‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘There is nobody of that name. Not here.’
‘Perhaps she left recently?’
‘I’ve worked here ever since the building opened. Eleven months. I know all the residents. There is no Cornelius here and there never has been. I’m afraid you have the wrong address.’
It was not yet eight o’clock. Lom waited on a bench with a view of the exit. Perhaps she was using another name. Perhaps she had married again. It was possible.
Forty minutes later he saw her come out alone, in her dark clothes again, intense and purposeful, not looking around. She was coming his way. When she got near he rose to meet her.
‘Can we talk?’ he said. ‘Not here. Is there a place?’
‘I have to be at work.’
‘Say you were sick.’
‘I’m never sick.’
‘Then they’ll believe you.’
She hesitated.
‘Please,’ he said.
‘All right then. OK.’
She took him to a workers’ dining hall. Long wooden benches and sticky chrome-legged tables. Yellow-flecked laminate tabletops. The floor was sticky too. The place was crowded with people taking breakfast–young women mostly, girls in sneakers and overalls with tied-back hair. Sweet smells of make-up and scent at war with the black bread and apricot conserve, tea and coffee and steam. The din of cutlery and crockery, the chatter of women with the workday ahead.
Lom and Elena found a space at the end of a bench, near a wide window which looked across an empty paved square to an identical dining hall on the other side.
‘Where’s Maroussia?’ said Elena. She held her cup awkwardly in clawed, broken hands.
‘I lost her.’
Elena nodded. In the aftermath of war, when half the world, it seemed, was lost, you didn’t ask. People told you or they did not. The stories were always more or less the same.
‘I lost my children,’ Elena said. ‘Galina and Yeva. You remember them?’
‘Of course,’ said Lom.
‘The building they were in is gone, built over now, but I go there every day, and when they come back they’ll find me waiting. They’re not dead, I know that at least. Of course I’d know if they were killed. A mother would feel that, wouldn’t she? In her bones? They were taken away but nobody would tell me who took them or where. They all denied knowing anything about it–Taken away? Nobody was taken away–but some of them were lying, I could see. There’s a post office box in my name, so when Galina or Yeva writes me a letter it should go there. The system is very reliable and good, everyone says that.’
‘Is that why you want to kill Rizhin?’ said Lom quietly. ‘Because of what happened to Galina and Yeva?’
‘Not his fault,’ said Elena. ‘Before him, that. That was others. Rizhin came later.’
‘What happened to your hands, Elena?’ said Lom.
‘These?’ She shrugged.
‘Did they do that in the camps? Did they interrogate you?’
‘These are nothing, not compared to what they did to others… not compared to…’ She stopped. Looked out of the window.
‘They hurt someone you knew?’ said Lom.
‘What good is this doing? Talking never does any good. None at all.’
‘Who was he?’
‘He was trying to make a new start,’ she said, still looking out across the sunlit concrete square. ‘New ideas. A better world after the war. Some of us believed in that. We tried… We wanted to… Why would I tell you this? You wanted to stop me killing Rizhin. You were trying to save him. Weren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘And now I’m trying to stop you trying again.’
‘But… why?’
‘Because simply killing Rizhin is no use at all. It’s worse than useless: it would be disastrous. It’s the idea of him that needs to be destroyed. Killing the man will only make the idea of him stronger. Things will only be worse if you kill him. Much, much worse. ’
‘No,’ said Elena. ‘You’re wrong. Why do you think that?’
‘I don’t think it,’ he said. ‘I know it.’
‘What do you want from me? Why are you here?’
‘I want your help. I want to bring Rizhin down. Not kill him, but worse than kill him. Destroy him. Ruin him. Ruin his memory. Make it so people will hate all his plans and all he wants to do, and never do any of it simply because it was what he wanted.’
‘How? How would you do this?’
‘With information. With proof of what he really is.’
‘And you have this?’
‘Not yet. I should have it tomorrow. But I’ll need help to use it properly. That’s why I came to see you. I thought you might know people. You could put me in contact—’
‘What kind of people?’
‘Like you said. People with new ideas. Do you know people like that? People I could talk to?’
‘Maybe. Perhaps they would talk to you. You could show them what you have.’
‘I’d need to meet them first, before I brought them anything.’
Elena looked hard at Lom. Her thin dark face. Her broken nose. Eyes burning just this side of crazy.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But Maroussia trusted you.’
‘And this is Maroussia’s work I’m doing. Unfinished business.’
Elena moved her head slightly. That connected with her.
‘Is it?’ she said.
‘Yes, it is.’
She took a deep breath. ‘OK. Come with me. I’ll take you there now.’
7
Maroussia Shaumian walks in the forest and as she walks she picks things up. Small things, the litter of forest life that snags her gaze and answers her in some instinctive wordless way. Smooth small greenish stones from the bed of a stream. Twigs of rowan. Pine cones. Galls and cankers. Pellets and feathers of owl. A trail of dark ivy stem, rough with root hairs. A piece of root like a brown mossy face. The body of a shrew, dead at the path-side, a tiny packet of fur and frail bone, the bright black drupelet of an open eye. She stops and gathers them and tucks them in her satchel.
When she rests she tips the satchel out and sorts through them. Holds them one by one, interrogates them, listens, and shapes them. Knots them together with grass, threads them on bramble lengths, fixes them with dabs of sticky mud and resin smears. She is making strange objects.
Each one as she makes it becomes a tiny part of her, but separated off. Each one is an expression, a distillation, a vessel and an awakening: not the whole of her, but some small and very specific part, some particular and exact feeling, one certain memory that she separates from herself and makes a thing apart. Some don’t work. The investing doesn’t take, but slips through the gaps and fades. Those, the emptied ones, the ones that die, she buries under earth and moss and leaves. But many do take, and she knows each one and gives it a name. Lumb. Hope. Wythe. Frith. Scough. Carse. Arker. Haugh. Lade. Clun. Mistall. Brack. Lund. In the evenings she hangs them at intervals around her camp. They dangle and twist and open themselves to the night, to watch and listen while she sleeps.
No one showed her how to do this, not Fraiethe or the father or the Seer Witch of Bones. She found her own way to it.
She comes to where a wide shallow beck crosses the path, running fast and cold, spilling across mounded rocks. Trees on either side lean across it, leaf-heads merged, darkening the water. She drinks a little from the stream and sits a while on the bank. Makes a leaf boat, pinned in shape with thorns, weighted with pebble ballast.
When the leaf boat is ready she reaches for one of the figures she’s made. Brings it close to her eye and studies the tiny striations on the twig bark, the exact complexity of grass-stem knots, the russets of moss, the lichen maps like moth wings. She tries to feel her way into it, curious to find what part of herself it is that the object holds. But it is opaque now and keeps its own counsel. She puts it in the boat.