R. Morris - A Vengeful Longing

They entered the dim passageway that led to the courtyard of the building. With each step the stink grew stronger. Both men involuntarily held their breath but felt the teeming air work on their eyes. A door set in one wall of the passageway bore a crudely painted cross.

Porfiry reached out towards the door, hesitating for a moment as he sought Virginsky’s eye.

‘Can we wonder that those who are forced to live in these conditions are driven to criminality?’ pressed Virginsky.

Porfiry waited in silence with his hand hovering near the door.

‘Porfiry Petrovich, have you nothing to say?’

Porfiry finally allowed his hand to touch the door and pull it open. The door’s whine of complaint stood for his answer.

There was no relief from the foul atmosphere inside. They waited for a moment, listening, tensed in expectation. It was unnaturally quiet, given the many lives that the building must have housed. But there was something audible, or perceptible in some way, a kind of pulse to the air. As they strained to attune their senses to it, the coarser sound of footsteps overlapping on the stairs above intruded. The two men looked up. The footsteps were erratic: at times slow and laboured, at other times progressing in hurried bursts. Occasionally, there would be a break altogether, usually accompanied by a heavy metallic clank. Then a second, lighter, clank would precede the continuation of the footsteps.

At last the person on the stairs came into view, a girl who appeared to be about eleven, although her head seemed as large as an adult’s. Her clothes were little better than rags. Her scrawny arms were bent back on themselves by the weight of a tin pail. The girl halted on the landing above Porfiry and Virginsky and let the bucket drop on to the boards, releasing the handle. Even in her oversized head, her eyes appeared enormous. They swivelled to take in the two men looking up at her. She wiped her brow with the side of her wrist, then patiently picked up the bucket again and resumed her descent.

They knew the contents of the bucket before they saw them.

‘Dear God,’ cried Porfiry, lifting a hand to his face. He tried to avert his eyes but the fascination of that dark swill proved too great. Almost too late he flinched away, swallowing back the quickly rising gorge. The two men parted to let the girl through. Porfiry heard a fast trickle of liquid on the floor. He looked down to see the thin, filthy trail marking where she had been.

‘Where are you going with that, daughter?’ said Virginsky.

‘To the canal.’

‘Are there no closets here?’ asked Porfiry.

‘In the yard.’

‘Then why don’t people use them?’

‘They are too sick, sir. They cannot manage the stairs and it comes on them sudden. They use chamber pots. We empty the chamber pots into the bucket. And when the bucket is full we take it to the canal.’

‘It makes no difference anyhow,’ said Virginsky. ‘The owners of these buildings construct waste pipes straight into the canals.’

‘How many sick do you have here?’ asked Porfiry.

‘I don’t know, sir. In my family, there are three.’

‘I am sorry.’ Porfiry held the door open for her and waited for her to return. Her step was shuffling and weary now. She held the empty bucket in one hand; fortunately for Porfiry, it was the hand furthest from him. He expected her to avert her gaze too, out of embarrassment, or even shame. But she stared straight at him. Her expression was dulled, however: not unabashed, just empty. He felt that if he had struck that face or cradled it, it would have been all the same to her.

‘My child.’

She halted and absorbed his gaze.

‘We are looking for the Gorshkovs. They live with the widow Dobroselova. Do you know where that is?’

The girl nodded. ‘Widow Dobroselova lives in the basement.’

‘The basement? I see. Thank you.’ Porfiry’s slow nod released her.

‘It is no wonder they lost six children,’ said Virginsky, his feet splashing in water. He had reached the bottom of the steps to the cellar, which were at the front of the building, outside.

Porfiry felt the water rise above his shoes and lap his ankles. Looking down he saw a cloudy pool about two inches deep. It seemed the daylight hung back, unwilling to penetrate the surface of the water.

‘The cesspit has overflowed.’ Virginsky turned his grimace away from Porfiry.

‘It would seem so.’ Porfiry’s eye skimmed along the murky water. Black tide-marks on the walls indicated that there had been deeper floods. The door to the basement stood open.

‘Through there?’ asked Virginsky.

‘There is nowhere else to go,’ answered Porfiry, bemused; however, he understood the reluctance that Virginsky’s question expressed.

They entered a long open room. Light seeped weakly through high windows, and where it did not reach there was a shadowed gloom, unrelieved by any candle flame or lantern. Arched slabs of darkness were dimly discernible, suggesting that the basement extended into labyrinthine depths beyond. A sound, the amplification of the pulse they had noticed when they first entered the building, echoed somewhere in the unseen periphery, together with the steady dripping, and occasional stirring, of moisture. As their eyes adapted, it was a shock to make out first the odd pieces of broken furniture and then the people positioned amongst them, lives discarded and consigned to this cellar.

An old woman, dressed in black, stared up at them with clouded, unblinking eyes. Her skirts were soaked in the water that surrounded her seat. She was motionless. Her face possessed a strangely beatific expression.

‘Good day, Grandmother,’ said Porfiry. His voice reverberated, as if it were startled by itself. She did not react to his greeting. So fixed was her stare that he thought for a moment that she was dead, but a girlish giggle warbled unexpectedly in her throat. ‘Are you the widow Dobroselova, by any chance?’

This time the girlish giggle came out strangled and distorted. It could have been intended to express amusement, but there was a mechanical emptiness to it that horrified.

‘She may be deaf,’ said Virginsky. ‘As well as blind.’

‘Widow Dobroselova?’ shouted Porfiry. The whole cellar rang with his voice.

The old woman’s mouth stretched open revealing a few cherished remnants of teeth. ‘Is that you, Dobroselov?’

‘My name is Porfiry Petrovich.’

‘Oh, Dobroselov!’ She chuckled indulgently. Her misty eyes opened wide on nothing. ‘You and your games.’

‘I assure you, madam, I am Porfiry Petrovich and I am a magistrate. We are looking for the factory worker Gorshkov. It is our understanding that he lives in the basement here.’

‘Get away with you, Dobroselov!’ The old woman gave a flick of the wrist.

Porfiry straightened up and looked at Virginsky.

‘She is. . mad?’ asked the younger man tentatively.

‘Can you blame her?’ murmured Porfiry. He surveyed the rest of the room and the other human figures in it, bodies curled around their misery on bare mattresses, or sitting slumped over empty tables. He estimated that there were about twenty people visible, though he sensed the presence of many more hidden in the shadows at the edges, beyond the arches. Undoubtedly, only the oldest and most infirm would remain in the flooded cellar when the day outside was dry and warm.

The pulsating sound continued, identifiable now as weeping. It seemed to be all around them.

An old man sitting at a table lifted his head from sprawled arms and looked at them. His face was gaunt and sallow, but his gaze was firm, hostile even. Dressed in the overalls of a labourer, he seemed worn out by the effort of sitting up. His head was massive on puny shoulders. ‘What do you want with Gorshkov?’ The voice that addressed them was harsh-edged, as if every word was dredged from a corrosive pool of bitterness.