Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  She re-settled the rifle. Pulled back the bolt with the outside of her hand to drive the first cartridge into the breech. One should be enough, but there were nine more in the magazine. She let the cross hairs move along the line of faces on the platform. You. You. You. The graticule came to rest clear and steady in the middle of Papa Rizhin’s head.

  ‘… our vessels explore the cosmos, but we must master our own planet also… inevitably the Archipelago will crumble and fade… the force of history will do our work… the forest… no more dark areas of superstition and myth… this time we will not be prevented, we will take a strong grip…’

  In the siege she had shot without thought or conscience. The whole city then was filled with a loud dinning noise that made everyone always deaf. Sleepwalkers. The invaders wore blank masks. This, today, was different: the face in the cross hairs the focus of all the world and more familiar than her own. A killing imagined a thousand times. Long sleepless years. Her heart beat faster. Perspiration on her forehead. In the roots of her hair.

  She breathed in and breathed out slowly, emptying her lungs. Calling up calm. She reached back to wipe her hand dry on her skirt. Cocked her wrist into the firing hold she had practised till it came easy and smooth. Began to squeeze her obtuse finger gently. Taking up the slack. A breath of wind kissed her sweat-damp cheek.

  Lom pushed open the door onto the hotel roof and stepped out into dazzling glare. The rooftop was empty. There was nobody there and nothing to see but parapet and sky.

  He heard the sound of a single rifle shot. It was unmistakable. And it had come from somewhere above him.

  Not the first-stage roof, the second.

  Shit.

  He spun round, went back inside and ran up the darkened staircase, taking the steps three at a time.

  Elena Cornelius saw the bullet strike the cushioned seat of the chair behind Rizhin. It must have passed his skull by inches, but he didn’t react. Didn’t pause. Didn’t flap a hand at the zip and crack by his ear, like she’d seen people do. He’d heard nothing above the amplified echoes of his own speech.

  Lukasz Kistler was staring, puzzled, at the hole that had been punched in the seat beside him. In a second it would dawn on him what it meant.

  She lined up the cross hairs on Rizhin again, took a deep slow breath, exhaled and fired again. Rizhin’s face disappeared in a puff of soft pink. The energy of the bullet snapped his whole body backwards. He went down as if someone had smashed him full force in the temple with a baseball bat.

  Even in the dim stairwell Lom heard the horrified moan of the crowd. It was like the lowing of a stricken herd. He pounded on up the stairs, floor after floor.

  He almost ran smack into Elena Cornelius coming down, the rifle held delicately in splayed fingers, pointing at the floor.

  ‘It’s me, Elena. You know me. Vissarion. Vissarion Lom.’

  Her eyes were wide and unblinking, glassy bright in the shadows.

  ‘I’ve killed him,’ she said.

  It was like a punch in Lom’s stomach. All the air went out of him. Less than a day in Mirgorod and he had failed. Mission over.

  He took the rifle from her awkward grasp and propped it against the wall.

  ‘You have to lose this,’ he said. ‘Leave it. The bag too. Lose it. We need to get out of here.’

  She didn’t resist. She didn’t move. He took her by the arm and led her down the stairs.

  7

  On a broad front the divisions of the New Vlast army entered the endless forest. Fleets of barges up the wide slow rivers and under the trees.

  The forest is woods within woods, further in and further back. It has an edge but no central point and there is no end to going on. Deeper and deeper for ever. Strange persons live there. It is not safe.

  As long as the divisions kept to their barges on the rivers they made progress, but five yards back from the bank all was impassable: layers of dead wood, luxuriant undergrowth, lake, bog and hill. Oak, ash, elm, maple and linden tree. Thorn and fir. A trackless catalogue of all the forests of northernness and east. Disoriented compass needles swung. Radios sucked in static. Green noise.

  The forest removed irony. It was the place itself. Woodland and shadow and the lair of wild beasts. Every divisional commander was on his or her own. One by one each hauled up on some bend of their nameless river and disembarked and began to burn. Petrol-driven chainsaws ripped resinous raw avenues. The noise echoed down the river valleys. Trundling battle tanks pissed arcs of singeing ignition, the soldiers’ smut-grimed sweat-shone faces gleamed dull and lurid orange, and every day the churned and stinking ash-carpeted swathes extended deeper into the interior of the forest. Fingernails scraping at the heart of green silence. A war against the world.

  The rivers became supply lines for the beachheads. Barge trains shuttled fuel day and night from New Vlast base camps at the forest edge.

  In a week the black smoke had darkened the midday sky.

  Divisions encountered waterlands that would not burn, marshes that sucked at the tracks of wallowing tanks. Engineers sank to the waist in bog and floundered. Horses drowned. Methane pockets burst and burned behind them. Divisions came to sudden rising cliffs and turned aside. Divisions reached the brink of mile-wide bottomless mist-rimmed holes in the ground. Trolls blundered out of the thickets, roaring, hair on fire and blackened blistering skin.

  The advancing swathes of engine-driven desolation drifted left and right, circling round to rejoin themselves, beginning to lose direction, tracing mazy aimless scribbles on the margins of elsewhere under the trees.

  Chapter Five

  Skulking along behind the revolution’s back

  the petty functionaries stuck out their heads…

  From the motherland’s farthest corners they assembled,

  hurriedly changing their clothes and settling in

  at all the institutions,

  their chair-hardened buttocks

  solid as washbasins.

  Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930)

  1

  Dead shock pulsed out across Mirgorod from the head of Papa Rizhin obliterated in a pink flower. His poleaxed fall punched the city in the face.

  There was a spontaneous attempt to put a roadblock across Noviy Prospect, but the tide of dazed and weeping spectators rolled down out of Victory Square and swept on through, and nobody seriously tried to stop them. Militia patrols gathered in stricken leaderless huddles. Officers with panic in their eyes jogged between them barking orders no one seemed to hear.

  Elena Cornelius pulled herself together quickly. She dropped her dark coat in an alleyway. In a white short-sleeved blouse she was taller and ten years younger, narrow shoulders and pale muscular arms, almost unrecognisable as the woman of the morning crowd. From six years back Lom remembered a rounder, fuller face, but she was all bone structure now. Nose pushed askew and night-blue eyes. The lines of a mouth long kept pressed tight shut to keep words back. Lom noticed her damaged hands. Fingernails not grown properly back.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  ‘Helping you,’ said Lom. ‘Two are less visible than one.’

  They walked among the stricken, the shocked, the wandering. Not fast, not slow, catching no one’s eye. Gendarmes were hauling people from the crowd. Pushing them against the wall. Spilling the contents of pockets and bags onto the pavement.

  ‘I don’t need you,’ said Elena. ‘I’m better alone.’

  ‘I’m good at this kind of thing.’

  Bright banners fluttered in the strengthening wind. Rizhin’s huge smiling face watched over them. Rizhin’s face–Josef Kantor’s face–the man Lom had known, become a monstrous bullying avuncular god. The death of him left the world strangely deflated and pointless. Not the world, thought Lom. Only me.

  ‘Were you following me?’ said Elena. ‘Were you looking for me?’

  ‘Later,’ said Lom. ‘We’ll talk later, when we’re clear.’

  ‘What were you doing there? H
ow could you know?’

  ‘I didn’t know. I saw you in the street. You were pretty obvious. But I lost sight of you, and by the time I found you again it was too late.’

  ‘Too late? For what?’

  ‘Too late to stop what you did.’

  She left him then. Turned on her heel into a side alley, a narrow chasm between high windows and steep blank walls. Lom thought of hurrying after her. Catching up. What happened to you? How are you become this? But he let her go and watched her until she reached the far end of the alley and turned to the right. She didn’t look back.

  Then he followed.

  2

  Elena Cornelius was going east. The streets were almost empty. She took a low underpass beneath the thundering Rizhin Highway: a urinous pillared human culvert.

  She was easy to follow. Lom trailed her across waste and cratered rubble-lands and through pockets of still-standing bullet-pitted soot-grimed war damage. She led him into a wilderness of elephantine newness: concrete apartment buildings hastily thrown up among the ruins, already stained and dispirited and bleached colourless in the watery afternoon desolated sun. Lom logged the meaningless street names and recognised nothing at all, but he always knew where he was: wherever you went in Mirgorod you could tell your position by the Rizhin Tower. The skied statue of dead Josef Kantor was a beacon. A steering star.

  He remembered the old city, the shifting rain-soft city, layered with glimpses, haunted with strange perceptiveness, turnings and doorways alive with contending futures, but now the triumphant future was here, and if the city was littered with shards and broken images, they were dry bone fragments of the past. Angels and giants were gone, rusalkas also: the waters had closed over them and people behaved as if they had never existed.

  The blank blinding sky on concrete and asphalt made him squint. He was thirsty, and heavy with obscure guilt. He had made a mistake somewhere, taken a wrong turning, this future now and in Mirgorod his fault. His intentions were good, but history judged only results, and all his choices so far had been bad. The world around him had come out wrong. One day back in Mirgorod and here he was, trailing across wasted ground after a damaged and solitary woman who had killed a monster and made things worse. He didn’t know why he was here, except there was nothing better to do.

  He kept following Elena Cornelius. She entered an apartment block indistinguishable from the others except by a name. KOMMUNALKA SUBBOTIN NO. 19.

  Lom waited in a doorway across the square to see if she would come out again, but three hours later she had not. He turned away then, back towards the clustered sky rises under the reaching steel arm of the Rizhin statue.

  3

  General-Commander Osip Rizhin held himself rigidly upright in the chair while the doctor leaned in close and did his work. Papa Rizhin stared at the desk in front of him and focused his mind on the pain. He held himself open to it and felt it to the full.

  His right eye was swollen shut but his left eye was good. Water streamed from it, not tears but cleansing salt burn, and when the doctor offered him morphine Rizhin cursed him. He had borne worse, in other chairs in other rooms, chairs with straps in rooms with barred high windows. Pain was a good harsh friend. An honest friend. Pain was strength and focus. Everyone who had ever leaned over him in a chair and caused him pain was dead now, and he was still here, the survivor, the indestructible.

  The whole of the right side of his face was a swollen, shifting, stiffening map of numbness and pain. Every fresh insertion of the needle, every tug of thread, every application of the burning antiseptic pad, brought its own unique and individual new agony. Rizhin paid attention to the particularity of them all, the thing that made each pain different from every other pain he had ever felt. Pain magnified the right hemisphere of his head until it was bigger than the whole of the rest of the world, but Rizhin knew all the intimate topography of it. Carefully, attentively, he traced across it every new event in the intricate history of hurting.

  The collar and back of his dress-uniform tunic were drenched with cold sticky blood. Fragments of human meat and bone. Most of the blood and all of the fleshy mess was not his but Vladi Broch’s. The sniper’s bullet had deeply furrowed Rizhin’s cheek as it passed on by and entered the seated Broch on a downward trajectory, finding the soft gap between left shoulder and neck. A trajectory that took the top of Broch’s spine out through a hole in his back.

  The doctor straightened up and dabbed at his handiwork on Rizhin’s cheek with an iodine cloth. He washed his hands in a bowl of soap and then took a clean handkerchief from his pocket to polish his round-rimmed spectacles. The doctor had soft subtle hands. He wore his thinning hair combed back.

  Trust no doctor, that was Rizhin’s iron rule. Doctors were the cunning eunuch viziers of the modern world. Mountebank snake-oil alchemists. Obfuscating cabalists of a secretive knowledge. Master superciliists. All surgeons and physicians played you false. In comfortably upholstered rooms they wove their mockery and plots.

  Doctor, respected doctor, fear your patient.

  ‘There will be a scar, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s nothing I can do about that. I’ve been as neat as I can.’

  He began to prepare a dressing pad.

  ‘A battle scar is a source of pride,’ Rizhin growled at him through lopsided tongue and uncooperative mouth. ‘A million of our veterans bear far worse than this, and they’re the lucky ones.’

  4

  Nikolai Forshin convenes a conference of the Philosophy League at eight in the evening to consider the letter from Mirgorod.

  ‘Of course you must come to our meeting, Eligiya Kamilova,’ he says. ‘You are one of us, and I may need your support.’

  They gather in the principal room of the dacha, part salon, part library: a room of divans and cretonne and canework chairs, threadbare rugs on a parquet floor. Forshin has left the doors to the veranda open, admitting sullen lilac evening. The birch avenue flimsy and skeletal.

  Everyone is there: Forshin himself, standing tall and wild-haired at the fireplace, brimming with enthusiasm; the economist Pitrim Brutskoi; Karsin the lexicographer; Olga-Marya Rapp, novelist of the woman’s condition; the historians Sitzenvaldt and Polon; Likht the architect and tiny birdlike Yudifa Yudifovna, one-time editor of the short-lived New Tomorrows Review. Wives and husbands and lovers are crammed into the room too, squeezing onto sofas, propping cushions on the floor. Here are all the members of Forshin’s odd ad-hoc league of the self-exiled and self-appointed intelligentsia, withdrawn into obscurity when the air of the Writers and Artists Union began to chill against them. One by one they got out before the cycle of denunciation, ostracism and arrest got an unbreakable grip. Forshin recruited them. Encouraged them. Gathered them in. Told them they were awaiting better times. At Forshin’s dacha they could work and write and plan. There were schemes and journals to be prepared for publication when the wheel turned.

  All are thin now, gaunt, their clothes worn thin and polished with age and overuse.

  We are the last of the last of the cultured generation, Forshin had said to each of them tête-à-tête over tea and petit-beurre biscuits in a quiet corner of the Union. Confronted by horrors on such a scale, such a massiveness and totality of alien attitude, our cultured souls can have no response. There is no place for us here. We are numbed. We are enfeebled. We are without resources. We are exiled from the world itself. Our own country no longer exists, so we must learn to breathe in a vacuum and float three feet above the earth. We must withdraw from the world and wait for other times, until the call comes–as one day it will–for us to return.

  But now–this very day–that call has come. So Forshin believes. Pacing in front of the mantelpiece he reads to them once more extracts from Pinocharsky’s momentous letter.

  ‘Come back to the capital, Nikolai! The times are changing, and much for the better. Now is the moment for the Philosophy League to step into the light.’

  Pinocharsky told in his letter how Rizhin h
imself had commissioned him to found a great new institution, the House of Enlightened Arts!

  ‘We are to have our own new building,’ Pinocharsky wrote. ‘A splendid and beautiful place. A true monument of modernity! The plans are already drawn. I have seen them, Nikolai! Rizhin himself had a model before him on his desk when he spoke to me. Oh, you should have heard him speak, Nikolai. He is a surprisingly cultured man. Not crude at all. He speaks our language. I did not expect this at all. I remember his exact words. “Get me writers, Pinocharsky!” That’s what Rizhin said to me. “Get me musicians. Artists. Intellectuals. Build me a palace of culture. What we need now is people who will look at life clearly and show us its truth. Intellectuals will produce the goods we require most of all. Even more than power plants and airplanes and factories, we must forge strong new human souls.”

  ‘I must confess I was reserved at first. I played my cards close to my chest, as you can imagine. Factories are important too, I said wisely. But Rizhin leaned towards me and touched my arm. “I myself,” he said, “I myself wrote verse in my youth. You doubt me but I did. I respect poetry. I respect art. I am myself a creative man. I am your brother and your friend.”

  ‘I declare, Nikolai, that Papa Rizhin had tears in his eyes! “Do you mean this?” I said to him. (I wanted him to see I was a canny operator. A fellow with something about me.) “Let there be an amnesty,” that’s what Rizhin said then. “A great homecoming welcome for our finest minds, and past disagreements forgotten: that was then, this is now; we had to be tough, but now it is time to be kind.” ’

  Forshin finishes reading the great letter aloud, stuffs it in the pocket of his jacket with a flourish and pauses to light his pipe.

  ‘And there you have it, friends,’ he says, effortless powerful voice booming. ‘We have no choice; our duty is clear. Our country and our people need us now and so we must return to Mirgorod. And the call has come none too soon, for frankly the conditions here are worsening. Belatinsk is no longer safe for us.’