Ian Watson: Stalin's Teardrops

Peterkin admitted them into a large foyer lit by a single low-powered-light bulb and decorated by several large vases of dried, dusty roses in bud. A faint memory of musky aroma lingered, due perhaps to a sprinkle of essential oils. A creaky elevator lifted them slowly to the third floor, its cables twanging dolorously once or twice like the strings of a double bass. Valentin found himself whistling a lively theme from an opera by Prokofiev-so softly he sounded as though he was actually labouring up marble stairs, puffing.

The dark petite young woman who admitted these three visitors to her apartment was not alone. Mirov slapped the reassuring bulge of his gun, as if to stun a fly, before relaxing. The other two occupants were also women, who wore similar cheap dresses patterned with roses, orchids, their lips and cheeks rouged.

"May I present Masha?" Having performed this introduction, Peterkin slackened; he stood limply like a neglected doll.

"This is my older sister Tanya," Masha explained. Masha's elder image smiled. If the younger sister was enticingly lovely, Tanya was the matured vintage, an intoxicating queen.

"And my aunt Anastasia." A plumper, far from frumpish version, in her middle forties, a twinkle in her eye, her neck strung with large phony pearls.

Absurdly, the aunt curtsied, plucking up the hem of her dress quite high enough to display a dimpled thigh for a moment.

"We are chief Eggers," said Anastasia. "Tanya and I represent the Guild of Imperial Eggs."

The large room, replete with rugs from Tashkent and Bokhara hanging on the walls, with curtains woven with thread of gold, housed a substantial carved bed spread with brocade, almost large enough for two couples entwined together, though hardly for three. All approaches to it were, however, blocked by at least a score of tall narrow round-topped tables, each of which served as a dais to display a decorated egg, or two, or three. Some ostrich, some goose, others pullet and even smaller, perhaps even the eggs of canaries.

On gilt or silver stands, shaped as swans, as chariots, as goblets, these eggs were intricately cut and hinged, in trefoil style, gothic style, scallop style. Some lids were lattices. Filigree windows held only spider's webs of connective shell. Petals of shell hung down on the thinnest of silver chains. Pearl-studded drawers jutted. Doors opened upon grottos where tiny porcelain cherubs perched pertly. Seed pearls, lace, gold braid, jewels trimmed the doorways. Interior linings were of velvet…

To blunder towards that bed in the heat of passion would be to wreak devastation more shattering than Carl Faberge could ever have inflicted on a faulty golden egg with a hammer! What a fragile cordon defended that bedspread and the hint of blue silk sheets; yet to trespass would be to assassinate art-if those eggs were properly speaking the products of art, rather than of an obsessional delirium which had transfigured commonplace ovoids of calcium, former homes of bird embryos and yolk and albumen.

Aunt Anastasia waved at a bureau loaded with egging equipment: pots of seed pearls, jewels, ribbons, diamond dust, cords of silk gimp, corsage pins, clasps, toothpicks, emery boards, a sharp little knife, a tiny saw, manicure scissors, glue, nail varnish, and sharp pencils. The General rubbed his eyes. For a moment did he think he had seen jars of beetles, strings of poisonous toadstools, handcuffs made of cord, the accoutrements of a witch in some fable?

"Aren't we just birds of a feather?" she asked the Colonel. "You use the quills of birds for mapping-pens, so I hear. We use the eggs of the birds."

"I've rarely seen anything quite so ridiculous," Mirov broke in. "Your eggs are gimcrack mockeries of Tsarist treasures. Petit bourgeois counterfeits!"

"Exactly," agreed queenly Tanya. "Did not some financier once say that bad money drives out good? Let's suppose that falsity is superior to reality. Did you not try to make it so? Did you not succeed formerly? Ah, but in the dialectical process the false gives rise in turn to a hidden truth . The map of lies leads to a secret domain. The egg that apes treasure shows the way towards the true treasury."

Tanya picked up a pearl-studded goose egg. Its one oval door was closed. The egg was like some alien space-pod equipped with a hatch. Inserting a fingernail, she prised this open and held the egg out for Mirov's inspection.

On the whole inner surface of that goose egg-the inside of the door included-was a map of the whole world, of all the continents in considerable detail. The difference between the shape of the egg and that of the planetary globe caused some distortion, though by no means grotesquely so. Mirov squinted within, impressed despite himself.

"How on earth did you work within such a cramped volume? By using a dentist's mirror, and miniature nibs held in tweezers? Or… did you draw upon the outside and somehow the pattern sank through?"

"Somehow?" Tanya chuckled. "We dreamed the map into the egg, General, just as you dreamed us into existence by means of your lies- though unintentionally!"

She selected another closed egg and opened its door.

"Here's the map of our country… Ours, mark you, not yours. If you take this egg as your guide, our country can be yours, too. You can enter and leave as you desire."

"Be careful you don't break your egg." Aunt Anastasia wagged a warning finger.

"The same way you broke the pysanka egg," squeaked Peterkin, emerging briefly from his immobility and muteness. "Most of those eggs are technical exercises-not the one you hold." (For Mirov had accepted the egg.) "That was dreamed deep within the other country." Having spoken like a ventriloquist's dummy, Peterkin became inert again.

However, he left along with his two superiors-presently, by which time it was fully night.

"Maps, dreamed on the insides of eggs! Deep in some zone of absurd topography!" Mirov snorted. "Your escape hatch is preposterous," he told Valentin, pausing under a street lamp.

"Actually, with respect, we aren't deep in the zone at all. Oh no, not here. But that egg can guide-"

"Do you believe in it, you dupe?"

"Why didn't I receive one for my own? I suppose because I already know the way to Koshka's place…"

Mirov snapped his fingers. "I know how the trick's done. They use transfers. They draw the map on several pieces of paper, wet those so they're sticky, then insert with tweezers on to the inside of the shell. When that dries, they use tiny bent brushes to apply varnish."

Mirov removed the map-egg from his overcoat pocket, knelt, and placed the egg on the pavement under the brightness of the street lamp. Was he surprised by the limber flexibility of his joints?

"I can prove it." Producing his pistol, Mirov transferred his grip to the barrel, poising the handle above the pearl-studded shell. "I'll peel those transfers loose from the broken bits. Ha, dreams indeed!"

"Don't," said Peterkin in a lame voice only likely to encourage Mirov.

"Don't be a fool," said Valentin.

"A fool, is it, Comrade Colonel?"

"If you're told not to open a door and you insist on opening it-"

"Disaster ensues-supposing that you're a child in a fable."

Valentin knelt too, to beg the General to desist. To an onlooker the two men might have appeared to be fellow worshippers adoring a fetish object on the paving slab, cultists of the egg indeed.

When Mirov brought the butt of the gun down, cracking the egg wide open and sending tiny pearls rolling like spilled barley, a shock seemed to ripple along the street and upward to the very stars, which trembled above the city.

Although Mirov probed and pried, in no way could he discover or peel loose any stiffly varnished paper transfers.

When the two sprightly oldsters looked around again, Peterkin had slipped away without a word. The two men scrambled up. Night, and strange streets, had swallowed their escort utterly. Despite Valentin's protests-which even led the men to tussle briefly-Mirov ground the shards of egg to dust under his heel, as if thereby he might obliterate any connexion with himself.