Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘I’m still going to Vishnik’s apartment,’ said Maroussia.

‘Then finish the pastries and have some coffee before we go. It’s going to be a long cold walk.’

Antoninu Florian, at rest in the wing-backed chair by the fire in Billroth’s, listened to Lom and Maroussia’s whispered talk with a corner of his mind. Eyes closed, he heard it all, as he heard the crackle and hiss and slip of coals in the fire, the stir of smoke, the steam from the samovar on the counter. The tick of spoon against side of cup. The breathing of the man behind the counter. The bark of the pink women’s laughter.

He leaned forward and picked a fragment from his plate. Fingernails clicked against ceramic. The apple cake exploded on his tongue, a shattering of acid and sugar and cinnamon and orchard earth. He sipped at his lemon tea. It was hot and sour. He crushed sugar-grit against the bottom of the glass with a spoon. The teeth in his mouth were sharp. He took another sip of tea and listened to the murmuring traffic roar of the city rumbling overhead. He discriminated a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand separate sounds. Each one was heard. Nothing was merged and muddy, everything was distinct: every engine cough and rumbling wheel, every footfall, every shout. The brush of every sleeve. The sifting fog.

Florian detested the city and wished he had not come back again. He resented the press of human crowds against his sense of privacy and solitude. He was tired of worrying away at the weight of what had been done and straining at the looming, muttering shadow-gates of what must be done next. The weight of choice and consequence had long ago grown wearisome. All he wanted to do was fill his lungs with cold clear air and stretch out his limbs and run among trees. He wanted to sleep out the heat of the day in the grass by a lake with a belly full of meat. He wanted to clear his mind of words .

He hated Mirgorod, but he had returned. The call had come, insistent, almost below the threshold of cognition, and he answered, as he always did. He’d sensed the mind of the living angel fallen in the forest, the terrible widening horror of its seeping poison, and he’d felt the movement in the Pollandore, the opening of many new possibilities. He had no choice but to make the long journey to Mirgorod again, because this was a moment of turning.

And now he considered his own choices once more, as he had done already several times that morning. The woman mattered–she was a maker of difference, an agent of change–but it wasn’t yet clear what her effect would be. Influences from the forest were driving her towards the Pollandore, and that made him uneasy. They wove their stories around her and told her their tales; they gave her what they needed her to hear, but the consequences could be disastrous. While the Pollandore remained where it was, in the world beyond the border, the border stayed permeable: forest breathed in the world, world in the forest. But if the Pollandore was… touched, that would be the end of it, the green wall would be shut. The angel, its contact severed, would die, and the forest would live, but there could be no reopening: the forest would be gone from the world.

Was that what the minds from the forest at work here intended? He would not let it happen. He would intervene first. If necessary he would kill the woman. Yet the Pollandore itself drew the woman forward, for purposes of its own. It was murky. Florian could not see. He didn’t know what he should do.

The woman and the man who was with her got up to go. They didn’t look at him as they left, and he didn’t move to follow. There was no need. He could find that man again, any time he needed. He was opened up . There was no other word for it. It was shocking to encounter.

This man’s involvement in the unfolding pattern had thrown Florian off balance. He was something completely unexpected, something new and unpredictable, a mixing of forest and the stain of angel flesh such as Florian had never known before. And there was strength in him. He was new and frail and oblivious, and could easily still fade and fall back, lapsing into wherever and whatever he had been before. But he might not fall. He might grow stronger. Stronger, perhaps much stronger, than Florian himself. Strong enough to drive a living angel out of the world?

Florian finished the lemon tea and found he’d come to a decision, of a kind. A temporary decision, until a clearer pattern emerged. In fact, he realised, he’d reached it even before he entered the gendarme station. There was too much uncertainty to act. So. Let the man and the woman find their own paths. Maximum openness. Close nothing down. Keep the borders open. At least for now.

One of the women at the other table said something, and the other erupted in a cackle of laughter. Then they were both laughing, raucous, blowsy and wild. Their mouths gaped. Lipsticked lips pulled back from poor, ragged teeth. The pink flesh of their throats and upper arms shook, spilling the scent of powder compacts and thick-sweet scent and stale underclothes. And then something happened.

A stir of air in the room, a flicker of shadow from the lamp on their table, and Florian glimpsed the whole trajectory of each woman’s life in her face: each was at once and all together a child, a lover, a sleeper in the dark of dreams, and an older–not much older–face, drawn thin and grey and hard by terrible loss to come. Each woman was the same as the other and also resembled her not at all; resembled no one else ever out of all the millions of millions of women who lived and ever had lived or ever would live. But in that moment, now and in Mirgorod, the women were together and laughing with the raspberry brandy in their stomachs at some small ripe obscenity, and the floor fell away under them and they stayed where they were, suspended.

The women in their squat upholstered chairs, their lamp-bearing table, Florian in his chair, and all the furniture in Billroth’s hung, turning slowly, held in formation by their own gentle gravitation, above a beautiful dark well of endless coldness and depth, an abyss scattered with fat and golden stars. The walls of the room receded and grew endlessly tall, rising towards more nightfallen sky. The dark-purple flowers and twisting stems in the wallpaper were mouths to see night through. The room turned and tumbled at moon-slow pace, and the women, their faces illuminated from within by copper-yellow light, turned with it. Light poured from their open laughing silent mouths. The barman, red and green, standing on a patch of carpet canted at thirty degrees to the rest of the room, sang a quiet private song with the voice of the wallpapered, star-intestined piano.

The Pollandore was stirring.

Lom and Maroussia crossed the Brass Cut by an unwatched footbridge and followed the canal-side north in the direction of Big Side, where Vishnik’s apartment was. Mailboats were unloading at a jetty in the lee of a huge wood-framed warehouse. The Fransa-Koromantsy Postal Depot. There were still huge areas of the Vlast, thousands of miles of bog and lake and birchwood, where the railways didn’t run and the roads were rutted dust in summer and thick impassable mud in winter. Long slow rivers connected by lakes and stretches of canal and overland portage were the only way to cover distance. Place names were crudely stencilled on the sacks and pallets. Solovits. Onyeg. Voitsogorad. Shar-Dudninsk. Plestovosk. Way stations on the inland waterways. A litany of strangeness and distance. The men in bulky coats and rubber boots, talking quietly among themselves as they shifted their cargoes, knew such places and the long wildernesses in between.

Lom studied the boatmen curiously. They were all men. Women sometimes worked the mailboats, and even whole families, but he saw none here. Many of the men had the broad, flattened faces and squat strength of the people from beyond the ice edge, but others were lean and wiry, with straw-coloured hair and colourless eyes. They all had the same quietness, the same hard-weathered distant look. Interior voyagers, one or two to a boat, moving slowly through non-human landscapes. The country of giants. Man-wolves. Great elk. Rusalkas.