I smiled and laughed, dismissing the idea with a shrug, and picked my notebook back up to ask the rest of the empty questions I had prepared. When I left, van Thiel shook my hand and winked and said I was on to a good thing in my line of work. Germany would always need people who understood the big ideas. Four days later he was found hanging from the quaint wooden rafters of his traditional wooden house by an old bit of hemp rope. A note on the desk stated that he had betrayed his country by selling his ideas and his soul, and he could no longer live with the grief. The verdict was suicide, and the bruising around his ribs and hands dismissed as incidental injuries sustained post-mortem, when the police came to cut him down.
Two days after that, under the name Kostya Prekovsky, I boarded a cargo ship hauling coal to Leningrad, one set of travel documents in my pocket, another stowed in the false bottom of my bag, and an escape passport already deposited in an unused signal box just beyond Finland Station, ready should I need it. I was looking for Vitali Karpenko, the man who could change the future.
Chapter 34
It is not I, but he, who takes the night train across Europe.
It is perhaps the universal experience of travellers–I have only my own view to judge it by–but there is a moment, in the dead hours of the night, when a man may sit upon a platform in an empty station, waiting for the last train upon a long journey, and regardless of the personal experience of that individual, he ceases to be an “I” and becomes a “he”. Perhaps another creature stirs in this dead place: a traveller, back bent, eyes too weary to read a book; a government apparatchik on his way back from an unsuccessful meeting straight to an early-morning reproach; two or three strangers gathered beneath the hissing white lights whose sound is inaudible by day, when the trains race through the station and doors clatter and clunk, and which by night become the base sound of the universe. When the train pulls in, it seems to be a long way away for a very long time, then suddenly here, and longer than you had imagined. The doors bend in the middle as they open, heavy and unwieldy. The toilets stink of urine, the nets above the seating sag from too much baggage for too many shaking miles. Three people board the last train to Leningrad, and no one gets off.
I sit by the window, a false name in my passport, a dozen languages mixing in my mind, not sure which one will make an appearance on the end of my tongue, and look at my reflection in the window of the carriage, and see a stranger. Someone else travels on the sleeper train through Russia, alone with the beating of the bumpers beneath the wheels of the cart. Someone else’s face is too white against the blackness outside. Someone else’s head bumps against the cold window with each jerk of the engine, each shriek of the brake.
Thoughts, at such times, happen not in words but in stories told about someone else’s life. A child approached a man, dying in Berlin, and said the world is ending, and these words meant nothing at all. Death has always come to the man as death always will, and frankly the man couldn’t be more or less interested in death than in a curious tropical beetle, save that death brings with it the tedium of youth once again. Bombs have fallen and people have died, and frankly why should a change in the process of these events be of any interest, since the outcome is always the same?
And then again.
Vincent Rankis hit a professor in Cambridge, punched him right in the jaw, and for what? For two words uttered in hope–Cronus Club.
A child threw himself from the third floor of an asylum; a wandering monk asked a Chinese spy how to die, and Vincent Rankis exclaimed at the wonders of the universe, and wanted more.
What is the point of you?
A man on a train to Leningrad hears the voice of Franklin Phearson in his mind, and is briefly surprised to see his own features flinch in the window. What is that? Is that pain at an unwelcome recollection? Is that guilt? Regret?
What is the point of you, Dr August? Do you think all this was just a dream?
An argument with Vincent in my rooms in Cambridge.
We also posited a parallel universe which you might be able to save from the trials of war. We even hypothesised a world in which you yourself could experience the joy of said peace, paradox being left aside.
When I am optimistic, I choose to believe that every life I lead, every choice I make, has consequence. That I am not one Harry August but many, a mind flicking from parallel life to parallel life, and that when I die, the world carries on without me, altered by my deeds, marked by my presence.
Then I look at the deeds I have done and, perhaps more importantly considering my condition, the deeds I have not done, and the thought depresses me, and I reject the hypothesis as unsound.
What is the point of me?
Either to change a world–many, many worlds, each touched by the choices I make in my life, for every deed a consequence, and in every love and every sorrow truth–or nothing at all.
A stranger takes the train to Leningrad.
Chapter 35