‘No!’ called a voice.
‘Yes!’ called another. ‘Yes! It’s all true!’
‘Here we see it, friends,’ said Yashina, looking out across pained faces. Shock and disbelief and fear. ‘This is the fate that will come to us all if the man Rizhin remains in his position.
‘He has elevated himself so high above the Vlast he purports to serve that he thinks he can decide all things alone, and all he needs to implement his decisions are engineers, statisticians, soldiers and police. All others must only listen to him and praise him and obey. He has created about himself a cult of personality of truly monstrous proportions, devoted solely to the glorification of his own person. This is supported by numerous facts.
‘His official biography is nothing but an expression of the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a god, an infallible sage, the sublimest strategist of all times and nations. It is a confection of lies from beginning to end, and all edited and approved by Rizhin himself, the most egregious examples added to the text in his own handwriting. I need not give other examples. We all know them.’
Lom noticed that Kistler had slipped onto the platform and taken a seat at the back. Rizhin had seen him too.
‘Friends and colleagues,’ said Yashina, ‘we must draw the proper conclusions. The negative influence of the cult of the individual has to be completely corrected. I urge the Central Committee to declare itself resolutely against such exaltation of a single person. We must abolish it decisively, once and for all, and fight inexorably all attempts to bring back this practice. We must in future adhere in all matters to the principle of collective leadership, characterised by the observation of legal norms and the wide practice of criticism and self-criticism.’
She paused.
‘I present the motion stated by Secretary Gribov to the Central Committee for the vote,’ she said. ‘Long live the victorious banner of our Vlast.’
Yashina returned to her seat, visibly shaken. The observer-delegates sat absolutely still. A woman was sobbing. A naval officer had his head between his knees, being quietly sick.
Rizhin sat looking at his fingernails with the same faint smile.
‘I ask my colleagues,’ said Gribov at the microphone, ‘to indicate assent or dissent.’
For long moments nobody moved. Rizhin looked along the row of them, and none would meet his gaze. He began to smile. Then Kistler raised his hand.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Assent. Assent.’
Another hand went up.
‘Yes.’
And another, and another, and the dam broke, and all hands went up, every one, and the Victory Hall exploded into tumultuous shouting. In the body of the auditorium the observer-delegates–knowing now which way the wind blew–were on their feet, applauding, roaring, weeping their relief and joy.
Alone, Lom watched from the balcony corner. Rizhin was still sitting in the same attitude, still with the same supercilious smile. He seemed frozen in time. Gribov and Yashina embraced, and Kistler’s face was alight with the clear happy grin of a child. The face of a man to whom the future belonged.
Lom listened to the ecstatic cheering and asked himself why he wasn’t cheering too. He had won. He had done what he set out to do–Rizhin was fallen, the beast was down, the very idea of him in tatters–but his own first emotion was a flood of tired cynicism. Here he was, watching the rulers applaud themselves. All was decided now: Rizhin was a criminal; no one else was to blame, and the banners of the Vlast still flew. The roaring in the hall was the sound of survival, and of ranks closing.
He pushed that weariness aside: it wasn’t right, it did no justice to the courage of Kistler, Yashina and the rest, and it did no justice to himself. The fall of Rizhin might not be an end, but it was a beginning. Things which only that morning could not have happened were once again possible now. Doors were opening. Possible futures multiplying second by second. He had done a good thing, and it had been hard, and he had a right to a moment’s satisfaction. And more than that. Maroussia. He had a right now to go home.
He looked across at Rizhin once again, but his chair was empty. The man was not there.
Lom took the steps up to the exit from the gallery three at a time, crashed open the door into the deserted corridor and began to run.
Part IV
Chapter Eleven
1
The man who was Osip Rizhin moves alone through the corridors of the Victory Hall. No praetorian troopers precede him, ten paces ahead, sub-machine guns in hand, sweeping the way. None follows ten paces behind. But he wears his white uniform still and he walks with the confidence of absolute power.
If you see him coming, press yourself against the wall, show the palms of your hands, lower your eyes. Do not meet his gaze. Papa Rizhin can break you open and smash your world. The modest gold braid on the white of his shoulder, the ribbons at the white of his breast: these are the crests of the truth of the power of death.
He looks at you with soft brown burning eyes as he passes.
The news of his fall has not yet escaped the plenum chamber.
Papa Rizhin, President-Commander and Generalissimus of the New Vlast, walks the passageways of the Victory Hall with measured pace and purposeful intent, but he does not exist. He is ghost. He is after-image. He is lingering, fading retinal burn.
The man who hurries towards the exit is Josef Kantor, wearing Papa Rizhin’s clothes.
He pushes his way through heavy bronze doors and finds himself on a high terrace overlooking the River Mir. No one else is there. Above him the sky and before him the city of Mirgorod in the sun of the afternoon. He stands at the parapet and sees the city he saved, the city he rebuilt from the burned ground up: the great sky-rise buildings spearing the belly of cloudless blue, the tower that bears his face but Rizhin’s name, the tower at the top of which Josef Kantor’s immense and far-seeing statue stands.
Josef Kantor looks out across the city that is still his. Below him is the great slow silent river sliding west towards the sea. Barges call to barges, ploughing the green surface burnished in the afternoon sun, and a warm breeze palms his face. Summer air stirs his thick lustrous hair and gently traces the tight puckered scar on his cheek. Gulls wheel above the city lazily, flashing white in the sunlight. Their whiteness answers the whiteness of his tunic.
Josef Kantor does not move. He is calm. He is waiting. It is nearly time.
The revolutionary has no personal interests. No emotions. No attachments. The revolutionary owns nothing and has no name. All laws, moralities, customs and conventions–the revolutionary is their merciless and implacable enemy. There is only the revolution. All other bonds are broken.