A stick of two-thousand-pound bombs splashed across Levrovskaya Square: three crashed through the roof of the Hotel Sviatopolk and erupted inside, two more hit in the square itself. Shockwaves swept through the Teagarden, smashing rubble and fragments of traffic and restaurants and people through the citizens taking tea. The blast buckled the heavy bronze doors of the Bank of Foreign Commerce and shattered the plate windows of Rosenfeld’s, blowing a hurricane of tiny glittering blades through customers and staff. Lacerating the polished mahogany panels and counters.
A five-thousand-pound barrel of explosive demolished the Ter-Uspenskovo Bridge. The river erupted, drenching the Square of the Piteous Angel and leaving the riverbed temporarily naked. The shock waves rocked the Lodka: glass and stone from its high roof-dome crashed down on the readers in the hall of the Central Registry and the great wheel of the Gaukh Engine canted six inches sideways, its motors seized up and screeching.
Incendiary clusters set the roofs of the Laughing Cockerel Theatre and the Dreksler-Kino burning.
Vanko’s Uniform Factory was a crater of rubble and dust.
Mirgorod, city burning.
Fire-flakes licked at blistering paint and smouldering furniture and blew from house to house and street to street on gusting breezes of fire. Fire-clusters spread and merged and sucked in streams of air. Roads became channels for fire-feeding streams of air, hurricane inflows that reached the burning centre and columned up, high swaying pillars of uproarious flame. The walls of high buildings burning within toppled forward and came crashing down in billowing skirts of dust and flying brick and glass.
Rusalkas screamed and giants stumbled in the streets with burning hair. People saw other people hurt and die. Hurt and died themselves.
The warehouses and shipyards of the Ring Wharf burned. The timber yards and oil storage tanks and coal mountains burned. The bales and barrels and pallets in the lading sheds burned. The fires of the Ring Wharf roared like storms of wind and merged into one great fire, half a mile across: one bright shivering dome of burning under a thin canopy of smoke. The smoke-shell glowed from within as if it was itself on fire. Wavering curtains of orange-red flame opened and closed across the blinding heart of outrageous glare. Firefighters, walled off from the central blaze by bastions of heat, scrabbled at the outer edges of the Ring Wharf fire. They sucked water from the canals and harbour basins and pumped it in feeble arcs of spray that turned to steam on the air. If they got too close, their clothes and hair caught fire.
Josef Kantor, his own room gone, stands among the firefighters at the Ring Wharf, warming himself in the glow of the dockyards burning. Sweat greases his face. His skin is smeared with soot-smuts. He watches the thick column of oil-black smoke rising mile-high into the sky. A signal fire to the future. Heat and shadow flicker across his face, and the voice of Archangel whispers in his ear. Archangel has learned to whisper now.
40
Walking in silence, weighted with a heavy, sick emptiness, Lom and Maroussia saw almost no one as they made their way back from the Ship Bastion to Elena Cornelius’s house after the bombing raid on the city. The raion had closed its shops and shut its doors and gone indoors. Belated air-raid warning sirens wailed in the distance. In the sky anti-aircraft shells were bursting, too high and too few and too late. The attackers had drifted away. Blue and yellow-brown smoke-streaks smudged the sky. Smuts drifted down and settled on the snow. The smell clung to their clothes: the faint, sickening smell of the city frying.
Elena met them in the hallway. The girls were with her.
‘There’s to be an announcement on the radio,’ she said. ‘We’re going up to the Count’s room to listen. Come with us.’
The Count opened the door. He had a newspaper in his hand.
‘Ah, Elena!’ He waved the paper at her. ‘These are terrible times. Fohn is to speak at four. And did you hear? Dukhonin is dead. He was killed. An attack on his home. Terrorists. Assassins. We are blamed of course. We are behind it, apparently. This is very bad. But Vissarion Yppolitovich is with you! Marvellous. Come in, my friend. Come in.’ He noticed Maroussia standing behind them. ‘Ah, and you, you are Elena’s friend and Vissarion’s friend, and now our friend also.’ He started towards her, holding out his hand.
‘This is Maroussia, Sandu,’ said Elena. ‘Maroussia Shaumian.’
The Count stopped mid-stride.
‘Shaumian? There is a Shaumian in my house? And nobody told me?’ He took Maroussia’s hand in both of his, his eyes devouring her face. ‘Elena! How could you not tell me?’
Maroussia was looking at him in alarm.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t—’
The Count turned and shouted over his shoulder into the apartment, ‘Ilinca! Ilinca! Say you do not believe this! A Shaumian is here! Feiga-Ita’s daughter is come to our house!’ He turned back to Maroussia. Took her by the hand like a child. ‘Come in. Come in. Enter.’ His face was pink with pleasure and excitement.
Count Palffy ushered them all through into the Morning Room. That was what he called it, though no doubt it was the afternoon and evening room as well. French windows with white louvred shutters gave a fine view over the snow-loaded lilacs in the garden, and there was a handle to crank down the awnings for summer afternoons in the sun. There were bears’ heads and antlers on the walls and animal skins on the floor, no longer glossy, abraded by moth. The fine chairs and sofas still retained a few strands of their original fabric.
Ilinca came in with a tray of tea in glasses. A jug of lemonade for the girls. Ilinca was small and dumpy. She swished and shuffled noisily across the parquet in a tight skirt of funereal bombazine that reached the floor. She had forgotten to change out of her green house slippers, but her hair was pinned up and she wore a small, defiant turquoise brooch pinned on her chest. Let enemies come, it said. We are aristocrats of proud and ancient family. We have survived and will survive again.
A radio was set up on a table in the middle of the room. A fine old Piagin Silvertone in a highly polished wooden case. The tuning dial was illuminated. An orchestra was playing the ‘Hero March’ from Ariadna Triumphs, the volume turned low.
Palffy made the introductions.
‘You see, Ilinca!’ he said. ‘Of course she is a Shaumian. Of course. No doubt of it. She has the look. She is Feiga-Ita come back to us, and here in my house! And I might never have known. Oh Elena! I might have missed her.’
‘Did you know my mother?’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m sorry. She never talked about her friends in the raion. We never came here.’
‘Know her?’ said the Count. ‘Of course we knew her!’
‘Many years ago,’ said Ilinca. ‘She would have been the age you are now, perhaps, or younger. Then she married that hothead Kantor boy, and when he was sent to Vig she went with him. She came back of course, but not here, not back among her friends here in the raion.’
‘A disaster!’ said the Count. ‘A catastrophe for Lezarye. We should not have left her so. We should have gone to her. We should have reached out. Insisted. I am ashamed. For myself and for all of us, I am ashamed.’