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 fucked.
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 fucking 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 fuck. 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?’