‘I don’t believe that. I need you to tell me about it. And tell me about my mother. What happened to her in the forest? It’s all connected. I need to understand it. I have a right to know. You’re my father. You have to tell me.’
Kantor was tired of playing games. It was time to end this. End the pretence. Open her eyes. Peel back the lids. Make the child stare at some truth.
‘I’m not your father,’ he said.
She stared at him.
‘What?’ she said. ‘What do you mean? Yes you are.’
‘That’s what your mother told you, apparently, but she lied. Of course she lied. She always lied. How could I be your father? She would not… your mother would not… She refused me… For months. Before she became pregnant. She went into the trees. She kept going there. And then she abandoned me and ran back home to Mirgorod. You’re not my child. I’m not your father. I couldn’t be.’
There was raw shock in her face.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘You’re lying.’
But he saw that she did believe him.
‘What does it matter, anyway?’ he said. ‘What difference does it make?’
‘It matters,’ she said. ‘It matters to me.’
‘Hoping for a cuddle from Daddy? Then ask your mother who he is. If you can get any sense out of the old bitch.’
The girl was staring at him. Her face was white and set hard. Blank like a mask. So be it. She would not look to him for help again.
‘You bastard,’ she said quietly. ‘You bastard.’
‘Technically, that’s you. The forest whore’s bastard daughter.’
‘Fuck you.’
After she had gone Kantor extinguished the lamp again and sat for a long time, considering carefully. The girl’s visit had stirred old memories. Vig. The forest edge. The Pollandore. He’d thought he had eradicated such things. Killed and forgotten them. But they were only repressed. And the repressed always returns. The girl had said that.
He should have done something about the Shaumian women long ago: that he had not done so revealed a weakness he hadn’t known was in him, and such weakness was dangerous. More than that, the girl was a threat in her own right. She was rank with the forest, and surprisingly strong. She had caused him to show his weakness to her. He would have to do something: the necessity of that was clear at last. He must end it now. He was glad she had come. Laying bare weakness was the first step to becoming stronger. In the familiar dialectic of fear and killing, only the future mattered. Only the future was at stake.
11
Maroussia Shaumian walked out through the night din and confusion of the dockyard and on into nondescript streets of tenements and small warehouses. She was trembling. She needed to think, but she could not. There was too much. She walked. Wanting to be tired. Not wanting to go home. Scarcely noticing where she went.
There was rain in the air and more rain coming, a mass of dark low cloud building towards the east, but overhead there were gaps of clear blackness and stars. She didn’t know what time it was. Late.
She came at last to the Stolypin Embankment: a row of globe lamps along the parapet, held up by bronze porpoises. Glistening cobbles under lamplight. Beyond the parapet, she felt more than saw the slow-moving Mir, sliding out into the Reach, barges and late water taxis still pushing against the black river. The long, punctuated reflections of their navigation lights trickled towards her, and the talk of the boatmen carried across the water, intimate and quiet. She couldn’t make out the words: it felt like language from another country. A gendarme was observing her from his kiosk, but she ignored him and went to sit on a bench, watching the wide dark river, its flow, its weight, its stillness in movement. She took the knotted nest of forest stuff out of her pocket and held it to her face, breathing in its strange earthy perfume. Filling her lungs.
And then it happened, as it sometimes did.
A tremble of movement crossed the black underside of the clouds, like wind across a pool, and the buildings of the night city prickled; the nap of the city rising, uneasy, anxious. Maroussia waited, listening. Nothing more came. Nothing changed. The rain-freighted clouds settled into a new shape. And then, suddenly, the solidity of Mirgorod stone and iron broke open and