of herself, a ball of bees’ wax nestled inside the paluba’s chest cavity, approximately where the heart would be. The wax has been mixed with many intimate traces of its maker – her saliva, her blood, her hair, a paring of fingernail, smears of sweat and other fluids, a condensation of breath – and many intimate words have been whispered over it, as the maker kneaded it between her warm palms for many hours over many days, making it well, making it strong, so that she would remain connected with it as the paluba travelled ever further westward. The maker doesn’t stay with the paluba all the time. That would be exhausting and unnecessary. She can find it when she needs to. She can guide its steps, perceive with its senses and speak with its tongue, which is the tongue of a hind deer. When she needs to. For now, the paluba is empty. It’s waiting, endlessly patient, facing its direction of travel. Facing westwards. Facing Mirgorod.
The paluba’s companion faces opposite, eastwards, back towards the border of the endless forest. And whereas the paluba has a hand-made body, a material caricature of the living human form, the companion is the opposite of this also. For while she is not an artifice but a living creature, she has no body at all. Inside her shrouds of cloth there is nothing but air, only air – collected, coherent, densely-tangible forest air. She is the breath of the forest, walking.
As the train edges slowly closer to Mirgorod, the paluba’s companion feels the widening distance between herself and the forest as an ever-increasing pain. She wants to go home. She needs to go home. Nothing would be easier for her than to leave, but she cannot. It is only her presence close to the paluba that enables it to continue to hold together and function so far from the forest. If she were to abandon the paluba it would fall apart. It would become inert, nothing more than the heap of rags and stuff of which it is made. Without her, the paluba’s mission would fail, and with it would fail the hope of the forest, the only hope of the world.
25
The next morning, Lom took the tram back to the Lodka. He had a lead from Safran – the name of the painter, Petrov, who was one of Kantor’s gang and had betrayed the Levrovskaya raid – not much of a lead, but something. A link to Kantor. Lom tried to keep his focus on Kantor, but his thoughts kept sliding sideways. Chazia was a presence in the background, unsettling him. A dark, angel-stained presence. She had showed herself to him deliberately. Playing a game with him. He was sure of that, though he didn’t understand why. Yet it wasn’t her face he kept seeing in the street on the other side of the tram window, but Maroussia Shaumian’s. She had got under his skin. He hadn’t liked the way she looked at him as she left last night: the mixture of fear and scorn in her face had cut him raw. For the first time, it didn’t feel so good, being a policeman.
The tram had come to a stop. The engine cut out. A murmuring broke out among the dulled morning passengers.
‘We’re going nowhere,’ the driver called. ‘They’ve cut the power. Traffic’s all snarled up. I guess there’s another march somewhere up ahead.’
Lom sighed and got out to walk. It wasn’t far.
A few hesitant snowflakes twisted slowly down out of the grey sky and littered the streets. People kept their heads down. As he got nearer the Lodka, Lom noticed the crowds getting slower and thicker. There was a sound of distant music. Hymns. He turned a corner and was brought up short by a mass of people passing slowly down the street.
They were singing as they came, not marching but walking. There were old men in sheepskin hats and women in quilted coats. Students in threadbare cloaks. Workers from the Telephone and Telegraph Office and the tramcar depot. Schoolchildren and wounded soldiers, bandaged and hobbling. There were giants, shuffling forward, struggling to match the slow pace. Faces in uncountable passing thousands, following a hundred banners, shouting the slogans of a dozen causes. STOP THE WAR! PAY THE SOLDIERS! FREE TRADE UNIONS! LIBERATE THE PEOPLE OF LEZARYE! The finest banners belonged to the unions and free councils. They were made of silk, embroidered in beautiful reds and golds and blacks and hung