‘The Peter the Great has sailed, has she not?’
‘Regrettably.’
‘And so we have missed our chance to present the photograph of Kozodavlev to Apprentice Seaman Ordynov?’
‘We shall have a photographic copy made and sent on to Helsingfors. The authorities there will question Ordynov when the ship docks, in a few days’ time.’
‘And the second thing?’
Porfiry’s expression clouded suddenly, and he looked away from Virginsky. He snatched up the copy of Russian Soil. ‘Whether this. . novel. . has any merit at all.’
Virginsky’s frown made it clear he had detected the lie in Porfiry’s voice.
Swine
By D.
Preface
Be in no doubt. The events set out in this narrative occurred. The personalities with which it is peopled exist. The crimes they commit are real and depicted without exaggeration or sensationalism. I say this with absolute authority. I was there. I am one of those personalities.
I share in the guilt of the crimes, even of the very worst.
Perhaps I did not pull the trigger, but I held down the man.
Why then have I chosen to write this account?
The simplest answer is to say that I have realised the error of my ways. I was in thrall of certain ideas, but am no longer. My intellectual captivation went hand in hand with personal fascination. There are men, and women, whom it is difficult to resist. Even when they utter the most flagrant and outrageous lies — for example, when they assert that black is white — one feels that they are telling the truth. Indeed, one is certain that they are capable only of truth-telling. It goes without saying that the truths they reveal are felt to be the most profound and devastating imaginable.
Their truths are the truths upon which one must act, and with a fierce urgency. When they call, whatever they may ask, one does not refuse.
You may find it hard to believe that any individual could exercise such power over another, that such scoundrels — such swine — are capable of commanding the loyalty of intelligent people. To which I can only say, believe.
They begin with seduction. The seduction of ideas, ideals, hope and goodness. They end with entrapment. The entrapment of fear and mutual suspicion. It is a web from which one cannot extricate one’s self.
Every noble sentiment, every soaring aspiration, every burning desire to improve the lot of one’s fellow man, is reduced to a simple formula of hate: kill or be killed.
One can accept this formula only for so long — that is to say, only for so long as one has not been called upon to act on it. As an abstract formula it may seem as logical, and reasonable, as any other. But the moment one acts upon it is the moment one grasps its true horror. One’s soul is thrown into upheaval. One’s sanity is fractured.
Of the personalities who appear in this narrative, all have suffered for the part they played. All are isolated from their fellow creatures — from God’s creation, in fact — by the sins that hang over them. One man has already committed suicide. I would not be greatly surprised if others follow his example. It is a course of action to which I give due consideration daily.
Perhaps I wrote this narrative to defer that terrible, final crime. Perhaps I hope that the writing will atone for the crimes written about, and render my suicide unnecessary, that by offering this as a warning, I will redeem myself in some small measure.
Or perhaps it is simply the note I will leave behind.
D.
*
By the middle of the following afternoon, that of Friday, 21 April, Porfiry had finished reading all four instalments of Swine. He put the last copy of Russian Soil to one side with a dissatisfied expression. He could not say with any certainty what he had just read. Despite the assertions of that preface, much of the main narrative read as a novel, and a bad novel at that. It was full of cheap novelistic tricks. Indeed, the preface itself could be taken as the first of them. What more transparent novelistic trick could there be than to assert the truth of what is to follow?
And yet, the force of the preface gave him pause. The apparent authenticity of the sentiments expressed seemed to sit at odds with the lurid and contrived narrative that followed. The plot displayed a laughable reliance on coincidence and a lamentable taste for melodrama. The ‘personalities’ portrayed were flat and unconvincing.
That said, it did occur to Porfiry that perhaps individuals in such situations find themselves speaking and acting like characters in a bad novel; if a true account of their acts were written down, the result would be indistinguishable.
He had read the serial half in the hope that it might shed some light on the case he was investigating. On that front, he was not entirely disappointed, although he remained suspicious of the parallels he found. He was looking for a man shot through the head and cast into a canal, and he found him, or something similar. In point of fact, in Swine, the body was thrown into a lake, rather than a canal, and one located on a remote country estate and not in the centre of St Petersburg. Striking as any similarities were, Porfiry was not unduly excited by them. The crime in the novel was clearly modelled on a notorious case of a few years earlier, which had been widely reported when it came to trial. The body in that case, also shot through the head, had been disposed of in a lake.
Besides, when it came to disposing of their victims’ bodies, there was a limited number of choices open to murderers. Immersion in water was not so unique that its occurrence in the novel and in the current case could be seen as significant. More significant, as far as Porfiry was concerned, was the location chosen for disposaclass="underline" in the case he was investigating, this was the Winter Canal, right under the Tsar’s nose. Nothing in Swine resembled this in any way.
More generally, he had hoped to gain some insight into the ‘men of the shadows’ who organised and controlled the types of grouping described in the novel. In Swine, such figures were given names that left one in no doubt as to their role in the narrative. The cruel and ruthless taskmaster who drove the revolutionaries to murder was ‘Tatarin’; the shadowy mastermind whose fiendish plans set their crimes in motion was simply ‘Dyavol’, or Devil. To Porfiry, these characters had no humanity beyond the traits encompassed by their names, which made it difficult for him to believe that they were based on real personalities. In fact, they reminded him of identifiable characters from other books; they were a little too much the stock villains of low literature.
This thought prompted him to turn his attention to the other novel found in Kozodavlev’s drawer, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? The Peculiar Man of that novel, Rakhmetov, seemed to have provided the model for one of the characters of Swine, an ascetic called Monakh. Porfiry had read the book before, soon after its publication in 1863; almost ten years ago, he realised. The character of Rakhmetov, sleeping on a bed of nails to prepare for the struggle ahead, had struck him at the time as a rather preposterous construction. But then again, he was no less realistic than any of the other characters in the book. If the danger of such creations was that they might lead the youth of Russia to emulate them, then really there was no danger. One had to give the youth of Russia more credit. When it came down to it, they were just too sensible to fall for all that idealised nonsense, or so Porfiry believed. The self-negating sacrifice of Chernyshevsky’s improbable hero Lopukhov (which, under the tortuous rationalising of the novel, was an act of supreme self-interest), faking his own suicide in order to leave his wife free to marry her lover — who in their right mind would wish to emulate him?