Then he followed.
2
Elena Cornelius was going east. The streets were almost empty. She took a low underpass beneath the thundering Rizhin Highway: a urinous pillared human culvert.
She was easy to follow. Lom trailed her across waste and cratered rubble-lands and through pockets of still-standing bullet-pitted soot-grimed war damage. She led him into a wilderness of elephantine newness: concrete apartment buildings hastily thrown up among the ruins, already stained and dispirited and bleached colourless in the watery afternoon desolated sun. Lom logged the meaningless street names and recognised nothing at all, but he always knew where he was: wherever you went in Mirgorod you could tell your position by the Rizhin Tower. The skied statue of dead Josef Kantor was a beacon. A steering star.
He remembered the old city, the shifting rain-soft city, layered with glimpses, haunted with strange perceptiveness, turnings and doorways alive with contending futures, but now the triumphant future was here, and if the city was littered with shards and broken images, they were dry bone fragments of the past. Angels and giants were gone, rusalkas also: the waters had closed over them and people behaved as if they had never existed.
The blank blinding sky on concrete and asphalt made him squint. He was thirsty, and heavy with obscure guilt. He had made a mistake somewhere, taken a wrong turning, this future now and in Mirgorod his fault. His intentions were good, but history judged only results, and all his choices so far had been bad. The world around him had come out wrong. One day back in Mirgorod and here he was, trailing across wasted ground after a damaged and solitary woman who had killed a monster and made things worse. He didn’t know why he was here, except there was nothing better to do.
He kept following Elena Cornelius. She entered an apartment block indistinguishable from the others except by a name. KOMMUNALKA SUBBOTIN NO. 19.
Lom waited in a doorway across the square to see if she would come out again, but three hours later she had not. He turned away then, back towards the clustered sky rises under the reaching steel arm of the Rizhin statue.
3
General-Commander Osip Rizhin held himself rigidly upright in the chair while the doctor leaned in close and did his work. Papa Rizhin stared at the desk in front of him and focused his mind on the pain. He held himself open to it and felt it to the full.
His right eye was swollen shut but his left eye was good. Water streamed from it, not tears but cleansing salt burn, and when the doctor offered him morphine Rizhin cursed him. He had borne worse, in other chairs in other rooms, chairs with straps in rooms with barred high windows. Pain was a good harsh friend. An honest friend. Pain was strength and focus. Everyone who had ever leaned over him in a chair and caused him pain was dead now, and he was still here, the survivor, the indestructible.
The whole of the right side of his face was a swollen, shifting, stiffening map of numbness and pain. Every fresh insertion of the needle, every tug of thread, every application of the burning antiseptic pad, brought its own unique and individual new agony. Rizhin paid attention to the particularity of them all, the thing that made each pain different from every other pain he had ever felt. Pain magnified the right hemisphere of his head until it was bigger than the whole of the rest of the world, but Rizhin knew all the intimate topography of it. Carefully, attentively, he traced across it every new event in the intricate history of hurting.
The collar and back of his dress-uniform tunic were drenched with cold sticky blood. Fragments of human meat and bone. Most of the blood and all of the fleshy mess was not his but Vladi Broch’s. The sniper’s bullet had deeply furrowed Rizhin’s cheek as it passed on by and entered the seated Broch on a downward trajectory, finding the soft gap between left shoulder and neck. A trajectory that took the top of Broch’s spine out through a hole in his back.
The doctor straightened up and dabbed at his handiwork on Rizhin’s cheek with an iodine cloth. He washed his hands in a bowl of soap and then took a clean handkerchief from his pocket to polish his round-rimmed spectacles. The doctor had soft subtle hands. He wore his thinning hair combed back.
Trust no doctor, that was Rizhin’s iron rule. Doctors were the cunning eunuch viziers of the modern world. Mountebank snake-oil alchemists. Obfuscating cabalists of a secretive knowledge. Master superciliists. All surgeons and physicians played you false. In comfortably upholstered rooms they wove their mockery and plots.
Doctor, respected doctor, fear your patient.
‘There will be a scar, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s nothing I can do about that. I’ve been as neat as I can.’
He began to prepare a dressing pad.
‘A battle scar is a source of pride,’ Rizhin growled at him through lopsided tongue and uncooperative mouth. ‘A million of our veterans bear far worse than this, and they’re the lucky ones.’
4
Nikolai Forshin convenes a conference of the Philosophy League at eight in the evening to consider the letter from Mirgorod.
‘Of course you must come to our meeting, Eligiya Kamilova,’ he says. ‘You are one of us, and I may need your support.’
They gather in the principal room of the dacha, part salon, part library: a room of divans and cretonne and canework chairs, threadbare rugs on a parquet floor. Forshin has left the doors to the veranda open, admitting sullen lilac evening. The birch avenue flimsy and skeletal.
Everyone is there: Forshin himself, standing tall and wild-haired at the fireplace, brimming with enthusiasm; the economist Pitrim Brutskoi; Karsin the lexicographer; Olga-Marya Rapp, novelist of the woman’s condition; the historians Sitzenvaldt and Polon; Likht the architect and tiny birdlike Yudifa Yudifovna, one-time editor of the short-lived New Tomorrows Review. Wives and husbands and lovers are crammed into the room too, squeezing onto sofas, propping cushions on the floor. Here are all the members of Forshin’s odd ad-hoc league of the self-exiled and self-appointed intelligentsia, withdrawn into obscurity when the air of the Writers and Artists Union began to chill against them. One by one they got out before the cycle of denunciation, ostracism and arrest got an unbreakable grip. Forshin recruited them. Encouraged them. Gathered them in. Told them they were awaiting better times. At Forshin’s dacha they could work and write and plan. There were schemes and journals to be prepared for publication when the wheel turned.
All are thin now, gaunt, their clothes worn thin and polished with age and overuse.
We are the last of the last of the cultured generation, Forshin had said to each of them tête-à-tête over tea and petit-beurre biscuits in a quiet corner of the Union. Confronted by horrors on such a scale, such a massiveness and totality of alien attitude, our cultured souls can have no response. There is no place for us here. We are numbed. We are enfeebled. We are without resources. We are exiled from the world itself. Our own country no longer exists, so we must learn to breathe in a vacuum and float three feet above the earth. We must withdraw from the world and wait for other times, until the call comes–as one day it will–for us to return.