A meal of cabbage soup, beef and pirogi was laid out on a table in the main room. Virginsky and Tatyana Ruslanovna murmured appreciative comments, which were ignored by the old merchant and seemed to pain the young woman, who gave a small wince whenever she was addressed. And so the company quickly lapsed into silence.
Virginsky watched the baby grope the air, fascinated by its perfect fingers and minuscule fingernails. The young mother seemed strangely unwilling to engage with her child. The gently curving hands restlessly sought out something to grip, and it would have been natural for her to slip a maternal finger into their reach. It was an inclination she resisted. The baby’s innocent animation was in contrast to the adults’ stiff constraint and seemed almost to offend the old man. When it began to cry, the merchant set down his cutlery with a disapproving clatter and looked sharply up into the corner of the room, averting his gaze as far as possible from the sound. The child’s mother took this as her cue to sweep the child away from the table, carrying it off into the couple’s bedroom. The old man continued his meal as if the child, and its mother, had never existed.
*
In the night she answered all his fears with wordless consolations. And although their position was fraught with difficulties and deception, there was honesty in what they gave to one another in the darkness. And what they gave had a voice, a bleating presence ratcheting the infinite night, pulling it tighter around them, making a black blanket of the void.
Afterwards, he realised that the sound he had heard was the baby crying in the next room. He realised too that Tatyana Ruslanovna was also crying. He held her and was shocked by the tremors of her weeping, her tears damp on his chest. ‘What is it? What’s the matter, my darling Tanya?’
‘I’m afraid.’ Her voice was so small it was almost not there at all.
‘Don’t worry. I’m here. Nothing can hurt you.’ His eyes were wide open as he lied.
‘I’m afraid,’ she repeated. ‘What if. . what if we are wrong?’
The bleating of the baby had become something inhuman and incomprehensible. The old man shouted something that Virginsky could not make out. ‘What do you mean?’ His murmur was for Tatyana Ruslanovna.
‘I was thinking of the children who died.’
He thought of the answer he ought to give, the argument of social utility, of a price that has to be paid, of sacrifices that have to be made.
It was almost as if she had heard his thoughts: ‘Oh, I know what Botkin would say. But what if Botkin is wrong? Men like Botkin frighten me.’ For a moment, she allowed the child’s cries to speak for her. ‘Men like you frighten me.’
‘I?’
‘It frightens me that we need murderers. Somehow it seems to undermine every argument we make that we must have men of blood to put them forward for us.’
Virginsky tensed. He felt a reciprocal tensing in her body. Beads of sweat began to break out between them. ‘But surely I don’t frighten you?’
She did not answer. He frowned in the darkness, his brows compressing around the idea that it was fear that had prompted her to give herself to him; that the sexual act was, for her, a way of overcoming her fear.
‘You know what they are planning next?’ she continued.
‘An atrocity of some kind?’
He felt her head move in anguished confirmation. ‘What if other innocents die?’
A shudder of revulsion was the only answer he could give.
‘Sometimes,’ she went on, ‘I cannot understand how it came to be that I am involved with such men.’ She clung onto him, and the feel of her nakedness and need against him was enthralling. It empowered him.
‘But you were in Paris, in the Commune?’
‘Yes, I was there. And what I saw terrified me. And what I did — what I saw I was capable of — terrified me even more.’ Her body shook with what could have been laughter, the bitterest. ‘I sometimes think the only reason I was there was to shock my parents. It was an act of childish rebellion. And look where it has got me!’
‘With me?’ His whispered consolation lacked conviction.
‘In the arms of a murderer. And now, you will betray me to the others. You will tell them of my fears, that I am losing heart, that I cannot be trusted. And so it will begin. They will come for me. .’ She seemed to see her comrades closing in on her. Her voice brimmed with terror.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You need not be frightened of me. I am not like them. I am not a murderer.’
‘But you killed Porfiry Petrovich.’
He shook his head. ‘It was staged. I. . I fired a blank cartridge. Porfiry is not dead.’
‘But they announced his death in the paper.’
‘Porfiry Petrovich has always been a great prankster.’
He sensed her relax in his arms. He had the impression that she fell asleep. He was alone with the crying of the baby, and the occasional incomprehensible barks of rage from the old man.
*
She was no longer in his arms when he awoke. It was morning. She was dressed and had opened the one low window to air the room, as if she wanted to dispel all trace of what had happened in the night. She seemed stubbornly reluctant to face him.
Virginsky’s destiny
The intimacy of the first night was never repeated.
He dreamt one night that the merchant couple’s baby was dead. When he looked down, he saw that one of his hands was over the baby’s face. An atmosphere of unspeakable guilt pervaded the dream.
When he woke in the morning after the dream, he strained to listen for the baby’s cries. Instead he heard voices in the room outside. He sat up and pulled on his trousers, throwing the blankets onto the bed. Almost as soon as he had done so, there was a violent knocking on the door. Tatyana Ruslanovna admitted Botkin, Totsky and, to Virginsky’s surprise, Professor Tatiscev. Totsky was carrying a small suitcase made of polished steel, which he seemed reluctant to let out of his hands. The room was cramped with five people in it, and Botkin’s customary stench, of petrol and masculinity, was a sixth unwelcome presence, crowding them out.
Totsky and Virginsky remained standing, confronting one another across their rivalry for Tatyana Ruslanovna. Botkin pushed one of the chairs against the door and sat on it. Tatiscev took the other chair and Tatyana Ruslanovna sat on the bed.
‘Are you sure this is wise?’ began Virginsky. He glanced nervously towards Tatyana Ruslanovna, whose expression had become peculiarly set. ‘All of us here like this?’
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ said Tatiscev quickly.
For a moment, no one spoke. Virginsky found the brisk determination of the men ominous; he picked up subtly unnerving signals in the glances that passed between them. He felt that he ought to have been frightened on Tatyana Ruslanovna’s behalf, but a strange fixity had come over her face that was more chilling than anything he saw on the men’s. She was the first to speak, and the flitting of her eye just before she did so told him that he would do better to be frightened on his own account.
‘It’s as we suspected. It was all a pretence.’ She tilted her head dismissively towards Virginsky. ‘He fired a blank cartridge. He is here to spy on us.’
Virginsky felt as if a cannonball had dropped inside him, forcing the wind out as it bounced into his solar plexus. She turned to face him with a look of brazen contempt.
Tatiscev merely nodded. Nothing Tatyana Ruslanovna had said seemed to surprise him.
Botkin leant forward in his chair, his heavy axe-shaped head looming towards Virginsky dangerously, as if even his consideration was something to be afraid of.
Totsky’s face lost what small amount of colour it had. His mouth was pinched into a disapproving dot. His hand tightened around the handle of his steel suitcase.
Tatiscev produced a small glass bottle from the inside of his jacket. He handed it to Botkin, who looked into it with an unseemly hunger, flashing a mocking grin towards Virginsky. ‘Come now, take your medicine like a good boy.’ Botkin took the stopper out and rose to his feet.