‘I only stepped out for five minutes, to answer the call of nature. And on the way back, I paid a visit on the Widow Sudbina. She lives on the third floor. Her husband died not long ago and she has been melancholy ever since. They were sleeping soundly when I left, the little ones. What harm could come to them, I thought?’
‘It’s not your fault. You did not set the fire.’
‘You don’t understand.’ The landlady’s eyes stood out as if they were trying to distance themselves from what she was about to confess. ‘I locked them in! For their own safety, you understand. You don’t know who is prowling around these buildings. That yardkeeper is worse than useless. He never asks to see anyone’s passport. He admits the most unsavoury characters. I locked them in! And then they wouldn’t let me go back upstairs because of the fire.’
It took a moment for Porfiry to absorb what the woman had told him. ‘No. You are not to blame. I repeat, you did not light the fire. You could not have known. My colleague and I are magistrates. Please rest assured that we will find the man responsible for this, and we will bring him to justice. Is that not so, Pavel Pavlovich?’
There was undeniably a challenge in Porfiry’s question. Virginsky said nothing. He bowed his head and in so doing once again found himself looking into the face of the youngest of the Prokharchin children. He thought of the embalmer’s hands on her tiny body, and wondered at the mysterious alchemy that had been worked to bring about her lifeless preservation. In truth, it was a brutal process, a cutting open, a ripping out, a filling in, a trussing up. A violation. The eyes could not turn to him in appeal, could not implore, held no rebuke, however gentle. He willed her grip to curl and tighten around the painted egg.
He felt certain that whoever had lit the fire, for whatever motives, had not wanted her dead. And yet the fire had been lit, and her death, however unintended, was the consequence.
Virginsky lifted his gaze from the child. But he found nowhere else in that room for it comfortably to settle.
Radonitsa
The solution came to Virginsky in the night while he was sleeping. He had not even started working on the problem, so it was indeed surprising that he had solved it so quickly. He woke from his dream with a start and sat bolt upright.
Lighting the tallow candle by his bedside, he pulled out the tin trunk that contained his collection.
Virginsky felt a strange sense of power, which was superseded almost immediately by one of revulsion. This was mysticism! He would not give in to it. He would not open the trunk. It was absurd to think he had dreamed the solution. He would leave the shamanism to Porfiry Petrovich.
He felt at once relieved to have made the decision. Opening that trunk would take him into a realm he had no wish to enter.
As soon as that realisation struck him, his relief evaporated. He stared in horror at the trunk. He imagined it containing some grisly secret: a severed body part, or the corpse of a child. The youngest of the Prokharchin children would just about fit inside it. No, it was inconceivable that he would open it. Not now, possibly not ever.
At the same time, he could not bring himself to push it back under his bed.
He was a rationalist. To unlock the trunk in the expectation of finding the solution he had seen in his dream was not the behaviour of a rationalist. And what if the solution turned out to be there, just as his dream predicted? The ramifications of that were devastating. He was beset by a fleeting premonition, a sense of imminent disintegration.
If his dream were proven to be true, he would be brought to a critical moment in his political as well as his inner live, a genuine crisis. It was far better that the lid remained closed, particularly as his rationalism told him that there could be nothing in it anyhow. One did not dream the solutions to the crimes one was investigating.
He pushed the trunk back under his bed.
He extinguished the candle and lay back down. He closed his eyes but sleep felt a long way off now. He tried to analyse what had just happened. There must be a psychological explanation for his dream, the rationalist in him decided.
The devastation at Kozodavlev’s apartment had naturally made him think of Easter Sunday night when he had gone to witness the fires at the vodka warehouse. Furthermore, Porfiry Petrovich’s theories about Kozodavlev’s radicalism — together with his fixation on the novel Swine — had naturally influenced Virginsky. The dream, in which Kozodavlev had made an appearance, was therefore perfectly explicable. The details were already fading but he thought that it had been to do with a revolutionary cell. For some reason, the Prokharchin children were involved too. Had they been the members of the cell? A ridiculous idea, but that was the way with dreams. And therefore, all the more reason not to act on them.
Certainly, the urgent sense of discovery that had stung him from his sleep had faded. He could not even remember what it was that had almost convinced him to look in the trunk. He began to relax, welcoming the slow dissolution of his being that presaged sleep.
*
As he had intimated he would, Porfiry visited a cemetery on the Feast of Radonitsa. He had learnt from the landlady that the children were to be buried that day, at the Smolenksoe Cemetery on Vasilevsky Island. A procession would set out from the Koshmarov Apartment Building at ten.
There had been a subscription to help with funeral costs, to which both Porfiry and Virginsky had contributed. An edge of hostility had crept into Virginsky’s voice when he answered Porfiry’s question of whether he intended to give something, or not. It seemed that he had detected some kind of slight in the pause Porfiry allowed between the alternatives.
It was the finest day of the spring so far. There had been an explosion of buds in the city’s gardens and parks. The bird-cherry trees were in blossom everywhere. In sending forth its shoots and stems, the earth seemed to be straining up towards the sky, drawn by its inhuman weightlessness. And yet it took a great effort of will on Porfiry’s part to lift his face towards the exuberant light.
The Prokharchins’ friends and neighbours had done them proud. Yekaterina Ivanovna alone had given one hundred assignat roubles. No expense was spared. To bear the five small coffins were two white funerary carriages, their elaborate canopies draped in lace and decked in spring flowers. Each carriage was drawn by a pair of white horses. Ahead of the hearses walked a line of attendants, their white flowing coats and white top hats flashing brilliantly in the sunlight. Behind came the mourners in black. The way was strewn with flowers, scattered from another carriage that led the procession.
The children’s parents clung together. It seemed more that they were pulling each other down than giving mutual support. But somehow they managed to keep walking. They were impelled by the inevitability of the procession. This is what a funeral procession is for, thought Porfiry, why it is necessary. So that those most struck by grief may know where to direct their feet.
It was the first sight Porfiry had caught of Prokharchin. The man seemed to be in one of the stages of delirium tremens, so violently was he shaking. His feet came down with an exaggerated, slightly wayward tread, as if they were constantly trying to free themselves from the restraint of his ankles.
It was a long slow way to the cemetery, which was at the north of the island. They crossed the river over the Nikolaevsky Bridge. Now in full flow, the heedless Neva rushed away from the shuffling line of humanity, leaving it to its woes.
*
Virginsky wrote out the rows of letters:
Go
Of m
Stit