The Industry of Souls

by Booth, Martin

  Curious to trace the source of the music, I entered the building. How this was achieved I do not understand: the building did not grow in size nor did I, like Alice in Wonderland, consciously shrink. Be that as it may, my fingers gripped the polished bronze door handle, I turned it and entered. Immediately, to my intense disappointment, the music stopped.

  Inside, the temple was devoid of all furniture save one chair. Positioned under the very centre of the dome, it was an ornate, throne-like seat of the Louis XIV period, opulently upholstered with silks and velvets of the richest, indescribable hues which were less like colours and more like tangible textures devised to caress and cosset both body and soul. Around the walls was a frieze painted in pastels but I was unable to make out exactly what it depicted: the interior of the temple was in semi-darkness except for a circle of soft light in the centre of which the chair had been placed. Possibly, the frieze consisted of classical rustic scenes of maids drawing water, cows wandering lush valleys in low sunlight, castles on precipitous cliffs, hovels tucked away beside rivers running through oak woods.

  I required no invitation but went directly to the chair and sat in it. The door closed. It did not swing quickly shut as it might have done on a spring or hydraulic hinge but slowly as if secured by an invisible hand.

  At first, all was silent. I sat quite still in the chair, filled with expectation. How long I remained immobile I cannot say. It might have been minutes, it may have been hours: and I cannot say when the music began again. It did not suddenly commence but grew gradatim, fragment by fragment upon the very air. As the temple might fill with water so did it with sound which contained no scales, no defined or recognisable notes, no tune. There was no structured score to be followed.

  Closing my eyes, I leaned back in the chair which seemed to envelope me, fold itself around and cocoon me. The music rose and fell like waves upon a vast ethereal ocean until, hours later, the concert came to an end. As it had begun, so it finished, the melody gradually melting away like ice on a summer’s day. I did not consciously hear it fade but came suddenly to the realisation that it was over.

  Quitting the temple, and returning to my normal size as soon as I was out of the door, I found it was evening. The sun was setting over a copse of beech trees, the last rays golden through the shimmer of the branches. In the sky, a full moon was risen, casting a white gleam upon high, stratospheric clouds which, as I gazed up at them, darkened and became the fern leaf fossil over my head.

  ‘What was yours called?’

  I turned my head. Kostya was leaning against the wall of the mole hole beside me, chewing on a piece of bread.

  ‘My what?’ I asked.

  ‘Your girl, Shurik! Your girl, the one you had. Jesus! Have you had others we’ve not heard about!’

  ‘My girl,’ I replied, thinking hard. I was still partly in the garden where there were no girls, only statues.

  ‘Yes! The little piece you shagged…’

  ‘Valya,’ I said.

  ‘Mine was Lena.’ He looked into the distance which was less that three metres away across the tunnel. ‘Tight as a keyhole.’

  ‘I’m amazed we managed it,’ Titian cut in.

  ‘Speak for yourself!’ Kostya retorted. ‘I was never lacking…’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Titian rejoined. ‘I’m not doubting any of our manhoods. But the thing is, our diet is pretty turgid…’

  ‘Shit, shit and more shit, some of it hot,’ said Ylli.

  ‘And mammoth,’ Avel added.

  We all laughed except for Titian who was determined to make his point.

  ‘If your diet,’ he went on, ignoring the interruptions, ‘lacks vitamin E you can’t get an erection.’

  ‘A hard on,’ Kostya said. ‘We aren’t in anatomy class.’

  ‘In that case, we’ve all either lied like buggery to each other,’ Ylli said, ‘and not one of us has had his end away or, despite the crap food, we’re still getting vitamin E.’

  ‘Well, I’m getting vitamins a-plenty!’ Kostya announced proudly.

  ‘What about you?’ Titian asked me.

  ‘Truthfully, it would seem I’m getting my vitamin E,’ I told him.

  Kirill, who had been lazing against a pit prop, joined the conversation and said, ‘You can be sure we’re getting the very basic needs we require. They don’t want to starve us. We might be zeks but we are also labour. We’re not here because we sabotaged socialism, because we sold secrets to the British or helped someone jump a ship for Rio. We’re here because the last Five-Year Plan, and the one before that, and the next one, needs so many tens of thousands of ants to see it through. We, comrades-in-coal, are nothing more than ants.’

  ‘We live like ants,’ Avel remarked. ‘Under the ground most of the time and coming up only to forage about for food.’

  ‘But with sufficient vitamins to fuck,’ Kostya said, with finality.

  Dmitri, who had been lying on a sack, sat up and said quietly, ‘I hate all people, present company excepted. People can’t be trusted. They’ll rat on you, shit on you and do you in for a plate of porridge. They’ll steal what they don’t need and destroy what they do. People are the worst animals on earth.’

  He spoke with such a conviction that it silenced us all for a moment: each of us, in his own way, looked for justification to this statement, and found it in his own experience.

  ‘Heard about the Kuskova family?’ Dmitri asked at length, breaking our thoughts.

  He paused and looked from one to the other of us, ending on me. There was no humour in his eyes, no twinkling impishness.

  ‘I’ll tell you about them,’ he continued, ‘They lived in an apartment block in the city – Minsk, Moscow – I forget which. Doesn’t matter. There was father, mother, babushka, two teenage sons and a daughter. Father’s a clerk in some state office, mother’s a nurse, babushka’s old and toothless and the kids’re at school or university. Late one night, they were all sitting round reading, playing cards – whatever. There’s a heavy knock on the door. They go pale, look at each other. Visions of KGB uniforms and a man in a black leather coat. “Keep quiet!” father K whispers, “they’ll think we’re out.” The knocking starts again, louder, more insistent. They all cower, pray no one’s got a door ram. Again – knock! knock! Then they hear footsteps going away and their neighbours’ door being rapped upon followed by urgent but incomprehensible voices. Then silence. They’re scared witless but they want to know what’s going on so they decide to send the daughter out to discover what’s happening. She’s a paid up, bona fide Party member, secretary of a youth organisation. Pretty, long legs, nice hair, firm tits. All the attributes to woo herself out of a pickle. She slips out of the apartment. Ten minutes go by then there’s a heavy knocking on the door again. The family are silent. The knock is insistent again. Then they hear a muffled voice. “It’s me! Alya!” The daughter! They open the door. “What’s going on, Alya?” “It’s all right!”’ she says. “Nothing to worry about. It’s only the building on fire.”’

  This time, our laughter was muted, wry.

  ‘Time to cut coal,’ Kirill announced.

  We rose to our feet. It was my turn to take over the hauling of a sledge to the main gallery but Kostya had another idea.

  ‘Shurik,’ he asked, ‘will you swap over?’

  ‘Swap over?’ I answered.

  ‘Will you do my loading stint now and I do your pulling the sledge?’

  I gave his request no second thought. My muscles were relaxed from my rest and my mind soothed by the music in the temple.

  ‘Sure!’ I agreed and I picked up one of the shovels.

  At the time, I gave no thought as to why he suggested this, and why I accepted his offer. It was nothing more than a simple request from a friend although rarely did we exchange our roles: there was little to be gained by either of us from changing places.

  Now, of course, I know it was scheming providence at work, tugging at my strings, re-setting the compass o
f my life. Had Kostya not made the suggestion, had I not accepted it, my life would never have taken the path that it has. Upon that one infinitesimal fraction of time hung everything.

  We settled back into our routine. Ylli took his turn with the pick, Kostya and Titian pulled the sledges, Kirill and Avel shovelled back whilst Dmitri and I filled the sledges. Conserving our energies, none of us spoke. Conversation was usually reserved for rest periods. Nor did we slacken our rate of work. As a team, we worked well for we had come to understand the others’ capabilities and had adjusted our pace to the lowest common denominator. In this way, no one was stretched, no one was criticised for holding the others up, no one was looked down upon.

  In many ways, Work Unit 8 was the supreme irony. Two kilometres above us, Communism was failing in the bright light of day whilst we, state-confirmed dissident malcontents with KGB dossiers, guilty of something or nothing as the case may be, laboured in eternal darkness with dim bulbs in a structured, ordered team under one leader, everyone looking out for his fellow and doing his bit. If there was ever an example of socialism truly working it was the seven of us.

  About halfway through Ylli’s digging stint, he struck a particularly crumbling section of rock. The point of the pick went in to the shaft and, as he worked and levered it loose, fragments of coal and stone started to tumble down to his feet. By the time the pick was free, a hole had formed a good thirty centimetres deep and seventy in diameter.

  Kirill called an immediate halt. Leaning forward, he sniffed at the hole like a bloodhound hot on the scent. Knowing what was in his mind, we stood motionless, making sure our metal tools touched nothing from which they might strike a spark.

  ‘We’re all right,’ he announced at length. ‘My lungs don’t itch. No gas.’ Stepping back, he surveyed the cavity and added, ‘Better get this lot supported. Avel, go with Titian and get more props.’

  Kostya being already absent with a sledge full of coal and debris, when Avel and Titian departed with the second sledge there were just the four of us left. Kirill issued fresh orders: we set about moving the loose rock Ylli had brought down, piling it up against the tunnel wall ten metres back, clearing the face area so the new pit props could be erected and bedded in. Kirill and Ylli moved the rubble back from the tight confines of the work-face, Dmitri and I taking it on down the mole hole. It was hard work. Without a sledge, we had to carry the débris on shovels, walking with our backs slightly bent.

  Despite the slog of our labours, Dmitri’s spirits were not dampened. It took a lot to get him down: he was, despite his fervent denigration of the entire human species, one of nature’s optimists. As he crouched along, his shovel held out before him and his biceps tensed, his mind was working. When we had shifted about half the rubble, he stopped me by the spoil tip we were building.

  ‘There’s a pianist travelling by train across the Soviet Union,’ he said, touching me on the arm in an almost conspiratorial manner. ‘He’s on his way to a concert, studying the score for his next performance. In the next seat, there’s a KGB officer in plain clothes.’

  ‘What score?’ I interrupted. ‘Tchaikovsky? Rachmaninov?’ I suggested.

  ‘How do I know, Shurik?’ Dmitri replied. ‘What does it matter? Stop being obtuse.’

  ‘It’s important,’ I needled him. ‘Details are important if you tell a story about the KGB. Details are everything to them. Rimsky-Korsakov?’

  ‘You want to hear the story?’

  ‘Not Borodin?’

  I was not to know it but, as with Kostya’s request to pull the sledge, my captious questioning was yet another intervention of fate’s hand, slowing the wheel of fortune by a few crucial snippets of time.

  ‘Right!’ Dmitri said pointedly to silence me. ‘Mendelssohn. Satisfied? Now can I go on?’

  I nodded.

  Dmitri gave me a sharp look for playing with him and continued, ‘Being KGB, he didn’t know the first thing about music and thought the sheet of notation was a code and the pianist an enemy of the state. “What is this, comrade?’ he asked the pianist. ‘Just one of the works of Mendelssohn,” the pianist replied. At the next station, he was dragged off the train and thrown in a cell. Six days went by before they lugged him into an interrogation cell. ‘Right!” said the KGB officer. “You’d better tell us all you know. Mendelssohn’s already confessed.”’

  I chuckled and said, ‘Probably true. But why Mendelssohn? He was a German. Surely a Russian pianist would play a Russian composer.’

  ‘He was Russian?’ Dmitri retorted sharply. ‘I said he was Russian…?’

  Something touched me softly, almost inconsequentially on the shoulder, drawing my attention as a friend might coming up behind me in the street. It could have been an angel’s wing. Instinctively, I turned.

  By the glimmer of the last of our pilfered light bulbs, down towards the end of the mole hole, I could see Kirill. He was half bent with his shovel in his hand and looking at me. Beyond him, Ylli had his back turned. Something in me wanted to call out yet I held my silence.

  A thunderclap struck me as physically as a fist, the sound ramming itself through my body like a charge of heavy electricity. It was as I imagined it must be in the very nucleus of a storm cloud, rising and billowing over sun-baked plains. My ears rang, my pulse raced, my eyes screwed themselves shut. My soul withdrew into the core of my body and crouched there, trembling. I was thrust to my knees by a force I could neither resist nor understand and a strange wind blew over me which smelled of rotting flesh and dead stone. A blast of tiny shrapnel spattered against me, stinging my ear lobes.

  All was then black and silent save for a tribal drum beating close to my head in the jungle of the impenetrable night. I raised my hand to my face. My left cheek was damp and sticky.

  Slowly, I gathered my wits. The tattoo on the tribal drum subsided and my ears began to pick up individual sounds again. At first, I heard my own breath coming in short gulps, then my heart racing followed by a noise like small waves breaking on a shingle beach: finally, I heard someone else breathing and a voice.

  ‘Shurik!’ The voice was low, cautious. ‘Shurik!’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, my own voice loud inside my head.

  ‘My battery’s fucked.’

  It was Dmitri.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked.

  There was a pause for a moment, as if he was checking himself, before he answered, ‘Fine. Is your lamp working?’

  I felt along my belt to where the lamp, which Kirill had filched for me on my first day at Sosnogorsklag 32, was clipped. Tugging it free, I pressed the switch with my thumb. The battery was not fully charged, the beam consequently dim but sufficient to show me Dmitri’s drawn face, his eyes staring through a mist of fine dust hanging in the air.

  ‘Blessed Isaac!’ he half-whispered: it was more a prayer than an expletive.

  It was then I turned, swinging the feeble beam of the lamp. The roof supports were buckled and splintered: the roof over our heads had retained its integrity but it was lower by at least ten centimetres. Through the dust, where Kirill and Ylli had been, there was a sloping wall of rock and rubble.

  I did not bother to try to stand. I scrabbled forwards on my hands and knees, jammed the lamp behind a prop that had eased itself away from the wall and began to tear at the rubble, throwing the rocks back behind me. Blood from a gash just beneath my left eye dripped onto my chest, fingers and the stones I was man-handling.

  My mind was empty of all cogent thought. I did not bother to reason if what I was doing was either logical or sensible. Something instinctively told me to dig, regardless of the consequences. After some minutes of frantic scratching, I glanced over my shoulder. Dmitri was just visible as a vague figure on the periphery of the lamplight.

  ‘Don’t just stand there!’ I bellowed, my voice flat in the confined space. ‘Get fucking backup!’

  Dmitri disappeared and I returned to my task.

  As I laboured, I swore in the most foul-mouthed fashion
, cursing my luck, the cave in, the overseers and the Politburo and the Supreme Soviet, the callous gods that had stuck me in the mole hole and buried Kirill.

  In retrospect, I gave little or no thought for Ylli. Something told me, his having been behind Kirill, that he was passed rescuing. He was, I considered, already gone, his spirit heading for purgatory by way of a Mediterranean beach lined with pine trees wafting in a warm, onshore breeze, pretty girls with long legs swimming in the sea and waving to him.

  A rock the size of a football came free. Too heavy to lift, I rolled it clear, thrusting it impatiently out of the way with my foot. A slide of gravel slid over where it had been.

  ‘Fuck you!’ I addressed the gravel, digging my fingers into it, paddling to either side like a dog digging for rabbits. ‘Get the fucking, shitting fuck out of it!’

  I reached another stone, tore at it with my fingers to get a grasp on its surface, tugged at it, rocked it back and forth and got it free. As it slid to the floor, I saw an opening. Thrusting myself forward, I lay with my chest against the rock fall and pressed my face to the hole. A warmth came out from it and I could hear a gentle hissing, like a punctured tyre slowly going down.

  Grabbing the lamp, I held it next to my face and shone it into the hole. Not twenty centimetres in, I saw the top of Kirill’s head.

  The hissing stopped, started again.

  With a renewed frenzy, I set to work on the rock fall, oblivious to the consequences of another possible cave in. In less than a minute, I had the fallen rock cleared from around Kirill’s head, exposing him down to the shoulders. He was lying face upwards, his eyes shut and a pit prop across the chest. The rest of his body was buried.

  Stepping back into the gloom, I ranged about for the water pail. Although some débris had fallen into it, there remained a few litres of water. I dragged the bucket forward and, cupping my hands, splashed water in Kirill’s face, dripping it onto his closed eyes which I wiped free of dirt with my fingers. His breathing hissed again.