Field of Mars

by Stephen Miller

  And by the end of the month, sitting before the mirror, listening to Larissa and Gloriana warming up in the hallway, observing herself in the reflection, she knew she was never going to sell it again. All that was gone now. She had turned a corner in her life on to an entirely new boulevard.

  Her face was powdered white like a Japanese mask. She’d even smoothed her eyebrows with soap and covered them with greasepaint so that she looked like a marble bust of herself. Her terrible hair had been chopped off in angled bangs, which was just fine, she’d hated it anyway. Now, no one would recognize her. In only one week, she’d transformed completely and forever. She was a new human, an adventure unwrit. An innocent girl in a mirror.

  And then the Professor poked his head around the door and said it was time to go on.

  She moved through the performance playing the part of a kind of Aztec war god crossed with an Oriental nightmare. Her costume was painted with garish colours and bizarre geometric polka dots. It wasn’t real dancing, of course. All she had to do was gesture and turn and watch the fabric move about her in the lights. There was a chorus of voices that chanted between the ringing bells:

  ‘Omicron … Epsilon … Pi … Sigma …’

  With each crash Vera would tremble and react to a different invisible point in space. It was easy enough, and she had been told to ‘put her energy into it’, so she did. After her ‘dance’ she was summoned by one of the Goddesses of the Seven Winds. Her ornate feathered head-dress was taken from her and a mathematical symbol was branded across her forehead—an 8 laid over on its side. Finally, when the last of the Aztec gods was destroyed by a hurricane of ribbons, there was applause, and for a moment Vera was disoriented—sweating through the make-up, all out of breath—a little lost before she came back into her new self. Applause! She bowed, smiling, with the mark of infinity across her brow.

  Afterwards there was food, and she found herself crowding to the table and stuffing herself with cakes and caviar. A man came and stood beside her, saying something over the din about how much he had enjoyed her performance. She nodded and kept on eating, and a few minutes later he was there again, the only well-dressed patron in the room, holding out a rhumki he had bought for her.

  ‘Thank you!’ she shouted and then tossed the drink back quickly, and headed away from him before he could get started on selling himself.

  In the corner Dmitri Khulchaev was shouting at the man from New Art, a young writer with bright blond curls he’d waxed down in ringlets all around his forehead in a style that he must have thought was attractive. The atmosphere in the club was intense, as if the performance had just been a fuse for the party to come afterwards.

  She was alive now after the drinks. Thrilled by the performance, but relieved that it was over, she floated through the crowd, smiling at all the audience who’d stayed behind, embracing all her new friends. She had no old ones, not any more. She saw the Professor across the room, drunk and laughing himself into a coughing fit, and on impulse she went over and kissed him.

  ‘You!’ he nearly coughed in her face. ‘You are very … very … You!’ And then quickly she kissed him again and laughed, bouncing away before she gave him a heart attack.

  Khulchaev caught her by the arm, pressed himself right up against her, held a bottle of champagne to her lips and made her drink until she nearly choked. And then he was kissing her—a quick hard insertion of his tongue—and gone almost as quickly. And she stood there, reeling in the smoky room.

  At some point she realized that she was drunk, really drunk. Too drunk, and she developed a plan, a very detailed plan to make her way to the back door and into the alley and vomit somewhere where no one could see her. It was a good plan, and she began to put it into motion. Putting one foot in front of another and heading for the back.

  Then she found herself on her hands and knees in the alley, coughing and wiping her face on her sleeve, slipping as she struggled to her feet, bracing herself against the masonry wall while she caught her breath. There was a hissing sound as Tika, the cat, ran beneath her feet and she looked wildly around and nearly fell into the wet mud.

  It was cool out in the alley and the air was refreshing, penetrating her bones, and driving the poison out. She would never drink again, never, never, never she told herself, and she tried to feel her way along towards the door.

  She didn’t see the man at first, and then she stopped, because she thought he was urinating and she’d surprised him, but he held the door for her and she recognized him as the same man as before. The one who’d bought her the drink, the one with the sad eyes.

  The torrent of noise crashed out of the doorway, the roar of artists arguing and debating minutiae that no one would ever understand. There was a screamed announcement about the next performance, some wild idea Khulchaev had cooked up—a mock trial of all the oppressors; for the enslavement of artists and smothering of new ideas, for the strangulation of imagination and the censorship of newspapers, the necrophilia of history, the vampirism of peasant culture … A trial against the Crime of Blindness. With each item in the indictment they were screaming, laughing, cheering.

  The man with the sad eyes was still holding the door open for her, why? Waiting for her to make up her mind? Pretending to be a gentleman? She let her eyes slide over to him. His face seemed to float lazily in front of her. She tried to focus.

  ‘I saw you before,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Oh? That’s right …’ Like all the rest, she thought. Did he expect her to thank him for the cheap drink that had started the whole thing off? She leaned against the frame of the doorway and tried to make her feet work.

  ‘No, I’ve seen you, before tonight, I mean …’ His voice had a tone of urgency; soon he’d be whining about his wife not understanding him. Maybe he had been a customer back in her old life, someone who’d paid his money and fallen in love. Another fool. Trying to get away she managed to take one step into the corridor. Inside they were all singing now, one of the songs in the show …

  So what! It doesn’t matter,

  So what! I just don’t care, So what …

  On and on, people stamping the time on the floor.

  She wanted to go back and find Dmitri, maybe he’d be nice for a change, maybe he was tired of laughing at her. They were all waiting to see who she was going to start sleeping with. They’d even applauded when he kissed her and left her spinning around there on the dance floor. So, maybe it looked like it was going to be Dmitri. So what … So, maybe that was how he said ‘I love you’, by insulting her all the time.

  The man was explaining that he had never really seen anything like the theatre they’d produced this evening, it was different, he said. Unusual. He needed to talk to her, to have a conversation. Now was not the time, but perhaps in the morning?

  She laughed, spun around in the alley looking for escape. But the only other person in the alley was him— smiling his droopy smile, helping her back down the corridor where she could rejoin the party, if that’s what she wanted? Or perhaps she would enjoy some coffee right now?

  … the consequence, the consequence,

  … the consequence of No–thing!

  Oh, yes, join the party. And she let herself sing with the others the last phrases of the Professor’s anthem, raising her fist into the air at the end for the three cheers. She threw her head back with the last triumphant chorus, and found herself looking up, following the upraised arms and staring up at the patterns pressed into the metal ceiling …

  And all of a sudden it was as if she, Vera Aliyeva, was the only person that could see, really see. It had come to her all in a haze, dreamily, but truly she could see the future, see it all speeded up, see Izov’s old building crumbling, the Komet beginning to collapse all around them. She saw it in sudden images as if she were running through a gallery of hideous paintings—the collapse of the world spreading out, like a ripple in a still lake, wider, wider, wider.

  Perhaps the vision was the result of a curse. Perhaps
they had mocked the ancient Aztec gods during tonight’s performance, and in revenge been issued an apocalyptic challenge. Perhaps a great wave was about to smash down upon them and drive them into oblivion; the Komet, her, Dmitri, the whole city, everything … Everything.

  Oh, how far she’d come in this, the find chapter of her life on Earth! She stood in the corridor hanging on to the sad man’s arm as the world disintegrated around them.

  She woke late in the morning, the thunder of carriages rumbling along the embankment nudging her out of sleep. She was in a soft, wide bed … the heavy coverings. Ah, yes … She remembered.

  She wrenched herself upright and swung herself to the edge of the mattress for a moment, got up and shuffled out of the bedroom—everything heavily furnished in an oriental motif, with Persian rugs hung from the walls, a lot of plants that needed watering. Yes … yes … what was his name?

  His place was on the second floor and the parquet was warm from the heat of the flats below. Everything was dusty, she could feel the little pieces of dirt under her feet. Everything needed to be cleaned. The apartment looked like it needed a good shaking out.

  She discovered him in the kitchen. There was a little balcony there and he was dressed, sitting in the doorway smoking and reading a copy of Gazette.

  ‘If you want tea, it’s on the stove,’ he said without looking up.

  ‘Yes, good,’ she said, making her voice flat. She groped for the glasses and poured herself a tall glass of tea as quietly as she could.

  ‘When you’re dressed and awake I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Um … I have a real katzenjammer …’ She put her hand up to her forehead.

  ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ he said and turned a page of the paper. She took the tea and walked back out into his front rooms without answering.

  She didn’t think he’d touched her during the night. Maybe he was too drunk, maybe he was scared, maybe he wanted to make love to someone who was awake. She found his writing desk and, tucked under a stack of mail, the solitary portrait of the woman. The wife, he’d admitted. Gone, he’d told her. So he was married, then. From the envelopes tucked into his blotter she learned his name—Ryzhkov. Yes, she remembered now. Pyotr, spelled the old way. She went to the lavatory and sat on the cold seat and shivered while she had a morning pee. Inspected herself in his mirror. No. He hadn’t touched her.

  She went back out to his sitting-room, and stood in the sunny window, rested her head against the glass and stared out at the misty Obvodni Canal below her. To the south were the working-class neighbourhoods—long identical rows of wooden houses. In the distance to the west was the cluster of smokestacks from the Putilov works. She could see the shining threads of the rails at the Tsarskoye Selo Station.

  She could get enough money to leave, she thought. She could go away. Maybe the sad man would lend her the money. Italy, she thought. Somewhere warm. Somewhere where there were flowers in March instead of chunks of ice floating down the river. She could dance there in Rome, or act, or become a governess, teach Russian. Or she’d meet someone who made her laugh, someone who was a real gentleman.

  ‘All right, why don’t you sit down and talk to me for a while.’ She whirled at the sound of his voice. He came in and took a pad and pencil off the desk, moved to the sofa and waited for her.

  ‘Let’s start with the basics. Your name?’

  ‘What are you, police?’

  ‘Kind of a policeman. I wanted to talk to you about the girl that fell out the window that night.’

  She looked at him for a long moment while she went cold inside. ‘Aliyeva, Vera Evgeniya,’ she said angrily. ‘I don’t want to talk about any of that, there’s nothing to talk about anyway.’

  ‘Look, you’re going to talk to me one way or the other, let’s be clear about that from the start, eh? Now, what did you see?’

  ‘No, I’m not. Go to hell—’ she started to walk out, but he grabbed her wrist and spun her back into the kitchen. She hit her elbow on the counter and it hurt.

  ‘Calm down. Do what I tell you or I’ll telephone my friends and they’ll pull your yellow card and you’ll be waiting in jail until they throw you on a riverboat back to wherever you came from, understand?’ He was standing there, close. Blocking her off in the corner of the kitchen. ‘I can do whatever I want with you,’ he said; his voice was low, almost a whisper. ‘For now you’re mine and you’re going to cooperate and give me an answer for everything I ask. The quicker you get that through your head, the easier we’ll get along. Now … tell me about how she died.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about that …’

  ‘You were screaming in the street about it.’

  ‘I hate you people.’ She had started to cry now, all of it his fault, and she flung the glass at him—it glanced off his elbow and spun across the floor.

  ‘I heard you. You were screaming about murder,’ he said. ‘What did you see? Did you see anyone you recognized? Did you know Rasputin was there? Did you see him?’

  ‘No … no.’ She almost laughed.

  ‘Were you acquainted with the girl?’ he said quietly.

  ‘I had met her before. There are always girls around … Katya was one of them.’ She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes.

  ‘Do you know who did it?’ He was looking at her fixedly. He wasn’t going to stop with his questions. It was as if she had run into a wall, an immovable, logical wall that was too high to climb, to wide to go around. He kept staring, a serious priest demanding a confession. She didn’t have to tell him everything. Just enough to get rid of him. Give him something to make him happy, then he’d leave her alone. Like all men.

  ‘There were two of them,’ she said finally in a voice like a bedtime story. ‘A little one—shorter, younger, and with a pointed nose like a mouse, and the old one … the one who did it.’

  ‘Good, Vera. Go and get some more tea if you want,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want your tea, I want to leave.’

  ‘Tell me what happened. If I like the sound of it, maybe you can go.’

  ‘I don’t know anything. I suppose it was some kind of party, some kind of special party. It was a celebration of something, an anniversary? Some kind of party in the old man’s honour. Both of them were wearing funny little hats. They had a room all to themselves for a while. We weren’t allowed to watch that part. No girls allowed, I guess they were shy.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Maybe a dozen at a big party at the beginning. Then they came and went, I don’t know. Then we were supposed to come in and entertain them. Some of them weren’t so bad. Some of them were nice. They’re afraid at first. They want to talk to you, some of them. Sometimes one of them might think they’ve fallen in love with you.’ She turned her face from the window, let her gaze fall on Ryzhkov for a long moment. Was he a fool, too? No reason to think otherwise. Being a policeman didn’t give him some special immunity. She’d never met a man who wasn’t a fool one way or another.

  ‘Then what?’ He held out a cigarette for her. A reward? After a moment she gave in and took it.

  ‘After they’d all gone off to the other rooms then it was time for us to go with the short one and his guest of honour.’

  ‘The old one?’

  She nodded. ‘They had wanted a show, so Larissa and I were doing our act and in the middle of it they brought Katya in. You could see the old one perk right up then. A little while later they took her with them.’ She suddenly shifted in the seat, rocked forwards. ‘I don’t know his name or why he was so important, who he was …’

  ‘Just tell me what happened. Now you were in another room?’

  ‘There’s a hallway, and I heard the screaming when Larissa and I were going to the men in the next room. We had been drinking, of course. Champagne, champagne and more champagne … And I could hear this argument. Two men yelling at each other at the end of the hall, and Larissa stopped and looked at me and I thought, that … maybe if I went in there, maybe I could
say that I just made a mistake. I don’t know, I was thinking that maybe just having some other girl, an older girl come in there would be a way of making him stop but …’

  Vera was staring at the nothingness in front of her. He let her gather herself, take her time.

  ‘The first thing … The first thing I saw was the short one, he was carrying her in his arms. The old man was screaming at him, promising that he would do anything. He was on his knees, this angry old man. So old, so fat, with his white whiskers, and little thin white legs that could hardly hold him up. They must have given him something, a powder or an injection, something to make him strong. He was enraged, like a bull. Red, sweating, talking nonsense. The small man was laughing at him. When he saw us he told us to leave, and ran into a different room. Then … some others from the party came into the hallway and tried to get us to leave, and that was when I heard the glass breaking.’

  ‘All right, Vera.’

  ‘You can tell, sometimes. The ones like that, they’re different. If you look close, you can see it. I should have seen it.’ She gave a sudden bitter laugh. ‘They were treating him like a fucking god. He was someone’s special friend. And she was so little, and he wanted to … It makes it better supposedly, everybody always wants to make it better.’

  ‘Who else did you see?’

  She shook her head. ‘No one. The others came and took the old man away, kicked us out.’

  ‘Could you recognize these men? I need to get names for all of them. Will you help me?’ He half-expected her to break down again, but she didn’t. She just fell silent for a long minute, the cigarette burned down so much now that he reached out and pried it from her fingers. ‘The police are saying it was suicide, did you know?’ he said. ‘They say she wanted to fly.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any bullshit. You really think she killed herself because she was a whore? She’d been doing what she did for years! She didn’t suddenly realize she was in a degrading, disgusting profession, and just because she was wallowing in sin that she had to end it all.’