Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  ‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m not going to run.’

  30

  Chazia left General Secretary Steopan Dukhonin alone for most of the night in the interrogation room where Bez Nichevoi had put him. Let him stew. Let him think. Let him wonder. She had other work to do. And she wanted to prepare for the interview: get the facts and figures straight in her head. Dukhonin was a sly little shit, but she would skewer him. She was going to skewer them all one by one: Dukhonin, Khazar, Fohn, all the vicious, patronising, conspiring little men who thought they could use her and keep power for themselves. The men who did not know her and did not see who she was. She would start with Dukhonin. Industrious, cautious, greedy, tiny, frightened Dukhonin. He was the worst. Start with him.

  When she went down for him he was sitting at the table in his shirt and carpet slippers. The skin of his face was grey and patched with sparse white stubble. He smelled faintly of urine.

  ‘Lavrentina, what the fuck…’ he said. ‘What the fuck is this? Am I arrested? That… that thing of yours killed my people. My fucking housekeeper! Fohn will destroy you for this. Destroy you!’

  His small watery eyes glared at her, sour with fear. His thin little face was tight and full of bone. Chazia sat down across the table from him.

  ‘We need a little talk, Steopan Vadimovich,’ she said. ‘Just a little talk.’

  ‘You want to talk, make a fucking appointment.’

  ‘Let’s start with the steel from Schentz.’

  ‘Does Fohn know I’m here?’ said Dukhonin. ‘He doesn’t, does he? You’re finished, Lavrentina. You’re nothing. We should never have let you in. I told Fohn… I told him you were—’

  ‘Fohn?’ said Chazia. ‘What does Fohn matter? Look around you, Steopan. Where is Fohn? Is he here?’

  ‘You’ve overreached yourself, Lavrentina. You’re dead. Finished. What is this situation? It is preposterous, that’s what it is. I am the General Secretary. I am one of the Four. You don’t question me and I certainly don’t fucking answer.’ He stood up. ‘I’m going home and you’re fucking dead.’

  ‘The steel, Steopan. Tell me about the steel from Schentz. The Mirskov Foundry invoices the Treasury for forty million roubles and the Treasury pays forty million. But only thirty-six million shows up in the Mirskov accounts.’

  ‘So? Is that it? You think you can bring me down with that? Ten per cent for my trouble? Who fucking cares? You’ve got shit. Big mistake. You’re dead.’

  ‘I’m not interested in the money, I’m interested in the steel. Forty million gets a lot of steel. How much steel is worth forty million?’

  ‘I don’t know. Who fucking cares?’

  ‘At a thousand roubles a ton that’s forty thousand tons. Minimum. A hundred tons per wagon. Four hundred wagons. If you moved it in one train it would be four miles long.’

  Dukhonin shrugged.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So why send forty thousand tons of steel to Novaya Zima?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me. Why would I care where it went?’

  ‘But you ordered it, Steopan,’ said Chazia. ‘You did it. You. Forty thousand tons of steel to Novaya Zima and a nice four million roubles for you. It was the cut that got noticed, but as you say, so what? Still, I’m curious. I ask myself, why is Steopan Vadimovich sending so much steel to Novaya Zima? What is there at Novaya Zima? A shit-hole on an island in an icebound sea? Nothing is happening there. We’re losing a war, yet Steopan finds enough steel to make a thousand main battle tanks and sends it north-east to the edge of the ice?’

  ‘This is outside your sphere, Lavrentina,’ said Dukhonin. ‘Way outside. You shouldn’t be touching this. It’s serious stuff. Dangerous stuff. You need to back away.’

  ‘I made enquiries about Novaya Zima, Steopan. And what did I find? Nothing. Not a record of nothing, but no record. No file. An empty shelf where Novaya Zima should be. So I asked a different question. What else has my friend Steopan Vadimovich Dukhonin been buying with Treasury money? It wasn’t easy to track that either, but I found traces. Coal. Rare earths. Machinery. Small quantities of metals I’ve never heard of. Seventy tons–seventy tons–of reclaimed angel flesh. Every scrap of angel flesh that could be found in the Vlast. All arranged by Steopan Vadimovich Dukhonin, who incidentally takes his little ten per cent. And people too. Eighty thousand conscript labourers diverted from war work, all for Novaya Zima. You’re even taking them from here! From Mirgorod! So. Steopan. This is the question. What is happening at Novaya Zima?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dukhonin. He was confident now. The stupid man was confident. ‘Like you said. Nothing.’

  Chazia smiled.

  ‘Actually, I considered that possibility. Maybe, I thought, it is all a scam. Paper transactions only. Money paid but nothing sent. Maybe Steopan’s little scheme is a big scheme. But no, the shipments are real, and they really go to Novaya Zima. So what happens when they get there?’

  ‘You’ve got shit,’ said Dukhonin. ‘Dangerous shit, but shit. You think you know it all, with your files and your informers and your useless lickspittle secret police? You know nothing, Lavrentina! Nothing of importance. You know nothing and you are no one. Who are you? What are you? You’re meat, you’re disgusting, a diseased, repellent little cow-bitch. Novaya Zima will kill you. Shit. You send that thing to scare me and you kill my housekeeper and you keep me locked up all night in this pathetic stinking toilet. Fohn will kill you slowly and I will piss on your shitty corpse.’ He stood up. ‘I’ve had enough. I’m going home.’

  ‘The door,’ said Chazia, ‘is not locked.’

  Dukhonin stood up, raised himself to his full five foot six, shuffled across in his carpet slippers and pulled the door open. Bez Nichevoi was standing in the corridor, patient and still. A shadow in the shadows. Dukhonin didn’t see him until he moved. Bez dislocated Dukhonin’s left arm at the shoulder and Dukhonin screamed.

  Bez did something to Dukhonin’s face, too fast for Chazia to see, and pushed him back into the room. Dukhonin fell forward hard on the floor and lay there, his left arm at a wrong angle, useless, his right hand holding his face.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he murmured. ‘Shit.’

  Bez followed him into the room and looked to Chazia for instructions.

  ‘Help him back into his chair.’

  Dukhonin sat slumped forward, twisted sideways with the pain in his shoulder, blood trickling down his cheek from his ruined left eye. The socket was a jellied, swollen mess.

  ‘There cannot be four rulers, Steopan,’ said Chazia. ‘There can only be one. Power shared isn’t power at all. This Colloquium you and Fohn and Khazar cooked up is an abortion. It is an arena for battle only–it is a war–but none of you is a soldier and none of you will win. I am going to take it all.’

  Dukhonin didn’t look at her. His one good eye was fixed on Bez Nichevoi, motionless and watchful in the corner of the room. Nichevoi seemed to be exuding the shadows that gathered around him despite the flat glare of the overhead lamp. Tall and thin, he wore a neat dark suit made of shadows. Dark hair, a dark inexpressive gaze, a stark face white as chalk. He made the angles of the room around him seem wrong.

  ‘You’re just like the rest of them, Steopan, when they come in here,’ Chazia said. ‘The ground you walked on was always fragile, and now it has broken and you’ve fallen through. You’re in my world now.’

  ‘But we can do a deal, Lavrentina,’ said Dukhonin. ‘Listen. We can do a deal. You’re right about Fohn, of course you are. Completely. He’s weak. A bureaucrat. A committee man. A compromiser. But not me, I’m not like that. You and I–we can make an alliance. Don’t let that thing… You don’t need to kill me, Lavrentina. There’s no call for that. I can help you. You want to come in on it? I’ll let you in. Of course I will. It’s a perfect idea. Perfect. I should have thought of it before. We’ll be good together, Lavrentina. We don’t need Khazar and Fohn. You don’t need to kill me. I’ll share.’

  ‘Share? What have you got that I n
eed, Steopan Vadimovich?’

  ‘Novaya Zima! Shit. Novaya Zima! You need it. You need me.’

  ‘So what is Novaya Zima? Tell me what it is.’

  ‘Not tell you. I’ll show you. You need to see.’

  31

  When Elena Cornelius had left them alone in the attic, Maroussia went across to one of the mattresses and sat down. She put the carpet bag she’d brought from Vishnik’s on the floor next to her and opened it. Started pulling things out, one by one and setting them out on the quilt. The envelope with Vishnik’s photographs. A dark woollen skirt. A couple of thin cotton blouses, faded and softened from frequent washing. A blue knitted cardigan, neatly mended at the elbow with slightly mismatched thread. A linen nightshirt. A bar of soap, wrapped in a piece of brown waxed paper. A thin book in a grey card cover. The Selo Elegies and Other Poems by Anna Yourdania. The clothes were crumpled. They’d been fingered by Vishnik’s killers and thrown aside until Maroussia had grabbed them off the floor and stuffed them roughly, hastily, back into the bag. Lom watched her set out each one, smooth it down and refold it, neatly.

  She felt him watching her and looked up.

  ‘I don’t want to wear these again,’ she said. ‘Not after where they’ve been. Not after what happened there.’

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I guess not.’

  ‘They’re not… they’re not mine, not any more.’

  She picked up the packet of soap and went across to the table under the window. There was a large pitcher of water and a wide shallow washbowl: chipped yellow enamel with a thin black rim. A rough brown towel hung from a hook. Maroussia poured some water into the bowl, rolled up her sleeves, leaned forward and splashed her face with tight cupped hands. Rubbed her dripping hands across her eyes, her mouth, her forehead, her throat, the back of her neck. Ran wet fingers through her hair. Then she straightened up, unwrapped the soap and lathered her hands, her arms up to the elbow. She turned the soap over and over in her fingers, rubbed it again along the length of her arms and let it slip back into the bowl. Scooped a double handful of water and jammed the heels of her palms into her eyes. Not rubbing but pressing, gently pushing. She stood like that, not moving, breathing.

  Lom went up behind her. He could smell the soap and the warmth of her skin and hair. Her hands, her face, her neck were flushed from the icy cold of the water. He could smell the scent of her on the thin blouse she’d been wearing the day the boat took them into the White Reaches and was still wearing now. He could still feel the warmth of her long back against his side, where she had lain pressed against him in the bed in the gate keeper’s lodge the night before. Twenty-four hours ago. He picked up the towel and dipped a corner of it in the icy water in the pitcher. Began to wipe the soap from her neck and her arms.

  When he took her two hands in one of his and drew them gently away from her face, her eyes were screwed tight shut. He wiped the soap from them, one by one. She turned into his arms, opened her eyes and looked into his. Held his gaze for a long, quiet time. There was a faint sweetness of brandy on her breath.

  She was a stranger to him. Again, he felt the otherness of her. A part of her was very far away, behind her eyes, not wanting to be reached.

  He moved the rough damp edge of the towel across her mouth, wiping the soap away. She moved her body against him. He felt the patch of damp cold where she had spilled water down her neck. She opened her mouth and put her lips against his.

  Hours later, Lom lay wakeful in the dark, listening to the quiet creaks and ticks of the roof beams under the accumulating weight of snow. Maroussia was lying next to him, sleeping, the warmth of her breathing against his cheek. He listened to the rattles and groans in the pipes, the scratch and skitter of small animals. Felt the presence of dark, amorphous, inky, shifty, scuttling night-things that lived in the shadows and ceilings and whispered. Cool, filmy presences. Watchful creatures of fur and dust. The delicate new skin across the hole in the front of his skull fluttered in response with gentle moth-wing beats.

  Slowly and carefully so as not to wake her, he slipped out from under the quilt and padded barefoot across to the window. It was bitterly cold in the room. He was instantly shivering. The vapour of his and Maroussia’s breath had crystallised in whorls and ferns of frost across the windowpanes, and through it a faint snow-glimmer filtered into the room. He cleared a patch with the side of his palm and looked out: dense, swirling snowfall still coming down; the tumbled, tightly packed rooftops of the raion falling away down the hill. Lamps burning in a few isolated windows, their light reflecting off the snow.

  Lom used to think, once, that snow was frozen rain, that snowflakes were raindrops that turned to ice as they fell through freezing air. But then, he’d forgotten where, he discovered the truth. Snow wasn’t frozen rain, it had never been rain. Snow was the invisible vapour of water–the slow and distant breath of lakes, of rivers, of oceans–crystallising suddenly out of thin air. A billion billion tiny weightless dagger-spiked ghosts, materialising. From the first time Lom heard this, the thought had electrified him: he’d realised that all around him, all the time, all the year, always, there existed in the air, unseen, the latent possibility of snow. Even the warmest summer day was haunted by snow. The memory of how to be snow. All that was required to make it real was cold. And when the cold moment came, snow manifested itself suddenly out of the air in a kind of chill ignition, the opposite of flame.

  Somewhere in the city was a man who had worn his face. A man who pulled bullets out of his belly and walked away. And Chazia was out there too. And so was Josef Kantor.

  ‘Vissarion?’ said Maroussia. Her voice was quiet in the dark.

  ‘Yes? I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes. Only… I was thinking.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you think Elena’s right? Do you think we should get out of Mirgorod? Do you think we should run?’

  ‘Do you?’ he said across the dim snow-shadowed room.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then don’t. Don’t run.’

  ‘But… I don’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘I mean, say we could get into the Lodka and find it, find the Pollandore… All I’ve got is fragments. Garbled messages. It’s not enough.’

  ‘So what do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I need more. I need the forest to talk to me again.’

  ‘OK,’ said Lom.

  ‘OK what?’

  ‘OK, so talk to the forest again.’

  ‘Do you know how to do that?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘No.’

  She said no more, but Lom could hear her breathing. Lying awake in the dark.

  She was taking the righting of the world on her shoulders. The weight of it, the pressure and hopelessness of what she was choosing, squatted heavily in the room. He went across to the bed and got in. Pulled the quilt up around them both. Made a warm dark private place, simple and human, like people’s lives should be. Just for now.

  32

  Lavrentina Chazia had never believed that she knew every room in the Lodka. No one could. The route Dukhonin led her, shuffling slowly in his carpet slippers, his left arm stiff and useless, his thin bony face sticky with drying blood from his ruined eye, was new to her. They climbed stairs and took lifts, ascending and descending, until she had no idea where in the building they were, or even whether they were above or below ground. They passed no one.

  ‘Here,’ said Dukhonin, stopping at a heavy anonymous door with a combination lock. ‘This is the place.’

  He fumbled with the tumbler. His hand was trembling. He pulled at the door but it didn’t shift.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered. ‘Shit.’

  He started again. Chazia pushed him aside.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Tell me the numbers.’

  He did.

  Beyond the door were more corridors, deserted in the early hours. Bez Nichevoi followed a few paces
behind them. Silently in his soft leather shoes. They passed rooms that showed signs of current occupation. Handwritten notices: ESTABLISHMENTS; ACCOUNTS; TRANSIT; PROCUREMENT AND SUPPLY. Telephone cables trailing across the floor. Green steel cabinets. A telegraphic printing machine–a contraption of brass and cogs with a board of black and white keys like a piano, the kind that printed out endless spools of paper tape–stood inactive on a heavy wooden table. There was a basket to catch the tape as it passed out, but it was empty. This was a significant operation. Dukhonin set it all up and kept it running without even a whisper reaching her? But it was all support functions. Generic. The substance was elsewhere.

  Dukhonin brought them to a small windowless room. The card beside the door said PROJECT WINTER SKIES. Inside were eight chairs set round a plain meeting table and on the wall was a map showing the rail and river routes of the north-eastern oblasts: wide expanses of nothing but a patchwork of small lakes and emptiness, railheads and river staging posts, the coast of the Yarmskoye Sea; and beyond that the irregular fringe of permanent ice, and blankness.

  At one end of the room was a small projection screen, and at the opposite end a Yubkin film projector on a sturdy tripod.

  ‘Sit, Lavrentina,’ said Dukhonin. ‘Please. Sit.’ He looked at Bez. ‘Is he… staying? This is… What you’re going to see is… I would not recommend that he remains.’

  ‘He stays.’

  ‘Lavrentina. Please. Nothing is more sensitive than this. And… and I will need to extinguish the lights.’

  ‘He stays.’

  Dukhonin, his breathing loud and ragged, unclipped the twin reel covers and checked the film spool was in place. One-handed and trembling, it took him a long time. At last he got the projection lamp lit and set the cooling fan running. He brought up a test image and spent some time selecting a lens and adjusting the focus. There was a heavy radiator blasting heat into the cramped stuffy room. Chazia smelled Dukhonin’s stale sweat. The sourness of his fear. The piss on his trousers. She shifted in her seat and scratched in irritation at the angel stains on her arms.