She grabbed at the pistol with both hands, twisting and wrenching it. It fired a shot but she barely noticed. She felt the man’s finger snap and the gun came away in her grasp. ‘Oh no,’ he said quietly. ‘No.’
She pressed the muzzle against his thigh and pulled the trigger.
44
In the mid-morning quiet of his apartment Raku Vishnik cleared his desk and spread across it a large new street plan of Mirgorod. The city — crisp black lines on fresh white paper — looked geometrical and rectilinear, a network of canals and prospects laid out like electrical cabling, connecting islands to squares and squares to islands; a civic circuit diagram for the orderly channelling of work and movement. It was nothing, or almost nothing, but wishful aspiration. A flimsy overlay of civilisation, the merest stencil grid over marsh and mist and dreams.
Next to the map Vishnik set out his neat pile of filled notebooks, a box file of newspaper cuttings, a sheaf of other maps and plans. The maps all showed the city or parts of it, and all of them were creased, much re-folded, and covered with faint pencil marks: lines and symbols and Vishnik’s own cramped and scarcely legible annotations, from single words to entire paragraphs. The hatbox of photographs was on the floor beside his chair. On the other side of the window the city breathed and rumbled. Snow flurries smudged the distance, yellow and grey and brown.
He was looking for shape and pattern.
Methodically he sifted through his notes, looking for anomalous events. Times and places when the city slipped and shifted. Like it had in the Bakery Galina Tropina. Like it had in his photographs. Like it had when he went back to a familiar place and found it different. Others had seen such things in the city. He picked them up in newspapers usually, but also in conversations overheard on trams and buses, in shops, in the street. He’d kept a record of every one. They were in his notebooks. Date, place, time.
Ever since Maroussia Shaumian had come to him the other night a new idea had been taking shape in his mind. A new possibility. Maroussia had pushed him across a threshold. Until then it had never occurred to him that he could do more than accumulate notes and records. He had been an archivist of glimpses only. The thought had never struck him that what he was seeing had a cause. A source. That he could act.
But now, slowly, carefully, thoroughly, he went through the notebooks, one by one, and for each event he made a pencil mark on the map. All morning he worked, attuning his breathing to the slow pulse of the rain and the city.
The pattern began to emerge. It started to resolve itself under his gaze like a photograph in a developing dish, a sketchy outline first, then the richer finer details. But he resisted it. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions. He didn’t want to mislead himself. He kept calm. He stuck to his method.
I should have done this long ago. This has always been here for the finding and I never thought to look.
By mid-afternoon he’d finished. He pinned the map to the wall and stood back. There was no doubting it. There could be no mistake. The spattering of pencil marks looked like a black sunburst, a carbon flower blooming, a splash — as if a ball of black flakes had been thrown at the city and splattered on impact. The rays of the sun-splash pattern thinned out in all directions towards the edges of the city, but at the centre they were clustered, overlapping, intense. They were concentrated around one place. It looked like an impact point, a moon crater, the focal point of an explosive scattering. It was the source. There was something there. Causing the surface life of the city to shift and tremble. And the effect was growing stronger. He had found it.
Vishnik went to the bookshelf by the stove and took out the old book with the sun-faded, water-stained cover. The spine was detaching itself, the gilt lettering rubbing away, the thin translucent pages grubby and bruised. It was a forbidden work now, under the interdiction of the Vlast for more than a century, ever since its existence had been noticed. He’d found this copy tucked behind a heating pipe in the library of the Institute of Truth at Podchornok more than twenty years ago. He’d shown it to no one, and he’d never found another copy since. No reference to it in any library. So far as he knew, his was the only one in existence. A Child’s Book of Wonders, Legends and Tales of Long Ago.
Once more he opened it at the familiar page. Once more, sitting on the floor by his bookshelf in the dimming light of late afternoon, he began to read.
‘How They Made The Pollandore.’
45
Lom left Safran and the body of the executed woman, and walked. Anywhere. Nowhere. He hated the city. He hated the way you could just walk out of an alley and into the flow of crowds and traffic. Faces in the street. Faces behind windows. Faces that knew nothing about the dead body of an old woman a few yards away. That was in another city, not theirs. He needed to breathe. Needed to think.
He bought a ticket and got on a tram at random. The circle line, orbiting the city centre. The car was almost empty. Two thin men with clean-shaven angular faces were talking about horses. Round-brimmed hats, heeled ankle boots, woollen suits with trouser cuffs. Signs shouted at him: CITIZENS! BEWARE BOMBS! REPORT SUSPICIOUS PACKAGES! LEAVE NO LUGGAGE UNATTENDED!
A young man in the rear corner seat was staring at him. Frowning. A long thin nose. High cheekbones. Greasy hair in thick strands across his forehead. He had a book open but he wasn’t reading. When his gaze met Lom’s he de-focused his eyes and pretended he was looking past him, out of the window. Lom shrugged inwardly. Just a student. He wondered what book he was carrying. It was heavy and thick and looked old. Not mathematics or engineering, not with hair like that. He considered going across to find out what it was. Shake the tree. See what fell out. Once, not long ago, he would have. But not now. Leave him be. Leave him to his thoughts. Lom realised he was staring, and the young man was suffering under it: he’d buried himself in his book, pretending to be absorbed in it, but his neck and the edges of his cheekbones were flushed. When the tram stopped he would get up and leave, carefully, avoiding eye contact.
The snow had stopped falling. Nothing but wet grey slush on the pavements already. Mirgorod unfolded on the other side of the window but Lom hardly saw it. It was too close, pressed right up against his face. It was too big and too dirty. It made no sense. What you saw from a tram window were the small things. Random, fragmentary things: a narrow alleyway disappearing between shopfronts; the sign of a drawing master’s school; fresh perch on ice outside a fishmonger’s; the hobbles on a dray horse; a bricked-up window. The city was vast beyond understanding. It replenished itself infinitely, teeming beyond count. People lived their lives in Mirgorod by choosing a few places, a few faces, a few events, to be the landmarks of their own imagined, private city. Interior cities of the mind, a million cities, all interleaved one with another in the same place and time, semi-transparent. Onion-layer cities, stacked cities, soft and intricate, all of them tied together by the burrowing, twining, imperceptible threads of the information machine. Flimsy cities, every one. All it took was a militia bullet, the hack of a dragoon sabre. But the tissue cities carried on.
And underneath them all, two futures, struggling against each other to be born.
Lom slipped his hand into his pocket and met something sticky and rough: Feiga-Ita Shaumian’s bag, tacky with her clotting blood. He untied the cord and looked inside. It was like the hedge-nest of some bird, just the kind of thing a crazy old woman might carry around, but it wasn’t a nest. The sticks were tied together with thread. He eased it out of the bag for a closer look. Some of her blood had soaked through and clotted on it, dark and viscous, and there were globs of some other stuff, some kind of yellow wax, and dry, maroon-coloured berries. He held it up to the light. There were fine bones inside, parts of the skeleton of some tiny animal. A mouse? A mole? A small bird? There was a strong scent too, some sweet warmth stronger than the iron of blood. He remembered the whiteless brown eyes of the soldier in the street in Podchornok, out in the rain.