by Claire North
“The world is ending,” I said as we stood together on the viewing gallery, watching our apparatus being pulled away.
“What’s that, old thing?” he murmured, distracted by the disappointment and the need to put on a brave face.
“The world is ending. The seas boil, the skies fall, and it’s getting faster. The course of linear temporality is changing, and it’s us. We did this.”
“Harry,” he tutted, “don’t be so melodramatic.”
“This is the message that has been passed down from child to dying old man down the generations. The future is changing and not for the better. We did this.”
“The Cronus Club was always stodgy.”
“Vincent, what if it’s us?”
He looked at me sideways, and I realised he had heard me after all, over the sound of the machinery, over the sound of a machine which would one day beget a machine which would beget a machine which would beget the knowledge of God, the answer to all our questions, the understanding of the universe as a whole.
And he said, “So?”
Four days later, once it was evident from the growing number of results coming in from the fusion experiment that we had failed, but were still, in accordance with the 99.3 per cent probability of the same, alive, I requested a holiday.
“Of course,” he said. “I entirely understand.”
I was given a lift in an army car to Pietrok-111; from Pietrok-111 a different car took me to Ploskye Prydy, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t left Vincent’s lab for ten years. Time had not been kind to the landscape: what few trees there had been had been removed, leaving ugly stumps in the earth beyond which great walls of concrete proclaimed that here the people laboured for bread or here they toiled for steel or here there was no sign at all except a warning against any and all trespassers and that anyone coming within sight of the walls after 8 p.m. would be shot. Only one train a day left Ploskye Prydy, and the town was not renowned for its food and board. My driver took me to his mother’s house. She fed me plates of steaming beans and preserved fish and told all the secrets of the village, of which she seemed both the greatest source and, I suspected, the prime originator. I slept beneath an icon of St Sebastian, who had died shot through with arrows and who Catholic iconography tended to depict dying in his underpants but who here wore cloth of gold.
The train back to Leningrad was silent, none of the garrulous youngsters I had ridden with on my first journey to the north. A man was transporting several boxes of chickens. Four hours into the journey and the uneven tracks–more so than I remembered–sent one flying, and its prisoner, white-feathered and red-eyed, spent nine glorious minutes in freedom, hurtling up and down the carriage, before a militia man with scaling skin and a suggestion of melanoma about the jaw, reached out with a single gloved hand and caught the bird by the throat. I saw its neck stretch, and the creature seemed as grateful as an animal with a brain the size of a walnut can be to be restored to its master and its cage.
I was not officially met when I finally crawled off the train in Leningrad, the sky already black and rain tapping against the old slanted roof, but two men in wide-collared coats followed me as I left the station in search of a place to spend the night, and stayed outside the boarding house in the shadow of the street as the cobbles danced with rushing water. During the few days I spent in the city I came to know my watchers well, a six-man team in total, who I mentally dubbed Boris One, Boris Two, Skinny, Fat, Breathless and Dave. Dave earned his name by his uncanny physical resemblance to David Ayton, an Irish laboratory engineer who’d once destroyed my coat with a mug of sulphuric acid, only to beg a new one from the store, sew on my name overnight, and even attempt to smear a precise replica of the coffee stains and chemical erosions into the back and sleeves which had made my coat so distinctly mine. Sympathy for the effort involved far outweighed my ire, and now Soviet Dave earned my respect as well by his good-natured attitude to my shadowing. The others, especially Boris One and Boris Two, who mirrored each other in clothes, bearing and technique, attempted to conduct entirely covert surveillance of a most distracting kind. Dave afforded me the respect of being fairly overt in his observation, smiling at me across the street as I passed in acknowledgment of his own discovery and the futile nature of his role. In another time, I felt, I would have enjoyed Soviet Dave’s company, and wondered just what stories lurked behind his polite veneer, to have made him a security man.
For a few days I simply played tourist, as much as anyone could in the city at the time. In one of the few cafés to grudgingly merit the name, where the chef’s speciality was variations on the theme of cauliflower, I was surprised to encounter a team of sixth-form schoolboys from the United Kingdom watched over by the ubiquitous Soviet minders.
“We’re here on a cultural exchange,” explained one, prodding his bowl of cauliflower special dubiously. “So far we’ve been beaten at football, hockey, swimming and track athletics. Tomorrow we’re going for a sailing trip, which I think means we’re going to be beaten at rowing.”
“Are you a sports team?” I enquired, eyeing up the portly bearing of some of the boy’s companions.
“No!” he exclaimed. “We’re language students. I signed on because I thought they’d let us see the Winter Palace. Although yesterday evening Howard beat one of their boys at chess, which caused quite the stir. He’s been asked not to show us up like that again.”
I wished them luck, earning a wry smile and a polite wiggle of fork in acknowledgment.
That night a hooker was waiting by the door of my room. She said her name was Sophia and she’d already been paid. She was a secret fan of Bulgakov and Jane Austen, and asked, as I was reputed to be such an educated man, if I wouldn’t mind talking German, as she was still struggling to get the accent right. I wondered if this was Soviet Dave’s idea, or Vincent’s. I saw no obvious signs of physical abuse or disease, and tipped her generously for good company’s sake.
“What do you do?” she asked me as the headlights from a passing car defined the arc of a sundial across the ceiling, blooming, travelling and gone.
“I’m a scientist.”
“What kind of scientist?”
“Theoretical,” I replied.
“What kind of theories?”
“Everything.”
She found this briefly funny, then was embarrassed to find something funny which I could not. “When I was young,” I explained, “I looked to God to find answers. When God didn’t have anything, I looked for answers in people, but all they said was, ‘Relax, go with it.’ ”
“ ‘Go with it’?” She queried my American idiom, pronounced in German, using her native Russian.
“Don’t fight against inevitability,” I translated loosely. “Life is until it is not, so why get fussed? Don’t hurt anyone, try not to give your dinner guests food poisoning, be clean in word and deed–what else is there? Just be a decent person in a decent world.”
“Everyone’s a decent person,” she replied softly, “in their own eyes.”
She was warm against me, and my fatigue gave my words a slow certainty, a weight that, during more alert hours, I usually shied from as being too weighty for polite conversation. “People don’t have the answer,” I concluded softly. “People… just want to be left alone and not bothered. But I am bothered. We ask ourselves ‘Why me?’ and ‘What’s the point?’ and sooner or later people turn round and say ‘It’s a coincidence’ and ‘My purpose is the woman I love’ or ‘My purpose is my children’ or ‘To see this idea through,’ but for me and my kind… there is none of that. There must be consequences to our deeds. But I can’t see it. And I have to know. Whatever the cost.”
Sophia was silent a while, thinking it through. Then, “Go with it.” She said the unfamiliar words carefully, and, grinning, tried them again. “Go with it. You talk about decent people living decent lives as if that doesn’t mean anything, like it’s not a big deal. But you listen–this ‘decent’, it is the only thing that
matters. I don’t care if you theorise, Mr Scientist, a machine that makes all men kind and all women beautiful if, while making your machine, you don’t stop to help the old mother cross the street, you know? I don’t care if you cure ageing, or stop starvation or end nuclear wars, if you forget this–” she rapped her knuckles against my forehead “–or this–” pressed her palm against my chest “–because even then if you save everyone else, you’ll be dead inside. Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you’re not helping people, just servicing the machine.”
“That’s not a very communist viewpoint,” I breathed softly.
“No, it is the most communist view. Communism needs good people, people whose souls are–” she pushed harder against my chest, then sighed, pulled away entirely “–kind by instinct, not by effort. But that is what we most lack, in this time. For progress, we have eaten our souls up, and nothing matters any more.”
She left shortly after midnight. I didn’t ask for where or whom. I waited with the light out in my room for the dead hour of the night when the mind shifts into a numb, timeless daze of voiceless thought. It is the hour when all things are lonely, every pedestrian walking flat-footed over blackened stones, every car swishing through deserted streets. It is the utter silence when the engine stops in a flat, ice-drifting sea. I pulled on my coat and slipped out into it through the back door, circumventing Boris One and Breathless as I headed into the night. The secret to being unafraid of the darkness is to challenge the darkness to fear you, to raise your eyes sharp to those few souls who stagger by, daring them to believe that you are not, in fact, more frightening than they are. Easy, in this place, to remember Richard Lisle and the streets of Battersea, dead girls by the door. Leningrad had been built as Russia’s European city by a tsar who’d travelled the world and decided to take some of it home with him. Had Brezhnev travelled the world? The question surprised me, as something I did not know the answer to.
A corner. The streets in Leningrad are largely flat and sharp, a smell in the summer of algae on the sluggish canals, a madness in the city from the white nights; in winter euphoria at the first clean snows, then dullness as the freeze truly sets in. I walked by memory, turning a few times more than was strictly required to check on the presence of any would-be followers, until at last I came to the small wooden door of the Cronus Club.
Or, more accurately, the place where the small wooden door of the Cronus Club had been. So shocked was I to discover that the door was no longer there that for a brief moment I almost doubted my own infallible memory. But no, observing the street and my surroundings, this was the place, this was the porch, this the square patch of land where the Club had once stood and where now, built with tasteless 1950s brutality, a concrete plinth squatted instead, showing on its top a curious curve of stone crossed with an iron bar, and whose caption, chiselled into the stone, proclaimed:
IN MEMORY OF THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, 1941–1945
Nothing more remained.
Members of the Cronus Club leave signals for each other in order to find companionship in adversity. Entries in Who’s Who, messages left behind the counter of a nearby pub, stones laid in earth for future generations to gather and speculate on, hints as to a place to go inscribed in the black ironwork of the drainpipes hanging from rooftops. We are hidden, but the simple fact of our existence is so patently absurd that we do not need to hide much deeper than in plain sight. Over the next three days I lived a harmless tourist life around the city, walking, looking, eating and spending my evenings reading in my room, at night slipping out past my warders to seek out the clues of the Cronus Club, any sign as to its fate. I found only one: a tombstone in the local cemetery for OLGA PRUBOVNA, BORN 1893, DIED 1953; SHE SHALL RISE AGAIN.
Beneath this tombstone was a much longer inscription in, of all things, Sanskrit. Translated, it read,
IF THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN AFFIXED TO MY TOMBSTONE, IT IS BECAUSE MY DEATH WAS VIOLENT AND UNEXPECTED. BE MINDFUL THE SAME DOES NOT HAPPEN TO YOU.
Chapter 52
A dilemma.
To stay or to go?
What was I to make of the destruction of the Leningrad Cronus Club?
No degree of naïve optimism could dissuade me of the likely notion that Vincent was, somehow, behind this event.
No degree of self-deception could convince me that, in some way, I too was to blame–by my silence, by my vanishing to join the very cause I had set out to defeat.
And what now that I had learned of this truth–this old truth, years old, which had happened behind my back? Did it change anything? Did it change the essential wonder of our research, the breathtaking scope of Vincent’s vision? Was it not true that the project we were embarking on, the question we pursued, was bigger than any mere blip in the present, any tiny alterations to the future? It was absurd–patently absurd–to let such things influence my decisions, and yet, even as I firmly rationalised this fact, I knew quite plainly that my decisions were affected, and I would not be the same when I returned.
Return I did.
Fleeing Russia would have been problematic, and I had every confidence that, as it had been all those years ago, the simplest escape would be death. Why alert anyone to my contemplating this by attempting a crude physical escape? Escape from what? To what purpose? There were questions I needed answered, and if they were to end in my demise, it would be a death of my choosing, once I had as full a picture as I could find. Planning and questions, they were my food for the journey back to Pietrok-112.
“Harry!” He was waiting for me as I stepped through the goods door, blushing with enthusiasm. “Good holiday, well rested, yes? Excellent! I really need your brains on this one. It’s going to be beautiful when we solve it, simply beautiful!”
Vincent Rankis, did he ever sleep? “God for a pocket calculator,” he added, sweeping me down the halls. “Do you think it would be a waste of time developing a pocket calculator? I suspect that the time saved in having one to hand would vastly exceed the time wasted in bringing the technologies up to necessary scratch, but one never can tell with these productivity calculations, can one? How many decades do we have until they invent the management consultant? How many decades after that, I wonder, until they abolish it?”
“Vincent—”
“No, no time to take off your coat. I absolutely insist, we’re at a critical moment.”
“Afterwards,” I interjected firmly, “we need to talk.”
Strange how the approach of “afterwards” can weigh on a mind. I knew every number in front of me and every outcome of the equation on the board yet could barely concentrate or say a word. The others joked that my holiday had made me soft, that my mind was addled with pretty girls and too much drink. I nodded and smiled, and after a while, seeing just how distracted I was, they stopped joking and just got on with their work without me.
Afterwards should have been dinner, but Vincent, bursting with energy, was far too preoccupied.
Then it was the evening and he was wondering if we should try working through the night.
By the time I’d convinced him this was a poor idea, we’d already begun, and it wasn’t until two in the morning that I grabbed him by the sleeve, dragged him away from the blackboard and exclaimed, “Vincent!”
It was a rare breach of protocol to use his English name in front of others. His eyes flashed quickly round the room to see if anyone had noticed, but if they had, they ignored it. “Yes,” he murmured distantly, attention flowing back to me in little parts. “We were going to talk, weren’t we? Come into my office.”
Vincent’s office was his bedroom, and his bedroom was a cell like any other, small, windowless, humming with the sound of pipes and vents passing overhead. A small round table, a little too low to comfortably get your knees under, and two wooden chairs were the only furniture besides the wall-set single bed. He gestured me to a chair and, as I sat, pulled out a bottle of malt whisky and two shot glasses from beneath the bed, a
nd laid them on the table.
“I had it imported through Finland,” he said, “for special occasions. Your health.” He toasted me, and I chinked glasses back, barely letting the drink wet my lips before setting it back down on the tabletop.
“I apologise for my insistence in there,” I began at once, for it’s always easier with Vincent just to get on with things. “But, as I said, we need to talk.”
“Harry,” he sounded almost concerned as he settled down opposite me, “are you all right? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so urgent.”
I pushed the glass a little further into the centre of the table and attempted to arrange my thoughts in some sort of order. My desire to speak to Vincent had somewhat undermined the focused list of matters I needed to discuss; now I struggled to reassemble the cold plan of my train ride beneath the furnace of the moment.
Finally, “You destroyed the Leningrad Cronus Club.”
He hesitated, looked briefly surprised, then turned his face away. It was an oddly animal movement, eyes focusing down into the depths of his whisky as he considered the accusation. “Yes,” he said at last. “I did. I’m sorry, Harry. I’m somewhat playing catch-up–the reports from your watchers indicated you went nowhere near the property.” A sudden flash of a smile. “I suppose I should expect that they would be reluctant to admit to their own incompetence in keeping you away, however. Did you like Sophia, by the by?”
“She seemed perfectly pleasant.”
“I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but sometimes, I feel, a man just needs to unwind. Yes, I destroyed the Leningrad Cronus Club. Was there anything else you wished to say?”
“Are you going to inform me that it was for my sake? To prevent my colleagues tracking me down, to hide the betrayal?”
“Of course it was, and don’t you feel that ‘betrayal’ is rather a pejorative term? The Cronus Club are interested only in the endlessly repetitive present; you and I are working for much, much more. You believe that as much as I, yes?” He topped up my whisky glass as he talked, even though I’d hardly drunk a drop, and sipped his. If his hope was that I would follow his example, he was disappointed. “Surely this doesn’t trouble you? It was merely to cloud the trail. And if you insist on using ‘betrayal’, I must remind you, purely in the interest of academic precision, that I was never of the Cronus Club. You are. The betrayal that you refer to was entirely yours, your choice, made freely and in full conscience. If you had any doubt about what we are doing here, and how wrong the Club is in its policy, you could have blown your brains out ten years ago. You could have blown them out today.”