The Industry of Souls

by Booth, Martin

  12

  The bonfire is dying down now, the ashes grey as newly spewed larva, the embers glowing like the heart of the world. The more substantial boughs flare every few minutes as a breeze fans them and, when one splits, it raises a display of sparks which rise into the sky and are lost amongst the stars. The thin smoke is delicately scented for some of the wood was donated by Komarov who has recently felled a diseased apple tree in his orchard, replacing it, as local custom demands, with a sapling initially watered with cider to – as Komarov puts it – give it legs.

  All around the fire, people are sitting on chairs or benches which they carried into the field just after dark. Some talk, some laugh and joke, some stare at the fire, some at the sky, some at the black forest across the river where time is held captive. The children are here, too. The older ones tussle and chatter, the younger hold close to their parents because the night is dense outside the sphere of the firelight and they have been warned of the sprites which inhabit the shadows and snatch those that do not do as they’re told. A few have fallen asleep in their mother’s arms or curled up on the soft grass by her side, covered by a shawl.

  I sit on my usual chair brought down for me from under the silver birch: it is the one to the shape of which I have grown accustomed over the years. I am wearing a thick woollen sweater which the Merry Widow has knitted for me as a birthday gift. Perhaps she is not so keen to bury me after all. At least, not in the ground. I suspect she would rather bury me in her somewhat capacious bosom or the folds of her bed. What does she see in me! I can hardly be a stud and she is still young enough – just – to want the occasional tupping.

  My front is hot. The heat from the fire, even now that the flames have dropped and we have drawn our seats closer, is still intense, penetrating. If I were to sit a metre nearer, the wool on the sweater would scorch.

  Frosya gets up and, with a long stick, rakes several potatoes out of the ashes, skewering them onto forks and handing them round. The skins are charred but the flesh inside will be soft, almost powdery and sweet. I recall another fire, under another sky long ago, and potatoes cooked in the ashes.

  Trofim hands round bottles of Gigulovsky. He passes my chair, winks at me and hands me one.

  Out of the darkness a voice says, ‘What I’d give for a Russian beer…’

  It is so loud, I almost turn round.

  Perhaps, I consider, just as all my present friends sit here in the warm light of the fire with me so, in the chilly darkness, linger all my past comrades in adversity.

  I glance up. A meteor sparks briefly across the sky. I do not consider it to be a fragment of a far-off place, to which I may or may not aspire when I shuffle off this one.

  No. It is Avel in his MiG-15, chasing after eternity.

  ‘So, Shurik,’ someone calls from across the fire. ‘It’s your turn. Tell us a story.’

  ‘I am no story-teller,’ I call back.

  ‘A man of your advanced years has a million stories,’ Yuri says and, as he did this afternoon, immediately realises he’s blundered again.

  ‘Don’t look now,’ Komarov says, ‘but your foot’s in your mouth, teacher.’

  ‘For a schoolmaster, you’ve a great taste in shoes,’ Father Kondrati remarks dryly.

  Everyone laughs but I am not that easily let off the hook.

  ‘Come along, Shurik!’ Tolya demands. ‘Give us a tale.’

  What shall I tell them? That I once ate a mammoth steak above the Arctic Circle? That I did not share my bucket of oily hot water with a man whose soul was frozen? Or shall I speak of Valya who, like me, right now, could smell burning apple wood?

  There is another voice in the darkness. It is not as close as the other but comes from some way off, up by the tethered, belligerent goat.

  ‘Come along, Shurik,’ it chides me, ‘tell them a good one.’

  ‘Very well,’ I concede, but not just to Tolya.

  I take a swig of the beer to lubricate my throat and place the bottle on the ground by my chair.

  ‘There was an Armenian,’ I begin, ‘who went on a tour of Belarus.’

  In the darkness, there is laughter already. They know this one, my old comrades-in-chains.

  ‘He was driving along one day when he saw a man selling something at the roadside. He stopped and got out. The man had a tray of small, round black balls. “What are these?” the Armenian asked. “They’re learning pills,” replied the Russian. “How much are they?” the Armenian enquired. “Ten dollars each. Hard currency.”’

  My! How they are laughing back there in the black corners of the night!

  ‘The Armenian bought two and promptly ate them. “Blessed Jesus!” he exclaimed. “They taste like goat shit.” “There you go,” replied the Russian. “You’re learning already.”’

  Tolya weeps with mirth. Komarov spills his beer. Trofim splutters: I have caught him in mid-swallow.

  Up the hill, the truculent goat bleats once.

  Someone has passed it by on their way into the future.

  The laughter subsides.

  ‘A good one!’ Tolya congratulates me.

  Across the fire from me, Romka is tuning his balalaika. Frosya and Katya, Komarov’s wife, appear from the direction of a table set up by the river bank. They each carry a tray of glasses filled with sukhoye, a dry sparkling wine not unlike champagne. They hand them out to everyone, even the older children. I receive mine last. As soon as the trays are put away, Romka strums a few chords by way of a drum roll of sorts.

  ‘Ladies and gentleman!’ Trofim proclaims rather grandly. ‘A long time ago, over twenty years, I came back from a hard day’s slog at the office…’

  ‘You never slogged hard at the office,’ Tolya shouts. ‘You could tell from the state of the buses.’ He makes blurting noises with his lips, imitating a poorly maintained engine.

  ‘A hard day’s skive at the office,’ Trofim concedes, ‘to find a scarecrow on the porch. I thought Tolya had put it there. It was,’ he takes his revenge for the interruption, ‘dressed in his latest fashion.’

  Laughter greets this turning of the tables. Tolya raises his glass in acknowledgement of this attack upon his sartorial tastes, but he does not drink from it.

  ‘Coming up the path to my house,’ Trofim goes on, ‘you can all imagine my surprise when it moved.’

  The fire gives his face a ruddy glow. The glass in my hand is cold and wet with condensation.

  ‘I was all for putting it out in the vegetable plot,’ he continues, ‘let it earn its keep but – well, everybody, you know Frosya. A soft heart and a loving mind, except where I’m concerned. So, we made up a spare bed and the damn thing’s lived with us ever since.’

  There is a brief ripple of laughter around the fire. Frosya gives me a quick look, studies my glass to see it is charged. Trofim’s tone changes, the jocular replaced by the sober.

  ‘That day,’ he says, ‘Frosya and I simultaneously gained two things we lacked in our lives. We acquired in one stroke of the brush of heaven both a son and a father. From that moment on, our lives were enriched beyond our wildest dreams and, I hope you will all agree with me, our village became a different place. So, my friends…’ He looks around and everyone stands. ‘…I ask you to drink to Alexander Alanovich Bayliss, the Englishman of Myshkino whom we all call Shurik.’

  ‘Shurik!’ they echo him, holding their glasses up, catching the light of the burning log in the centre of the fire which has suddenly flickered into life.

  Nodding appreciatively, I accept the toast, raising my glass to them in mute gratitude for their friendship and then, at last, unable to resist it any longer, I turn.

  I can see no one. Yet they are there, as sure as the fire is hot, the sukhoye is chilled and Frosya is loving.

  And I raise my glass to them, to the past, to times you would think I should rather forget and yet which I cannot because I do not wish to. For, if I forget the past, I forget them – Work Unit 8 in Sosnogorsklag 32 – and that would not be righ
t.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Frosya asks.

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ I reply.

  ‘I think I do already,’ she answers, smiling at me with such love it takes my breath away.

  The darkness is silent again. They have departed now, gone their ways into hushed oblivion whence I shall join them soon enough.

  ‘I have spoken with Vera Dorokhova,’ Frosya continues. ‘Tomorrow, we shall start to tidy up the Izakov house. Now,’ she picks up her stick, ‘the next lot of potatoes should be done. Are you having one, Shurik?’

  I decline and walk a little way from the fire towards the bank of the river. On the far side, Bratan stands watching the party. The moon is rising over the forest. It has not yet broken above the tree line but there is a pale glow where it will soon come into view.

  Sipping my glass of wine, I think back over my day. In my imagination, I revisit my stroll around Myshkino, in much the same fashion as I used to stroll around my miraculous garden in the long gulag nights. One by one, I revisit Komarov’s cider shed, the school, Myshkino Motors, the church, the forest and the house where, once more, I meet the cousin I did not, until Geoffrey Grigson’s letter arrived, remember existed. I see him walk up the path, come towards me, unsure of himself. Finally, I see the envelope on the table.

  After the embassy vehicle had driven down the lane and the dust had settled on Frosya’s marigolds, I emptied the envelope onto the table. It contained, as Grigson had said it did, my parents’ death certificates, the Khruschev letter, some correspondence to my mother on headed notepaper from several government ministries, a sympathetic letter from an under-secretary at Buckingham Palace expressing the Queen’s regret, and my mother’s will. I unfolded the document, typed on crisp legal stationery. One clause stood out from the rest, underlined in red crayon and initialed by both my mother and, I presume, her lawyer. It read, In the event that my only child, Alexander David Bayliss, be not found alive on the centenary of my birth, then, at that time, the residue of my estates shall pass to Michael Ridley Tibble and his brother, Stephen Peter Tibble, or to their rightful heirs and descendants. Attached to the last page of the will was a statement of account dated three months ago. My mother’s estate, at that time, was valued at just over £412,000.

  By hunting me down, my cousin has forfeited an inheritance of a considerable sum of money. That, I consider, is the sign of a true man.

  The moon is just up. It is peering over the tops of the trees, the craters as clearly defined as the ruts in the lane.

  Standing by the river, with Bratan snuffling in the new moonlight, I have made a decision. I shall write to my cousin and request that, from my inheritance, a sufficient sum of money be set aside to re-equip Myshkino school, with another sum to be placed in trust to provide two scholarships per annum for pupils to travel and see the world, that they, like me, can come to understand that there is evil and there is goodness, to learn the lesson that if you kill something of beauty, two uglinesses spring up in its place. The balance after these deductions shall be divided equally between my two cousins.

  Or, not quite.

  I shall also request that my cousin orders one of those Land Rover vehicles. It will be dark red, have a plush leather interior and air conditioning. Along the side, in both the English and Cyrillic alphabets, I shall have painted the words Myshkino Taxis.

  Also by Martin Booth

  FICTION

  Hiroshima Joe

  The Jade Pavilion

  Black Chameleon

  Dreaming of Samarkand

  A Very Private Gentleman

  The Humble Disciple

  The Iron Tree

  Toys of Glass

  Adrift in the Oceans of Mercy

  CHILDREN’S FICTION

  War Dog

  Music on the Bamboo Radio

  POETRY

  The Crying Embers

  Coronis

  Snath

  The Brevities

  Extending upon the Kingdom

  The Knotting Sequence

  Devil’s Wine

  The Cnot Dialogues

  Meeting the Snowy North Again

  Killing the Moscs

  NONFICTION

  Carpet Sahib: A Life of Jim Corbett

  The Triads

  Rhino Road

  The Dragon and the Pearl: A Hong Kong Notebook

  Opium: A History

  The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle

  EDITED BOOKS

  The Book of Cats (with George Macbeth)

  Contemporary British and North American Verse

  The Selected Poems of Aleister Crowley

  THE INDUSTRY OF SOULS. Copyright © 1998 by Martin Booth. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Booth, Martin.

  The industry of souls / Martin Booth.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-24203-4 (hc)

  ISBN 0-312-26753-3 (pbk)

  I. Title.

  PR6052.O63I55 1999

  823'.914—dc21

  99-38419

  CIP

  First published in the United Kingdom by Dewi Lewis Publishing

  eISBN 9781466843592

  First eBook edition: March 2013