Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  Kantor picked up a chair, placed it in front of her desk and sat down. Chazia ignored him and carried on working. Her face had always reminded Kantor of something reddish and cruel. A vixen. And the dark, smooth blemishes where her skin was turning to stone. They were spreading. It was getting worse. He watched her unconsciously scratching at the angel mark on the back of one hand. She dabbles too much.

  ‘It was a complete success,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ She didn’t look up.

  ‘The march. On the Lodka.’

  ‘Oh. That. But we must talk about something else, Josef. Your position is compromised. Krogh knows who you are. He has the name. Josef Kantor.’

  ‘Krogh is old and tired.’

  ‘Krogh is clever,’ said Chazia. ‘He knows we’re working against him and he knows he can’t trust his own people. He’s taken steps against you. An investigator. From the east. Someone with no connections here. He’s set him to track you down.’

  Kantor grunted. ‘One investigator? That can be taken care of. You’ll do that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We can’t afford distractions.’

  She looked up from her papers at last.

  ‘You and I cannot meet again, Josef. Our plans must change. At least in so far as they involve you.’

  ‘I’m not dispensable, Lavrentina. The angel speaks to me. Not you.’

  Kantor saw Chazia’s vixen head lean forward, her eyes widen a fraction. She scratched at the stone-coloured back of her hand again. Delicately wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. How transparent she is. She gives herself away. She doesn’t know she’s doing it. How she wants to be close to power! How she desires it! She longs to feel power’s hot breath on her skin, and open her legs for power. She is jealous of me, because the angel comes inside me, not her. She felt it once and she wants it again. She’s hooked like a fish.

  ‘What does it say?’ said Chazia. ‘What does the angel say to you?’

  He saw how weak she was. Desiring to be near power is not the same as desiring power. It is the opposite.

  ‘It is impatient,’ he said. ‘It urges haste. It makes promises.’

  ‘Promises?’

  ‘To me, Lavrentina. Not to you. To me.’

  ‘Of course you would say that. To save yourself.’

  ‘One cannot lie about the angel. One cannot deceive it.’

  Chazia showed the tip of her tongue again, pink between pale thin lips.

  ‘Is it here? Is it with you… now?’

  ‘Of course not. I couldn’t speak to you if it was.’

  ‘Why does it choose you, Josef? Why doesn’t it come to me again?’

  Kantor said nothing.

  ‘Do you know why not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You could ask it.’

  ‘No.’

  Chazia sighed and leaned back in her chair.

  ‘So. What does it promise you, Josef?’

  ‘Stars. Galaxies. Universes. The red sun rising.’

  ‘Meaning? Meaning what?’

  Kantor looked at her and said nothing.

  ‘Meaning nothing,’ said Chazia.

  ‘It has given me an instruction. The Pollandore must be destroyed.’

  ‘It knows about that?’

  ‘It knows everything.’

  ‘Then it knows we cannot destroy the Pollandore. We have tried and failed.’

  ‘It must be done’

  ‘This doesn’t change your position, of course,’ she continued. ‘The logic is inescapable.’

  ‘I do not see it.’

  ‘Think, Josef. See it from my perspective. Soon the Iron Guard will step in and put things right. This weak and backsliding regime will fall. The One Righteous War will recommence with renewed vigour.’

  ‘With me alongside you, Lavrentina. That is the agreement. It must stand.’

  ‘But consider this, Josef. How would it be if Krogh makes the connection between you and me? If he can prove it? If he takes this to the Novozhd before we are ready? Surely you see the impossibility of this?’

  Kantor watched her steadily. He said nothing.

  ‘What would you do, Josef?’ she said. ‘In my position?’

  He shrugged. ‘It is not complex,’ he said. ‘Krogh must be killed.’

  Her eye flickered.

  You are transparent to me. You garrulous intoxicated mad old fox-bitch.

  ‘Nothing is easier than death,’ he said. ‘The more deaths there are, the better for our purpose.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘The solution is clear,’ Kantor continued. ‘Krogh must be killed. Of course…’ He looked her in the eye. Held her gaze. ‘If you don’t have the stomach for that, I will do it myself. It doesn’t matter so long as it is done.’

  Chazia glared at him.

  ‘It will be done,’ she said. ‘It’s not a problem.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Kantor. ‘Good. Of course, that isn’t why I came to see you.’

  ‘So why did you come?’

  ‘I have a couple of requests.’ He smiled. ‘No doubt these also will be no problem.’

  Chazia bridled.

  ‘Be careful, Josef. Don’t go to far. You are not… safe.’

  ‘No one is safe, Lavrentina. Such is the world. But there are some favours you could do for me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My former wife, the slut Feiga-Ita.’

  Chazia looked at him in surprise. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Kill her. Kill that bastard daughter of hers too.’

  ‘I see,’ said Chazia. ‘But… surely you could do this yourself? You have people.’

  ‘They would want to know why. That would not be helpful.’ Chazia sat back and considered.

  ‘I see no objection,’ she said eventually. ‘But you will owe me, Josef. The service is not your personal execution squad. Is that all?’

  ‘No. I want you to take me to the Pollandore. I want to see it.’

  31

  In Vishnik’s apartment, Lom poured another glass and reached for the file with his own name on it. It was a standard personnel file, tied with ribbon. The registry slip on the front showed it had been referred to Commander Chazia only the day before. The day he had arrived in Mirgorod and seen Krogh. The referring signature was Krogh’s own private secretary.

  The file itself contained all the paperwork of an unexceptional career. Good but not brilliant academic achievement. Stalled promotions and rejected applications. The criticisms, complaints and accusations. And one other thing. The earliest document. A letter. Lom read it over and over again until he had it by heart. It was addressed to the Provost of the Podchornok Institute of Truth.

  Righteous and Excellent Provost Savinkov

  I bow to you deeply from the white of my face to the damp earth, and I commit to your care this boy, gathered in by my artel when, in pursuance of the Forest Extirpation Order, we removed the village and nemeton of Salakhard. The boy does not speak to us, but is believed to be a child of uncouth persons, and consequently now parentless. He is apparently not above six years old, and in all conscience we hesitate to end the life of one so young. But his remaining with us is not by any means practicable. Our orders take us further eastwards, under the trees. Perhaps he may be closed up, in the way you know how, and enfolded in the One Truth? He is yet young.

  Your servant,

  S V Labin, Captain

  Lom leaned back on Vishnik’s couch. Deeply buried memories: first memories, beginnings. He was lying under a tree, a thickened old beech that thrust torsos of root deep into the earth and rose high over his head, spreading its leafhead, casting a pool of blue shade on the spring-green grass. The sun hung above the tree, a moored fiery vessel, and small things moved in the thickets. The air was filled with strong, sour, earthy smells, and he could feel the ground beneath his back. He heard the leaves of trees and bushes moving as if in a wind. He was looking upwards, tracing the boughs of the tree where the trunk bifurcated and rea
ched high into the mass of foliage, the million leaves, fresh and thick, bright with the green liquid fire of sunlight that was pouring through them. The tree was eating light and breathing clouds of perfume.

  The perfumed tree-breath was its voice, its chemical tongue. It was speaking to the insect population in its bark and branches, warning and soothing them. It was speaking to its neighbour trees, who answered: tree spoke to tree, out across the endless forest. And it was speaking to him. Psychoactive pheromones drifted through the alveolar forests of his human lungs and the whorled synaptical pathways of his cerebral cortex.

  At the institute at Podchornok they’d given the silent boy a name, Vissarion Lom, and all this they had taken from him.

  Memory left him. For a while Lom simply sat, tired and empty, thinking of nothing, listening to the evening call of the gulls in the seacoloured sky. Surfacing. It was almost dark when he finally moved. Lom gathered up the files and his notes, put them in the waterproof bag, weighted it with the quayside cobblestone and slipped it into the cistern in the bathroom. He settled down to wait for Vishnik to return. That night they would go to the Crimson Marmot Club. To see Lakoba Petrov.

  32

  The music got louder with each step down the alleyway. Letters in electric red flickered on and off above a door shut tight against the blowing rain and cold. The Crimson Marmot. Lom pushed the door open. A blast of thick, heated air, tobacco smoke and noise hit his face. Inside was a hot, boiling cauldron of red. Red, the colour of the Vlast, the colour of propaganda, the colour of blood, but also the colour of intimacy and desire. Loud voices shouting into excited faces.

  Vishnik led the way through the crowd to a table. A young man was dancing nearby, an absorbed, solitary dance with unseeing eyes. His face was powdered chalky white. As his face caught the light Lom saw a ragged wound scar down his cheek. At the next table a snaggle-bearded man was smoking with his eyes closed. The woman with him looked bored. Her jacket shimmered as if it was silk. She was naked from the waist down. She laughed and drained her glass and got up to dance with the young man with the powdered face, swaying her hips and moving her hands in complicated knots. The young man didn’t notice her. On a bench in the corner a couple were making love.

  Lom leaned across to shout in Vishnik’s ear: ‘Who are these people?’

  Vishnik shrugged.

  ‘That doesn’t matter here. They come to leave all that behind. Outside, in the daytime, they are clerks. Waiters. Former persons who used to be lawyers or the wives of generals. But this is the night side, a place without history. They come here for the now of it. Keep raising the level. Another notch. Another glass. Another powder. Here you make the most of your body and anyone else’s you can. Does that shock you?’

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘No. It doesn’t.’ He’d been to places in Podchornok where fat rich men went to get drunk and touch young bodies, but this was different. There was a version of himself that could be comfortable here. He looked around again. Searching the faces. ‘Can you see Petrov? Is he here yet?’

  ‘No, but it’s still early.’

  A waiter brought a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Lom watched him uncork and pour.

  ‘Relax,’ said Vishnik. ‘Enjoy the evening.’

  Lom’s eyes were adjusting to the rich, dim redness of the Marmot’s. The walls were crimson plush and hung with vast gilded mirrors that made the room seem larger than it was. Tables crowded one another in a horseshoe around a central space where dancers moved between people standing in noisy, excitable groups. At the back of the room was a small stage, its heavy curtains closed, and in one corner, musicians played instruments of the new music. Lom recognised some of them: a heckelphone, a lupophone, a bandonion, a glasschord. Others he couldn’t identify. He sipped at the champagne and winced. It was thick, with a metallic perfume.

  He’d expected something different of the Crimson Marmot: an art gallery, perhaps, with intense talk and samovars. There was art here, though. Wild, angular sketches on the walls. A larger-than-life humanesque manikin hanging from the ceiling, dressed as a soldier with the head of a bear. A figure, crouched high in the corner, with eight limbs and six pairs of woman’s breasts. Lom realised it was meant to be an angel. It was made out of animal bones, old shoes, leather straps and rubbish. Candles burned in its eyes and a scrawled placard hung from its neck. Motherland. Beneath it, someone had pinned a notice to the wall.

  ART IS DEBT! LONG LIFE TO THE MEAT MACHINE ART OF THE FORBAT!

  With a crash of drums, the musicians fell silent and the curtain was drawn aside to reveal the small stage. A red banner unfurled. The Neo-emotional Cabaret. An ironic cheer went around the room, and a smattering of applause. Vishnik leaned across to Lom.

  ‘You’ll like this. This is different. This is new. This is fucking good.’

  On the stage a man was crouching inside a large wooden crate, shouting nonsense words into a tube connected to a megaphone on top of the crate. ‘Zaum! Zaum! Baba-zaum!’ he chanted. The musicians hacked away with atonal enthusiasm. Lom caught some longer phrases of almost-coherent verse.

  Wake up, you scoundrel self-abusers!

  Materialists! Bread eaters! Mirgorod is a cliff —

  bare snow in banked-up drifts — daybreak.

  Winter’s late dawn — worn out — shivering —

  descends the river like smallpox.

  Lom was relieved when it finished. The curtain closed and the band struck up again. Pink spotlights lit the dance floor. Lom hadn’t noticed the dancer enter, but she was there. Her breasts were bare and she wore a long flickering skirt, divided to give her legs room for movement. The dancer’s body was thin and muscular, her breasts small and narrow, her black hair cut short, and she danced fast and thoughtlessly, shouting and jerking to the music, advancing towards the audience and then retreating with a shrug. Pleasing herself. Not trying. Just doing.

  And then, to cheers and applause, she was gone. Most of the band stood up and went to the bar, leaving the glasschord player alone to unwind some kind of drifting, song-like melody.

  Vishnik took him by the arm and whispered in his ear, ‘Petrov’s come. At the table by the bar. The green shirt.’

  Lom looked across to where a group of men were listening to a large bearded fellow talking loudly, his wet red mouth working, banging the table with his fist to punctuate his periods. Petrov was a silent bundle of energy in a corner seat, staring with obvious resentment at the talker. Lom studied him carefully. He was all wild, dark curly hair, a long sharp nose and dark eyes, wide and round, full of passionate need and intelligence and a crazed, intent sort of anger. His lips, pressed tight together, were full and almost bruised-looking. He looked as if someone had punched him and he was trying not to cry. When he leaned back in his chair, as if he was trying to get further away from the bearded shouter, his loose green shirt gaped open halfway to his waist, revealing the white, almost skeletal bone structure of his upper chest.

  ‘Take me over, can you?’ said Lom. ‘I want to talk to him.’

  Vishnik picked up the half-empty champagne bottle and the glasses and went across. Lom followed. Some of the men at the table nodded. The beard ignored them. So did Petrov.

  ‘The city as a whole,’ Beard was saying in a deep, resonant voice, ‘is instinct with energising power. It inspires me. The more marches and strikes and riots — the more confrontation — the better it is for art. The agitation in the squares and factories is like the revving of the engines of the vehicles in the street. It provides heart. It is marvellous. Wonderful. I must have it, at all times, in order to work. It’s the fuel my motor burns.’

  Beard paused to take a drink.

  ‘Did you hear?’ said the young man with the powdered face ‘The Novozhd has said that from now on all his rallies will be held after dark. Isn’t that perfect? It is already evening across the Vlast. Midnight! The Novozhd is an artist himself, though he won’t admit it.’

  Beard spluttered.

  ‘The
Novozhd! Do you know what he said about my picture of Lake Tsyrkhal?’ He stared around the table, daring them to speak. ‘I made the water yellow and black, and this is what the Novozhd said: As a hunter, I know that Lake Tsyrkhal is not like that. So now he forbids us to use colours which are different from those perceived by the normal eye. What is the point, I ask you, of a painter with a normal eye? Any idiot can see what’s normal. But do I fear this Novozhd? No!’

  ‘Does he fear you, Briakh?’ said Petrov fiercely, uncoiling from the tense crouch he’d wound himself into. He was nursing a small glass of something thick and dark. ‘Does the Novozhd fear you? Isn’t that the question? I think he does not.’

  Briakh glared at him.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning your paintings are nothing. All our paintings are nothing. This club is nothing. It’s not even so much shit on his boots, so far as the Novozhd cares. We’re only still here because he hasn’t noticed us yet.’

  ‘He put three of my pictures in his Exhibition of Degenerate Art. Three.’

  ‘They get people to laugh at us, that’s all. It’s a distraction. Do you think the Novozhd lies awake at night because you made Lake Tsyrkhal black and yellow?’

  Powdered Face giggled. ‘The most perfect shape,’ he quoted, ‘the sublimest image that has ever been created didn’t come out of any artist’s studio: it is the infantryman’s steel helmet. The artists ought to be tied up next to their pictures so every citizen can spit in their faces.’

  Briakh ignored him. He was staring at Petrov.

  ‘And you, Petrov?’ he said. ‘Is the Novozhd scared of you? How many of your pictures does he have in his exhibition?’

  ‘Painting’s finished,’ said Petrov quietly. ‘I told you. There will be a new art. And he will know my name soon enough. He will know Petrov by his works. You all will. Yes, he should fear me.’