would creep outwards for ever. The forest was dying.
The angel had been shot into the forest’s belly like a bullet, bursting it open, engendering a slow, inevitable, glacial, cancerous, stone killing.
The angel was watching her. The whole of the lenticular stone waste was an eye, focused on her. She felt the gross intrusion of its attention like a fat finger, tracing the thread from her to the paluba to the great trees of the forest.
It knew. And without effort it burst the paluba open.
The explosion of the paluba drove sticks and rags and meat across the apartment, smashing furniture and shattering glass. The air companion was sucked apart like a breeze in the hurricane’s mouth.
Maroussia felt a scream in her head as the paluba tried to tuck her away in a pocket of safety. There were fragments of voice in the scream – the paluba’s voice – desperately stuffing words into the small space of her head.
The Pollandore! Open it! Open it, Maroussia! You have the key! The key is in your pocket!
And in the moment of ripping and destruction she also sensed the angel’s fear. Fear of what was in Mirgorod waiting, and fear of what she, Maroussia, could do.
Maroussia walked out of her apartment and down the stairs. Out into the street and the rain. In her pocket was a frail ball of twigs and berries, bones and wax. She wasn’t going to Koromants. Not yet.
53
Lakoba Petrov lay among the bodies of the dead. A dead face pressed against his cheek. The smell and the weight and the feel of killed people were piled up on his chest – he couldn’t breathe he couldn’t breathe he couldn’t breathe – the trench was filling up with the bodies of the dead – one by one in rows they jerked as the bullets struck them and they died – they fell – they died. Water, percolating through the stack of the dead, brimmed in his open mouth. He coughed and puked. His mouth tasted bitter and full of salt.
The soldiers clambered among the bodies, finishing off the ones who were not yet dead, the ones who moaned, or hiccupped, or moved, or wept. Petrov, who had fallen when the firing began, untouched by any bullet, lay as still as the dead under the rain and the dead.
The soldiers began to cover the bodies over with wet earth. Petrov felt the weight of it and smelled its dampness. It was as heavy as all the world. He could not draw breath. He waited.
When the time came he pulled himself out from among the bodies and the red earth and turned back towards the city. But there was no escape: the dead climbed out after him in countless number; sightless, speechless, lumbering. Dripping putrefaction and broken as they died, they climbed out from the pit and followed him, walking slowly.
What he needed now could be got only from Josef Kantor.
54
By the time Raku Vishnik got home from the House on the Purfas he was soaked, but he hardly noticed the rain. He was certain that he had found the Pollandore. What Teslom had said confirmed it. It was real, it existed, he knew where it was. He wanted to tell someone – he would tell Vissarion – he would tell Maroussia Shaumian –they would share his triumph. They would understand. And together they would make a plan. His head was turning over scenes and plots and plans as he opened the door to his apartment and walked into nightmare.
The room was destroyed. Ransacked. His furniture broken. Drawers pulled out and overturned. Papers and photographs spilled across the floor. A man in the pale brick colour uniform of the VKBD looked up from the mess they were sifting when he arrived. Two other men were sitting side by side on the sofa. Rubber overalls and galoshes over civilian clothes. Neat coils of rope put ready beside them. Two large clean knives.
‘My room,’ he said. ‘My room.’
It was the room he thought of first, though he knew, some part of him knew, that this was madness. When he’d arrived in Mirgorod twenty years before, to begin his career, he’d been able to obtain this small apartment, just for himself. The first time he closed the door behind him he had almost wept for simple joy. One afternoon soon afterwards he’d found on a stall in the Apraksin a single length of hand-blocked wallpaper – pale flowers on a dark russet ground – and put