Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘We’ll meet back here,’ said Florian. ‘Give me a couple of hours. Three at most.’ He gave Lom his knapsack. ‘You’d better keep this. It’s out of character for Iliodor. There’s money in the side pocket.’

Lom wandered the streets aimlessly, angry and frustrated. For days he had been a passenger, a tagger-along, abandoned now to his own devices. He saw the force of Florian’s logic but he didn’t like it. He’d left Mirgorod thousands of miles to the south and west, burning on the edge of war, and he felt Maroussia’s loss as an emptiness next to him. I’ve just been pissing about , he thought. And I’m still just pissing about.

He found himself in a shopping street. Modistes sold suits and gowns and patent shoes at impossible prices. Bright-lit displays offered cameras, radios, gramophones, perfumes, chocolate, southern sparkling wines, but it was all garish, ersatz and shoddy, and nobody was buying. He walked on up Dukhonin Prospect–six lanes wide, almost empty of traffic–and into the blustery immenseness of Dukhonin Square. The square was lined with gleaming new buildings. The Polytechnical College. The Institute of Metallurgy. The Faculty of Mathematical Design. The Engineers’ Euharmonia was giving a concert that night at the House of Culture: a poster next to the entrance promised Zoffany’s PSYCHO-INDUSTRIAL SYMPHONY FOR VOICE AND NEW-STYLE ORCHESTRA, WITH THEATRE OF PUPPETS.

Absences worried at Lom. Absences frayed his patience. They made him edgy. The absence of Maroussia. The absence of Chazia. The absence of trainload after trainload of conscript workers. Stolen persons. Thousands of them. They went on north, through the town and into the mountain and disappeared.

Lom wanted a closer look at the mountain.

There was a station on Dukhonin Square. The ticket hall was a brightly lit lofty palace. Stainless-steel arches. Walls of marble and malachite. Chrome fittings. Electric chandeliers. The size and solidity of the place dwarfed the few travellers passing through. Bronze bas reliefs on the walls represented the achievements of science and industry: dynamos and hydroelectric dams; Magnitograd; the Novozhd Factory; mining engineers drilling and excavating the torso of a huge fallen angel. Slogans carved in marble shouted: THOUGHT IS LABOUR! PRIVILEGE IS SACRIFICE! CONTRIBUTION IS FULFILMENT! CADRES DECIDE EVERYTHING! CITIZEN, YOU ARE THE CONDUIT TO THE FUTURE!

With money from Florian’s bag, Lom bought the most expensive ticket. Two roubles for all day and all stops. There was a sign that said FOUNDATION LINE NORTH. He bought a coffee in a paper cup and took it up the granite staircase to the platform overhead. A transit car was waiting. It was like a tramcar, but low and round-shouldered, and there was no overhead electric cable. Power came from the single steel rail itself.

KEEP OFF THE RAIL, CITIZEN! DANGER OF DEATH!

Lom took a corner seat. The coffee was good, not so good as Count Palffy’s, but sweet and bitter and hot. He took slow sips, making it last, as the train carried him slowly north. Beyond the carriage window the office blocks, parks and squares of the town centre gave way first to a few streets of elite housing–individual homes with yards and gardens–and then more communal blocks. Through the lighted and uncurtained upper-floor windows Lom could see cramped apartments separated by paper-thin partitions, shared bathrooms and shared kitchens. A new world had begun here, a world yet unseen in Mirgorod or Podchornok. Collective endeavour in a place without a past.

Novaya Zima, deposited ready-made in the middle of a wintry wilderness, drained the past. It soaked the life of memory away. There was only now, and an avid, echoing, hungry future. Lom found it drab and ugly and brutal.

The overheated car carried on trundling slowly northwards, stopping every minute or so. The route zigzagged across the town, making the most of its unnecessary existence. The overhead transit was a superfluous municipal showpiece–you could have walked the breadth of Novaya Zima in an hour–but people seemed to use it. Passengers came and went. Without exception they wore thin coats and carried briefcases. The men had knitted ties, the women wore blouses buttoned to the neck.

Lom finished his coffee and propped the empty paper cup on the seat next to him. A young woman, hair tied severely back, was watching him from across the aisle, her face a mixture of disapproval and curiosity. Lom realised how out of place he looked. He grinned at the woman cheerfully and she looked away. She had a pale thin face.

Lom got up and went across to sit beside her. She glanced at him in surprise and looked away. Shifted herself as far as she could along the bench away from him.

‘Does this train go all the way to the mountain?’ he said.

‘ Foundation Mountain?’

‘Is there another one?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘of course not.’ She was staring straight ahead. ‘This train doesn’t go there,’ she added.

‘So, if I wanted to get to the mountain, how would I do that?’

‘Why? Why would you want to?’

Lom shrugged.

‘To have a look. Curiosity.’

‘Are you assigned to work in the mountain? This is the wrong train. You should have been told… Why are you asking me this? What is your work?’

‘I’m new,’ said Lom. ‘I don’t have any work. Not yet.’

‘Nobody comes here without an assignment. How could you even get here?’

‘I flew,’ said Lom. ‘And I walked.’

The woman’s cheeks burned. She glanced around the carriage, looking for help, but no one was sitting near. She didn’t want to make a scene. She turned and glared into Lom’s face.

‘Are you drunk or something? If this is some crude attempt at seduction, citizen, then I should tell you—’

The car pulled into a station. The woman stood up. She was trembling.

‘This is my stop,’ she said. ‘Get out of my way, please.’

Lom twisted round to make room for her. She pushed past, holding her briefcase tight against her chest, not looking at him. Her legs brushed against his awkwardly.

‘I only want—’ he began.

‘Piss off,’ she hissed over her shoulder. ‘Don’t follow me. I’ll call the police.’

When the train reached the end of the line, Lom stayed aboard and came all the way back, continuing on south past Dukhonin Square till he was near the place where he was to meet Florian. Back on the emptying streets the freezing air smelled of engine fumes. Lighted windows shone with a bleak electrical brilliance. From everywhere Foundation Mountain was visible, a darkened wall against the northern sky. Lom thought he could hear a long freight train rumbling through the town, making the pavement tremble. But he wasn’t sure.

The Magnetic Bakery was still open but there was no sign of Florian. Office workers were drinking tea and reading newspapers. The radio played band music. Lom ordered an aquavit and grabbed an abandoned paper from the next table. The Vlast True Reporter . It was yesterday’s edition. He started to read it, just to pass the time till Florian came.

The man called Fohn, whose name he’d seen on various announcements in Mirgorod and who was now apparently the president of the Vlast, had made a speech in the new capital, Kholvatogorsk. So Mirgorod wasn’t the capital any more? And where the fuck is Kholvatogorsk? Lom had a dizzy feeling that the whole world had changed and shifted while he’d been flying across the landscape in Gretskaya’s Kotik.

Fohn’s speech was full of dull good news: industrial targets would be exceeded in the coming quarter, despite the recent upheaval of relocation, and steel production was heading for an all-time high. Shock workers had risen to the challenge. Lom skimmed the rest of the paper. Working hours were to be increased again. About the war there was almost nothing: inconclusive skirmishes on the southern front; Seva recaptured from the Archipelago yet again. There was a small inside paragraph about the stalwart resistance of encircled Mirgorod, with extracts from a fierce speech of defiance from a General Rizhin, who was Commissar for City Defence. Reading between the lines, it seemed that Mirgorod was doomed and the Vlast had decided it didn’t care. The piece was accompanied by a smudgy photograph of Rizhin. Lom almost ignored it, but something about the long narrow face caught his attention. His heart missed a beat.