The limousine tyres hissed quietly. The driver dropped a gear and slowed into a hairpin switchback, and the turn brought Kistler suddenly face to face with the biggest portrait of Papa Rizhin he’d ever seen: two hundred feet high, surely, and the benevolent smiling countenance outlined with scarlet neon tubes, burning bright against the cliff face even in the noonday light.
Lukasz Kistler had his own dacha, a white-gabled lodge in the Koromantine style tucked in among black cypresses a mile or so from Krasnaya Polyana. They all did–Gribov, Yashina and the rest–all except Rond, who travelled with his staff and had rooms in Rizhin’s place. No vacation for the assiduous Colonel Hunder Rond.
Studded timber gates opened at Kistler’s approach. The car entered a rough-walled unlit tunnel cut through solid mountain and ten minutes later emerged into sunlight and the courtyard of Krasnaya Polyana, a sprawling low green mansion on the brink of a sheer cliff.
The sun-roofed verandas of Dacha Number Nine looked out across the sea. Some previous occupant had planted the gardens with mulberry, cherry, almonds and acacia. Tame flightless cranes and ornamental ducks for the boating lake. Rizhin had added tennis courts, skittles, a shooting range. Papa Rizhin holidayed seriously.
Kistler found Rizhin himself in expansive mood, rigged out in gleaming white belted tunic and knee-length soft boots, Karima-fashion, paunch neat and round, hair brushed back thick and lustrous in the sunshine. He seemed taller. Mountain air suited him. The bullet scar on his cheek, still puckered and raw, gave his long pockmarked face a permanent lopsided grin. A show of white ivory teeth.
‘Lukasz! You came!’ Rizhin clapped him on the shoulder. ‘So we haven’t arrested you yet? Still not shot? Good. Come and see Gribov playing tennis in his jacket and boots, it’s the most comical thing–everyone is laughing. But he wins, Lukasz! He plays like a firebrand. What a man this Gribov is.’
They linked arms like brothers and walked around the edge of the lake.
‘Zorgenfrey came up yesterday from Anaklion,’ said Rizhin, ‘and completely fixed my teeth. No pain at all. Why can’t we have such dentists in Mirgorod? The Karima sanatoriums get the best of everything. Yet he tells me he can’t get his daughter into Rudnev-Possochin. He wants her to study medicine but the university puts up no end of obstructions. We must do something there. Talk to them for me, Lukasz. Iron the wrinkles out.’
‘Leave it with me, Osip,’ said Kistler. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
There were twenty-four at dinner: the Central Committee, Rizhin’s bodyguards Bauker and Vasilisk, uncomfortable and self-conscious (‘Come,’ said Rizhin. ‘We’re all family here.’) and silent, watchful Hunder Rond. They ate roasted lamb in a thick citrus sauce. Sliced tomatoes, cherries and pears. Red wine and grappa. Rizhin kept the glasses filled, and after dinner there was singing and dancing.
Bauker and Vasilisk pushed the table to the side of the room and rolled back the carpet. Rizhin presided over the gramophone, playing arias from light operas and ribald comic songs. He led the singing with his fine tenor voice. The bodyguards circulated, refilling glasses.
‘Dance!’ said Rizhin. ‘Dance!’ He put on ‘Waltz of the Southern Lakes’ three times in a row, loud as the machine would go. The men danced with other men or jigged on the spot alone. Yashina, tall and gaunt, twirled on her spiky heels, arms upraised, face a mask of serious concentration. Gribov went to take her in his arms, and when she ignored him he pulled out a handkerchief and danced with it the country way, stamping and shouting like the peasant he used to be. He lunged at Kistler, breathing grappa fumes. Kistler ducked out of his way.
‘Osip!’ shouted Gribov. ‘Osip! Put on the one with dogs!’
‘What’s this about dogs?’ said Marina Trakl, the new Secretary for Agriculture, red-faced. She was very drunk. ‘Are there dogs? I adore dogs!’
‘These are dogs that sing,’ said Gribov. He started to dance with her.
‘Then let us have singing dogs!’ Marina Trakl grinned, snatching Gribov’s handkerchief and waving it in the air.
‘Of course,’ said Rizhin. ‘Whatever you say.’ He changed the record to Bertil Hofgarten’s ‘Ball of the Six Merry Dogs’. When the dogs came in on the second chorus Rizhin started hopping and yelping himself, face twisted in a lopsided beatific smile. Kistler hadn’t seen Rizhin so full of drink. Normally he left the aquavit and the grappa to the others and watched.
‘Come on, you fellows!’ called Rizhin, dancing. ‘Bark with me! Bark!’
One by one, led by Gribov, the members of the Central Committee pumped their elbows and put back their heads and howled like hounds and bitches at the broken moons.
‘Yip! Yip! Yip! A-ruff ruff ruff! Wah-hoo!’
‘Come on, Rond!’ yelled Rizhin. ‘You too!’
Peller, the Secretary for Nationalities, slipped on spilled food and fell flat on his back, legs stuck out, laughing. He wriggled on his back in the mess.
‘Yap! Yap! Yap!’
When the music stopped Gribov slumped exhausted and sweaty on a couch next to Kistler, undid his jacket, put back his head and began to snore. Kistler jabbed him when Rizhin, face flushed, eyes suddenly on fire, drained his glass and banged the table. It was time for Rizhin’s speech.
‘Look at ourselves, my friends,’ he began. ‘What are we?’
He paused for an answer. Somebody made a muffled joke. A few people laughed.
‘What was that? I didn’t hear,’ said Rizhin, but no one spoke. The atmosphere was suddenly tense.
‘I’ll tell you what we are,’ Rizhin continued. ‘Nothing. We are nothing. Look at this planet of ours: a transitory little speck in a universe filled with millions upon millions of far greater bodies.’ He gestured towards the ceiling. ‘Out there, above us, there are countless suns in countless galaxies, and each sun has its own planets. What is any one of us? What is a man or a woman? We are, in actual and literal truth, nothing. Our bodies are collections of vibrating particles separated by emptiness. The very stuff and substance of our world is nothing but light and energy held in precarious patterns of balance, and mostly it is nothing at all. We are accidental temporary assemblages in the middle of a wider emptiness that is passing through us even now, at this very moment, even as we pass through it. Emptiness passing through emptiness, each utterly unaffected by the other. The energies of the universe pass through us like Kharulin rays, as if we are not here at all. We are our own graves walking. We are handfuls of dust.’
Several faces were staring at Rizhin with open dismay. Gribov leaned over in a fug of grappa to whisper in Kistler’s ear, ‘What the fuck’s the man talking about? What’s all this crazy shit?’
Kistler winced. ‘You’re too loud,’ he hissed. ‘For fuck’s sake, keep it down.’
Every time Kistler glanced at Hunder Rond the man was watching him. Their eyes locked for a second, then Rond turned away.
One day, little prince, thought Kistler. One day I’ll snap your fucking thumbs.
‘But what a gift this nothingness is, my friends!’ Rizhin was saying. ‘It is the gift of immensity! Once we see that this world, this planet, is nothing, we realise what our future truly holds. Not one world, but all the worlds. The universe. The stars like sand on the beach. The stars like water, the oceans we sail. Our present world is triviaclass="underline" it is merely the first intake of breath at the commencement of the endless sentence of futurity.’
Rizhin poured himself another glass, the clink of bottle against tumbler the only sound in the room. He fixed them with burning eyes. It was Rizhin the poet, Rizhin the artist of history, speaking now.