Kistler stared at him.
‘Fuck,’ he said. His face flushed. ‘Fuck. You’re right. Hah!’ He reached across and put his hand on Lom’s knee. Squeezed it affectionately. ‘Of course you’re right, you marvellous fucking marvellous man. It doesn’t matter at all.’
‘So did I get you what you need?’ said Lom.
‘You did,’ said Kistler. ‘You bloody well did. Get me back to Mirgorod and I’ll tear the bastard down. I’ll bury him.’
2
As soon as he was back in Mirgorod, Lukasz Kistler went to work. It took time. There were no phone calls. No letters. No traces. Kistler travelled across the city only by night, with the assistance of Maksim and the Underground Road, and by day he lay up in hiding and slept and prepared himself for the next night. He visited every single member of the Central Committee. In secret he came to them, unannounced and unexpected, when they were alone and at home. Each one was shocked by the thinness of his body, the new lines in his face, the black energy burning in his eye.
But you were dead, Lukasz. We all thought you were dead.
He sat with them, whispering into the early hours of the morning in studies and bedrooms while the households slept, and told them his story. He showed them the documentary proofs that Lom had brought back from Vitigorsk. The notes of meetings. The lists. The letters to Khyrbysk in Rizhin’s own scrawl.
And as he spoke, they saw the intact intelligence in his face. They understood the clarity of vision, the urgent determination: this was not Kistler broken and made mad by fear and detention and loss of power; this was Kistler commanding. Kistler on fire. Kistler the leader they had been waiting for.
And one by one in the watches of the night each man and woman of the Central Committee made the same response to what he told them, as Kistler knew they would. He knew his colleagues. He knew the stuff of their hearts.
What shocked and horrified them most was not the plan Rizhin had put into effect; it was that they were not in it. They were not included.
I am not on the list! He was going to leave me behind. I was to burn. My husband, my wife, my children, all were to burn.
One after another Kistler reeled them in. Stroked their vanity, fed their fear, bolstered their courage and swore them to secrecy. And when he had them, he convened a secret meeting at two in the morning at Yulia Yashina’s house, and presented them with his proposal.
‘We must all be signed up to this,’ he said. ‘Absolute and irreversible commitment. Every single one without exception. You must understand–you already know this well, of course you do–that if one of us falters we are all, all of us, doomed. The man or woman who loses courage now, who believes that he or she can gain advantage by moving against the rest of us: that betrayer is the one Rizhin will kill first. You all know this as I do. Concerted collective decisive action, this is the only way. One swift and irresistible blow!’
3
Yeva Cornelius stares up at a tall cliff of concrete and windows. The concrete is grey but the building is somehow brown, and the windows reflect brown and yellow although the sky is blue. The paving of the street is brown and everything is strange.
Eligiya Kamilova has told them that this is Big Side, and this is the street where Aunt Lyudmila’s apartment was, before the bomb; she’s told them they can’t go back to the raion where their proper house was, with the Count and Ilinca and the dog and all the other people who lived there too, because the raion isn’t there any more. Yeva is beginning to doubt whether Eligiya is right about that or anything else. This doesn’t look like Big Side at all. Maybe there was another city, the one they lived in, and this is a different place, another city with the same name but somewhere else, and everything is a bad mistake.
Eligiya doesn’t say much any more, and Galina is thin and tall and her eyes are big and dark and she never says anything at all. They sleep in a dirty room with only one bed and come here very morning, but Yeva’s more sure every day that it’s the wrong place. The women who live here wear pale blue dresses and coats, and their hair is wavy and doesn’t move in the breeze, and they wear small hats, though it’s not cold or raining, and the hats are the same colour as the dresses and coats. Always the same colour. That’s what you have to do here. The men wear hats too, and thin shoes.
Yeva Cornelius thinks she’s eleven years old still, but she hasn’t counted the days and the dates here are wrong. She knows what date it is here–the newspaper has that–but when the date of her birthday comes, it won’t be her birthday. No one asks how old she is anyway. Birthdays are for children, and this is the wrong place; her mother is somewhere else.
‘This is the wrong place,’ she says again to Eligiya Kamilova, who’s standing next to her with Galina. They come here every day at ten o’clock and wait for half an hour. That’s their plan.
‘You say that every day, Yeva,’ said Eligiya, ‘but it’s not.’
A woman in black is watching them from the other side of the road. She looks like their mother but she’s smaller and she has browner skin and shorter hair and the hair’s grey and she’s very thin. Even from so far away, Yeva can see her eyes are black and sad.
The woman in black is watching Yeva just like the dead soldiers used to watch her at Yamelei: patient and with nothing to say and watching for ever and never getting bored or wanting to look at something else instead. But the eyes are black and sad and that shows the woman is alive.
It is their mother.
Galina has seen her too but she doesn’t move and she doesn’t make a sound.
Yeva wants to run across the road but she doesn’t because… because her mother is not the same and Yeva is not the same and nothing is the same. The awkwardness of strangers meeting. Yeva watches her mother back, from the opposite side of the road, and says nothing and doesn’t move.
Eligiya doesn’t know yet. She hasn’t seen.
The woman in black makes a small movement, almost a stumble. Yeva thinks she’s going to turn round and walk away. But she doesn’t.
4
The Sixth Plenum of the New Vlast convened in Victory Hall in central Mirgorod under low ceiling mosaics of aviators and cherry blossom, harvesters and blazing naval guns, all depicted against the same brilliant lucid eggshell-blue cloudless sky. Victory Hall was not large: despite the brutal columns of mottled pink granite and the banners of gold and red, the atmosphere was surprisingly intimate.
The Central Committee took their seats on the platform in a pool of golden light. The floor of the hall before them–the sixty non-voting delegates from the oblasts, the observers from the armed forces in their uniforms, the leading workers in crisp new overalls of blue–murmured anticipation. Order papers were shuffled. An official in a dark suit tested the microphone at the lectern.
This was the day of accounting. Annual reports were to be delivered, production targets exceeded, measures of increasing wealth and prosperity noted, improvements celebrated without complacency. Your committee can and must do better, colleagues, and in your name we will. Revisions to the rolling Five Year Plan would be proposed, and adopted by acclamation.
Watching from the tiered side-galleries, the fifteen chosen representatives of the press, snappy in new dresses and suits, were relaxed and slightly bored, their copy already written and filed according to tables of information and officially approved quotations previously supplied. The seven ambassadors and their assistants from the independent border states measured their shifting relative importance and influence by the seating plan. In the rows behind them, squinting at the platform, trying to identify the members of the committee by name and thinking of what they would tell their families and friends later, sat several dozen selected members of the public–outstanding citizens all, decorated heroes of the Vlast. And among them, perched at the end of a row, inconspicuous in shadow, Vissarion Lom waited alongside Lukasz Kistler.