13
Josef Kantor, master terrorist, was alone in his room on the Ring Wharf, listening to the voice of Marfa-Anna Priugachina. She was singing the ‘Apple Harvest’ from Lefalla’s Five Evening Songs.
The phonograph, a portable ODZ Pobedityel, was a new acquisition. When it was closed, the heavy, rexine-covered wooden cabinet looked like a briefcase, and when you unlatched and lifted the lid to reveal the turntable with its mat of red felt, it released a rich unnameable scent of components and dust. The neat iron crank handle was clipped inside the lid. All it needed was a disc on the felt, a few turns of the crank in the slot on the side of the box, and the machine was ready. A neat, precise lever dropped the meticulously balanced tone-arm into position and Lefalla’s melody, coming rich and full from the perforated grille on the sides of the casing, filled the room. The gramophone was modernity in a box. The contrast between the precision of its components and the nostalgic melancholy confection of Priugachina’s voice stimulated and soothed him.
Kantor had treated himself to the phonograph the week before: one small gift to himself, one negligible handful of roubles skimmed from the thirty million before they went north to Yakov Khyrbysk. It was a rare departure from his iron principle that all money was for the cause and none for himself, except the most frugal of necessary living expenses. But the deviation from his own discipline didn’t trouble him. It was justified. Looked at clearly, it was no deviation at all. The spirit must be nourished, just as much as the body must, because Kantor was a poet: his greatest resource was the force of imagination, and imagination must be given space to stretch and breathe, or else it grew tired and constrained, and then he missed opportunities and made mistakes.
So he sat in his chair and listened to music. It was a moment of pause, a widening of the spirit, a gathering of forces. The preparations for his new life were almost complete: his books were packed away in a wooden case and the ashes of his papers were smouldering in the grate. All his pamphlets and leaflets and speeches, all the incendiary paragraphs over which he had laboured in the long nights, they were all burned. Citizens! Sisters and brothers! New times are coming. The blood of the Vlast is thin and cold. A fragile skull under a paper face. Young Mirgorod will smash it with a fist! He had believed it in a way, and he believed it still, because it was true: in distant workshops far to the north, amid the pounding of steam hammers, the detonation of rivet guns, the blazing spark-showers of foundries spilling streams of glowing molten iron, new things were being built. Crimson seeds to scatter across the stars. Radiant humankind.
But Kantor let the papers burn without regret, feeling the fading warmth of the fire on his face like the evening sun in Lefalla’s orchard. A new phase was beginning for him now: there was new work to do, and he was ready. More than ready. He had long outgrown the tedious conspiracies of factions and cells, movements and tendencies and futile terrorist acts. The assassination of the Novozhd had been the last and greatest of his triumphs.
Kantor used explosives as an engineer did, with an engineer’s precision and strategic purpose, to loosen rock, to clear a blockage and blast a passage, as in a mine, a quarry, a tunnel, and the bomb that destroyed the Novozhd was the one that had broken through. It had released the landslide. Things were on the move. It was time for direct action now, and for that he needed different tools: he needed armies and police, he needed a city, he needed his own hands on the levers of power. And now he had that: the fox-bitch Chazia had given him Mirgorod in the end, as he knew she would. All he had to do was waft the scent of the living angel under her nose and she was avid for it, blind. She surrrendered the tool of her own destruction to him in her hunger for a sniff of the angel’s rancid piss.
Chazia was a hunter after power in her own way, but her way was weak. She wanted to be near power, to wash herself in it, to smell it on her fingers, but she had no idea what power really was. Chazia had the heart of a bureaucrat. She was insane–there was no doubt of that–but hers was the insanity of the mad administrator. She would give herself to power, when power was to be taken. Power was to be used. And to use power, you needed a poet’s purpose, not an administrator’s.
Kantor despised Chazia as he despised the rest of the authors of this pathetic Colloquium that sought to ride the rockfall of history let loose by the Novozhd’s death; he despised her as he despised the politicking conspirators and secret coterists he had been obliged to deal with for so long: the factionalisms of anarchists, nationalists, nihilists, social democrats, Birzelists. He despised them all. Weak-minded, they considered their goal to be the administrative implementation of ideas, principles, policies. They pleasured themselves in perpetual debate about ends and means and slogans, contending the disposition of property and labour, the organisation of schemes for the provision of sewerage and justice. They built and broke alliances, they disbursed compromise and patronage and money. Kantor understood their world–he had exploited it when he needed to–but he hated it. It absorbed energy and purpose and hope. Policies! The word itself was small-minded. Pusillanimous. It made him feel tired, nauseous, sleepy and bored. There was only one thing that mattered. Energetic force of personality. That was all there was to it, everything else was illusory, bones thrown to dogs. There was nothing of greatness in policies, and Josef Kantor was nothing if not great. He was a visionary. A poet. He saw the shape and sweep of things.
Chazia had given him Mirgorod, and Mirgorod would be his beginning. He would weld the city into one single weapon with a simple, efficient, basic, robust system of control. Fear. Terror. The Vlast had wandered in the foothills of terror but Josef Kantor would climb terror mountain. The city would be a Kantor-machine, and then the continent, the entire planet, would be a Kantor-machine. And still that would only be the beginning. Beyond the world were other worlds, other stars, the angels themselves. The Kantor-machine would force itself ever outwards with one simple beautiful poetic purpose, with an abstract beauty of its own. Perpetuation. Propagation. Expansion. Total universal integration.
And yet there was a problem, an obstacle: the living angel that came from time to time and screamed at him inside his head. For the moment, the angel’s direction and Kantor’s direction were the same, and it was useful to him. The angel was the leash that hauled Chazia to him again and again. But a machine could not have two engines. Kantor feared the angel, and the thing you feared must be confronted. It must be killed. In the end that time must come, and he would find a way.
The recording of Marfa-Anna Priugachina reached its end in a hiss of crackle. The metronome-click of the needle rebounded and rebounded at the limit of its groove.
14
The further north into the city Lom and Maroussia went, the smaller and poorer the houses became. Narrow streets smelled of rendering fat, cabbage and potatoes. There were shops selling black bread and dried fish, packets of dusty tea, sour kvass, second-hand linen. Pawn shops and moneylenders. In small yards groups of men smoked rank tobacco and tossed quarter-kopek coins against walls. Fat snowflakes flocked thicker in the air. They stopped at a second-hand clothes stall in the street. Bought a grey scarf and a pair of woollen gloves for Maroussia. A knitted cap for Lom. He pulled it low over his forehead to cover the wound there. They got the lot for a single rouble. Apart from a few kopeks, it was the last of their money.