Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “It’s not as if I had listened to it,” said Gabriel gloomily.

  Wynne threw the book aside and plucked off another one.

  “We are really impressed by your library,” he said.

  “I am sorry it has given you so much work.”

  “Not at all. We were eager to explore it. You can’t curb a man’s appetite for knowledge, can you?”

  “And your phantascopic collection is rare,” added de Brutus, tugging at a spooled-off reel of celluloid that might have been Gabriel’s collection of Bourne-Cantwell pornoperatic works. “Although as a lawyer, I would have difficulty defending it.”

  Gabriel suddenly understood what they were looking for, and tried to hide his concern. They were not exactly hot at the moment, but God forbid—or the Devil—or anyone—that they find it.

  “Ahh!” said Wynne, slapping a page of what Gabriel recognized as the copy of Phantastes offered to him by his former lover Christine Cranberry, “ ‘Rocket’ and ‘Pocket’! This is not exactly unknown to me, is it?”

  “I read books, you read my mind, so you read my books too,” said Gabriel, wearily, thinking Wynne was lucky not to be reading his mind right now.

  “And I suppose this is … Flap?” added Wynne, showing Gabriel a dedicated sepia photograph of Christine in a fairy outfit that served as bookmark.

  Gabriel said nothing. On his Old Testament scales, the retaliation level went up from sevenfold to tenfold for this single familiarity. Unaware of or indifferent to this, Wynne plunged back into the book, or feigned to do so.

  “Since we’re talking about your acquaintances, how is Mr. Orsini, these days?”

  “He’s well enough, I guess.”

  “Did your conversation over breakfast interest him?”

  “I’d hate to think it did not,” Gabriel said, though he had to admit that he hadn’t been exactly dazzling this morning.

  “Should we suppose that you talked about our little private chat at the Hotel de Police?”

  “We usually don’t stoop that low.”

  Wynne threw the book aside and took one step toward Gabriel, towering above him in a threatening attitude.

  “Do I detect a certain lack of respect, Mr. d’Allier?”

  “Do I detect a certain lack of self-control?” said Gabriel, quavering at his own insolence.

  “Tsk, tsk, gentlemen, please …” said DeBrutus. “This is no way to behave. Remember you are here on a mission, Mr. Wynne, and not to tease my dear client.”

  “Excuse us, Mr. DeBrutus. Now that you mention it, there is something I would like very much to show to Mr. d’Allier.”

  He rummaged through the scattered books and seized one, brandishing it in front of Gabriel as if it were the Tables of the Law. It was a copy of A Blast on the Barren Land. Gabriel knew instantly that it wasn’t his, which had a different binding. He was not, however, going to explain that to Wynne.

  “Oh! You brought me a book. How generous and thoughtful of you.”

  “You do not recognize it?” said Wynne venomously.

  Gabriel had a flash, one of those reflexes that one’s body and brain work out automatically in times of utter exhaustion. He saw himself browsing that very book in the Hôtel de Police, spotting something on the first page.

  “I do indeed. It looks a lot like the same copy you showed me last week.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Just check the ex-libris. It is different from mine, as you must know by now.”

  He was sure, or took the chance, that Wynne had not thought of counterfeiting the ex-libris before planting the book. It would have been the final “proof,” in their rather generous definition of what could pass as evidence. But Wynne was angry, in a hurry, under pressure from the Council, or simply not bookish enough to care for such details. Gabriel could read it in his eyes and in DeBrutus’s, as they glanced at each other. And more importantly, it meant they had not found his copy yet. Gabriel was not exactly disappointed in Wynne, but this was a botched job if he ever saw one.

  Wynne sighed.

  Gabriel tried to keep his victory modest, but it warmed his plexus with a pleasant glow. They had failed first to unlock his mind and now in tampering with his library. It reinforced some irrational belief in the value of his lifestyle, even if that was presently going to the dogs like a rotten piece of ring seal.

  “Do not worry about the mess. I’ll clean it up myself. See you later,” he said simply, stepping back to free the passage to the front door, which had remained open.

  Wynne fetched his greatcoat and hat without a word, while DeBrutus pandiculated on the sofa, trying to look unconcerned. Gabriel did not even feel hateful any more; he was merely in that state where a man would trade Heaven for a darkened room and pair of clean sheets.

  His visitors eventually shuffled moodily toward the door. Wynne, just before going out, pointed his cane at Gabriel, almost touching his breast. Gabriel thought of the sword that was sheathed inside.

  “There will be no third time, Mr. d’Allier.”

  “I should hope not,” said Gabriel.

  As soon as he had heard them leave the building, he hurried toward the book’s hiding place, inside the pianorad. It had been found, unlocked and rummaged through. The book had disappeared and, unless something was escaping him completely, had already been missing when the Gentlemen had searched there. Gabriel could not figure out why and was too tired even to try. Stella? But he had not told Stella about the book, having had other fish to fry, or as the French side of his mind put it, other cats to whip. He went toward the bed, his mind a foggy blank, and fell on his face, his boots still on his feet.

  That was when he heard a knock on the door.

  He tried to ignore it but it stabbed on, murdering his sleep. He finally stumbled to the door, barely awake, his brain sideways in his skull, promising himself to strangle the concierge if it was she. But it wasn’t. Instead Gabriel saw in front of him a tall, thin man dressed in a dirty black coat, with a pointy beard, very bad skin, and a parcel tucked under his arm.

  “Hello,” the man said in a conspiratorial whisper that revealed a thick Russian accent. “I am Mikhail Mikhailovitch Mugrabin. I have come to bring back your book.”

  “Book?” asked Gabriel in a thick voice.

  Mugrabin looked all around suspiciously.

  “The one you so kindly lent me,” he eventually murmured with a wink.

  Gabriel, without giving it much thought, moved away from the door to let the man inside. The mysterious visitor strode into the room and pivoted on his heels, tearing the parcel to shreds and pulling out Gabriel’s own copy of A Blast on the Barren Land.

  “Excellent book. A bit reformist for my tastes. But you have to start somewhere,” he said, with a grimace that would have been comical if his skin had not been so awfully wrinkled and red.

  Gabriel could not believe what he saw. He was astonished—not just by the return of his book, but also by this character who looked as if someone had crudely glued half of Dostoyevsky to half of Rasputin. He was like a policeman’s dream of a Russian anarchist, or perhaps more like a policeman’s impersonation of one. They had not been long to send a replacement for Wynne, he surmised. But the provocation was a bit gross.

  “I did not lend you this book, did I?” said Gabriel, who was not going to admit anything.

  “Your girlfriend did,” said Mugrabin. He leaned forward, his ugly mouth close to Gabriel’s ear. “Charming girl, by the way. You’re a very lucky man. What are your opinions about free love? I hope they are as liberal as hers.”

  Gabriel must have made a face. Mugrabin burst out in a forced laugh, as if trying to sound insane, or so it seemed to Gabriel.

  “Hahahaha!!! I was joking!!! Of course!!!”

  He pirouetted and launched himself onto the sofa with a sigh of ease.

  “Thanks for the coffee!” he howled as if Gabriel were already in the kitchen.

  Some automated part of Gabriel actually went ther
e and prepared two cups of coffee. When he came back to the living room, Mugrabin had found the liquor bar and was drinking vodka directly from the bottle.

  “Nothing like a drop of it in the coffee!” he hollered, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

  Gabriel handed a cup to Mugrabin, noticing he was missing the last two fingers on his gloved right hand.

  “Little accident,” Mugrabin explained, knocking his right eye with the spoon, so that Gabriel could hear the little dull glassy thud it made. “I also have metal pins all along my right leg. And a brass plate in my skull.” He took off his hat and bowed. His sparse fair hair was combed across his head but Gabriel could see more of the plate that he wanted to. Mugrabin knocked on that with the spoon as well. “Very uncomfortable here. Because of the frost. But these things can happen when you’re a chemist.”

  Then, suddenly, he shifted to a more serious mood:

  “Suffering, Mr. d’Allier, is part of the cause. We suffer in our flesh to pay for the pain we inflict on the enemies of mankind.”

  “Who sends you?” Gabriel managed to ask between two yawns.

  “My story is a rather long one,” said Mugrabin, as if that answered the question. “You care for a cigarette?”

  Gabriel craned his neck, trying to decipher the Cyrillic lettering on the packet.

  “Lacto,” said Mugrabin, squeezing the cardboard tip before putting it in his mouth. “Hard to find here, believe me,” he added as he helped himself with one-handed dexterity from a matchbox that bore a drawing of a revolver.

  Gabriel declined (his code of honour forbade him to deprive a man of cigarettes that were “hard to find”), but Mugrabin went on to savour his silently for a long time, his good eye lazily following the smoke as it drifted across the room, while his host sat through what he had decided was a nightmare.

  “We have to kill to put an end to all killing,” Mugrabin said dreamily, as if talking to himself. He nodded his head, lost in thought, as if it were a particularly worthy piece of wisdom that he had just proffered.

  “I lost my faith before I lost my virginity,” he kept on, for reasons that eluded Gabriel. “I suppose it’s the same thing anyway.”

  He rambled on. Between narcoleptic fits, Gabriel vaguely heard, as a hum, Mugrabin’s story as it unrolled its slimy meanderings. As was to be expected from a man with a supposedly long habit of clandestinity and false identity, his outpouring soon took on the proportions of a flood.

  From what Gabriel could piece together, he understood that Mugrabin had been born among Doukhobors (“spirit-wrestlers,” as Mugrabin translated it), a community of egalitarian peasants who rejected any secular or spiritual authority except for the Bible. Mugrabin’s people lived in the Ganja protectorate, somewhere in Transcaucasia. Such radical Christians are always especially abhorrent to their lukewarm, mainstream coreligionists, and the Doukhobors were duly persecuted, but they refused to use violence even to defend themselves, and as a way of resisting the temptation to do so had destroyed all their weapons. “When I saw my parents take a beating from a sotnia of Cossacks,” explained Mugrabin, “I totally lost any respect I had for them. From that day onward I was finished with family and any kind of authority.”

  He had fled to Baku, the nearest capital, a desolate, dusty, dreary jumble of derricks and minarets, of European streets, Persian bazaars, Tartar slums and wastelands—one of the most god-forsaken and violent cities in the world. “There’s a place there, not far from the city, Ateshgyakh, it’s called. It looks like a fort, but is a Zoroastrian temple. An eternal flame burns from the ground right in the middle of it. This is where I pledged myself to destruction by fire,” Mugrabin said, with intensity. “A sword of flame may defend Eden. A sword of flame will regain it,” he added, not without grandeur, and something in Gabriel—but he was tired—refused to find that as ridiculous as it was.

  Mugrabin had then found work in the sulphuric acid factories and had trained himself as a chemist, quickly joining the thriving anarcho-communist movement. He had been part, he said proudly, of the most radical group of them all, the Chernoye Znamya—the Black Banner. They were the ones who put the Baku in Bakunin, he said with a roar of laughter, though Gabriel supposed it was hardly the first time he had cracked that joke. The Black Banner had started by murdering some strike-breaking capitalists but had soon diversified their activities to include holds-up and “ex’s” (expropriations, Gabriel understood), attacking armouries and police stations, dynamiting restaurants and factories, shooting on sight or fighting in pitched battle the pharaohs—as they called the police—and detectives. They were, Mugrabin explained, bezmotivny, motiveless terrorists, exercising violence for violence’s sake, just to purify the old world in the flames. “It was a great life. You would need a considerable amount of alcohol to imitate the intoxication of walking around with dynamite in your pockets, the detonator clicking as you walk.”

  Which was how, as it turned out, Mugrabin had exploded in his room one day, while heating mercury fulminate to make a blasting cap. A good portion of him had gone to Heaven or Hell; he would never know. What was left was cared for in a hospital he then managed to escape from. Death could well be the sister of Liberty, but for all his courting of the first, Mugrabin had eloped with the second, younger one. But for the honeymoon he’d had to flee Russia. Baku was done with, anyway. Anarchy was not on the front page anymore. The suppression of the 1905 revolution had taken its toll, and now all the rage was about Tartars massacring Armenians in racial riots. The vandalized Bibi Eybat oil wells burned non-stop in the night, in true Zoroastrian fashion. He regretted that he had not done it.

  It was his luck that Doukhobors were at the time leaving the country for Canada in massive numbers, on a trip that was partly funded by Tolstoy’s royalties. Relatives of Mugrabin and men from the Anarchist Red Cross smuggled him aboard one of the ships. He eventually found himself in the Good Spirit Lake colony (its real name was Devil’s Lake, but this clearly would not do) located in Canada’s Northwest Territories, in a village that bore the same name as his childhood home and looked uncannily like it.

  He eventually emigrated with others to a place called Brilliant in British Columbia, where Doukhobors soon started to disagree over their degree of assimilation and their faithfulness to the old cause. Of course, Mugrabin joined the most radical branch, the Svobodniki, or Freedomites, though the sight of his scarred, sewn-up body during the naked protests they favoured did not always uplift the demonstrators. He came in handier when, at his own incenting, the Svobodniki turned to arson and bombing, destroying schools and transportation systems but also their own properties and money, all of this done in the nude. “Burning Money is truly exhilarating. And burning it naked is quite Edenic,” explained Mugrabin happily. “If you really want to drive people crazy, you should try it. Guaranteed or the ashes of your money back.” Mugrabin was in a good humour now. Obviously, his mood swings worked on a ten-second cycle.

  The Canadian authorities got tired of his antics and he soon had to seek other, even less benevolent, climes. How he arrived in New Venice he would not exactly reveal, but he maintained he had found a home here, though not in the Novo-Arkhangelsk district, which was swarming with Bolshevik flies. It was a moral home, rather.

  “The Eskimos. They remind me of us. The equality, how they share everything. This is how human beings should live, don’t you think? The True Community. I should really like to meet the author of this book.”

  If Gabriel had been not unpleasantly lulled so far, this slapped him awake. His suspicion that Mugrabin was another policemen in (black) sheep’s clothing returned forcefully. The story was too good to be true, and calculated to fit some of Gabriel’s pet interests, even if those interests were purely theoretical. For people like Gabriel, whose social status was going down the drain, radical politics was the cheapest commodity there was and a good thumb to suck on during daydreams. He knew that well, and kept it to the level of motiveless fascination.

  “I
do not know him,” lied Gabriel.

  “That’s not what the dedication suggests,” said Mugrabin, patting the book.

  “Are you a professional policeman or just an informer?”

  Mugrabin went mad at this. Jumping to his feet and advancing threateningly, he flourished a Nagant gun that made Gabriel shiver as it was agitated under his nose. “If there is one thing that would give me as much pleasure as killing a cop,” howled Mugrabin, his face even more noticeably red, “it is killing someone who calls me a cop. I may not look like it but I have some self-respect, you see.”

  “I’m sorry if I was mistaken,” said Gabriel grimly, as he was more than fed up with people menacing him. “I see more policemen than I would like to these days.”

  “Ah, who doesn’t?” said Mugrabin, who now settled down quickly. “It makes my heart bleed that you do not trust me. What can I do to prove my friendship to you? Oh! I know. What if those two pigs I have seen going out of your building had an accident? You know, some little explosion of their Bollée sled car?”

  “I do not know much about Russian terrorism, but enough to know that some infiltrated agents do no hesitate to kill policemen or even state ministers.”

  Mugrabin laughed at this.

  “Those SR clowns, really! They were too naïve with that Azev thing. I am an anarchist, Mr. d’Allier. I live on highly different moral grounds.”

  “I’m sure of that.”

  Mugrabin nodded his head.

  “I admire your loyalty, to speak frankly. I would even have been disappointed in you if you had told me who wrote that book. Imagine it as a test. We will contact you, and in the meantime, if you’re in need, you will find us.”

  “Us?”

  “It’s more impressive when put that way, isn’t it?” said Mugrabin with a smile that revealed his ceramic teeth.

  And with that he suddenly dashed toward the door, with, Gabriel noticed, the vodka bottle bulging in his coat pocket.

  “Drink to my health, Mr. Mugrabin.”

  “I certainly will do that. I hope it will be more beneficial to yours that it is to mine,” he chuckled while putting on his rubbers. “I’m not like this character in one of our greatest novels, who thinks he should have gone to the North Pole because he had the vin mauvais and wanted to get rid of the habit.”