Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘Thank you,’ said Florian. ‘I am tired. Just keep straight on. There’s only the one road: you just need to make sure you don’t turn off onto any farm tracks.’ He settled back in his seat and closed his eyes.

Lom started the engine and pulled away.

‘Florian?’ he said.

Florian stirred reluctantly and opened his eyes.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘You need to tell me how you know what you know. You need to tell me who you are.’

‘Who I am? In what sense, exactly? Are we discussing allegiances here? Sides? Motivations?’

‘Sure,’ said Lom. ‘Absolutely. For a start.’

‘I am…’ He paused, choosing his words carefully. ‘I am… freelance.’

‘ Freelance ?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘ Uh-huh? ’ said Lom. ‘You care to expand on that? Because you need to.’

Florian settled lower in the passenger seat and closed his eyes again. Lom thought he wasn’t going to say any more, but after a while he started speaking quietly.

‘You think I am playing games with you, Vissarion? OK. Maybe. But really . You should look at yourself. You are angry, and you ask me what I am? You? You, who have that marvellous, that wonderful, that unique and beautiful opening in your head? You sit there and it’s spilling out… shedding… you don’t know what , you’re not even aware … and you ask me to say what I am?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Lom. ‘What are you trying to say?’

Florian half opened his eyes and glanced sideways.

‘I think you should stop asking yourself what things are and start asking what they can become. I think you should work at yourself. I think you should, to coin a phrase, get a fucking grip.’

Colonel-General Rizhin put aside the name of Josef Kantor and the life he’d lived under that name without a backward glance. He killed Kantor without compunction or regret. There is no past, there is only the future. Commissar for Mirgorod city defence.

Rizhin began to work .

He had an appetite and capacity for work that were astonishing. Relentless. Prodigious. Terrifying. The more he worked the more energy he drew from it and the more work he did. No detail was trivial, no obstacle immovable. He had a nose for men and women whose capacity for work matched his, or almost, and he gathered them about him. Put them to work. Those that flagged or showed the slightest inclination to cling to a private life of their own (the very phrase an abomination in Rizhin’s lexicon) were ruthlessly obliterated.

And Rizhin’s work was war, his purpose victory.

Within hours of the departure of Chazia, Fohn and Khazar, the pyre outside the Lodka was extinguished. The number of recruitment booths doubled. That very afternoon, he told the people of Mirgorod what to expect. He broadcast on the radio, on the tannoys and loudspeakers. The film was played in cinemas and converted Kino-trams, over and over again. Incessantly. The text appeared that evening in special editions of all the newspapers. Every paper carried the same photograph of Rizhin’s gaunt, smiling, pockmarked face. By the evening it had appeared on posters in every public building, on every tram, on every city wall. Yesterday the people of the city might have been asking, who is this Rizhin? Today they knew.

He called the city to war, a war against two enemies: outside the city were the forces of the Archipelago, and inside the city were the diversionists, the traitors, the looters, the spies. It wasn’t two wars, it was one war fought on two fronts, and there was nothing that was not part of it. No bystanders. No noncombatants. No civilians.

‘At last,’ he told the people of Mirgorod, ‘we are coming to grips with our most vicious and perfidious enemy The fiends and cannibals of the Archipelago, the slavers, are bearing down on our city. And they have accomplices among us! Whiners. Cowards. Deserters. Panic mongers. Spies. Saboteurs. Traitors!

‘The enemy’s soldiers and their secret allies must be rooted out and destroyed at every step. This is no ordinary war. Not a war of soldiers but a war of all the people. Everyone and everything is at war! Total war! Our homes are not our own, our dreams are not our own. Our lives are not our own. There is only one life, the Vlast, and only one outcome is possible. Overwhelming triumph!

‘Everything must be mobilised, all that we are. Private lives do not exist. Every man, woman and child is a soldier of the Vlast. We will fall upon our enemies as one body, an irresistible mass, roaring defiance, destruction and death with a single voice. With the angels on our side we will certainly prevail. All the strength of the people must be used to smash the enemy. Onward to victory!’

In the cinemas and in the squares the people of Mirgorod broke into spontaneous cheering. The death of the Novozhd had left them adrift, afraid and grieving, but here was a leader again, come in their desperate hour.

Rizhin.

His face was everywhere, and his words.

Onward to victory!

Elena Cornelius was working in the Apraksin when she heard from a customer about the forced evacuation of the Raion Lezaryet. She closed the counter immediately and went as fast as she could to the school, desperate to be with her daughters, to see them safe, but when she got there she found the teachers reluctant to let her take the girls away.

‘Our instructions are to keep them all together here,’ the headmaster said, ‘until the trucks come. They will all be taken to a place of safety, far away from the bombs. The whole school is to go, we teachers also. We don’t know yet where we are going, but we are excited about this great adventure and so are the children. It is best for them, don’t you think? I would think you would be pleased for them, Elena Cornelius. Your girls will be safer with us.’

‘I am their mother and I will keep them safe,’ said Elena Cornelius. ‘Not you. Me. They are coming with me now.’

‘But—’

‘I am their mother and you will not stop me taking them.’

‘On your own responsibility, then,’ the headmaster said. ‘I wash my hands of them. Don’t come crying to me later, and do not expect to bring Yeva and Galina back to this school again when the war is over.’

Elena did not return to Count Palffy’s house in the raion–all their possessions, their home, the workshop, it was all lost to them now–but she went instead with her daughters to her aunt Lyudmila Markova, who had a one-room apartment in Big Side. Aunt Lyudmila had never married. She kept a caged parakeet for company and was reluctant to take in her niece and two girls as well.

‘But there’s only the one bed, Elena! Where would you sleep?’

‘On the floor. I’ll buy a mattress.’

‘I don’t know, Elena. That doesn’t sound comfortable for the girls, and Bolto doesn’t like change. It unsettles him. He doesn’t like strangers coming in and out. He has his own little ways.’ Bolto was the parakeet.

‘We are not strangers , Aunt,’ said Elena. ‘And I’ve got a hundred roubles at the workshop. You’ll be glad of the help when the war comes. Things will get expensive.’

‘All this talk of war, I don’t like it, Elena. It’s nonsense. The Novozhd won’t let anything happen to Mirgorod.’

‘The Novozhd is dead, Aunt. The enemy is coming. There’ll be more bombing. There may be fighting.’

‘Oh no, not here. I don’t think so. They wouldn’t dare. Why don’t you just go home and wait till it all blows over? Bolto and I will be fine.’

‘I can’t go home. Everyone in the raion is being taken away on trains and nobody knows where to.’