A stick of two-thousand-pound bombs splashed across Levrovskaya Square: three crashed through the roof of the Hotel Sviatopolk and erupted inside, two more hit in the square itself. Shockwaves swept through the Teagarden, smashing rubble and fragments of traffic and restaurants and people through the citizens taking tea. The blast buckled the heavy bronze doors of the Bank of Foreign Commerce and shattered the plate windows of Rosenfeld’s, blowing a hurricane of tiny glittering blades through customers and staff. Lacerating the polished mahogany panels and counters.
A five-thousand-pound barrel of explosive demolished the Ter-Uspenskovo Bridge. The river erupted, drenching the Square of the Piteous Angel and leaving the riverbed temporarily naked. The shock waves rocked the Lodka: glass and stone from its high roof-dome crashed down on the readers in the hall of the Central Registry and the great wheel of the Gaukh Engine canted six inches sideways, its motors seized up and screeching.
Incendiary clusters set the roofs of the Laughing Cockerel Theatre and the Dreksler-Kino burning.
Vanko’s Uniform Factory was a crater of rubble and dust.
Mirgorod, city burning.
Fire-flakes licked at blistering paint and smouldering furniture and blew from house to house and street to street on gusting breezes of fire. Fire-clusters spread and merged and sucked in streams of air. Roads became channels for fire-feeding streams of air, hurricane inflows that reached the burning centre and columned up, high swaying pillars of uproarious flame. The walls of high buildings burning within toppled forward and came crashing down in billowing skirts of dust and flying brick and glass.
Rusalkas screamed and giants stumbled in the streets with burning hair. People saw other people hurt and die. Hurt and died themselves.
The warehouses and shipyards of the Ring Wharf burned. The timber yards and oil storage tanks and coal mountains burned. The bales and barrels and pallets in the lading sheds burned. The fires of the Ring Wharf roared like storms of wind and merged into one great fire, half a mile across: one bright shivering dome of burning under a thin canopy of smoke. The smoke-shell glowed from within as if it was itself on fire. Wavering curtains of orange-red flame opened and closed across the blinding heart of outrageous glare. Firefighters, walled off from the central blaze by bastions of heat, scrabbled at the outer edges of the Ring Wharf fire. They sucked water from the canals and harbour basins and pumped it in feeble arcs of spray that turned to steam on the air. If they got too close, their clothes and hair caught fire.
Josef Kantor, his own room gone, stands among the firefighters at the Ring Wharf, warming himself in the glow of the dockyards burning. Sweat greases his face. His skin is smeared with soot-smuts. He watches the thick column of oil-black smoke rising mile-high into the sky. A signal fire to the future. Heat and shadow flicker across his face, and the voice of Archangel whispers in his ear. Archangel has learned to whisper now.
40
Walking in silence, weighted with a heavy, sick emptiness, Lom and Maroussia saw almost no one as they made their way back from the Ship Bastion to Elena Cornelius’s house after the bombing raid on the city. The raion had closed its shops and shut its doors and gone indoors. Belated air-raid warning sirens wailed in the distance. In the sky anti-aircraft shells were bursting, too high and too few and too late. The attackers had drifted away. Blue and yellow-brown smoke-streaks smudged the sky. Smuts drifted down and settled on the snow. The smell clung to their clothes: the faint, sickening smell of the city frying.
Elena met them in the hallway. The girls were with her.
‘There’s to be an announcement on the radio,’ she said. ‘We’re going up to the Count’s room to listen. Come with us.’
The Count opened the door. He had a newspaper in his hand.
‘Ah, Elena!’ He waved the paper at her. ‘These are terrible times. Fohn is to speak at four. And did you hear? Dukhonin is dead. He was killed. An attack on his home. Terrorists. Assassins. We are blamed of course. We are behind it, apparently. This is very bad. But Vissarion Yppolitovich is with you! Marvellous. Come in, my friend. Come in.’ He noticed Maroussia standing behind them. ‘Ah, and you, you are Elena’s friend and Vissarion’s friend, and now our friend also.’ He started towards her, holding out his hand.
‘This is Maroussia, Sandu,’ said Elena. ‘Maroussia Shaumian.’
The Count stopped mid-stride.
‘Shaumian? There is a Shaumian in my house? And nobody told me?’ He took Maroussia’s hand in both of his, his eyes devouring her face. ‘Elena! How could you not tell me?’
Maroussia was looking at him in alarm.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t—’
The Count turned and shouted over his shoulder into the apartment, ‘Ilinca! Ilinca! Say you do not believe this! A Shaumian is here! Feiga-Ita’s daughter is come to our house!’ He turned back to Maroussia. Took her by the hand like a child. ‘Come in. Come in. Enter.’ His face was pink with pleasure and excitement.
Count Palffy ushered them all through into the Morning Room. That was what he called it, though no doubt it was the afternoon and evening room as well. French windows with white louvred shutters gave a fine view over the snow-loaded lilacs in the garden, and there was a handle to crank down the awnings for summer afternoons in the sun. There were bears’ heads and antlers on the walls and animal skins on the floor, no longer glossy, abraded by moth. The fine chairs and sofas still retained a few strands of their original fabric.
Ilinca came in with a tray of tea in glasses. A jug of lemonade for the girls. Ilinca was small and dumpy. She swished and shuffled noisily across the parquet in a tight skirt of funereal bombazine that reached the floor. She had forgotten to change out of her green house slippers, but her hair was pinned up and she wore a small, defiant turquoise brooch pinned on her chest. Let enemies come, it said. We are aristocrats of proud and ancient family. We have survived and will survive again.
A radio was set up on a table in the middle of the room. A fine old Piagin Silvertone in a highly polished wooden case. The tuning dial was illuminated. An orchestra was playing the ‘Hero March’ from Ariadna Triumphs, the volume turned low.
Palffy made the introductions.
‘You see, Ilinca!’ he said. ‘Of course she is a Shaumian. Of course. No doubt of it. She has the look. She is Feiga-Ita come back to us, and here in my house! And I might never have known. Oh Elena! I might have missed her.’
‘Did you know my mother?’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m sorry. She never talked about her friends in the raion. We never came here.’
‘Know her?’ said the Count. ‘Of course we knew her!’
‘Many years ago,’ said Ilinca. ‘She would have been the age you are now, perhaps, or younger. Then she married that hothead Kantor boy, and when he was sent to Vig she went with him. She came back of course, but not here, not back among her friends here in the raion.’
‘A disaster!’ said the Count. ‘A catastrophe for Lezarye. We should not have left her so. We should have gone to her. We should have reached out. Insisted. I am ashamed. For myself and for all of us, I am ashamed.’
‘And then…’ said Ilinca. ‘We heard she was killed.’
‘Yes,’ said Maroussia. ‘She was.’
‘I am so sorry,’ said Ilinca. ‘So sorry.’
‘But this is a gift,’ said the Count. ‘Your coming here now, it is a sign. The times darken, but opportunity comes.’
Maroussia frowned. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t—’
‘Sandu!’ said Ilinca. ‘Leave the poor girl alone. Come and sit with me, Maroussia. Let’s have tea. It is almost time for the broadcast.’
‘But Vissarion Yppolitovich must have coffee!’ said the Count. ‘I promised him some of my coffee!’
‘Tea’s fine,’ said Lom.
‘Coffee,’ said the Count. ‘I will have some also. Ilinca, stay here. Talk to our guests.’ He hustled out to fetch it.
Lom left Maroussia and Elena with the Countess Ilinca a
nd wandered across to the window. Columns of thick black smoke on the skyline. A sudden dizzy unreality obscured his view of the raion. Could it really be that the war had come to Mirgorod? For a decade, for most of his adult life, war had been distant. Elsewhere. The Vlast at war was a permanent condition, the symptoms of which were glimpses of veterans and conscripts on the streets and accounts in newspapers of campaigns and salients across a geography that existed only on maps. War was background noise: you knew it was there, but only if you listened for it. Most of the time, unnoticed, it affected the taste and tone of things. Somewhere beneath consciousness it grew like a slow tumour and stained the world, an unease, a discomfort, but ignorable, and you carried on from day to day as if it was not there. Until, suddenly, between moment and moment, like a fist in the face, like a train crash in the night, bombs fell out of the sky. Buildings fell and burned. Everything changed.
Lom turned away from the window. Not wanting to join the murmuring conversation around the tea things, he prowled the room restlessly. It was a museum. There was a Kurzweiler baby grand piano in the corner. Its lid was down and crowded with framed photographs of officers in shakos and pelisses, guests at balls and shooting parties, a boy who might have been the young Count Palffy in a carriage. On the sideboard there was a rack of smoking-pipes on display and a collection of silver cigarette cases, all engraved with coats of arms and monograms. Lom drifted across to the bookcase. It was filled with directories, almanacs, bound volumes of the poets of the Silver Age. He picked one out. The pages were drilled through by insects.
But the coffee when it came was everything Count Palffy said it would be. Hot and bitter and strong, in a fine blue china mug. And sugar, dark brown and sticky in a matching lidded bowl. The mug was identical to one he’d seen Raku Vishnik drink from in his apartment. Before he was dead. It seemed a lifetime ago: another world, where Raku Vishnik was not dead and war had not come.
Time in Mirgorod, Lom realised, would for ever now be counted by the coming of war. Ah, that was before the war, people in the city would say, and, Since the war… If there was an after the war. That was a new thought, possible only now. Nothing endured for ever. Not even Mirgorod. Not even the Vlast. Past and future were dissolving out of the city, leaving only a raw and shocking perpetual now. Ever since he had come to Mirgorod, Lom had felt the presence of other possibilities, other futures, drifting in the alleys: hints and glimpses, scraps of mist and half-heard voices. But now, he felt, all that was suddenly burned away, bleached out in a shocking sunburst glare. Everything was old and everything was new. It was vertiginous and horrifying. It was–he realised with a start of surprise–exciting. It was a promise. The vicious promise of war. The clock and the calendar reset to zero. Everything begins again, thought Lom. Everything starts here.
The Count offered him a cigarette.
‘No,’ said Lom. ‘No thanks.’
‘Well, I will smoke,’ said the Count. ‘Permit me.’ He took Lom by the elbow and steered him across the room. ‘Let us men stand over here with our coffee and our talk, and I will smoke. Ilinca disapproves, you see.’ He lit a cigarette and inhaled it deeply, with satisfaction.
Count Palffy talked and Lom let him. Beneath the surface politesse, Palffy was agitated. Over-animated. Rambling. He talked without direction of neighbours in the raion and other people he had known in other places long ago. Balls and duels and amours. He pointed to photographs on the walls.
‘Ah. Yes. Now that is Amah. The Graefin Blegvad. Eight thousand acres in the Konopy Hills. Her great-grandfather was ambassador to the Feuilleton Court of Oaks. Did you know, the wolf’s head in their crest was awarded for some hunting exploit or other with the Bazharev Ride? She married a Tsyprian. He was the Archduke’s second when he duelled with the Mameluke and he was wounded himself, in the leg. An idiot, of course, but he had the most comfortable kastely in all of the south Hertzbergen. Part of the Detlevsk oblast now, more’s the pity. A military college. Such a waste.’
Count Palffy talked on. His world had gone fifty, a hundred years ago, but the Count was in it still, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the city around them was burning and war had come. Lom, only half-listening, found they had somehow moved on to lepidoptery.
‘I’m something of a collector,’ the Count was saying. He led Lom over to examine display cases mounted on the walls. Moths and butterflies and beetles, some drab, some gaudy, some as large as Lom’s palm, others so small you could hardly see them. All labelled in a clear and careful hand. ‘My specialism is winter moths. Ice moths. Strategies for surviving the deep winter cold. It’s a fascinating area. You know about this, perhaps?’
‘I’ve never thought about it. I assumed they laid their eggs and then they died.’
‘That is the common strategy, Vissarion Yppolitovich, of course. But there are some–like this one, you see, this shoddy-looking fellow here, this Faded Birchmoth–now, he survives the winter by allowing himself to become frozen solid. But only externally. He prepares himself for the temperature drop by excreting all the water in his body. His internal fluids become extremely concentrated. They resist freezing inside. You see the brilliance of this? Dead on the outside, alive within. He endures! He can survive temperatures as low as minus forty. More. And for months at a time. His wings blacken and drop off, of course. But he grows fresh wings in the spring.’
‘We’re not talking only about moths here, are we?’ said Lom.
The Count looked at him sharply.
‘Of course not, man.’
‘Sandu!’ Ilinca called from the other side of the room. ‘The radio. It’s starting.’
The clock on the mantelpiece showed seven minutes past four. It was growing darker outside, though the curtains were not yet drawn. Early winter twilight. Palffy went across to turn the volume knob higher.
‘Citizens of Mirgorod! Prepare yourselves for an important announcement!’
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Now we have it.’
‘Citizens,’ Fohn’s unfamiliar voice began. ‘Comrades. Friends. The Great Patriotic War has come to our city.’ He started to speak of fronts and salients. Unexpected advances. The fall of southern cities. The sinking of ships. He spoke hesitantly. He sounded out of breath, baffled and hurt. Lom struggled to follow what he was saying. And then, suddenly and it seemed too soon, he was finishing. ‘This afternoon I have given our commanders new orders. The enemy’s air force is to be smashed. Their armies annihilated. We will defend our beloved city. General Rizhin will lead the counter-attack. Our cause is good. We are ratified by the angels. The enemy will be defeated all along the line and victory will be ours.’
The orchestra started up again with a crash of brass and drums. The Count snorted in disgust and switched the radio off.
‘Well!’ he said. ‘So there we have it! There we have nothing at all! Who is this General Rizhin. We have heard nothing of him till now. And what kind of a name is Rizhin? These idiots will do nothing. They will let the country burn and the raion with it. The time has come for action. Maroussia, we must talk. We look to you. You must step forward.’
‘Me? Why? What are you talking about?’
‘Because you’re a Shaumian. You’re the Shaumian, now. The Vlast is crumbling and the Council of Lezarye is nowhere. And if the Council fails, then what is left but Shaumian? The name alone will be enough.’
‘What does my name matter? I have no idea what you mean.’
‘But of course you do. You must. You are Shaumian of the House of Genissei. Protosebasta. Porphyrogenita. You have a claim, a reasonable claim, there is no doubt about it. It goes by the female descent.’
Maroussia stared at him, pale and silent. She opened her mouth to speak but found nothing to say.
‘Sandu? said Elena Cornelius. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘We must do something,’ said the Count. ‘And now–’ he looked at Maroussia ‘–now we have an opportunity. We must take it.’
‘Do what, Sandu?’ said Ele
na. ‘What, exactly? What are you thinking of?’
‘Resist! The raion must rise! There has never been a better time. The Novozhd is dead, and there is no obvious successor. The enemy is at the gates. Don’t you see? People of courage are ready to act, and now is the time. The aristocrats will come forward again, united under the ancient Shaumian name. We are not all dead. The people remember us. They haven’t forgotten. We can make peace with the Archipelago. The Vlast itself will melt away and dissolve like mist in the heat of the sun.’
‘No!’ said Maroussia. ‘I know nothing about my family, this name, and I want nothing to do with whatever you’re talking about. Nothing at all.’
Lom saw that her hands were trembling slightly. He went across and stood beside her.
‘Of course things must be handled carefully,’ the Count was saying. ‘There are men who will know what to do. Men of courage. I will call them together. You must meet them.’
‘This is madness,’ said Lom. ‘Worse, it’s lethal madness.’
The Count flushed.
‘Certainly it is not madness. She has a legitimate claim. I know of no other.’
‘Sandu,’ said Elena. ‘Please stop this. This is the kind of talk that gets young men ruining their lives. Making bombs. Killing innocent people.’
Maroussia stood up.
‘I have to go now,’ she said.
‘But you’ll come back?’ said the Count. ‘Come up this evening. Dine with us. You also, Vissarion Yppolitovich. I will invite some people. You will feel differently if you meet them. Hear what they have to say. When you know their quality—’
Truth and Fear Page 16