The Industry of Souls

by Booth, Martin

  ‘Ten years without the right of correspondence,’ Trofim replied grimly.

  I knew that euphemism: in the old days, when men were afraid to sneeze in case atishoo sounded like Stalin, it was the official court declaration of a sentence which inevitably led, within the hour, to a firing squad in the prison yard and a hastily excavated pit in the woods ten kilometres out of town.

  Frosya put down her knife and went across to peer into the trap.

  ‘He is so magnificent,’ she said almost wistfully. ‘Come, Shurik, look at him.’

  I joined her and bent close to the bars. The fox was in its autumn colours, its coat a rich red-brown, its nose as black and shiny as an officer’s polished leather pistol holster. The tip of its brush was dark and it had a white streak on its chest. As my face came into its view, it flattened its ears and snarled.

  ‘Must you kill him?’ Frosya asked, returning to her chore. ‘Surely he will have learnt his lesson, being trapped. Now he will keep away from us.’

  ‘And do what?’ Trofim rejoined. ‘Go after Arseny’s chickens instead of ours? Or Roman’s ducks? Besides, do criminals learn? What of the recidivist?’

  Frosya shrugged. Both Trofim and I knew that shrug.

  ‘Could you not take it far off into the forest and let it go?’ I suggested.

  ‘Then he would die,’ Frosya said, ‘more slowly than if you threw him in the river. He would be out of his home range, competing with local foxes. They would chase him, attack him, wound him, tear his leg off.’

  She dropped a peeled beetroot into a pail at her side and, for a fleeting second or two, I was back in Hut 14 and Genrikh was doing his stuff.

  Trofim stood with his hands on the shafts of the barrow. He could sense the hidden admonishment in her words.

  ‘If you want to drown him,’ she continued after a pause, ‘you can’t do it in the trap. The trap will float. If you weight it, you’ll not be able to lift it to drop it off the bank. Or over the parapet of the bridge. You’ll need to take the fox out and put him in a sack.’

  Trofim thought for a minute and lowered the barrow onto its legs.

  ‘Very well, I shall keep the fox until Sergei returns. Then I shall borrow his gun.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘Bang! Finished. Quick, clean, no pain.’

  ‘No correspondence,’ I said.

  Frosya started on another beetroot and observed, ‘Sergei will be away three weeks. Masha told me. You can’t keep the fox in the trap that long.’

  At this, I could see Trofim was getting cross but he suppressed his anger.

  ‘I’ll sort something out,’ he grunted and, turning the barrow round, stomped off along the path, going back the way he had come.

  All afternoon, Trofim stayed away from the house. We saw him on occasion heading into the village but Frosya made no attempt to call to him. At dusk, he appeared on the porch with his arms akimbo.

  ‘Right!’ he said sharply. ‘Come and see.’

  We followed him to a patch of beaten earth in the middle of the vegetable garden, about halfway between the house and the chickens, where there stood a wire run about four metres long, two high and three wide with a wooden hutch at one end and a basin of water sunk in the ground at the other.

  ‘Satisfied?’ he growled.

  Frosya smiled and put her hand on his arm.

  ‘It’s good,’ she declared. ‘It will do and, when the fox has gone, we can use it to raise chicks.’

  ‘Won’t he dig himself out?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘There’s five gauge mesh under the earth,’ Trofim replied curtly. ‘He’s not going anywhere.’

  Within a week, the presence of the fox was shown to have benefits. For the whole summer, the vegetable plot had been regularly visited by a number of the feral cats which lived around the village. Not only had they liberally used it as a feline latrine, spraying the cabbages and defecating on the radishes but they had fought with Murka, bloodily ripping her ear. Nothing Trofim could do dissuaded them from visiting: pepper had no effect and a salutary fistful of gravel only worked if you caught them in the act. However, the scent of the fox drove them away. What was more, the rats which habitually lived around the chickens also seemed to diminish in numbers and the rabbits which came in from the fields to denude the carrots disappeared completely.

  Frosya stopped by the fox run regularly throughout the day. At first, the animal remained in the hutch during daylight but, growing used to her visits, it started to come out to laze in the sun. She gave it water, fed it scraps and, when one of Roman’s ducks was hit by a passing lorry, she presented it with the mangled carcass. In a fortnight, she was able to briefly stroke it.

  Her familiarity with the fox irked Trofim. He kept his annoyance under control until one evening when, on his way to lock the chickens up, he discovered Frosya sitting in the run with the fox lying at her side as she ran her fingers along its side.

  ‘Bring it in the house, why don’t you!’ he exclaimed peevishly.

  ‘He’s not a pet,’ Frosya answered calmly, ‘he’s a wild animal.’

  Yet, when Sergei returned, Trofim did not approach him for the loan of his shotgun.

  I visited the fox from time to time and it grew accustomed to my presence, too. Ever since the day it was released into its run, I felt a strange kinship with it. It was in prison, as assuredly as I had been and I was certain, in its own way, it felt as I had felt. Even dozing in the shade of the hutch, a luxury I had rarely been afforded in Sosnogorsklag 32, I could sense its heavy heart, its inner misery which did not show on the outside but which I knew dwelt far within the creature’s soul. Perhaps, I wondered, it dwelt in its mind in a wondrous forest, lingering in dark corners of its canine subconscious just as the marvellous garden had done in my own.

  ‘It is time,’ Frosya declared one evening in late October, ‘to let the fox go.’

  ‘Let it go?’ Trofim replied incredulously. ‘You mean kill it? I could cure the pelt and we could sell it. Fox fur is fetching a good price in Zarechensk. Or you can have it,’ he added with a certain sardonic touch to his voice. ‘Your coat needs a new collar.’

  Frosya ignored his remark and said, ‘I mean let him go. Not kill him. He will do us no harm.’

  Trofim snorted. ‘No harm? The minute it’s out of that run, it’ll be through the hen house like a rabbit down a row of radishes.’

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he realised what he had said, understood what Frosya’s plan had been all along and grinned sheepishly.

  ‘If I am wrong,’ Frosya said, ‘if the fox takes so much as a mouthful of feathers, you can fetch Sergei’s gun and sell the pelt.’

  The next day, the air chilly and the sunlight crisp, Frosya went to the run to bade the fox farewell. I followed her, entered the run for the first time and watched as the creature brushed against her legs, sniffing at the leather of her boots and raising its nose to catch her scent. She squatted down, the fox rubbing against her thigh and nuzzling her fingers for a titbit. She gave it an egg, warm from the nesting box. It took it delicately in its sharp teeth, not cracking the shell until it was a few paces off: then, holding the egg between its paws, it capped it at its pointed end with the expertise of a cook and lapped the contents.

  ‘Do you think, Shurik, he is now – how shall we put it? Politically educated?’

  I smiled and answered, ‘Do you think I am?’

  She laughed lightly and the fox, alerted by her laugh, stopped lapping and cast a quick, cautious glance at us.

  ‘If he is not,’ she reached out and stroked the animal’s back to reassure it, her fingers drawing lines in the creature’s fur which had thickened up for the coming winter, ‘his coat will soon adorn someone else. In Moscow.’

  The fox finished the egg, sat on its haunches and licked its muzzle. Frosya stepped back and we left the run, leaving the door open. At the edge of the vegetable plot, we halted and watched the fox.

  For a minute or two, it remained where it was,
its tongue wiping the last vestiges of yolk from its whiskers and licking traces of albumen off its front paws.

  ‘Do you recall the day they left your cage door open?’ Frosya asked quietly.

  I made no reply, but I could remember it. Standing to attention in front of the commanding officer’s desk, he handed me the release document.

  ‘Prisoner B916,’ he announced laconically. ‘You are hereby released from your imprisonment. You have served your sentence. A travel warrant is arranged for you. You will be taken to the railway terminus at thirteen hundred hours. Collect your belongings from your hut, report to the quartermaster at eleven-thirty hours.’

  He hammered several purple rubber stamps onto the document, initialled them and held it out to me. I took it in silence.

  ‘Have you nothing to say?’

  ‘Thank you, Grazhdanin Nachalnik,’ I replied, nonplussed.

  ‘Where do you intend to go?’ he enquired.

  I folded the document. My mind was quite blank. The inconceivable, the one thing none of us ever gave thought to except in the darkest of moments, for fear of creating a void of hope in our souls, had happened.

  ‘Will you go home?’ the nachalnik enquired.

  I made no response. Home was not a concept with which I was familiar any longer. He grew angry.

  ‘Ubiraisya!’ he exclaimed impatiently. ‘Go on! Bugger off!’

  As I crossed the compound, my head was swirling with near panic: yet, underlying it, I felt a terrible sadness creeping over me like night moving inexorably across the tundra and, beneath that, I realised home, for me, was Hut 14. I could recall nowhere else. Memories of my early life a quarter of a century before had faded, like photos of the dead. A few names lingered but I could put no faces to them, no sound of a voice, not even a familiar location.

  The only voice I heard clearly was Kirill’s.

  ‘Look!’ Frosya said softly.

  Quite suddenly, the fox had tensed. His ears were pricked and tuned to the main chance. His eye was bright.

  ‘He has seen his future,’ I whispered.

  Frosya took my hand in hers, gripping it tightly. The fox looked at the open door, pressed his belly to the ground and started to slink slowly towards it. At the threshold, he halted and put just his nose over the wooden sill.

  I had done much the same at the gate of Sosnogorsklag 32, had stopped at the white line over which no one could pass until counted off, waited a moment, tested the air as if I might smell the catch. Yet there was none. The guard by the door of the rundown prison bus shouted, ‘You! Get a fucking move on!’ And I remember, for a moment, I had not realised he was addressing me for it was the first time in 26 years that I had been addressed by a guard without his using my number.

  The fox put one paw over the sill, tentatively, like a swimmer testing the temperature of the sea before stepping into the waves. I looked down. In my mind’s eye, I could see my foot lift, go forward, cross the line.

  ‘He’s going,’ Frosya murmured.

  The fox, realising the coast was clear, moved warily out of its gaol and stood on the path, the sun glistening on its fur.

  ‘Will he run for it?’ Frosya pondered quietly.

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘He’s no fool.’

  Sure enough, the fox did not sprint for cover but made its way leisurely along the path towards the chickens. Its brush trailed behind it, swaying up and down to its step that had an almost jaunty pride about it which, in the same circumstance, my own had not for I was tired and afraid of what my future might hold whilst the fox was ready for whatever eventuality might arise. The hens, seeing it coming, took to the oak tree in a cacophony of annoyed clucking. The fox ignored them and kept going until it reached the edge of the forest. There, for a brief moment, it paused: and in my mind I, too, paused before putting my foot on the lower step of the prison transport.

  ‘What is he thinking?’ Frosya mused.

  ‘He is savouring,’ I said, ‘the wonder of his liberty.’

  Then he was no more, dissolved into the shadows of the trees as old as time.

  ‘Are you sad he’s gone?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I am happy. For him,’ she half-whispered.

  The door of the house opened and Frosya came out, walking swiftly over to check up on the samovar. Behind her, I could hear scrubbing as Trofim laboured to shift the grime of the garage from beneath his fingernails.

  From the other end of the village, I heard a vehicle approaching. I could tell from the sound of the engine it was diesel powered. Yet this was no stuttering, smoke-belching Russian motor. This was a smooth-running, well-lubricated, expertly-maintained foreign machine. It was in a low gear and I could imagine the driver swinging the wheel from side to side to avoid the potholes and ridges in the lane.

  Without hurrying – for who hurries at my age except towards the grave? – I turned my chair round and self-consciously straightened my jacket.

  The hour had, at last, come.

  * * *

  The vehicle was large and dark green, an hybrid between an African game safari truck and a saloon, with wide diameter tyres on silvered wheels shaped like three pointed stars. The windows were tinted and, on the right hand corner of the bonnet, was a short, chromium-plated flagstaff with a tiny crown surmounting the top. Beneath it, a flag was furled in a white canvas sleeve.

  It did not stop at the gate but passed slowly by, rocking gently over the ruts in the lane, the suspension smooth. I tried to make out the occupants but they were mere shadows through the tinting of the glass. A little way beyond the edge of Trofim’s plot, it halted and turned round. On the rear door was mounted a spare wheel in a black cover upon which was the stylised drawing of a mountain peak, the word Discovery printed beneath it in script.

  Back once more at the gate, it halted, facing down the lane towards the village. The engine fell silent. A man stepped down from the driver’s door, opening the passenger door. At the same time, a tall young man in his thirties with a trim moustache and wavy hair, dressed smartly in immaculately laundered grey trousers and a dark blue blazer, came round the rear of the vehicle and stood deferentially to one side as a second passenger alighted. He was in his late middle age, balding and very slightly stooping. He wore a charcoal suit with a light pink cotton shirt, a maroon cravat knotted at his throat.

  For a few moments, they stood by Trofim’s gate whilst the driver removed a small attaché case from the front seat and handed it to the younger man. They exchanged glances then started forward, the driver swinging the gate open but not following them as they made their way up the path.

  Trofim met them in front of the house. There were brief introductions before they proceeded on round the corner of the house and across to the birch tree under the canopy of which I was seated at the table. The samovar domestically bubbled. A wasp, perhaps having abandoned Komarov’s cider press, hovered over the pastries. Frosya, standing by my side, flicked it away then rested her hand on my shoulder, giving it a slight squeeze.

  ‘We love you, Shurik,’ she whispered. It might have been a plea.

  The younger man with the attaché case came briskly up to the table, holding out his hand. I stood up, Frosya’s hand slipping from my shoulder.

  ‘Mr. Bayliss,’ he greeted me in perfect Russian, ‘how do you do? I’m Geoffrey Grigson, deputy head of mission at the Moscow embassy.’

  ‘Mr. Grigson,’ I replied, taking his hand. His fingers were firm, not too hard in their grip but resolute, confident. ‘I’m well, thank you. Please,’ I indicated the chair next to me, ‘do sit down.’

  He ignored my suggestion, placing his leather case on a different chair. There was a gold crown embossed just above the polished brass clasp.

  ‘I am sure you realise who this is, from my letter,’ Grigson said, urbanely. ‘May I introduce Michael Tibble?’

  The older man stepped forward. He was almost reticent, plainly ill at ease and unsure of himself. His face was grave, his eyes meeting mine then, for a mo
ment, diffidently eluding them before returning to almost bore into me. Taking my hand, he held it rather than shook it.

  ‘It is so very good to meet you at last,’ he said in English. His voice was soft, kindly but in the detached way of a doctor at the bedside of a sickly child. ‘I have thought long about this moment.’

  ‘Welcome to Russia,’ I replied, in English. ‘And to the village of Myshkino. Do you speak Russian?’

  ‘I’m afraid I do not,’ he answered and I had the distinct feeling he was somehow afraid of me: certainly, he was in awe of me.

  ‘Very well,’ I declared. ‘Whilst you and I speak, let us communicate in English but, if I talk to the others, it will be in Russian. I hope you will not mind. They may understand what we are saying but they are not sufficiently fluent in English to reply.’

  He nodded and said, ‘Of course, I quite understand. I am, I regret, a typical Englishman, reasonably articulate in my own language but ignorant of all others except a smattering of schoolboy French.’

  I introduced Frosya first to Grigson then to Michael Tibble. Trofim guided everyone to seats, Tibble sitting opposite me across the table, Grigson at his side. Frosya fussed about at the samovar, serving tea and putting small plates before each of us.

  ‘So,’ I said at last, when the tea was poured and the cups steamed up into the shafts of late sunlight coming through the branches of the birch, ‘you must now tell me. How are we…?’

  ‘I am your aunt’s son,’ Tibble interrupted, eager to get the information out as if he was confessing to his interrogator. I had seen others behave just so before an overseer or a KGB inquisitor: speak fast, get it over with quickly. ‘Your father, Alan, had a much younger sister called Marion who married Arthur Tibble, my father. He was a tailor, in Leicester. They had two children, myself and my younger brother, Stephen.’

  ‘Then we are cousins,’ I remarked, trying to recall him but with little success.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. There was a distinct sense of relief in his voice. His confession, as it were, was being believed.

  ‘And now, if I may, let me ask you a few more questions,’ I continued. ‘My father, what became of him?’