The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(66)
Sophia was silent a while, thinking it through. Then, “Go with it.” She said the unfamiliar words carefully, and, grinning, tried them again. “Go with it. You talk about decent people living decent lives as if that doesn’t mean anything, like it’s not a big deal. But you listen–this ‘decent’, it is the only thing that matters. I don’t care if you theorise, Mr Scientist, a machine that makes all men kind and all women beautiful if, while making your machine, you don’t stop to help the old mother cross the street, you know? I don’t care if you cure ageing, or stop starvation or end nuclear wars, if you forget this–” she rapped her knuckles against my forehead “–or this–” pressed her palm against my chest “–because even then if you save everyone else, you’ll be dead inside. Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you’re not helping people, just servicing the machine.”
“That’s not a very communist viewpoint,” I breathed softly.
“No, it is the most communist view. Communism needs good people, people whose souls are–” she pushed harder against my chest, then sighed, pulled away entirely “–kind by instinct, not by effort. But that is what we most lack, in this time. For progress, we have eaten our souls up, and nothing matters any more.”
She left shortly after midnight. I didn’t ask for where or whom. I waited with the light out in my room for the dead hour of the night when the mind shifts into a numb, timeless daze of voiceless thought. It is the hour when all things are lonely, every pedestrian walking flat-footed over blackened stones, every car swishing through deserted streets. It is the utter silence when the engine stops in a flat, ice-drifting sea. I pulled on my coat and slipped out into it through the back door, circumventing Boris One and Breathless as I headed into the night. The secret to being unafraid of the darkness is to challenge the darkness to fear you, to raise your eyes sharp to those few souls who stagger by, daring them to believe that you are not, in fact, more frightening than they are. Easy, in this place, to remember Richard Lisle and the streets of Battersea, dead girls by the door. Leningrad had been built as Russia’s European city by a tsar who’d travelled the world and decided to take some of it home with him. Had Brezhnev travelled the world? The question surprised me, as something I did not know the answer to.
A corner. The streets in Leningrad are largely flat and sharp, a smell in the summer of algae on the sluggish canals, a madness in the city from the white nights; in winter euphoria at the first clean snows, then dullness as the freeze truly sets in. I walked by memory, turning a few times more than was strictly required to check on the presence of any would-be followers, until at last I came to the small wooden door of the Cronus Club.
Or, more accurately, the place where the small wooden door of the Cronus Club had been. So shocked was I to discover that the door was no longer there that for a brief moment I almost doubted my own infallible memory. But no, observing the street and my surroundings, this was the place, this was the porch, this the square patch of land where the Club had once stood and where now, built with tasteless 1950s brutality, a concrete plinth squatted instead, showing on its top a curious curve of stone crossed with an iron bar, and whose caption, chiselled into the stone, proclaimed:
IN MEMORY OF THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, 1941–1945
Nothing more remained.
Members of the Cronus Club leave signals for each other in order to find companionship in adversity. Entries in Who’s Who, messages left behind the counter of a nearby pub, stones laid in earth for future generations to gather and speculate on, hints as to a place to go inscribed in the black ironwork of the drainpipes hanging from rooftops. We are hidden, but the simple fact of our existence is so patently absurd that we do not need to hide much deeper than in plain sight. Over the next three days I lived a harmless tourist life around the city, walking, looking, eating and spending my evenings reading in my room, at night slipping out past my warders to seek out the clues of the Cronus Club, any sign as to its fate. I found only one: a tombstone in the local cemetery for OLGA PRUBOVNA, BORN 1893, DIED 1953; SHE SHALL RISE AGAIN.
Beneath this tombstone was a much longer inscription in, of all things, Sanskrit. Translated, it read,
IF THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN AFFIXED TO MY TOMBSTONE, IT IS BECAUSE MY DEATH WAS VIOLENT AND UNEXPECTED. BE MINDFUL THE SAME DOES NOT HAPPEN TO YOU.
Chapter 52
A dilemma.
To stay or to go?
What was I to make of the destruction of the Leningrad Cronus Club?
No degree of na?ve optimism could dissuade me of the likely notion that Vincent was, somehow, behind this event.
No degree of self-deception could convince me that, in some way, I too was to blame–by my silence, by my vanishing to join the very cause I had set out to defeat.
And what now that I had learned of this truth–this old truth, years old, which had happened behind my back? Did it change anything? Did it change the essential wonder of our research, the breathtaking scope of Vincent’s vision? Was it not true that the project we were embarking on, the question we pursued, was bigger than any mere blip in the present, any tiny alterations to the future? It was absurd–patently absurd–to let such things influence my decisions, and yet, even as I firmly rationalised this fact, I knew quite plainly that my decisions were affected, and I would not be the same when I returned.