Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  One portrait in particular caught his attention. A beautiful young woman was leaning forward towards the camera, kohl-rimmed eyes wide, bright and eager, long silver-blond hair flowing from under a headdress made of birds’ wings. Her body was squeezed into a spectacular confection of feathers and fruit and flowers and bead-covered concertina sleeves, and she held some kind of stick or staff in her hand, wound round with ivy. There was a typed caption set into the mounting card: ‘AVRIL AVRILOVA as the BEREHINYA QUEEN in YOU UNDER THE LEAVES WITH ME! Produced and directed by Captain T Y Lebwohl’. There was a date, more than twenty years before, and a signature scrawled in a rounded girlish script, written big and bold across the girl’s overspilling, fruit-bedecked bosom: ‘To Billroth. For the Friends and the Memories. Avrilova’.

  Maroussia came back from the counter with a pot of coffee on a dented pewter tray. Bowls of red pork soup. A heap of apricot pastries.

  ‘Yesterday’s pastries,’ she said. ‘They were cheap. I don’t think they’re too stale.’

  ‘Good,’ said Lom. ‘Wonderful.’ He meant it. The coffee was thick and strong, and he found he was hungry again. He heaped in sugar and scooped out the cream from a couple of pastries and stirred it in. Finished the first mug in one long gulp and poured himself a second.

  ‘Vissarion?’ said Maroussia. ‘Why did we survive? Whoever killed those gendarmes, why didn’t they find us?’

  ‘OK,’ said Lom, wiping crumbs from his mouth with the back of the hand. ‘Let’s think about it.’ In the warm fug of Billroth’s, his belly filled with coffee and pastries, what had happened was no longer an impossible irruption of uncanny violence. It was a problem to analyse. There were likelihoods to be appraised, improbabilities to be peeled away, kernels of fact to be rooted out into the light. Pragmatic decisions to be made. And he was good at that. He was trained. ‘There are three possibilities,’ he said. ‘One.’ He ticked it off on his finger. ‘The attack was unconnected to us. We just happened to be there. Whoever did it, they did what they came to do and then they left.’

  Maroussia made a face.

  ‘You think that was nothing to do with us?’ she said. ‘You think it was a coincidence?’

  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Nor do you.’

  ‘OK,’ said Lom. He folded down another finger. ‘Second possibility. They were looking for us. We were the target. But they didn’t find us. So why didn’t they find us? We weren’t hard to find.’

  ‘They could have been disturbed,’ said Maroussia. ‘Interrupted before they finished.’

  ‘Disturbed by what?’ said Lom.

  ‘I don’t know. Anything.’

  Lom shook his head.

  ‘I can’t see it,’ he said. ‘If they were after us, why did they fail? No reason to fail. Nothing stopping them. So…’ Another finger. ‘Third possibility. We have an ally. Or allies. The attack was meant to be help us. After all, that’s what it did. It got us out.’

  ‘In that case, why did they disappear?’ said Maroussia. ‘Why didn’t they stay and let us out and take us with them?’

  ‘Presumably so we wouldn’t see who they were,’ said Lom. ‘Our ally wants to remain anonymous.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’ said Maroussia.

  Lom shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Coincidence? Enemy? Ally? It’s all speculation. None of this is information we can work with. All we can do is carry on. Get to Vishnik’s apartment as quickly as possible. But be more cautious. Stay away from patrols and checkpoints. Keep off trams. Walk.’

  Lom paused and looked up as a tall slender man in a grey astrakhan hat came in, pulled off his hat and slumped into a deep chair next to the fire on the other side of the room. He was grey-faced and gaunt almost to the point of emaciation. He waved the barman over to give his order, then leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. The dark shadow-rings under his eyes looked like bruises.

  Maroussia picked at a stale pastry. She hadn’t touched the coffee. Lom’s rationalised anatomy of the situation hadn’t dispelled the silence in the gendarme station. The torn bodies. The smell of blood. The insistent ringing of the telephone.

  ‘What you said to Chazia,’ she said at last. ‘On the phone. You threatened her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ said Maroussia. ‘You didn’t have to say anything at all.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I need to find the Pollandore,’ said Maroussia. ‘That’s all I’m interested in. Nothing else.’

  ‘Chazia had your mother killed,’ said Lom.

  ‘Did she? It was Safran that shot her.’

  ‘On Chazia’s orders. And she’s still looking for you. Those gendarmes had your picture.’

  ‘But why? It makes no sense. I’m nothing. Why would Chazia even know or care that I exist?’

  ‘Because of the angel. Because of the Pollandore.’

  Maroussia stared at him.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘But I think it. There’s a connection. Chazia. Angel. Pollandore.’

  ‘So you reached into the Lodka and yanked Chazia’s tail?’ she said.

  ‘To see what she does.’

  Maroussia glared.

  ‘It was a spur of the moment thing,’ said Lom.

  ‘I’m still going to Vishnik’s apartment,’ said Maroussia.

  ‘Then finish the pastries and have some coffee before we go. It’s going to be a long cold walk.’

  11

  Antoninu Florian, at rest in the wing-backed chair by the fire in Billroth’s, listened to Lom and Maroussia’s whispered talk with a corner of his mind. Eyes closed, he heard it all, as he heard the crackle and hiss and slip of coals in the fire, the stir of smoke, the steam from the samovar on the counter. The tick of spoon against side of cup. The breathing of the man behind the counter. The bark of the pink women’s laughter.

  He leaned forward and picked a fragment from his plate. Fingernails clicked against ceramic. The apple cake exploded on his tongue, a shattering of acid and sugar and cinnamon and orchard earth. He sipped at his lemon tea. It was hot and sour. He crushed sugar-grit against the bottom of the glass with a spoon. The teeth in his mouth were sharp. He took another sip of tea and listened to the murmuring traffic roar of the city rumbling overhead. He discriminated a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand separate sounds. Each one was heard. Nothing was merged and muddy, everything was distinct: every engine cough and rumbling wheel, every footfall, every shout. The brush of every sleeve. The sifting fog.

  Florian detested the city and wished he had not come back again. He resented the press of human crowds against his sense of privacy and solitude. He was tired of worrying away at the weight of what had been done and straining at the looming, muttering shadow-gates of what must be done next. The weight of choice and consequence had long ago grown wearisome. All he wanted to do was fill his lungs with cold clear air and stretch out his limbs and run among trees. He wanted to sleep out the heat of the day in the grass by a lake with a belly full of meat. He wanted to clear his mind of words.

  He hated Mirgorod, but he had returned. The call had come, insistent, almost below the threshold of cognition, and he answered, as he always did. He’d sensed the mind of the living angel fallen in the forest, the terrible widening horror of its seeping poison, and he’d felt the movement in the Pollandore, the opening of many new possibilities. He had no choice but to make the long journey to Mirgorod again, because this was a moment of turning.

  And now he considered his own choices once more, as he had done already several times that morning. The woman mattered–she was a maker of difference, an agent of change–but it wasn’t yet clear what her effect would be. Influences from the forest were driving her towards the Pollandore, and that made him uneasy. They wove their stories around her and told her their tales; they gave her what they needed her to hear, but the consequences could be disastr
ous. While the Pollandore remained where it was, in the world beyond the border, the border stayed permeable: forest breathed in the world, world in the forest. But if the Pollandore was… touched, that would be the end of it, the green wall would be shut. The angel, its contact severed, would die, and the forest would live, but there could be no reopening: the forest would be gone from the world.

  Was that what the minds from the forest at work here intended? He would not let it happen. He would intervene first. If necessary he would kill the woman. Yet the Pollandore itself drew the woman forward, for purposes of its own. It was murky. Florian could not see. He didn’t know what he should do.

  The woman and the man who was with her got up to go. They didn’t look at him as they left, and he didn’t move to follow. There was no need. He could find that man again, any time he needed. He was opened up. There was no other word for it. It was shocking to encounter.

  This man’s involvement in the unfolding pattern had thrown Florian off balance. He was something completely unexpected, something new and unpredictable, a mixing of forest and the stain of angel flesh such as Florian had never known before. And there was strength in him. He was new and frail and oblivious, and could easily still fade and fall back, lapsing into wherever and whatever he had been before. But he might not fall. He might grow stronger. Stronger, perhaps much stronger, than Florian himself. Strong enough to drive a living angel out of the world?

  Florian finished the lemon tea and found he’d come to a decision, of a kind. A temporary decision, until a clearer pattern emerged. In fact, he realised, he’d reached it even before he entered the gendarme station. There was too much uncertainty to act. So. Let the man and the woman find their own paths. Maximum openness. Close nothing down. Keep the borders open. At least for now.

  One of the women at the other table said something, and the other erupted in a cackle of laughter. Then they were both laughing, raucous, blowsy and wild. Their mouths gaped. Lipsticked lips pulled back from poor, ragged teeth. The pink flesh of their throats and upper arms shook, spilling the scent of powder compacts and thick-sweet scent and stale underclothes. And then something happened.

  A stir of air in the room, a flicker of shadow from the lamp on their table, and Florian glimpsed the whole trajectory of each woman’s life in her face: each was at once and all together a child, a lover, a sleeper in the dark of dreams, and an older–not much older–face, drawn thin and grey and hard by terrible loss to come. Each woman was the same as the other and also resembled her not at all; resembled no one else ever out of all the millions of millions of women who lived and ever had lived or ever would live. But in that moment, now and in Mirgorod, the women were together and laughing with the raspberry brandy in their stomachs at some small ripe obscenity, and the floor fell away under them and they stayed where they were, suspended.

  The women in their squat upholstered chairs, their lamp-bearing table, Florian in his chair, and all the furniture in Billroth’s hung, turning slowly, held in formation by their own gentle gravitation, above a beautiful dark well of endless coldness and depth, an abyss scattered with fat and golden stars. The walls of the room receded and grew endlessly tall, rising towards more nightfallen sky. The dark-purple flowers and twisting stems in the wallpaper were mouths to see night through. The room turned and tumbled at moon-slow pace, and the women, their faces illuminated from within by copper-yellow light, turned with it. Light poured from their open laughing silent mouths. The barman, red and green, standing on a patch of carpet canted at thirty degrees to the rest of the room, sang a quiet private song with the voice of the wallpapered, star-intestined piano.

  The Pollandore was stirring.

  12

  Lom and Maroussia crossed the Brass Cut by an unwatched footbridge and followed the canal-side north in the direction of Big Side, where Vishnik’s apartment was. Mailboats were unloading at a jetty in the lee of a huge wood-framed warehouse. The Fransa-Koromantsy Postal Depot. There were still huge areas of the Vlast, thousands of miles of bog and lake and birchwood, where the railways didn’t run and the roads were rutted dust in summer and thick impassable mud in winter. Long slow rivers connected by lakes and stretches of canal and overland portage were the only way to cover distance. Place names were crudely stencilled on the sacks and pallets. Solovits. Onyeg. Voitsogorad. Shar-Dudninsk. Plestovosk. Way stations on the inland waterways. A litany of strangeness and distance. The men in bulky coats and rubber boots, talking quietly among themselves as they shifted their cargoes, knew such places and the long wildernesses in between.

  Lom studied the boatmen curiously. They were all men. Women sometimes worked the mailboats, and even whole families, but he saw none here. Many of the men had the broad, flattened faces and squat strength of the people from beyond the ice edge, but others were lean and wiry, with straw-coloured hair and colourless eyes. They all had the same quietness, the same hard-weathered distant look. Interior voyagers, one or two to a boat, moving slowly through non-human landscapes. The country of giants. Man-wolves. Great elk. Rusalkas.

  Sailors discharged from the navy sometimes took work on the river mail, and so did disillusioned politicals: zeks who had survived a sentence in the hard camps. It was something you could do, if you had no place to go. If you’d never had a home. Or you had lost it. It was something Lom had once thought he might end up doing himself, one day. But he didn’t want to be alone. Not always. Not for ever.

  Past the postal depot, they turned away from the canal into the Bronze Sturgeon Quarter. There was not enough traffic in the road. Lom didn’t like it. He felt exposed: him in his mud-streaked cloak-like loden, Maroussia bare-legged and shivering in her thin summer coat, they were too visible.

  ‘Isn’t there another way we could go?’ he said. ‘We stick out a mile.’

  Maroussia shook her head.

  ‘Not without crossing the Lilac Bridge, and they always check papers there. We’ll be in Starimost soon. It’ll be better there.’

  As they approached Starimost the buildings got bigger and grander, the roads more crowded: trams, horse-drawn karetas, the occasional private automobile. The street they were following widened and became a Prospect. Houses gave way to shops, department stores and hotels. Yellow light glowed in the windows and made soft halo-edges in the cold fog, as if it was later than it was. There were no checkpoints here, and no traces of the floods any more. Good property in Mirgorod was above the high-water line.

  Maroussia stopped at a milliner’s window. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look at this.’

  Lom came and stood next to her. Her cheeks were pink with cold, her short black hair, slicked damp and glossy from the fog, lay in tight curls across her forehead and stuck to the back of her neck. The window display was swathed with elegant lengths of mourning cloth. Among the homburgs, fedoras and astrakhans, the fascinators, cloches and cocktail hats, was a photograph of the Novozhd framed in overwrought gilt and draped with ribbons of black silk.

  ‘He must be dead,’ she said. ‘The Novozhd is dead. It doesn’t seem possible. Maybe it’s something else. His wife, or…’

  But other shops carried similar displays. Businesses had closed their doors in grief and left black-edged handwritten cards in their doors: ‘The proprietors and staff of Blue’s Tea Importation Company weep together for our beloved Novozhd.’ They had to step off the pavement to avoid the small crowd that had gathered round a stall selling mourning flags and tokens of remembrance. The stuff was hastily made and shoddy. Brass medal-pins. Red and black silk lapel-flowers. Lettered jugs and teapots. Black-rimmed cake plates with the Novozhd’s profile in the centre, his face looking strangely pink. Lom stopped at a newspaper kiosk to read the headlines. The front pages shouted in heavy black capitals, PEOPLE OF MIRGOROD, LINE THE STREETS WITH MOURNING BLACK! JOY FOR HIS LIFE! SORROW FOR HIS DEATH! HATRED FOR HIS KILLERS! MORE IS REQUIRED OF US NOW! RALLY TO THE STANDARD OF THE COLLOQUIUM! The funeral was to be held that afternoon. That explained the police lockdown in the cen
tre of the city. Lom picked up a paper and read the front page.

  ‘He didn’t just die,’ said Lom; ‘he was killed. Assassinated. A bomb.’

  ‘Then everything is changed,’ said Maroussia. ‘Nothing will be the same now.’

  Lom realised she was right. For twenty years–more–the Novozhd’s face, familiar, benevolent, paternal and determined, had looked out on the Vlast, smiling or stern, from posters, newspapers, cinema screens, history books, the wall of every office and school and home. Every person in the Vlast read about him, thought about him, dreamed of him all the time. The Novozhd was everyone’s constant interior conscience and companion, the interlocutor of a thousand imagined conversations, confessions and tirades. Even if you despised him he was always there. Even his enemies needed him, to give their enmity shape and meaning. And now he was gone. Something permanent had shifted, something unthought-of had come into the world. A wall had fallen down, a door had opened. A gap.

  ‘What’s the Colloquium?’ said Lom. ‘You heard of it before?’

  Maroussia shrugged.

  ‘Somebody new will take over now,’ she said.

  ‘There’ll be trouble first,’ said Lom. ‘This will stir things up.’

  Half an hour later, they were standing side by side outside the Hotel-Pension Koromantsy Most in Marzelia Vovlovskaya Prospect. An expensive place. Plate-glass windows. OYSTERS. FRUITS DE MER. The temperature was still falling. A brisk gusting wind from the north-west straight off the Cetic Ocean had scattered the fog. It sliced through their clothes and threw scant handfuls of snow in their faces. Sharp flakes caught on their shoulders and sleeves. In Maroussia’s hair. They watched the moneyed classes of Mirgorod taking early luncheon. Warm white light, white table linen, white napkins. MINERAL-VODA. SOURCE VAKUL. Fat men of business at their coquilles and perch. Hard, watery eyes blinked through flashing lenses. Women in furs and red shoes drank chocolate and ate cakes with pursed, dissatisfied lips. A clatter of lipstick and pastry crumbs, flickering tongues, complaints. The restaurant door opened and a sullen group pushed past them out into the street. Lom caught the smell of the dining room on their clothes. Garlic and gravy and eau de toilette. They’d left an unopened eighth of cherry aquavit on their table. RANEVSKAYA’S ORCHARD.