Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  The soul of the people is forever striving to behold the sunken city of Litvozh.

  Kamilova knew boats. All night she let the chill wind take them west, and in the dawn they followed the shore to where the westward river flowed out.

  ‘What river is this?’ said Yeva.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kamilova, ‘but it’s going the right way.’

  Low wooded hills and scraps of cool dawn mist. The girls slept under dewy blankets in the shelter of the gunwales, and the river took them into strange country. Unfamiliar hunting beasts called to one another across the water. Dark oily coils surged and rippled, and the backs of great silent fish broke the surface of the river. Kamilova sat in the stern with the gun across her knees and steered a course clear of the black bears that swam slow and strong and purposefully from shore to shore. They passed through a city ruined in the war. Nobody was there. Not anybody at all.

  The end of day brought them across the sudden frontier out of slow memorious places into the hungerland.

  In the deep past and in remoter places even now families and villages might fall into hunger and all of them die. That was one thing. In the towns and cities of the Vlast a wretched person sick and alone without a kopek might starve in a gutter. That was another thing. A ragged inconvenience. But when entire regions, millions of people, conurbations and suburbs and the penumbra of organised rural production, plunged into sudden and total desperate famine, that was something else. That was something never seen before.

  That was the hungerland.

  The boat came to a weir. A tremendous white-water fall. Nothing for it but to sleep and in the morning leave the boat and walk.

  Kamilova, thinking the house on the edge of the nameless town empty, broke in the door. The family was gathered in darkness, curtains drawn against the day. The smell was bad. There were puddles of water on the floor.

  Two chairs were pushed together, and across them lay the corpse of the boy. He might have been fourteen but starvation aged you. You couldn’t tell. The baby was propped in a pram, head to one side on the pillow, dead. The mother on the bed was dead. The daughter sat beside her on the stained counterpane, rubbing at the mother’s chest with a linen towel.

  ‘Where is your father?’ said Kamilova. ‘Did he go for help? For food?’

  The girl glanced up at her without expression and carried on rubbing the dead woman’s chest. The smell of embrocation.

  Kamilova took from her bag a piece of hard dry bread and a handful of potatoes brought from Yamelei and laid them on the bed. The girl didn’t look. The food just lay there on the counterpane.

  When Kamilova reached the door she stopped and turned back, picked the food up again and put it back in her bag. The equations of necessity.

  The girl didn’t glance up when Kamilova left the room.

  Days rose dark in colourless sunshine and set in bleakness. The hungerland walk was one long unrelenting road. Aftermath, aftermath. Deadened days after the end of the world.

  Slowly they realised how late they were. The distortions of slow time in the memorious zone. Here in the hungerland six years had passed, the war was over and this was Rizhin country now.

  ‘Mother will think we forgot her,’ Galina said. ‘She must think we are dead.’

  ‘She is waiting,’ said Yeva. ‘She would never stop waiting.’

  ‘I will take you home,’ said Kamilova. ‘I promise. We’re going there as quick as I can.’

  The girls wrote letters and posted them when they came to towns. We are OK, Mother. We are alive and fine. Not long now. We’ll be with you soon.

  Silence, horrible silence, settled across the hungerland. Livestock, cats and dogs, all dead. Birds and wild things all hunted or driven away. The only sound in the early morning was the soft breath of the dying. The footfalls of carrion eaters on patrol.

  A woman in a garden held up her baby as they walked by.

  ‘Please. Take him, take him. I beg you take him. I cannot feed him. They will eat him when he dies.’

  The child had an enormous wobbling head. A swollen pointed belly. He was already dead.

  They studied starvation and became connoisseurs of hunger. Darkened faces and swollen legs were the symptomology of famishment. Corpse faces with wide and lifeless eyes, skin drawn skull-tight and glossy and covered with sores.

  First your limbs grew weak, then you lost all physical sensation. The body became a numb and burdensome sack. The circulation of the blood grew sluggish until the unnourished muscles of the heart, unable to shift their own weight any more, simply failed to beat. By then you no longer had the energy to care.

  People died working at their desks. They died as they walked the streets.

  There was a shape to it, a pattern of progression. The speed of it surprised them. A few weeks was all it took before the people started dying. Those died who refused to steal or trade their bodies for food. Those died who shared their food with others. Parents who made sacrifices for their children died before them, and then their children died. Those died who refused to countenance the consumption of the most forbidden flesh. In the end it made no difference because everyone who didn’t escape the hungerland died.

  The hungerland was spreading westward, and Kamilova and the girls walked in the same direction. Sometimes they took a lift in a truck and sometimes they got ahead of the hungerland wave. Behind them the cannibal bands were coming. Mobile platoons of mechanised anthropophagi grinding their butchering knives.

  Kamilova shot two men with her gun to save the girls. The equations of necessity. Five shells left.

  All three of them were growing weak. Kamilova knew the signs.

  A cart brought them to Belatinsk one morning, and there they were stuck. Yeva and Galina could walk no more.

  ‘How far to go to Mirgorod?’ Kamilova enquired.

  ‘Twelve hundred miles,’ said the post office clerk. ‘Fifteen maybe.’

  The only way out was the railway.

  ‘Sixty-five roubles,’ said another clerk at another window. ‘Third Class. One way. Each.’

  Kamilova had money, scavenged from the bodies of the roadside dead. Money didn’t help in the deep hungerland, not unless you ate the paper. She had a sheaf of roubles in her pack. It was not enough.

  She sat on a bench by the station in Belatinsk with Yeva and Galina. She had simply reached the end. She didn’t know what to do.

  And then she saw the gleaming domed brow and wild flowing hair of Nikolai Forshin, six foot three and swinging an opera cane, come to the station to enquire about the arrival of a parcel of journals expected from the printers at Kornstadtlein.

  ‘Eligiya? Eligiya Kamilova?’ he called across the road. “Is that you?’

  Not all the members of Forshin’s Philosophy League were happy at the arrival of three extra mouths. Some of the wives were the worst. But Forshin decided, boom-voiced disputatious Nikolai Forshin of the purple bow tie and the hard bright visionary eye. Forshin led. Forshin prevailed. It was Forshin’s dacha and Forshin’s crazy hopeless League.

  At the dacha there was a clear stream for water, a few scrawny chickens that didn’t lay and a meagre vegetable patch. Potatoes were coming on. It was something but not enough. Not nearly enough. Kamilova gave her share to Galina and Yeva, though the girls didn’t know it.

  Forshin’s League was growing fearful. They looked to their defences. There were rumours of gangs in Belatinsk and a trade in human flesh. Starveling packs had already approached the dacha more than once. Stick-people stood in the road and looked. The hungerland was coming, and the walls of Forshin’s dacha were not strong enough to hold it back.

  Eligiya Kamilova reaches the end of the road and turns into the track to the dacha.

  This is the last return. I cannot do that fruitless walk again. It will kill me.

  Forshin himself is standing on the veranda smoking his pipe and watching her come. He is excited. He steps out to meet her, waving a piece of paper in his hand.


  ‘A letter, Eligiya! A letter from Mirgorod is come! The winds are changing. Rizhin himself has made a wonderful speech. “Times of Enlightenment”, that’s what he calls for. We are invited back! The League is to go home, I’m sure of it. We are to have a meeting this evening to resolve the matter. Come with us, Eligiya Kamilova, and bring your bright wonderful girls. Come! It will be a treat for them. Would they not adore to see the streets of Mirgorod again?’

  6

  Elena Cornelius couldn’t get a clean shot. The head of the woman sitting next to Rizhin–Secretary for Finance Yulia Yashina, long neck, aquiline nose, grey hair pulled tight back off a long pale face–floated in the centre of the scope’s optic, and behind her Rizhin’s nose and shoulder.

  That was OK. Eventually he would stand and come forward to the microphoned lectern to speak. Elena Cornelius could wait.

  Marching formations and rumbling military vehicles were passing interminably under the viewing platform. A huge cheer–the kind that used to greet the earth-shaking trudge of the old Novozhd’s platoon of forty-foot war mudjhiks–rose at the sight of atomic bombs on wide flatbed trucks. To Elena they looked ridiculous, like elephantine boiler-plated pieces of plumbing equipment.

  The fresh-painted weaponry of the Vlast–battle tanks, mobile artillery and radar vehicles, rocket launchers–was followed by a display of captured enemy war machines looking battered and drab. Then came the March of the Heroes of Labour. Smiling blond men in overalls. Women in skirts and white ankle socks, waving. To pass the time, Elena let her telescope sight climb the endless rising walls of the Rizhin Tower. Since she could not see Rizhin himself, except one shoulder, she scanned the statue instead. It wasn’t stone or bronze but steel, constructed by armaments engineers from the melted-down ships and guns and shell casings of the enemy. In her scope she could see the polished, shaped sections riveted together. The welding scars like patchwork.

  She got the eye of the statue in her cross hairs.

  Lom had lost time and found nothing. It was hopeless. He couldn’t find her by wandering and randomly looking, not if he had a week. He wondered if he was wasting his time and taking an unnecessary risk by lingering here. He was beginning to feel visible, and if something was going to happen he was probably already too late to prevent it. Elena Cornelius had most likely just joined the crowd to see the parade. But that’s not what he’d sensed when he watched her, and he’d learned to trust feelings like that.

  If I was a sniper, he thought, where would I choose? Where would I go?

  The only way to find her was to think like she thought. Work it out from first principles. Narrow down the options and make a throw of the dice. It was fifty-fifty: choose right or choose wrong. Except it wasn’t fifty-fifty. How many high buildings looked across Victory Square? How many rooftops? How many windows? There were a thousand options, and all of them wrong except one.

  Think it out. Narrow the odds. You’re a lucky man. Things work out for you. Yeah, right.

  The criteria were: a clear shot, access to the shooting position, inconspicuousness, an escape route.

  The first was useless. It didn’t narrow the field. Any building on three sides of the square would give a clear shot from the fourth floor up. The last was useless too: he had no information. And maybe she didn’t intend to escape. That was possible. So he was left with access and inconspicuousness. Access. That was the key. That had to come first. She’d choose a building she could get into, then look for a shooting position, and she’d only abandon it and move on to the next one if there wasn’t a place to fire from.

  But that was no good either. Access to anywhere in the vicinity today was a nightmare. Places were either locked down tight and shuttered, or they had people crowding every window to get a view of the parade. There were police and militia everywhere. Regular sweeps and patrols. There must be a way in somewhere–he knew that because he knew she’d found it–but there was no possibility that he could spot it or guess. Not today.

  Not today.

  Of course not today. But it wasn’t today that mattered. Today she’d have come already knowing where she was making for. She must have scouted the place out beforehand, on another day. She must have poked into corners, looked for vantage points, worked out lines of sight and ways in and out. Preparation. Planning. That meant that, wherever she was now, she’d have had to go there at least once before with plenty of time to look around. The access that mattered wasn’t today but any other day. Any normal day.

  He was getting somewhere. Maybe. He could rule out offices and residential buildings. You couldn’t wander around places like that without attracting attention–not unless you worked or lived there. Well maybe she did. But if so he was defeated: he had no chance. So rule all those buildings out anyway. Which left public places: shops, hotels, museums. And say the place she’d chosen wasn’t too far from where he’d lost her. There was no reason to think that, except that when he’d noticed her she was in the open, visible and vulnerable, and he could assume she’d expose herself as little as possible. It was likely he’d lost sight of her because she’d ducked in somewhere. Not certain, but the odds were in his favour. And this was all about odds.

  He looked around, scanning the buildings. There were three good possibilities: two hotels and the Great Vlast Museum. The museum was closed. She might be in there, but if so he couldn’t follow. Not quickly. Perhaps not at all. That left the two hotels. He was back to fifty-fifty.

  He chose the bigger, which was also nearer to where he’d last seen her. It was a thirty-storey three-tier granite cake. The entrance was guarded by two militia men and cast iron bas-reliefs of steelworkers with bulging forearms and collective farmers brandishing ten-foot scythes.

  Lom took stock of himself. When he arrived yesterday he’d had a shave and a haircut and bought himself a suit. In his pocket he had a thickish wad of rouble notes and ID papers in the name of Foma Drogashvili, which he’d been using on and off for several years. So how did you get to look around inside the New Mirgorod Hotel? You went up to the desk and asked for a room.

  Elena Cornelius watched the aircraft fly past low in the brilliant early-afternoon sky. The bass rumble of slow ten-engined bombers. The screaming of new-made jets trailing coloured vapour. Parachutists spilled from a lumbering transport plane and drifted down under brilliant blossoming canopies of red and yellow, alighting with perfect precision in the space in front of the viewing platform.

  Twisting, ducking fighters enacted dogfights against the warplanes of the Archipelago. One enemy bomber spouted oily smoke and flame and sank lower and lower as it limped from view. When it was out of sight behind the Rizhin Tower there was a loud flash and a white pall rose into the sky as if it had crashed. Perhaps it had. Elena remembered no such dogfights during the siege of Mirgorod. Then, the bombers had come day and night unopposed.

  Gendarmes had thrown a cordon across Karolov Street. On the other side of it a battered old delivery truck was propped up on a jack at the kerb, one wheel off. Two bearded young men lay on the ground, spreadeagled, rifles pointed at their heads. The back of the truck was open, being searched. And beyond the truck was the side entrance to the New Mirgorod Hotel. Lom had a choice: wait, or retrace his steps and try the front entrance on Victory Square.

  He didn’t want to keep going over the same piece of ground. If there were watchers–and there surely were–he would be noticed. He made a quick calculation. Something would be found in the truck or it would not. Either way, within five minutes the situation here would change. But for ten long edgy minutes he waited and nothing was different. He turned back the way he had come.

  The dark-panelled lobby of the hotel, when he finally reached it, was almost deserted. Ornate gilt-framed mirrors. Empty leather sofas under glowing chandeliers. The doorman was settled at a low marble table, cap off, drinking tea. Lom rang the bell at the desk. Waited. Rang it again. He could feel the eyes of the doorman on his back. From the room at the back came a radio commentary on the
parade unfolding outside. He wished the doorman would just step outside and take a look.

  Finally the reluctant clerk appeared.

  ‘A room?’ he said, raising his eyebrows sceptically. It was as if no one had ever asked him for such a thing before. ‘Regrettably, that is not possible. Naturally for Victory Day all our rooms are taken.’

  ‘All of them?’ Lom laid a stack of roubles on the table. The clerk scowled at him.

  ‘Of course all of them. Tomorrow you can have a room. Today, not.’

  ‘Then perhaps someone could just bring me coffee.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now. Yes, now. Thank you. And a newspaper.’ Lom indicated a low sofa against a pillar near the entrance to the lifts. ‘I’ll be over there.’ He went across and sat down to wait. The clerk, scowling, spoke into the telephone on the counter then returned to his back room.

  Minutes passed and Lom’s coffee did not come. He knew he should get out of there. He’d drawn attention to himself. If the clerk hadn’t been calling for tea, who had he been talking to on the phone? And Elena had already had plenty of time: if anything was going to happen it would have happened by now. But he stayed and waited. Eventually the doorman stood up with a sigh from his table by the window, set his cap on his head and went out through the plate-glass doors to take up his position outside on the steps.

  Lom moved.

  Elena Cornelius heard a roar from the crowd twenty-two floors below. An amplified voice was crashing out across the city, carried not only by the loudspeakers in Victory Square but also by every tannoy and radio in Mirgorod. Rizhin had come to the lectern and was speaking.

  The vast crowd hushed, but the hush had its own noise, like waves over shingle. Rizhin’s amplified speech bounced off the wall behind her. The echo confused sense. She could only make out fragments.

  ‘… life has become better, friends, life is happier now… remember yesterday’s sacrifices, yes, but look to tomorrow… a greater victory to come…’