‘In nothing but his skin?’
‘He had his clothes on,’ I replied.
Kirill put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t think about it. You could have done nothing. You were only an observer before the fact. He was already dead when you saw him.’
‘He raised his hand to me.’
‘Not his body, Shurik. His soul. He has been a dead man for weeks. It was only a matter of time. No one could have talked him out of it, reasoned him out of it.’
‘I still feel responsible,’ I said.
‘You are not,’ Kirill said, a little sharply. ‘You are responsible for the living.’
We reached the mustering area where the other work units were massing, shuffling into lines under the arc lights. The guards started counting heads.
The body was discovered whilst the count was going on and was taken past us by two guards who carried it between them, stiff as a board: it looked like a lifeless shop store dummy waiting to be dressed in the latest fashions. There was no attempt made at decorum, to cover the corpse: in death, it had as little privacy as it had had in life.
‘Do you know the poetry of Anna Akhmatova?’ Kirill asked me as the body was tossed into the back of a parked truck, keeping his voice down so as not to be heard by the guards who were wandering about between the ranks.
‘No,’ I said.
‘She wrote one line I saw inscribed on the wall of a cell I was held in,’ he remembered, ‘in Kiev. Such a line…’
‘How did it go?’
‘It was such a time when only the dead smiled,’ he quoted, ‘joyful in their peace.’
The count over, the guards ordered us forwards. We set off, heading toward the mine gates.
‘Now is such a time, Shurik, my friend. Now is just such a time.’
Half an hour later, we were marching along the road to the camp, struggling through the deep snow, forgetting the man we had left behind, his dead eyes staring unseeing at the featureless iron flank of a truck full of coal.
* * *
‘Two minutes,’ a voice muttered in the darkness.
I turned over in my bunk, the topmost of the tier of four, taking care to hold the blanket fully to my chin. With our returning to the camp so late, the stove had not been lit and the air inside Hut 14 was well below freezing. Beneath me lay Avel, Titian and Ylli whilst across the narrow space between the rows lay Dmitri, on my level, with Kostya and Kirill beneath him. The bottom bunk was unoccupied: Korotchenko had been transferred a few months before and the accommodation supervisor seemed to have overlooked the fact.
A usually reticent and self-possessed White Russian from Irkutsk, we had pondered on his departure. He had informed us that he was being sent to a timber camp in the far north, towards the Finnish border, but we had our doubts. Only a fortnight before his transfer was announced, we had been sitting round the stove when he had suddenly started to talk. At first, no one listened. Everyone had a story to tell and most were basically the same, variations on a theme with minute twists of fate to differentiate them: life was normal, there was a knock on the door in the middle of the night, someone had a bright torch, a car was waiting, the interrogation was followed by a swift trial and a slow train journey and – here we were, miners all!
Yet as he got going, talking more to the stove than to those gathered around it, so we took to listening, the room gradually falling silent. I can remember quite clearly the point at which I joined his story. He was facing the stove, his cheeks flushed from the heat radiating off it. His eyes were narrowed to mere slits, as if he was leaning into a chill, brisk wind, and his hands were clasped before him with his elbows on his knees.
‘…the cell,’ he was saying as I joined the audience to his soliloquy, ‘was in the police headquarters. About two metres square, it was. Three of the walls were stone but the fourth, facing the passageway, was a grill of iron bars about ten centimetres apart. The floor was smooth flags. No furniture, no bed or chair. Some straw in the corner, like an animal’s cage. And mosquitoes. It was summer. They flew everywhere.’
Korotchenko fell silent.
‘What’s he talking about?’ I asked quietly.
Avel, leaning against an upright supporting a tier of bunks, put his finger to his lips and said, ‘You’ll see…’
‘If one stung you,’ Korotchenko suddenly began again, ‘the bite swelled up like a boil. They came at you all day long, not just in the early morning or evening. Even at noon, they would whine in through the bars of the windows. There was no glass. If you caught one…!’ He smacked his hands together and stared at his palms. ‘Look at that!’ He pointed out his own hand to himself. ‘Blood! The little bastard’s already fed on someone and is heading now for you.’
‘Where is he?’ I whispered.
‘Kirin, north China,’ Avel replied. ‘Shut up and listen.’
‘I was shown in,’ Korotchenko continued, ‘by an officer. The cells were crowded. Chinese, mostly. Some Manchurians, Japanese stragglers. As I walked past, they watched me with sullen eyes and downcast faces. Finally, we reached the cell. She was in there, lying on the straw wearing a petticoat and a sort of loose-fitting blouse, both soiled with dirt and maybe blood. The mosquitoes bit her, too. They weren’t choosy, not those mosquitoes. Mongolian mosquitoes from the desert rim. As soon as I came in sight, she was up on her feet, grabbing at the bars, grabbing at me. “Har peen !” she screamed at me. “Har peen! Har peen!” I asked the officer what this meant. He told me, “Opium, comrade. She wants opium.”’
‘Who’s he talking about?’ I questioned Avel, somewhat annoyed at being left in ignorance. He had entered the audience before I had and knew what was going on.
‘Shut up, Shurik!’ he repeated.
‘The other prisoners started shouting now,’ Korotchenko went on. “Shoot her!” some shouted. Others, “Put her down!” as if she was a lame horse. The officer said to her, “No har peen for you, your majesty. No more good times for you, your highness.”’
I dug my elbow in Avel’s ribs and hissed, ‘Who is it?’
‘Radiant Countenance, Wan Jung, Elizabeth Pu Yi. The last empress of China.’
‘At that,’ Korotchenko reminisced out loud, ‘she went berserk, banging her brow on the bars, screaming incoherently, scrabbling with her fingers to reach for us. I stepped back. A transformation came over her. “Bring me my brocade cheong sam,” she ordered. In English. “Run my bath. Fetch me roast pork and glass noodles.” “Watch now,” said the officer. She turned and looked at the wall. “How beautiful the Forbidden City looks,” she said. “I can hear the finches singing.” Then, quick as that,’ Korotchenko snapped his fingers, ‘she was screaming for opium again.’
‘Is this true?’ I asked.
Avel nodded and said, ‘Why not? It was rumoured she was taken by the Chinese Communists in 1946. No one knows for sure what happened to her. Except, of course, that she died.’
‘How does he know all this?’
‘Why shouldn’t he? Korotchenko was sent as an adviser to the People’s Liberation Army after the war in Europe ended.’
‘I was on my way from Mukden to Vladivostok,’ Korotchenko declared to the stove but answering my question, ‘when I stopped off in Kirin. A week later, I went back. She was thin as a rake. Raving. Raving mad. Because she had no opium, she was hallucinating, going crazy, pulling her hair our, scratching her body like a flagellant. The cell was slippery with shit and vomit. They didn’t go in. The guards refused. A Japanese woman with a small daughter was with her and begged to be allowed to wash her. The guards refused but they did hose her down from a fire hydrant. Her clothes clung to her. You could see her nipples like brown targets through the silk. Her petticoat was wrapped round her waist. You could see everything. The guards gave her no food. The next day, Kirin was bombed. I left. She was taken to Yenchi and I saw her there, a week later. She was babbling now. Totally out of her mind. Just before I travelled on to the border, she died.’
For a
minute, Korotchenko was silent. We looked at each other. Even the blatnye were subdued, taking in the story.
‘She wasn’t the only one, you know,’ he finished. ‘We had others, too. Even Aisin Gioro Pu Yi, the emperor himself. And his brother Pu Chieh. I saw them in Chita.’
The lights dimmed, the signal that they would be switched off in ten minutes.
‘Kings and cobblers,’ Avel remarked soberly, pushing himself away from the bunks, ‘paupers and presidents – no difference between them. They say in Hut 27, there’s a general…’
The stove was stoked up and we all headed for our bunks except for Korotchenko who remained staring at the stove and mumbling to himself. In a fortnight he was gone. One of the blatnye stool-pigeons must have talked, Korotchenko was deemed to know too much and off he went, never to be seen nor heard of again.
‘Two bloody blink-and-you-miss-them minutes,’ the voice said again. It was, I now recognised, Dmitri speaking.
‘What’s two minutes?’ I asked softly so as not to wake the others.
He replied, ‘I reckon it took that poor bastard about two minutes from stripping off to ringing the doorbell to heaven. Not as quick as drowning but damn near so. And a lot less effort. No struggling against the natural desire to survive, to reach the surface. No waves to battle, no currents to defeat. No booming of water in the ears or the rush of the flood down your gullet. All he had to do was drop his pants and count to one hundred and twenty. What d’you think, Shurik?’
‘I don’t think,’ I said. ‘It was his affair, not mine. I’ve too much to think about to survive than to consider how to die.’
Dmitri chuckled, followed by a shuffling of blanket as he settled himself on his side, facing me.
‘I wonder where he went as his blood froze,’ Dmitri mused.
I knew what he meant. We all went somewhere when the going got rough, or the tedium started to tell, or the food was cold and late, or we were kept waiting at muster while the innumerate guards took another count.
‘Where would you go?’ I enquired.
‘Me?’ Dmitri responded. ‘I would go … You know, Shurik, I have this dream – no, fantasy. I am not a zek nor a conscript. Nor am I a cook or a caretaker as I once was. No! I am the manager of an office. I sit behind a big desk with a telephone, a large blotter set in a frame of leather before me and a silver tray bearing my pens and pencils. Outside, in an anteroom, sits my secretary. She’s twenty-two, got blond hair to her waist and her legs start in her armpits. Her tits are like two halves of an orange – firm, smooth and sweet to the tongue. I’ve tasted them. Believe me! And not in the stationery cupboard, either.’
‘What does your office do?’
‘It’s…’ he thought about it for a moment ‘…an Intourist office. I’m in charge of looking after important visitors to the Soviet Union. I fix up their hotel bookings, see they catch the right train, ascertain their car’s on time, fix their tickets to the Bolshoi, ensure they jump to the head of the queue to see Lenin, hold the flight if they’re late getting to the airport and line up a tart if they want one or the KGB needs a favour.’
‘And,’ I asked, ‘what sights do you show them?’
‘My office is in Moscow so I take them to Red Square, show them St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Novodevichy Convent, give them a tour of the Kremlin. If they are English – like you, Shurik – I would take them to the Angliiskoe Podvorye. You know it?’
‘No,’ I answered. ‘My visit to Moscow did not include a tourist guide.’
‘It is the English Inn,’ Dmitri continued, ‘a building given by Ivan the Terrible to English merchants four centuries ago. It was their hotel in Russia. Peter the Great used it as a mathematics school. Not many people know about it. It is in the bad part of town.’
‘What if I was an American?’
‘Take you to the State Armoury to see the Tsar’s crown jewels. Americans like monarchs.’
‘And if I was French?’
‘I would get special permission and take you on a two day visit to Barysav to show you where Napoleon Bonaparte had the crap beaten out of him.’
He chuckled again and turned over. In a few minutes, he was wheezingly snoring with his head under his blanket.
I did not fall immediately to sleep as I did most nights. Perhaps my dozing in the igloo under the truck had dulled the edge off my desire to sleep. Instead, I lay with my eyes closed and my knees drawn up to my chest, listening to the breathing of my companions and wondering where they were now.
On the bunk below Avel would be strapped into the cockpit of his MiG-15, sitting on a parachute he would never need to open, gripping the control column with his right hand, his feet depressing the aileron pedals, swinging himself in easy loops through the clear skies of the Far East, bucking high altitude thermals and soaring through clouds that appeared as solid as drifts of compacted Arctic snow but were as insubstantial as a young girl’s dream of handsome men. He would be on a sortie that never had to end: his aircraft would never run out of fuel and he would never need to sleep. Encased in his aluminium bird, he would dance in the sky forever, as free and easy as a migrating martin.
At a lower altitude, on the second bunk up, Titian would be standing at a blackboard, a stick of chalk in his hand and the flies on his trousers lightly talced where he had forgotten to wash his hands before relieving himself between classes. He was murmuring in his sleep but this, I knew, was neither the unconscious recitation of a Korean socialist’s poem nor a lecture to his students, for the classroom was empty save for him. It was instead a complex mathematical theorem to which he applied himself when he needed distraction. I could imagine him, in his mind, studying the calculations in an exercise book and tried to see what it was he was seeking to evaluate. For a moment, I let myself enter his dream and ran my eye along the incomprehensible line Ca>M/2 Yb2 = 4x/v + p4 > m
It was nonsense to me, and probably to him, but it kept him sane. Titian would survive. Ten, fifteen, twenty-five years. No matter how long they kept him in the gulag, no matter how protracted his sentence or tedious his life were to become, he would pull through because he had set himself a task which required of him the most ordered, methodical thinking of which he was capable, a process as far removed from Hut 14 or a rest period down the mine as Moscow was from the Milky Way. And, like the predicament in which fate and the powers-that-were in the Politburo had put him, it could not be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. He would never reach an answer but would be eternally occupied searching for one.
Ylli, I conjectured, was probably back in Albania, looking through pine trees across a sandy beach at the tideless swell of the Mediterranean, a glass of clear raki by his side and a pretty girl on his knee. Beneath Dmitri, Kostya twitched in his sleep. He was always restless at night, his body moving to the imagined roll of a ship far out in the Atlantic. His mind was filled with the howl of a storm bearing the promise of ice on the rigging and deck rails, the dull chime of the ship’s bell tolling the watches and the creak of the steel plates of the hull as the sea tested the rivets and tried the keel. And underneath him, Kirill was back in Myshkino with Tatyana Antonovna and his daughter who was always two years old, and he was still a young man unwounded by fate and the whim of distant leaders.
And what of me? Where did I go when Kostya was riding typhoons, Avel the skies and Dmitri his secretary?
I had a place to go of which none of the others had so much as an inkling. I kept it quite to myself, never spoke of it to them, never admitted its existence.
It was a garden.
Where it was, in which country of which continent, I neither knew nor cared. It contained rain forest ferns and stalwart oaks, cacti and roses, lilac wisteria and lianas as thick as your wrist. Verdant lawns ran between copses of ash and elm, acacia and baobab. Desert palms grew next to Rocky Mountain pines. The pathways, of which there were many, were gravelled with chips of grey granite, strewn with shingle pebbles mixed with sea-shells or paved with Carrera marble. He
re and there, overlooking magnificent vistas, were erected small rustic shelters, miniature Greek temples and grottoes of rough-hewn stone. In a matter of metres, I could pass from the close, luxuriant foliage of the Amazon Basin into the leaf-strewn mellowness of a European beech wood.
At the centre of my secret property, the size of which I never ascertained, there was a substantial water garden covering an area of about two and a half hectares. The pool was shaped roughly like a dumb bell, the bar between the two weights, as it were, traversed by an ornamental bridge not placed centrally but three quarters of the way along towards the eastern end, laid down according to the rules of an ancient oriental geomancy of which I was ignorant. To continue the metaphor, the weights were not equal, one being twice the size of the other, with a circular island in the middle. The bridge, which was highly arched but not stepped, was constructed of pine planks, the rail posts elaborately carved with gryphons and dragons, mythical beasts from the Norse sagas above a trellis of chrysanthemum blossoms cut out by intricate fretwork. It was an ancient structure, the pine having mellowed to a caliginous imperial ochre. The copper nails holding the structure together were an iridescent green with verdigris.
At one end, where the path turned towards the bridge, a lantern hung from a pole. It was square with a frame fashioned of rosewood and, in place of glass, it had tissue-thin rice paper stretched between the sides, stiffened with dope and brushed with lacquer. When the candle within was lit, the paper glowed with an ethereal translucence. It reminded me of light shining through flayed skin.
All along the bank, wherever the lawns did not come down to end in a flagstoned edging, willows draped out to weep over the water in which a wide variety of lilies grew, their pads spreading across the surface. In places, they were so large and strong as to afford small birds a platform from which to dip their beaks when drinking. Emerald green frogs the size of field mice could often be spied squatting on them, their throats ballooning out as they bloarted for a mate in the dusk or declared ownership of their part of the pond. Overhead and even by moonlight, if the moon was already up as the sun went down, huge dragonflies darted or hovered, their thoraxes polished brown as mahogany, their long abdomens a deep vermilion with their grotesque compound eyes as pink as the flesh of an over-ripe grapefruit. As they turned, the orbs changed colour like a rainbow of oil on a puddle.
The Industry of Souls Page 18