Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  ‘I want you to hear this from my own lips. Pay close attention now and remember. On this very day of Truth and Light I want you to hear it and be sure. Your love is with me. Our victory will be absolute and total. With the Truth of the Angel clear in our minds it cannot be otherwise. Goodnight.’

  The image of the Novozhd at his desk faded out, replaced by a full close-up of his face. He was outside now. The sunshine was in his face, making him crinkle the corners of his eyes in laughter lines. A breeze teased his hair. As the opening bars of the ‘Friendship Song’ began to play, the words started scrolling slowly up the screen and twenty thousand voices sang.

  All join in our song about him —

  About our beloved — our Novozhd!

  And us his true friends —

  The people — his friends!

  Count us? You cannot!

  No more could you count

  The water in the sea!

  All join in our song about him!

  ‘Fuck,’ said Vishnik as they filed out slowly into the rain. ‘We need a drink.’

  23

  It was almost midnight. After the Dreksler-Kino, Vishnik had dragged Lom to a bar where they drank thin currant wine. He would have stayed there all night if Lom hadn’t insisted on going back and getting some food. And now Lom was sitting on the couch in Vishnik’s room with his legs stretched out along the seat. His chest was sore and bruised where the mudjhik had hit him, but the stove had heated the room to a warm fug and the bottle of plum brandy was nearly empty. The apartment smelled of lamb goulash and burning paraffin, and also of something else — the sweet tang of hydroquinone. Lom recognised it from the photographic laboratory at Podchornok.

  ‘That smell. Is that developer?’

  ‘What?’ said Vishnik. ‘Oh. Yes. I was printing.’ His face was flushed. He had been drinking steadily all evening. ‘Photographs. Have you ever made photographs, my friend? Marvellous. Very fucking so. You’re completely absorbed, you see. In the moment. Immersed in your surroundings. Watching your subject. Observing. How does the light fall? What is the shutter speed? Aperture? Depth of field? It is an intimate thing. Very fucking intimate. It drives out all other thoughts. Your heart rate slows. Your blood pressure falls. You are in a waking dream. Time is nowhere. Nowhere.’ Vishnik lurched unsteadily to his feet. ‘Wait. Wait. I’ll show you. Wait.’

  He was going towards the kitchen when there was a loud rapping at the outer door. Vishnik froze and stared at Lom. The fear was in his face again. His eyes went to the bag waiting packed by the door.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Lom. ‘I’ll deal with it. You wait here.’

  Lom opened the door, half expecting uniforms. But there was only a woman, her wide dark eyes staring into his.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I was looking for Raku Vishnik. I thought this was his place. I’m sorry. Would you know, I mean, which—?’

  Vishnik had come up behind him.

  ‘Maroussia?’ he said. ‘I thought it was your voice. This is a good surprise. Don’t stand in the doorway. Come in. Please. Come in.’

  She hesitated, glancing at Lom.

  ‘I’m sorry, Raku. I wanted to ask you something. But it can wait. You’re not alone. Now’s not the time. I’ll come back.’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ said Vishnik. ‘Fucking so. You can speak in front of Vissarion, for sure. He is my oldest friend, and he is a good man. If there is trouble, perhaps he can help. At least come in now you’re here. Warm yourself. Eat something. Have brandy with us. ‘

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s no trouble. It doesn’t matter.’

  Lom had been watching her carefully. The yellow light from Vishnik’s room splashed across her troubled, intelligent face. She looked worn out and alone. Like she needed friends. She would be worth helping, Lom found himself thinking. He wanted her to stay.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said. ‘Please. You look tired.’

  She hesitated.

  ‘OK then,’ she said. ‘Just for a moment.’

  Lom stood back to let her in. As she passed he caught her faint perfume: not perfume, but an open, outdoor scent. Rain on cool earth.

  ‘Well,’ said Vishnik. ‘How can I help?’ He was pacing the room, eager and animated. ‘What is it that I can do for you? There must be something, for you to come so late. Tell me, please. I am eager for gallantry. For me, the chances are few. Ask me, and it is yours.’ His eyes were alive with pleasure. He was more than a little drunk.

  Maroussia looked at Lom again.

  ‘I don’t know that I should…’ she said.

  ‘Oh for the sake of fuck, Maroussia,’ said Vishnik. ‘Tell us what you need.’

  She took a breath. ‘OK. I want you to tell me about the Pollandore, Raku. I want you to tell me anything you know about it. Anything and everything.’

  Vishnik stopped pacing and stared at her.

  ‘The Pollandore?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maroussia was looking at him earnestly. Determined. ‘The Pollandore. Please. It’s important.’

  ‘But… fuck, this I was not expecting… of all things, this.’ Vishnik fetched another bottle from the shelf and settled himself in a sprawl on the rug on floor. ‘Why are you asking me this?’

  ‘You know about it? You can tell me?’

  ‘I’ve come across the story. It’s an old Lezarye thing. Suppressed by the Vlast long ago. Nobody knows about the Pollandore any more.’

  ‘I do,’ said Maroussia. ‘My mother used to talk about it. A lot. She still does.’

  ‘Really?’ said Vishnik. ‘I thought… those stories are forgotten now.’ He turned to Lom. ‘Did you ever hear of the Pollandore, Vissarion?’

  Lom shrugged. ‘No. What is it?’

  ‘Maroussia?’ said Vishnik. ‘Will you tell him?’

  ‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘I want to hear it from someone else.’

  ‘OK,’ said Vishnik. ‘So then.’ He poured himself another glass. ‘Do you ever think about what the world was like before the Vlast, Vissarion?’

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘Not much.’

  ‘Four hundred years,’ said Vishnik. ‘But it might as well have been four thousand, no? Our civilisation, if we might even call it that, has lived for so long in the shadow of the angels’ war, our history is so steeped in it, we live with its consequences in our very patterns of thought. Who can even fucking measure the damage it has done?’ Vishnik paused. ‘That’s what the Pollandore is about. The time before the war of the angels.’

  ‘The Lezarye walking the long homeland,’ said Maroussia quietly. ‘The single moon in the sky, not broken yet.’

  ‘The world had gods of its own, then,’ Vishnik was saying. ‘That’s how the story goes. Small gods. Gentle, subtle, local gods. But those gods are gone now. They withdrew when the angels began. They foresaw destruction and a terrible, unbearable future. They couldn’t co-exist with that. Their time had to end.’

  Vishnik emptied his glass and poured another. Lom wondered just how drunk he was. And how long since he’d had an audience like this.

  ‘But before they went,’ Vishnik continued, ‘one of them, a forest god, made a copy of the world, the whole world, as it was at the moment before the first angel fell to earth. It was a pocket world, a world in stasis. Everything squeezed up into a tiny box. A packet of potential that would exist outside space and time, containing not things themselves but the potential for things. Possibilities. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘The idea was,’ said Vishnik, ‘that this other future, the future that could not now be, in our world, was to be kept safe. Waiting. A reserve. A fall-back. A cupboard. A seed. That’s the Pollandore. That’s the legend, anyway.’

  ‘But what happened to it, Raku?’ said Maroussia. ‘Where did it go?’

  ‘The people of Lezarye kept it safe for a while, but in the end the Vlast took it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maroussia. She was leaning forward. Looking at Vishnik intently. ‘But what did
they do with it? Where is it now?’

  Vishnik shrugged.

  ‘They tried to destroy it,’ he said, ‘but they could not. It was lost. Why are you asking me this, Maroussia? These are old forgotten things.’

  ‘I want to find it.’

  ‘Find it?’ Vishnik looked startled. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Yes. And please don’t tell me it doesn’t exist. I don’t want to hear that again.’

  ‘But… It’s a good story, yes. A symbol. Truth in a picture. But what makes you think this? That it actually exists?’

  Maroussia hesitated. Lom tried to read her expression but couldn’t. She was looking at Vishnik with a pale and troubled look.

  ‘Things have been… happening,’ she said. ‘Things have been coming… to my mother. From the forest. She was there once, long ago, before I was born, and something happened. I don’t know what. But she always used to talk about the Pollandore. And now… Things happen in the city. I see… stuff that isn’t there… only it’s more real than what is there. It’s like glimpses of a different version of the world. It’s as if the Pollandore was trying to open. That’s what it feels like. That’s what it is.’ She stopped. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not saying this right.’

  But Vishnik was hardly listening any more.

  ‘Oh, my darling girl!’ he said. ‘You see these things too? I thought I was the only one. And you think it’s the Pollandore? That’s… that’s… I hadn’t seen that, but it could be. It could be so. What an idea that is. Fuck. Yes. But—’

  ‘Raku? Do you mean you know what I’m talking about?’ said Maroussia. ‘Fuck,’ said Vishnik. ‘I could hug you. I could fucking hug you.’

  ‘Could somebody tell me, please,’ said Lom, ‘just what the hell you two are talking about?’

  ‘Tell you?’ said Vishnik. ‘Fuck. Show you.’ He stood up and lurched unsteadily in the direction of the kitchen.

  ‘Raku?’ said Lom. ‘What are you—’

  ‘Wait,’ said Vishnik. ‘This is what I was going to show you anyway. Wait.’

  Lom and Maroussia sat for a moment in awkward silence while Vishnik rummaged in the other room and came back with a large round hatbox. He dumped it on the low table and took off the lid.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  The box contained photographs. Hundreds of them. Vishnik shuffled through them, picking out one after another.

  ‘See?’ said Vishnik. ‘See?’

  The photographs were odd and beautiful. A light in a window at dusk, shining from a derelict building. A penumbra of gleaming mist about a house. A great dark cloud in the sky. There was a sad magic in them all. It was in the sunlight on a street corner, in the ripples in a pool of rain on the pavement, in the way the light caught the moss on a tree. Gleams and glimpses. Tracks and traces. There was a purity of purpose in Vishnik’s work that was strangely moving.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Vishnik, pointing to one picture. ‘That building there. See it. It does not exist. It never did. I photographed it, but it’s not there. I have been back. Nothing.’ He picked up another. His face was flushed. His breath ripe with brandy. ‘See this burned-out store? There was no fire. See this alleyway? Its not on any map. See this island? There is no island in this water. And this couple has no children. I know them, Vissarion. They live here. But see… there… that child?’

  Maroussia was looking through the photographs intently, staring at each one with a frown of concentration. She said nothing.

  ‘And these,’ Vishnik was saying, opening a small package and laying the contents out on the table. ‘These are my specials. My very fucking absolutely specials.’

  The first picture was a street scene, but the familiar world had been torn open and reconstructed all askew. The street skidded. It toppled and flowed. All the angles were wrong. The ground tilted forwards, tipping the people towards the camera. It wasn’t an illusion of perspective, the people knew it was happening. A bearded man and an old woman threw up their arms and wailed. A baby flew out of its mother’s arms.

  Maroussia picked up the picture and stared at it for a long time.

  ‘Oh Raku,’ she whispered. ‘This is it. Yes. This is it.’

  Raku went to sit next to her.

  ‘How often do you see this?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Not often,’ said Maroussia. ‘Sometimes. You?’

  ‘All the fucking time. But then I look for it. Every day.’

  ‘How long have you been doing this, Raku?’

  ‘Two years,’ said Vishnik. ‘Maybe more. Other people are seeing it too, I’m sure of it. It’s not the kind of thing you talk about though.’

  Lom remembered the woman in the paper, the mother who had killed her children. The floors keep opening, that was what she’d said. Will no one stop it? He looked through the other pictures. Vishnik’s specials. One showed an interior, a hotel bar, but the walls of the room were broken open to the elements and the ceiling was studded with stars. A woman’s head was floating upside down in the corner of the picture, smiling. The barman, from the waist up, floated in mid-air, while his legs — were they his? — danced at the other end of the room. In another, a girl was descending like a messenger from the sky to milk a luminous cow. In her ecstasy at the lights blazing across the black night, she had left her head behind. The whole city was ripping open at the seams.

  ‘You made these?’ said Lom.

  ‘All the time,’ said Vishnik.’Always.’ He picked one out and showed it to Maroussia. ‘This is today’s. It’s a good one.’

  She looked at it and passed it to Lom. The print was still damp. It had been taken in a café or a bakery, something like that. There was a girl in a black dress floating in the air. Up near the ceiling. The top had come off the counter: it was up there with her.

  ‘These are good,’ said Lom. ‘How do you do it?’

  ‘What, you think these are fakes?’ said Vishnik.

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Fuck off with fakes. Of course they’re not fucking fakes. This is what’s happening. Out there. This is the city. Maroussia has seen this.’ He looked at her. ‘No? Am I not right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s the Pollandore.’

  ‘See?’ said Vishnik. ‘Shit. Why would I make such stuff up? Why do fakes? Fuck, Vissarion. You’ve been a policeman too long.’

  Maroussia stared at Lom.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘What did he say? You? You’re the police?’

  Lom didn’t say anything.

  ‘Well,’ said Vishnik. The colour had drained from his face. ‘Yes, I suppose he is a policeman. Of a sort. But a good policeman. Not really a policeman at all.’

  ‘Raku?’ said Maroussia quietly. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Lom. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t—’

  But Maroussia was on her feet, gathering her coat. Her face was closed up tight. She looked… alone. He wanted to reach out to her. He didn’t want her to go, not like this.

  ‘Maroussia—’ he said.

  ‘Leave me alone. Don’t say anything to me. I’ve made a mistake. I have to go.’

  Vishnik was aghast.

  ‘No.’ he said. ‘Don’t go. Not when we’ve just… Fuck. Fuck. But it’s fine. Vissarion is a friend. Your friend.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Raku,’ said Maroussia. ‘That could never be.’

  Lom watched her walk out the room, straight and taut and brave. He felt something break open quietly inside him. A new rawness. An empty fullness. An uncertainty that felt like sadness or hunger, but wasn’t.

  24

  In a train travelling west towards Mirgorod there is a first-class compartment with its window blinds drawn, which the guards think is empty and locked. The guards know — though they couldn’t say how they know — that there’s something wrong with it, something ill-defined which needs a mechanic, which makes it unsuitable for occupation, and which they themselves should keep clear of. That’s fine. No inconvenience for the
m. It’s the end compartment of the furthest carriage, and first class is barely a quarter full. When they arrive in Mirgorod there’ll be the fuss of detraining, and by the time that’s done the episode of the closed compartment will be forgotten. When the train’s ready to leave again, the compartment will be fine, except — should anyone notice, which isn’t likely — for a lingering trace of ozone and leaf- mould in the air.

  Just at the moment there are two figures sitting opposite each other in the darkness of the closed and blinded compartment. They are making a long journey. Should anyone happen to see them — which nobody does — they would appear to be human: two women, not young, riding in composed, restful, silent patience, swaying slightly with the movement of the train. Both appear to be dressed in layers of thin cloth in muted woodland colours of bark and moss. Their heads are covered, their faces lost in shadow. Or they would be, if they had faces, which — strictly speaking — neither does.

  One of them — the one facing the direction of travel, as if eager to reach her destination, for her purpose is to arrive — is a paluba. The word is complex: its possible meanings include old woman, witch, hag, female tramp, manikin, tailor’s dummy, waxwork, puppet and doll, none of which is exactly accurate here, though all have some bearing on the true nature of the figure, which is an artefact carefully constructed of birch branches and earth and the bones of small birds and mammals. The paluba is a kind of vehicle, a conveyance, currently travelling inside another conveyance, artfully made to carry the awareness of its creator and act as a proxy body for her, while she herself remains in the endless forest, in the safety of the trees which she can never leave.

  The paluba’s maker has placed a little gobbet of herself, a ball of bees’ wax nestled inside the paluba’s chest cavity, approximately where the heart would be. The wax has been mixed with many intimate traces of its maker — her saliva, her blood, her hair, a paring of fingernail, smears of sweat and other fluids, a condensation of breath — and many intimate words have been whispered over it, as the maker kneaded it between her warm palms for many hours over many days, making it well, making it strong, so that she would remain connected with it as the paluba travelled ever further westward. The maker doesn’t stay with the paluba all the time. That would be exhausting and unnecessary. She can find it when she needs to. She can guide its steps, perceive with its senses and speak with its tongue, which is the tongue of a hind deer. When she needs to. For now, the paluba is empty. It’s waiting, endlessly patient, facing its direction of travel. Facing westwards. Facing Mirgorod.