Ten minutes later they came to the first smashed windows. Pieces of broken glass and shattered roof tiles littered the pavement. Lom felt the tension of violence and fear in the air. It was a tangible thing. A taste. Outside a ransacked clothing shop a white-haired woman was gathering up the ruins of her stock. She’d made a neat little heap of dislocated, broken-backed umbrellas at the roadside, and in her arms she held a pile of white undergarments, torn and trodden with mud. Her face was closed up tight. Nobody helped. Further down the street, other shops were the same. Words were daubed on walls and windows in red paint.
FUCK OFF LEZARYE!
A thin young man in a peaked felt hat was handing out printed fliers. Lom took one. It was badly printed on a cheap portable press.
‘Friends, remember Birzel!’ it read. ‘The government of the Colloquium is not legitimate. The Archipelago is not our enemy. All angels are dead. Let us unite with our brothers the giants and all free peoples everywhere. Wear the White Freedom Rose of Peace! Support Young Mirgorod and bring an end to this pointless war!’
The young man looked cold and scared and vulnerable. Lom wanted to stop and say something to him, but what could he say? Not all the angels are dead?
The part of the city they were walking through was like nothing Lom had experienced in daylight before. It felt both small and immensely extensive. Streets led into other streets, turned into alleyways, went blind and died, or opened suddenly into expansive paved squares. It was like the place he’d wandered into when he was lost on his way to Vishnik’s in the rain, the evening he first arrived in Mirgorod. Through open windows he could see the shadowy profiles of people at work in kitchens. In workshops open to the street men in overalls bent over dismantled engines, and from somewhere out of sight came the sound of a lathe. Every so often there was a street name, but the names were strangely anonymous, interchangeable, perfunctory. Meat Street. Polner Square. Black Pony Yard. A woman flapped a rug from an upstairs window: she caught his eye and looked away. Lom felt he had intruded on something private.
Before he came to Mirgorod, Lom had been only in towns which had a centre and a periphery, and that was all. But this place was neither middle nor edge, but some third thing that could exist only in the gaps and interstices of a great city. It was a part of the huge fabric of Mirgorod, yet Lom had the feeling that for the people they passed, these ordinary fractal streets were the core of their lives, the stage for their dramas, and they seldom left them. It was both somewhere and nowhere, a familiar alienness, the kind of place you saw–if at all–from the window of a tram or a train. The otherness of someone else’s ordinary places. Yet history found its way here, just as much as it came to the wide central prospects and the great buildings of the capitaclass="underline" you felt the presence of it, its strength and its anxiety, the possibility of dark murderous events and love and wonder. For the first time Lom realised the strangeness of what history was: a physical force that acted from a distance on the granular substance of life, like gravity, like inertia. Every where was obscure and elsewhere, non-existent until you found yourself in the middle of it, and then it was local and overwhelmingly specific. Everywhere history operated, everywhere there were things to be afraid of and choices to be made. Because history was gravity, but you could choose not to fall.
‘Where is this place?’ said Lom. ‘What’s it called?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Maroussia. ‘I don’t think I’ve been here before. We must have taken a wrong turning somewhere back there.’
They turned to retrace their steps, only what they’d passed before wasn’t there any more. Different traders, different names. Maroussia slowed and looked around, puzzled.
‘I thought there was an umbrella shop on this corner,’ she said. ‘We haven’t passed that stationer’s before. I would have remembered. Still. It doesn’t matter. We just need to keep going north and east and we’ll come into Big Side in the end.’
There was a burned-out building on the corner of a broad cobbled square. It stank of wet ash and charred wood. A girl of fifteen or sixteen was sitting in the middle of the square under a statue of Admiral Koril. She had a box eubandion on her knees but she wasn’t playing, just resting her arms on the instrument and staring up at the raw darkness of glassless windows, the mute gape of a broken doorway, the jagged roof beams against the sky. She wore long black skirts and a black scarf drawn up over her head. Pulled low, it shadowed her face. Maroussia went across to her.
‘Was that your place?’ she said, nodding to the burned ruin.
The girl looked at her narrowly. She had dark intelligent eyes. Watchful. A strand of dark hair fell across her face. Her hands were red and raw with the cold.
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s the Internationals.’
‘The what?’
‘The Peace and Hope Meeting Rooms For All Nations. Or it was.’
‘What happened here?’
‘Who are you?’ said the girl. ‘Why’re you asking?’
‘We’re not anybody,’ said Maroussia. ‘We’re just walking through.’
The girl glanced at Lom.
‘He’s not nobody. He’s police.’
‘No,’ said Lom. ‘No. I’m not.’
The girl closed her face against them and looked away.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Maroussia. ‘He’s OK. Really, he is. My name’s Maroussia Shaumian. I live by the Oyster Bridge. And this is Vissarion. He’s my friend.’
‘Oyster Bridge? Isn’t that in the raion?’
‘Just this side of the gate. We only want to know what happened here.’
‘The Boots burned it in the night,’ said the girl.
‘Boots?’ said Lom.
‘Thugs,’ said Maroussia. ‘Vlast Purity rabble rousers. Why?’ she said to the girl. ‘Why would they do that?’
‘They’re saying Lezarye killed the Novozhd,’ said the girl. ‘The government said that, so the Boots attacked the Lezarye shops and the hotheads came to fight the Boots, which is what the Boots wanted. Because the Novozhd is dead now, and they want to make trouble.’
‘Who did kill the Novozhd?’ said Lom. ‘Who is the government now?’
The girl stared at him.
‘It’s not a trap,’ said Lom. ‘It’s just a question.’
‘But everyone knows.’
‘We don’t,’ said Maroussia. ‘Honestly. We’ve been away. Travelling. We don’t know what’s happened here.’
‘Where could you travel where they don’t have the Novozhd?’ The girl stood up and hoisted the eubandion across her shoulder. ‘I’m going. Don’t follow me. I’ve got brothers. They’re just over there. I’ll call them.’
‘We won’t follow you,’ said Maroussia. ‘Please. We just want to know what everyone knows. It can’t do you any harm to tell us.’
The girl studied Maroussia for a moment. Lom hung back.
‘The Colloquium is the government now,’ she said. ‘There’s four of them. Fohn. Dukhonin. Chazia. I forget the other one. They say it was the Lezarye that killed the Novozhd, but some people say it was a spy from the Archipelago, and others say it was a loner. A madman. Who do you believe? Everyone says what they want to be true.’ The girl lowered her voice. ‘I even heard someone say the Colloquium did it themselves, to get him out of the way. I don’t know. Whoever did it, it was bad. Look at what happened here. Everything’s getting worse. The Boots—’