the centre, partially covered in ground ivy, a circular saw bench stood slightly askew on a platform of rotting planks as thick as railway ties. Halfway up the frame was a platform, once the saw-mill director’s inspection platform. Clearing creepers from the lower rungs of an iron ladder, Trofim began to ascend to the platform.
‘We have the best seats in the house, Shurik,’ he whispered as he beckoned me to follow him.
Once on the platform, we sat with our legs dangling into mid-air, our arms resting on one of the rails. All around us, bathed in brilliant moonlight, the new growth of trees prodded up from the undergrowth. A hundred metres to our left was a stack of felled trunks, abandoned by the loggers and now black and rotting, whilst in front of us glimmered a large pool.
‘Just as on the moon,’ Trofim murmured, ‘we have a sea of tranquillity. There was always a clearing here because a spring rises out of the ground at this point. When the timber was being cut, they diverted the water away and the pool dried up. Now, there are no men, except you and me, and things are as they should be, as they always were.’ He carefully laid the gun on the platform by his side, making sure the metal breach did not clang against the iron. ‘Now, we don’t talk. We don’t move. We just watch.’
Within minutes of our falling silent, an owl landed on the girders above us, whoo-whooing strenuously. Its presence was our endorsement. Not a minute later, a deer materialised from the undergrowth and, with delicate steps, approached the pool. After raising its snout to test the air, twisting its ears to catch the slightest threat, it dipped its head and began to drink. The ripples fanned out across the still black surface, breaking into lines of coruscated moonlight. When it had drunk its fill, it stepped back. We could hear the suck of its hooves as it pulled its feet out of the marshy ground. Satisfied it was safe, it began to browse upon a bush until, quite suddenly, it was gone. No branches thrashed or twigs snapped. It simply dematerialised like a wraith.
The moon slid behind a cloud. Trofim touched my arm and nodded slowly over to his left. A dark shadow was moving towards the pool from the direction of the wood pile. The cloud moved on and there, in the full moonlight, stood a bear.
It was a young male, about three-quarters grown and yet already immensely powerful. Walking on all fours, its head was thrust forward in an almost belligerent fashion. The moonlight shimmered on its fur as if the creature were dusted with powdered diamonds. Its wet snout and eye glistened. Every movement it made was filled with the surety of its supremacy.
At the water’s edge, it stopped yet, unlike the deer, it did not bother to glance around but immediately dipped its muzzle and started lapping noisily.
‘This is how men were,’ Trofim whispered under cover of the bear’s drinking, ‘before Adam sharpened a stone and cut himself upon it.’
When the bear had slaked its thirst, it sat back on its haunches on the soggy bank of the pool and proceeded to lick its front paws, running them over its snout as a cat might. Its toilet done, it swung round onto all fours and sauntered towards a bush into which it started to nuzzle, bending branches and grunting.
‘Blackberries,’ Trofim murmured.
For a while, the bear feasted on the bush, guzzling so noisily that, when I shifted my position to ease my legs which had begun to grow numb from the edge of the metal platform pressing on a nerve in my thigh, and a rusty bolt in the platform mounting squeaked, the creature paid not the slightest heed. At last, having gorged its fill, it returned to the pool, lowering its head to the surface once more.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Trofim’s hand reach for the gun, feeling along the stock until his fingers touched the metal of the breech, cold in the moonlight. Very slowly, he lifted the weapon off the platform to bring it over the railing, the butt fitting into his shoulder.
‘Watch!’ he said quietly, and he aimed the shotgun at the bear.
The bear stopped drinking. It raised its head, turning it from side to side. Moving quickly, with an agility belied by its ungainly shape, it set off for the cover of the bushes. I could hear its paws padding on the waterlogged soil. At the edge of the cover, it halted and turned, standing on its hind legs. It looked like a man in an overcoat several sizes too large.
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‘Don’t shoot it,’ I whispered, not raising my voice for fear that the bear, on hearing it, might decide to come for us.
The bushes parted and the bear disappeared. Trofim put the gun down.
‘I would not shoot him,’ Trofim said, no longer keeping his voice down. ‘Russia has killed enough.’
He stood up and rubbed his legs: like mine, they must have grown stiff. We descended the ladder, Trofim going across to the pool to fill his water bottle. Taking no care to be silent now, we headed off back to the shack, put more wood on the fire and boiled the water, making tea which we drank in turns from a small mug Trofim produced from his pack. Warmed, we lay under our blankets on the earth as the smoke billowed up to the hole in the roof and the moon moved across the sky.
‘Why did you raise the gun?’ I asked.
‘To tell him I was there,’ Trofim replied.
‘Why not just shout? Kick the platform? Clap your hands?’
‘I did not want to disturb his peace,’ Trofim said. ‘I just wanted to let him know I was there, had the power but was not going to use it. And this he understood and left in his own time. If I had alarmed him, he would have run, terrified, and feared me forever more.’
A log on the fire shifted, sending a scatter of sparks upwards. Some made it through the hole in the roof, others fell to die on the earth floor.
‘How much better,’ he continued, ‘to let your adversary know your strength rather than prove it for him. Animals appreciate such a demonstration. They are sophisticated, obey the laws of nature. Only men break nature’s laws to supplant them with their own.’
I turned on my side to face him. He was leaning against his knapsack, staring at the fire. The flicker of the low flames danced upon his skin and shone in his eyes.
‘Consider this, Shurik, how we insult the bear by associating ourselves with him. As strong as a bear, we say. Russia is the Bear, the Americans say. But have you seen a more noble animal?’
He punched the pack to make it a more comfortable shape and lay his head against it.
The Industry of Souls Page 16