R. Morris - The Cleansing Flames

He had the sense of someone standing over him.

Give up the fight, my dear! It’s time to give up the fight.

It was his father’s voice, but where was his father? Did his father exist now just as a voice?

Release your grip! Let go!

‘Papa?’

I am inside you. The pain — that pain that you feel — you do feel it, don’t you? That pain is me.

‘You can heal me!’ cried Porfiry. He opened his eyes. And opening his eyes was like throwing open the shutters of a window in a Swiss chalet. In fact, that was what he was doing. He was in the bedroom of a Swiss chalet, throwing open the shutters. A blinding light rushed in, with the eagerness of a sniffing hound. The initial fierceness of the light settled into an amber glow on the planks of the chalet’s cladding.

Porfiry turned to where the voice of his father had come from. He had the sense that it had been located in the corner of the room. But his father had said that he was inside him. Did that mean that his father had lied?

The man standing in the corner of the room was not his father. It was Prince Dolgoruky but somehow Porfiry confused him with another prince. He remembered a question that had been on his mind, one that he very much wanted to ask the Prince for whom he mistook Dolgoruky. ‘Did you find him?’

‘He’s not here,’ said Dolgoruky, as if he too mistook himself for someone else.

‘No,’ said Porfiry, as if he had expected this answer. Another question occurred to him. ‘Where are we? In Switzerland?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Prince Dolgoruky.

‘What will it be like to die?’ asked Porfiry.

Give up the fight, my dear! You must give up the fight.

Porfiry looked up. It seemed to him that his father’s voice came from above.

A terrible weight was pushing down on him now. He was lying on his back, pinned to the ground by an enormous stone. It seemed to be a stone, but he couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that he had to push it off him. Otherwise it would crush him.

Give up the fight!

His father’s voice was in the stone now. His father’s voice was crushing him.

‘Heal me!’ pleaded Porfiry with the weight of the stone.

Don’t you think if I could, I would have healed myself?

‘But God?’ implored Porfiry. ‘There is a God?’

His father’s answering laughter was devastating.

It is not so difficult. Simply decide that you will give up the fight, and lo!

His father’s voice seemed to be answering a question that Porfiry had asked earlier.

‘Why can’t I see you?’

You must give up the fight if you want to see me.

Porfiry closed his eyes and pushed with both hands. The great weight suddenly became nothing. He looked down to see that he was holding a painted egg in his hands. And somehow, he was standing again.

He heard children’s laughter. The five Prokharchin children circled him, arms outstretched, hands linked. They moved around him with half-dancing, half-skipping steps.

Porfiry was overjoyed to see them. ‘You did not die after all! It was all a ruse!’

The children giggled back at him. There was a mindless, empty quality to their laughter that began to unsettle Porfiry. He decided that he wanted no part of it. ‘That’s enough now, children.’

But the children’s dance continued and in fact grew faster, until they were whirling around him at an impossible speed. Their faces blurred into a streak of flesh encircling him, their laughter merging into a single scream.

The fleshy blur shrank like an elastic band contracting, tightening around his head. He felt it against his face, filmy, acrid with the taste of burning. The film was unspeakably revolting, as if it were a spider’s web, or the web woven by something more repulsive than a spider. He pulled at the web with his fingers.

‘Death,’ said Porfiry. And the web that clung to his face rushed into his mouth as soon as he opened it to speak. Once it had gained admittance to his mouth it began to expand. He knew that this did not bode well. The more it expanded, the harder it was for him to breathe. It was suffocating him.

Give up the fight, my dear! It’s time to give up the fight.

His father’s voice was suddenly overwhelmingly comforting. He knew that if he relaxed his being, as his father urged, everything would be all right.

He knew that his father would never lie to him.

He knew that he must do as his father said.

He felt the tension go from him. The first thing that happened was that he swallowed the clump of sticky webbing that had entered his mouth.

There was a sound like the wind chasing itself through a tunnel. The window shutters banged against the outside of the chalet.

Flakes of snow came in through the window, quickly building to a swirling blizzard that obliterated the interior. The blizzard became denser and darker. He had a sense of it as something infinite. The bedroom no longer existed, nor the chalet. There was only the ever-darkening snowstorm.

There was the sound of the unseen shutters slamming to. And then all was darkness.

It seemed he was not to be left alone from now on. The next day, Botkin sat with him in the morning. Unlike Kirill Kirillovich, he was confident enough of his own revolutionary commitment to engage Virginsky in conversation. ‘Where has she put the clock?’

‘She moved it into the bedroom. I think she was afraid I would carry out your threat to smash it.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘I am glad she’s moved it. If it were still here, I would destroy it.’

‘A rather pointless act of vandalism.’

‘There is no such thing. Vandalism is always to the point.’

‘Alyosha Afanasevich, there is no reason now why we may not be completely frank with one another. My fate is already sealed. Either I am to be afforded the revolutionist’s equivalent of canonisation, or I am to be executed. Therefore, you may tell me. . anything. . and everything. It can make no difference now.’

‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’

‘When we met, on Easter Sunday night, at the warehouse blaze. .’ Virginsky watched the other man closely, looking for an answer to a question he hadn’t asked in the angle of Botkin’s defiance.

‘What of it?’

‘Did you set the fire?’

A crack opened in Botkin’s face. From it emerged that sound that Virginsky remembered from the night they met, an axe hacking into soft wood, his laughter. ‘What harm can it do now? Yes, I was the petroleur that night.’

‘And the fire that destroyed Kozodavlev’s apartment?’

Botkin shrugged. ‘I know nothing about that.’

‘Truly?’

‘Truly. Why would I lie to you?’

‘Because of the children. The children who died.’

‘Ah, my friend, I see you do not understand me. Neither do you understand the nature of the struggle in which we are engaged.’

‘What are you saying? That you don’t care about the children?’

Botkin sighed, as if he were suddenly bored of the conversation. ‘You realise that you have just betrayed yourself?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A true assassin would never ask such a ridiculous question.’

‘But children!’

‘Many more may have to die before the revolution is accomplished.’

Virginsky nodded. Botkin clearly would have had no compunction admitting the crime if he had committed it. ‘But can we be sure these children died in the furtherance of the revolution? That is far from clear.’

‘Kozodavlev had become unreliable. Such considerations as you just voiced were distracting him from the cause. He was on the verge of betraying us. The central committee was right to instigate his termination. In this instance, they did not call upon me to execute their orders. Had they done, I would have willingly answered the call.’