The Industry of Souls (13 page)

The day being bright, the interior of the garage was cast in deep shadow and I could not make out what was going on inside until I was quite close. In the centre of the work area was a distinctly derelict, old-fashioned Russian limousine of dubious provenance. The bodywork was black, the doors wide enough to accommodate the fattest of Party secretaries, the back windows darkly tinted and still hung with threadbare curtains stretched from chromium-plated rails. Dents in the driver’s door and front wing ringed with rust bubbles were evidence of an accident in the distant past. The windscreen was cracked right across and starred by stones. The vehicle was raised on axle stands, a pair of legs projecting out from under the engine over which the bonnet had been removed.

Perhaps, I considered as I stood for a minute at the side of the entrance to observe the occupants at work, the car was evidence of the veracity, extant after so many decades, of Dmitri’s story of the onion seller at the railway crossing.

Nearest the entrance was the apprentice who, standing before a workbench, was hammering seized bolts out of a chassis member from, I presumed, the limousine. With every strike of the hammer, flakes of mud and rust dropped to the floor.

The apprentice’s name is Romka and he was once a pupil of mine. A studious child of eleven when I retired from Myshkino school, he was always polite, quiet, unassuming and diligent but never all that bright except, that is, at music. Give him anything with strings on it and he would be able to bow or pluck a tune out of in it hours.

At another workbench at the rear of the garage, sparks shot out from the grinding wheel. The air smelled of hot metal, cold oil, gasoline and the sun-warmed timbers of the walls.

‘Shurik!’ a voice shouted out. ‘Happy 80th.!’

The grinding wheel stopped screeching and hummed, the pitch dropping as the power was switched off and the motor slowed. The legs protruding from under the old heap started to scrabble and Trofim began to appear, wriggling out on his back. His face was besmirched with oil, his hands blackened. For a moment, I felt an unpleasant stab of nostalgia: he might have been a miner.

Tolya walked briskly past the car, avoiding the handlebars of a motorbike and tugging off a pair of metal-worker’s safety goggles.

‘Good morning, Tolya. How’s business?’ I enquired.

This is my customary greeting for Tolya, like any boss around the world, loves to have an interest expressed in his company.

He put his finger and thumb together and kissed the air a few centimetres from them. To put his fingers to his lips would have been to have had the taste of oil and metal filings lingering in his mouth for the rest of the day. In a vain attempt to clean his hands, he wiped them on a cloth hanging from a nail on the wall then inspected them. They were no cleaner.

‘Well, you know I want to shake your hand, Shurik. But…,’ He shrugged. ‘How’re you feeling today?’ He made a fist and punched the air. ‘Ready for battle?’

‘As I feel every day,’ I replied. ‘A little older, a little wiser.’

‘So what wisdom have you learnt today? Or has it yet to come?’

‘I have had my lesson for today,’ I told him. ‘Just now, in Komarov’s shed. I discovered that spiders do not tackle wasps but deliberately cut them free from their webs to avoid a confrontation with a more powerful enemy.’

‘And these were
Russian
spiders?’ Tolya asked with a feigned incredulity. ‘From the country that took on the wily Afghans? And would have tangled with the Yanks if the chance had arisen?’

‘Indeed, Russian spiders,’ I confirmed.

‘Ah, yes!’ Tolya retorted, as if coming at last to his senses. ‘Of course, they are Russian spiders. Not
Soviet
spiders.’ He laughed aloud, throwing his head back. ‘There you are, Trofim. Proof we do live in a new world. Even the spiders have wised up.’

Trofim balanced a monkey wrench on the radiator of the car and slid his hands up and down his sides.

‘Happy birthday, Shurik,’ he greeted me.

‘What did they give you, Shurik?’ Tolya wanted to know.

‘They bought me a very old icon of St. Basil. How much it cost, I dare not think.’

‘But do you like it?’ Tolya demanded.

‘It is exquisite,’ I replied and smiled at Trofim, ‘but you should not have spent so much.’

‘What use are dollars?’ he responded, ‘if you don’t spend them?’ He picked up a ball of cotton waste and rubbed it between his palms. ‘Have some tea with us. I’m losing my patience with this old bitch.’ He slammed his hand against the side of the limousine so hard that the monkey wrench fell off the radiator to chime on the concrete floor.

Romka provided an old steel framed office stool for me to sit on and drew four mugs of tea from a samovar they keep on the go at the back of the garage. This, too, is an indication of Pavel’s influence for he has told them that American garages always provide refreshment for customers waiting whilst their cars are attended to in the workshop. Tolya leaned on the end of the bench, Trofim cleared a space and hoisted himself onto the work surface. Romka sat on the motorbike.

‘What is this car?’ I asked, pointing at the dilapidated limousine with my cup.

‘It was the official Party car in Zarechensk,’ Trofim explained. ‘When the Party office was shut, it was given to the town mayor who used it for a few months but he did not take to it.’

‘For a start,’ interrupted Tolya, ‘he is a liberal reformer and the car had connotations with which he did not wish to be associated. It was unreliable and broke down frequently, embarrassing him in front of other mayors. When the back seat broke free from its mounting and he found a condom down the back of the upholstery – that was it! He sold it to a farmer who couldn’t afford to run it. It does only five kilometres to the litre. With a tail wind.’

‘The farmer kept it in his barn,’ Trofim took up the narrative, ‘where hens nested and his dog whelped in it. He sold it to us last week.’

‘The condom, by the way, was as second-hand as the car,’ Tolya cut in again. ‘It seems the last Comrade Secretary had a busy extra-governmental life.’

‘And a deaf, dumb and blind chauffeur,’ Trofim suggested.

‘But what are you going to do with it?’ I asked. ‘It’s a wreck.’

‘We are going to restore it,’ Tolya declared with more than a hint of optimistic pride, ‘and use it as a taxi. The Myshkino Cab Company. That’s what we’ll be. Romka here is going to be the driver, on commission.’

‘Will you paint it yellow?’ I wanted to know.

‘We’ve not decided. Black is out and so is red, for obvious reasons. We were thinking silver…’ Tolya stopped. He caught up with my thinking. ‘You’re a vicious, irritating old bastard!’ he exclaimed.

I affected an air of hurt innocent and said, ‘What do you mean?’

Trofim broke out into a peal of laughter. Romka cottoned on, too.

‘This is Myshkino, not Manhattan!’ Tolya retorted but with good humour.

We sipped our tea. A swift swooped into the garage, circled over our heads and swung out into the sunlight once more. From the samovar, a thin plume of steam rose up to the beams which, for a brief moment, looked less like the supports of a barn roof and more like transverse pit props. Tolya embarked upon a comparison of the new Ford Mustang, of which he has recently received the latest sales brochure, with a BMW convertible. He favoured the American car for style, ingenuity and what he termed the fun factor, which phrase he spoke first in English with an American, Pavelian accent before translating it into Russian: Trofim preferred the German for its superior engineering and build quality. I paid little heed to their esoteric conversation and it was not until Tolya addressed me that I was jolted back to the present.

‘You’ll like this story, Shurik,’ he said. ‘I heard it in Leontiy’s bar. You know it? The one by the market in Zarechensk. They serve good coffee there and Andryukha’s little minion pushes his wares round the table. Andryukha’s walnut cake…’

‘Are you going to tell us it? At this rate, the preface will be longer than the novel,’ Trofim remarked.

‘Now that the Cold War is over,’ Tolya began, ‘there was held a joint military exercise between the Americans, the British and the Russians. On a survival course, there were an American CIA officer, a British MI5 spy and a KGB operative. The three are sitting down round a fire on the edge of the forest. CIA says, “I bet I could go into the forest, catch a rabbit, skin it and have it cooking in fifteen minutes.” “That’s a long time,’ says MI5. “I could do it in ten.” KGB looks at them and says, “five minutes for me.” So the challenge is made. CIA goes off into the trees. Fourteen minutes later he returns, pulls the rabbit inside out, discards the pelt and sets it cooking on a stick. MI5 goes off. Nine minutes later, he’s back and his rabbit’s in the pot, boiling. KGB goes off. Twenty minutes later, he hasn’t come back. CIA says to MI5, “So much for the Russian threat! These rabbits are nearly cooked. Let’s eat them.” They eat the rabbits and then, lying back, they have a little doze.’

Tolya took a swallow of his tea and I swear I heard Dmitri’s voice. Looking out of the garage door and across the road towards the river, there were some men standing down by the bridge, where the bus to Zarechensk stops. They were in a knot, talking to each other, and I should not have been the least surprised had one of them waved to me.

‘Two hours later,’ Tolya continued, ‘KGB still hasn’t come back. MI5 says, “Maybe he’s in trouble. Bears. Wolves. Vipers. I think we should go and look for him. After all, we’re all friends now.” So CIA and MI5 set off into the forest. They follow KGB’s trail. Eventually, they come to a clearing. Across the far end, KGB is standing. He has caught a fox which he has tied by its hind legs from a branch. As they watch, he beats the fox with a stick and shouts, “Come on, you bastard! Talk! Where are the rabbits?”’

Both Trofim and Romka laughed aloud at this tale which, ten years ago, would have had them rubbing shoulders with a team of benighted
zeks
in a mole hole or breaking stones on the Trans-Siberian railway. I also chuckled but, as I did so, I wondered where Dmitri is now.

It is twenty years since we parted, shaking hands in the rain on the steps outside the barrack hut in which we ate and slept and snored and farted and argued and occasionally fought with men who had been caught with their hands in the till, or their fingers on the trigger, or simply fallen foul of a system they thought protected them from pain, injustice and the corruption of power.

‘So, Shurik, your time’s come,’ Dmitri said.

‘I’d rather stay a while,’ I replied. ‘Go in the winter.’

‘Why?’ he questioned. ‘The snow’s gone now.’

‘It’s the rain,’ I said. ‘I hate walking in the rain.’

‘Stay then. The office is dry,’ he argued, using that old euphemism of the bad, red years: wherever you worked was your office, be it a tractor factory or a collective farm. Or a mine.

‘Maybe not. I have no secretary,’ I countered. ‘What can a man do without a secretary? I have had enough of typing my own letters. I am,’ I straightened my shoulders with false pride, ‘going up in the world.’

‘How far?’ Dmitri asked.

‘About two and half kilometres,’ I said.

‘Find me a place in your new office.’

I looked into his eyes and saw, way back in his soul, a terrible sadness.

‘You will always have a place in my office,’ I replied. ‘A desk in the corner by the window, overlooking the park with a black telephone at one elbow and an in-tray at the other.’

‘Made of…?’

‘Steel?’ I offered.

‘Wood. Mahogany, polished, tanned as the skin on the breasts of a Burmese princess!’

‘Consider it done,’ I promised.

‘And a calendar?’

‘What are the pictures of?’

He thought for a moment then decided, ‘The natural wonders of the world. One picture for each month. January will be the Grand Canyon.’

He leaned forward, embracing me and kissing me on both cheeks and I kissed him in return: then he took my hand, removing his work glove so that our palms might touch.

‘Go carefully in the world, Shurik,’ he advised.

‘Good-bye, Dmitri,’ I replied. ‘You have my love.’

We did not shake each other’s hand. We just held it, like sweethearts reluctantly parting on a railway platform, the train getting up a head of steam and a porter walking down the line of carriages, slamming the open doors shut. I even thought I heard the ticket inspector calling
All aboard
! but it was a guard yelling at me to move my arse over to the administration building.

‘Have a good life, Shurik,’ Dmitri half-whispered, ‘A good life for a good man.’

I could say nothing. I was no better, nor no worse than any of those men whose names the world had forgotten and who existed only in an official dossier locked away in a Moscow vault as dusty as Gallery K for Khruschev who would crucify Khazars.

The guard grabbed me by the arm and shouted, ‘You want to go,
zek
, or do you want to be planted for another 25 years?’

From the steps of the administration building, I looked back. Through a thin mist of breath condensing on the pane, I could see Avel’s face at the window by the door of our hut. Something white moved next to it. It was his hand, tentatively waving. On the steps, Dmitri was still standing, watching me as I disappeared.

I do not know, but I should like to think that he is living somewhere in a quiet corner of the new Russia, telling his jokes just as Tolya does and loved by the people with whom he is spending his last years, just as I am. Yet just as likely, he has been knifed on a train, or in a back street in an anonymous town, by an Armenian without a sense of humour.

I drained my tea and rose to my feet.

‘It is time I was on my way,’ I declared. ‘I’m not halfway round my daily constitutional and you’ve a tired old wreck to rebuild. And paint yellow.’

Tolya slapped me on the back.

‘You’ll be the first passenger to ride with the Myshkino Cab Company!’

‘Where to?’ I asked. ‘My funeral? It looks like a hearse.’

Tolya nudged me.

‘To the church. For your wedding to the Merry Widow.’