‘A small, diffident girl,’ Yuri prompted me. ‘Her mother had a withered arm. The child had no father.’
He spoke as if the lack of a parent was an accepted biological certainty, like the mother’s deformity.
‘Just vaguely. They lived in a small hut a little way down the Zarechensk road.’
‘That’s her. A quiet child, under size for her age, withdrawn into herself.’
‘How old was she?’
‘Nine or ten when you first saw her.’
‘That must have been in ‘78. Did not the others call her Water Snail?’
‘Because she always retreated into her shell,’ Yuri explained. ‘You know what became of her?’
‘I have not the slightest notion,’ I replied.
‘She is now a librarian in the University of Minsk where she lives in a small apartment with her pet Samoyed. Twenty-eight years old, rather pretty but as yet unmarried.’
‘The way you talk,’ I responded, ‘you might be lining her up for someone. Or fancying her for yourself. You would not be the first. That’s the oldest pit a teacher in his middle years can tumble into.’
Yuri ignored my flippancy.
‘Do you not want to know how I have discovered these facts?’ he went on.
‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’
‘They are printed on the back cover of her first book of poetry. Good stuff it is, too. The critics love her. The book has a foreword by Yevtushenko. And do you remember Ivnev?’
‘The name rings no bell for me.’
‘His father was a labourer, worked on the railway. Track maintenance, fence painting. Nothing too taxing for the brain. You know what’s become of him?’
‘I assume,’ I answered, ‘he is still working on the railway.’
Yuri was slightly annoyed at my continual jibing and said, ‘Not him! Not the father. The son. Ivnev is now a journalist in Moscow working for CNN, a world-wide American television company. I saw him the other night.’
‘You saw him?’ I responded, allowing a degree of scepticism to creep into the words. ‘Where?’
‘In Zarechensk,’ he continued, picking up on my dubiety, ‘and before you get clever with me, it wasn’t in the bus station or a bar. I saw him at my sister’s place. My brother-in-law’s cousin lives in Germany and gave them a satellite television. He was on the American news, clear as the nose on your face. Along the bottom of the screen was his name.’
We reached the river bank and the stepping stones beside which were hoof-prints in the mud. Yuri squatted down to inspect them.
‘Is this where the horse picks up stones?’ I enquired.
‘It could be,’ Yuri responded. ‘The children sometimes amuse themselves by throwing pebbles at the stepping stones. Some shatter into sharp splinters.’
All his talk of children had set my mind wandering.
‘Do you know what happened to little Raisa?’ I asked at length, as Yuri washed his hands in the river, scaring away a number of small fish which darted for the cover of the mid-stream weeds.
‘Your favourite,’ he replied, straightening up. ‘A round, truly Russian face, always smiling.’
‘And clever, quick on the uptake.’
‘She went to study nursing in Kiev. Then she emigrated. Now she works in a hospital in Canada, sends money back to her parents. Every month, sure as the moon rises, fifty dollars arrive. So,’ he added, ‘you do remember some of them.’
‘Names are coming back to me,’ I admitted, ‘because you have oiled the cogs of memory.’
‘Do you remember Davidov?’
‘There were several.’
‘Davidov, son of the panel beater in the Zarechensk bus garage. He is now an engineer in Germany, working for Mercedes Benz.’
‘He was always crazy about cars,’ I remarked.
‘And Lado? Remember him? The boy who played with matches and burned Rysakov’s hay rick to the ground. He’s studying to be an architect in Moscow. And Ninochka, with her incredible blond hair, a mass of tight curls. You know, they used to say her family was descended from ancient Greeks who sailed up the Volga and got lost. Last month, she was appointed as a simultaneous translator to the Russian mission to the United Nations.’
Yuri put his foot on the first of the stepping stones. They are large, flat and firmly set on the river bed which, at this point, is shallow for once there was a ford here, before the bridge was built. I followed him and he paused three stones out, offering me his hand.
‘I am not one of the children,’ I reproved him. ‘Old and doddery I may be but I’m not yet derelict.’
He smiled and carried on across the river. Some of the stones in the middle, where the current splashes over loose rocks just under the surface, were slick with water and I took, as I do every day now, great care not to slip.
‘I trust the Styx will be as easy to cross when the time comes,’ I commented as I reached the far bank, now accepting the offer of his hand to help me up the step from stone to shore. I have, of late, had to make a quick and undignified clamber to get ashore.
Side by side, we started off slowly up the slope towards the village, the houses above set against the sky. Ahead of us, close to the path, a billy-goat was tethered to a stake and chewing on a clump of weeds. To the right, I could see the Merry Widow’s laundry hanging on a line, a drift of smoke lifting from a short chimney at the end of her house as she fired her baking oven. Farther down, in a corner of the field near to the river, someone had erected a large pile of wood for a bonfire.
‘You are a devil of a man, Yuri,’ I exclaimed. ‘Your damned talk of Davidovs and Ivnevs has set my mind off.’
‘Don’t you want to remember those days? Were they that bad?’
‘No,’ I shook my head, ‘of course not. They were good, golden times. Yet, recently, I have tried not to dwell in the past. A penchant for nostalgia is a sure sign that the Grim Reaper is running the whetstone over his scythe.’
‘Do you know why those children have been so successful?’ Yuri remarked.
‘Because they are lucky,’ I replied. ‘Because the wheels of fortune have turned well for them.’
‘That’s not true,’ Yuri responded. ‘They have done well because you were their teacher.’
‘I can hardly see how four years in the occasional company of an old zek can shape an entire life.’
‘You didn’t shape their lives, you opened them up. Before you came, their teachers were men and women of narrow vision who towed the Party line, preached the Party gospel and sang the Party hymns of praise. They were not small-minded because they were dolts but because that was the only way they could survive. Then you arrived and the world expanded.’
The goat stopped its munching and looked at us with shrewd hircine eyes brimful with mischievous evil. With like minds, we stepped off the path to detour the creature. Its curlicued horns invited injury.
‘Few,’ I quoted, ‘have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers. Those are the words of Joshua Reynolds.’
‘He was an artist, was he not?’ Yuri rejoined. ‘For painting that may be true but not for life. And if you are going to be sententious, Shurik, I can be too. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell when his influence stops: the words of Henry Brooks Adams.’
‘I taught English and a little elementary mathematics, the latter very badly.’
‘And astronomy,’ Yuri reminded me.
‘I hardly taught that. It was merely an interest I had.’
At that moment, the goat decided to charge us, its head down and horns out. At the end of its tether, it was brought to an abrupt halt. Yuri laughed at the animal which backed off with a look of humiliation on its face.
‘You broadened horizons, Shurik,’ he continued. ‘Before you stepped into the classroom, the sky was just a black space with lights and the world ended just beyond my horse. You gave them a new language, a whole new universe to explore.’
So as not to lose face
, the goat had another but half-hearted lunge at us but we were now well out of its range and besides, it stopped itself before it reached the extent of the rope.
‘What are you getting at, Yuri?’ I wanted to know.
‘Just that the people here admire you.’
‘I know.’
‘You have made a poet of a timid child and an architect of an infant arsonist. Two people survive into their old age because their daughter, whom you taught, supports them.’
‘You will tell me next that Komarov’s apples swell, Trofim’s tomatoes ripen and Vera Dorokhova’s bread rises because of my presence.’
‘Don’t be facetious, old man,’ Yuri chastised me. ‘You know exactly what I mean.’ He paused and looked back across the river to where Bratan was still standing, head down to the hay. ‘They are afraid, you know…’
He left the remainder of his sentence hanging in the air and we walked on up the hill to the road not far from Frosya’s house. Several of the Merry Widow’s hens had flown from the coop by her woodpile and were scratching about in the dust, looking for seeds or grasshoppers.
‘You taught the children English, yes,’ he said at length. ‘And maths and their way about the stars, yet you gave them so much more. What you brought to Myshkino was humanity. You may not realise it, even now, but you are to this day only the second person ever to return here from the gulag.’
‘I did not return,’ I reminded him.
‘You know what I mean. Stop playing the pedagogue.’
‘Who was the other?’ I enquired. ‘I don’t recall a fellow zek.’
‘He was before your time. Arrested in 1950, he was accused of anti-Soviet activities. Whatever the hell that meant! He can hardly have been an American spy or sabotaged the future of the USSR. He was a bus conductor. They sentenced him to thirteen years in the gulag and, during that time, he met a woman inside who was there for anti-social activities. She’d been a common whore in Moscow. They were both released round about the same time and wandered about before ending up in Myshkino. He built them a shanty on a scrap of rocky ground the commune had no interest in and earned a bit of money cutting timber in the forest. But he couldn’t adjust, not even with his wife’s love. And she did love him. Passionately, in her own way.’
‘The gulag had conditioned him.’
Yuri nodded and continued, ‘He hanged himself in the forest, just beyond the stile. It was my father who cut him down.’
A feeling of apprehension ran down my spine.
‘Which tree?’ I asked.
‘It’s not there now,’ Yuri replied. ‘It blew down in a blizzard, years ago. Only the roots remain. We chopped the rest of it up.’
‘And the wife?’
‘She was a mother by the time he killed himself, with a toddler. She stayed, grew a few vegetables, kept a nanny goat and some hens, like the rest of us. Her health was not good and she only worked spasmodically, cleaning offices in Zarechensk.’
‘Still here?’
‘No, she moved away in due course and died a year or two back.’
I tried to think who it could have been but arrived at no conclusion.
‘Who was he?’
‘He was Lubya’s father.’
So now, after all this time, I knew why, when I sat in my forest throne and surveyed the leaves, I never felt alone.
‘When you came,’ Yuri went on, ‘people thought it would only be a matter of time before they found you stretching your neck or blowing your head off with one of Sergei Petrovich’s shotguns. Yet you were different. It was as if the gulag had somehow strengthened you. You had not become demoralised by it, broken by it.’
I smiled and thought of Work Unit 8, conjured up their faces in my mind, took a mental roll call, heard Dmitri’s laugh and Kirill’s soft, authoritative voice, saw again the snow flurries eddying round our legs.
‘In you, Shurik, we saw that strength and were ourselves uplifted by it. We knew – at least, our imaginations told us – what you had been through, what things you had seen, things you had done. Where Milyukov was concerned – that was Lubya’s father’s name: the mother and child never used it after his suicide – we saw only despondency and surrender and it dragged us down. There, but for the grace of God and the KGB, went every one of us. Then you appeared that day, shambling along the road, and Myshkino changed.’
‘You make me sound like some kind of Saviour of the Steppes.’
Yuri chuckled and retorted, ‘Not quite so grand, old man. More a Harbinger of Hope.’
We arrived at the gate in front of Trofim and Frosya’s house. The marigolds were wilting in the heat of the late afternoon but Frosya had just turned on the tap by the wall and the water was running down little trenches cut in the sun-baked soil. In a matter of minutes, the plants would receive their succour, the leaves would perk up and the flower heads would stand erect again.
‘I shall see you later,’ Yuri said, somewhat mysteriously: then he took my hand, not to shake it but to hold it in both his. ‘Don’t forget, Shurik. You mean something to us. To Myshkino.’
He relinquished my hand and set off down the lane. I watched him until he had passed Komarov’s house at which point he turned up towards the school house. With him out of sight, I made my way up the path towards the house, my every step a conscious pace into the future.
10
Over about three months, we lengthened the mole hole by seventy-nine metres: then, in one day, we dug out over five metres. The coal seam we were following began to narrow and turn and, whilst the rock above remained firm, that beneath it became friable and richly fossiliferous. This made the coal easier to chip free from its surrounding matrix but it was still heavy going for the tunnel was less than one and a half metres high and three wide. Only one of us could work at the face at a time, back distorted and neck cricked, smashing the pickaxe sideways to lever the rock and coal loose.
We organised ourselves into a strict shift rota, based not upon time – for none of us possessed a watch – but upon effort. The worker at the coal face swung the pickaxe sixty times then surrendered the implement to the next man who started to labour at the rock as he moved to the sledge, waiting to tow it away. One person was usually absent with the second sledge, delivering the previous load to the central gallery and bringing back thirty centimetre square timber pit props when they were needed and fresh water, if he could find any. Usually, drinking water down the mine was stale and contaminated with dust. Two others loaded the sledge whilst the last two shovelled both coal and debris back from the face or shored up the roof. As soon as a complete cycle was achieved, we all downed tools for what we assumed to be fifteen minutes but which, subterranean time being beyond accurate computation, could have been anything up to twice that time. What usually set us to work again was a general consensus that our muscles were eased a bit.
In the rest periods, we lay about on sacks pilfered from the supply tunnel or sat with our backs to the wall, each sunk in his own private thoughts or making his own private escape.
I remember so very clearly, as if it happened only last week, the second rest break of that day towards the end of the third month in the mole hole. I had just finished my stint of chipping away at the under-belly of Mother Earth and was lying on my back on two sacks, my face staring at the roof of the tunnel. Set into the stone, as if engraved by someone working with a fine stonemason’s engraving awl, was the perfect outline of a leaf. It resembled a frond of fern and was so flawless it might have been deliberately placed there by an ancient child goddess with a propensity for pressing flowers.
Ylli, edging past me, knocked the bare bulb hanging by its flex from the row of pit props. The light oscillated briefly. In the changing shadows, the fossilised leaf seemed to twitch as it must have done tens of millions of seasons ago in a Triassic breeze.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Titian remarked, following my eye. ‘We’re two kilometres down in the middle of a forest, looking at a leaf that once heard the roar of dinos
aurs.’
‘Reckon we might find one of those big motherfuckers of a lizard?’ Kostya mused. ‘Frozen in the coal like the mammoth was under the tundra.’
Titian embarked upon an explanation as to why that was unlikely but I paid him scant attention for the leaf above was sufficient for me. It was a ticket to leave the mine, leave the USSR, leave the pain and dust and smell of sweat for my garden. I turned on my side. Next to me, Avel had closed his eyes: from the look on his face, he was already shooting the clouds in his MiG-15.
In seconds, the others ceased to exist and I strolled along one of the gravel paths leading from the bridge over the pool to the temple to Athena on a grassy knoll.
From a distance, the temple looked to be a grand, imposing structure, circular with a surround of Corinthian pillars supporting the overhang of the domed roof at the top of which stood a statue of a Greek girl dressed in a flowing toga-like gown, one of her breasts bare. She was cut from marble, the white stone giving her firm skin a certain palpable translucency, the veins in the stone like the delicate blood vessels around her nipple.
My feet crunched crisply on the gravel which consisted not of sharp, grey granite chips but water-smoothed beach pebbles and tiny shells my every footstep ground to powder: and yet, whenever I next came that way, those shells I had crushed on my last walk had reconstituted themselves. Nothing was ever destroyed in my garden.
The temple, however, was not all it seemed to be for, as I approached it, it appeared to shrink in size until it was little bigger than a child’s garden play-house. By stretching out my hand, I could touch the statue, feel the smooth curve of the breast which, despite its diminutive size, perfectly fitted the palm of my hand. It was always warm, as if the statue was in reality a young girl only just turned to stone by some wicked spell: that, of course, was unlikely for there was no evil in the garden, nothing so malign as to transform a living creature into inanimate marble.
On this visit, as I approached the temple, I heard a strange music coming from within. It was liquid, flowing as if performed on a flute or bass clarinet, the notes not distinct but merged into each other. If warm syrup could have been transfigured into music, I thought, it would have sounded like this.
The Industry of Souls Page 20