‘But it may be all we have, Pavel Pavlovich. And besides, I am sure that you will be able to make some sense of it.’
‘I?’
Porfiry’s smile made it clear that no thanks were necessary for the generous gift he considered himself to have bestowed.
*
‘Now we must pay our respects next door,’ said Porfiry quietly, as they stepped back out onto the landing.
Virginsky froze. The door to the apartment next to Kozodavlev’s suddenly acquired a monumental presence. Glistening with fresh paint, it appeared to have been recently fitted. But there was something inhuman about its pristine edges. Given all that had happened inside that apartment, it seemed monstrous that someone had thought to repair the door, as if paint and joinery could set those horrors to rights. To Virginsky, the bright new door was a slab of desolation bearing down on him, the emptiness at the centre of the human heart. He did not want to go anywhere near it. ‘Would it not be an intrusion? At this time. . their grief. .’
Porfiry gave him a curious distracted glance, as if he could not understand what Virginsky was saying, or even the language in which he was saying it. ‘We must pay our respects, Pavel Pavlovich,’ Porfiry insisted.
Virginsky did not care to probe his reluctance. Instead, he gave in to a surge of panic-tinged antagonism. ‘All this talk of paying respects. . that is not it at all, Porfiry Petrovich. It is unseemly. An unseemly prurience. All you want to do is goggle at their suffering.’
Porfiry met the accusation with a mild flurry of blinking, the softest of reproaches.
‘Does it not seem odd to you that they have repaired the door?’ said Virginsky abruptly. Now that he had voiced it, his thought of a moment ago struck him as absurd and unfeeling. He felt the need to defend himself: ‘If I had lost five children, I would not have the presence of mind to summon a carpenter to mend a damaged door.’
‘What would you have them do? Besides, the door was most probably paid for by their neighbours. That is the Russian way.’ Porfiry considered Virginsky sternly. ‘It does not mean they loved their children any less just because they have thought to replace the door to their apartment.’
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.’