Stephen Burke: The Reluctant Contact

The threat of war with the Americans was at an all-time low. The burning question of the day was whether Brezhnev really was the most boring man alive; or if, in fact, he was alive at all and not a mannequin as some suggested. There was also some heated bar-room debate on how many more self-awarded medals he would be able to fit on his bloated chest. However, despite the new stability in the country, for Yuri the old gulag-avoidance rules still applied.

Don’t trust anyone.

Keep your head down.

Look after number one.

For the whole afternoon, Semyon followed Yuri around like a jittery hen as he attempted to decipher the problem. They rechecked the furnace, the pumps, dozens of pipe intersections and the exec block itself. After four hours Yuri threw his hands up and admitted that he was as clueless as Semyon had been. Everything seemed to be functioning, yet the hot water stubbornly refused to arrive in the executive apartment building. Semyon grudgingly parked his sabotage accusations and offered a few suggestions. Yuri humoured him by trying them out, but none delivered the desired solution.

‘We’ll have to tackle it again in the morning,’ said Yuri, as the night-time freeze made continuing their outdoor work impossible.

‘But that’ll be four nights in a row!’ protested Semyon. ‘We’ll get into deep shit. I’m already in the bad books.’

‘Look, don’t worry about them,’ said Yuri. ‘They’ve survived this long, and a little dose of hardship will do them good. Besides, they can pin all the blame on me now.’

Semyon was satisfied with the last part.

The heating system was Yuri’s masterpiece. A thing of beauty. A quarter of the coal they dug out of the mountain went into Pyramiden’s furnace, which heated the water, which was then pumped around the whole town through miles of piping. Outside, they ran above ground under wooden walkways, which were kept snow-free as a result. He liked to think of the power plant as Pyramiden’s heart. The pipes were the blood vessels, keeping the organs, the living quarters and their occupants alive. Heating was no joke up here, eight hundred miles from the North Pole. Without Yuri, the 1,000 inhabitants would all freeze to death. Soviets prided themselves on being able to tame nature, enabling them to live and work wherever they pleased. Pyramiden was proof they could.

Yuri dined with the other workers in the canteen in the Cultural Palace, waited on by robust Ukrainian women. The menu for tonight was cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and meat. Semyon sat at another table, as always. They were not friends, would never be, and neither of them had the slightest problem with that. Yuri looked around the room. Apart from the miners, there were clerical staff from the office, cooks and cleaners, farmers for the livestock and greenhouses, a doctor and a couple of nurses from the hospital, teachers from the kindergarten and school, and two dozen kids of varying ages, from toddlers to teens.

The room itself was the grandest mine canteen in the whole of the Soviet Union. One entire wall was covered with a mosaic depicting an Arctic scene with snow-covered mountains and polar bears. Yuri never understood why they had decided to put it there. Wasn’t the whole idea to keep the cold on the outside? If anyone wished to be reminded of an Arctic vista, they need look no further than the nearest window. The Kremlin had its own reasons for pumping millions of rubles into this place. It was their little patch of the west, and it was designed to give any foreign visitor a glamorous – and entirely false – impression of what daily life was like behind the iron curtain. Whoever heard of a mine with chandeliers in its workers’ canteen? And a plush cinema. And a heated swimming pool. And a Yuri Gagarin sports centre. And a library with sixty thousand books. All for miners!

When word got out about the relative luxury that was on offer here, Pyramiden was inundated with eager transfer requests from every mine from Siberia to Chechnya. There were downsides of course. The isolation. The bitter cold. The three winter months of 24-hour darkness. And the same faces to look at every day for two years. All of these were positives for Yuri. Especially the two-year contracts the others were on. It meant he could begin a relationship with a woman, usually a waitress or one of the clerical staff, knowing that she would be leaving in a maximum of twenty-four months. If a romance wasn’t working out, no problem. Why bother going through the hassle of a break-up, when her departure boat was already booked? And the same fjord that had brought her would take her away again, with no tears shed. He had an aversion to hurting, because it made him feel guilty, and to being hurt.

Right now he was single, but on the lookout.

Across the room, he spotted that young foreigner again. English. Some sort of a space student he had heard. Catherine. Pyramiden being so small, everyone already knew something about her, or thought they did. For Yuri, foreign equalled exotic; however, she was not his type. She was too young, obviously. Just over half his age. But that wasn’t it. When he looked at her there was no spark.

One of the more surprising things he found about getting older was the range of possibilities it opened up. When he was twenty, he was attracted to a narrow age group. But now, in middle age, he found himself drawn to all sorts of women from twenty to fifty. Thirty years of choice.

At another table, he noticed Anya. One of the school teachers. Late forties. Straight, dark hair to her shoulders. Delicate chin. Brown eyes. Beautiful. She had been here a few months already and Yuri had his eye on her. If he had to pick from the bunch, she’d be the one, though she hadn’t shown even the slightest interest in him so far. To date, the sum total of their conversations numbered zero. She had given him a monosyllabic greeting on three occasions. But he wasn’t disheartened, yet. Winter here was long.

After dinner, he made his way down through the main square, past Lenin’s bust as it gazed sternly across the fjord. His apartment block was for the single men, and was nicknamed London. The block for families was aptly called the Crazy House. The one for single women was called Paris, perhaps because everyone dreamed of going there, one day. That’s where Anya was, and Catherine now too. Yuri would never get to visit the real Paris. Foreign travel was not for a worker at his level. But he knew the Arctic Paris well.

Inside his modest apartment, he finally got to wash and put on some clean clothes. In common with other residents, he had decorated his quarters with whatever could be recycled. Strings of coloured beads made from plastic wiring, pictures cut from magazines and framed. None of the apartments had kitchens, since they all ate together in the canteen, and food was free. They did have fridges, metal boxes attached to the outside of the windows. No electricity required. Yuri reached into his and pulled out a half-full bottle of vodka. He poured himself a glass, drank it down in one gulp and then lay on his narrow single bed, fully clothed. He set his alarm clock for two in the morning, and closed his eyes.

An image of his brother intruded into his head, from when he was six and Yuri was eight. Both of them with shaven heads after their mother had found lice. His brother looked up at him, confident of his protection and guidance, as they played war with the other kids in the neighbourhood. That was before their innocent world collapsed, and they had to play the game for real.

He was in a deep sleep when the beeping roused him. He got up, put on his warmest coat and hat and walked silently down the unlit corridor.

There was no one about as he stepped outside, in minus twenty degrees. Everyone else had more sense. They were all tucked up in their warm beds, apart from the execs with their unresolved problem.