‘It is a habit you had better get out of. It will not stand you in good stead with our people.’
‘Yes, of course.’ And although he tried to, he could not resist another question. Indeed, he was not even aware of asking it: ‘Where is Kirill Kirillovich?’
‘He will not be back for another hour or so. Now, if you will forgive me, I wish to rest until Kirill Kirillovich’s return.’ Varvara Alexeevna did not look at him as she said this. Neither did she wait for his courteous bow, before disappearing into the bedroom. He heard the scratch of the hook slotting into its eye, locking the door.
Virginsky moved along the hallway. The light in the apartment was more diffuse now, the flaring panels of sunlight gone. He wondered how long he had spent chasing around after Dolgoruky. His grumbling stomach told him it must have been the best part of the day.
As he entered the main room he saw his service uniform draped over the sofa, almost as if there was a man — a strange two-dimensional, headless man — sitting there. It seemed that Varvara Alexeevna must have arranged the clothes like this deliberately, perhaps to give him a shock when he came in. Or perhaps her motives were more subtle and psychologicaclass="underline" the bottle-green frock coat with the polished brass buttons was a reminder of the man he had once been; it could also be intended to serve as a warning of the powers aligned against him now.
But really, he had to smile at Varvara Alexeevna’s stupidity. What if someone had come in and searched the apartment while they were out? He thought about knocking on her door and pretending to be angry about it. While he was at it, he would ask her about food.
But then a furtive embarrassment came over him as he tried to remember where he had left the clothes when he had changed out of them. On the floor in the couple’s bedroom, he surmised. He remembered her rebuke of ‘Foolish man!’ He realised that her displaying the uniform in that manner was just another way of saying the same thing.
So must he hide them, or even destroy them? The simplest and most effective way to achieve the latter would be to burn the clothes, feeding them into the couple’s stove. But the idea repelled him in a way he could not fathom. He bundled the clothes up hurriedly and stowed them beneath the table. It was hardly a permanent solution but somehow it freed him to concentrate on what he needed to do.
He crossed to the window, or rather to the wall beside the window, doing his best to keep out of sight of anyone watching the apartment. The room was on the same side of the corridor as the bedroom, so that its window also overlooked the courtyard. Virginsky peered down. The man was still there.
There was a small escritoire in the corner of the room. Virginsky found writing paper and pens in the drawer and drafted his initial report, which he made sure fitted onto one side of paper. He folded the sheet into a paper dart, with the plain side out.
This time Virginsky stood in full view of the window. The man in the courtyard bristled to attention. They exchanged minute nods, understanding one another’s gestures perfectly despite the distance between them. There was no one else in the courtyard. Virginsky opened the casement window, wincing at the creak of its hinges, and threw out the dart.
The man in the courtyard seemed determined to disregard the missile. As soon as it began its twisting descent, he looked sharply away from it, and continued to ignore it after it had landed. A terrible thought struck Virginsky: what if the fellow was not the man he had taken him to be? That is to say, what if he was exactly what he appeared to be, an idle loiterer, or even a burglar in waiting? Worse still, what if he was wholly and dangerously mistaken about him; that is to say, he was not a police agent, but one of ‘our people,’ watching the apartment for any slips on his part, a slip of precisely the kind he had just committed.
At last, as if in response to a signal, the man began to walk across the courtyard, though without looking down at the paper dart on the ground. Even so, he was walking straight towards it.
Virginsky’s heart was pounding hard. Surely he had not been mistaken? Porfiry Petrovich had promised him that there would be a man in place, through whom he would be able to communicate. This fellow had to be that man. But if he were not, Virginsky had just, in all probability, written his own death warrant.
The man stooped and retrieved the dart, moving on without opening it. He glanced up at the window. Virginsky tried to interpret his look, for he felt that it must contain the secret of his own fate. But the look was all too brief and utterly inscrutable.
Virginsky turned to the mantelpiece to consult the ormolu clock, wondering how much longer he would have to wait for something to eat. But he saw that Varvara Alexeevna had removed it. Its absence struck him as pointed, and yet he felt a strange sense of injustice at this. After all, it was Botkin who had threatened to smash the clock, not him. Whatever else she might think of him, she had no reason to believe he was a vandal, or a thief.
*
In the adjoining room, Varvara Alexeevna lay on top of the bed, overwhelmed by the sensation of her heartbeats resonating throughout her body. She felt as though her core had been drained from her, leaving a vacuum that seemed to be expanding all the time, pressing up against her epiglottis. It was as if she was on the brink of regurgitating her soul, or what her soul had become now that she no longer believed in it.
She had delivered four babies that day, the first to a merchant’s wife in Vasilevsky Island, the second to a clerk’s wife in Narvskaya District, the third to a prostitute in Kazanskaya District, and the fourth to the wife of a factory worker, who already had six other children, huddled together in a damp cellar in Spasskaya District. Perhaps the strange physical sensations she was experiencing were symptoms of a kind of elation. She ought to be at least satisfied with a good day’s work. The babies had all been born alive, although she could not vouchsafe how long they would remain so. The mothers too had survived the trauma of childbirth. And yet she could not shake off the sense that she was helping to bring children into a terrible world, and therefore she was complicit in fashioning the joyless, loveless destinies that awaited them; in their oppression, in other words. Many of the babies she delivered were unwanted. They would grow up — if they survived infancy — experiencing only hardship and misery. In all likelihood, the girls would become prostitutes; the boys, drunken brutes, fathering more unwanted children. And so it went on. Ignorance breeding ignorance.
She relied on two consolations to bring herself out of these depressive states: the first was her commitment to the revolution, her determination to do what she could to create a better world for the four babies she had delivered that day to grow up in; the second was her enjoyment of the small collection of fine objects she had managed to accumulate over the years. She was aware of the contradiction inherent in these positions. It had been pointed out to her enough times by Kirill Kirillovich and his friends. But as far as she was concerned, both were essential to her, and therefore she saw no difficulty.
At times, however, the latter consolation, that of beautiful objects, was more compelling than the allure of a distant, unachieved future. There was so much uncertainty on the way to a better society, so much debate and disagreement, about methods and means, not to mention objectives, that it was hard to maintain her commitment to the cause at every minute of every day. The present was dominated by sacrifice, as the immediate future would be. There was the very real possibility that she herself would not live to enjoy the rewards that would one day come. In the meantime, all that was left to her was to obey unquestioningly whatever was asked of her by the central committee. But she had to confess, she found this harder than she might have hoped. For example, she had been called upon to harbour the man in the next room. She did not like him. She did not trust him. But it seemed that he was a hero of the revolution, or on the verge of becoming one. And so she must share her apartment, and her food, with him.