R. Morris - The Cleansing Flames

Virginsky began to shake. He fell to his knees and clasped one of Porfiry’s hands in both of his, squeezing the clammy flesh as if he thought he was sealing the life in. ‘Forgive me.’ He lifted the hand and pressed it against his forehead.

He sensed movement on the bed. Porfiry’s eyes were open now. Something like a smile flickered weakly over his lips. ‘Pavel Pavlovich?’

‘Yes. It is I.’

‘Good.’

‘I. . did this to you.’

‘No.’

‘ Forgive me ,’ insisted Virginsky.

With heroic effort, Porfiry swung his other hand over to lay it over Virginsky’s with a reassuring pat. It took an equal effort for Porfiry to swallow. ‘Pray for me. For my soul.’

‘You are not going to die!’

Virginsky felt the squeeze of Porfiry’s grip. It was surprisingly strong.

‘Pray for me,’ repeated Porfiry.

‘I. .’ He was about to say that he could not, that he did not believe in prayer, or the soul. This once, he exercised tact when it came to expressing his convictions to Porfiry Petrovich.

But Porfiry seemed to have sensed what was on his mind: ‘My father. . was a non-believer too. And yet, God gave him the gift of healing. Pray for me .’ The entreaty was charged with an urgency that even Virginsky could not escape.

He closed his eyes. He tried to remember the words of Kozodavlev’s prayer. ‘ Eternal God, the judge of all, look with compassion on this our brother. ’

Porfiry lifted his head from the pillow. ‘I don’t know that prayer.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s not a proper prayer. The words just came to me.’

‘God gave you the words.’

‘No, I don’t think so. I read it somewhere.’

‘No matter.’

Porfiry’s head fell back against the pillow. There was a flurry of blinking as his eyelids settled over the bulbs of his eyes. His breathing settled into a deep, regular pattern. His hand relaxed. Virginsky placed it onto the sleeping man’s rising and falling abdomen.

*

He stayed by the bedside all night, dozing in an armchair that was found for him. He dreamt again of the merchant couple’s baby but also of his own father. In this dream, the baby was alive, although his father was dead. He shook his head sharply when he woke from it, as if to deny the subconscious wish his dreaming mind had voiced.

In the morning, Dr Pervoyedov expressed himself satisfied with Porfiry’s condition; indeed he described himself as more satisfied than he had been for days. He told Virginsky to go home and sleep.

Virginsky found himself on the Fontanka Embankment again. He walked alongside the gently lapping river and thought of the much smaller river that ran through his father’s estate. In fact, the river ran through a birch coppice that his father had recently sold. The sale had been the cause of some tension between them at the time. His father had believed that Virginsky’s anger derived from seeing his inheritance sold off, but there had been more to it than that, as Virginsky now realised, perhaps for the first time. The river was part of his childhood. It seemed that his whole childhood had been spent running breathless through that coppice; that childhood was a silver lattice made from threaded shafts of summer. But his brightest, happiest memory was of one rare afternoon sitting on the riverbank beside his father, the two of them lazily teasing the water with lines dangled from simple rods. He had looked up at his father, and in his father’s gentle smile, happiness dwelt. It was the betrayal of that memory, he realised, that had provoked his anger at the sale of the coppice, not any resentment at the reduction of the estate he stood to inherit.

He crossed the Fontanka by the Semyenovsky Bridge, and it was as if he was walking over the memory of that day. He felt a renewal of the anger he had once entertained against his father, but almost as soon as it had come upon him, he was newly aware of the same unseen presence dogging his steps that he had experienced the day before. But, unlike then, he now had the unmistakable sense that the presence was benign. Whatever it was, he was no longer afraid of it.

Forgive him! The words arrived in his consciousness as an urgent plea. At the same moment, Virginsky realised that if he forgave his father he too would be forgiven.

He would go straight home, as Dr Pervoyedov had advised. In his mind, he began to draft the letter he would write to his father as soon as he had reached his lodgings.