He was looking for something. Shadows and trails of what used to be. Old wild places where the forest still was. Giants and rusalkas and the dry ghosts of rain beasts in a wide cobbled square. There must be something left, something he could work with. But he was the only haunter of the new ruined city, caught between memory and forgetting, listening to the silence of dried waters. The city had turned its back on the Mir, and he was on the wrong side of the river.
In the very shadow of the Rizhin Tower, almost under the walls of the Lodka, he crossed into a small field of rubble. Mirgorod was aftermath city yet, and the heal-less residuum of war still came through. Stains under fresh plaster.
Lom stepped in among roofless blackened walls propped with baulks of timber. Night scents of wild herb and bramble. The smell of ash and rust and old wood slowly rotting. A grating in the gutter and running water down below–moss and mushroom and soft mud–the Yekaterina Canal paved over and gone underground.
Follow. Follow.
Gaps and small openings into blackness everywhere. Subterranea.
He kicks aside a fallen shop sign. CLOVER. BOOKS AND PERIODICALS.
Down he goes into old quiet tunnels and long-abandoned burrowings. There is no light down there, no lurid Rizhin glow, but he is Lom and needs no light to find his way.
Chapter Six
1
The Lodka, sealed up and abandoned by Papa Rizhin–New Vlast, new offices! Sky rise and modern! Concrete and steel and glass!–stands, a black stranded hulk on Victory Square, doors locked, lower windows barred and boarded, the silent and disregarded River Mir at its back. Papa Rizhin refuses to use it at all. It is a mausoleum, he says. A stale reliquary. It stinks of typewriter ribbons and old secrets and the accrual of pensions. Four hundred years of conferences and paper shuffling and the dust of yesterday’s police. Will you make me breathe the second-hand breath of unremembered under-secretaries? Titular counsellors who died long ago and took their polished trouser seats with them to the grave? Fuck you. I will not do it.
And so the panels of angel flesh were removed from the Lodka’s outer walls to be ground up for Khyrbysk Propellant, and the vast building itself–its innumerable rooms and unmappable corridors, its unaccountable geometry of lost staircases and entranceless atria open to the sky, its basement cells and killing rooms–was hastily cleared out and simply closed up and left.
Inside the Lodka now an autumnal atmosphere pervades, whatever the external season. Time is disrupted here, unforgetting and passing slow. Many windows are broken–shattered bomb-blast glass scattered on floors and desks–and weather comes in through opened oriels and domes. Paint is flaking off leadlights. In the reading room the great wheel of the Gaukh Engine stands motionless, canted two degrees off centre in its cradle by an Archipelago bomb that fell outside. Animals have taken up residence–acrid streaks and accumulations of bird shit–bats and cats and rats–but they do not penetrate more than the outermost layers, leaving undisturbed the interior depths of this hollowed-out measureless mountain. Only shadows and paper dust settle there, little moved by slow deep tides of scarcely shifting air.
In the inner core of the Lodka, unreached by traffic noise and the coming and going of days, the silence of disconnected telephones drifts along corridors and through open doorways, across linoleum, tile and carpet. Nowhere here is ever completely dark: bone moonlight sifts and trickles eventually through the smallest gaps. Dim noiselessness brushes against walls painted ivory and green and the panels of frosted glass in doors. Quietness drifts along empty shelving and settles like ocean sediment inside deed boxes, cubbyholes, lockers and filing cabinets, the drawers of desks. Chairs still stand where they were left, pushed back. Abandoned pens rest on half-finished notes and memoranda. Jackets hang on coat stands in corners. Spare shoes are stowed under cupboards. Muteness insinuates itself into the inner mechanisms of typewriters, decryption machines, opaline desk lamps and heating boilers. Tiny fragments of angel flesh, inert now, lie where they fell on workroom floors. Obscurity preserves in grey amber the strangely intimate and homely office world of government. The Lodka is an ungraspable archaeology of administration. Surveillance. Bureaucracy. Interrogation. Death. Suspended and timeless. An unfathomable edifice. A sanctuary. An abysm.
Vissarion Lom found his way into the abandoned Lodka by subterranean ways. Following passages till recently used by only the most secretive of confidential agents of the secret surveillance police, he crossed the barely tangible time-slow frontier into memorious residuum, and long hours he wandered there, a warm attentive ghost. There was endless freedom in the Lodka now. It was the one free place in Rizhin’s new city. Free of everything but memories and a strange nostalgia for faded old oppression. It suited Lom better than the Pension Forbat.
But about one thing he was wrong.
The abandoned Lodka is not empty.
The vyrdalak sisters are light and fragile, almost weightless. They dress in brittle patchwork fabrics of subtle colour unlike anything in Rizhin world, and they have wide nocturnal lovely eyes. Inside them is very little body left at all. They are not of the forest but older and stranger than that.
Lom, entering the Lodka, spilling bright perfumed pheromone clouds of forestness all unawares, drew the hungry vyrdalak sisters to him like a warm candle flame.
‘He’s beautiful,’ said Moth. ‘I’d almost forgotten the good smell of trees.’
‘But he stinks of angel also,’ said Paper. ‘Violence is coming back.’
‘We should go to him,’ said Pigeon. ‘One of us must go.’
‘Let it be me then,’ said Moth. ‘Let me. I will go.’
2
Under-Secretary Pavel Ilich Antimos had a natural talent for dealing with complex administration, matured by years of experience. He was subtle, clever, far-sighted, cautious and patient, and he grasped the elegant beauty inherent in meticulous precision and detail. He had been around a long time in large institutions and knew instinctively how to make his way.
Lom’s appearance in his apartment had put Pavel in an uncomfortable place, caught between risk and risk. Through a long evening and sleepless night he weighed up options, measured the balance of danger and reward, and by the time he rose in the morning he had decided to do as Lom suggested. He would find the private Chazia archive. It was a dangerous project, but who could tackle it better than he could, and do it without attracting notice? He knew the ways of government offices: the harmless word in the corridor, the enquiry hidden inside the request, the flicker of reaction, the silent tell. The oblique and traceless passage through a filing list.
By the first afternoon Pavel was beginning to feel he was getting somewhere. There was a book of cancelled requisition slips in a box under a counter at the former address of the Ministry of Railways, a building located out towards the old Oxen Quarter and now occupied by an outpost of the Catering Procurement Branch. If certain papers were not there, if a certain circuit of communication had not been closed, he would be several steps nearer the missing archive, which he was increasingly certain did actually exist.