Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  And Lukasz Kistler was a clever, subtle, observant and far-sighted man. He saw that Rizhin knew how to spend money and people but had no idea where such resources actually came from. Rizhin didn’t know how to turn dirt into cash or people into workers. Rizhin grabbed and stole to spend, and spent what he could not make, and in the end he would spend the whole of the world until he had nothing left. Kistler suspected that one day he and Papa Rizhin would come to blows.

  Kistler was watching Rizhin now. Rizhin was on his feet and prowling behind the seated committee members in his soft leather shoes. He liked to walk behind them. It made them uncomfortable. And today Rizhin was wielding a sword. He gripped it in his swollen fist and made experimental swipes at the air as he prowled. (Rizhin’s hands fascinated Kistler: hard, thickened, stub-fingered hands, butcher’s hands, raw-pink hands that looked like they’d been stung by bees. Long rough work on stone in ice and cold could make such hands. Many years in labour camps. That was something not in Papa Rizhin’s official biography.)

  The sword was ridiculous. The Severe Sword. The Southern Congress of Regions had presented it to him that morning as a birthday gift. Its blade was inscribed on one side SLASH THE RIGHT DEVIATION! and on the other SLASH THE LEFT DEVIATION! and on the hilt it said PUMMEL THE CONCILIATOR!

  ‘They give me a sword?’ Rizhin was saying. ‘And what are we to make of that? I give them jet engines and atomic space vessels and they give me a sword. What am I to do with a sword? What does a sword say? You see how riddled we are with aristocrats and peasants still? Fantasists. Nostalgists. Am I to ride out on a fucking horse like a khan? Do they mean me to butcher my own people? Well, if there is butchery to be done, let us start with the Southern Congress of Regions.’

  ‘The sword is an emblem, Osip,’ said Yashina. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Everything is an emblem,’ said Rizhin. ‘A generator is an emblem. A sky rise is an emblem. Those fuckers need to get better emblems.’

  Rizhin laid the sword on the table and sat down, slumping back in his chair. He picked up a pen and began to scrawl doodles on his notepad.

  ‘The people call me Papa and sing hymns about me,’ he said. ‘“Thank you Papa Rizhin. Glory to our great commander.” It’s laughable. I’m not Papa Rizhin; I’m a simple man. I am Osip, a worker and a soldier just like them.’

  He paused and looked around the table, fixing them one by one with his smiling burning eyes.

  ‘Even you, my friends,’ he said, ‘even you do this to me. You want me to walk out there today on that platform and let you make me Generalissimus. Do I need this? No. Does Osip the simple industrious man need such empty titles? No, he does not. I do not. I will not accept it. I give it back to you. Take it back, I beg you, and make someone else your Generalissimus, not me.’

  There was silence in the room. Everyone froze. Everyone looked down. Secretary for Agriculture Vladi Broch stared glassy-eyed at the sword on the table in front of him as if it would leap up and stab him in the neck. Rizhin doodled on his pad and waited.

  For one horrifying moment Lukasz Kistler thought the idiots were going to accept. It’s a test! he screamed inwardly. A loyalty test! If someone didn’t speak soon he would have to do it himself, and that would be no good. He wasn’t on trial–everyone knew he was Rizhin’s dynamo–but if he had to step in and repair the situation it would be the end for some of them.

  It was Yashina who rescued them in the end. Smooth, calm, cultured Yulia Yashina.

  ‘We’re nothing without you, Osip,’ she said quietly. ‘No one else could step into your shoes. It is unthinkable.’

  They all swung in behind her then. General acclamation, a clattering of fists on the table. Rizhin sighed and straightened himself up in his chair.

  ‘Very well, then,’ he said. ‘If you insist… I do not like it, you hear me. I protest. Let the record show that. Well… let’s get this over with, and get back to our real work.’

  Lukasz Kistler glanced down at Rizhin’s notepad as they filed out of the room. There was a jagged black scribble in the corner of the top sheet: the scrawled angular face of a wolf glaring out at him from a wall of dark trees. The wolf’s jaw was open, showing its teeth.

  3

  Elena Cornelius climbed the concrete stairwell in near-darkness, counting floors as she went. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. The light filtering through fluted glass panes in the landing doors was enough to climb by, but too dim to read the floor numbers. It didn’t matter. She could count. She knew how many storeys up she needed to go. The key to the service entrance of the New Mirgorod Hotel was in her pocket. Vesna Mayskova, a floor attendant at the New Mirgorod, had got it for her, and she’d left a bucket of dirty water and a mop in the alley outside, the signal that the area was clear of militia patrols.

  On the twenty-second floor of the New Mirgorod Hotel, Elena Cornelius stopped climbing and shoved open the door onto the second-tier roof. The sudden daylight was blinding: the shock of air and sky and the noise of the city after the dim stairwell. Elena held the door open with her foot, swung the canvas bag off her shoulder and rummaged in it for a small sliver of wood. Panic rose for a moment when she couldn’t find it, but there it was. Putting the bag on the ground, she let the door almost close and slipped the wooden sliver between the edge of it and the jamb. From the stairwell it would look shut, but there was just enough edge left proud of the surround to wrench it open again from outside with the tips of clawed fingers.

  She turned and looked out across the roof. Taking stock. Considering. Checking. She had been here before–a rehearsal run–but nothing must be taken for granted. Check and check again. That’s what had kept her alive in the siege.

  She was trembling from the effort of the long climb, but that was OK: she knew that it would pass and her hand would steady. There was plenty of time. The impersonal oceanic murmur of the crowd in Victory Square twenty-two floors below was oddly restful. It didn’t sound human but like the power of waterfalls or the wind in forest trees.

  There was no chance of being seen from below as long as she kept back from the edge. Only the newly built Rizhin Tower on the other side of Victory Square was tall enough to overlook her, and that was still unoccupied. If she were in charge of security, she’d have posted an observer with binoculars in one of the deserted rooms high in the Rizhin Tower. Maybe somebody had, but the architect who designed the three-tiered edifice of the New Mirgorod Hotel had set thirty-foot bronze allegorical figures at the roof corners of every stage. He hadn’t worried that he was giving cover for shooters.

  The final tier of the New Mirgorod Hotel rose dizzyingly high behind her, casting a deep shadow all the way to the parapet. There was a risk of being seen from one of those upper windows, but she’d checked the angles when she scouted the location. The danger was only when she crossed the roof. Once she was in firing position the hut-like lift mechanism housing would hide her, as long as she kept low.

  The roof crossing was only half a dozen paces. Crossings were always a risk, and there was no point in waiting. Elena Cornelius picked up her bag and went. In the cover of the lift housing she crouched low. Knelt. Lay flat, stomach to the ground, face inches from the mix of rough gravel and tar that coated the roof. The waist-high parapet was five yards in front of her.

  During the siege she had crawled on her belly every day. Now she crawled again, hauling herself, knees and elbows and belly across the rough surface, dragging the canvas bag, until she was in the shelter of the parapet. Then she moved right until she was tucked in under the plinth of the bronze statue in the corner.

  The statue was a woman in military uniform facing out across the city, a rifle held at an angle across her breast. Above her huge bronze military boots her calves swelled, shapely and muscular. Elena scrabbled into a sitting position and pressed her back against the parapet wall. She was in a safe high place, a vantage point to hide and watch from and not be seen. She knew how to do this. It was familiar. It was a kind of home. She didn’t think abou
t why she was there, what had led her to this point. All the decisions were already taken. When you were at work, you worked. That was how you survived.

  She unwrapped the Zhodarev rifle, checked the magazine and banged it into position with the heel of her hand. Found the telescopic sight at the bottom of the bag, polished the optics with her sleeve and pushed it onto the rail, easing it forward until it clicked solidly. Then she folded the faded pink towel with the lemon-yellow tractors into a thick sausage, reached up and laid it on the parapet for a barrel rest. Raising herself into a kneeling position, she propped her left elbow on her left knee and raised the rifle, made sure the barrel sat good and solid on its towel rest, settled the stock into her shoulder, pressed her eye to the scope and adjusted the focus.

  The VIP viewing platform jumped into view, crisp and clear, down and to the left of her firing position. Tiers of empty seats. They hadn’t started to arrive yet.

  It was a long shot. She could have done with a more powerful scope, but she didn’t have one. She checked the adjustment of the graticule. It was unchanged from how she’d set it that morning before she left home. The range was six hundred and fifty yards–she’d paced it out a week ago plus some simple geometry to allow for height.

  The warm morning air rested gently against her cheek. Windage, zero.

  Nothing to do but wait and watch.

  4

  Lom had lost sight of Elena Cornelius at the top of Noviy Prospect just before it opened into Victory Square. He tried to find her again, but it was hopeless: there were any number of alleys and doorways she might have taken, or she could have switched direction and ducked past him back down the avenue against the flow of people without him seeing. He hesitated. Considered abandoning looking for her. After all, it was possible he was wrong about what she was doing. Maybe she’d just come to see the parade.

  But he didn’t believe that.

  He made his way out onto the fringe of Victory Square. The open space, laid out on what had once been the much smaller Square of the Piteous Angel, was staggeringly vast. Block after block of streets and buildings (Lom remembered them) had been demolished to make room for it. Rivers and canals had been covered over, the city completely reoriented. And now it was completely filled with people come for the Victory Parade. It was impossible to estimate how many were there: half a million? A million? There were high terraces for seating, and crowds of people standing shoulder to shoulder in the gaps between. He could see across to the raised platform where Rizhin would take his place. The VIP seats were beginning to fill up.

  Not far from the platform the Lodka still stood, the dark and many-roofed headquarters of the old Vlast, no longer on an island between river and canal, occupying one small corner of the square. The Lodka had survived siege bombardment and aerial bombing raids, but now–eviscerated when Chazia removed the great archives and burned most of the contents, overtopped by the surrounding sky rises of concrete and granite and glass with their wedding-cake encrustations and monumental bas-reliefs–the huge cliff of a building looked isolated and diminished. Smartened-up but mothballed. A museum piece.

  And next to the Lodka, dwarfing it, climbing higher–far higher–than any other building in the city, rising tier upon tier of stark grey stone, fluted, slender and almost weightless against the sky, was the Rizhin Tower, which was to be formally declared open that day. The top of the tower, constituting one tenth of the total height of the building, was an immense and gunmetal-grey statue of Papa Rizhin. He was in civilian clothes, standing bare-headed, his long coat lifting behind him slightly in a suggestion of wind. He was stepping forward towards the city, his back to the sea, his right arm raised and outstretched to greet and possess. The statue’s civilian clothing puzzled Lom. Not the military tunic and shoulder boards of the standard Rizhin portrait, it struck an odd note.

  Then the truth struck him. This dizzying and mighty behemoth was not a statue of Rizhin at all; it was a statue of Josef Kantor. Kantor the agitator, the plotter, the revolutionary orator, the killer, the master terrorist.

  Josef Kantor had transformed himself into Papa Rizhin at the siege of Mirgorod. He kept his origins secret, hidden, suppressed. All hints of his former self were ruthlessly obliterated. But here in Victory Square in the heart of Mirgorod–in plain sight, in the most visible, most spectacular place of all, full in the face of the whole of the Vlast–Rizhin thrust the truth of himself at them all, and nobody could see it, or if they did they dared not say. The Rizhin Tower was an act of the most astonishing hubris: a challenge, a yell, a dare, a spit in the eye of the world.

  At that moment a strange noise started to swell and grow in Victory Square. Lom had heard nothing like it before. It began as a low clatter and hum and grew to a great roaring, deafening buzz. It was the sound of the crowd rising to greet the arrival of Papa Rizhin, who had stepped out onto the raised platform. It wasn’t cheering. It was a vibration of excitement like the agitation of a billion bees. The extraordinary noise reverberated around the square and echoed, magnified, off the surrounding buildings.

  Lom turned his back on it. He shoved and threaded his way back into Noviy Prospect, which was almost deserted now, its flags and banners and portraits of Rizhin stirring in a gentle rising breeze. Everyone who was going to Victory Square had found their place; the parades and speeches were about to begin. But where was Elena Cornelius?

  5

  Eligiya Kamilova walks once more the five level miles, the long straight stony road south out of Belatinsk and back to Nikolai Forshin’s dacha. The dacha of the Philosophy League. Keeping her eyes down, no longer even consciously hungry, she walks with slow and fierce determination. One step. One step. One step. All her attention is fixed on her dust-yellowed boots and the pale stalks that are her shins.

  To either side of her, electricity pylons march away across bare earth and dried yellow grass, level to the encircling blued horizon. Grey wooden sheds and grey corrugated-iron roofs. Dust and bone sunlight. The pylons carry no cables. The pylons are built, but the gangs that bring the cables have not yet come.

  Kamilova notices none of this. Not any more. Every day the same. Nothing changes.

  One step. One step.

  She has done this walk every day for a week. Five miles out and five miles back. She wonders how much longer she can.

  Her legs are so thin it frightens her. These fleshless wasted sticks are not hers; they are the legs of one who died long ago. How do they carry her without the shifting contour of muscle? Dried knots and tendons only, visibly working. Her knees are crude obtrusions, like the stones in the unmade road. Her own hands startle her: demonstration pieces of skeletal articulation for the instruction of anatomists.

  My face is gone. I have transparent skin. I have forgotten how to be hungry.

  All day Eligiya Kamilova has stood in line in Belatinsk, Galina’s ration card in her pocket. (Galina has found a job running messages at Lorschner’s. The wage is pitiful but the ration card is more valuable than platinum and silks.) She didn’t know what she was queuing for. People in line in Belatinsk hold tight to the belt of the one in front to keep their place. Too weak to stand alone, they lean against strangers and do not speak.

  All day Kamilova’s line waited and did not move. In the afternoon the shopkeeper closed up.

  ‘Fuck off now,’ he screamed at them. ‘Fuck off. Fuck off. There’s nothing here.’

  So Kamilova turned away and walked back out through the town.

  Belatinsk was everywhere silent, subsided under dugouts, shacks and shanties of rusty iron, planks, cardboard, wire, glass and earth. There was no water, no electricity, no sewerage. Paved streets were dug up for scraggy allotments where nothing properly grew. Everything wood–benches, hoardings, fences, boardwalks–had been ripped up and burned. Vermin everywhere and no repairs to anything.

  She passed a scrap of municipal garden behind iron railings. Sign on the gate: DIG NO GRAVES HERE.

  No cars or trucks on the road out of Bela
tinsk to Forshin’s dacha. On the verge a mare had died, her body swollen hard. Black lips stretched off yellow teeth in a snarl. Black jewel flies were sipping at her eyes and crawling over the blue fatness of her tongue. Kamilova wanted to sit in the dust and lean against her like a couch, just for a while.

  One step. One step. One step.

  She does not know how many more days she can do this. Hunger is not the absence of food. It is a big black rock you carry that fills the sky. It crushes you while you sleep.

  Yet things are better now at Forshin’s dacha than they were on the road.

  The evening after they buried the twice-killed soldier, Kamilova stole a boat from the village at Yamelei. She still felt bad about the boat, but the village would survive and the girls could not walk. Not so far, not all the way. The equations of necessity.

  So Kamilova had taken the boat, and in her they crossed the lake above the sunken city. Still purple waters at twilight and the sound of a distant bell.