The Cleansing Flames (13 page)

With that, still fixing Virginsky with a recriminatory gaze, Porfiry tapped his knuckles against the controversial door.

It seemed that the old woman who opened up for them was expecting someone else entirely. An expression of joyous relief quickly collapsed into one of disappointment, which in turn sharpened into suspicion. She was wiry and angular, seemingly possessed of a stubborn strength. A black bonnet sat on loose grey curls. Her mourning dress was respectable and respectful.

‘Madame Prokharchina?’ The extremely sceptical emphasis in Porfiry’s voice suggested that he did not for one moment believe she was the lady in question.

‘No, I am Yekaterina Ivanovna Dvigailova. The landlady.’

‘Of course.’ Porfiry gave Virginsky a shaming glance. ‘We are magistrates. We have come to pay our respects to the family.’

Yekaterina Ivanovna regarded him mistrustfully.

‘Out of common human feeling. We read about the tragedy in the newspapers. We felt compelled to pay our respects. This being Thomas Week, you understand. Tomorrow is Radonitsa. We intend to say a prayer for the little ones.’

Virginsky stifled the cry of protest that was rising in his throat. The resultant sound resembled a sob of emotion. This seemed to decide the landlady. She pulled the door open to admit them.

Five white coffins of varying sizes were arranged on trestles. The grimy, smoke-blackened room was crowded with the dead, who seemed to be falling over one another in their prostrate immobility. The coffins were open. Virginsky could not avoid looking into them, could not avoid engaging with the faces of the dead children. The youngest of them must have been about eighteen months old, an infant. A girl, she was dressed like a doll, in her christening gown. Her face was unbearably perfect, with no evidence of burning or scars. Unblemished, adorable, dead. A red-painted egg lay on her chest, in her cupped hands.

It was too much for Virginsky, but everywhere he looked he saw the face of a dead child: two boys, one about five, the other seven or eight, in sailor suits; and two more girls, one about three, and the other whose age was hard to gauge: from her face, you would have said she was the eldest, but she was smaller in stature than the elder of the boys. All of them nestled their Easter eggs in limp, lifeless hands.

A thin, washed-out woman with a black shawl pulled up over her head sat in one corner. Her lips were constantly moving, though no words could be made out, just a hoarse, soft gurgling. Her eyes were wide and raw. She turned them on Virginsky with a look that had gone beyond emotion. It asked nothing of him, but was simply a reflex turning of the head. Her face, he saw, was swollen and streaked with moisture. It was not that her expression was dazed, rather that it was emptied – spent. She had felt all that it was humanly possible to feel. Now all she could do was turn her blank, uncomprehending gaze onto whatever came within her purview. She existed as a kind of warning, and nothing more.

‘You won’t get much sense out of her,’ said Yekaterina Ivanovna. ‘And
he
’s out. At some tavern or other, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Porfiry nodded his understanding. All the same, he took a step towards the woman in the corner. At his approach, a kind of startled horror flitted over her face. It was as if she were horrified not at Porfiry, but at the idea that someone, anyone, would want to approach her. She recoiled, withdrawing herself, buffeted by a violent repulsive force that seemed to surround her. Her chair scraped back along the floor.

‘Madame Prokharchina,’ said Porfiry gently. ‘We have come to offer our condolences.’ He reached a hand out towards her. The woman jerked away from it.

‘This is not good,’ hissed Virginsky.

Her movements were sudden and stilted, like a captured bird. It seemed imperative to her to avoid human touch at any cost.

Porfiry continued his efforts to reassure her. ‘We are one with you in your grief.’

Virginsky felt a wave of anguish surge through him at Porfiry’s words, so perhaps what he had just said was true.
But how could it be?
How could anyone’s emotions at this moment compare with this woman’s? It was just a platitude, hypocritical and therefore abhorrent. Perhaps the anguish Virginsky felt was simply the hypersensitivity caused by an intolerable excess of embarrassment. After they – or rather Porfiry – had uttered their condolences, they would walk out of that apartment, away from the roomful of white coffins, closing the newly hung door behind them. The woman’s utterly worn-out face would fade from memory. In time, even the death-perfected faces of the children would be forgotten, or at least become harder and harder to recall.

Virginsky imagined the woman sitting in the corner of that room, the five coffins of her children in front of her, forever.

Suddenly he felt Porfiry’s gaze on him, as though he expected him to add a consoling sentiment. The woman too looked up at him expectantly. He looked back at them both in turn, aghast. But suddenly he felt compelled to say something. ‘I . . . I cannot imagine . . . cannot imagine . . . how . . . you bear this.’

The woman sighed. It seemed that she had somehow found relief, if not comfort, in Virginsky’s words; that to have a stranger speak the truth to her was all that she wanted.

Porfiry bowed and turned away from her. Virginsky continued to search her emptied eyes, as though now he was the one needing consolation from her.

‘It is a terrible tragedy,’ said Porfiry to the landlady.

The landlady seemed to crumple under his fluttering gaze. ‘I am to blame!’ she suddenly cried. ‘I promised I would sit with them. I promised I would look after them.’

‘Now, now. Don’t torment yourself, Yekaterina Ivanovna. You were not to know.’

‘I only stepped out for five minutes, to answer the call of nature. And on the way back, I paid a visit on the Widow Sudbina. She lives on the third floor. Her husband died not long ago and she has been melancholy ever since. They were sleeping soundly when I left, the little ones. What harm could come to them, I thought?’

‘It’s not your fault. You did not set the fire.’

‘You don’t understand.’ The landlady’s eyes stood out as if they were trying to distance themselves from what she was about to confess. ‘
I locked them in!
For their own safety, you understand. You don’t know who is prowling around these buildings. That yardkeeper is worse than useless. He never asks to see anyone’s passport. He admits the most unsavoury characters.
I locked them in!
And then they wouldn’t let me go back upstairs because of the fire.’

It took a moment for Porfiry to absorb what the woman had told him. ‘No. You are not to blame. I repeat, you did not light the fire. You could not have known. My colleague and I are magistrates. Please rest assured that we will find the man responsible for this, and we will bring him to justice. Is that not so, Pavel Pavlovich?’

There was undeniably a challenge in Porfiry’s question. Virginsky said nothing. He bowed his head and in so doing once again found himself looking into the face of the youngest of the Prokharchin children. He thought of the embalmer’s hands on her tiny body, and wondered at the mysterious alchemy that had been worked to bring about her lifeless preservation. In truth, it was a brutal process, a cutting open, a ripping out, a filling in, a trussing up. A violation. The eyes could not turn to him in appeal, could not implore, held no rebuke, however gentle. He willed her grip to curl and tighten around the painted egg.

He felt certain that whoever had lit the fire, for whatever motives, had not wanted her dead. And yet the fire had been lit, and her death, however unintended, was the consequence.

Virginsky lifted his gaze from the child. But he found nowhere else in that room for it comfortably to settle.

The solution came to Virginsky in the night while he was sleeping. He had not even started working on the problem, so it was indeed surprising that he had solved it so quickly. He woke from his dream with a start and sat bolt upright.

Lighting the tallow candle by his bedside, he pulled out the tin trunk that contained his collection.

Virginsky felt a strange sense of power, which was superseded almost immediately by one of revulsion.
This was mysticism!
He would not give in to it. He would not open the trunk. It was absurd to think he had dreamed the solution. He would leave the shamanism to Porfiry Petrovich.

He felt at once relieved to have made the decision. Opening that trunk would take him into a realm he had no wish to enter.

As soon as that realisation struck him, his relief evaporated. He stared in horror at the trunk. He imagined it containing some grisly secret: a severed body part, or the corpse of a child. The youngest of the Prokharchin children would just about fit inside it. No, it was inconceivable that he would open it. Not now, possibly not ever.

At the same time, he could not bring himself to push it back under his bed.

He was a rationalist. To unlock the trunk in the expectation of finding the solution he had seen in his dream was not the behaviour of a rationalist. And what if the solution turned out to be there, just as his dream predicted? The ramifications of that were devastating. He was beset by a fleeting premonition, a sense of imminent disintegration.

If his dream were proven to be true, he would be brought to a critical moment in his political as well as his inner live, a genuine crisis. It was far better that the lid remained closed, particularly as his rationalism told him that there could be nothing in it anyhow. One did not dream the solutions to the crimes one was investigating.

He pushed the trunk back under his bed.

He extinguished the candle and lay back down. He closed his eyes but sleep felt a long way off now. He tried to analyse what had just happened. There must be a psychological explanation for his dream, the rationalist in him decided.

The devastation at Kozodavlev’s apartment had naturally made him think of Easter Sunday night when he had gone to witness the fires at the vodka warehouse. Furthermore, Porfiry Petrovich’s theories about Kozodavlev’s radicalism – together with his fixation on the novel
Swine
– had naturally influenced Virginsky. The dream, in which Kozodavlev had made an appearance, was therefore perfectly explicable. The details were already fading but he thought that it had been to do with a revolutionary cell. For some reason, the Prokharchin children were involved too. Had they been the members of the cell? A ridiculous idea, but that was the way with dreams. And therefore, all the more reason
not
to act on them.

Certainly, the urgent sense of discovery that had stung him from his sleep had faded. He could not even remember what it was that had almost convinced him to look in the trunk. He began to relax, welcoming the slow dissolution of his being that presaged sleep.

*

As he had intimated he would, Porfiry visited a cemetery on the Feast of Radonitsa. He had learnt from the landlady that the children were to be buried that day, at the Smolenksoe Cemetery on Vasilevsky Island. A procession would set out from the Koshmarov Apartment Building at ten.

There had been a subscription to help with funeral costs, to which both Porfiry and Virginsky had contributed. An edge of hostility had crept into Virginsky’s voice when he answered Porfiry’s question of whether he intended to give something, or not. It seemed that he had detected some kind of slight in the pause Porfiry allowed between the alternatives.

It was the finest day of the spring so far. There had been an explosion of buds in the city’s gardens and parks. The bird-cherry trees were in blossom everywhere. In sending forth its shoots and stems, the earth seemed to be straining up towards the sky, drawn by its inhuman weightlessness. And yet it took a great effort of will on Porfiry’s part to lift his face towards the exuberant light.

The Prokharchins’ friends and neighbours had done them proud. Yekaterina Ivanovna alone had given one hundred assignat roubles. No expense was spared. To bear the five small coffins were two white funerary carriages, their elaborate canopies draped in lace and decked in spring flowers. Each carriage was drawn by a pair of white horses. Ahead of the hearses walked a line of attendants, their white flowing coats and white top hats flashing brilliantly in the sunlight. Behind came the mourners in black. The way was strewn with flowers, scattered from another carriage that led the procession.

The children’s parents clung together. It seemed more that they were pulling each other down than giving mutual support. But somehow they managed to keep walking. They were impelled by the inevitability of the procession.
This is what a funeral procession is for
, thought Porfiry,
why it is necessary. So that those most struck by grief may know where to direct their feet
.

It was the first sight Porfiry had caught of Prokharchin. The man seemed to be in one of the stages of delirium tremens, so violently was he shaking. His feet came down with an exaggerated, slightly wayward tread, as if they were constantly trying to free themselves from the restraint of his ankles.

It was a long slow way to the cemetery, which was at the north of the island. They crossed the river over the Nikolaevsky Bridge. Now in full flow, the heedless Neva rushed away from the shuffling line of humanity, leaving it to its woes.

*

Virginsky wrote out the rows of letters:

He felt immediately the hopelessness of the task he had been set. It was not a code. It was simply the first few letters of four lines of text. The letters in themselves meant nothing, or any meaning they suggested was illusory. They had been severed from their true meaning by a random accident. If the piece of paper had any significance at all, it was to be found in the larger, missing text. That is to say, it was beyond his reach. Therefore, no matter how much he applied himself, he would never be able to make sense of the letters in front of him.

The fragment seemed to start with an exhortation and end with discouragement. Between was nonsense.
All too appropriate
, decided Virginsky.

And yet, as Virginsky repeated the truncated chant that the letters spelled out –
Go
,
Of m
,
Stit
,
No
,
Go
,
Of m
,
Stit
,
No
– the significant detail struck him. Each of the four lines began with a capital letter. He could assume that the text these letters came from was a poem of some kind.

With this first realisation came another: he had seen these letters before. However, he was far less certain of this than he was of the letters’ poetic provenance. He remembered waking from his dream the night before, but by now all the details of the dream were irretrievably lost to him. Had he also dreamt of pulling the tin trunk out from under his bed? His memory of that seemed to be of a different quality to the sense he had of the vanished dream.

The mood of the previous night came back to him, in particular his sense of appalled rationality. Now, in the cold light of day, he was not so sure that his refusal to open the trunk was in fact the right decision, even from a supremely rationalist standpoint. A rationalist would be able to accept that the mind – even his own mind – was at times irrational. He would reason that this aspect of the mind must not be ignored. Ignored, it would only grow and fester in secret. Far better to confront it with its own absurdities, to wage open war constantly against its calamitous influence. Far better, in other words, to have opened the trunk and to have proven to himself the folly of his delusions.

Virginsky pulled a wincing face. He was reasoning himself into acting like a superstitious peasant, trusting to dreams and omens. No. The trunk must remain under the bed, its lid firmly closed. Until he had another manifesto to add to his collection, that is.

To do otherwise would be to give in to irrationalism, not to fight it.

*

It was after lunch when Porfiry returned to his chambers. To Virginsky, it seemed that his face was greyer than it had been when he had last seen him. There was a wan emptiness to his expression. He seemed hunched in on himself, reduced somehow. But when he spoke there was a rasp of determination, a fierce impatient quality to his voice. Judging by his voice alone, one would have said that Porfiry had been energised by the Feast of Radonitsa.

‘How are you getting on with those letters? Have you deciphered them yet?’

‘It is not a question of deciphering them,’ complained Virginsky. He took Porfiry through his reasoning, though he omitted to tell him about his dream, and his consequent indecision.

‘A poem? Good, yes. That is very plausible. Given Kozodavlev’s politics, it is not likely to be some verses of Pushkin. You remember what our young nihilist said. Boots over Pushkin. No, this was probably some radical manifesto, severely utilitarian in purpose. Many of them are written in verse, you know. I suppose the writers believe it will make their message more memorable. If the printed handbills are destroyed, the message will linger in the minds of those who have read it. Furthermore, it makes it easier to pass it on orally, if distribution becomes dangerous.’ Porfiry pulled open a drawer in his desk. ‘I have a small collection of such manifestos here . . .’

‘
You?
’

‘Yes. I. Why does that surprise you?’

‘What possible reason could you have to collect such material?’

‘Oh, all the wrong reasons, you would undoubtedly say. But I am interested to know what people are saying. And thinking. Many of these are in wide circulation. I have had a number posted to me anonymously, or thrust in my hand by passing strangers. It is not so hard to acquire them, and not so easy to destroy them. One feels that they are too interesting to destroy, although one cannot always agree with the sentiments expressed. I am a magistrate, after all. I must acquaint myself with the doctrinal edicts of the state’s enemies, if they can be regarded as such.’ Porfiry gave Virginsky a quick warning look. ‘However, I must say that it would be quite another matter for anyone to harbour such a collection in the privacy of their own home. Magistrate or not. It is the fact that I keep my collection here, in my chambers, that makes it allowable. It is logged as official evidence, you see. There can be no unpleasant repercussions.’ Porfiry took out a couple of handfuls of printed sheets. ‘A rather tedious task for you, I’m afraid, Pavel Pavlovich. Sort through these and see if you can find a section that corresponds to our fragment. And well done, by the way. It was a breakthrough to perceive that it came from a poem.’

Virginsky frowned in bemusement as he took the manifestos from Porfiry.

*

It was a simple but laborious chore to look through the twenty or so pamphlets, isolating the beginnings of lines to find a sequence that matched the letters on the fragment. Almost all of the handbills were familiar to him from his own collection.

So when he found the poem he was looking for, it should not have been a surprise.

But it was worse than that. He felt a sickening vertigo. As soon as he saw it, he remembered his dream of the night before. For in the dream, he had held this very pamphlet in his hands as it caught fire, burning away the words as he read them.

He handed it to Porfiry without a word.

‘This is the one?’

‘Yes. There. The second verse.’ Virginsky recited from memory. ‘God is man-made, but no less real; / Of man’s fears, does he consist. / Stitched from such stern material, / No wonder God’s a Nihilist.’

‘I see. Yes. Well done. A strange work. God the Nihilist.’ Porfiry shook his head wonderingly. ‘Perhaps he is. On days like this, one cannot help wondering.’

Virginsky’s voice faltered as he asked: ‘D-do you . . . do you remember where you got this?’ After a beat, he added, redundantly: ‘Who gave it to you?’ He held in his own mind an image of the hatchet-headed man.

Porfiry leaned back in his seat and sighed. ‘My memory is not what it used to be. That is in itself a cause for concern, Pavel Pavlovich. The investigator’s memory is one of the chief weapons in his armoury. One must not only be able to hold on to the details of the current case one is investigating, but one must also be alert to ripples of connection from past cases. Criminals do not burst forth spontaneously. They are like the spring buds. They give the appearance of spontaneous generation, but the plants that bear them may have taken root long ago.’

‘Yes,’ said Virginsky, shortly. ‘I know that. You do not need to talk to me in this way. I am not a pupil in need of instruction.’

Porfiry looked aghast. ‘Forgive me, I meant no offence. I am a foolish, forgetful old man. One falls into habits. And habits are by definition bad. I have acquired the habit of talking down to you. Whenever I succumb to it, you must reprove me, in the harshest possible terms.’

Virginsky shook his head impatiently. ‘So you cannot remember who gave it to you?’

‘In essence, no.’

Virginsky constricted his mouth and turned his back on Porfiry, as if in disappointment.

*

That night, Virginsky lit the tallow candle and pulled the tin trunk out from under his bed. He took the key from a drawer in his bedside table. He did not need to open the trunk to know that it was in there. He did not need to look at it, nor hold it in his hands.

Yet he did.

His dreaming mind had been right. He had known all along.

He stared at the lines of doggerel without reading them. Virginsky had to accept that his mind, in its totality, was a monstrously larger entity than his consciousness. It did most of its work without his knowing anything about it. This need not alarm him, he decided, although he was uneasy about the surrender of control that it implied. His emotions were racing to keep pace with his thoughts. A surge of panic was overtaken by anger: he would not relinquish his claims to be a rational being. On the contrary, his rationalism now had to encompass this newly recognised and undeniable fact. Calmer now, he realised that he must seek to grasp with conscious thought what his unconscious mind had been up to.