Wolfhound Century

16


Maroussia Shaumian climbed the familiar stairs to Lakoba Petrov’s studio and pushed open the door. Grey daylight flooded the sparse, airy room. Gusts of rain clattered against the high north-facing windows. She knew the room well: its wide bleak intensity, its smell of paint and turpentine, uneaten food and stale clothing. She used to come here often.

Petrov had been working on Maroussia’s portrait, on and off, for months. He was painting her nude, in reds and purples and shadowed blacks of savage energy, her body twisted away from the viewer in a violent torsion that revealed the side of one breast under the angle of her arm. A vase of flowers was falling across a tablecloth behind her, as if she had kicked the table in the violence of the movement that hid her face. Petrov had said it was an important work: he was using it to feel his way out of conventional, scholastic painting of the female form, searching for a way to express directly his dispassionate desire and his indifference to the suffocating conventions of love and beauty. But he had lost interest in painting her since he’d got involved with Kantor. He had changed, becoming distant and distracted. Maroussia had come there less and less, and finally not at all.

She had met Petrov at the Crimson Marmot Club, where she had started going in the evenings after work. She had gravitated towards the place because she felt obscurely hungry for new things. New ways of looking at the world. But the Marmot’s had been disappointing: a refuge where artists and intellectuals gathered to drink and boast instead of work. Everyone there had tried to get inside her skirts. Everyone except Petrov.

‘What do you want from this place?’ he had asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she’d said seriously. ‘Something. Anything. So long as it’s new.’

“Is anything ever really new?’ Petrov had said. ‘The present only exists by reference to the past.’ That was the kind of thing you said at the Marmot's.

Maroussia had frowned. ‘The past is a better place than the present,’ she said. ‘The present is a bad place, and the future will be bad too. Unless we can start again. Unless we can find a new way.’

Petrov had laughed. ‘You won’t find anything new at the Marmot's. Look at them. Every one a poser, every one a hypocrite, every one a mountebank. They talk about the revolution of the modern, but all they’re after is fame and money.’

‘Are you like that?’

‘Not me, no,’ Petrov had said. ‘I mean what I say. One must begin the revolution with oneself. One must remove all barriers and inhibitions within oneself first, before one can do work that is truly new. One must do all the things it is possible to do. Experience the extremes of life. I don’t care what other people think about me: I want to shock myself.’

She had liked him then. She hadn’t seen then the danger of his words, the literal seriousness of his desire to shock and destroy. They had met again at the Marmot’s, several times, talking earnestly. Maroussia had wondered if they might become lovers, but it hadn’t happened.

And now, he scarcely looked up when she came in. The studio was bitterly cold, but he was working regardless, in fingerless mittens and a woollen cap, the paint-spattered table at his side set out with jars and tubes and brushes. He painted hastily, with bold, rapid strokes, stabbing away at the immense canvas that towered above him.

‘Lakoba?’ said Maroussia. ‘I wanted to ask you something.’

Petrov didn’t look round.

‘I will not paint you today,’ he said. ‘That picture is finished. They’re all finished. This is the last.’

‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘Can I look?’

He shrugged indifferently and turned away to busy himself at the table. Maroussia stared up at the picture he had made. It was colossal, like nothing he had made before. At the centre of it was a giant, laid out on a black road, apparently dead, his head and feet bare, surrounded by six lighted candles, each set in a golden candlestick and burning with a circle of orange light. A woman in a white skirt – suffering humanity – threw up her arms in grief. Dark, crooked buildings, roofed with blood, loomed around them. Behind the roofs and taller than all the buildings a man walked past, playing a violin. He seemed to be dancing. The lurid yellow-green sky streamed with black clouds.

‘This is good,’ she said. ‘Really good. It’s different. Has it got a title?’

‘It’s Vaso,’ he said. ‘The Death of the Giant Vaso, Killed in a Bank Raid.’ But he didn’t look round. Her presence seemed to irritate him.

‘Lakoba?’ she said. ‘I want to ask you something. It’s important. I want to find Raku Vishnik.’

Petrov didn’t reply.

‘Raku Vishnik,’ she said again. ‘I need to see him. He didn’t come to the Marmot’s last night.’ She paused, but he didn’t answer. ‘Lakoba?’

‘What?’ he said at last. ‘What did you say?’

‘Raku Vishnik. I need to find him. Quickly. I need his address.’

‘Vishnik?’ said Petrov vaguely. ‘You won’t find him during the daytime. He wanders. He always wanders. He’s on the streets somewhere. He walks.’

‘Where then? He wasn’t at the Marmot’s.’

‘No. I haven’t seen him there. Not for weeks.’

‘Where then?’

‘You must go to his apartment. At night. Late at night. Very late.’

‘What’s his address?’

‘What?’

‘Vishnik’s address? Where does he live?’

‘Oh,’ said Petrov vaguely. ‘He’s on Pelican Quay. I don’t know the house. Ask the dvorniks.’

For the first time he turned to look at her. Maroussia was shocked by how different he looked. He had changed so much in the weeks that had passed. His hair was wild and matted, but his face was illuminated with a strange intense distracted clarity. His pupils were dilated, wide and dark. He was staring avidly at the world, and at her, but he wasn’t seeing what was there: he was looking through her, beyond her, towards some future only he could see. And he stank. Now that he was close to her, she was aware that his breath was bad, his clothes smelled of sourness and sweat.

‘Something’s wrong, Lakoba,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

Petrov opened his mouth to speak again but did not. He looked as if his brain was fizzing with images… ideas… words… purpose – what he must do – But he could say nothing. He tried, but he could not.

‘Lakoba?’ Maroussia said again. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Go,’ he said at last. ‘You have to go now.’

‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘You have to go.’

‘Why?’

‘I want you to go. I won’t need you again. Don’t come here again. Not any more.’

‘What are you talking about? What have I done?’

‘Everything is finished now. I am leaving it behind.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘There is no more to say. No more words. Words are finished now. Personal things don’t matter any more: my personal life is dead, and soon my body will also die.’

‘Lakoba—’

‘Go. Just go.’


Maroussia left Petrov to his empty room and the immense dead giant. Once again, for the second time in as many days, she walked away from a door that had closed against her. She didn’t want to go to work, and she didn’t want to go home – not home to her mother, trapped in quiet shadow, waiting silently, too terrified to leave the room, too terrified to look out of the window, too terrified to open the cupboards, too terrified to move at all – she didn’t want to go anywhere. But it was still early, not even afternoon: she would have to wait till night to go to Raku Vishnik’s. Vishnik might tell her about the Pollandore. He was the historian. He might know





17


That morning, after Lom left, Raku Vishnik went to the Apraksin Bazaar. He liked the Apraksin, with its garish din and aromatic confusion, its large arcades and sagging balconies of shopfronts and stalls, the central atrium of market sellers and coffee kiosks. Areas of the Apraksin were reserved for different trades: silver, spices, rugs, clothes, shoes, umbrellas, papers and inks, rope and cordage, parts for motors and appliances, tools, chairs, tobacco, marble slabs. Poppy. One distant corner for stolen goods. And at the very top, under a canopy of glass, was an indoor garden littered with unwanted broken statuary: a dog, a child on a bench, a stained sleeping polar bear. Katya’s Alley.

Vishnik wandered from stall to stall, floor to floor, making lists, drawing sketches, taking photographs, picking up discarded bits of stuff – a tram ticket, a discarded theatre programme. He recorded it all.

Mirgorod, graveyard of dreams.

He had roamed back and forth like this across the city every day for more than a year, a satchel slung over his shoulder with a fat oilskin notebook, a mechanical pencil, a collection of maps and a camera. The official historian of Mirgorod. He took his duties seriously, even if no one else did. He was systematically mining the alleyways, the streets, the prospects. Blue–green verdigrised domes. Cupolas. Pinnacles. Towers. Statues of horsemen and angels. The Opera. The Sea Station. The Chesma. The Obovodniy Bridge. It all went into his notebooks and onto his maps. He noted the smell of linden trees in the spring and the smell of damp moss under the bridges in the autumn. He photographed chalk scrawlings on the walls, torn advertisements, drinking fountains, the patterns made by telephone wires against the sky. A wrought iron clock tower with four faces under a dome.

What he found was strangeness. Vishnik had come to see that the whole city was like a work of fiction: a book of secrets, hints and signs. A city in a mirror. Every detail was a message, written in mirror writing.

A wrong turning has been taken. Everything is f*cked.

As he worked through the city week by week and month by month, he found it shifting. Slippery. He would map an area, but when he returned to it, it would be different: doorways that had been bricked up were open now; shops and alleyways that he’d noted were no longer there, and others were in their place, with all the appearance of having been there for years. It was as if there was another city, present but mostly invisible, a city that showed itself and then hid. He was being teased – stalked – by the visible city’s wilder, playful twin, which set him puzzles, clues and acrostics: manifestations which hinted at the meaning they obscured.

Tying myself in knots, that’s what I’m doing. There must be cause and pattern somewhere. I’m a historian: finding cause and pattern is what I do. And it’s here, but I can’t see it. I just can’t f*cking see it.

Vishnik was hunting traces: the trail of vanished enterprise, the hint of occupations yet to come, the scent of possibilities haunting the present. Such as this jeweller and watchmaker, whose wooden sign of business (S. LARKOV) was fixed over – but didn’t completely cover – the larger inscription in bottle green on purple tiling RUDOLF GOTMAN – BOOKSELLER – PERIODICALS – FINE BINDINGS. Vishnik noted Gotman’s advertisement on his plan of the Apraksin and took out his camera to photograph the palimpsest vitrine.

‘You. What do you want? What are you doing?’

Oh my f*ck. Not again.

A small man – slick black hair, round face polished to a high sheen – had come out of the shop. S. Larkov. He wore gold half-moon glasses on his nose and a gold watch chain across his tight waistcoat. Expandable polished-steel sleeve suspenders gripped his narrow biceps, making the crisp white cotton of his shirtsleeves balloon.

‘I said, what are you doing?’

‘Taking pictures,’ said Vishnik, and offered him a card.


Prof. Raku Andreievich Vishnik

Historian of Mirgorod

City Photographer

231 Pelican Quay, Apt. 4

Vandayanka

Big Side

Mirgorod


The jeweller brushed it aside. ‘This means nothing. Who photographs such places? Who makes maps of them?’

‘I do,’ said Vishnik.

‘I’ll tell you who. Spies. Terrorists. Agents of the Archipelago. Here, give me that!’ He grabbed for the camera. Vishnik snatched it back out of his grip.

‘Listen, you f*ck. I’m a historian—’

Larkov’s face was stiff with hatred. His tiny eyes as tight and sharp and cramped as the cogwheels in the watches he picked over at his bench.

‘What if you are? Your sort are disgusting. Parasites. Intelligentsia. Only looking after their own. The Novozhd will—’

People were coming out of the neighbouring shops. Larkov made another snatch at the camera and missed, but caught the strap of Vishnik’s satchel.

‘Stay where you are. I haven’t finished with you. Intellectual!’ The man propelled the word into Vishnik’s face, spattering him with warm spittle.

‘You piss off,’ said Vishnik. ‘Piss away off.’

He jerked the satchel away from Larkov.

‘Gendarme! Gendarme! Stop the bastard!’

Vishnik saw a green uniform coming from the other direction. Time to go.





18


From the mortuary Lom found his way eventually, via many corridors and stairs, to the Central Registry of the Lodka. He had wanted to see this place for years, and when he found it he stopped a moment in the entrance, taking it in.

It was a vast circular hall, floored with flagstones, ringed by tiers of galleries, roofed with a dome of glass and iron. It had the airy stillness of a great library and the smell of wood polish and ageing paper that a library has. Rows of readers’ desks radiated outwards from the hub of the room like the spokes of a wheel. Each desk had a blue-shaded electric lamp of brass, a blue blotter, a chair upholstered in blue leather. Three thousand readers could work there at once, though not more than a tenth of that number was present now, bent in quiet study.

At the centre of the vast hall, rising more than a hundred feet high, almost to the underside of the dome, was the Gaukh Engine. Lom had seen a photograph of it once. It had been beautiful in the picture, but nothing prepared him for the reality. It was immense. An elegant nested construction of interlinked vertical wheels of steel and polished wood carried, like fairground wheels, dozens of heavy gondolas. The whole machine was in constant motion, its wheels turning and stopping and turning. The murmuring of its electric motors gave the hall a quiet, restful air.

A woman – pink arms, a round red face, hair wound in braids about her head, a white sweater under her uniform tunic – was watching him.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Can I help?’

‘I’m looking for a file,’ said Lom. ‘Name of Kantor. I haven’t been here before.’

The archivist came around from behind the desk. She was shorter and wider than he had thought. There were crumbs in the lap of her skirt.

‘Follow me,’ she said.

She led him to one of the control desks. There were two arrays of lettered keys, like the keyboards of two typewriters.

‘This one is for surnames, and this is for code names. Enter the first three letters of the name you want, then press the button and the engine will bring the correct gondola. Gondolas contain index cards. When you find the one you’re looking for, copy the reference number in the top right corner and bring it to me. The index is phonetic, not alphabetical – sometimes a name is only overheard, and the spelling is uncertain. Cards are colour coded: yellow for students, green for anarchists, purple for nationalists, and so on. It’s all here.’ She showed him a hand-coloured legend pinned to the desk.

‘How many cards do you have here?’

‘Thirty-five million. Approximately.’

Lom keyed in the letters. K A N. Pressed the button. The wheels turned slowly, until the right car stopped in front of him. He lifted the hinged lid to reveal tray after tray of cards suspended from racks on an axle. He spun through the racks. There was a half-tray of Kantors, generations of them, but only two Josefs with a birth date in the last half-century. One card was white, indicating a minor public official included for completeness, against whom nothing was known. The other was lavender, creased and dog-eared, cross-referenced to at least twenty separate code names. Lom noted the reference on a slip of paper from the pad provided and handed it in.


While the archivist was gone, Lom wandered around the hall. There were card index cabinets, rows of guard-book catalogues. Newspapers, periodicals, journals, directories, maps, atlases, gazetteers, timetables. The publications, proceedings and membership lists of every organisation and society. The records of universities, technical colleges and schools. Galleries rose up to the domed ceiling. Swing doors led to the specialised archives and collections: keys, said a notice, could be collected from the desk by the holder of appropriate authorisation.

The foundation of any security organisation is its archives. That was what Commander Chazia had said in her address to the assembled police and militia of the Podchornok Oblast the previous year. Lom and Ziller had arrived late to find the room over-filled and over-hot. They had to stand at the back, craning to get a decent view between the bullet heads of a pair of gendarmes from Siflosk. Deputy Laurits had made a long and unctuous speech of welcome. The visit of the great Lavrentina Chazia, head of Vlast Secret Police, in all her pomp was a momentous occasion, a moment for the provincial service to feel close to the heart of the great machinery of the Vlast.

Chazia had dominated the room: a small woman but, standing on the simple stage at the front of the hall, a pillar of air and energy, pale and intense, neat and slender and upright, her voice carrying effortlessly to the back of the hall. She had drawn and held the attention of every man there. We are hers, they found themselves thinking. We are her soldiers. We are working for her.

The reports they provided mattered, that was Chazia’s message to them: they were used; they had to be done right. Lom listened intently as she unfolded the process by which raw intelligence from across the Dominions of the Vlast was gathered and sifted. It was a huge undertaking, rigorous, elegant, thorough: beautifully simple in its conception, dizzying in its scale and reach.

The Vlast’s information machine was in fact three machines, or rather it was a machine in three parts: that was how Chazia expounded it. First, there was the soft machine, the flesh machine, the machine of many humans. They were the Outer Agents: uniformed policemen, plain-clothes detectives, infiltrators and provocateurs – tens if not hundreds of thousands of them – watching and listening, collecting information about the political activities, opinions and social connections of the population. The Outer Agents used direct observation, and they also employed their own informants – dvorniks, tram drivers, schoolteachers, children. Their primary targets were the shifting and fissile groups of dissidents, separatists, anarchists, nationalists, democrats, nihilists, terrorists, insurgents and countless other dangerous sects and cults that sought to undermine the Vlast. Naturally they also collected an enormous amount of collateral intelligence on the families, neighbours and associates of such people, and on public servants and prominent citizens generally, for the purposes of cross-reference, elimination and potential future usefulness.

The soft machine fed the second machine, the paper machine: tons and tons of paper; miles of paper; paper stored in the dark cavernous stacks that ramified through the basements and inner recesses of the Lodka. Nothing was thrown away: nothing had ever been thrown away in the history of the centuries-long surveillance. The technicians of the paper machine were the archivists and code breakers and, at the pinnacle of the hierarchy, the analysts. It was they who, working from summary observation sheets, prepared the semi-magical Circles of Contact. Finding cadres, plots and secret cells in the teeming mass of the population was harder than finding needles in haystacks. Circles of Contact was how you did it. You began by writing a name – the Subject – at the centre of a large sheet of paper and drawing a circle around it. Then you drew spokes radiating from the circle, and at the end of each spoke you put the name of one of the Subject’s contacts or associates. The more frequent or closer the contact, the thicker the connecting spoke. Each associated name then became the centre of its own circle, a new node in its own right, and the process was repeated. The idea was to find the patterns – connections – linked loops – that would crystallise out of seemingly inchoate lists of names and dates and demonstrate the presence of a tightly knit but secretive connection. Lom found it exhilarating. It was like focusing a microscope lens and seeing some tiny malignant creature swimming in a bath of fluid. This was why he had become a policeman. To understand the pattern, to find the alien cruelty at its heart, to cut it out.

And the third machine, Chazia had said, the heart and brain of the operation, was the machine of steel and electricity: the famous Gaukh Engine, right at the heart of the Lodka. And now Lom was standing in its shadow.


The archivist came back.

‘The material you ordered is unavailable,’ she said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means you can’t have it. You don’t have the appropriate authorisation.’

‘Where do I get authorisation? I mean urgently. I mean now.’

‘This material is stored in Commander Chazia’s personal archive. They are her personal papers, and her personal permission is required. In writing. I’m sorry, Investigator. There’s nothing I can do.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you. I’m grateful for your help.’

Shit.

I’m running out of threads.

Pull another one.





19


The tattered pelmet of an awning fluttered in the wind. It was the colour of leather. Florid script crawled across it. Bakery. Galina Tropina. Confections. Coff –.

Vishnik went in.

The woman behind the counter frowned at him. She had arms the colour and texture of uncooked pastry, and her hair was artificially curled, sticky-looking, dyed a brash, desiccated copper. There were a couple of empty tables at the back.

‘I would like coffee,’ said Vishnik. ‘Strong, please. And aquavit. A small glass of that. Plum. Thank you.’

His legs were trembling. He was getting sensitive: things were getting to him more than they should. I’ve been spending too much time on my own. He used to like being alone, when he was young. But that was a different kind of loneliness: the solitude of the only child who knows that he is free and safe and loved. That was the rich, enchanted solitude of Before. Before the purge of the last aristocrats, when the militia had come winkling them out of the obscure burrows they had made for themselves in their distant country estates.

That was a different world. The storms smashed it long ago. All I am now is f*cking memories. I move through life facing backwards.

He checked the camera. It was a precise, purposeful thing. A Kono. When he was growing up in Vyra, a camera was a hefty contraption of wood and brass and leather bellows, which required a solid and man-high mahogany tripod to hold it steady. But the Kono was matte black metal, about the size of his notebook, and sat comfortably in the palm of his hand, satisfyingly solid and weighty. Vishnik had built a darkroom in the kitchen of his apartment, where he developed his own films and made his own prints, which he kept in boxes. Many, many boxes.

A girl came into the bakery and put a basket of provisions on the counter. Her black dress fell loosely from her narrow, bony shoulders. Her fine strengthless hair had parted at the back to show the pale nape of her neck. She wore thick grey stockings and scuffed, awkward shoes. The woman behind the counter smiled at her. The smile was a sunburst of love, extraordinary, generous and good, and in the moment of that smile it happened: the surface of the world split open, spilling potential, spilling possibility, spilling the hidden truth of things.

The sheen of the zinc counter top separated itself and slid upwards and sideways, a detached plane of reflective colour, splashed with the vivid blues and greens of the tourist posters on the opposite wall. The hot-water urn opened its eyes and grinned. The floorboards turned red– gold and began to curl and writhe. The woman’s arms were flat, biscuity, her hands floated free, dancing with poppy-seed rolls to the tune of the gusting rain, and the girl in the black dress was floating in the air, face downwards, bumping against the ceiling, singing ‘The Sailor’s Sorrow’ in a thin, clear voice.


O Mirgorod, O Mirgorod,

Sweet city of rain and dreams.

Wait for me, wait for me,

And I’ll come back.


Cautiously, slowly, so as not to disturb the limpid surface of the moment, Vishnik raised his camera to his eye and released the shutter. He wound the film on slowly – cautiously – with his thumb and took another. And another. Then he opened his notebook and began to write, spilling words quickly and fluently across the page.


The Pollandore, buried beneath a great and populous upper catacomb of stone in the heart of the city, waits, revolving.

In darkness, but having its own light, it turns on its axis slowly. Swelling and subsiding. Gently.

Like a heart.

Like a lung.

Like respiration.

Every so often – more frequently now, perhaps, but who could measure that? – somewhere inside it – deep within its diminutive immensity – a miniscule split fissures slightly wider – a cracking – barely audible, had there been anyone to hear it (there wasn’t) – the faintest spill of light and earthy perfume.

Almost nothing, really.

The egg of time, ripening.