‘I see no objection,’ she said eventually. ‘But you will owe me, Josef. The service is not your personal execution squad. Is that all?’
‘No. I want you to take me to the Pollandore. I want to see it.’
31
In Vishnik’s apartment, Lom poured another glass and reached for the file with his own name on it. It was a standard personnel file, tied with ribbon. The registry slip on the front showed it had been referred to Commander Chazia only the day before. The day he had arrived in Mirgorod and seen Krogh. The referring signature was Krogh’s own private secretary.
The file itself contained all the paperwork of an unexceptional career. Good but not brilliant academic achievement. Stalled promotions and rejected applications. The criticisms, complaints and accusations. And one other thing. The earliest document. A letter. Lom read it over and over again until he had it by heart. It was addressed to the Provost of the Podchornok Institute of Truth.
Righteous and Excellent Provost Savinkov
I bow to you deeply from the white of my face to the damp earth, and I commit to your care this boy, gathered in by my artel when, in pursuance of the Forest Extirpation Order, we removed the village and nemeton of Salakhard. The boy does not speak to us, but is believed to be a child of uncouth persons, and consequently now parentless. He is apparently not above six years old, and in all conscience we hesitate to end the life of one so young. But his remaining with us is not by any means practicable. Our orders take us further eastwards, under the trees. Perhaps he may be closed up, in the way you know how, and enfolded in the One Truth? He is yet young.
Lom leaned back on Vishnik’s couch. Deeply buried memories: first memories, beginnings. He was lying under a tree, a thickened old beech that thrust torsos of root deep into the earth and rose high over his head, spreading its leafhead, casting a pool of blue shade on the spring-green grass. The sun hung above the tree, a moored fiery vessel, and small things moved in the thickets. The air was filled with strong, sour, earthy smells, and he could feel the ground beneath his back. He heard the leaves of trees and bushes moving as if in a wind. He was looking upwards, tracing the boughs of the tree where the trunk bifurcated and reached high into the mass of foliage, the million leaves, fresh and thick, bright with the green liquid fire of sunlight that was pouring through them. The tree was eating light and breathing clouds of perfume.
The perfumed tree-breath was its voice, its chemical tongue. It was speaking to the insect population in its bark and branches, warning and soothing them. It was speaking to its neighbour trees, who answered: tree spoke to tree, out across the endless forest. And it was speaking to him. Psychoactive pheromones drifted through the alveolar forests of his human lungs and the whorled synaptical pathways of his cerebral cortex.
At the institute at Podchornok they’d given the silent boy a name, Vissarion Lom, and all this they had taken from him.
Memory left him. For a while Lom simply sat, tired and empty, thinking of nothing, listening to the evening call of the gulls in the seacoloured sky. Surfacing. It was almost dark when he finally moved. Lom gathered up the files and his notes, put them in the waterproof bag, weighted it with the quayside cobblestone and slipped it into the cistern in the bathroom. He settled down to wait for Vishnik to return. That night they would go to the Crimson Marmot Club. To see Lakoba Petrov.
32
The music got louder with each step down the alleyway. Letters in electric red flickered on and off above a door shut tight against the blowing rain and cold. The Crimson Marmot. Lom pushed the door open. A blast of thick, heated air, tobacco smoke and noise hit his face. Inside was a hot, boiling cauldron of red. Red, the colour of the Vlast, the colour of propaganda, the colour of blood, but also the colour of intimacy and desire. Loud voices shouting into excited faces.
Vishnik led the way through the crowd to a table. A young man was dancing nearby, an absorbed, solitary dance with unseeing eyes. His face was powdered chalky white. As his face caught the light Lom saw a ragged wound scar down his cheek. At the next table a snaggle-bearded man was smoking with his eyes closed. The woman with him looked bored. Her jacket shimmered as if it was silk. She was naked from the waist down. She laughed and drained her glass and got up to dance with the young man with the powdered face, swaying her hips and moving her hands in complicated knots. The young man didn’t notice her. On a bench in the corner a couple were making love.
Lom leaned across to shout in Vishnik’s ear: ‘Who are these people?’
Vishnik shrugged.
‘That doesn’t matter here. They come to leave all that behind. Outside, in the daytime, they are clerks. Waiters. Former persons who used to be lawyers or the wives of generals. But this is the night side, a place without history. They come here for the now of it. Keep raising the level. Another notch. Another glass. Another powder. Here you make the most of your body and anyone else’s you can. Does that shock you?’
‘No,’ said Lom. ‘No. It doesn’t.’ He’d been to places in Podchornok where fat rich men went to get drunk and touch young bodies, but this was different. There was a version of himself that could be comfortable here. He looked around again. Searching the faces. ‘Can you see Petrov? Is he here yet?’
‘No, but it’s still early.’
A waiter brought a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Lom watched him uncork and pour.
‘Relax,’ said Vishnik. ‘Enjoy the evening.’
Lom’s eyes were adjusting to the rich, dim redness of the Marmot’s. The walls were crimson plush and hung with vast gilded mirrors that made the room seem larger than it was. Tables crowded one another in a horseshoe around a central space where dancers moved between people standing in noisy, excitable groups. At the back of the room was a small stage, its heavy curtains closed, and in one corner, musicians played instruments of the new music. Lom recognised some of them: a heckelphone, a lupophone, a bandonion, a glasschord. Others he couldn’t identify. He sipped at the champagne and winced. It was thick, with a metallic perfume.
He’d expected something different of the Crimson Marmot: an art gallery, perhaps, with intense talk and samovars. There was art here, though. Wild, angular sketches on the walls. A larger-than-life humanesque manikin hanging from the ceiling, dressed as a soldier with the head of a bear. A figure, crouched high in the corner, with eight limbs and six pairs of woman’s breasts. Lom realised it was meant to be an angel. It was made out of animal bones, old shoes, leather straps and rubbish. Candles burned in its eyes and a scrawled placard hung from its neck. Motherland. Beneath it, someone had pinned a notice to the wall.
With a crash of drums, the musicians fell silent and the curtain was drawn aside to reveal the small stage. A red banner unfurled. The Neo-emotional Cabaret. An ironic cheer went around the room, and a smattering of applause. Vishnik leaned across to Lom.
‘You’ll like this. This is different. This is new. This is fucking good.’
On the stage a man was crouching inside a large wooden crate, shouting nonsense words into a tube connected to a megaphone on top of the crate. ‘Zaum! Zaum! Baba-zaum!’ he chanted. The musicians hacked away with atonal enthusiasm. Lom caught some longer phrases of almost-coherent verse.