Solaris Rising 3 - The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction

by Ian Whates

  I hate it when people do that. It’s a form of stealing.

  I RODE THE tram back to the city centre then caught a trolleybus to Vasilievsky Station. Vasilievsky is the old name for the station, the same name as the street it’s on and the one that was given to it when it first opened, back in the 1880s I think it was. The station was renamed in honour of the Red Army general Vladimir Chorny in 1925, but had its name changed to Voksal Rosa Luxemburg in 1956 after Chorny was discredited, along with everyone else who ever exchanged so much as a word with Leon Trotsky. Following the secession, the council voted to restore the original name, which most of the city’s older residents had never stopped using in any case.

  There’s a large mosaic across the rear wall of the station hall, created by local art students and showing Vasilievsky Street the way it looked before the bomb. It’s made entirely from shards of glass and pottery and other detritus collected from the rubble. The station facade, with its twin corkscrew towers, is the defining feature of the mosaic, as of the street itself. The remarkable thing about that is that in contrast to virtually every other building in the neighbourhood, the station – designed by Ilya Fillipov in the overwrought yet nonetheless impressive style architectural historians usually like to refer to as Byzantine – survived the bomb more or less undamaged.

  Whole theses have been written on how that might have been possible – several dozen conflicting and contrasting theories involving wind direction and centre of impact and prevailing atmospheric conditions. The only consensus the various parties seem able to arrive at is that Vasilievsky’s survival was a freak event, a confluence of environmental, meteorological and aerodynamic circumstances that have, at least for the present, resisted a complete analysis.

  Just chance, in other words. Pure fluke.

  The station interior was redesigned and updated in the 1980s. In the old days, before the bomb, there was no buffet, just a selection of kiosks and covered stalls selling everything from freshly baked khvorost and pirogi to expensive boxes of chocolates from Zhukov’s, the century-old city centre confectioners that was destroyed in the bomb. I remember in particular the smell of roasting chestnuts, the red glow of the brazier, the toasted scent of winter, of drawn curtains and silver paper. I found the aroma irresistible. My mother didn’t like buying things from the food stalls – she said they were overpriced. The chestnuts were different though, probably because you couldn’t find them anywhere else. If I asked her at exactly the right moment she would usually give in.

  “THEY’RE HOT,” MUM said. “Mind you don’t burn your fingers.” She handed over the paper packet, a double-folded sheet of newspaper twisted into a cone shape. I offered it to Peter first, who stuck in his hand and immediately withdrew it. The concentration of heat in such a confined, papery space scared him, I think.

  “Silly billy,” my mother said. She kissed my brother’s reddened fingers, and ruffled his hair. Five minutes later, as the new, pleasant sensation caught up with the earlier, frightening one, cancelling it out like train wheels flattening a patch of weeds overgrowing the railway track, Peter smiled.

  THE CHESTNUTS WERE delicious, dense and vaguely sweet, like baked potato. They tasted differently from anything I could have imagined.

  THE CHESTNUT STALL is long gone. The station buffet has wipe-down tables and chrome-legged chairs and an enormous steel samovar that always reminds me of a squatting toad. I went to stand by the door, gazing out across the teeming concourse and trying to imagine how it might look and sound and feel to an eight-year-old girl in a too-big coat, a girl who probably didn’t have a clue about where she was or why she was there.

  The crowds seethed around me and through me, an invincible tide of buttoned-up faces and impatient voices, of thundering boots with tarnished buckles and traces of mud. My Rae-self stared about uncertainly, feeling trapped and disorientated, overcome by unease. Fear lapped at me like a wave. It was as if the space I occupied was no longer a part of the station but somewhere else, somewhere that bore no relation to any time or place I had experienced previously. Even the word ‘station’, normally so commonplace, seemed to have lost its currency. Its meaning had floated away, replaced inside my head by some other, less definable concept, a garbled and terrifying anagram of madness.

  The roar of diesel engines was overpowering.

  I shook my head to clear it. The station floated back into view. I went into the buffet, which seemed suddenly less crowded, and bought a glass of tea and a sourdough roll. I sat at one of the Formica-topped tables, flicking through my notebook and thinking about Rae and Vasilievsky Station and the fire at the Maria Davidova children’s home, moving them about inside my mind like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and failing to find a way to fit them together.

  EVENTUALLY I WENT home. I made supper and then called Clara.

  “Any change?” I asked.

  “She’s still not speaking, if that’s what you mean. I gave her a colouring book and she seems happy with that, at least. It’s kept her busy for hours.”

  I fell silent, remembering the castles I became obsessed with drawing as a child. I’d fill whole scrapbooks with castles, each more elaborate and unlikely than the last. “Do you know how long she’ll be allowed to stay with you?” I said eventually.

  “I don’t know for sure. Another few days at most.” After that, and assuming we were no closer to tracing her parents, Rae would become the responsibility of the social welfare system. She would be taken from Clara’s apartment and transferred to a children’s home. The state machinery would take over. The idea horrified me but there seemed little point in dwelling upon it. I said goodbye to Clara, and told her I’d call again at the same time tomorrow. Less than five minutes after I put down the phone, it began to ring. It was Miryam Zneyder.

  “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to return your call, but I’ve been staying with friends,” she said. I’d been expecting her to sound frail, confused even, but her voice was surprisingly firm and clear. “I’m not sure that I can help you, though. Could you explain to me again what you wanted to know?”

  And what did I want to know? I hadn’t realised until she asked that her question didn’t have an obvious answer.

  “Do you know a girl called Rae?” I said.

  “Rae? I don’t think so.” She paused. “It might be better if you told me exactly what this is about.”

  So I told her about the mystery child, and where she’d been found. I told her about the leather purse around her neck, the newspaper clipping inside, which had led me to the story about her son. “I know this must sound rather unusual,” I said. I suspected that was putting it mildly. “But I had to call you. I’m convinced there’s a link somewhere, between your son and this child, that I just can’t see it yet. Is there anything you remember that seems to connect with what I’ve told you? Anything at all?”

  “You think that because my own child died I’m the kind of person who goes around stealing other people’s?” She sounded amused rather than angry, and I sensed that here was a woman who had long given up on anger as an emotion. She was clearly having a bit of fun at my expense, a fact that did not prevent me from being mortified by her suggestion.

  “Oh God, no. That’s not what I meant at all.”

  “What exactly did you mean, then? Orel has been dead for thirty years. What could I possibly have to tell you about a child whose mother probably wasn’t even born at the time?” She drew in her breath. The amused, waspish tone was gone. Now she just sounded tired. I remembered what Paula had said about being careful and felt ashamed suddenly. What right did I have to burden Zneyder with my questions, even if they were in a good cause?

  The truth was, I had none.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Zneyder was silent for what seemed like a long time. I listened to the faint crackling of static on the line, hoping she wouldn’t put the phone down and knowing I could hardly blame her if she did. But when she finally spoke again she sounded quite different.

&nb
sp; “No,” she said. “It’s I who should be sorry. You’re a good person, I’m sure. It’s just that not everyone who’s called me over the years has had such selfless motives. Some people can be very cruel. Suspicion becomes a habit, I’m afraid.” She sighed. “I still miss him, you know. He’d be thirty-eight now, a man with his own concerns, his own life. It could be that we would hate one another – it’s so easy to idealise the dead, isn’t it? The thing is, I’ll never know. That’s what hurts most.”

  I remained silent, pressing the phone to my ear, knowing anything I said would sound shallow, inaccurate, a platitude. I felt like crying.

  “Your girl sounds like an interesting mystery,” Zneyder said in the end. She laughed briefly, then cleared her throat. The subject of Orel was clearly closed. “I wish I could help you, I really do. And I admit it’s strange, her having that newspaper clipping. I suppose it must mean something. But I’m afraid I have no idea what that might be.” She hesitated. “Do you happen to remember what was on the back?”

  “On the back?”

  “On the other side of the page.”

  “Nothing. I mean, nothing important. Just part of a photograph.”

  “Oh well, it was worth a try.”

  “I read your book about Helen Messger,” I said. “I thought it was brilliant.”

  “Helen was the brilliant one. Her death was a crime. All the deaths, but hers especially. I know it’s wrong to think that, but it’s how I feel. If not for our friendship, I don’t think I’d ever have found the confidence to go into politics. Helen was a remarkable woman. My life was never the same after she died. I was very ill for a while, you know. When Orel was born I didn’t know how I’d cope. You do though, don’t you? One slow day at a time, you become someone else.”

  “I lost my mother in the bomb,” I said suddenly. “She was exactly your age.”

  “Really?” She sounded impatient again, and I realised I’d made a mistake, that she must be fed up with people telling her their bomb stories or their prison stories or their dead child stories, seeking meaning in their misfortune by trying to equate their own story with that of a stranger who had once been famous for her tragedy, if only briefly. Zneyder would naturally reject such confidences as an invasion of her privacy. Bomb or no bomb, everyone’s lost someone. But that’s not my problem. “Then you’ll understand how it was for me. Do you mind if we finish this now? It’s getting late. I don’t sleep well these days. Too much talking makes my insomnia worse.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

  “Not at all. I’m sorry, too. About the girl, I mean. If anything occurs to me I’ll call you back.”

  “That would be very helpful. Thank you.” I knew even as I said it that I would not hear from her again.

  Paula came in around an hour later. I told her what had happened.

  “She sounds a bit of a bitch to me,” she said. One of the nicest things about Paula is that she never says I told you so.

  I shook my head. “It’s not her fault. Can you imagine how I sounded? The most frustrating thing is that I still believe there’s something there, something I’m missing.”

  Paula leaned her back against the sofa and hugged her knees. “Don’t you think you might be overcomplicating things? What if Rae is just what she seems – a lost child? What if that piece of newspaper is just a – you know, what they say in detective stories?”

  “A red herring?”

  Paula nodded.

  “How can it be, Paula? She was carrying it in a purse around her neck. Someone must have put it there for a reason.”

  “Not necessarily. Suppose the clipping was in the purse already, and Rae just happened to find it on the station or somewhere? The purse, I mean. You’re constructing this whole big mystery out of it, but it could all be chance.”

  The notion had never occurred to me, but I was bound to admit that Paula’s idea had more than a ring of truth to it. My heart sank. If the purse wasn’t really Rae’s, then all my extravagant suppositions concerning it had been a waste of time.

  It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “I’m just saying,” Paula added. “What’s that thing about the simplest explanation of a problem being the correct one?”

  “Occam’s Razor. But it’s not always true.” I couldn’t help remembering what Lyuba had said, about the police having to prise Rae’s fingers from the purse strap before they could take it away from her. Would a child become so quickly attached to an object she’d found by chance? I seriously doubted it. Later, when Paula was asleep, I found myself going back over my conversation with Miryam Zneyder and wondering how I might have handled it better. Zneyder’s book about Helen Messger was still on the floor under the bed. I picked it up and began leafing idly through the section at the end, which consisted of more than a hundred photographs Zneyder had collected, of women who had been killed in the bomb or who had lost someone close to them, either in the strike itself or in its aftermath.

  Ailsa Kurkov, 23, whose poems ‘White Guard’ and ‘A Night in Murmansk’ took both the first and second prizes in Black Dog magazine’s annual poetry competition for 1961.

  Zhanna Bruderhof, 46, a chemistry teacher who single-handedly organized the evacuation of her school after the other teachers fled.

  Mona Verlinsky, 19, a local chess champion who had recently been promoted to grandmaster status.

  Vanessa Chubin, 32, a television reporter whose extended reportage ‘Diary of a Nuclear Strike’ was later awarded the gold medal in the Frankfurt Prize for International Journalism. Chubin’s eight-year-old daughter Raisa went missing from Vasilievsky Station on the day of the bomb. Chubin died of cancer, no doubt caused by radiation exposure, in 1969.

  Something about the photograph of Chubin seemed familiar, but I was too tired by then to give the subject much thought. I turned out the light, thinking I’d fall asleep more or less immediately, but an hour later I was still awake. I couldn’t get that photograph of Chubin out of my mind. In the end I switched the bedside lamp back on so I could look at it again. Paula stirred briefly beside me but was sound asleep again in less than a second. She likes to joke that nothing wakes her, not even a bomb going off.

  Chubin had been photographed facing slightly away from the camera. The left side of her face lay partly in shadow, and it was the shadow I recognised, I realised, the particular shape it made against Chubin’s cheek, like a spoon cutting ice cream.

  It was the same as the shadow in the photograph on the back of the newspaper clipping.

  I knew this could not be possible, yet at the same time I understood beyond all doubt that it was so. I slipped from the bed and pulled on the grey long-sleeved T-shirt Paula had been wearing. My heart was racing. I kept hearing Zneyder’s words to me over the phone – do you happen to remember what was on the back? I had dismissed them so casually, yet it seemed her instincts had been correct all along.

  I switched on the living room light and reached for the box file Lyuba had given me at the start, stuffed now with my notes as well as the photocopies of the original documents. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I sifted rapidly through the papers, my hands clumsy with panic, suddenly convinced that the photograph wouldn’t be there, that someone had stolen it. The idea was crazy of course, pure paranoia. I told myself to calm down, to relax my breathing. When I sorted back through the papers a second time I came upon the picture almost at once.

  I placed the already dog-eared photocopy flat on the floor, then opened Zneyder’s book at the appropriate page. There was no room left for doubt – the two images were identical.

  I closed the book, folding the clipping between its pages to mark the place, then left the book on the floor beside the other things and went back to bed. There was nothing I could do until morning and I needed to sleep. Now that I had found what I was looking for, I thought I probably would.

  (From Izvestiya, Thursday May 8th 1969)

  Vanessa Thomasovna Chubin 18/1
/30 – 4/5/69

  Prizewinning reporter Vanessa Chubin has died at her grandmother’s home in Kasli, Chelyabinsk District, at the age of thirty-nine. She had been suffering from cancer.

  Chubin became internationally famous when her live television coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the consequent American nuclear strike on the city of Kuragin was broadcast around the world. A documentary based on her broadcasts, ‘Diary of a Nuclear Strike’, was later awarded the gold medal in the Frankfurt Prize for International Journalism.

  Chubin’s achievements were marred by personal tragedy. Her older brother Richard, a gifted poet, committed suicide in his late twenties, and Chubin’s eight-year-old daughter Raisa disappeared on the day of the attack and was never seen again. It was presumed she was killed in the blast, although Chubin herself never believed this and continued to search for her until a few months before her death. A personal memoir of her quest, Wait for Me Here, briefly became a bestseller.

  Vanessa Chubin never married. She is survived by her sister, Bella, and her younger brother Carl.

  (From Wait for Me Here, Mirabil’nie Knigi 1967)

  RAYA DIDN’T HAVE her coat on. We were halfway to the tram stop before I realised. I was furious, because I knew she’d done it deliberately. She’d made a fuss about leaving the apartment – something about wanting to finish a cardboard rocket ship she was building for her friend Emma – and I felt certain this was her way of making sure we’d have to go back.

  “For goodness’ sake, Rae!” I grabbed her hard around the shoulders. I came close to shaking her. It was cold out, two degrees below freezing at least. Raya couldn’t go anywhere dressed like that. Her face was suddenly blank with distress and confusion. I could see she didn’t understand how I could be so angry over something so small. Perhaps I should have tried to explain, that it was not her I was angry with, not really, but time. Time like a runaway mare, her flanks heaving and sticky with sweat, breaking free of her constraining harness and dashing madly away across the train tracks.