‘I don’t have time for it.’
‘Don’t have time for it? You have nothing but time.’
‘When I’m awake and not so drugged that I can think, I don’t have time to worry about you, that’s all.’
‘Worry about me; I’m going to kill you.’
‘Don’t be upset, you won’t.’
‘I’m not upset.’ Pribluda’s voice rose. With better control, he added, ‘I’ve been looking forward to it all year. You’re crazy, Renko.’ He was disgusted. ‘You forget who’s in charge here.’
Arkady said nothing. Over the field were the triumphant screams of small birds mobbing a crow; they looked like a bar of music moving through the air. He had determined by the short-range Antonov airliners flying overhead, their steady frequency, and their direction toward the balmy south that he was within an hour of Domodovo Airport, itself just outside Moscow. The psychiatrists sent to question him were all from the KGB’s Serbsky Clinic in Moscow, so he assumed that Irina was there.
‘Well, what do you think about, then?’ Pribluda asked in exasperation.
‘I think that I never knew how to think. I feel as if I’m making it up as I go along. I don’t know. At least, for the first time, it’s not making me up.’ He opened his eyes and grinned.
‘You’re crazy,’ Pribluda said seriously.
Arkady got to his feet and stretched. ‘Want to get back to your seeds, Major?’
‘Fuck your mother, you know I do.’
‘Say you’re human.’
‘What?’
‘We’ll be back,’ Arkady said. ‘All you have to do is say you’re human.’
‘I don’t have to do anything. What kind of game is this? You’re so crazy, Renko, it makes me sick.’
‘It shouldn’t be so hard to say you’re human.’
Pribluda walked in a tight circle as if screwing himself into the ground. ‘You know I am.’
‘Say it.’
‘I’ll kill you for this – for this alone,’ Pribluda promised. ‘To get it over with’ – his voice fell to a monotone – ‘I’m human.’
‘Very good. Now we can go.’ Arkady started toward the house.
The new interrogator was the doctor with fluttery hands who had once addressed the meeting at the prosecutor’s office.
‘Let me give you my analysis,’ he told Arkady at the end of their session. ‘For every truth told us by you and the Asanova woman there is a lie. Neither of you was directly a member of the Iamskoy-Osborne clique, but you were each indirectly involved, and you were and still are involved with each other. With your wide experience as an interrogator and her long experience as a suspect, you hope to confuse and outlast us. You have unreal expectations. All criminals have unreal expectations. You and the Asanova woman are both suffering from the pathoheterodoxy syndrome. You overestimate your personal powers. You feel isolated from society. You swing from excitement to sadness. You mistrust the people who most want to help you. You resent authority even when you represent it. You think you are the exception to every rule. You underestimate the collective intelligence. What is right is wrong, and what is wrong is right. The Asanova woman is an obvious, classic case, easily understood by anyone and thus easily dealt with. Yours is a far more devious and dangerous case. You were born with a famous name and great advantages. Despite strong indications of political egoism, you rose to a position of significance in the system of justice. After heroically combating a powerful superior, you entered into a criminal conspiracy with this woman to hide important facts from this inquiry. What was her actual relationship with Osborne? What transactions took place between you and the American intelligence agent William Kirwill? Why did you let Osborne go? I’ve heard your answers. I believe the healthy part of you wants to give me the real answers, and with sufficient therapy you would. But it would be pointless. We have the real answers. Further interrogations in this vein, I am convinced, will only feed your unhealthy delusions. We have to think of the greater good. So I am recommending that an example be made of you, and that you pay the extreme penalty as quickly as can be arranged. You and I have one more session scheduled for tomorrow morning before I leave for Moscow. I have no more questions for you. However, if you have any new information, it will be your final opportunity. Otherwise, goodbye.’
Pribluda carefully emptied the pail. Water, sparkling like an icicle, ran through a ditch and into a cutoff for a row of lettuce until Arkady pushed soil from the ditch into its wall, rerouting the water to the next cutoff. He moved on his knees from row to row, reshaping a whole series of tiny dams until the whole garden was afloat. ‘A veritable Nile,’ he said.
‘Agh, the ground’s too dry. A dozen big buckets for a garden this size?’ Pribluda shook his head. ‘That’s a drought.’
‘The private agricultural sector of the Committee for State Security will never go dry, I’m sure.’
‘You laugh. I came from a farm. Drought is a serious thing, and I can feel a drought coming. I confess I joined the Army to get away from the farm’ – Pribluda lifted a shoulder, a graceful gesture for a man of his shape – ‘but at heart I’m still from the country. You don’t even have to think; you can feel a drought coming.’
‘How?’
‘Your throat tickles for three days. That’s because the dust is not lying down. There are other ways.’
‘Like?’
‘The earth. The ground is like a drum. It’s true – you can hear it. As a drumhead gets hotter and drier, what happens? It gets louder. The same with the ground. Listen.’ Pribluda slapped his foot down. ‘Sort of hollow. The water table is falling.’ He stomped among the pails, delighting in a newfound ability to entertain, stomping harder the more Arkady laughed. ‘This is peasant science. Hear the earth? You can hear how dry its throat is. You thought you cosmopolitans knew everything.’ Pribluda did an ungainly dance, kicking the pails over until he tripped himself up and sat down with a clown’s grin.
‘Major’ – Arkady helped him up – ‘you’re the one who should see the psychiatrist, not me.’
Pribluda’s grin vanished. ‘It’s time for your last session,’ he said. ‘You’re not going?’
‘No.’
‘Then I have to.’ The major looked away. He pulled on his shirt, rolled down his pants, wiped the dust off his shoes and put on his jacket, trying to make himself presentable. Then at the same time they saw that his gun and holster still hung from a stake in the middle of the flooded garden.
‘I’ll get it for you,’ Arkady said.
‘I’ll get it.’
‘Don’t be silly. You have shoes on, I’m barefoot.’
With the major shouting at him, Arkady stepped through the mud and picked the holster off the stake. The major was silent as he made his way back to dry land. When Arkady handed the gun over, Pribluda swung the barrel against the side of Arkady’s head. ‘Don’t touch my gun.’ He was furious. ‘Don’t you know what’s going on here, don’t you know anything?’
Arkady and Pribluda no longer worked in the garden together, and the vegetables withered, as water was restricted. Under vacant skies the fields yellowed in midgrowth. The house stood with all its doors and windows open in hopes of a breeze.
Zoya came. She was thinner, her eyes pinched, though she displayed a smile.
‘The judge said we should give it another go,’ Zoya explained. ‘She said nothing was final if I changed my mind.’
‘You’ve changed your mind?’
She sat by the window and fanned herself with her handkerchief. Even her girlish braid of golden hair seemed thinner, older – like a wig, he thought.
‘We just had troubles,’ she said.
‘Ah.’
‘Maybe it was my fault.’
Arkady smiled. Zoya said maybe it was her fault the way a bureaucrat would discuss a change in department policy.
‘You’re looking better than I expected,’ she said.
‘Well, there’s nothing to do here but get healthy. I hav
en’t had any interrogations now for weeks. I wonder what’s going to happen next.’
‘It’s very hot in Moscow. You’re lucky to be here.’
Zoya went on to say that while they’d never be able to go back and live in Moscow, she had been assured that a suitable job could be found for him in a pleasant town away from the pressures of the capital. Perhaps as a teacher. They could teach together. Also, maybe it was time to start a family. In fact, it might even be possible for her to return here for a longer conjugal visit.
‘No,’ Arkady said. ‘The truth is we aren’t married and we don’t care for each other. I certainly don’t love you. I don’t even feel responsible for what you are.’
Zoya stopped fanning herself and stared dully past Arkady at the other wall of the room, hands on her lap. Strangely, losing weight and roundness made her gymnast’s muscles bulkier, her calves into biceps.
‘Is it another woman?’ She all too obviously remembered to ask.
‘Zoyushka, you were right to leave me, and now you should stay as far away as you can. I don’t wish you ill.’
‘You don’t wish me ill?’ She seemed to rouse herself, and repeated what she’d said more fiercely and more sarcastically. ‘You don’t wish me ill? Look at what you’ve done to me. Schmidt has left me. He’s asked for my transfer to another school, and who can blame him? They have my Party card; I don’t know what they’re going to do with it. You’ve ruined my life, as you plotted to from the day I met you. Do you think it was my idea to come here?’
‘No. In your own way you’ve always been fairly truthful, so I was surprised to see you.’
Zoya pressed her fists against her eyes and worked her mouth so tightly that the red of her lips could not be seen; after a moment she took her hands away, trying to smile again, her blue eyes wet and bright when she spoke. ‘We just had marital troubles. I was not understanding enough. We’ll start fresh.’
‘No, please.’
Zoya grabbed his hand. He had forgotten how callused her fingers were from exercises. ‘It’s been a long time since we slept together,’ she whispered. ‘I could stay tonight.’
‘Don’t.’ Arkady pried her fingers off.
‘Bastard.’ She scratched his hand.
They flew Zoya out before supper. The experience of seeing the woman who had once been his wife turn herself inside out before him was profoundly depressing.
That night he woke with an overwhelming desire for Irina. His room was black around a window of stars. He stood at the window, naked. A touch, even the light friction of the sheet, would have brought a rush of pleasure and relief, and he would have felt no shame. But easing the desire would have erased her image. Stronger than an image, it was an apparition of Irina asleep on a blue bed. It had been in his dream, then in his room; it passed through the window and hovered outside. He could feel the warmth of her through the glass. She was the shock of life.
Not of ordinary life. Ordinary life was an endless queue of backs, of the next man’s breath. In ordinary life people went to offices and did terrible things, and went home and, still in the jumble of a communal apartment, drank, swore, made love, waged war for a bit of dignity and somehow survived. Irina rose above this mob. She flaunted extraordinary beauty in a ragged jacket, she wore a mark on her cheek as honesty, she didn’t care for petty survival. In many ways she was not a person at all. Arkady understood other people well; as an investigator it was his talent. He didn’t understand Irina, and he suspected he might never penetrate vast areas of her unknowability. She had appeared as another planet and taken him in tow. He had followed, but he didn’t know her, and it was he who had switched allegiance.
In the past months he had made himself almost dead, a defense of impassivity against the probes of the interrogators. It was a necessary suicide, his bow to killers. But it was a death all the same. Now this image of her had appeared, and for one night, at least, he was alive, too.
The peat fires began the following month. For days the whole northern horizon shifted under a purple haze. The provisions plane was turned back before landing one afternoon, and the next morning the southern horizon was also covered in smoke. A fire truck showed up with an engineer and firemen in rubber helmets and capes that made them look like medieval soldiers. The engineer ordered the house abandoned. There was to be no evacuation to Moscow; the roads were either cut off or blocked, and every able person was being enlisted in the battle against the fire.
It was truly a battle. Just thirty kilometers from the house was a command post of hundreds of firemen, Army engineers and ‘volunteers’ being organized as infantry around mobile water tanks, excavating machines and tractors. The group from the house – Arkady, Pribluda, a score of guards, housekeepers and cooks – were made into a reserve line of shovel wielders, with Arkady in the middle. But as soon as they crossed the first firebreak and went into action, the line started to fall apart. There was the underbrush to deal with, which spread out the line and frustrated it. There were sudden changes of wind and smoke that blinded and gagged the men and left them walking in different directions entirely. There were ancient ditches into which a man or a whole tractor suddenly dropped. The rest of the line would march into a new wall of smoke, exit behind two tractors and not know which to follow. Men in charred clothes appeared from nowhere running for safety, or bravely shoveling a new firebreak directly in the face of the flames. Of the people Arkady had started with, he recognized only Pribluda.
The fire was unpredictable. One bush would catch slowly like a biscuit of fuses; another would erupt whole into a torch. The problem was the peat. By now Arkady had a fair idea that he was close to the town of Shatura. Shatura was famous for building the first electric power station after the Revolution, and the fuel for the station was peat. The ground itself caught on fire; below the surface, it burned through seams of peat, so that even beaten out, each blaze was parent to a fair ring of new flames. An excavating machine collapsed through burned-out and hollowed turf, releasing methane gas that exploded among the fire fighters like a bomb. The intense heat was staggering. Every man coughed up cinders and blood. Helicopters crossed overhead releasing tons of water that fell as a suffocating rain of steam and smoke. Men with tearing eyes held on to each other’s belts in a blind chain.
The plan was to contain the fire, but the peat fields were too immense, and firebreaks were useless against an enemy that attacked underground. As each successive line of defense retreated, the men at the earlier lines were more entrapped. Arkady no longer knew which way to retreat. Shouts of confusion sounded through the smoke in every direction. A ridge of torn earth ended in a burning tractor; shovels lay where they had been thrown. Pribluda, face smeared black, sat with fat legs outstretched, gagging and exhausted. The major held his gun limply, and his voice was so weak that Arkady could hardly understand him.
‘Get out of here. Save your skin,’ Pribluda said bitterly. ‘This is your big opportunity. You can pick the papers off some poor dead guy if you don’t burn yourself. This is the chance you’ve been waiting for. We’ll catch you anyway; I’d shoot you if I didn’t know that.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Arkady asked.
‘I’m not so dumb as to wait and fry, I’ll tell you that. I’m no coward.’
Pribluda looked more like a hamstrung pig than anything else. High walls of smoke closed in as the wind turned. Arkady had always felt that Pribluda was not going to kill him; he had no idea whether he would die in the fire. At least that would be a natural death, not nine grams of lead in the back of his head from his fellow man.
‘Run!’ Pribluda coughed.
Arkady pulled the major up and lifted him onto a shoulder. He could no longer see the tractor or trees or sun. He started to his left, the last clear path he recalled.
Weaving under the weight of Pribluda, tripping on debris, soon he couldn’t tell if he was moving left, right or in a circle, but he knew that they would die if he stopped. It was the claustrophobia of not breat
hing, of keeping his mouth shut as if there were a hand over it, that he hadn’t expected. The vacuum in his lungs sucked on his windpipe. Through the slits of his eyes he made out only a red furze of fire. When he could go no further and was so deep in smoke that he had to shut his eyes entirely, he ordered himself another twenty steps, and when the smoke was worse, another twenty steps beyond that, and then another ten, and another five. He stumbled into a ditch of brackish water. The ditch was as tall as a man; the water was shallow, and between it and the lip of the ditch lay a channel of thin, acrid air. Pribluda’s lips were violet. Arkady turned him on his back in the water and rocked back and forth, pumping air into him. Pribluda revived, but the heat became worse.
Arkady walked him through the ditch. Embers fell on them, settling in their hair and burning curlicues in their shirts. The ditch rose and ended, and at first in the haze Arkady thought he had worked his way back to the field he had started from that morning. Then he saw that the excavation machines, water tanks and fire engines were black and gutted, some upended from explosions when their fuel ignited, and that what seemed shapeless hillocks on a charred field were the bodies of men who had died the day before. Some of them apparently had taken refuge from the smoke in a peat cutter’s shaft; now they were skeletons. Peat was anaerobic compost, organic decay so old that all its oxygen had been used up. Few microbes survived in peat – perhaps twenty or thirty a cubic meter. Exposed to air and water, the microbes instantly reproduced to many millions, a voracious pool of starved life that bored through flesh like lye. The walls of the shaft were gouged by efforts to escape this sanctuary. A rubber cape lay across the white slick of an arm and one hand. From two of the bodies on the ground above, Arkady took intact water containers, made masks out of his shirt, wet them, tied them on Pribluda and himself, and started out again as the smoke approached.
They moved to keep the smoke at their backs. At one point Arkady stumbled near a shaft, and Pribluda, ahead of him, turned and caught his hand before he dropped into it. They continued across more burning plains, more scenes of calamity and heroism strewn randomly with a generous hand, deaths in a war that would never be reported in any newspaper except for a paragraph that admitted to some windblown cinders in the Moscow area.