who he was. He was a man of muscle and lung and love and understanding. He was a vessel and a flowering on the seaward flow. There were people it was right to love and there were people it was right to loathe and bring to destruction.
Yes, if I have time. I need more time.
Only there was no more time.
As he rotated slowly on the current, the ice-cold waters of the river were draining all the feeling from his body. Lom no longer knew where his arms and legs were, or what they were doing. The muscles of his face were numbed into immobility, his mouth frozen in its permanent open O.
Helplessly, from a great distance, he observed the rippling water work at the bulges and pockets of air that had been trapped in the folds of his cloak. The movement of the river was easing them slowly to the edges of the heavy fabric. One by one they bubbled out and surrendered themselves to the sky.
There was nothing he could do.
What his lily-pad cloak was losing in buoyancy it gained in weight, and slowly it was sinking, and taking him down with it. The river was already lapping at his chin and spilling over into the waiting uncloseable O.
The river brimmed against his nostrils and covered them over. At last he inhaled the cold waters deeply and sank for the second and last time. It felt like sleep. As he closed his eyes he saw against the shadows the face of Maroussia, pale and calm and serious, looking down on him hugely out of the sky, like the moon made whole.
Close by (so close!) – but also not – neither in this world, nor very far away at all – the other O – the pocketful of second chances, the waiting second mouth, the tongue of different lives – is listening to the river, listening to the rain.
63
Maroussia Shaumian found Lom’s body floating face down, lodged against a squat stone pillar of the Ter-Uspenskovo Bridge among planks and branches, lost shoes and broken packing cases. She tried to pull it into the boat but she could not. Several times she almost tipped herself into the river before she gave up and knotted a line to his leg and towed him, an inert, lifeless weight, to a place where there were stone steps in the embankment. All the time she worked, she expected the shouts, the bullets, to start.
She had found the boat – an open, clinker-built, tapered skiff, her oars neatly stowed on board – bumping against the wall at the end of Pelican Quay. Ignoring the oars, she’d crouched in the bottom and edged it slowly, hand over hand, along the house-fronts until she came in sight of Vishnik’s building, and she’d watched from the shadows as Lom was taken into the militia vessel. When the police boat left, its searchlight stabbing the night, raking darkened street frontages and swirling water, she followed it all the way to the Lodka, and moored against a telegraph pole.
Cold and wet and shivering, she waited. She could have left, but she did not. Lom had saved her twice. She thought of Vishnik, his ruined body and his terrible lonely death. She thought of her mother, shot in the back in the street. She would not let the Vlast take another. Not if she could prevent it.
When dawn began to seep across the city and other boats began to appear, she felt it would be less conspicuous to be moving, and so she started a slow patrol, circling the Lodka through flooded squares and across re-emerging canals. It was sheer luck that she saw, from the cover of a stranded fire-barge, the uniforms come out of a side door, and Lom stumbling along in the middle of them as if he was drunk. She saw his lurch for the parapet and heard the warders’ shouts and the splash when his body hit the water. But she couldn’t go to look for him straight away. She had to wait, watching the killing party linger near the bridge, shouting to each other and shining torch beams on the dark water. It was fifteen minutes before they gave up and another fifteen before she spotted the sodden hump of his back floating low in the water among the rubbish.
She dragged the body up the steps and laid it on its back. Water seeped out and puddled on the stone. The eyes were open and glassy,