The snow had stopped falling. Nothing but wet grey slush on the pavements already. Mirgorod unfolded on the other side of the window but Lom hardly saw it. It was too close, pressed right up against his face. It was too big and too dirty. It made no sense. What you saw from a tram window were the small things. Random, fragmentary things: a narrow alleyway disappearing between shopfronts; the sign of a drawing master’s school; fresh perch on ice outside a fishmonger’s; the hobbles on a dray horse; a bricked-up window. The city was vast beyond understanding. It replenished itself infinitely, teeming beyond count. People lived their lives in Mirgorod by choosing a few places, a few faces, a few events, to be the landmarks of their own imagined, private city. Interior cities of the mind, a million cities, all interleaved one with another in the same place and time, semi-transparent. Onion-layer cities, stacked cities, soft and intricate, all of them tied together by the burrowing, twining, imperceptible threads of the information machine. Flimsy cities, every one. All it took was a militia bullet, the hack of a dragoon sabre. But the tissue cities carried on.
And underneath them all, two futures, struggling against each other to be born.
Lom slipped his hand into his pocket and met something sticky and rough: Feiga-Ita Shaumian’s bag, tacky with her clotting blood. He untied the cord and looked inside. It was like the hedge-nest of some bird, just the kind of thing a crazy old woman might carry around, but it wasn’t a nest. The sticks were tied together with thread. He eased it out of the bag for a closer look. Some of her blood had soaked through and clotted on it, dark and viscous, and there were globs of some other stuff, some kind of yellow wax, and dry, maroon-coloured berries. He held it up to the light. There were fine bones inside, parts of the skeleton of some tiny animal. A mouse? A mole? A small bird? There was a strong scent too, some sweet warmth stronger than the iron of blood. He remembered the whiteless brown eyes of the soldier in the street in Podchornok, out in the rain.
Some instinct made Lom hold the thing up close to his face and sniff at it. And the world changed. It was as if the skin of his senses had been unpeeled. The hard line between him and not-him, the edge that marked the separateness of himself from the world, was no longer there. Until that moment he had been tied up tight inside himself, held in by a skin as taut and tense as the head of a drum, and now it was all let go. It was as if he had fallen into green water and gone down deep, turning and tumbling until he had no idea which way was up. At first he panicked, lashing out on all sides, struggling to get control, but after a moment he seemed to remember that you shouldn’t do it like that. He stopped struggling and allowed himself to drift, letting his own natural buoyancy carry him back to the surface.
He was a woman in the woods in winter. He wasn’t seeing her, he was her, crunching her way among silent widely-spaced trees, going home, tired and alive in the aftermath of love, her mouth rubbed sore, the man’s semen pursed up warm inside her. She sniffed at her fingers. The scent of the man clung to them, as strong as memory. She remembered the weight of his belly on her, the warmth of his bed by the stove. Her collar, her sleeve, the fur of her hood, everything had soaked up the smell of his isba, rich and strong, smoke and resin, furs and sweat. Oh hell! He would notice when she got home! Even He couldn’t miss the smell of him on her skin. Did she care? No! This was a new kind of madness and she liked it.
The vision faded. Lom closed his eyes and watched the patterns of muted light drift across the inside of his eyelids. Thinking was tiring. His thoughts were too heavy to lift. He stared out of the window, trying to think as little as possible. In the reflection he saw Maroussia Shaumian’s wide dark eyes. Her long straight back as she walked away.
Three shots. There were three shots.
I’ve achieved nothing. Every thread I follow leads nowhere, or to a corpse.
No, not nowhere. To Chazia.
Kantor was Chazia’s agent. All the killing, the bombs, the robberies, inspired not by nationalist fervour or revolutionary nihilism, but by the Chief of the Vlast Secret Police. Safran was Chazia’s too. Chazia had sent him to kill Maroussia and her mother.
And I am Chazia’s too.
Except that wasn’t true. Not any more.
Chazia would kill him now for what he knew, and take the file back. She had sent the vyrdalak. It must have been her.
The file.
He saw it tucked away in the bathroom of Vishnik’s apartment. He saw Vishnik beaten by militia night sticks. He saw Vishnik, dead in his room, bleeding from Safran’s bullets.
The file. Shit. The file.
46
Josef Kantor followed Chazia along empty passageways seemingly cut through blocks of solid stone. They clattered down steep iron flights of steps lit by dirty yellow bulbs. The treads were damp and treacherous. She was leading him deep into the oldest, lowest parts of the Lodka, where he had never been before, down into ancient, subterranean levels.
‘No one comes here,’ she said. ‘Only me. You’re privileged, Josef. Remember that.’
When had she become so pompous? She was weaker than he had thought. Failing. Not to be trusted. She had agreed, reluctantly, to show him the Pollandore, but she had made him wait. ‘Come back tomorrow,’ she’d said. ‘Let me prepare.’
Kantor felt suddenly annoyed with this terrible old fox-bitch who pushed him around. He wanted to bring her down a bit.
‘Is Krogh dealt with, Lavrentina?’
She was walking ahead of him and didn’t look round.
‘You were right about him,’ she said. ‘He’s an annoyance. It is in hand.’
‘But not done yet, then. And what about the other matter?’
‘The other matter?’
‘The women,’ said Kantor impatiently. Chazia had not forgotten — she never forgot anything — she was prevaricating. ‘The Shaumian women. You were going to deal with them too. Is it done?’
‘Oh that,’ she said. ‘Yes. Your wife is dead.’ He caught a slight hesitation in Chazia’s reply.
‘And the daughter?’
Chazia said nothing.
‘The daughter, Lavrentina?’ said Kantor again.
‘She is not dead. She escaped. We’ve lost her. Just for the moment. We’ll find her again.’
‘What happened?’
‘She had help, Josef. Krogh’s investigator was there.’
‘Lom?’
‘He interfered,’ said Chazia. ‘Safran let him get in the way. Your daughter shot one of Krogh’s men and disappeared.’
‘Did she, then?’ Despite himself, he was impressed. But it would not do.
‘You must kill them both,’ he said. ‘Krogh’s man and the daughter. Do it now. Do it quickly, Lavrentina. And Krogh too. No more delays. Kill them all.’
Chazia turned to face him.
‘Don’t try to bully me, Josef. I won’t accept that. Remember our respective positions. I have other things to do apart from clearing away your domestic mess. Today we are going into the Lezarye quarters. That will raise the temperature. And you have your part to play too. Remember that. The Novozhd—’
‘You can leave that to me,’ said Kantor. ‘You don’t need the details. Better you don’t…’ He felt that Chazia was going to argue the point, but just then they reached a narrow unmarked door in the passageway, and she stopped.
‘Here,’ she said, reaching in her pocket for a bunch of keys.
The door looked newer than the rest. Shabby institutional paint, but solid and heavy with several good locks. Chazia opened it and Kantor followed her inside.
The first impression was of spacious airy dimness. Grey light filtered down from high — very high — overhead: muted daylight, spilling through a row of square grilles set into the roof. But they must have been far below ground level. The grilles were the floors of light wells, he realised: shafts cut up through the Lodka to draw down some sky. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he saw that they were in a high narrow chamber that stretched away on both sides. He could not see the
end of it in either direction. It might have been a tunnel. Parallel rails were set into the floor, for a tram or train.
The floor of the chamber was heaped with boxes and sacks and pallets. Large shapeless lumps of stuff shrouded under sacking and tarpaulins. And there were machines, on benches or on the floor. Some he recognised: lathes and belt saws, pulleys and lifting chains and other such contraptions. Others, the majority, meant nothing to him: complex armatures of metal and rubber and wood and polished stone. The impression was of a workshop, or a warehouse, but its purpose escaped him. There was an oppressive mixture of smells: iron filings, wet stone and machine oil. The atmosphere unsettled him. He felt on edge and slightly disoriented, as if there was a low vibration in the air and the floor, a rhythm and resonance too deep to hear.
‘Where is it?’ he said. ‘Where’s the Pollandore?’ He didn’t know what he was expecting the Pollandore to look like, but nothing he could see seemed likely to be it.
‘It’s not far,’ said Chazia. ‘I need another key.’ She switched on a lamp at a work table and began to search through drawers. ‘I haven’t needed this for a while.’ The table she was searching was spread with small implements, scraps of paper and chips of stone. Its centrepiece was a large brazen ball with tiny angled spouts protruding from its dented, fish-scaled skin. It floated in a dish of some heavy silver liquid that might have been mercury. Its surface shimmered and rippled faintly in the lamplight.
‘So what is this place?’ said Kantor.
Chazia glanced up. Light from the lamp glinted in her foxy eyes and slid off the dark marks on her face and hands. Did they cover her whole body, Kantor found himself wondering. He was beginning to feel uneasy. He felt for the revolver in his pocket.
‘This is my private workplace,’ said Chazia.
The lamp threw light into some of the nearer shadows. Kantor started. He thought he had seen someone else in the room, standing watchful and motionless against the wall. It was a shape, draped in oilcloth, almost seven feet tall. Curious, Kantor went across to it and pulled the sheet away.
At first the thought he was looking at a suit of armour, but it was much cruder, larger and heavier than any human could have worn and moved in. There was some kind of goggle-eyed helmet and clumsy-fingered gauntlets with canvas palms that made the effect more like a deep sea diver’s suit. The whole thing was a dull purplish red. He realised it was constructed from pieces of angel flesh. The woman had made herself a mudjhik! But one you could climb inside. One you could wear. He had underestimated her. Badly. His mind began to work rapidly. What you could do with such a thing, if it worked. If it worked.
‘Come away from that,’ said Chazia sharply.
She didn’t want me to see this. So this is what she does. This is her dabbling.
‘You wear this?’ he said. ‘You put yourself inside this thing?’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Chazia. ‘Come away from it. Do you want to see the Pollandore or not? We haven’t much time. I need to get back. Come, it’s this way.’
She led him to an iron door in the side wall, unlocked it and went through. Kantor followed her and found himself standing on a narrow iron platform suspended over space.
Whatever he had expected, it was not this. They were looking across a wide circular pit, a cavern, and in the middle of it was a wrought iron structure. It must have been a hundred and fifty feet high. In the depths of the Lodka. An iron staircase climbed up round the outside. There were viewing platforms of ornate decorative ironwork, pinnacles and spiracles, and within this outer casing an iron helix spiralling upwards. It reminded Kantor of a long thin strip of apple peel. And inside it, held in suspension, touching nowhere, the Pollandore.
The air of the cavern crackled as if it was filled with static electricity. It made Kantor’s head spin. The Pollandore hung in blankness, a pale greenish luminescent globe the size of a small house, a cloudy sphere containing vaporous muted light that emitted none. Illuminated nothing. A smell of ozone and forest leaf. It revolved slowly, a world in space: not part of the planet at all, though it was following the same orbit, describing the same circumsolar trajectory, passing through the same coordinates in space and time, tucked in its inflated sibling’s pocket but belonging only to itself. There was no sound in the room. Not even silence. The Pollandore looked small for a world, but Kantor knew it wasn’t small, not by its own metrication.
He turned to say something to Chazia, who was standing beside him staring across at the uncanny, terrible thing. Kantor opened his mouth to say something to her, but nothing came out. The space in the cavern swallowed his words before they were spoken. He grabbed her arm and pulled her roughly back off the platform and pushed the door shut.
‘We must destroy it,’ he said. ‘Get rid of that repellent thing.’
‘Don’t you think,’ said Chazia, ‘don’t you think we have tried?’
47
Maroussia Shaumian sat on the slush-soaked ground under the trees at the end of her street, leaning her back against one of the trunks. Watching for uniforms. Watching for watchers. Her whole body was trembling violently. She had almost not made it. The militia man’s first bullet had gouged a furrow of flesh in the calf of her left leg. It was a pulpy mess of blood, but it held her weight. Her knee, which had crashed against the wall in her first wild jump, stabbed bright needles of pain with every step, and the hair at the back of her head was sticky with blood — hers, and his. She could feel pits and flaps of skin where his teeth had cut her scalp. There was a ragged stinging tear in her cheek, wet with blood. Her neck was stiff. It hurt when she tried to turn her head. The pistol lay black and heavy in her lap.
She knew it was stupid to return home. The policeman. Lom. He had warned her not to. But then that was reason enough to do the opposite. Distrust of the Vlast and all its agents went deep. And yet… this one had helped her. He had let her get away. Without him she would already have been taken.
She could not think about that now. She needed to go home. Where else could she go? She needed to be clean of all this blood. She needed fresh clothes. She needed the little money that was there. She needed to rest. And she needed to think through her plan. She waited until the street was quiet, stood up stiffly and limped up the road to the entrance to her building.
There was a small bathroom up a flight of stairs at the end of the corridor. It had a basin and a bathtub and cold running water. A tarnished mirror. The walls were painted a pale lemon-yellow. Maroussia locked herself in, took her clothes off and washed herself, all over, slowly and without thinking. She let trickles of icy water take the blood and dirt from her skin. Out of her hair. She caught some water in cupped hands and drank from it: it tasted faintly of blood, but it was cold and sweet. She left her dirtied, bloodied clothes in a heap on the floor, wrapped herself in a thin rough towel and went barefoot back to her room as quickly as her stiffening injuries would let her, not wanting to encounter Avrilova on the stair. She found the door broken down, and assumed the militia had done it.
She dressed carefully, taking her time, not only because of her vicious and stiffening wounds, but also because she felt there was something ceremonious about it. Here begins the new life. She found clean underwear. A cotton slip. A plain grey dress. A black scarf for her hair. Shoes were a problem: her left shoe was sticky with the blood that had run down her leg. Her mother had saved a pair of boots from better times. They would do. And there was a clumsy woollen coat, also grey, which her mother had left behind that morning. She must have frozen.
When she’d dressed, she wandered around the room stuffing things into a bag. A few spare clothes. Soap. Their bit of money, about thirty roubles. That wouldn’t last long. After some thought she put in the book of Anna Yourdania’s poems. Someone at the Marmot’s had given it to her. The Selo Elegies. She loved the quiet, allusive, suffering voice.
The sun is dropping out of the sky, the orchard
breathes the taste of pears and cherries,
and in
a moment the transparent night
will bear new constellations —
like salt berries — glittering — harsh.
Why are our years always worse?
Yourdania’s son, who was nineteen, had died in the camp at Vig. Her husband was shot on the basement steps of the Lodka.
As she dressed and packed her few things, Maroussia went over her plan. Like so many people in Mirgorod, she had lived for years with the thought that one day such a time would come. The militia would come for her, and it would be necessary to run. She had decided long ago that when this day came she would make for Koromants, the Fransa Free Exclave on the Cetic shore, three hundred miles to the south of Mirgorod.
The whole world to the west of the forest was divided between Vlast and Archipelago, locked in their endless war. But wherever there was war, there must be bankers, financiers, traders in weapons — wars were fought on credit — and so the Fransa free cities, which belonged neither to the Archipelago nor to the Vlast, existed. Sealed off from the dominions by guarded perimeters. Everyone was stateless there, everyone was free, money and information the only power. Spies and criminals and refugees of every kind gravitated to such places — if they could get in, through the wire or over the walls. Exiled intellectuals gathered there to plot and feud, and she had heard of other, stranger figures, not human, forced out of the ghettos, margins and northern wildernesses of the Vlast, who found places to live in the older, darker corners of the Fransa exclaves. Ones who might understand about the Pollandore and help her.
Wolfhound Century Page 17