Lom waited. Nobody came. He stood there, dripping, in the dark passageway. He realised that he was shaking, and not just with cold and hunger and the fatigue of carrying his case through the empty streets. The taste of the living rain was in his mouth. The smell of it on his face and his clothes. He had heard of such things, the possibilities of them. You didn’t live at the edge of the forest without being sometimes aware of the wakefulness of the wilder things: the life of the wind, the sentience of the watchful trees. The memory of the damp, living earth. But not in Mirgorod. He had not expected to find such things here: Mirgorod was the capital of solidity, the Founder’s Strength, the Vlast of the One Truth.
He needed Vishnik to open up. He rang the bell again. Nothing happened. Maybe Vishnik was already in bed. He rang twice more and banged on the door. There was a muffled sound of movement within, and it opened slowly. A pale, drawn face appeared. Dark eyes, blank and unfocused, looked into his own.
‘Yes?’
‘Raku?’
The dark eyes looked past him to see if someone else was in the corridor. Vishnik was dressed to go out: an unbuttoned gabardine draped from his shoulders, a small overnight bag in his hand. He was taller than Lom remembered, but the same glossy fringe of black hair flopped across his forehead. The same dark brown eyes behind rimless circular lenses. But the eyes were glassy with fear.
‘Raku. It’s me. Vissarion.’
Vishnik’s hands were balled in tight fists. He was shaking with anger. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck. What the fuck are you doing.’
‘Raku? Didn’t you get my telegram?’
‘No I didn’t get any fucking telegram. Shit. What are you doing? I don’t see you for half a lifetime and then you’re hammering on my door in the middle of the night.’
‘I wired. Five, six days ago. I said I would be coming. I said it would be late.’
Vishnik held up his bag. Shoved it at Lom. ‘See this? What’s this? Clothes. Bread. So I don’t have to go in my pyjamas when they come. How did you get in here anyway? The dvornik shouldn’t have—’
‘I gave him fifty kopeks.’
‘Fifty? That’s not enough. He has to report visitors to the police.’
‘What’s he going to report? I am the police.’
‘Some fucking policeman. Look at you. Dripping on the carpet.’ He looked at Lom’s valise. ‘You got dry things in there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wait.’
Vishnik disappeared. Rain seeped out of Lom’s hair and down his face. Rain dripped from the hem of his cloak and spilled from his trouser cuffs.
Vishnik came back carrying a towel.
‘There’s a bathroom at the end of the corridor.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Yeah. Shit. Well, get dry.’
Lom tucked the towel under his arm, picked up the valise and started down the corridor.
‘Oh, and Vissarion.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s good to see you. I thought I never would.’
Fifteen minutes later Lom was sitting on Vishnik’s couch with a glass of aquavit. There was food on the table. Solyanka with cabbage and lamb. Thick black bread. He leaned back and let the room wrap itself around him. Heavy velvet curtains of a faded brick colour hung across the window. Electric table lamps cast warm shadows. A paraffin heater burned in the corner. Bookshelves everywhere. More books piled on the floor and stacked on the desk. And on a side table, carefully arranged, a strange assemblage of objects: a broken red lacquer tea caddy; a grey and blue mocha mug with no handle; a china dog; a piece of stained wood, stuck through with bent and rusting nails; broken shards of ceramic and glass; a feather; a bowl of damp black earth. Odd things that could have been picked up in the street. Set out like the ritual items of a shaman of the city.
But it was the collection of art that made the room extraordinary. In plain dark frames, squeezed in between the bookshelves, hung in corners and high up near the ceiling, the paintings were like none Lom had seen before. They were of shapes and colours only. Sharp angular quadrilaterals of red and blue and green, smashed against a background of dark grey that reminded him of city buildings at twilight, but falling. Collapsing. Black lines slashed across jumbled boxes of faded terracotta. Thick, unfinished scrapes of paint — midnight blue — burnt earth — colours of rain and steel. Mad, childish clouds and curlicues and watery rivers of purple and gold and acidic, medicinal green. As Lom looked he began to see that there were objects in them — sometimes — or at least suggestions of objects. Bits and pieces of objects. A bicycle wheel. A bottle-cork. A bridge reflected in a river, exploded by sunset. A horse. The spout of a jug. Sometimes there was writing — typographic fragments, scrawled vowels, tumbled alphabets, but never a whole word.
Vishnik was sitting at the desk nursing a glass. He looked thin, almost gaunt. His hands were still trembling, but his eyes were warmer now, filled with the dark familiar ardour, missing nothing. It was the same clear serious face, illuminated with an intense intelligence. There was something wild and sad there, which hadn’t been there when they were young. But this was Raku Vishnik still.
‘You gave me a fright, my friend,’ Vishnik was saying. ‘I was ungracious. I apologise. I spend too much time alone these days. One becomes a little strung out, shall we say.’
‘What about your work?’ said Lom. ‘The university.’
Lom had gone with Vishnik to see him onto the boat, the day he left Podchornok for Mirgorod. Vishnik was going to study history at the university, while Lom was to stay in Podchornok and join the police. Vishnik had dressed flamboyantly then. Wide-brimmed hats and bright bow ties. The fringe longer and floppier. They’d exchanged letters full of cleverness and joking and the futures that awaited them both in their chosen professions. Vishnik was going to become a professor, and he had. But the correspondence dwindled over the years and finally stopped. Lom had settled into the routine of the Provinciate Investigations Department.
‘The university?’ said Vishnik. ‘Ah. Now they, they are fuckers. They don’t let me teach any more. My background became known. My family. Someone let the bloody secret out. Aristocrats. Nobility. Former persons. Some of the darling students complained. And then of course there was the matter of my connections with the artists. The poets. The cabaret clubs. I used to write about all that. Did you know? Of course not. Criticism. Essays. Journalism. The magazines could never afford to pay me, but sometimes they gave me a painting.’ He waved clumsily at the walls. ‘But that’s all over. It appears I became an embarrassment to the authorities. The hardliners run the show now, on matters of aesthetics like everything else. These pictures are degenerate. Fuck. They closed the galleries and the magazines. The painters are forbidden to paint. They still do, of course. But it’s dangerous now. And I am silenced. Forbidden to publish. Forbidden to teach.’
He emptied his glass and filled it again. Poured one for Lom.
‘That’s tough,’ said Lom. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I was lucky. Not completely cast into the outermost darkness. I think some of my fucker colleagues did have the grace to feel a little ashamed. They have made me the official historian of Mirgorod, no less. In that august capacity I sit here before you now. There’s even a small stipend. I can afford to eat. Not that anyone wants a history of Mirgorod. I doubt it will ever be published. I’m not spoken to, Vissarion, not any more. And I’m watched. I’m on the list. My time will come. I thought it had, when you came banging at the fucking door. They always come in the night. Never the fucking morning. Never fucking lunchtime. Always the fucking middle of the fucking night.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think—’