Maroussia stood up, spilling a tin of pins across the floor. By the time she reached her, her mother had come to a bewildered halt.
‘Mother? What are you doing here?’ said Maroussia. ‘Do you want to lose me my job?’
Her mother’s eyes wouldn’t focus properly. She was pressing the little bag to her breasts. Fasil was coming closer. Maroussia put her mouth against her mother’s ear and shouted.
‘Come on. We have to get outside.’
Her mother didn’t move. She was saying something, but her voice couldn’t be heard. Maroussia put her hands on her shoulders — they felt as soft and strengthless as a child’s — and turned her towards the way out, pushing her gently forward. They had reached the door and Maroussia was pulling it open when Fasil gripped her roughly by the elbow and pulled her backwards.
‘You’re holding up the line. Will you pay for the pieces?’ He turned to Feiga-Ita. ‘Will you?’
‘Look at her, Fasil. She’s ill.’
Fasil pulled Maroussia closer against him. His cheeks were striated with fine red veins. His small eyes were narrowed, his mouth slightly open. There were damp flecks of stuff in his heavy tobacco-gingered moustache.
‘Superior little whore,’ he breathed. ‘You think we’re shit.’
‘Fasil, please, I just need a moment…’
He moved his hand down her back. She felt him trace the curve of her spine down into the valley of her buttocks, probing with his fingers through the thin material of her coat.
‘Whore,’ he hissed in her ear. ‘You can pay me later.’
Maroussia shoved her mother out and followed, pushing the door shut behind her and leaning against it, her eyes closed. Fasil was a bastard. There wouldn’t be an end to that, now.
Her mother was talking rapidly.
‘They’ve come for me. He’s back. We have to go. Run. Hide.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He’s alive. He’s come back. He sent a message. He wants us. He says for us to go with her. To the forest, Maroussia. Back to the trees.’ She held out the bag she was clutching. ‘Take it,’ she said. ‘Take it. It’s here. You can feel it here.’
Maroussia pushed the shabby little bag aside.
‘You shouldn’t have come here, Mother. I have to go back inside now.’
‘No!’ Her mother was pleading with her. She held the little bag forward again, her thin white fingers like frail claws. ‘There were trees in the room. He wants you.’
‘He’s not in the forest! Josef is in Mirgorod. And he doesn’t want us, mother, of course he doesn’t. And we don’t want him.’
Her mother looked at her, puzzled. ‘Josef? No. Not him — not Josef — the other one.’
Maroussia felt the door move behind her. Somebody was trying to push it open. She heard Fasil’s voice.
‘Go home, mother!’ It was hard enough without this. ‘Please. Whatever it is, you can tell me later. At home.’
Maroussia turned and pulled the door open, surprising Fasil. She shoved past him and walked back to her trestle, looking neither right nor left, feeling the eyes of the women watching her. She picked a uniform from the line and began to work.
It took her two minutes, perhaps five, to realise that her mother would never find her way home by herself. It was a miracle she’d managed to get herself to Vanko’s in the first place.
Maroussia picked up her coat and walked back down the aisle, out into the Mirgorod morning. There were other jobs. Probably.
When she got outside she looked up and down the street. There was no sign of her mother.
40
Lom came round a corner against soft wet flurries of snow and stopped dead in his tracks. Twenty yards or so ahead of him two militia men were standing in the long alleyway that cut down between warehouses towards Vanko’s. They had their backs to him. One of them was Major Safran.
The other had laid a hand on Safran’s shoulder and was pointing out an elderly woman coming up the alley towards them, walking slowly, talking to herself. Her hair was a wild wispy mess and she was holding her hands cupped in front of her, carrying something precious. Safran took some papers out of his pocket — photographs — glanced at them and nodded. The militia men moved down the alley to meet the old woman. When she saw them coming she clutched her hands tighter against her chest and turned back.
‘Hey!’ shouted Safran. ‘You! Stop there!.
She ignored him and walked faster, breaking into a kind of scuttling hobble. Safran took his revolver from his holster and levelled it.
‘Militia! Halt or I shoot!’
‘No!’ shouted Lom, but he was too far away to be heard above the traffic noise.
Safran fired once.
The woman’s legs broke under her and she collapsed. She was still struggling to crawl forward when Safran reached her. He hooked the toe of his boot under her ribs and flipped her over onto her back. She lay, her left foot stuck out sideways at a very wrong angle, looking up at him. Her other leg was shifting feebly from side to side. Safran compared her to the photograph in his hand, said something to the other militia man, and shot her in the face. Her head burst against the snowy pavement like an over-ripe fruit, spattering the men’s legs with mess. The one with Safran flinched back in disgust, and dabbed at his trouser-shins with a handkerchief. After a cursory check that she was dead, they continued towards Vanko’s.
Lom felt sick. Another senseless killing in the name of the Vlast. Another uniformed murder.
The woman’s body, when he came close to it, was a bundle of rags. Around her broken face the cooling blood had scooped hollows in the snow, scarlet-centred, fringed with soft edges of rose-pink, and in one of the hollows lay the object she had held so tightly: a little bag of some thin, rough material. Hessian? Hemp? Lom picked it up. The side that had lain in the snow was wet with blood. He untied the cord that held the mouth of it pursed shut. Inside was a fragile-looking ball of twigs. He closed the bag and slipped it into his pocket
‘Get away from her! Leave her alone!’
Lom looked round. Maroussia Shaumian was staring at him with wide unseeing eyes.
‘She’s my mother,’ she said. ‘I have to take her home.’
‘Maroussia,’ said Lom. ‘I couldn’t stop this. I was too late. I’m sorry.’
‘I have to take her home,’ she was saying. ‘I can’t leave her here.’
‘Maroussia—’
‘Perhaps I could get a cart.’
She was losing focus. He’d seen people like this after a street accident: together enough on the surface, but they weren’t really there, they hadn’t aligned themselves to the new reality. You had to be rough to get through to them.
‘Your mother has been shot,’ he said harshly. ‘She is dead. That is her body. The militia killed her deliberately. They were looking for her. Do you understand me?’ Maroussia was staring at him, her dark eyes fierce, small points of red flushing her cheeks. ‘I think they’re looking for you too. When they find you’re not at Vanko’s they’ll come back, and if you’re still here they’ll kill you as well.’
‘You,’ she said. ‘I know you. You did this.’
‘No. I didn’t. I wanted to stop it. I couldn’t—’
‘You’re a policeman.’
He took her arm and tried to turn her away from her dead mother.
‘I want to help you,’ he said.
‘Fuck you.’
‘I’ll take you somewhere. We can talk.’
She jerked her arm away. She was surprisingly strong. Her muscles were hard.
‘I said fuck you.’