by Ian Watson
"I know what 'dead ground' means. That merely refers to areas you can't see on a relief map from a particular viewpoint."
"Such as the viewpoint of the State…? Listen to me: if we inflate certain areas, then we shrink others away to a vanishing point. These places can still be found by the map-maker who knows the relation between the false and the real; one who knows the routes. From here to there; from now to then. Do you recognize this street, Grusha? Do you know its name?"
"I can't see a signpost…"
"You still don't understand." I drew her towards a shop window, under a street lamp which had now illuminated. "Look at yourself!"
She regarded her late-adolescent self. She pressed her face to the plate glass as though a ghostly shop assistant might be lurking inside, imitating her stance. Then she sprang back, not because she had discovered somebody within but because she had found no one.
"These dead zones," she murmured. "You mean the gulags, the places of internal exile…"
"No! I mean places such as this. I'm sure other people than me must have found similar dead zones; and never breathed a word. These places have their own inhabitants, who are recorded on no census."
"So you're a secret dissident, are you, Valentin?"
I shook my head. "Without the firm foundation of the State-as-it-is-without the lie of the land, as Mirov innocently put it-how could such places continue to exist? That is why we must not destroy the work of decades. This is magical-magical, Grusha! I am young again. My mistress lives here."
She froze. "So your motives are entirely selfish."
"I am old, back at the Centre. I've given my life to the State. I deserve… No, you're too ambitious, too eager for stupid troublesome changes. It is you who are selfish at heart. The very best of everything resides in the past. Why read modern mumbo-jumbo when we can read immortal Turgenev or Gogol? I've suffered… terror. My Koshka and I are both honed in the fires of fear." How could I explain that, despite all, those were the best days? The pure days.
"Fear is finished," she declared. "Clarity is dawning."
I could have laughed till I cried.
"What we will lose because of it! How our consciousness will be diminished, diluted, bastardised by foreign poisons. I'm a patriot, Grusha."
"A red fascist," she sneered, and started to walk away.
"Where are you going?" I called.
"Back."
"Can't do that, girl. Not so easily. Don't know the way. You'll traipse round and round."
"We'll see!" Hitching herself, she marched off.
I headed to Koshka's flat, where pickles and black caviar sandwiches, cold cuts and mushroom and spirit were waiting; and Koshka herself, and her warm sheets.
Towards midnight, in the stillness I heard faint footsteps outside so I rose and looked down from her window. A slim shadowy form paced wearily along the pavement below, moving out of sight. After a while the figure returned along the opposite pavement, helplessly retracing the same route.
"What is it, Valentin?" came my mistress's voice. "Why don't you come back to bed?"
"It's nothing important, my love," I said. "Just a street walker, all alone."
Part II: Into the Other Country
When Peterkin was a lad, the possibilities for joy seemed limitless. He would become a famous artist. He dreamed of sensual canvases shamelessly ablush with pink flesh, peaches, orchid blooms. Voluptuous models would disrobe for him and sprawl upon a velvet divan. Each would be an appetizing banquet, a feast for the eyes, as teasing to his palate as stimulating of his palette.
Why did he associate naked ladies with platters of gourmet cuisine? Was it because those ladies were spread for consumption? How he had lusted for decent food when he was young. And how he had hungered for the flesh. Here, no doubt, was the origin of the equation between feasting and love.
Peterkin felt no desire to eat human flesh. He never even nibbled his own fingers. The prospect of tooth marks indenting a human body nauseated him. Love-bites were abhorrent. No, he yearned-as it were-to absorb a woman's body. Libido, appetite, and art were one.
Alas for his ambitions, the requirements of the Party had cemented him into a career niche in the secret police building in Dzerzhinsky Square; on the eighth floor, to be precise, in the cartography department.
Not for him a paint brush but all those damnable map projections. Cylindrical, conical, azimuthal. Orthographic, gnomonic. Sinusoidal, polyconic.
Not Matisse, but Mercator.
Not Gauguin but Gall's Stereographic. Not Modigliani but Interrupted Mollweide.
The would-be artist had mutated into an assistant in this subdivided suite of rooms where false maps were concocted.
"My dreams have decayed," he confided to friend Goldman in the restaurant one lunchtime.
Around them, officers from the directorates of cryptography, surveillance, or the border guards ate lustily under rows of fat white light-globes. Each globe wore a hat-like shade. Fifty featureless white heads hung from the ceiling, brooking no shadows below, keeping watch blindly. A couple of baggy babushkas wheeled trolleys stacked with dirty dishes around the hall. Those old women seemed bent on achieving some quota of soiled crockery rather than on delivering the same speedily to the nearest sink.
Goldman speared a slice of roast tongue. "Oh I don't know. Where else, um, can we eat, um, as finely as this?"
Dark, curly-haired, pretty-faced Goldman was developing a hint of a pot-belly. Only a proto-pot as yet, though definitely a protuberance in the making. Peterkin eyed his neighbour's midriff.
Goldman sighed. "Ah, it's the sedentary life! I freely admit it. All day long spent sharpening quills for pens, pens, pens… No sooner do I empty one basket of wing feathers than that wretched hunchback porter delivers another. Small wonder he's a hunchback! I really ought to be out in the woods or the marshes shooting geese and teal and woodcock. That's what I wanted to be, you know? A hunter out in the open air."
"So you've told me." Peterkin was lunching on broiled hazel-hen with jam. However, each evening-rain, snow, or shine-he made sure to take a five-kilometre constitutional walk, armed with a sketchbook as witness to his former hopes; rather as a mother chimp might tote her dead baby around until it started to stink.
Peterkin was handsome where his friend was pretty. Slim, blond, steely-eyed, and with noble features. Yet all for what? Here in the secret police building he mostly met frumps or frigid functionaries. The foxy females were bait for foreign diplomats and businessmen. Out on the streets, whores were garishly painted in a do-it-yourself style: Slash lips, cheeks rouged like stop-lights, bruised eyes. Under the evening street lamps those ladies of the night looked so lurid to Peterkin.
Excellent food a-plenty was on offer to the secret servants of the State such as he. Goose with apples, breaded mutton chops, shashlik on skewers, steamed sturgeon. Yet whereabouts in his life were the soubrettes and odalisques and gorgeous inamoratas? Without whom, how could he really sate himself?
"So how are the, um, projections?" Goldman asked idly.
"Usual thing, old son. I'm busy using Cassini's method. Distances along the central meridian are true to scale. But all other meridian lines stretch the distances. That makes Cassini's projection fine for big countries that spread from north to south. Of course ours sprawls from east to west. Ha! Across a few thousand kilometres that's quite enough distortion for an enemy missile to miss a silo by kilometres."
"Those geese and turkeys gave their wings to shelter us! Gratifying to know that I'm carving patriotic pens."
"I wonder," Peterkin murmured, "whether amongst our enemies I have some exact counterpart whose job is to deduce which projections I'm using to distort different areas of land…"
Goldman leaned closer. "I heard a rumour. My boss Andrey was talking to Antipin. Andrey was projecting the future. Seems that things are going to change. Seems, for the sake of openness, that we'll be publishing true maps sooner or later."
Peterkin chuckled. This o
utlook seemed as absurd as that he himself might ever become a member of the Academy of Arts.
Yet that very same evening Peterkin saw the woman of his desires.
He had stepped out along Krasny Avenue and turned down Zimoy Prospekt to enter the park. It was only early September, so the ice-skating rink was still a lake dotted with ducks: fat quacking boats laden with potential pens, pens, pens. The air was warm, and a lone kiosk sold chocolate ice cream to strollers; one of whom was her.
She was small and pert, with eyes that were brimming china inkwells, irises of darkest brown. Her curly, coal-black hair-not unlike friend Goldman's, in fact-formed a corona of sheer, glossy darkness, a photographic negative of the sun in eclipse; the sun itself being her round, tanned, softly-contoured face. From the moment Peterkin saw her, that woman suggested a sensuality bottled up and distilled within her-the possibility of love, lust, inspiration, nourishment. She was a liqueur of a lady. She was caviar, licking a chocolate cornet.
Her clothes were routine: cheaply styled bootees and an open raincoat revealing a blotchy floral dress. Yet Peterkin felt such a suction towards her, such a powerful current flowing in her direction.
She glanced at him and shrugged with what seemed a mixture of resignation and bitter amusement. So he followed her out of the park, across the Prospekt, into a maze of minor streets which became increasingly unfamiliar.
Some empty stalls stood deserted in a square which must serve as a market place, so he realized that he was beginning to tread "dead ground," that unacknowledged portion of the city which did not figure on any plans. If inspectors approached by car they would be hard put to find these selfsame streets. One-way and no-entry signs would redirect them away. Such was the essence of this district; impenetrability was the key that locked it up safely out of sight.
Of course, if those same inspectors came on foot with illicit purposes in mind-hoping to buy a kilo of bananas, a rare spare part for a washing machine, or a foreign pornography magazine-they could be in luck. Subsequently they wouldn't be able to report where they had been with any clarity.
The moan of a saxophone assailed Peterkin's ears; a jazz club was nearby. Rowdy laughter issued from a restaurant where the drapes were drawn; he judged that a heavy drinking bout was in progress.
A sign announced Polnoch Place. He had never heard of it. How the sky had darkened, as if in passing from street to street he had been forging hour by hour deeper towards midnight. At last the woman halted under a bright street lamp, her ice cream quite consumed, and waited for him, so unlike the ill-painted floozies of more public thoroughfares.
He cleared his throat. "I must apologize for following you in this fashion, but, well-" Should he mention voluptuous canvases? He flourished his sketchbook lamely.
"What else could you do?" she asked. "You're attracted to me magnetically. Our auras resonate. I was aware of it."
"Our auras-?"
"Our vibrations." She stated this as a fact.
"Are you psychic? Are you a medium?"
"A medium? Oh yes, you might say so. Definitely! A conduit, a channel, a guide. How else could you have strayed so far into this territory except in my footsteps?"
Peterkin glanced around him at strange facades.
"I've heard it said… Are there really two countries side by side-one where the secret police hold sway, and a whole other land which is simply secret? Not just a few little dead zones-but whole swathes of hidden terrain projecting from those zones?"
"Why, of course! When human beings yearn long enough to be some place else, then that somewhere can come into being. Imagine an hourglass; that's the sort of shape the world has. People can drift through like grains of sand-though only so far. There's a kind of population pressure that rebuffs intruders. For the second world gives rise to its own geography, but also to its own inhabitants."
"Has anyone mapped this other terrain?"
"Is that what you do, draw maps?" Her hair, under the street lamp! Her face, like a lamp itself unto him!
His job was a state secret. Yet this woman couldn't possibly be an "eye" of the police, trying to trap him.
"Oh yes, I draw maps," he told her.
"Ah, that makes it more difficult for you to come here."
"Of course not. Don't you realize? Our maps are all lies! Deliberate lies, distortions. In the department of cartography our main brief is to warp the true shape of our country in all sorts of subtle ways."
"Ah?" She sounded unsurprised. "Where I come from, artists map the country with kaleidoscopes of colour. Musicians map it in a symphony. Poets, in a sonnet."
It came to Peterkin that in this other land he could at last be the painter of his desires. He had never believed in psychic phenomena or in a spirit world (unless, perhaps, it was the world of ninety-proof spirit). Yet this circumstance was different. The woman spoke of a material other world-extending far beyond the dead ground of the city. Peterkin knew that he must possess this woman as the key to all his hopes, the portal to a different existence.
"So do you despise your work?" she asked him.
"Yes! Yes!"
She smiled invitingly-and wryly, as though he had already disappointed her.
"My name's Masha."
Her room was richly furnished with rugs from Central Asia, silverware, onyx statuettes, ivory carvings. Was she some black marketeer in art treasures or the mistress of one? Had he stumbled upon a cache hidden since the Revolution? Curtains were woven through with threads of gold. Matching brocade cloaked the bed in a filigree till she drew back the cover, disclosing silk sheets as blue as the clearest summer sky. Her cheap dress, which she shed without further ado, uncovered sleek creamy satin camiknickers… which she also peeled off carelessly.
"Take fright and run away, Peterkin," she teased. "Take fright now!"
"Run away from you?"
"That might be best."
"What should frighten me?"
"You'll see."
"I'm seeing!" Oh her body. Oh his, aquiver, arrow notched and tense to fly into her. He laughed. "I hardly think I'm impotent."
"Even so." She lay back upon the blue silk sheets.
Yet as soon as he started to stroke her limbs…
At first he thought absurdly that Masha had concealed an inflatable device within her person: a dildo-doll made of toughest gossamer so as to fold up as small as a thumb yet expand into a balloon with the dimensions of a man. This, she had liberated and inflated suddenly as a barrier, thrusting Peterkin aside…
What, powered by a cartridge of compressed air? How risky! What if the cartridge sprang a leak or exploded? What if the compressed air blew the wrong way?
The intruder had flowed from Masha in a flood-from her open and inviting legs. It had gushed out cloudily, spilling from her like pints and pints of leaking semen congealing into a body of firm white jelly.
He gagged, in shock. "Wh-what-?"
"It's ectoplasm," she said.
"Ectoplasm-"
Yes, he had heard of ectoplasm: the strange fluidic emanation that supposedly pours out of a psychic's nostrils or ears or mouth, an amorphous milk that takes on bodily form and a kind of solidity. It came from her vagina.
Pah! Flimflammery! Puffs of smoke and muslin suspended on strings. Soft lighting, a touch of hypnosis and auto-suggestion.
Of course, of course. Went without saying. Except…
What now lay between them could be none other than an ectoplasmic body.
A guard dog lurked in Masha's kennel.
A eunuch slept at her door. She wore a chastity belt in the shape of a blanched, clinging phantom. Peterkin studied the thing that separated them. He poked it, and it quivered. It adhered to Masha, connected by…
"Don't try to pull it away," she warned. "You can't. It will only go back inside when my excitement ebbs."
And still he desired her, perhaps even more so. He ached.
"You're still excited?" he asked her.
"Oh yes."
"D
oes this… creature… give you any satisfaction?"
"None at all."
"Did a witch curse you, Masha? Or a magician? Do such persons live in your country?"
Perhaps Masha belonged to somebody powerful who had cast a spell upon her as an insurance policy for those times when she crossed the in-between zone to such places as the park. If composers could map that other land with their concerti, or painters with their palettes, why not other varieties of magic too?
She peered around the white shoulder of the manifestation. "Don't you see, Peterkin? It's you. It's the template for you, the mould."
What did she mean? He too peered at the smooth suggestion of noble features. His ghost was enjoying-no, certainly not even enjoying!- Masha. His ghost simply intervened, another wretched obstacle to joy. A twitching lump, a body equipped with a nervous system but lacking any mind or thoughts.
"And yet," she hinted, "there's a way to enter my country. A medium is a bridge, a doorway. Not to any spirit-world, oh no. But to: that other existence."
"Show me the way."
"Are you quite sure?"
How he ached. "Yes, Masha. Yes. I must enter."
As his thoughts and memories flowed freely-of old desires, of canvases never painted and bodies never seen, of stuffed dumplings and skewered lamb and interminable cartographic projections-so he sensed a shift in his personal centre of gravity, in his prime meridian.
He felt at once much closer to Masha, and anaesthetized, robbed of sensation.
His body was moving; it was rolling over on the bed, flexing its arms and legs-no longer his own body to command.
Equipped with the map of his memories, the ghost had taken charge.
Now the ghost was making Peterkin's body stand up and put on his clothes; while he-his kernel, his soul-clung against Masha silently.
