The pony walked slowly, head down and shoulders bunched against the weight of the cart. Maroussia hugged her carpet bag in her lap. Lom shivered and pulled his loden tighter against the cold. An early twilight was closing in and the snow was coming down in a dense steady flow, settling thickly, when they crossed the Purfas by the narrow wooden bridge and entered the raion.
The failing of the day brought the dusk bells ringing, the last circling of rooks, the first evening flicker of bats, lamps and candles in the windows. From narrow passageways came the smell of food: frying fish and spiced meat. Paprika. Onions. Livestock wandered and rooted in the cramped alleyways. There were animals in every tiny courtyard and fenced-in patch of cottage ground. Small stunted orchards, leafless and snow-covered, crouched behind walls. The chill darkening air was rich with woodsmoke and the reek of pigs, chickens and cows.
They climbed the winding streets between ravines of red-tiled roofs and smoking chimneys, jutting windows and arched doorways, weather-blackened wood and stone. Here and there angular outcrops of raw black rock shouldered the crowded buildings aside. Small cottages and wooden shanties jostled in the shadow of tall old houses with peeling louvred shutters at their windows and carved coats of arms on their gable ends: spread-winged eagles, prowling bears, running wolves. The antlers of a great elk were mounted over a courtyard arch. The raion was a place of gaps and crannies, steep angular lanes, small doorways and purposeless openings barred with rusted iron gratings.
Elena Cornelius walked ahead, leading the pony.
‘Elena’s a good woman,’ said Maroussia, breaking a long silence.
‘Yes,’ said Lom.
‘We can’t stay here. We’ll bring her trouble. She doesn’t understand. She has children. I don’t want to get her involved. This is my thing. People have died already.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ said Lom. ‘It happened.’
‘If anything happens to Elena, it will be my fault. I went to her. I shouldn’t have.’
‘It’ll be OK,’ said Lom. ‘It’ll be fine. It’s just for tonight.’
Wooden signs announced places of business–an estaminet, a pension, a tailor, an apothecary, a notary public–all crowded in among the houses and cottages. The names above the shops were names from lost, remembered countries, long ago obliterated under the hegemony of the Vlast. SYLWEST. NIKODEM. TILL. CZESLAW. ONUFRY. KAZIMIERZ. WHITE. The poetry of distance and difference.
Lom had known of the raion since childhood, though it wasn’t mentioned in the books of the library at the Podchornok Institute of Truth. There were students at the Institute who said that Podchornok, within sight of the endless forest, had been one of the Lezarye way forts once, in the great days of their wardership of the border, under the Reasonable Empire long ago. Some even made whispered claims to family connections with the aristocrat families of the raion, though saying so risked denunciation by the Student Council. Lom, knowing nothing of his own family and remembering nothing before the Institute, toyed with the idea that he too was one of them. But Raku Vishnik, his one true friend, had mocked him. The Lezarye, Vissarion, never gave birth to a great blond clumsy bear like you!
Nevertheless, Lom stared about him now and wondered if it felt like coming home. But it didn’t. Not for him.
Elena Cornelius pulled the cart off the road into a small yard.
‘We’ll go in this way,’ said Elena. ‘Our neighbours watch and talk as much as anyone else’s do.’
She unlocked a door in the brick wall of the yard and led them through into a small private garden. In the gathering darkness Lom caught a vague impression of the side of a tall house: walls of mossy brick and crumbling stucco, precarious vine-tangled wrought-iron balconies, steep roofs and high crowded gables. The ground floor was skirted with a glass-roofed pillared loggia. Yellow light spilled through gaps in the curtains. They rounded the corner of the house and descended a narrow flight of basement steps. Elena rattled at a storm door of pierced zinc and wire netting until it jerked open and they squeezed inside, past buckets and mops and a rack of oilskins. A dog appeared at the end of the passageway, a black and yellow coarse-haired thing, standing stiff-legged and growling at the back of its throat. It was some kind of spitz or laitka, Lom didn’t know what and didn’t care. He preferred dogs at a distance.
‘Vesna!’ called Elena gently. ‘It’s OK. They’re friends.’
The dog padded forward and inspected them. Lom offered his hand to be sniffed. The dog ignored it and went out into the garden.
‘This is a big place,’ he said.
‘It’s Sandu Palffy’s house,’ said Elena. ‘Count Palffy. He and Ilinca have an apartment at the back. The rest is let out. But it is Count Palffy’s house. At least, morally it is his, as he is morally a Count.’
There was a warm fug in the kitchen. Black and white tiles on the floor. Curtains drawn. A hefty old stove against the wall, its fire door open, shedding the heat of fast-burning logs. Two girls at the scrubbed deal table–thick black curly mops of hair and bright clever eyes–looked up when they came in. The older was about thirteen, school books spread in front of her amid the remains of their supper. The younger, who must have been ten or eleven, had a piece of reddish wood and a big clasp knife. She was carving something. An animal. A cat maybe. Lom thought it was probably good.
‘Galina, Yeva, this is my friend Maroussia from the city,’ said Elena. ‘And this…’
‘Vissarion,’ said Lom. ‘I’m Vissarion. That’s a good cat.’
‘It’s a lynx,’ said Yeva. ‘Not a cat.’
‘Oh yes. Of course. Sorry.’
‘There’s rassolnik on the stove,’ said the older girl. Galina. ‘We got pigeons from Milla’s. It was four kopeks for two, and Ilinca gave us a loaf of black bread. And kvass. There’s plenty left.’ She looked doubtfully at Lom and Maroussia. ‘I think.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Maroussia. ‘Thanks.’
‘You girls need to go and see to the pony,’ said Elena. ‘Then go upstairs. Both of you. Go and sit with Ilinca. You could get her to put the phonogram on.’
Yeva made a sour face.
‘Oh, but we haven’t—’
‘Upstairs,’ said Elena. ‘Now. I need to talk to Maroussia in private. Tell Sandu there’ll be people in the attic tonight. Don’t forget that.’
Elena brought a big iron pot from the oven. On the table she set out plates, a loaf of bread and a small blue jug of soured cream, and spooned out the thin rassolnik. Onions and cucumber. A few scraps of grey meat.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Maroussia. ‘We should never have come. We’ll go tomorrow.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Elena. ‘It makes no difference.’
‘You’re not safe while we’re here. The girls—’
‘Safe?’ said Elena. ‘Nobody is safe. Not anywhere. One day they come for you, and that’s it. That’s all. Every day the girls go to school and I never know if they’ll come back. Last week they shot thirty people at the Red Cliff. They lined them up in the rain and shot them. Buried the bodies in the ditch. A reprisal. Reprisal for what? Who knows? They didn’t care who they took. Old men. Women. Children. They took their clothes first and then they shot them. They made them stand naked. Then they burned the houses.’