The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(41)
I sit by the window, a false name in my passport, a dozen languages mixing in my mind, not sure which one will make an appearance on the end of my tongue, and look at my reflection in the window of the carriage, and see a stranger. Someone else travels on the sleeper train through Russia, alone with the beating of the bumpers beneath the wheels of the cart. Someone else’s face is too white against the blackness outside. Someone else’s head bumps against the cold window with each jerk of the engine, each shriek of the brake.
Thoughts, at such times, happen not in words but in stories told about someone else’s life. A child approached a man, dying in Berlin, and said the world is ending, and these words meant nothing at all. Death has always come to the man as death always will, and frankly the man couldn’t be more or less interested in death than in a curious tropical beetle, save that death brings with it the tedium of youth once again. Bombs have fallen and people have died, and frankly why should a change in the process of these events be of any interest, since the outcome is always the same?
And then again.
Vincent Rankis hit a professor in Cambridge, punched him right in the jaw, and for what? For two words uttered in hope–Cronus Club.
A child threw himself from the third floor of an asylum; a wandering monk asked a Chinese spy how to die, and Vincent Rankis exclaimed at the wonders of the universe, and wanted more.
What is the point of you?
A man on a train to Leningrad hears the voice of Franklin Phearson in his mind, and is briefly surprised to see his own features flinch in the window. What is that? Is that pain at an unwelcome recollection? Is that guilt? Regret?
What is the point of you, Dr August? Do you think all this was just a dream?
An argument with Vincent in my rooms in Cambridge.
We also posited a parallel universe which you might be able to save from the trials of war. We even hypothesised a world in which you yourself could experience the joy of said peace, paradox being left aside.
When I am optimistic, I choose to believe that every life I lead, every choice I make, has consequence. That I am not one Harry August but many, a mind flicking from parallel life to parallel life, and that when I die, the world carries on without me, altered by my deeds, marked by my presence.
Then I look at the deeds I have done and, perhaps more importantly considering my condition, the deeds I have not done, and the thought depresses me, and I reject the hypothesis as unsound.
What is the point of me?
Either to change a world–many, many worlds, each touched by the choices I make in my life, for every deed a consequence, and in every love and every sorrow truth–or nothing at all.
A stranger takes the train to Leningrad.
Chapter 35
History often forgets about the siege of Leningrad, focusing instead on its southern counterpart, Stalingrad. In that the Nazis’ retreat from Stalingrad has widely been seen as a turning point, the focus is understandable, but as a consequence it is easy to overlook the siege that Leningrad, a fine city of wide promenades and ancient jingling trams, endured for eight hundred and seventy-one days of unrelenting war. Once the home of tsars, then the heartland of the revolution, it seemed remarkable to me that any semblance of the royal city had survived the beating it had taken, and indeed, in the suburbs all the way through to the heart of the city, an architecture of pragmatism and speed had taken over, of squares and rectangles and grey tarmac before brown walls. History was of little interest to the Soviets, unless it was the history of their success, and, as if embarrassed by the fine stone houses that still survived around the canals of the inner city, the high walls of the old town were plastered over with posters proclaiming STRIVE FOR VICTORY! and CELEBRATE COMMUNISM AND UNITE IN LABOUR! and other such azures of wisdom. The Winter Palace stood rather awkwardly in the midst of all these ugly good intentions, a monument to a bygone era and testimony to the regime which had been overthrown. To celebrate the Winter Palace would have, in some quaint way, glorified its previous occupiers, but to destroy it would have been an insult to those men and women of 1917 who fought against it and all it stood for, and so it and much of Leningrad remained standing strong, walls too thick to be more than scratched by bullets or cracked by ice.
The Leningrad Cronus Club resided, to my surprise, not in one of the great buildings of the old city, but in a far smaller, more modest tenement tucked in behind a Jewish cemetery, whose stones were long-since overgrown and whose trees dangled heavy over its high grey walls. The Club’s gatekeeper and, as it turned out, one of the few remaining members, introduced herself simply as,
“Olga. You must be Harry. You won’t do at all–those boots are quite wrong. Don’t stand there–come in!”
Olga, fifty-nine years old, grey hair plaited down to her waist, shoulders bent slightly forward to give her chin a jutting, protruding quality that her face itself did not merit, may once have been a beautiful young woman at whose lightest step upon tiny feet the heart of many an aristocrat raced; but now, as she grumbled and grunted at the creaking pipes that ran up the staircase of the tenement block, she was almost a child’s caricature of that creature called a crone. Green tiles on the floor and faded cobalt-blue paint on the walls were the tenement’s only real concession to vitality, and the doors that looked out on to the winding staircase upwards were kept firmly shut, “To keep the heat in!”
It was March in the city, and though the air was still biting cold, the snow was beginning to melt, whiteness giving way to a perpetual shimmer of grey-black as five months of embedded dirt, soot and grime was revealed from beneath the crystal piles shoved up against the roadside. The worst of the ice had gone from the roofs, but these masses of shovelled snow remained, insulating themselves, monuments to the fading winter that had gone before.