‘Tell me, Peter,’ he asked, in a voice that was both sarcastic and ingratiating, ‘do you think me a monster?’
‘I don’t care.’ Solinsky was keen only to get away.
‘Well, let me put it this way. Do you think of me as an ordinary man, or as a monster?’
‘Neither.’ The Prosecutor General gave a sharp nasal sigh. ‘I suppose I think of you as just a gangster.’
Petkanov laughed unexpectedly at this. ‘That is not answering my question. Peter, let me give you a riddle, to replace the one your father gave you. Either I am a monster or I am not. Yes? If I am not, then I must be someone like you, or someone you might be capable of becoming. Which do you want me to be? It is up to you to decide.’
When Solinsky declined to answer, the former President pressed on, almost tauntingly. ‘No, you are not interested? Then let me continue. If I am a monster, I will come back to haunt your dreams, I will be your nightmare. If I am like you, I will come back to haunt your living days. Which do you prefer? Eh?’
Now Petkanov was tugging on his hand, pulling him closer so that Solinsky could smell hard-boiled egg on his breath. ‘You cannot get rid of me. This farce of a trial makes no difference. Killing me would make no difference. Lying about me, saying I was only hated and feared, not loved, that will make no difference. You can’t get rid of me. Do you see?’
The Prosecutor General wrenched his hand from his captor’s grasp. He felt stained, contaminated, sexually corrupted, irradiated to the bone marrow. ‘To hell with you,’ he shouted, turning violently away. He found himself face to face with the young militiaman, who was following the exchange with a new democratic curiosity. Something made the prosecutor nod politely, and the soldier clicked his heels in response. Then he shouted again, ‘To hell with you. Curse you.’
As he was reaching for the doorknob he heard a dry scuttle behind him. He was startled by the terror he felt. A hand gripped his upper arm and made him turn. The former President was now glaring up at him, and pulling, pulling to bring their faces closer. Suddenly, the prosecutor lost strength, and their eyes were furiously on the same level.
‘No,’ said Stoyo Petkanov. ‘You are wrong. I curse you. I sentence you.’ The unvanquished stare, the whiff of hard-boiled egg, the old fingers clamped bruisingly around the upper arm. ‘I sentence you.’
Since the Changes, people had started coming back to the Church; not just for baptism and burial, but for worship, for unspecific consolation, for the knowledge that they were more than bees in a hive. Peter Solinsky had expected a crush of head-scarved babas, but he saw only men and women, young and old and middle-aged: people like himself. He stood awkwardly in the narthex of St Sophia, feeling like an impostor, wondering what to do, whether to genuflect. When no-one challenged his credentials, he began to walk slowly up the narrow side aisle. He had left behind the dull forty watts of a March afternoon; now his eyes adjusted to a brightness that depended upon surrounding darkness. Candles blazed at him, the polished brass was fiery, and small high windows focused the sun into thin hard rays.
The sturdy wrought-iron candle-stand, with its bristling spikes and soft curlicues, was a theatre of light. Candles were lit at two levels: at shoulder height for the living, ankle height for the dead. Peter Solinsky bought two beeswax tapers and touched them into flame. He knelt, and pressed the first one into the flat tray of sand on the church floor. Then he rose, extended his arm, and forced the base of the second candle, the one burning for his country, down on to a black iron spike. The assembled flames were hot on his face. He retreated stiffly, like a wreath-laying general, and stood to attention. Then his fingertip discovered his forehead, and unprotestingly he continued the sempiternal gesture, crossing himself, from right to left, in the Orthodox fashion.
Evening and rain fell softly together. On a low hill to the north of the city stood a concrete pedestal, sullen and aimless. The bronze panels round its sides gleamed dully in the damp. Without Alyosha to lead them into the future, the machine-gunners now found themselves fighting a different battle: irrelevant, local, silent.
On the piece of waste ground beside the marshalling yard, rain gave a gentle sweat to Lenin and Stalin, to Brezhnev, to the First Leader, and to Stoyo Petkanov. Spring was coming, and the first tendrils would soon try once again to take a hold on the skiddy bronze of military boots. In the dark, locomotives lurched on wet points and dragged at overhead cables, flashing brief light on to sculpted faces. But argument had ceased in this posthumous Politburo; the stiff giants had fallen silent.
In front of the vacant Mausoleum of the First Leader an old woman stood alone. She wore a woollen scarf wrapped round a woollen hat, and both were soaked. In outstretched fists she held a small framed print of V.I. Lenin. Rain bubbled the image, but his indelible face pursued each passer-by. Occasionally, a committed drunk or some chattering thrush of a student would shout across at the old woman, at the thin light veering off the wet glass. But whatever the words, she stood her ground, and she remained silent.
The Porcupine Page 13