Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘I thought you were doing well at the Apraksin, Elena? I thought they liked you there? You’ve always said—’

‘It’s not to do with the Apraksin, Aunt. It’s everyone.’

In the end Aunt Lyudmila relented.

‘Just for a couple of days, Elena, until you get yourself settled. I must say I’m disappointed in Count Palffy; it’s very shoddy behaviour to put you out like this. You don’t expect it, not from an aristocrat. The Novozhd always said they were enemies of the people.’

When she heard Rizhin’s broadcast on Aunt Lyudmila’s radio, Elena Cornelius knew she had to do something. She could not go to the raion again, she could not go back to the Apraksin and she could not simply hide away in her aunt’s apartment. Sooner or later she would be found and questions would be asked. The girls had to be safer than that. She had to do what she could to protect them. Immediately. That meant she had to have a role. She had to have a place. She had to have a story.

‘This new man, Rizhin,’ said Aunt Lyudmila. ‘He sounds like a strong man. He’ll sort out this nonsense about a war.’

That same evening Elena went to the Labour Deployment Office and filled in a form. Where it said address, she put Aunt Lyudmila’s apartment in Big Side. She waited in line for two hours and handed the form to a woman at a desk.

‘My name is Elena Schmitt,’ she said.

‘Would I be in this job if I couldn’t read?’

‘No,’ said Elena. ‘Of course not.’

The woman studied the form carefully. She had close-cropped fair hair and colourless eyes in a dry, sunless face, striated with fine lines. She must have been about forty. Her fawn uniform blouse was fresh and spotless. Crisp epaulettes. Sharp creases down the outside edge of her sleeves. Elena thought that, close to, she would smell of laundry. The woman pulled out a file and paged through sheets and sheets of typescript.

‘This is your address?’

‘Yes. Well, it is my aunt’s apartment. I live with her.’

‘How long?’

‘I’m sorry? I don’t understand?’

‘How long have you lived there?’

‘Two years.’

‘You’re not listed at that address.’

‘I came to Mirgorod two years ago,’ said Elena. ‘To work at Blue’s. Before that I lived with my parents. At Narymsk, and before that Tuga. Look, I want to work, citizen. I want to do something. For the city.’

‘So. And what can you do, Elena Schmitt?’

‘I am a carpenter. I have my own tools. I have a school certificate in mathematics and a diploma in bookkeeping.’

‘Can you dig?’

‘What?’

‘Can you dig? Can you use a pick and a spade?’

‘I make furniture. Cupboards. Wardrobes.’

‘When the Archipelago tanks arrive, should we put them away in a cupboard?’

‘No. But surely—’

‘There is a requirement for more workers on the inner defence line. People who can dig. Can you dig frozen soil with your fingers on a quarter-pound of black bread a day?’

‘If that is what the city requires of me then I will try, citizen. I will do my best.’

The woman filled in some details on a pink card, stamped it with an official stamp and gave it to her.

‘Report at six o’clock tomorrow morning.’

Aunt Lyudmila had already gone to bed when Elena Cornelius got back to the apartment, and the girls were asleep together on the floor, curled up under an eiderdown on cushions from the couch. Elena found a packet of tea in the cupboard, boiled a kettle on the paraffin stove and made herself a pot. The label on the tea packet had a drawing of ladies in high lacy collars with a samovar on a tablecloth, and underneath was written in curly script:

What follows after taking tea?

The resurrection of the dead.

It was an old saying, some kind of joke or pun. It was traditional. Elena had always wondered what it meant.

She sat in a wicker chair in the window, the curtains drawn back, a blanket wrapped round her shoulders. It was too cold to sleep. The moons bathed the city in a bone-white glare, monochrome and alien. Mirgorod looked like the capital of some other planet. Silent searchlight beams swept the skyline and flashed across the soft silver hulls of barrage balloons. A remembered phrase from childhood came into her mind and would not leave. The beneficence of angels .

At midnight the Archipelago bombers came. Tiny bright anti-aircraft shells crackled and flowered briefly in the dark. Searchlights slashed at the raiders but didn’t hold what they caught. Within an hour huge fires were burning on the horizon. Elena watched flames lick high into the air: arches and caverns, sheets and waterfalls of flame. Whirling flame tornadoes. Hurricanes of fire. It was all happening several miles away. She imagined she could feel the heat of the fires against her face, though she could not.

Lom had never driven anything like a ZorKi Zavod limousine before. He liked it. Eight cylinders, automatic transmission, the flat empty road at night. He pressed his foot down and watched the needle climb smoothly to fifty. The car must have weighed a couple of tons, but the engine scarcely rose above a quiet purr. The bonnet stretched ahead of him like the boiler of a locomotive, pennant flickering. All he had to do was keep his foot on the throttle and his hand on the wheel and follow the patch of lamplit road that skimmed ahead of him, always just beyond arrival. Except for the interior of the car, smelling of leather and polish, and the splash of lamplight on the road, there was nothing anywhere but blackness under a vast black sky. Forward motion without visible result. He kept the window open an inch to let the wind touch his face. When small snowflakes began to speckle the windscreen he found the switch for the wipers and set them sweeping back and forth: a quiet click at the end of each cycle, clearing twin arcs in the sparse accumulating snow.

Lom put his hand to his forehead and felt for the lozenge-shaped wound socket. It was just the right size to accommodate the tip of his forefinger. He touched the smooth newness of young skin covering the uneven rim of cut skullbone, soft-edged and painless. It was a blind third eye, pulsing faintly with the restful rhythms of his beating heart, a life sign, part of him now, absorbed, healed, no longer conspicuous. A mark of freedom. A badge of honour. A legacy of ancient hurt. When he took his finger away he could feel the coolness of the wind pressing against the place with gentle insistence. A nudge of conscience. A memory just beyond the frontier of recollection.

Hours passed. The road stretched on ahead, drifting slightly to right and left. The ZorKi swept along at a steady fifty miles an hour. Villages rose ahead and fell behind. Mostly they were too small for names: just clusters of buildings glimpsed and gone, straggling settlements barely registering against the emptiness. No lights showed: they might as well have been deserted. The needle on the fuel gauge had been creeping round to the left all night, and now it was ominously close to empty. Lom pulled up and got out to relieve himself. Legs and back stiff from the long drive, he walked self-consciously a few yards off the road to a scrubby stand of brush at the foot of a telegraph pole. When he got back to the car, Florian was awake, easing himself upright and rubbing his face

‘Where are we?’ he said.

‘We came through Zharovsk a while back,’ said Lom. He looked at his watch. It was coming up towards three in the morning. ‘We’re running short of fuel.’

‘There’s more in the back.’

Florian went round to the boot of the car, opened it and dragged out a couple of jerrycans. He found a funnel and began to fill the tank. When he’d done, he stowed the empty cans. Then he brought out a suitcase and changed his uniform for a neat and sober suit, produced his astrakhan hat and chucked the officer’s cap on the back seat.