by R. N. Morris
‘I judged it a poor piece of work.’
‘You think it fails, as a warning to society?’
‘I think it fails as a novel.’
‘And the author? Do you have any opinions regarding his identity?’
‘I do not see that it is at all material to the case we are investigating.’
‘The novel concerns the activities of a group of would-be revolutionaries, is that not so?’
‘Yes.’
‘It seems likely that Kozodavlev was involved in revolutionary politics. I mean actively, rather than just observing from the sidelines and occasionally cheering on in editorials. His letter to me hints at that. He was worried about spies in the department. It is not inconceivable that there may be individuals employed by the state whose true loyalties lie elsewhere, is it, Pavel Pavlovich?’
‘You are accusing me?’
‘Not at all. I know you are far too sensible to get involved with any of that.’ There was an undoubted hint of irony in Porfiry’s voice, that could only be infuriating to Virginsky. ‘To return to Kozodavlev. He went to the bridge over the Winter Canal on Monday, the day the thaw began, because he had a terrible presentiment that the body was going to come to light. He knew this because he had been present when it had been cast in the canal. We can speculate that our man from the canal was a member of a closed cell murdered by his fellows, one of whom may well have been Kozodavlev. The resurfacing of this old crime stings Kozodavlev’s conscience, which had never been easy about the murder, and he writes to me. A spy in the department sees his letter, notifies the Central Revolutionary Committee, and an assassin is sent round to torch his apartment building. In the process, killing five other innocent residents.’
‘Kozodavlev was not innocent. Not if he was an informer.’
‘You think he deserved to be killed?’
Virginsky dipped his gaze, abashed. ‘I had not meant to say that.’
‘And what of the body in the canal? If he too was an informer, he too deserved to die?’
‘We don’t know what he was, or who.’
‘These men . . . these men of the shadows.’ Porfiry’s sudden rage rendered him inarticulate. He was forced to light a cigarette to calm himself. ‘Who gave them the right to take another’s life?’
‘No one . . . gave it to them.’
The faltering emphasis of Virginsky’s answer implied a world of meaning that Porfiry was reluctant to explore. He looked at his junior colleague for a moment warily before inhaling deeply on his cigarette. ‘There are two things that I would like to know for certain. The first being whether Kozodavlev was the man on the bridge who watched the sailors bring up the body.’
‘The Peter the Great has sailed, has she not?’
‘Regrettably.’
‘And so we have missed our chance to present the photograph of Kozodavlev to Apprentice Seaman Ordynov?’
‘We shall have a photographic copy made and sent on to Helsingfors. The authorities there will question Ordynov when the ship docks, in a few days’ time.’
‘And the second thing?’
Porfiry’s expression clouded suddenly, and he looked away from Virginsky. He snatched up the copy of Russian Soil. ‘Whether this . . . novel . . . has any merit at all.’
Virginsky’s frown made it clear he had detected the lie in Porfiry’s voice.
*
Swine
By D.
Preface
Be in no doubt. The events set out in this narrative occurred. The personalities with which it is peopled exist. The crimes they commit are real and depicted without exaggeration or sensationalism. I say this with absolute authority. I was there. I am one of those personalities.
I share in the guilt of the crimes, even of the very worst.
Perhaps I did not pull the trigger, but I held down the man.
Why then have I chosen to write this account?
The simplest answer is to say that I have realised the error of my ways. I was in thrall of certain ideas, but am no longer. My intellectual captivation went hand in hand with personal fascination. There are men, and women, whom it is difficult to resist. Even when they utter the most flagrant and outrageous lies – for example, when they assert that black is white – one feels that they are telling the truth. Indeed, one is certain that they are capable only of truth-telling. It goes without saying that the truths they reveal are felt to be the most profound and devastating imaginable.
Their truths are the truths upon which one must act, and with a fierce urgency. When they call, whatever they may ask, one does not refuse.
You may find it hard to believe that any individual could exercise such power over another, that such scoundrels – such swine – are capable of commanding the loyalty of intelligent people. To which I can only say, believe.
They begin with seduction. The seduction of ideas, ideals, hope and goodness. They end with entrapment. The entrapment of fear and mutual suspicion. It is a web from which one cannot extricate one’s self.
Every noble sentiment, every soaring aspiration, every burning desire to improve the lot of one’s fellow man, is reduced to a simple formula of hate: kill or be killed.
One can accept this formula only for so long – that is to say, only for so long as one has not been called upon to act on it. As an abstract formula it may seem as logical, and reasonable, as any other. But the moment one acts upon it is the moment one grasps its true horror. One’s soul is thrown into upheaval. One’s sanity is fractured.
Of the personalities who appear in this narrative, all have suffered for the part they played. All are isolated from their fellow creatures – from God’s creation, in fact – by the sins that hang over them. One man has already committed suicide. I would not be greatly surprised if others follow his example. It is a course of action to which I give due consideration daily.
Perhaps I wrote this narrative to defer that terrible, final crime. Perhaps I hope that the writing will atone for the crimes written about, and render my suicide unnecessary, that by offering this as a warning, I will redeem myself in some small measure.
Or perhaps it is simply the note I will leave behind.
D.
*
By the middle of the following afternoon, that of Friday, 21 April, Porfiry had finished reading all four instalments of Swine. He put the last copy of Russian Soil to one side with a dissatisfied expression. He could not say with any certainty what he had just read. Despite the assertions of that preface, much of the main narrative read as a novel, and a bad novel at that. It was full of cheap novelistic tricks. Indeed, the preface itself could be taken as the first of them. What more transparent novelistic trick could there be than to assert the truth of what is to follow?
And yet, the force of the preface gave him pause. The apparent authenticity of the sentiments expressed seemed to sit at odds with the lurid and contrived narrative that followed. The plot displayed a laughable reliance on coincidence and a lamentable taste for melodrama. The ‘personalities’ portrayed were flat and unconvincing.
That said, it did occur to Porfiry that perhaps individuals in such situations find themselves speaking and acting like characters in a bad novel; if a true account of their acts were written down, the result would be indistinguishable.
He had read the serial half in the hope that it might shed some light on the case he was investigating. On that front, he was not entirely disappointed, although he remained suspicious of the parallels he found. He was looking for a man shot through the head and cast into a canal, and he found him, or something similar. In point of fact, in Swine, the body was thrown into a lake, rather than a canal, and one located on a remote country estate and not in the centre of St Petersburg. Striking as any similarities were, Porfiry was not unduly excited by them. The crime in the novel was clearly modelled on a notorious case of a few years earlier, which had been widely reported when it came to trial. The body in that case, also shot through the head, had been disposed of in a
lake.
Besides, when it came to disposing of their victims’ bodies, there was a limited number of choices open to murderers. Immersion in water was not so unique that its occurrence in the novel and in the current case could be seen as significant. More significant, as far as Porfiry was concerned, was the location chosen for disposal: in the case he was investigating, this was the Winter Canal, right under the Tsar’s nose. Nothing in Swine resembled this in any way.
More generally, he had hoped to gain some insight into the ‘men of the shadows’ who organised and controlled the types of grouping described in the novel. In Swine, such figures were given names that left one in no doubt as to their role in the narrative. The cruel and ruthless taskmaster who drove the revolutionaries to murder was ‘Tatarin’; the shadowy mastermind whose fiendish plans set their crimes in motion was simply ‘Dyavol’, or Devil. To Porfiry, these characters had no humanity beyond the traits encompassed by their names, which made it difficult for him to believe that they were based on real personalities. In fact, they reminded him of identifiable characters from other books; they were a little too much the stock villains of low literature.
This thought prompted him to turn his attention to the other novel found in Kozodavlev’s drawer, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? The Peculiar Man of that novel, Rakhmetov, seemed to have provided the model for one of the characters of Swine, an ascetic called Monakh. Porfiry had read the book before, soon after its publication in 1863; almost ten years ago, he realised. The character of Rakhmetov, sleeping on a bed of nails to prepare for the struggle ahead, had struck him at the time as a rather preposterous construction. But then again, he was no less realistic than any of the other characters in the book. If the danger of such creations was that they might lead the youth of Russia to emulate them, then really there was no danger. One had to give the youth of Russia more credit. When it came down to it, they were just too sensible to fall for all that idealised nonsense, or so Porfiry believed. The self-negating sacrifice of Chernyshevsky’s improbable hero Lopukhov (which, under the tortuous rationalising of the novel, was an act of supreme self-interest), faking his own suicide in order to leave his wife free to marry her lover – who in their right mind would wish to emulate him?
At the very moment Porfiry formulated that question, Virginsky came into his chambers. He was holding a large sheet of paper, the blank side of which was directed towards Porfiry.
‘Ah, it has come in already, has it? The revised poster. And I see that everything is in order, this time.’
‘But I haven’t shown it to you yet,’ said Virginsky, somewhat crestfallen.
‘You don’t need to. I can tell by the eagerness of your step, and by your smile, which though slight manages to transmit both relief and satisfaction. In addition, the fact that you are withholding the printed side of the poster, making ready to reveal it to me with a grand flourish, as if you were unveiling a masterpiece – all this leads me to suspect that the Imperial State Printing Works has not let us down this time.’
‘Yes, well, here it is.’ Virginsky turned the poster over. ‘Do you approve it for release?’
Porfiry barely glanced at it. ‘Is the wording correct?’
‘It is.’
‘Very well. Release it. Have it posted in all the city’s police bureaux, and in the usual public places.’
‘Do you not wish to check it?’
‘I trust you, Pavel Pavlovich.’
The casually issued statement seemed to take Virginsky aback.
‘Before you go,’ continued Porfiry. ‘This book.’ He held up the copy of What Is to Be Done? ‘You have read it, of course.’
‘Of course. We have talked of it before, I believe. You have mocked me for admiring it too much.’
‘You do admire it, don’t you?’ Porfiry’s surprise at this fact was renewed in his voice. ‘And bound up in your admiration of the novel is your admiration of the characters? These new men and women.’
‘Yes.’
‘You see it as a . . . how can I put it? As a programme . . . a manual . . . or even a manifesto? It is not a novel, it is a guide to how one may live one’s life?’
‘Certainly, I believe that it may point the way to a better basis for relationships between the sexes.’
‘But this character, Lopukhov, the one who fakes his own suicide . . .’ Porfiry flicked through the pages. ‘Let me find it. The note he left. Ah, yes. Here it is. “I was disturbing your peace and quiet. I am quitting the scene. Don’t pity me; I love you both so much that I am very pleased with this decisive act. Farewell.” I ask you, Pavel Pavlovich! How would you describe the man who wrote that? A doormat, perhaps? I mean to say . . . the way he just takes himself off like that! Can we really believe it? Would you do that?’
‘If I believed that my disappearance was the only way to bring about the happiness of the woman I loved, and if I truly loved her, then, yes . . . I would like to think that I would be capable of such an act. It is not so strange. It is logical. He loves Vera Pavlovna. She loves another. He makes way for the man she loves.’
‘But a real man would not act like that. You would not act like that. Not in that situation. Love is not logical, Pavel Pavlovich.’
‘There are men – and women – who are living their lives in accordance with the precepts of that book. Marriage is the only way for many women to escape the control of their families. But traditional marriage only replaces one form of control with another. It is not true freedom for the woman. Therefore, many young people are entering into a new kind of marriage, a marriage of friendship and equality, in which the woman is not expected to bow down before the man. Such a marriage truly does bring about the liberation of the woman, because she is free to live her life as she wishes, not as her husband wishes. And if she wishes to take a lover, she is free to do so.’
‘Yes, yes, that’s all very well. But is it really possible to imagine a husband so devoid of jealousy that he negates his own life, faking his suicide and assuming a new identity, solely to allow his wife’s future happiness?’
There was a pause before Virginsky answered: ‘Yes.’
‘Well, he is a fool.’
‘I shall see to the distribution of the poster.’
‘And really, does the author take us for fools? The police and the judicial authorities, I mean? That we would not see through the manifest fraud of that supposed suicide! A bullet in a cap! The cap was fished out of the water near Liteiny Bridge! The cap belonged to Lopukhov! Therefore, Lopukhov must have killed himself on Liteiny Bridge and fallen in the river!’
‘Unfortunately, Chernyshevsky did not think to make you a character in his novel, Porfiry Petrovich.’
‘Well, I would have seen right through it if he had.’
‘I have no doubt.’
‘I see that I must read this tiresome book again,’ grumbled Porfiry. ‘We cannot overlook the possibility that it may have some bearing on the case. But, good God, I do not find the company of these new men and women at all congenial!’ He flashed a sour glance to Virginsky, as if he counted him one of their number.
*
Porfiry finished reading What Is to Be Done? on Sunday morning. He put the book down and left his apartment.
He headed straight for Haymarket Square, where he joined the traffic of worshippers flowing to and from the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The cathedral stood like a bastion over the square, its minaret-like towers asserting the essential orientalism of the Orthodox religion. It both drew and repelled: it drew the faithful, the true believers, the true Russians, eastern- and inward-looking; and it repelled all those who would look to the west, outside Russia, for their ideas and influences.
Porfiry was drawn. He felt the simple need to be in an Orthodox church. Perhaps it was a reaction against the book he had just finished reading. He had never considered himself as a Slavophile; on the contrary, he had prided himself on being receptive to new ideas, from wherever they came. He knew that if
Russia was to progress, as she must, she could not afford to isolate herself from the rest of Europe. It was simply that, increasingly as he grew older, he found himself comforted by the overwhelming scent of incense and the warm dazzle of the candle-lit icons. And the only God he could believe in was the Russian God.
Porfiry crossed himself as he entered.
The throng inside the church was lively, almost excitable. As always, there was a loose informality to the congregation. People came and went all the time, while the priests and monks continued to chant and drone. There was a soft murmur of chatter which echoed and overlapped, giving the impression that the multitude of saints and celestial beings depicted on the tiers of icons all around were joining in the conversations. The priests took a dim view of all this talking in church, but there was little they could do to stop it. The Church invited its flock to be as children in their Father’s house. It could hardly be surprised if some of them behaved like naughty children.
The three doors of the iconostasis stood open, as they had done since Midnight Mass on Good Friday. This towering screen, a full six tiers of icons in height, shielded the altar sanctuary from the congregation in the nave. Encrusted with a grid of thick gilt frames, populated with holy personages, it symbolised the division between Heaven and Earth. For most of the year the doors were kept closed, with only the clergy being allowed to pass through them. The doors would close again later that day, at the None, or Ninth Hour of prayer, that is to say, at about three o’clock that afternoon. Porfiry felt a surge of emotion as he considered the symbolism of the doors’ opening. He felt a corresponding opening of his heart. It seemed to be a gesture of transcendent generosity on the part of the Church. Heaven stood open to him, and to all the miscreant congregation. He was possessed by hope. And yet, at the same time, he was aware of the imminent closure. And so, he seemed to feel, and regret, the loss of that hope at the same time as he experienced the hope itself.