Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  Bauker and Vasilisk pushed the table to the side of the room and rolled back the carpet. Rizhin presided over the gramophone, playing arias from light operas and ribald comic songs. He led the singing with his fine tenor voice. The bodyguards circulated, refilling glasses.

  ‘Dance!’ said Rizhin. ‘Dance!’ He put on ‘Waltz of the Southern Lakes’ three times in a row, loud as the machine would go. The men danced with other men or jigged on the spot alone. Yashina, tall and gaunt, twirled on her spiky heels, arms upraised, face a mask of serious concentration. Gribov went to take her in his arms, and when she ignored him he pulled out a handkerchief and danced with it the country way, stamping and shouting like the peasant he used to be. He lunged at Kistler, breathing grappa fumes. Kistler ducked out of his way.

  ‘Osip!’ shouted Gribov. ‘Osip! Put on the one with dogs!’

  ‘What’s this about dogs?’ said Marina Trakl, the new Secretary for Agriculture, red-faced. She was very drunk. ‘Are there dogs? I adore dogs!’

  ‘These are dogs that sing,’ said Gribov. He started to dance with her.

  ‘Then let us have singing dogs!’ Marina Trakl grinned, snatching Gribov’s handkerchief and waving it in the air.

  ‘Of course,’ said Rizhin. ‘Whatever you say.’ He changed the record to Bertil Hofgarten’s ‘Ball of the Six Merry Dogs’. When the dogs came in on the second chorus Rizhin started hopping and yelping himself, face twisted in a lopsided beatific smile. Kistler hadn’t seen Rizhin so full of drink. Normally he left the aquavit and the grappa to the others and watched.

  ‘Come on, you fellows!’ called Rizhin, dancing. ‘Bark with me! Bark!’

  One by one, led by Gribov, the members of the Central Committee pumped their elbows and put back their heads and howled like hounds and bitches at the broken moons.

  ‘Yip! Yip! Yip! A-ruff ruff ruff! Wah-hoo!’

  ‘Come on, Rond!’ yelled Rizhin. ‘You too!’

  Peller, the Secretary for Nationalities, slipped on spilled food and fell flat on his back, legs stuck out, laughing. He wriggled on his back in the mess.

  ‘Yap! Yap! Yap!’

  When the music stopped Gribov slumped exhausted and sweaty on a couch next to Kistler, undid his jacket, put back his head and began to snore. Kistler jabbed him when Rizhin, face flushed, eyes suddenly on fire, drained his glass and banged the table. It was time for Rizhin’s speech.

  ‘Look at ourselves, my friends,’ he began. ‘What are we?’

  He paused for an answer. Somebody made a muffled joke. A few people laughed.

  ‘What was that? I didn’t hear,’ said Rizhin, but no one spoke. The atmosphere was suddenly tense.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we are,’ Rizhin continued. ‘Nothing. We are nothing. Look at this planet of ours: a transitory little speck in a universe filled with millions upon millions of far greater bodies.’ He gestured towards the ceiling. ‘Out there, above us, there are countless suns in countless galaxies, and each sun has its own planets. What is any one of us? What is a man or a woman? We are, in actual and literal truth, nothing. Our bodies are collections of vibrating particles separated by emptiness. The very stuff and substance of our world is nothing but light and energy held in precarious patterns of balance, and mostly it is nothing at all. We are accidental temporary assemblages in the middle of a wider emptiness that is passing through us even now, at this very moment, even as we pass through it. Emptiness passing through emptiness, each utterly unaffected by the other. The energies of the universe pass through us like Kharulin rays, as if we are not here at all. We are our own graves walking. We are handfuls of dust.’

  Several faces were staring at Rizhin with open dismay. Gribov leaned over in a fug of grappa to whisper in Kistler’s ear, ‘What the fuck’s the man talking about? What’s all this crazy shit?’

  Kistler winced. ‘You’re too loud,’ he hissed. ‘For fuck’s sake, keep it down.’

  Every time Kistler glanced at Hunder Rond the man was watching him. Their eyes locked for a second, then Rond turned away.

  One day, little prince, thought Kistler. One day I’ll snap your fucking thumbs.

  ‘But what a gift this nothingness is, my friends!’ Rizhin was saying. ‘It is the gift of immensity! Once we see that this world, this planet, is nothing, we realise what our future truly holds. Not one world, but all the worlds. The universe. The stars like sand on the beach. The stars like water, the oceans we sail. Our present world is trivial: it is merely the first intake of breath at the commencement of the endless sentence of futurity.’

  Rizhin poured himself another glass, the clink of bottle against tumbler the only sound in the room. He fixed them with burning eyes. It was Rizhin the poet, Rizhin the artist of history, speaking now.

  ‘I have seen this future! Red rockets, curvaceous, climbing on parabolas of steam and fire. making the sky seem small and wintry-blue. Because the sky is small. We can take it in our fists! I have seen these rockets of the future rising into space, carrying a new human type to their chosen grounds. Individuals whose moral daring makes them vibrate at a speed that turns motion invisible. There are new forms in the future, my friends, and they need to be filled with blood. We are the first of a new humankind. Where death is temporary a million deaths mean nothing.’

  After the dinner and the dancing, Rizhin led the way to his cinema. Blue armchairs in pairs, a table between each pair: mineral water, more grappa, chocolate and cigarettes. Rugs on the grey carpet. They watched an illicit gangster film, imported from the Archipelago: men in baggy suits with wide lapels fought over a stolen treasure and a dancing girl with silver hair. Then came a Mirgorod Studios production, Courageous Battleship! Torpedoed in the Yarmskoye Sea, a hundred shipwrecked sailors line an iceberg to sing a song of sadness, a requiem for their lost ship.

  Halfway through the film, Rizhin leaned across and gripped the elbow of Selenacharsky, secretary for culture.

  ‘Why are the movies of the Archipelago better than ours?’

  Selenacharsky turned pale in the semi-darkness and scribbled something in his notebook.

  Dawn was coming up when they filed out of the cinema into the scented courtyard. Kistler was going to his car when Rizhin appeared at his elbow.

  ‘I shoot in the mornings at the pistol range. Join me, eh, Lukasz? We’ll have a chat, just you and me. Man to man.’

  Kistler groaned inwardly. His head hurt.

  ‘Of course, Osip.’

  ‘Good. Nine thirty sharp.’

  3

  Kistler managed a couple of hours’ sleep and returned to Rizhin’s dacha stale and depressed, unbreakfasted, the dregs of the wine and the grappa still in his blood, a sour taste of coffee on his tongue. The dinner of the night before weighed heavy in his stomach. He felt queasy.

  He followed the sound of gunfire to Rizhin’s shooting range, a crudely functional concrete block among almond trees. Vasilisk the bodyguard, six foot three, blond and beautiful, was lounging on a chair by the door, white cotton T-shirt tight across his chest. He was wearing white tennis shoes and regarded Kistler with sleepy expressionless sky-blue eyes.

  Kistler nodded to him and entered the shooting range.

  Vasilisk rose lazily to his feet and padded in behind him. Closed the door, leaned against the wall and folded his arms. Kistler watched the muscles of the bodyguard’s shoulders sliding smoothly. His thickened honey-gold forearms.

  Rizhin was alone inside the building, bright and fresh in shirtsleeves, firing at twenty-five-yard targets with a pistol. Three rounds then a pause. You could cover the holes in the target with the palm of your hand.

  He paused to reload. The gun was fat and heavy in his swollen fists but his fingers on the magazine were lightning-quick. Nimble. Practised.

  ‘Do you know firearms, Lukasz?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You should. Our existence depends on them. The powerful should study and understand the foundations of their power. This, for instance, is a Sepora .44 magnum.
Our VKBD officers carry these. Heavy in the hand, but they shoot very powerful shells. Very destructive. They tend to make a mess of the human body. The removal of limbs. The bursting of skulls. Large holes in the stomach or torso. Butchery at a distance. Not a pretty death.’ He turned and fired seven shots in rapid succession. The noise was deafening. An unmistakable acrid smell.

  Rizhin offered the gun to Kistler.

  ‘Would you like to shoot, Lukasz? It’s important to keep one’s skills up to scratch’

  ‘No,’ said Kistler. ‘Later perhaps. I drank too much grappa last night.’

  Rizhin shrugged.

  ‘Your hand’s trembling,’ he said.

  Kistler couldn’t stop himself looking down at his hands. It was a sign of submission. He cursed himself inwardly.

  Careful.

  He held his hands out in front of him, palms down.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  Rizhin ejected the magazine from the pistol and reloaded, taking a fresh magazine from his pocket.

  ‘You enjoyed our evening then?’ he said. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Of course! It’s good to know one’s colleagues better. The holiday season is valuable. Time well spent.’

  ‘I thought you were bored. You seemed bored. Gribov can be overpowering.’

  ‘Not at all. A little tired perhaps. I’d had a long journey.’

  Rizhin raised his arm and squeezed off three rapid shots. ‘But you keep a distance–I see you doing it–and that’s sound. I admire it in you. Music and feasting are excellent things, Lukasz; they reduce the bestial element in us. Song and dance, food and wine, good company: they calm the soul and make one amiable towards humanity. But we aren’t ready for softness yet, you and I. Today is not the time to stroke people’s heads. Of course, opposition to all violence is the ultimate ideal for men like us, but you have to build the house before you hang the pictures. Your attitude last night was a criticism of me, which I accept.’

  ‘No. Not at all, Osip. I only—’

  ‘But yes, it was, and I accept it. I’ve sent the others home, you know. I’ve packed them all off back to Mirgorod, back to their desks. There is work to be done and they must get to it.’

  ‘What? All of them?’ said Kistler.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased. Our colleagues bore you, Lukasz, isn’t that so? Be honest with me. I’ll tell you frankly, they bore me too. For now I must use people like them, but they’re narrow, they have limited minds. Not like you and me. We see the bigger picture.’

  Where is this going?

  Vasilisk the bodyguard moved across to a wooden chair. The neat brown leather holster nestled in the small of his back bobbed with the rhythm of his buttocks as he walked. Vasilisk settled into the chair, crossed legs stretched out in front of him, and absorbed himself in studying his fingernails.

  Rizhin was turning his pistol over with thick clumsy-looking fingers.

  ‘What I was trying to say last night,’ he continued, ‘but I was drunk and over-poetical… what I was trying to say is that this–this, all around us, our work and our diplomacy and our cars and our dachas–this is not the point to which history is leading us. This is only the beginning: the first letter of the first word of the first sentence of the first book in the great library of futurity. You see this as well as I do.’

  ‘There’s a lot more to be done,’ said Kistler cautiously. ‘Of course. Certainly. Our industry…’

  Rizhin fished out three more shells from his pocket, ejected the magazine and pressed them into place one by one. Replaced the magazine in the pistol.

  ‘I’m talking philosophically,’ he said. ‘The moral compass is not absolute, you see. It has changed and we have a new morality now. A new right. A new good. A new true. Our predecessors were scoundrels; the angels were an obfuscation, the things of the forest bedbugs. Leeches. A distortion of the moral gravity. Whatever serves the New Vlast is moral. That’s how it must be, for now. Where all death is temporary then death is nothing. Killing is conscienceless. A million deaths, a billion deaths, are nothing.’

  ‘But we need people,’ said Kistler. ‘Strong healthy people, educated, burning with energy. We need them to work. And we need steel. We need oil. We need power. We need mathematics and engineering. We need to be clever, Osip, or the Archipelago will—’

  Rizhin brushed him off with a gesture. ‘The Archipelago will be ground to powder under the wheels of history, Lukasz,’ he said. ‘You underestimate inevitability.’

  He raised the pistol and levelled it at Kistler’s head, the ugly blackness of the barrel mouth pointing directly between his eyes.

  ‘History is as inevitable and unstoppable as the path of the bullet from this gun if I pull the trigger. Effects follow causes.’

  Kistler made an effort to take his eyes from the pistol. His gaze met Rizhin’s soft-brown gentle look.

  ‘Osip…’ he began.

  Rizhin turned away and fired a shot at the target. The raw explosion echoed off the concrete walls. Kistler realised his hands were damp. The back of his shirt was cold and sticky against his skin.

  ‘I had hopes for you, Lukasz,’ said Rizhin. ‘I was going to involve you. You’re a man of fine qualities. An outstandingly useful fellow. I was going to take you with us. But I find you are also a sentimentalist. Your belly is soft and white and you aren’t to be trusted. You’ve let me down. Badly.’

  ‘I don’t understand this,’ said Kistler. ‘What’s happening here, Osip? Where is this going to?’

  ‘Tell me about Investigator Vissarion Lom.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Feeble. Feeble. Where is the famous Kistler fire in the guts? Where is the energy?’ Rizhin pulled a crumpled typescript from the back pocket of his trousers and pushed it towards him. Kistler read the first few lines.

  Kistler Residential–Internal

  23.47 Transcription begins

  Kistler: Yes?

  Unknown caller: I wish to speak with Lukasz Kistler.

  Kistler: This is Kistler. Who the fuck are you?

  ‘I know this is Lom,’ said Rizhin. ‘He’s a man I know. He circles me, Lukasz. He buzzes in my ear. I can’t shake him off.’

  ‘So shoot me.’

  Rizhin shook his head.

  ‘I want you to extend your vacation, Lukasz. Another week or two maybe. I’ve had enough of this bastard Lom. I want to trace him. I want to tie him down and finish him. And he’s not doing this alone; there are conspiracies here, Lukasz, and you’re deep in the whole nest of shit, and I’m going to know the extent of it. The whole fucking thing. Names. Dates. Connections. Circles of contact. You’ll stay here and spend some time with Rond and his people. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other. We’ll have more talks.’

  4

  Back in Mirgorod again after the long journey from Vitigorsk, Lom wasted no time. He dialled from a call box at the Wieland Station. The contact number Kistler had given him rang and rang. He hung up and tried again.

  Eventually someone answered. A woman’s voice. Cautious.

  Yes? Who is this?

  ‘I want to speak with Lukasz Kistler.’

  Name, please. Your name.

  ‘I will speak to Kistler. Only Kistler. He is expecting me.’

  Secretary Kistler is unavailable.

  ‘I’ll call back. Give me a time.’

  The Secretary will be unavailable for some considerable time, perhaps days, perhaps longer. You may discuss your business with me. What is your name?

  Lom cut the connection.

  He took a cab across the city and walked the last few blocks to the war-levelled quarter of the rubble dwellers, to the cellar Elena Cornelius had led him to. His link to the Underground Road. Konnie and Maksim were there. So was Elena, looking strained. Hunted.

  ‘I can’t reach Kistler,’ said Lom. ‘I’ve got something he can use. Devastating material. Dynamite. In Kistler’s hands it will bring Rizhin down. Definitely. But Kistler is out of contact.
His number’s no good. I thought you could—’

  ‘Kistler has been arrested,’ said Maksim.

  Lom felt the warmth drain from his face.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. When?’

  ‘He went to Rizhin’s dacha. He’s being held there under interrogation. Rizhin is there with him, and so is Rond. Nobody else.’

  ‘How do you know this? How can you be sure.’

  ‘We have somebody there,’ said Konnie. ‘On the dacha staff. There is no doubt.’

  ‘But Kistler is alive?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Maksim. ‘For now he is alive, though what state he’s in…’

  ‘Is there anybody else?’ said Lom. ‘Anyone else who could use the material I have, like Kistler could?’

  ‘In the Presidium? No. Not a chance.’

  ‘Then I have to get Kistler out of there and back to Mirgorod,’ said Lom.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ said Maksim. ‘He’s being held by the Parallel Sector in Rizhin’s own fucking dacha.’

  ‘Nothing’s impossible,’ said Lom. ‘I need Kistler. Tell me about this dacha. Tell me about your contact there.’

  ‘No,’ said Maksim. ‘It’s out of the question.’

  ‘This material,’ said Konnie. ‘It’s as big as you say? It’s that dangerous for Rizhin?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Lom. ‘Poisonous. Lethal. In Kistler’s hands it will bring him down.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Maksim.

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘First you tell me about Rizhin’s dacha.’

  ‘But what you’ve got is really that good?’

  ‘Yes. If we can get Kistler back to Mirgorod, free, and arm him with what I have, he can turn the Central Committee against Rizhin and he will fall.’

  Konnie glanced at Maksim.

  ‘We won’t tell you where Rizhin’s dacha is,’ she said. ‘You’ll need help. We’ll take you there. We’ll go with you.’