pressed right up against his face. It was too big and too dirty. It made no sense. What you saw from a tram window were the small things. Random, fragmentary things: a narrow alleyway disappearing between shopfronts; the sign of a drawing master’s school; fresh perch on ice outside a fishmonger’s; the hobbles on a dray horse; a bricked-up window. The city was vast beyond understanding. It replenished itself infinitely, teeming beyond count. People lived their lives in Mirgorod by choosing a few places, a few faces, a few events, to be the landmarks of their own imagined, private city. Interior cities of the mind, a million cities, all interleaved one with another in the same place and time, semi-transparent. Onion-layer cities, stacked cities, soft and intricate, all of them tied together by the burrowing, twining, imperceptible threads of the information machine. Flimsy cities, every one. All it took was a militia bullet, the hack of a dragoon sabre. But the tissue cities carried on.
And underneath them all, two futures, struggling against each other to be born.
Lom slipped his hand into his pocket and met something sticky and rough: Feiga-Ita Shaumian’s bag, tacky with her clotting blood. He untied the cord and looked inside. It was like the hedge-nest of some bird, just the kind of thing a crazy old woman might carry around, but it wasn’t a nest. The sticks were tied together with thread. He eased it out of the bag for a closer look. Some of her blood had soaked through and clotted on it, dark and viscous, and there were globs of some other stuff, some kind of yellow wax, and dry, maroon-coloured berries. He held it up to the light. There were fine bones inside, parts of the skeleton of some tiny animal. A mouse? A mole? A small bird? There was a strong scent too, some sweet warmth stronger than the iron of blood. He remembered the whiteless brown eyes of the soldier in the street in Podchornok, out in the rain.
Some instinct made Lom hold the thing up close to his face and sniff at it. And the world changed. It was as if the skin of his senses had been unpeeled. The hard line between him and not-him, the edge that marked the separateness of himself from the world, was no longer there. Until that moment he had been tied up tight inside himself, held in by a skin as taut and tense as the head of a drum, and now it was all let go. It was as if he had fallen into green water and gone down deep, turning and tumbling until he had no idea which way was up. At first he panicked, lashing out on all sides, struggling to get control, but after a moment he seemed to remember that you shouldn’t do it like that. He stopped struggling and allowed himself to drift, letting his own natural buoyancy carry him back to the surface.
He was a woman in the woods in winter. He wasn’t seeing her, he was her, crunching her way among silent widely-spaced trees, going home, tired and alive in the aftermath of love, her mouth rubbed sore, the man’s semen pursed up warm inside her. She sniffed at her fingers. The scent of the man clung to them, as strong as memory. She remembered the weight of his belly on her, the warmth of his bed by the stove. Her collar, her sleeve, the fur of her hood, everything had soaked up the smell of his isba, rich and strong, smoke and resin, furs and sweat. Oh hell! He would notice when she got home! Even He couldn’t miss the smell of him on her skin. Did she care? No! This was a new kind of madness and she liked it.
The vision faded. Lom closed his eyes and watched the patterns of muted light drift across the inside of his eyelids. Thinking was tiring. His thoughts were too heavy to lift. He stared out of the window, trying to think as little as possible. In the reflection he saw Maroussia Shaumian’s wide dark eyes. Her long straight back as she walked away.
Three shots. There were three shots.
I’ve achieved nothing. Every thread I follow leads nowhere, or to a corpse.
No, not nowhere. To Chazia.
Kantor was Chazia’s agent. All the killing, the bombs, the robberies, inspired not by nationalist fervour or revolutionary nihilism, but by the Chief of the Vlast Secret Police. Safran was Chazia’s too.