R. Morris - The Cleansing Flames

‘I see.’

‘Now that the magistrate has died, there will be a renewed effort to track you down. Your presence in a married couple’s apartment can only attract suspicion. We have found a new apartment for you. You will live there with Tatyana Ruslanovna as man and wife. You will be provided with forged papers. I trust that will be agreeable to you?’

‘It will be a satisfactory arrangement.’

‘You are to have no further communication with the other grouping. Do you understand? You are ours now. We are claiming you as one of our people.’

‘You will not talk to them at all?’ Virginsky’s heart pounded. It was a dangerous gambit, considering the grouping did not in fact exist.

‘There is only one central committee. Ours. These people you were mixed up in, it is best that you forget them.’

‘Very well.’

The carriage slowed and stopped. Virginsky heard the door open and felt the bounce of the springs as Tatiscev got out. The door slammed shut once more. But he sensed that he was not alone. ‘May I take off my blindfold now?’

There was no answer. He raised his hands to the blindfold. No other hands restrained him. When he slipped the blindfold off, he saw Tatyana Ruslanovna sitting opposite him, her smile sealed with secret irony. ‘A satisfactory arrangement?’ Her words were charged with mock outrage.

‘You were there?’

‘All the time.’

‘You lied to me.’

Her eyebrows bobbed upwards. Better get used to it , the gesture seemed to indicate.

He had never seen the city so empty. Yes, there were people about, but they moved like ghosts, solitary and without substance, sealed off from one another, their faces drained of emotion and hope. They seemed to breathe desolation; it was the element in which they moved. For the first time, he realised that everything in this city was too big: vast squares and avenues of vertiginous breadth that could never be filled except with countless regiments of parading soldiers, as if the whole point of raising an army was to ward off this terrible sense of desolation. Even the sprawling palaces and tenements could not fill the emptiness, but simply section it. They stood like aspirations, shell-like structures that overwhelmed the merely human, that were in fact hostile to it. Virginsky was reminded that it was a city that had been built on nothing, or almost nothing — on marshland. It had been dreamt into existence, an act of will, one man’s vision which could only demoralise those who came to live in it, as it had destroyed so many of those who had built it. The premeditation of the place sapped the life from its inhabitants. One was presented everywhere with straight lines and purpose, universal direction imposed by the city’s first planner, still dictating their lives even after his death. It was no wonder that most people chose to keep off the streets. Virginsky imagined them cowering in basements, huddled together as far as possible from the excessive scale and expanse outside. But he could not be sure of their presence even there, so great was the sense of abandonment he felt.

He looked across at the woman facing him in the moving carriage. The space that had opened up between them was equal in vastness to any outside. And he was as alone here as he was anywhere in St Petersburg.

*

The driver must have been paid in advance, or was perhaps one of ‘our people.’ At any rate, he didn’t ask for money, and none was offered. The carriage pulled away with a disconsolate lurch. Virginsky looked around to get his bearings but did not recognise the deserted lane they had been left in. The district was poor, and his sense was that it was far from the centre. He had been too distracted to follow consciously the route they had taken. A strange reticence prevented him from looking at Tatyana Ruslanovna, though she was the cause of his distraction. Tongue-tied, he waited for her to take the lead.

But it seemed that she was affected by an equal shyness. When at last he dared to glance at her, he saw that she had her eyes fixed on the ground. He tried to think of something to say to set her at her ease. But all that came to mind was, ‘Where do we go?’ Even to his own ear his voice sounded harsh and unforgiving.

She looked up, her glance still shy. ‘They have taken rooms for us in a tenement building around the corner from here. I did not think it would be advisable for us to be seen arriving by carriage. We are to pose as a poor working couple.’

He understood now her peasant clothes. Somehow they lost their charm for him, striking him as suddenly calculating. He almost hated her for them.

They began to walk. An unbroachable space was maintained between them, the result of a magnetic repulsion that kept them from touching. More to the point, there was an equal space between the couple they were now and the couple they had been that morning. At that moment, it was unimaginable that she would ever appear naked to him again, or that he would ever know again her clinging embrace around his quaking flesh.

Somehow, he had fallen from grace. Perhaps it was because he had asked her about Totsky. Something like rage rose up in him. No — he was not to blame, or at least not solely. She had acted deceitfully to him. Not only that, she had shrugged off the lie in which she had been caught.

Their position, he realised, was entirely false, and that was what had changed between them. To be thrown together by the central committee in this sham marriage pre-empted whatever natural feelings might have developed. Furthermore, Tatyana Ruslanovna must have known of the central committee’s intentions when she gave herself to him, as was proven by the clothes she came to him wearing. Besides which, she was a member of the central committee. It was evidence of further deceit on her part. He couldn’t fathom what she had meant by that act but felt that there must have been more to it than he had first thought. It was not, in other words, a simple declaration of love, and there was no trust implied in it at all.

And then it struck him: she had wanted him simply because she believed he had killed a man. It was curiosity rather than love that had driven her, and now that her curiosity had been satisfied, there was no possibility of the act being repeated.

Had she been disappointed in the experience? Or had she simply got all that she wanted from him?

She must have noticed the unhappiness in his expression. ‘What is wrong, Pavel Pavlovich?’

Her question provoked him. ‘How long are we to remain living this lie?’

‘Until the central committee decides — ’

He cut her off with an anguished, derisive cry.

‘Until the central committee decides,’ she resumed patiently, ‘that it is safe for you to be removed from Petersburg.’

‘So we must wait for the central committee to decide our fate?’

‘It is not a question of that. You placed yourself in their hands when you killed your colleague and declared it a revolutionary act.’

‘What do you mean? Of course it was a revolutionary act. What else could it be?’

‘Perhaps you had other reasons for wanting him dead. Please don’t take offence. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters. You must trust the central committee.’ After a moment she added, ‘You must trust me.’

They came to a broad avenue, again unknown to Virginsky. The street was muddy, and occupied mostly by manufacturing premises and cheap restaurants. She led him across it to another narrow lane, overshadowed on both sides by the looming black walls of vast tenement buildings.

He followed her into the yard. The ground was swimming in waste matter. The yardkeeper, who had the physique of a young man, but the face of someone much older, was busy shovelling the filthy mud away to the sides. But it always seemed to settle back, covering the area he had just cleared. At the sight of the yardkeeper’s prematurely aged face, Tatyana Ruslanovna gripped Virginsky’s arm and pulled him to her. He felt the sinews of his heart ripple, as his misery slipped from him. It no longer mattered that it was a lie. All that mattered was that she was holding on to him.