The Industry of Souls

by Booth, Martin

  ‘And what do we do to this noble beast? We catch it, pull its claws out, file down its teeth and make it dance in Red Square to amuse the tourists.’ He spat into the fire, his spittle hizzling on the embers. ‘When I see a bear, Shurik, I am ashamed and put in my place.’

  I dozed off and on that night. The ground was hard and my back, despite twenty-five years of exhausted sleep on a palliasse in the gulag, had grown accustomed to a bed. Yet it was not just the discomfort that kept me awake: as I lay there, I recalled that night I sat outside the tent, the stars above me, a taint of vodka on my breath. And mammoth. And, before me, just such a fire keeping the night and cold at bay.

  Our expedition was taken a long time ago now. Trofim was younger then, employed by the state and unburdened by the proprietorial cares of Myshkino Motors: I was happy, free of the gulag, settled in my life with him and Frosya, no longer haunted by demons and unafraid of the uncertainties of the future.

  8

  During the day, whilst we were toiling underground in the mole hole, a blizzard rolled down from the north. By the time we surfaced into the night, a metre and a half of snow had fallen, inundating the surface crews. No sooner were we out of the cage and counted, work unit by work unit, than we were issued with snow shovels and told to report to the marshalling yards.

  The wind which had heralded the blizzard had dropped by now but, in its vanguard, snow was still densely falling in heavy, lazy flakes which pirouetted to the ground. The locomotives in the yard had tried to make a getaway but could not and the snow plough, which usually cleared the branch line to the mine, was engaged in keeping the main line free until another could be sent up from the south.

  ‘If hell were to freeze over,’ Avel observed as we stood with our shovels waiting to be assigned a task, ‘this is what it would be like.’

  He was right. The lights around the pit head mustering ground and the sidings were only visible if you were close to them. The others were invisible in the falling snow, even as a distant glow. The sounds of the winding gear, the whining of the steel cables and the clatter of machinery and the cage doors were all muffled to nothing much more than an undercurrent of muted sound like the far off wailing of demented, disappointed souls. Even the loudspeaker system was useless for the sound of the overseer dropped within metres to the ground, as if frozen like the steam from our breath.

  After ten minutes stamping our feet and huddling close together for mutual warmth, Kirill appeared from the gloom.

  ‘Track six,’ he said. ‘Dig out the rear four trucks of the train and keep them clear.’

  ‘Keep them clear!’ Ylli explained. ‘For how long?’

  ‘Until the snow eases,’ replied Kirill as if this was the most obvious fact in the world.

  ‘It could snow like this for days,’ Kostya said.

  ‘Months,’ Dmitri added.

  ‘And what’s the point?’ Ylli went on. ‘The locomotives can’t get out until the snow plough gets here. And then what? It’s not just snowing here. God’s dumping the shit all over the land. The blizzard could be two hundred kilometres across and as many deep. We clear four trucks that can’t go anywhere.’

  Kirill’s eyes were black in the shadow of the lowered peak of his ushanka.

  ‘So you’ve a choice then, Ylli,’ he remarked. ‘You can dig the trucks out as the bastards want, or you can refuse and be shot – on the assumption that the guards in the firing squad can see you through the snow – or you can do a runner into the night, hitch a ride on the snow plough, commandeer it to Moscow and complain to the Politburo personally that this was a dumb-arsed order and they ought to get their thinking straight.’

  We trudged across the mustering ground and over the tracks. Four trains of fully laden coal trucks stood idle, thatched with snow and looking like uniform rows of peasants’ cottages with the windows shuttered and the fires gone out. Crawling under one of the trains we reached track six, turned left and made our way to the end of the row of trucks parked there. The last one had a dim red oil lantern burning in a bracket and casting a pink glimmer upon the snow piling up against the buffers.

  ‘So where do we put it?’ Titian mused aloud. ‘We dig the snow off this truck and then what? If we put it by the track, it’ll pile up and freeze into a rock-hard wall we’ll have to chip out. If we put it too far over it’ll block the next line.’

  ‘Dump it on the far line,’ Kirill decided. ‘Let the surface crews shift it. It’ll be their pigeon by then and we’ll be down in the snug of the mole hole. No one’s going to know who was responsible for what. They weren’t taking notes of which work unit was assigned which task. The overseer was merely ticking off the tracks as he allocated the work.’

  We set to on the last coal truck, working our way forward but, by the time the penultimate truck in the train was more or less dug out, the last was under another twenty centimetres of fresh snow. What was worse, every now and then a load avalanched off the top of the truck and either filled in our previous labours or fell upon us, freezing our faces and even bowling us over under the weight. After half an hour, Kirill disappeared into the blizzard for a while then, reappearing like a spectre, called us together.

  ‘May I make a suggestion, comrades?’ he began as we crowded together close to the side of the third truck. He spoke with the urbanity of the chairman of a Party meeting. ‘This is frankly a bloody waste of our energy. Nothing can be done until the snow abates. I suggest we dig ourselves in and wait.’

  ‘For what?’ I ventured. ‘If we are found slacking…’

  ‘Don’t worry, Shurik. We shan’t be. The overseers are ensconced round the stove in the admin. office. The guards’ve hunkered down in the pit head building and the guard-house. Half the zeks have taken cover in the coal sheds and a number have even gone back down the shaft to Gallery B. Those left in the sidings are doing bugger all.’

  ‘So we get cutting,’ Kostya said and, raising his shovel, he trimmed out a block of snow the size of a small box.

  Following his example, we cut loose blocks of snow and built a wall along the side of one of the trucks, Kostya filling in the gaps with compacted snow slammed in with the flat of his shovel. When one side was done, we did the other and both ends, leaving just a crawl-hole at one end. As we worked outside, Ylli worked within, flattening the snow that had drifted under the truck so that it made a smooth floor over the granite hard core of the track. In ten minutes, we had a truck-roofed igloo.

  It was dark inside but both Avel and Titian had their lamp batteries charged so we switched one on. Within a surprisingly short space of time, the air heated up and we were able to remove our ushankas.

  ‘Shame we’ve nothing to eat,’ Dmitri remarked.

  ‘And it looks like we’ll not get any tonight, either,’ Titian added. ‘By the time the blizzard lifts and we’ve trudged back to camp…’

  ‘Gygulevskoe,’ said Kostya.

  ‘What’s gygulevskoe?’ I asked.

  ‘Russian beer,’ Titian replied. ‘The best.’

  Ylli grinned and said wistfully, ‘What I’d give for a beer.’

  ‘Dream on!’ exclaimed Dmitri. ‘The only thing that looks like beer round here is your piss. And you can’t drink that. It’s flat.’

  Kirill fumbled in his clothing and, pulling out three thin cardboard boxes rather like large pencil cases, declared, ‘I think, when I get out of here, I’ll become a blatnoi. As a law enforcer, I learnt a lot about the criminal mind but I was straight and made an honest crust. Next time around, I’ll cross the road and earn a dishonest loaf.’

  He handed the boxes round. I opened one. Inside, packed tightly together, were six dried herring.

  ‘Where did these come from?’ I enquired.

  ‘Ask not and thou shalt be pleased,’ Dmitri intoned.

  ‘Two and a half each,’ Kostya marvelled.

  ‘But they’re salty,’ Avel commented.

  Kirill nodded to me and indicated the door. I knew what he had in mind and slip
ped out of the igloo. The snow was still falling as heavily as before and there was no sound save the mutter of my companions and the minute reptilian hiss of flakes colliding.

  Hanging from a bracket in the twilight under the next truck were five galvanised steel, ten-litre fire buckets. I checked one. There was no hole in the base and the handle was firm. Unhooking it, I set off along the train, moving from the dim areas of light into near darkness before arriving beneath the next lamp.

  Suddenly, ahead of me in the gloom, I saw what I took to be a guard and was about to duck down when the figure saw me, stepping slowly back out of sight between two trucks on the adjacent track. For a moment, I pondered upon my situation but realised that if this had been a guard he would have challenged me, not slunk out of sight. I went on, not looking at the figure as I passed: it was probably another zek on the lam or a look-out for another work unit which had decided to skive.

  At last, I came close to the locomotive. It was fired up, the cab glowing like the entrance to a furnace. Three or four men sat crouched about the open firebox like sentinels to the underworld. They were talking in low voices. Keeping my head down, I passed them by. Beneath the locomotive, the heat of the firebox and the shower of embers raked out each time a new load of coal was thrown in had thawed the snow. Water dripped all round from snow falling on the casing of the boiler.

  I had thought to collect this melt-water but it did not reach the ground. The air was so cold, it froze in long icicles from the locomotive chassis. Cursing my luck and stupidity, I kept down considering my options. The best was to fill the bucket with snow and place it under the locomotive for the fire to melt it: but, I guessed, it would be frozen to an icy slush before I reached the igloo. I was about to despair when I saw a small brass tap connected to a copper pipe running the length of the locomotive, heading towards one of the huge pistons that powered the driving wheels. The tap itself was shut but the copper pipe was not covered in snow or icicles: it must, I therefore reasoned, be hot. I did not dare remove a glove to test it by touch. Instead, I dropped a pinch of snow upon it. It instantly liquefied.

  Watching the cab, I placed the bucket under the tap and, very carefully, inched it open. There was a brief hiss of steam then a trickle of water which tumbled noisily into the bucket. I quickly turned the bucket on its side so the water did not rattle onto the base. In a few minutes, I had five litres of scalding water.

  Setting off for the igloo, I reached the point where the figure had stood. This time, so as to be on the alert in case the man was a zek and readying to steal the bucket of water, I looked into the space between the trucks where he had stepped. He was still there. I briefly nodded a friendly greeting. He raised his hand and I plodded on. When I reached the igloo, the water was still hot. We ate the dried fish then drank our fill, the water tasting metallic.

  Organising a look-out every quarter of an hour to see how the blizzard was progressing, we lay back in the comparative comfort of our igloo, occasionally talking or just resting with our own thoughts.

  ‘Tell me, Shurik, have you ever been to Volgograd?’ Kirill asked me, shifting himself over the snow floor and sitting by my side.

  ‘Never,’ I told him. ‘The only parts of the Soviet Union I have seen are the inside of several detention centres, a few prison courtyards, bleak forests spied through the cracks in a box car door and the road between the camp and the mine.’

  ‘When this is over,’ he said, ‘and a new moon shines in our sky, you must come with me. We shall sit by the river, drink vodka, eat caviar. The sturgeon in the Volga give the best caviar. Not black. Grey, like the eyes of an old cat past its mousing days.’

  He leaned back against the snow wall, a little flaking onto his shoulder like dandruff, quick to vanish into the material of his coat. Titian poked his head out of the entrance and brought it back in, his hair speckled with huge flakes.

  ‘Still coming down like the ash of a million freezing fires,’ he said. I wondered if he was quoting from some unknown poem by Yi Yuk-sa.

  ‘Downstream from the city,’ Kirill continued, closing his eyes, ‘the river turns south east, crosses desert and marshland to Astrahan and the Caspian Sea. Upstream, it runs beside hills, north of Kamysin. It’s beautiful there. The forests come down to the river and you can walk in peace for kilometre after kilometre. Sometimes you see no one, just vessels passing. The crew wave to you. I know a place…’

  His voice trailed off and I made no comment. When a man is living inside himself, it is best to leave him be. One word at such a time can shatter a fragile world.

  ‘We’ll go there,’ he declared after a long silence, opening his eyes and looking straight at me. ‘You and me, Shurik, I’ll show you. Then, after, we shall take the train to Zarechensk then the bus and go to Myshkino.’

  It was the first time I heard of the village. Kirill uttered the name with such a sense of love and mystery, I found my mind beginning to try and draw in wayward strands of my imagination to shape it in my mind.

  ‘Myshkino?’

  ‘It is where my family comes from,’ he said. ‘Where I came from before the hand on the shoulder and the machine pistol barrel in the belly. My wife lives there now. At least, I suppose she does: she has no reason to leave for we have a small house there, once my father’s. In Myshkino, she is amongst friends, can grow vegetables and keep hens. Maybe a goat. Survive. And she has my daughter…’

  It was the first time Kirill had ever mentioned his family. I felt immensely privileged to be sharing this knowledge.

  ‘I did not know…’ I began.

  ‘My wife is called Tatyana Antonovna. She is – or was – a school teacher. For young children. My daughter,’ he closed his eyes to see her the better, ‘is called Frosya. It is short for Efrosiniya.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘When I was arrested, she was two. Now,’ he thought for a moment, ‘she is sixteen, seventeen perhaps.’

  ‘Tell me about Myshkino,’ I asked.

  ‘Myshkino?’ he answered thoughtfully. ‘Myshkino is the real Russia. It is a village of maybe two hundred people. It has a church, a forge, a carpenter’s shop, several farms – all you would expect of a small community in the middle of the world, far from machines and rancorous men who plot. A small river runs through the middle of the village and all around, beyond the fields, there is forest crawling with animals.’

  ‘And what do the people do?’

  ‘What do they do?’ Kirill laughed. ‘What can they do? In the summer they collect in their harvest and build their stacks of firewood, in the winter they toast their feet and talk of the summer. You would like it there, Shurik.’

  He fell silent again. Titian checked the snow was still coming down. Dmitri, who had fallen asleep, started to snore. Kirill closed his eyes once more and I too dozed off to be woken a short time later by Kostya kicking the soles of my valenki.

  The snow had thinned considerably. We could see ten trucks down the train. Kirill gave orders and we set to with our shovels. In twenty minutes, we had cleared our allocated trucks of snow and there was no remaining sign of the igloo.

  ‘Typical!’ Ylli exclaimed as we finished the job. ‘We clear the last four trucks but no one was sent to do the rest.’

  By now, it was not long to go to midnight. The sky was still clouded but there were breaks appearing in it.

  ‘As soon as the clouds disperse,’ Kostya observed, ‘the temperature’ll drop another ten degrees. If we’re not back in the camp by then…’

  We shouldered our snow shovels and set off in the direction of the locomotive, making heavy work of it through the snow which was now getting on for two and a half metres deep, nearly 40 centimetres deeper than when I had filched the boiling water. With every step, we sank in to our thighs.

  Nearing the locomotive, I caught sight of something sticking up from the snow ahead of us. For a moment, it was hard to define its shape: then, just as I recognised it, Kirill gave a shout and started as best he could t
o stride out for it. I followed, the others in my trail.

  Standing proud of the snow was the torso of a man. His head was shaven in the prison fashion and he was utterly naked, as chilled as a side of beef in a cold store.

  ‘Allah have mercy!’ Ylli murmured. Dmitri, never the religious one amongst us, half-heartedly crossed himself in the close proximity of death.

  We gathered in a circle around the corpse. The skin had gone waxen, even more so than the usual prison pallor, the ears almost translucent and the whole surface was covered in a fine dusting of exquisite crystals of ice. In the middle of the face, the glazed eyes stared sightlessly ahead above slightly-parted lips drawn into a thin, emotionless smirk.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ Kostya began. ‘You think some of the blatnye…?’

  ‘No,’ Kirill pronounced, ‘this was no killing. Revenge has not raised her bloody hand here.’

  ‘What about theft?’ Kostya conjectured.

  ‘What can you steal from a naked man?’ Titian mused quietly.

  ‘Except life,’ Avel said.

  ‘They’ve taken his clothes,’ Kostya suggested.

  ‘No,’ said Kirill. ‘When they dig him out, they’ll find his clothes in a pile round his feet.’

  There was no need for further explanation. We just stood like mourners around a vertical grave, our heads bowed not so much in sympathy or respect, nor against the cold, but simply because it seemed vaguely appropriate.

  ‘What do we do with him?’ Dmitri asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Kirill answered. ‘What can we do? He’s dead meat. Let’s just move on. Say nothing. Pretend we never saw him. He won’t care.’

  As we filed off along the line of the trucks, one by one, I realised that the dead man must have been the lurker in the shadows.

  ‘I saw him,’ I confided in Kirill as we reached a gap in the trucks through which we turned towards the mustering area. ‘When I went for the water. I thought he was a guard…’

  ‘And now you regret not having stopped to talk to him,’ Kirill said astutely.

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘I could have offered him a mouthful of the water in my bucket. Maybe that is what he was looking for…’