‘Can you dig?’
‘What?’
‘Can you dig? Can you use a pick and a spade?’
‘I make furniture. Cupboards. Wardrobes.’
‘When the Archipelago tanks arrive, should we put them away in a cupboard?’
‘No. But surely—’
‘There is a requirement for more workers on the inner defence line. People who can dig. Can you dig frozen soil with your fingers on a quarter-pound of black bread a day?’
‘If that is what the city requires of me then I will try, citizen. I will do my best.’
The woman filled in some details on a pink card, stamped it with an official stamp and gave it to her.
‘Report at six o’clock tomorrow morning.’
Aunt Lyudmila had already gone to bed when Elena Cornelius got back to the apartment, and the girls were asleep together on the floor, curled up under an eiderdown on cushions from the couch. Elena found a packet of tea in the cupboard, boiled a kettle on the paraffin stove and made herself a pot. The label on the tea packet had a drawing of ladies in high lacy collars with a samovar on a tablecloth, and underneath was written in curly script:
What follows after taking tea?
The resurrection of the dead.
It was an old saying, some kind of joke or pun. It was traditional. Elena had always wondered what it meant.
She sat in a wicker chair in the window, the curtains drawn back, a blanket wrapped round her shoulders. It was too cold to sleep. The moons bathed the city in a bone-white glare, monochrome and alien. Mirgorod looked like the capital of some other planet. Silent searchlight beams swept the skyline and flashed across the soft silver hulls of barrage balloons. A remembered phrase from childhood came into her mind and would not leave. The beneficence of angels.
At midnight the Archipelago bombers came. Tiny bright anti-aircraft shells crackled and flowered briefly in the dark. Searchlights slashed at the raiders but didn’t hold what they caught. Within an hour huge fires were burning on the horizon. Elena watched flames lick high into the air: arches and caverns, sheets and waterfalls of flame. Whirling flame tornadoes. Hurricanes of fire. It was all happening several miles away. She imagined she could feel the heat of the fires against her face, though she could not.
59
Lom had never driven anything like a ZorKi Zavod limousine before. He liked it. Eight cylinders, automatic transmission, the flat empty road at night. He pressed his foot down and watched the needle climb smoothly to fifty. The car must have weighed a couple of tons, but the engine scarcely rose above a quiet purr. The bonnet stretched ahead of him like the boiler of a locomotive, pennant flickering. All he had to do was keep his foot on the throttle and his hand on the wheel and follow the patch of lamplit road that skimmed ahead of him, always just beyond arrival. Except for the interior of the car, smelling of leather and polish, and the splash of lamplight on the road, there was nothing anywhere but blackness under a vast black sky. Forward motion without visible result. He kept the window open an inch to let the wind touch his face. When small snowflakes began to speckle the windscreen he found the switch for the wipers and set them sweeping back and forth: a quiet click at the end of each cycle, clearing twin arcs in the sparse accumulating snow.
Lom put his hand to his forehead and felt for the lozenge-shaped wound socket. It was just the right size to accommodate the tip of his forefinger. He touched the smooth newness of young skin covering the uneven rim of cut skullbone, soft-edged and painless. It was a blind third eye, pulsing faintly with the restful rhythms of his beating heart, a life sign, part of him now, absorbed, healed, no longer conspicuous. A mark of freedom. A badge of honour. A legacy of ancient hurt. When he took his finger away he could feel the coolness of the wind pressing against the place with gentle insistence. A nudge of conscience. A memory just beyond the frontier of recollection.
Hours passed. The road stretched on ahead, drifting slightly to right and left. The ZorKi swept along at a steady fifty miles an hour. Villages rose ahead and fell behind. Mostly they were too small for names: just clusters of buildings glimpsed and gone, straggling settlements barely registering against the emptiness. No lights showed: they might as well have been deserted. The needle on the fuel gauge had been creeping round to the left all night, and now it was ominously close to empty. Lom pulled up and got out to relieve himself. Legs and back stiff from the long drive, he walked self-consciously a few yards off the road to a scrubby stand of brush at the foot of a telegraph pole. When he got back to the car, Florian was awake, easing himself upright and rubbing his face
‘Where are we?’ he said.
‘We came through Zharovsk a while back,’ said Lom. He looked at his watch. It was coming up towards three in the morning. ‘We’re running short of fuel.’
‘There’s more in the back.’
Florian went round to the boot of the car, opened it and dragged out a couple of jerrycans. He found a funnel and began to fill the tank. When he’d done, he stowed the empty cans. Then he brought out a suitcase and changed his uniform for a neat and sober suit, produced his astrakhan hat and chucked the officer’s cap on the back seat.
‘I’ll drive from here,’ he said.
An hour or so later Florian slowed the car at a crossroads and turned off the highway onto a rough track between trees. There was no sign: nothing to mark the turning. The woods closed in around them and the ZorKi was suddenly bouncing and slithering through soft rutted mud. Florian handled the car effortlessly.
Eventually, the track emerged abruptly onto the edge of a lake and turned left to follow it. The road, if you could call it that, was almost too narrow for the car. On the driver’s side trees pressed in close and overhanging branches clattered and scraped against the windows. To the right the crazily jolting headlamps showed glimpses of a narrow strip of muddy shore: scraps of low mist and the carbon glitter of black water.
They swung round the end of a narrow headland and climbed a slight rise. As they crested the rise, a low wooden building appeared in front of them. It looked halfway between a cabin and a barn. There was a jetty, and a small seaplane moored on the water.
Florian pulled the car in close to the edge of a low stone wharf and killed the engine. On Lom’s side there was a three-foot drop to the water. He could hear the quiet lapping of water against stone, the wind in the trees, the breathy wheezing of disturbed waterfowl.
‘Wait here,’ said Florian. He left the door open and walked towards the building, taking care to stay clearly visible in the glare of the head-lamps. ‘Lyuba!’ he called into the darkness. ‘Lyuba! It’s Florian!’
A woman’s voice answered from the darkness, ‘You’re late. You said yesterday.’
The voice didn’t come from the building, but from somewhere away to the left under the trees. Lom realised that Florian had been facing that way before she spoke. He’d known where she was, out there in the dark.
‘There was some delay leaving Mirgorod,’ Florian said. ‘But I am here now. Is everything ready?’
‘There’s someone else in the car.’
‘A friend. He’s travelling with me.’
‘You didn’t say anything about passengers.’
‘Is there a problem?’
‘Passengers are extra. The deal didn’t include passengers.’
‘Of course. Can we discuss this inside? We’ve come a long way.’
The woman stepped out into the headlamps’ glare. She was short and solidly built: not fat, but heavy, and wearing a bulky dark knitted sweater, the kind seamen favoured. Thick curly hair spilled out from under a peaked seaman’s cap.
She was carrying a shotgun loosely in the crook of her arm.
Lom got out of the car.
‘This is Vissarion,’ said Florian. ‘Vissarion Lom. Lyuba Gretskaya.’
Gretskaya looked him up and down.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘If you say so.’
Florian took a satchel from the boot of the ZorKi.
‘Anything
of yours in the car?’ he said to Lom.
Lom leaned into the back, picked up his woollen cap and crammed it down on his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’
Florian reached in and released the handbrake, leaned his right shoulder against the car and, with his hand on the steering wheel, turned it slowly to the right and pushed it off the edge of the wharf. When the front wheels went over, the fenders crashed and scraped on the stonework. The headlamps dipped below the surface and spilled murky subaqueous yellow-green light. Florian flicked them off and gave a heave with his shoulder that levered the whole massive car, all two tons of it, up and forward. The limousine plunged off the edge of the wharf into the lake, leaving oily swirls of disturbance.
60
Lyuba Gretskaya lived in a single room that did her as a workshop and a kitchen. It smelled of pine and tobacco and engine oil. There was a single bed along one wall. A metal cot piled with blankets. Maps and charts. Racks of hand tools. A lathe.
‘Breakfast, gentlemen?’
Lom realised he hadn’t eaten for almost twenty-four hours.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Please. That would be great.’
He watched Gretskaya cut thick slices off a piece of bacon and fry them on an oil stove in the corner. Her face, lit by a single lamp hung above the stove, was broad and round and weathered to a dark polished brown, with a small stub of a nose. Her bright small eyes were a pale, pale grey, almost lost in the creases of her face.
‘Is that your own plane?’ he said for something to say.
‘Yup,’ said Gretskaya, not looking round.
‘Where did you learn to fly?’
‘Where did you learn to ask questions?’
Lom caught Florian’s eye. He was trying not to smile.
‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘Sorry. Just making conversation.’
The bacon was nearly done. Gretskaya threw some chunks of black bread into the pan to fry in the bacon fat and made a pot of coffee. They ate in silence, rapidly, and when they’d finished she cleared the plates, spread out a chart out on the yellow deal table and lit a cigarette. Her fingers were stubby and brown and stained with oil.
‘The Kotik will do eight hundred miles on a single tank,’ she said. ‘We cover more ground if the wind’s with us, less if it’s not. Maximum speed is one three five, but for efficient cruising I don’t go much over a hundred. With a safety margin, that gives us, say, five or six hours airtime before we need to refuel.’ She jabbed at the chart with her cigarette, spilling ash. Brushed it away. ‘The first leg is straightforward. North-east to Slensk. Refill at the pier head. From Slensk, we have a choice.’ She sketched out the options on the chart. ‘We can follow the coast to Garshal–see that island there? There’s a whaling station, I’ve used it before–or we follow the river inland’–she traced the course of the Northern Kholomora with her finger–‘and stop at the portage head at Terrimarkh. We’ll decide which course to take when we get to Slensk. It’ll depend on the weather, mainly: maybe we’ll be able to get a forecast at Slensk. Either way, from Garshal or Terrimarkh it’s a five-hundred-mile hop to Novaya Zima. I’ll have you there tomorrow afternoon.’
Florian lifted the satchel onto the table, undid the buckles and pulled out thumbed and grubby bundles of ten-rouble notes.
‘A thousand,’ he said. ‘I think that’s what we agreed.’
‘Plus a passenger.’
‘So? How much?’
Gretskaya glanced at Lom. ‘Has he got travel papers?’
‘No—’ Lom began.
‘Sure,’ said Florian. He threw a passport across the table towards him. ‘Here. Name of Vexhav. Stanil Vexhav, age thirty-three. You’re a former policeman interested in setting up as a timber merchant. But only if anyone asks. Don’t volunteer information about yourself. People with nothing to hide don’t do that.’
Lom picked up the passport and turned the pages. It looked convincing. The green cover was creased and stained with use, and its pages were spattered with the internal visas and crossing marks of a man who’d been travelling the rivers and ports of the north for the last couple of years. His own face looked out at him, the version of two or three years ago, stern and monochrome, eyes hooded with fatigue. Hair flopped across his forehead to obscure the angel seal.
‘You got a photograph of me?’
‘It’s not you. It’s me.’
Lom glanced across at Gretskaya.
‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘He pays. I fly. Another two fifty for the passenger,’ she said to Florian. ‘And you pay to fill the tanks. Also other expenses.’
‘Expenses?’
‘We’ll need to eat. Maybe sleep. Maybe bribe a harbour clerk here and there.’
Florian made a sour face but nodded and counted out the money without protest.
‘When do we start?’ said Lom.
Gretskaya ignored him. She gathered up the roubles, disappeared with them into a back room and came back with an armful of leather jackets, sheepskin gloves, fur hats, scarves.
‘Put these on,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be cold.’
Gretskaya went ahead and turned on the cockpit lamp and the navigation lights. Lom recognised the aircraft: he’d seen one like it moored at the Yannis boatyard in Podchornok. It was a Beriolev Kotik biplane, the clumsy reliable workhorse of the northern lakes. The boat-shaped hull, dented and water-stained, wasn’t much bigger than the ZorKi limousine. Beneath the centre of the upper wing was a single stumpy engine nacelle, its two-bladed wooden propeller facing backwards. The lower wings stuck out from behind the cockpit, a canoe-shaped stabilising float slung beneath each one. The wings looked feeble, like arms raised in surrender or despair, like they’d snap off under the weight of the fuselage. Lom remembered the immense sleek bombers of the Archipelago roaring low across Mirgorod. Machines from a different world.
Florian clambered up into the cockpit and ducked down into the cabin behind.
‘He always travels below deck,’ said Gretskaya. ‘Straps himself in and keeps his eyes screwed shut. You take the co-pilot seat.’
She swarmed neatly up the side of the hull and over the windscreen. Lom followed awkwardly and squeezed himself into the tight space beside her. The cockpit was crude and industrial: lime-green steel with canvas bucket seats. No concessions. In front of the pilot’s seat was a flat black panel of gauges, dials, knobs and switches, and a small three-quarter wheel on a green steel column thick as an arm. Gretskaya taped several layers of red cellophane across the cockpit lamp, dimming the interior to near darkness, made a few adjustments to her instruments, then stood up in her seat so she could reach behind to start the engine. It burst into life with a reek of oil and smoke. The whole airframe began to vibrate.
Gretskaya slid the cockpit canopy forward and closed them in.
‘You flown before?’ she said, pulling on her gloves.
‘No.’
‘Don’t touch anything. If you feel like you’re going to puke, well, don’t.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ said Lom.
Gretskaya opened the throttle and eased the plane away from the jetty, swinging its nose to point across dark open water. Lom looked at his watch. It was half past five. Still three hours to dawn.
The engine bellowed and the machine surged forward, bumped two or three times as it hit the swell, and then… nothing. It took Lom a moment to realise they were airborne. Gretskaya pulled back sharply on the column. Lom’s weight pressed him back into his seat as the Kotik, trembling with the surge of its engines, its airframe creaking alarmingly, climbed steeply into darkness. While they were still pushing upwards at a steep angle, Gretskaya took her hands off the stick and gripped it between her knees. She tested the lamps and added another layer of red cellophane. She saw Lom watching her and grinned.
‘Night vision,’ she said. ‘Don’t want to be dazzled by the interior lights. Don’t worry, there’s nothing up here to crash into.’
Lom grunted and stared out of the side windo
w. The ground below was a broadening, sliding patchwork of barely legible darkness: the foggy glimmer of the lake and the spreading inky absolute blackness of trees, threaded by a dim paler line that must have been the road they came in by. A sudden flash of light outside the starboard window at his shoulder startled him. It was followed by another longer flash, a flicker, and then a trail of intermittent, vaporous brightness was streaming backwards from the wingtip lamp, which until then had been invisible under the wing. The temperature dropped precipitously and the landscape below them disappeared. Lom realised they were flying into cloud. The plane lurched sideways, caught in turbulence. Gretskaya steadied her and kept on climbing. As they reached the upper fringes of the cloud the wingtip lights seemed to flash on and off again, more and more rapidly, and suddenly vanished.
They emerged into clear dark space. Above them, drifts and scarves of stars glittered in blackness. The moons on the horizon illuminated the oceanic cloud below and pinned the tiny aeroplane to it with a bitter mineral glare.
Gretskaya levelled off, balancing the Kotik by gyroscope. Wrapped in the cockpit’s companionable little pocket of blood-red dimness, Lom watched the thin radium line of the artificial horizon rise and settle. The dials on the instrument panel breathed slowly. The engine quietened and the aircraft droned onwards, chasing its own mist-haloed shadow on the cloud below. The sky above the clouds was a beautiful, desolate, endless, frontierless world.
Lom had felt the beautiful ache of immensity before–a silent afternoon in a train crawling across continental moss, a night walk among birch trees in the Dominions of the Vlast. Simplification. Purification. Humbling. The mortification of the self. But never anything like this. Never anything to compare with these dangerous, darkly shining, planetary, abyssal eternities. Up with the moons the angels swam. Words he hadn’t heard since childhood rose up out of the accumulated silt in the bottom of his mind and tugged at him like rusalkas pawing a tiring swimmer. Trying to grab his attention. Trying to pull him under.
Truth and Fear Page 23