Earth

  Ox-Tales EARTH

  Original stories from remarkable writers

  Ox-Tales are published in support of

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by GreenProfile, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd, 3A Exmouth House, Pine Street, London EC1R 0JH

  COPYRIGHTS

  Earth © Vikram Seth 2009; The Jester of Astapovo © Rose Tremain; 2009; The Nettle Pit © Jonathan Coe 2009; Boys in Cars © Marti Leimbach 2009; Lucky We Live Now © Kate Atkinson 2009; Fieldwork © John Rebus Ltd 2009; The Importance of Warm Feet © Marina Lewycka 2009; Long Ago Yesterday © Hanif Kureishi 2004; Telescope © Jonathan Buckley 2009; The Death of Marat © Nicholas Shakespeare 2009; Afterword: Earth © Oxfam 2009.

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, CR0 4TD Typeset in Iowan to a design by Sue Lamble

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978 1 84668 258 2

  Ox-Tales: Earth

  OX-TALES: EARTH is one of four original collections, featuring stories by leading British- and Irish-based writers. Each of the writers has contributed their story for free in order to raise money and awareness for Oxfam. The FOUR ELEMENTS provide a loose framework for the stories and highlight key areas of Oxfam’s work: water projects (WATER), aid for conflict areas (FIRE), agricultural development (EARTH), and action on climate change (AIR). An afterword, at the end of each book, explains how Oxfam makes a difference. And in buying this book, you’ll be a part of that process, too.

  Compiling these books, we asked authors for new stories; or, from novelists who don’t do short stories, work in progress from their next book. The response was thirty-eight original pieces of fiction, which are spread across the four books and framed by a cycle of element poems by Vikram Seth. We think they’re extraordinary, but be your own judge. And if you like what you read here, please buy all four OX-TALES books – and help Oxfam work towards an end to poverty worldwide.

  Mark Ellingham (Profile) & Peter Florence (Hay Festival) Editors, OX-TALES

  Acknowledgments

  The Ox-Tales books were developed at Profile Books by Mark Ellingham in association with Peter Florence and Hay Festival. Thanks from us both to the authors who contributed stories – and time – to creating these four collections in support of Oxfam. And thanks, too, to their publishers and agents who, without exception, offered generous support to this project.

  At Oxfam, Tom Childs has guided the project alongside Suzy Smith, Charlie Hayes, Annie Lewis, Fee Gilfeather, Annemarie Papatheofilou and Matt Kurton.

  At Profile, Peter Dyer, Penny Daniel, Niamh Murray, Duncan Clark, Claire Beaumont, Simon Shelmerdine, Ruth Killick, Rebecca Gray, Kate Griffin and Andrew Franklin have been instrumental. Thanks also to Nikky Twyman and Caroline Pretty for proofreading, and to Jonathan Gray for his cover illustrations.

  Contents

  Earth Vikram Seth

  The Jester of Astapovo Rose Tremain

  The Nettle Pit Jonathan Coe

  Boys in Cars Marti Leimbach

  Lucky We Live Now Kate Atkinson

  Fieldwork Ian Rankin

  The Importance of Warm Feet Marina Lewycka

  Long Ago Yesterday Hanif Kureishi

  Telescope Jonathan Buckley

  The Death of Marat Nicholas Shakespeare

  Afterword Oxfam

  VIKRAM SETH (born Calcutta, India, 1952) is the author of the novels The Golden Gate (1986), A Suitable Boy (1993) and An Equal Music (1999), and of books of poetry, travel, fable and memoir.

  ‘Earth’ is part of a sequence of poems, Seven Elements, incorporating the elements in the European, Indian and Chinese traditions (earth, air, fire, water, wood, metal and space). Set to music by the composer Alec Roth, Seven Elements will be performed in summer 2009 at the Salisbury, Chelsea and Lichfield festivals.

  Earth

  Here in this pot lies soil,

  In which all things take birth.

  The blind roots curve and coil

  White in the sunless earth.

  The soil slips over fire.

  The great lands crack apart

  And lava, pulsing higher,

  Springs from earth’s molten heart.

  Here in this jar lies clay,

  Dried clay, a whitened dust.

  The moistened fingers play

  To make it what they must.

  The earth begins to reel,

  Round, round, and near and far,

  And on the potter’s wheel

  Is born another jar.

  Here in this urn lies ash,

  Dust uninfused with breath:

  Burnt wood, burnt bone, burnt flesh,

  The powdered clay of death.

  The embers from the pyre

  Sink on the rivered earth

  And moistened into mire

  Wait for a further birth.

  Vikram Seth

  The Jester of Astapovo

  ROSE TREMAIN (born London, 1943) lives in London and Norfolk, with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have won many prizes: Restoration (1989) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a film and a stage play; Sacred Country (1992) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Fémina Etranger; Music and Silence (1999) won the Whitbread Novel Award; and The Road Home (2007), her most recent book, won the Orange Prize for Fiction.

  A FEW WEEKS BEFORE the main events of this story disturbed forever the life of its protagonist, Ivan Andreyevich Ozolin, he had believed himself to be in love with an older woman, Tanya Trepova.

  The year was 1910. Ivan Andreyevich Ozolin was the stationmaster of Astapovo, an insignificant little stop some 120 miles south-east of Moscow, on the Smolensk–Dankovo section of the Ural railroad line. He was forty-six and had been married to his wife, Anna Borisovna Ozolina, for twenty years. Tanya Trepova was a widow of fifty-three with excellent deportment, but whose pale face wore an expression of perpetual and affecting melancholy. It had been this melancholy of hers that Ivan Ozolin had longed to alleviate. On one of his days off (which were few) he arranged to go on a bicycling trip to the forest with Tanya Trepova, pretending to Anna Borisovna that he was going mushroom picking.

  Ivan Ozolin and Tanya Trepova sat down on the mossy earth, where there were indeed a few pale mushrooms nestling among the tree roots. Ivan wanted to lean over and kiss Tanya, but he felt that to touch with his lips features still set in such a sorrowful arrangement was tantamount to an insult. So what he decided to do was to lean back on his elbows and cross one leg over the other and point out to his would-be mistress the ridiculous appearance of his white cycling socks.

  ‘Look at these!’ he said with a guffaw. ‘And look at the little bit of my leg showing between the top of the sock and the bottom of my trousers. How can we take anything seriously – anything in the world – when we catch sight of things like this? Life’s a joke, don’t you think so, Tanya? Every single thing in life is a joke – except love.’

  A smile did now appear on Tanya Trepova’s face. It remained there long enough for Ivan to get up
the courage to say: ‘I’d like to make you happy. I’m serious about that. My wife thinks I’m a fool who jokes about everything, but to jest is better than to despair, don’t you think?’

  The September sun, coming and going between clouds, flickering through the trees, now suddenly laid on Tanya Trepova’s pale skin a steady and warming light. But as soon as this light arrived there, her smile vanished and she said: ‘Sometimes despair is unavoidable.’

  Then she got to her feet and brushed down her skirt and said: ‘I shouldn’t have come to the forest with you, Ivan Andreyevich. I can’t think what I was doing. I only agreed because I was flattered by the kind attention you’ve shown me since my husband died, and because I enjoy cycling. But please let’s go back now.’

  Ivan was a courteous man. Despite his strong feelings for Tanya Trepova, he wasn’t the type to take advantage of any woman – even here, in the eternal silence of the woods.

  So he got up obediently, tugging down his trouser leg over his rucked white sock, and he and Tanya Trepova walked to where their bicycles were parked and then rode back to Astapovo, side by side, talking only of inconsequential things.

  When Ivan Ozolin got home to his red-painted stationmaster’s cottage, Anna Borisovna asked: ‘Where are the mushrooms, then?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ivan, swearing silently at his forgetfulness, ‘I couldn’t find any. I searched and searched. I didn’t find a single one.’

  Anna Borisovna stared accusingly at her husband. After twenty years of childless living with him, he wearied her. Was this just another of his stupid jokes?

  ‘It’s September and the sun’s out after the long rains we’ve endured and there are no mushrooms in the forest?’

  ‘No. Or perhaps there were mushrooms, but other people gathered them before I got there.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.

  In October, winter began to close in on Astapovo, as it did at this time each year.

  Ivan Ozolin supervised the cleaning and oiling of the ancient snowplough kept in a dilapidated shed on a siding on the Smolensk side of the tracks. He chopped wood for the pot-bellied stoves that heated his own cottage, the two waiting rooms (ladies’ and gentlemen’s) and the station buffet on the Dankovo side. His mind, as he went about these familiar tasks, was preoccupied by his failed attempt to have a love affair with Tanya Trepova. Most men that he knew had love affairs and even boasted about them. But he, Ivan Ozolin, hadn’t been able to manage even this! It was laughable. Ivan Ozolin thought, My life’s at a standstill. Trains come and go, come and go past my door day and night, but I live without moving at a way-station where nothing stops for long or endures – except the monotony of all that’s already here.

  The idea that this state of affairs would just go on and on and nothing important would ever happen to him ever again began to terrify him. One evening, he deliberately got drunk with his old friend Dmitri Panin, who worked in the one-man telegraph office at Astapovo station, and began to pour out his heart to him.

  ‘Dmitri,’ he said. ‘How on earth are we meant to escape from the meaninglessness of life? Tell me your method.’

  ‘My method?’ said Dmitri. ‘What method? I’m just a telegraph operator. I send out other people’s messages and get messages back …’

  ‘So, you’re in touch with the wider world.’

  ‘I may be in touch with the wider world, but I don’t have any message of my own. Life has not … Life has not … equipped me with one.’

  ‘Equipped you? Have another drink, my friend. I think we’re both talking drivel, but it seems to me there are four ways and only four ways of escaping it.’

  ‘Escaping what?’

  ‘Meaninglessness. The first is ignorance. I mean the ignorance of youth, when you haven’t seen it yet.’

  ‘Seen what?’

  ‘Death waiting for you. Inevitably waiting. You know?’

  Dmitri said that he knew perfectly well and that meanwhile he’d order them another bottle of vodka and a piece of special Smolenski sausage to keep them from falling under the table. Then he asked Ivan Ozolin to hurry through the other ‘three ways of escape’ because he had a feeling that they were going to bore him or depress him, or both.

  Ivan gulped more vodka. He tried to explain to Dmitri Panin that, in his view, human beings were just merely ‘randomly united lumps of matter’. Some people, such as his wife, Anna Borisovna, refuted this and believed that human life had been created by God. ‘She thinks’, said Ivan Ozolin, ‘that, contrary to all evidence, God is benign … but me, I can’t go along—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Dmitri. ‘We know all that twaddle and counter-twaddle. Come on, Ivan, let’s change the subject. Let’s talk about Tanya Trepova, for instance.’

  Ivan Ozolin scratched his head, balding on the crown, growing sensitive to winter cold.

  He didn’t really want to talk about Tanya Trepova, even to Dmitri. He began cutting up the hunk of Smolenski sausage into manageable pieces.

  ‘That was a farce,’ he said.

  ‘A farce?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t even kiss her.’ And then he let out one of his famous guffaws of laughter.

  Dmitri began to cram his face with sausage. ‘I can’t see what’s so funny about that,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘If it had been me, I would have kissed her, at least.’

  On the afternoon of 31st October, a cold day marked by an icy wind and flurries of snow, a southbound train from Tula arrived at Astapovo station. Ivan Ozolin, wearing his stationmaster’s uniform, was standing alone on the platform, holding his flags, waiting to see if anybody was going to disembark before waving his green flag to send the train onwards towards Dankovo. He saw the door of one of the second-class carriages open and a young woman stepped down and came towards him.

  She was plump, with a wide, homely face, and wore a peasant scarf over her brown hair.

  ‘Stationmaster!’ she called. ‘We need your help. Please. You must help us …’

  Ivan Ozolin hurried towards her. Her voice, he noticed at once, was not the voice of a peasant.

  ‘What can I do?’ said Ivan.

  ‘My father is on the train. We were trying to get to Dankovo, but he’s been taken ill, very ill. A doctor is with us. The doctor says we must get off here and find a bed for my father. Or he could die. Please can you help us?’

  Ivan Ozolin now saw that the young woman was trembling violently, whether with cold or agitation, or both, and he knew that at all costs he would have to do whatever he could to help her and her sick father; it was his duty as a stationmaster and as a human being.

  He followed her to the open door of the second-class carriage. Steam billowed all around them in the freezing air. He climbed aboard the train and was led along the crowded carriage to one of the hard leather benches where an elderly man was lying, covered by a thin blanket. By his side knelt the doctor, wearing a black coat. From all the other benches passengers were staring and whispering.

  ‘Dushan,’ the young woman said to the doctor. ‘Here’s the stationmaster. Between the two of you, you can carry Papa to the waiting room and then this good man is going to find us a bed for him, aren’t you, sir?’

  ‘A bed? Yes, of course …’

  ‘There’s an inn here, I suppose? What’s this place called?’

  ‘Astapovo.’

  ‘Astapovo. I’ve never heard of it, have you, Dushan? But everywhere has some little inn or hotel. Hasn’t it?’

  Her agitation was growing all the time. He saw that she could hardly bear to look down at her father, so greatly did the sight of him lying there in his blanket upset her. Very calmly, Ivan Ozolin said: ‘There is no inn in Astapovo. But the fact that there is no inn in Astapovo doesn’t mean that there are no beds. We can arrange a bed for your father in my cottage … just over there on the Smolensk side of the track … that red house you can glimpse …’

  ‘Dushan,’ said the young woman, now breaking down into tears, ‘he says there’s no
inn. What are we going to do?’

  The doctor stood up. He put a comforting arm round the young woman’s shoulders and held out his other hand to Ivan Ozolin. ‘I am Doctor Dushan Makovitsky,’ he said. ‘Please tell me your name, stationmaster.’

  Ivan Ozolin took Makovitsky’s hand and shook it. He bowed. ‘I am Ivan Andreyevich Ozolin, doctor,’ he said.

  ‘Very well,’ said Makovitsky. ‘Now let me explain the situation. My patient here is Count Tolstoy: Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the world-famous writer. He was attempting to get as far as Novocherkassk, to stay with his sister, but he has been taken ill. I’m desperately afraid he may have pneumonia. Will you help us to save his life?’

  Leo Tolstoy …

  Ivan Ozolin felt his mouth drop foolishly open. He looked down at the old man, who was clutching in his frail hands a small embroidered cushion, much as a child clutches to itself a beloved toy. For a moment, he found himself unable to speak, but could only repeat to himself: Leo Tolstoy has come to Astapovo … Then he managed to pull himself together sufficiently to say: ‘I’ll do everything I can, doctor. Everything in my power. Luckily the waiting rooms are on this side of the track, so we haven’t got far to carry him.’

  Dushan Makovitsky bent down and gently lifted Tolstoy’s shoulders. The old man’s eyes opened suddenly and he began murmuring the words: ‘Escape … I have to escape …’

  His daughter stroked his head. ‘We’re moving you, Papa,’ she said. ‘We’re going to find you a warm bed.’

  Ivan Ozolin took hold of the writer’s legs, noting that underneath the blanket, he was wearing peasant clothes: a tunic tied at the waist, moleskin trousers tucked into worn boots. When the two men lifted him up, Ivan was surprised at how light his body felt. He was a tall man, but with very little flesh on his bones.

  They carried him gently from the train and out into the snow. Feeling the snowflakes touch his face, Leo Tolstoy said: ‘Ah, it comes round me now. The cold of the earth …’