52
Maroussia was in a terrible place. The paluba’s kiss had taken her there. A dreadful nightmare place in the shadow of a steep hill. Only it wasn’t a hill, it was alive. It was an angel, fallen.
There were trees here too, but here the trees were stone, bearing needles of stone. Maroussia was walking on snow among outcrops of raw rock. In parts the earth itself, bare of snow, smouldered with cool, lapping fire under a crust of dry brittleness. Dust and cinders, dry scraping lava over cold firepools. Walking over it, Maroussia’s feet broke through the crust into the soft flame beneath. Flame that was cold and didn’t burn.
Stone grew and spread like vegetation. There were strange shimmering pools of stuff that wasn’t water.
Everything was alive and watched her. No, not alive, but the opposite of life. Anti-life. Hard, functional, noticing continuation without existence, like an echo, a shadow, a reflection of what once was. But everything was aware of her. Everything.
The hill that was an angel had spilled its awareness. It was bleeding consciousness into the surrounding rock for miles. Like blood.
She wasn’t alone. Sad creatures wandered aimlessly among the trees. Creatures of stone. Creatures that had become stone. They were broken, cracked, abraded, but they couldn’t die. From the shelter of stunted stone birches, a great stone elk with snapped antlers and no hind legs watched her pass. There was no respite for it. It could only wait for the slow weathering of ice and wind and time that would, eventually, wear it away and blow its residuum of dust across the earth. But it would be watching, noticing dust. Cursed with the endlessness of continuation.
Stone giants were digging their way up out of the earth and walking across the top of it, breaking waist-high through stone trees. If they fell they cracked and split. Headless giants walking. Fingerless club-stump hands. Giants fallen and floundering in pools of slowed time.
The corruption was spreading, seeping outwards through the edgeless forest in all directions like an insidious stain, like lichen across rock, like blood in snow. It would never stop. It would creep outwards for ever. The forest was dying.
The angel had been shot into the forest’s belly like a bullet, bursting it open, engendering a slow, inevitable, glacial, cancerous, stone killing.
The angel was watching her. The whole of the lenticular stone waste was an eye, focused on her. She felt the gross intrusion of its attention like a fat finger, tracing the thread from her to the paluba to the great trees of the forest.
It knew. And without effort it burst the paluba open.
The explosion of the paluba drove sticks and rags and meat across the apartment, smashing furniture and shattering glass. The air companion was sucked apart like a breeze in the hurricane’s mouth.
Maroussia felt a scream in her head as the paluba tried to tuck her away in a pocket of safety. There were fragments of voice in the scream — the paluba’s voice — desperately stuffing words into the small space of her head.
The Pollandore! Open it! Open it, Maroussia! You have the key! The key is in your pocket!
And in the moment of ripping and destruction she also sensed the angel’s fear. Fear of what was in Mirgorod waiting, and fear of what she, Maroussia, could do.
Maroussia walked out of her apartment and down the stairs. Out into the street and the rain. In her pocket was a frail ball of twigs and berries, bones and wax. She wasn’t going to Koromants. Not yet.
53
Lakoba Petrov lay among the bodies of the dead. A dead face pressed against his cheek. The smell and the weight and the feel of killed people were piled up on his chest — he couldn’t breathe he couldn’t breathe he couldn’t breathe — the trench was filling up with the bodies of the dead — one by one in rows they jerked as the bullets struck them and they died — they fell — they died. Water, percolating through the stack of the dead, brimmed in his open mouth. He coughed and puked. His mouth tasted bitter and full of salt.
The soldiers clambered among the bodies, finishing off the ones who were not yet dead, the ones who moaned, or hiccupped, or moved, or wept. Petrov, who had fallen when the firing began, untouched by any bullet, lay as still as the dead under the rain and the dead.
The soldiers began to cover the bodies over with wet earth. Petrov felt the weight of it and smelled its dampness. It was as heavy as all the world. He could not draw breath. He waited.
When the time came he pulled himself out from among the bodies and the red earth and turned back towards the city. But there was no escape: the dead climbed out after him in countless number; sightless, speechless, lumbering. Dripping putrefaction and broken as they died, they climbed out from the pit and followed him, walking slowly.
What he needed now could be got only from Josef Kantor.
54
By the time Raku Vishnik got home from the House on the Purfas he was soaked, but he hardly noticed the rain. He was certain that he had found the Pollandore. What Teslom had said confirmed it. It was real, it existed, he knew where it was. He wanted to tell someone — he would tell Vissarion — he would tell Maroussia Shaumian –they would share his triumph. They would understand. And together they would make a plan. His head was turning over scenes and plots and plans as he opened the door to his apartment and walked into nightmare.
The room was destroyed. Ransacked. His furniture broken. Drawers pulled out and overturned. Papers and photographs spilled across the floor. A man in the pale brick colour uniform of the VKBD looked up from the mess they were sifting when he arrived. Two other men were sitting side by side on the sofa. Rubber overalls and galoshes over civilian clothes. Neat coils of rope put ready beside them. Two large clean knives.
‘My room,’ he said. ‘My room.’
It was the room he thought of first, though he knew, some part of him knew, that this was madness. When he’d arrived in Mirgorod twenty years before, to begin his career, he’d been able to obtain this small apartment, just for himself. The first time he closed the door behind him he had almost wept for simple joy. One afternoon soon afterwards he’d found on a stall in the Apraksin a single length of hand-blocked wallpaper — pale flowers on a dark russet ground — and put it up in the corner behind the stove. It was there now. And he’d accumulated other treasures over the years: the plain gilded mirror, only a little tarnished; the red lacquer caddy; the tinted lithograph of dancers. He looked at it now, all spilled across the floor.
‘Fuck,’ said Vishnik quietly, almost to himself. ‘Fuck.’ A tired resignation settled over him. None of it mattered now. He had known this time would come. He picked up the holdall, waiting packed by the doorway. ‘OK,’ he said to the VKBD man. ‘OK. Let’s go.’
The VKBD man took the bag from Vishnik’s hand and shut the door.
‘You won’t be needing that,’ he said. ‘We’re not going anywhere. All we need is here.’
‘What?’ said Vishnik.
‘Where is Lom? Where is the girl? Where is the file?’
‘What the fuck is this?’ Vishnik was angry. Livid. ‘Who the fuck are you, with your fucking questions? Look at my room. Look what you have done. You can go fuck yourself.’
‘Where is Lom? Where is the girl? Where is the file? Please answer.’
‘Number one,’ said Vishnik. ‘I don’t know. Number two. What girl? Number three. What fucking file?’
The two men in rubber overalls were standing now. They picked up the couch and moved it to the middle of the room. The VKBD man repeated the questions. And then the fear came. Vishnik stumbled and almost fell. But he would not fall. He would not.