"Well, from orbit one can clearly discern the spherical shape of the planet. The sight is quite unique. Between the sunlit surface of the planet and the deep black sky of stars the dividing line is thin, a narrow belt of delicate blue. While crossing the Vlast we see big squares belowour great collective farms! Ploughed land and grazing may be clearly distinguished. During the state of weightlessness we eat and drink. It is curious that handwriting does not change though the hand is weightless."
And do you have a message for your loved ones left behind?
"Tell them," says Vera Mornova, "tell them we love them and remember them in our hearts."
Part II.
Chapter Four.
We have raised the sky-blue sky-flag the flag of dawn winds and sunrises, slashed by red lightning. Over this planet our banners fly! We present...
ourselves! The Presidents of the Terrestrial Globe!
Velemir Khlebnikov (18851922).
1.
The sky above Mirgorod was a bowl of luminous powdery eggsh.e.l.l blue, cloudless and heroic. Enamel-bright coloured aircraft buzzed and twisted high in the air, leaving trails of brilliant vapour-white. The loudspeakers were broadcasting speeches and news and orchestral music at full distorted volume. The production of steel across the New Vlast exceeded pre-war output by 39 per cent. The cosmonaut-heroes continued to orbit through s.p.a.ce.
Citizens! Today is Victory Day! Congratulate yourselves!
From all across the city hundreds of thousands of people were making their way towards Victory Square on buses and trams and trains for the celebration parade. Hundreds of thousands more were coming on foot. Already an inexhaustible river of people was moving up the wide avenue of Noviy Prospect (newly paved and freshly washed before dawn that morning). Half the population of Mirgorod must have been there, going in a slow tide between the towering raw new buildings of the city centre. Vissarion Lom, less than twenty-four hours back in Mirgorod, sat at a cafe table under a canopy on a terrace raised above the sidewalk, nursing a cooling birch-bark tea, and watched them pa.s.s: more people in one place than all the people he"d seen in the last six years put together. Sunlight glared off steel and gla.s.s and concrete fresh out of scaffolding; glared off the flags and banners that lined Noviy Prospect; glared off the huge portraits of Papa Rizhin and the lesser portraits of other faces Lom could not name.
Lom disliked crowds. Even sitting somewhat apart and watching them made him uneasy. Edgy. Even anxious. The noise. The faces. He couldn"t understand how it was that most people could merge into a throng so readily, so gladly even. To him it felt like submersion. Surrender. Drowning. He couldn"t have done it even if he"d wanted to. But he saw the woman with the heavy canvas bag on her shoulder.
He almost missed her. She was moving with the crowd, one small figure in the uncountable ma.s.s, going in the same direction as everyone else. Someone else might not have noticed her or, if they had seen her, wouldn"t have understood what it meant. It would have been a coincidence, nothing more. But because he was Lom, not someone else, he saw her, and recognised her, and knew what she was doing.
She was just another slight ageing woman in shabby sombre clothes: there were dozens like her, hundreds, shuffling along among the uniformed service personnel, the families, the cla.s.ses shepherded by hara.s.sed teachers, the young women workers in blue overalls and sneakers, the salaried fellows in s.h.i.+rtsleeves and fedoras, the limping veterans, the veterans in wheelchairs and the tight little groups of short-haired and pony-tailed Young Explorers in their blue shorts, grey s.h.i.+rts, red neckerchiefs, knee-length woollen socks and canvas shoes. The women in dark clothes walked alone or in twos and threes. They had their special place that day: they were the widows, the childless mothers, come to watch and remember on bittersweet Victory Day. Lom"s gaze pa.s.sed across the one with the canvas bag on her shoulder and moved on. But something about her caught his attention and he looked again.
People in a large slow crowd surrender themselves to it. They all have the same purpose, all heading for the same destination. Simply being part of the crowd is itself the occasion and the only reason for being there. There"s no rush. They have no need to do anything except move along at the crowd"s speed and take their cues from the crowd. So they look around and take in the sights and talk, or absorb themselves in their own thoughts. Some bring drink and food and eat as they go. They won"t miss anything. They"re already where they need to be.
But this one woman was different. There was a tension and separateness about her. Something about the way she held her head and looked around: an obsessive, exclusive watchfulness that snagged his attention, raw and jangled as his nerves were by the numbers of people everywhere. She was making her way through the crowd, not moving with it, and she was alert to her surroundings as those around her were not. She knew where the security cordons and the crowd watchers were, and kept away from them. She tracked her way forward, intent on some private purpose.
And then there was the bag. A drab and scruffy canvas bag, nothing remarkable except Lom could tell by the way she carried it that it was heavy, and the object inside was long and protruded from the top. The thing in the bag was wrapped in a bright childish fabric, which was clever because it attracted attention but also disarmed suspicion. It looked like something that belonged to a child, or used to. The kind of thing an older woman might carry for her grandchild. Or keep with her for ever and never lay down, to remember the dead by. Only this woman seemed a little too young and a little too strong, and it wasn"t easy to guess what sort of childish thing this long heavy object was. It scratched at Lom"s crowd-raw nerves.
As she pa.s.sed near where Lom was sitting, the woman with the bag glanced sideways at something, and as she turned Lom glimpsed her face in profile. And recognised her. Six years had changed her. She was leaner, harsher, a stripped-back and sanded-down version of the woman who"d once given Maroussia and him shelter in the Raion Lezaryet, but still he knew instantly that this was Elena Cornelius: Elena, who used to have two girls and live in an apartment in Count Palffy"s house and make furniture to sell in the Apraksin Bazaar.
He watched her move on through the crowd. She was good but not that good. Intent on her work, she was just a little too interesting. Too noticeable. Too vivid. She made use of sightlines and available cover for protection. She made small changes of pace. She was moving instinctively as a hunter did. Or a sniper. But snipers move through empty streets, not crowds. In a crowd she was conspicuous. If he could spot her, so could others. Like for instance the security operatives, who were no doubt even now scanning Noviy Prospect from upper windows, though he could not see them.
Lom got up from the cafe table and followed. He moved up through the crowd to get closer to her, working slowly, cautiously, so as not to be noticed himself and above all not draw the attention of other watchers to her. He felt her vulnerability and her determination. He wanted to protect her, and he owed her his help, but he couldn"t let her do what she was going to do. She had to be stopped.
She made a sudden move to the right, picking up speed and making for the ragged edge of the moving crowd. Lom tried to follow, but his way was suddenly blocked by a knot of loud-voiced broad-backed men. They had just spilled out from a bar and stood swaying unsteadily and squinting in the glare of the sun. They smelled of aquavit. By the time Lom got past them, Elena Cornelius had disappeared from view.
2.
The meeting room of the Central Committee of the New Vlast Presidium was painted green. The conference table was simple varnished ash wood. There were no insignia in the room, no banners, no portraits: only the smell of furniture polish and new carpet. There is no past; there is only the future. Each place at the table had a fresh notepad, a water jug, an ashtray and an inexpensive fountain pen. A single heavy lamp hung low above the table, a flat box of muted grey metal shedding from its under-surface a muted opalescent glow. The margins of the room where officials and stenographers sat were left in shadow.
On the morning of the Victory Day Parade the Committee gathered informally, no officials present, to congratulate their leader and President-Commander General Osip Rizhin, whose birthday by happy chance it also was that day. At least, according to the official biography it was his birthday, though of course the official biography was a tissue of fabrication from beginning to end.
All twenty-one committee members were present: twelve men and eight women, plus Rizhin. Sixteen were makeweights: bootlickers, honest toilers, useful idiots, take your pickplaceholders just pa.s.sing through. Apart from Rizhin there were only four who really mattered, and they were Gribov, Secretary for War; Yas.h.i.+na, Finance; Ekel, Security and Justice; and Lukasz Kistler. Above all, Lukasz Kistler.
Kistler was a shaven-headed barrel of a man, boulder-shouldered, hard not fat, his torso straining at the seams of his s.h.i.+ny jacket. Kistler liked money, drank with workers and didn"t care about spilling his gravy. His s.h.i.+rt cuffs jutted six inches beyond his jacket sleeves. But the intelligence in his small creased eyes was sharp and dangerous as spikes. Kistler was never, ever tired and never, ever got sick and never, ever stopped working. His energy burned like a furnace. He had made huge amounts of money before he was thirty out of iron and oil and coal, anything big and dirty that came out of rock and was hard to get. He was a digger and a burrower and a hammerer. When Rizhin found Kistler he was turning out battle tanks from a factory that had no roof. It had been bombed so often Kistler had stopped rebuilding and left it a ruin in the hope the enemy would p.i.s.s off and bomb something else. Within half an hour of their first meeting Rizhin put him in charge of producing battle tanks for the whole of the Vlast. Since the war ended, Kistler had expanded into oilfields, gasfields, hydro turbines, petroleum refineries, atomic power. Energy. Energy. Energy. Lukasz "Dynamo" Kistler made Papa Rizhin"s Vlast burn brighter and run louder and faster every day.
And Lukasz Kistler was a clever, subtle, observant and far-sighted man. He saw that Rizhin knew how to spend money and people but had no idea where such resources actually came from. Rizhin didn"t know how to turn dirt into cash or people into workers. Rizhin grabbed and stole to spend, and spent what he could not make, and in the end he would spend the whole of the world until he had nothing left. Kistler suspected that one day he and Papa Rizhin would come to blows.
Kistler was watching Rizhin now. Rizhin was on his feet and prowling behind the seated committee members in his soft leather shoes. He liked to walk behind them. It made them uncomfortable. And today Rizhin was wielding a sword. He gripped it in his swollen fist and made experimental swipes at the air as he prowled. (Rizhin"s hands fascinated Kistler: hard, thickened, stub-fingered hands, butcher"s hands, raw-pink hands that looked like they"d been stung by bees. Long rough work on stone in ice and cold could make such hands. Many years in labour camps. That was something not in Papa Rizhin"s official biography.) The sword was ridiculous. The Severe Sword. The Southern Congress of Regions had presented it to him that morning as a birthday gift. Its blade was inscribed on one side SLASH THE RIGHT DEVIATION! and on the other SLASH THE LEFT DEVIATION! and on the hilt it said PUMMEL THE CONCILIATOR!
"They give me a sword?" Rizhin was saying. "And what are we to make of that? I give them jet engines and atomic s.p.a.ce vessels and they give me a sword. What am I to do with a sword? What does a sword say? You see how riddled we are with aristocrats and peasants still? Fantasists. Nostalgists. Am I to ride out on a f.u.c.king horse like a khan? Do they mean me to butcher my own people? Well, if there is butchery to be done, let us start with the Southern Congress of Regions."
"The sword is an emblem, Osip," said Yas.h.i.+na. "That"s all."
"Everything is an emblem," said Rizhin. "A generator is an emblem. A sky rise is an emblem. Those f.u.c.kers need to get better emblems."
Rizhin laid the sword on the table and sat down, slumping back in his chair. He picked up a pen and began to scrawl doodles on his notepad.
"The people call me Papa and sing hymns about me," he said. ""Thank you Papa Rizhin. Glory to our great commander." It"s laughable. I"m not Papa Rizhin; I"m a simple man. I am Osip, a worker and a soldier just like them."
He paused and looked around the table, fixing them one by one with his smiling burning eyes.
"Even you, my friends," he said, "even you do this to me. You want me to walk out there today on that platform and let you make me Generalissimus. Do I need this? No. Does Osip the simple industrious man need such empty t.i.tles? No, he does not. I do not. I will not accept it. I give it back to you. Take it back, I beg you, and make someone else your Generalissimus, not me."
There was silence in the room. Everyone froze. Everyone looked down. Secretary for Agriculture Vladi Broch stared gla.s.sy-eyed at the sword on the table in front of him as if it would leap up and stab him in the neck. Rizhin doodled on his pad and waited.
For one horrifying moment Lukasz Kistler thought the idiots were going to accept. It"s a test! he screamed inwardly. A loyalty test! If someone didn"t speak soon he would have to do it himself, and that would be no good. He wasn"t on trialeveryone knew he was Rizhin"s dynamobut if he had to step in and repair the situation it would be the end for some of them.
It was Yas.h.i.+na who rescued them in the end. Smooth, calm, cultured Yulia Yas.h.i.+na.
"We"re nothing without you, Osip," she said quietly. "No one else could step into your shoes. It is unthinkable."
They all swung in behind her then. General acclamation, a clattering of fists on the table. Rizhin sighed and straightened himself up in his chair.
"Very well, then," he said. "If you insist... I do not like it, you hear me. I protest. Let the record show that. Well... let"s get this over with, and get back to our real work."
Lukasz Kistler glanced down at Rizhin"s notepad as they filed out of the room. There was a jagged black scribble in the corner of the top sheet: the scrawled angular face of a wolf glaring out at him from a wall of dark trees. The wolf"s jaw was open, showing its teeth.
3.
Elena Cornelius climbed the concrete stairwell in near-darkness, counting floors as she went. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. The light filtering through fluted gla.s.s panes in the landing doors was enough to climb by, but too dim to read the floor numbers. It didn"t matter. She could count. She knew how many storeys up she needed to go. The key to the service entrance of the New Mirgorod Hotel was in her pocket. Vesna Mayskova, a floor attendant at the New Mirgorod, had got it for her, and she"d left a bucket of dirty water and a mop in the alley outside, the signal that the area was clear of militia patrols.
On the twenty-second floor of the New Mirgorod Hotel, Elena Cornelius stopped climbing and shoved open the door onto the second-tier roof. The sudden daylight was blinding: the shock of air and sky and the noise of the city after the dim stairwell. Elena held the door open with her foot, swung the canvas bag off her shoulder and rummaged in it for a small sliver of wood. Panic rose for a moment when she couldn"t find it, but there it was. Putting the bag on the ground, she let the door almost close and slipped the wooden sliver between the edge of it and the jamb. From the stairwell it would look shut, but there was just enough edge left proud of the surround to wrench it open again from outside with the tips of clawed fingers.
She turned and looked out across the roof. Taking stock. Considering. Checking. She had been here beforea rehearsal runbut nothing must be taken for granted. Check and check again. That"s what had kept her alive in the siege.
She was trembling from the effort of the long climb, but that was OK: she knew that it would pa.s.s and her hand would steady. There was plenty of time. The impersonal oceanic murmur of the crowd in Victory Square twenty-two floors below was oddly restful. It didn"t sound human but like the power of waterfalls or the wind in forest trees.
There was no chance of being seen from below as long as she kept back from the edge. Only the newly built Rizhin Tower on the other side of Victory Square was tall enough to overlook her, and that was still unoccupied. If she were in charge of security, she"d have posted an observer with binoculars in one of the deserted rooms high in the Rizhin Tower. Maybe somebody had, but the architect who designed the three-tiered edifice of the New Mirgorod Hotel had set thirty-foot bronze allegorical figures at the roof corners of every stage. He hadn"t worried that he was giving cover for shooters.
The final tier of the New Mirgorod Hotel rose dizzyingly high behind her, casting a deep shadow all the way to the parapet. There was a risk of being seen from one of those upper windows, but she"d checked the angles when she scouted the location. The danger was only when she crossed the roof. Once she was in firing position the hut-like lift mechanism housing would hide her, as long as she kept low.
The roof crossing was only half a dozen paces. Crossings were always a risk, and there was no point in waiting. Elena Cornelius picked up her bag and went. In the cover of the lift housing she crouched low. Knelt. Lay flat, stomach to the ground, face inches from the mix of rough gravel and tar that coated the roof. The waist-high parapet was five yards in front of her.
During the siege she had crawled on her belly every day. Now she crawled again, hauling herself, knees and elbows and belly across the rough surface, dragging the canvas bag, until she was in the shelter of the parapet. Then she moved right until she was tucked in under the plinth of the bronze statue in the corner.
The statue was a woman in military uniform facing out across the city, a rifle held at an angle across her breast. Above her huge bronze military boots her calves swelled, shapely and muscular. Elena scrabbled into a sitting position and pressed her back against the parapet wall. She was in a safe high place, a vantage point to hide and watch from and not be seen. She knew how to do this. It was familiar. It was a kind of home. She didn"t think about why she was there, what had led her to this point. All the decisions were already taken. When you were at work, you worked. That was how you survived.
She unwrapped the Zhodarev rifle, checked the magazine and banged it into position with the heel of her hand. Found the telescopic sight at the bottom of the bag, polished the optics with her sleeve and pushed it onto the rail, easing it forward until it clicked solidly. Then she folded the faded pink towel with the lemon-yellow tractors into a thick sausage, reached up and laid it on the parapet for a barrel rest. Raising herself into a kneeling position, she propped her left elbow on her left knee and raised the rifle, made sure the barrel sat good and solid on its towel rest, settled the stock into her shoulder, pressed her eye to the scope and adjusted the focus.
The VIP viewing platform jumped into view, crisp and clear, down and to the left of her firing position. Tiers of empty seats. They hadn"t started to arrive yet.
It was a long shot. She could have done with a more powerful scope, but she didn"t have one. She checked the adjustment of the graticule. It was unchanged from how she"d set it that morning before she left home. The range was six hundred and fifty yardsshe"d paced it out a week ago plus some simple geometry to allow for height.
The warm morning air rested gently against her cheek. Windage, zero.
Nothing to do but wait and watch.
4.
Lom had lost sight of Elena Cornelius at the top of Noviy Prospect just before it opened into Victory Square. He tried to find her again, but it was hopeless: there were any number of alleys and doorways she might have taken, or she could have switched direction and ducked past him back down the avenue against the flow of people without him seeing. He hesitated. Considered abandoning looking for her. After all, it was possible he was wrong about what she was doing. Maybe she"d just come to see the parade.
But he didn"t believe that.
He made his way out onto the fringe of Victory Square. The open s.p.a.ce, laid out on what had once been the much smaller Square of the Piteous Angel, was staggeringly vast. Block after block of streets and buildings (Lom remembered them) had been demolished to make room for it. Rivers and ca.n.a.ls had been covered over, the city completely reoriented. And now it was completely filled with people come for the Victory Parade. It was impossible to estimate how many were there: half a million? A million? There were high terraces for seating, and crowds of people standing shoulder to shoulder in the gaps between. He could see across to the raised platform where Rizhin would take his place. The VIP seats were beginning to fill up.
Not far from the platform the Lodka still stood, the dark and many-roofed headquarters of the old Vlast, no longer on an island between river and ca.n.a.l, occupying one small corner of the square. The Lodka had survived siege bombardment and aerial bombing raids, but noweviscerated when Chazia removed the great archives and burned most of the contents, overtopped by the surrounding sky rises of concrete and granite and gla.s.s with their wedding-cake encrustations and monumental bas-reliefsthe huge cliff of a building looked isolated and diminished. Smartened-up but mothballed. A museum piece.
And next to the Lodka, dwarfing it, climbing higherfar higherthan any other building in the city, rising tier upon tier of stark grey stone, fluted, slender and almost weightless against the sky, was the Rizhin Tower, which was to be formally declared open that day. The top of the tower, const.i.tuting one tenth of the total height of the building, was an immense and gunmetal-grey statue of Papa Rizhin. He was in civilian clothes, standing bare-headed, his long coat lifting behind him slightly in a suggestion of wind. He was stepping forward towards the city, his back to the sea, his right arm raised and outstretched to greet and possess. The statue"s civilian clothing puzzled Lom. Not the military tunic and shoulder boards of the standard Rizhin portrait, it struck an odd note.
Then the truth struck him. This dizzying and mighty behemoth was not a statue of Rizhin at all; it was a statue of Josef Kantor. Kantor the agitator, the plotter, the revolutionary orator, the killer, the master terrorist.
Josef Kantor had transformed himself into Papa Rizhin at the siege of Mirgorod. He kept his origins secret, hidden, suppressed. All hints of his former self were ruthlessly obliterated. But here in Victory Square in the heart of Mirgorodin plain sight, in the most visible, most spectacular place of all, full in the face of the whole of the VlastRizhin thrust the truth of himself at them all, and n.o.body could see it, or if they did they dared not say. The Rizhin Tower was an act of the most astonis.h.i.+ng hubris: a challenge, a yell, a dare, a spit in the eye of the world.
At that moment a strange noise started to swell and grow in Victory Square. Lom had heard nothing like it before. It began as a low clatter and hum and grew to a great roaring, deafening buzz. It was the sound of the crowd rising to greet the arrival of Papa Rizhin, who had stepped out onto the raised platform. It wasn"t cheering. It was a vibration of excitement like the agitation of a billion bees. The extraordinary noise reverberated around the square and echoed, magnified, off the surrounding buildings.
Lom turned his back on it. He shoved and threaded his way back into Noviy Prospect, which was almost deserted now, its flags and banners and portraits of Rizhin stirring in a gentle rising breeze. Everyone who was going to Victory Square had found their place; the parades and speeches were about to begin. But where was Elena Cornelius?
5.
Eligiya Kamilova walks once more the five level miles, the long straight stony road south out of Belatinsk and back to Nikolai Fors.h.i.+n"s dacha. The dacha of the Philosophy League. Keeping her eyes down, no longer even consciously hungry, she walks with slow and fierce determination. One step. One step. One step. All her attention is fixed on her dust-yellowed boots and the pale stalks that are her s.h.i.+ns.
To either side of her, electricity pylons march away across bare earth and dried yellow gra.s.s, level to the encircling blued horizon. Grey wooden sheds and grey corrugated-iron roofs. Dust and bone sunlight. The pylons carry no cables. The pylons are built, but the gangs that bring the cables have not yet come.
Kamilova notices none of this. Not any more. Every day the same. Nothing changes.
One step. One step.
She has done this walk every day for a week. Five miles out and five miles back. She wonders how much longer she can.
Her legs are so thin it frightens her. These fleshless wasted sticks are not hers; they are the legs of one who died long ago. How do they carry her without the s.h.i.+fting contour of muscle? Dried knots and tendons only, visibly working. Her knees are crude obtrusions, like the stones in the unmade road. Her own hands startle her: demonstration pieces of skeletal articulation for the instruction of anatomists.
My face is gone. I have transparent skin. I have forgotten how to be hungry.
All day Eligiya Kamilova has stood in line in Belatinsk, Galina"s ration card in her pocket. (Galina has found a job running messages at Lorschner"s. The wage is pitiful but the ration card is more valuable than platinum and silks.) She didn"t know what she was queuing for. People in line in Belatinsk hold tight to the belt of the one in front to keep their place. Too weak to stand alone, they lean against strangers and do not speak.
All day Kamilova"s line waited and did not move. In the afternoon the shopkeeper closed up.