He stared at the lines of doggerel without reading them. Virginsky had to accept that his mind, in its totality, was a monstrously larger entity than his consciousness. It did most of its work without his knowing anything about it. This need not alarm him, he decided, although he was uneasy about the surrender of control that it implied. His emotions were racing to keep pace with his thoughts. A surge of panic was overtaken by anger: he would not relinquish his claims to be a rational being. On the contrary, his rationalism now had to encompass this newly recognised and undeniable fact. Calmer now, he realised that he must seek to grasp with conscious thought what his unconscious mind had been up to.
In the first place, there was the question of his resistance to opening the trunk the previous night. It would have been a simple matter to have looked inside, thereby confirming one way or another the solution which his dreaming mind had apparently furnished. A simple matter, and not at all irrational, for that was the only logical way to settle the question and restore his mental equilibrium. To confront his unconscious.
The irrational act had been to push the trunk back under his bed without looking inside.
It could only be that his unconscious mind had sensed the connection between Kozodavlev and the hatchet-headed man who had given him the manifesto. But why should that have provoked this strange reluctance? Of course, the answer to that was that opening the trunk and taking out the manifesto would have inevitably drawn Virginsky into the case they were investigating, and not simply as an investigator. His conversation with the hatchet-headed man would have come under scrutiny, as well as his motives and intentions at the time. He would have been forced to reveal far more of himself than he wished to, or was sensible.
The crux of the matter was this: the man had told him that he should look for him in the taverns around Haymarket Square. To pass this on to Porfiry Petrovich was tantamount to informing on him. Virginsky may have been a magistrate, but he was not yet ready to become an informant.
Furthermore, he himself, inevitably, would have been embroiled in whatever plan Porfiry came up with to catch the fellow.
To have opened the trunk and looked inside would have hastened the moment that Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky was finally made to choose between his principles and his conscience; the moment, in short, when he would have to decide who he was.
His principles and his conscience. It was unnerving to think that they were not one and the same. But when he tried to give shape to his principles, he had a vision of marvellous beings — very different from the grubby, venal populace of the day — living in vast communal phalansteries, which his imagination modelled on the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition in London. All would be equal. Every need would be met. Hunger, poverty and therefore crime would be at an end. The old institutions of church, marriage and the family would be dismantled. Women and men would be free to think — and love — as they wished. According to the principles to which he ascribed, whatever had to be done to bring about such a future was justified.
The image that his conscience imposed on him was very different. A little girl in a christening gown, her hands loosely folded around a painted egg, her eyes open but unseeing.
The Slavophiles
Two days later, Porfiry received a telegram from the authorities in Helsingfors. Apprentice Seaman Ordynov confirmed that the mysterious stranger who had watched him and his mates bring the body to the surface of the Winter Canal was the man identified as Kozodavlev in the Affair staff photograph.
‘So, Pavel Pavlovich, what do you say now? Kozodavlev was on the bridge. He was there watching, as though he expected the body to come to light now that the ice was melting. Furthermore, we have found the trace of a nihilist manifesto in his apartment. You must at least admit the possibility that he was involved in a revolutionary grouping and was on the verge of informing on it when he was killed.’
‘Of course. It is possible.’ Virginsky’s emphasis was intended to suggest that anything was possible.
‘And so, we may look further into his background?’
‘You do not need my permission. I believe we were waiting for the witness identification to come through. And now that we have that, it seems sensible to proceed.’
Porfiry’s face lit up. ‘Let us visit the Slavophiles then!’
*
If — thought Porfiry — one were to choose one’s politics based on the physical attractiveness of the proponents of this or that cause, then the radicals would certainly win out over the Slavophiles. For one thing, the men (for they were without exception male) who comprised the editorial staff of Russian Era and Russian Soil were markedly older than their counterparts at Affair. They were all heavily bearded. Their expressions, stern to the point of forbidding, created the distinct impression that they held a grievance against anyone who dared to cross their threshold. They looked out from the territory of their office on Liteiny Prospect with the same suspicion and hatred with which they looked out from Russia. According to their siege mentality, which was clearly visible in their faces, everything that came in from outside was inevitably evil and had to be repelled.
In other respects, the office was very similar to the one he and Virginsky had visited exactly a week ago. It was basically a domestic apartment converted to a business. There was a central arrangement of desks with hardly any space to move around them.
A facetious thought occurred to Porfiry as he sought to appease the automatic hostility of the room with a deep bow. He knew of many famous men who had begun their careers as radicals, only to become conservatives in later years. Did they, as the more reactionary views took hold on their minds, undergo a physical transformation to match their ideological one? Of course, they would have worked on their beards. But he was thinking of something more fundamental than that: a gradual rearrangement of the structure of their faces, inevitably a contraction, a hardening.
The oldest and most thickly bearded man in the room rose shakily to his feet. He was a frail figure, of slight build. His beard was white and divided into two points. He wore a soft velvet hat on the back of his head, which gave him a strangely bohemian appearance. His eyes were little black points in a luminously pale face. He had a large domed forehead in comparison to which the rest of his face seemed shrunken away. Both eyebrows were steeply arched, one higher than the other, in an expression of permanent quizzicality. ‘How may I help you gentlemen?’ His voice was unexpectedly kindly and welcoming. Porfiry felt at once that he had been unfair to the Slavophiles. If their expressions appeared serious, it was only because they were engaged in a serious business: that of survival, both personal and national.
‘I am looking for Mr Trudolyubov.’
‘I am he. Who might you be?’
‘I am Porfiry Petrovich, an investigating magistrate. And this is my colleague, Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky.’
Trudolyubov’s pinpoint eyes widened slightly in alarm. ‘What is this about?’
‘We are investigating a body found in the Winter Canal. The victim of a murder, we believe.’
‘Good Heavens! What has that to do with us?’
‘Did you recently commission a review for your publication Russian Soil of the novel Swine?’
‘I did.’
‘The novel was serialised in your other publication, Russian Era, was it not?’
‘It’s a common practice.’
‘Yes, of course. I understand,’ said Porfiry smoothly. ‘A practice known as advertisement, I believe.’
Trudolyubov recoiled at the suavely delivered barb.