A Vengeful Longing pp-2

by R. N. Morris

  Porfiry rattled the door in the frame. ‘I could send you downstairsto fetch the yardkeeper, or. .’ He looked down at the door handle regretfully. ‘It is a pity we don’t have Ilya Petrovich here with us. He has a way of getting through locked doors.’

  Virginsky frowned resentfully. ‘Stand back!’ He puffed himself up and took a step back, possessing the corridor with his arms outstretched in readiness.

  ‘My dear boy, what do you intend to do?’ asked Porfiry, alarmed.

  Before Virginsky could answer, they heard the hook lifted, followed by a protracted, gurgling moan. Virginsky lowered his arms slowly. The tendons in his neck flexed as a repulsive force twisted his head away from that sound.

  The door opened outwards in Porfiry’s hand. ‘It is perhaps as well that you did not charge it,’ said Porfiry dryly. But as the door reached its full extent, and they were able to see inside the room, all thought of drollery evaporated.

  It was the blood they saw first. His hands were wet with it. And the sheets of the bed where he was lying were drenched in it, as was his nightshirt. The nightshirt was pulled up past his groin, revealing the ragged, red-glistening wound, a dark, incomprehensible void from which the blood was still pumping in rhythmic spurts. The blood was in his beard too, the points of which had clearly been pulled and twisted by those sodden fingers.

  His right hand, with which he had reached out to unlock the door, so small was his room, hung limp in the air. The left lay across his abdomen, weak and lifeless.

  On the bed, next to him, pooled in blood, was a mess of something fleshy, a bundle of butchered tissue. Porfiry stared at it in horror, disbelieving, or rather not wanting to believe, what he saw. But there could be no mistaking it: the tubular stub, wrinkled and retracted; and still attached to it, a loose, ravaged appendage sprawling open to reveal the compact globes of his testes, like secret eyes, peeping fearfully up at them.

  A penknife, similar to the one that had been taken from him at the bureau, but with a blade that looked strangely, freshly, rusted, lay nearby.

  Rostanev turned his face towards them, his eyes bulging, as though surprised by the absolutism of pain. Another creaking, rattling groan came from his throat. His legs stirred, the knees rising up slightly, and then falling apart, airing the gaping mutilation. The wound continued to haemorrhage copiously.

  ‘My God,’ said Virginsky.

  ‘What happened here?’ Porfiry asked the question in no real expectation of an answer, at least not from the diminished man upon the bed.

  But a word came from him, a word that grew out of another visceral moan and faded into an empty gasp: ‘Voices-s-s-s-s-s-s.’ He closed his eyes on his pain.

  A sharp spasm brought his legs together, the tension of which gripped his whole body. His hands contracted into fists and pummelled the mattress. His head shot back, mouth racked open. From it came a full-throated scream.

  The moment the scream ended, his body relaxed. A profound change was visible in his face, a collapsed emptiness, his features rendered almost unrecognisable.

  For an instant, Porfiry was overwhelmed by the horror of what he had just witnessed and by the grotesque aftermath of it displayed before him. This was all that there was in the world and all, even, that the world could promise. Every human hope and endeavour came to this. And even when this bleak sentiment faded, all that was left in its place was a reminder of every other scene of violence and destruction that he had been called upon to survey in his career.

  It was this thought that caused him to remember Virginsky’s presence.

  The boy’s face — for in this moment Virginsky appeared to him as a lost and terrified boy — was white. His head was shaking in a tremble of denial. His arms began to shake too, violently. Porfiry held him firmly by both forearms, feeling the vibrations of his distress pass into him.

  ‘He’s. . d-d-d-dead.’

  Porfiry nodded.

  ‘This is bad,’ said Virginsky. ‘This is bad.’ He repeated the phrase several more times, his eyes staring in wild distraction into Porfiry’s.

  ‘Yes,’ said Porfiry calmly. ‘But it will not always be as bad as this.’

  ‘Who’s done this to him?’

  ‘I think he did it to himself.’ Porfiry’s voice sounded distant and weak, empty of everything apart from puzzlement.

  ‘Why would he?’

  Porfiry looked down at the wreckage of a man on the bed. He frowned, as if squeezing an emotion out through his brows. ‘It’s a renouncement. Is this not what members of the skoptsy sect do to themselves?’

  ‘How can you?’ cried Virginsky, accusingly.

  Porfiry’s frown thickened.

  ‘Here you are, even now, thinking it over, puzzling it out, reducing it to a mystery to be solved. Can you not see?’ Virginsky’s face was appalled. ‘The blood?’

  ‘You have to learn to look beyond the blood,’ said Porfiry, quietly. ‘There will always be blood. If you cannot see beyond the blood, you will see nothing.’

  ‘It’s just an intellectual exercise to you, a game!’

  ‘I cannot stop myself thinking. And I am not sure what purpose would be served if I did.’

  ‘How can you be so cold?’ said Virginsky.

  ‘You are in shock,’ answered Porfiry. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’ He released his hold on Virginsky’s arms and took out his cigarette case. ‘Here.’

  Virginsky looked at the opened case with unexpected avidity. He grabbed a cigarette and took it shaking to his lips. Porfiry lit it for him, steadying the bobbing cigarette with one hand. Virginsky immediately began to cough. He held the cigarette away from his face, wincing out the smoke. He looked again at Rostanev. ‘Are you sure he is dead? Should we not try to help him — to a hospital?’

  ‘He is dead,’ said Porfiry. ‘The severed artery has stopped pumping. ’ He lit a cigarette for himself.

  A floorboard creaked in the next room. There were footsteps in the corridor. Porfiry shut the door on the faces of Rostanev’s neighbours, catching inquisitiveness turn to horror in the closing sweep.

  Virginsky attempted to smoke his cigarette once more. His face darkened to a hue that brought to mind the flesh of a pickled cucumber. Then he lurched forward and vomited, turning his face from Porfiry though he held on to him to stop himself falling over.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Porfiry. ‘There is no shame in it. No shame in it at all.’ It was out of tact that he avoided Virginsky’s eye as he patted his shoulder gently.

  Footsteps receded outside the room and everything was quiet. Porfiry listened to the air and smoke pass through his cigarette and the comforting crackle of burning tobacco.

  10

  Panic in Stolyarny Lane

  It is strange, thought Porfiry in the drozhki back to Stolyarny Lane, how such discoveries disrupt one’s experience of time.

  How long they waited in Rostanev’s room before the arrival of the yardkeeper, he could not have said. As long as it took to smoke a cigarette through was one answer. But on this occasion the cigarette in his hand had burnt with such exquisite, vegetal slowness that it had not been possible to conceive of its extinction. At the time, he had been conscious to a heightened degree of his presence in a moment of infinite elasticity and power. He looked back on it now with nostalgia and incredulity. And then it occurred to him that he was in another such moment now, and that what such upheavals as Rostanev’s death brought about was a dislocation of every moment from its neighbour. Undoubtedly, it was the propinquity of death that caused the effect. Each moment’s ending was like a tiny death in itself, an intimation, as well as a reminder, of mortality. Life became transformed into a series of segmented deaths.

  Perhaps too the act of smoking, in which he was engaged now, contributed.

  The lapping clatter of the horse’s hooves imposed an alternative patterning of time and reminded Porfiry that, however much he might desire to, he could not postpone the headlong rush of the present away from itself. I
t was as if a spell had been broken. The flow of time returned, marked off now by the passing apartment buildings.

  The drozhki came to a halt. They had reached their destination in no time at all. It seemed incumbent upon them to leap from the carriage as if propelled by the momentum of the tragedy.

  Porfiry looked at Virginsky. The younger man gave every appearance of having recovered from his earlier slip. He drew himself up and breathed through his nostrils with eager, savage attack, as if to show he was ready for anything. His eyes flashed fiercely. Porfiry nodded grimly then looked up towards the block that housed the bureau.

  ‘We must concentrate on the meaning of the act,’ said Porfiry. It calmed him to be back in his chambers, positioned once again behind his desk. However chaotic and senseless events outside that room became, here was one place where he could order his thoughts and clarify his perception. He inhaled deeply from his cigarette; his eyelids flickered half-closed. ‘Rostanev excised his generative organs by his own hand. Perhaps it is a judgement on the act of generation itself? An expression of disgust at something he has fathered? Alternatively, we might imagine that he has found himself, a solitary man, to be tortured by his sexual drive, which he has no hope of requiting, except through self-administration or through visits to prostitutes — a class of woman he despises. That brings us back to Raisa Meyer, does it not?’

  ‘Perhaps it is simply the by-product of his madness,’ said Virginsky, seated at his desk by the window. ‘A random act, wholly without meaning.’

  ‘Everything has meaning,’ said Porfiry. ‘This could be interpreted as an act of self-hate, or perhaps more accurately, a symbol of what we might call life-hate. We could even consider it to be an act of childish petulance directed against — whom? women? or a particular woman? — in return for what we may imagine to have been a lifetime of rejection. As if to say, “They will be sorry now!” Of course, we have already alluded to the skoptsy sect. With them, I believe, the removal of the genitalia is understood to be a spiritual act, a commitment to the spiritual life, chosen over a more worldly existence — the life of the flesh we might say — which is utterly renounced.’ Porfiry broke off to consider the swirls of smoke from his cigarette. ‘He spoke of being defiled by women, I seem to remember.’

  ‘But you are proceeding as if you believe Rostanev to be the murderer,’ objected Virginsky.

  ‘I have a strong sense that someone wants me to believe Rostanev is the murderer. It would be convenient for this person were we now, with Rostanev dead, to consider these cases closed. If I want to get closer to this person, I must take a moment to follow the path he has laid out for me.’

  ‘But now you’re talking as if you believe this other person responsible for Rostanev’s death. And yet I thought you were of the opinion that that came about as a result of self-mutilation? There is a contradiction, surely?’ Virginsky seemed almost belligerent.

  ‘My dear boy,’ said Porfiry cheerfully, ‘the two hypotheses you mention are not mutually exclusive. Yes, I am certain that Rostanev mutilated himself. Otherwise, I believe he would have named his assailant when he had the opportunity. And yet, instead, he struggled — with his last breath, as it were — to blame it on voices.’ Porfiry whispered the last word with melodramatic emphasis.

  ‘I confess that I am confused.’ Virginsky’s tone was pettish.

  Porfiry smiled sympathetically. ‘That’s quite normal. One gets used to it. One must grope for the signposts in the mist.’

  ‘But each of the signposts points in a different direction,’ complained Virginsky.

  ‘That’s perhaps because someone has played a trick on us, and twisted them around. But who?’ Porfiry drew from his cigarette. ‘Nikolai Nobody — that’s who,’ he murmured to himself.

  ‘Porfiry Petrovich?’ said Virginsky, sitting up so that Porfiry narrowed his eyes expectantly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When we were in Rostanev’s room, did you hear something in the next room?’

  Porfiry nodded slowly. ‘I believe I did.’

  ‘And yet didn’t Ilya Petrovich say that the room next to Rostanev’s was vacant?’

  ‘Nobody lives in it,’ said Porfiry wonderingly. ‘Nikolai Nobody. Well done, Pavel Pavlovich. I think perhaps we should take a look at that vacant room.’ Porfiry kept his cigarette at his lips as he drew deeply from it. He showed no inclination to hurry.

  ‘We let him go,’ said Virginsky, with a dead tone.

  He was answered by a deep boom that seemed to fill, and expand beyond, the confines of Porfiry’s chambers. The windows rattled as it receded. It was not thunder. They had heard thunder only days ago. This was something different.

  ‘An explosion,’ said Porfiry, rising falteringly from his chair. ‘And nearby.’

  Virginsky was already on his feet, craning to look out of the window.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ asked Porfiry.

  Virginsky shook his head. Porfiry crossed his chambers and opened the door to the police bureau. Uniformed officers were rushing blindly in every direction, voices raised in panic. The faces of the men and women whose lives had brought them into the bureau at that particular moment were stricken with fear. Shocked into silence, they watched the disarray of the police in bewilderment.

  Porfiry caught sight of Nikodim Fomich crossing the floor. They fell in together.

  ‘It’s very close, Porfiry Petrovich.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have a bad feeling about it.’ Nikodim Fomich seemed about to say something more but shook his head. ‘A very bad feeling indeed,’ he added, as they exited the bureau.

  ‘It feels like an attack,’ said Porfiry. ‘On us.’

  ‘Yes.’ Nikodim Fomich became tight-lipped as they descended the stairs.

  Virginsky caught up with them as they reached the ground floor. ‘What’s happened? Does anyone know?’

  He was not answered.

  They stepped out into a sun-startled day and a pungent scent of burnt saltpetre.

  ‘Black powder. Primitive,’ said Porfiry and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t clear that the others had heard him, however. Their gazes were transfixed. He had seen what they saw but it was almost as if by not referring to it, he sought to un-see it; more than that, to undo it; to remove from the record of things that had occurred the scattered ground of writhing, wailing bodies that Stolyarny Lane had become, the charred faces streaked with blood, some stretched with pain and some in awed repose, the frayed and flesh-stripped limbs, a burnt-meat smell. And in amongst the human bodies, there were the horses, flailing, thrashing, twisting their necks against the pain and the incomprehensible loss of footing, turning a blood-filled eye on the men who had brought them to this.

  ‘These are our men,’ said Nikodim Fomich, quietly. ‘My men.’ And indeed there were police caps strewn about like garlands. ‘We need medical staff.’

  ‘A surgeon has been sent for,’ said a politseisky who was crouching uselessly over one of his wounded colleagues.

  ‘A surgeon? We will need more than that. We will need doctors and medical support staff. We will need to get these men to a hospital. See to it, man.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The politseisky rose to his feet, clicked his heels and ran off.

  A pistol was discharged as the first of the horses was shot. Porfiry caught the heavy, relinquishing fall of its head.

  Nikodim Fomich was scanning the faces of the fallen men desperately.

  ‘What is it?’ said Porfiry.

  Nikodim Fomich let out a stifled cry and rushed forwards. Porfiry followed the line of his trajectory. A reeling dizziness came over him. Fiery red hair matted with a darker red, a face accustomed to the colour of fury, now more furious than ever, eyes that often bulged, now almost bursting: Salytov lay unmoving on the ground. His mouth was open as if he was about to let rip with a torrent of abuse, but no sound came from it. His eyes stared straight up into the clear, unblooded sky.

  Porfiry felt a heavy dread inside h
im, burdening his limbs and coarsening his muscles. It was hard to move against it.

  A weighted roll of Salytov’s eyes towards them released him. ‘Give him air! Don’t crowd him!’ cried Nikodim Fomich, who was pressing in on Salytov. He crouched over him, surveying the mangled body with great emotion, revering it almost, unable to touch it, but covering it with his gaze, like a lover before his mistress’s naked beauty for the first time, greedy for it, it seemed.

  Salytov clenched his teeth. His head quivered with a tremendous effort.

  ‘Don’t try to move,’ murmured Nikodim Fomich.

  But Salytov lifted his head. ‘Trap,’ he got out, before his head fell back against the ground. Rust-smeared lids came down over his eyes.

  Nikodim Fomich’s gaze flinched away from him, as if he had been slapped. He curled a fist over his mouth.

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Porfiry.

  Nikodim Fomich stood up and moved Porfiry away from Salytov. ‘He came to me. Just before. He had a tip-off. Anonymous, of course. It purported to come from a member of the Ballet’s revolutionary cell.’

  ‘As far as we know, there is no Ballet’s revolutionary cell,’ protested Porfiry angrily.

  ‘It was you!’ Nikodim Fomich shouted in sudden indignation. ‘You suggested he should continue his surveillance. What were your reasons for doing so if you did not believe in the cell? Was it one of your pranks, Porfiry Petrovich? Were you trying to make a fool of Salytov?’

  ‘No, of course not. But I thought the surveillance had come to nothing.’

  ‘It came to this!’ Nikodim Fomich shook his head bitterly. ‘The contact requested a meeting, promising information about a bomb-making factory. I authorised Salytov to go. With a contingent of men.’ Nikodim Fomich looked over the carnage, away up Stolyarny Lane. ‘They were waiting for him. Revenge, of course. For all the pressure he has been putting on their boy.’