Red Plenty by Spufford Francis

Author:Spufford, Francis [Spufford, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571269471
Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Published: 2010-08-18T20:00:00+00:00

Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1963

The light was fading as the train from Solovets left the forests behind, and snow swept past the window in bluish swathes. Out on the Moscow plain, factory walls rose higgledy-piggledy, first a few and then more and more, unstoppably, as if a sorcerer’s apprentice had been let loose to build industry and had just kept going, a coking plant here and a fractionating tower there, reduction gears here and solvents there, tractors and rifles, lathes and electro-plate, steel and brass and zinc and cement, da da da da-da-da dadada, the countermanding spell never uttered, until the same sights repeated all the way along the railroad; the same dark clustered silhouettes of chimneys, the same girdered rooflines, the same gridded windows, the same branching tracks of rusty wagons, the same blocks of workers’ flats, with the snow rushing through and between, thick and soft, smoothing to blankness the churned mud and ice from which so many pipes, stakes, poles, reinforcing rods protruded, on which so many sacks, pallets, drums, bundles were piled. The snow rushed through, the train whirled by. Arkhipov pulled the curtains closed and turned back to the compartment.

‘Well,’ he said, slapping his knees, ‘who wants another drink?’

The flasks were out, and a chunk of sweating ham wrapped in newspaper, and a whole sausage, to be carved with a penknife. Arkhipov, Kosoy and Mitrenko; they were all getting pleasantly steamed, there in the prickly heat of the soft-class car. Mitrenko, Arkhipov and Kosoy; three big men, tightly filling their skins, all in high good humour. The tekhpromfinplan was in Arkhipov’s briefcase, up in the luggage rack, and they were off to the fleshpots together for the annual jamboree. Mitrenko’s wife and Kosoy’s had given their men shopping lists, detailed plans of campaign calling for raids on GUM and Gastronom No. 1 and Moda. Arkhipov’s lady was a little too high-minded, or absent-minded, to manage that kind of thing; but he had already resolved that when they boarded the train home he would be wrestling a new top-of-the-line radiogram up the steps for her, with an armful of discs to play. They might shop on their own account too, when the meetings and the hand-shaking were done. Late at night, in the bar of the Ukraina, you could meet obliging professional girls, offering the kind of entertainment in such short, such lamentably short supply in Solovets, where everyone knew everyone, and the hotel Icebound Sea faced across the town square in dismal competition with a closed ice-cream kiosk, the household goods store and a teashop run by the fisheries trust. Oh, the sorrows of provincial life! But, till next Thursday, they were out of it, and they grinned at each other, Kosoy and Mitrenko and Arkhipov, their moods buoyed up, as if by thousands of little bubbles, with the knowledge of boldness rewarded.

This time last year, how dismal they had been. Solkemfib, the three of them had understood by then, was a career-killer. For a while they had been able to kid themselves that there was something else to try, but now the truth had sunk in.

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