In the distance, the flames of the rostral towers flickered uncertainly. They held nothing for him, nor was he drawn to them. Beyond them, the city awaited his coming like a spider’s web. But he was already footsore and exhausted. He hungered but had no appetite. There was nowhere for him to go, only a dead and empty dacha to flee from.
He stepped on to a big, stone-built bridge spanning the river’s full width. There were no names any more, not for the island he was quitting, nor even for the city that lay across the nameless river.
At the mid-point of the bridge, he climbed the balustrade and stood for a moment poised against the pull of the turning earth. One step forward would take him away from the swirling clash of music, into silence. He closed his eyes and imagined taking that step. He imagined his fall. How long would he have to flail his limbs in the air? In his mind, the fall took for ever; the slam of the water never came. He opened his eyes and looked down into the lapping darkness.
His body swayed forwards, giving in to the allure of gravity. He looked up, away from the river, tears blurring his vision, and continued to lean into the empty air. A sickening internal shift carried his body with it. He passed the point of control. The lean became a lurch. He felt his legs buckle.
There were voices behind him. Someone called out the words of a psalm.
His arms thrashed out, winging the air. He bent his knees and lowered his centre of gravity to recover his balance.
It was not that he wanted to live. It was just that he could not bring himself to die. He allowed the hands on his legs and waist to pull him back. He surrendered himself to the grip of strangers.
PART THREE
Poniard
1
The fallen man
‘The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want!’
Yemelyan Antonovich Ferfichkin shouted the words at the man swaying on the balustrade. He crossed himself twice and moved away from the commotion on the Tuchkov Bridge, away from the memory of the man’s face as he tottered on the railings, balanced for a moment between life and death. He did not wait to see the outcome. The face had seemed familiar. The more Ferfichkin thought about it, the more convinced he became that he recognised the wretch. It was, without doubt, one of his enemies.
‘A suicide is no good to anyone,’ he muttered scornfully. ‘Especially one who throws himself in the Neva.’ He pointed into the air emphatically as he spoke. It was a habit that came from living alone, this talking aloud to himself - or rather to an imagined audience. He had seen children, and even those old enough to know better, laugh at him to his face, not even bothering to hide their mockery behind their hands.
An unaccountable sense of guilt, as if he were to blame for the man’s predicament, hounded him as he moved south. ‘R-r-ridiculous! ’ he called out with a defiant laugh. The glances he attracted were wary. He scowled back and even bared his teeth. It was simply a bizarre coincidence that he should see this man, whose name he couldn’t even remember - ‘German, wasn’t he? That was it!’ - but with whom he had almost certainly quarrelled at some point in the past; that he should see him tonight, on midsummer’s night of all nights, for the first time in God knows how many years, at possibly the ultimate moment of the scoundrel’s life. For, whoever the fellow was, whatever his name, Yemelyan Antonovich Ferfichkin was certain that he had to be a scoundrel. None but scoundrels and sinners took their own lives.
Naturally, it unsettled him. Coming on top of the day’s events, the rather nasty scene with Gorshkov, it was no wonder that it got to him. His nerves were frayed. ‘Understandable,’ he cried.
He had braced himself for the inevitable splash but it had not come and he had moved too far away to hear it now. It hung over him like the sense of unfinished business.
He was tempted to return home. There was work waiting for him there, always work to be done, money to be earned by the plying of the needle, or the weaving of words. There was another one to be buried tomorrow. Ferfichkin would need to spend some time beforehand browsing the Good Book, letting the words enter him, joining the words that were already there, so that he could call on them when he needed them: by the graveside. He needn’t worry, he knew. The right words always came to him.
Again he felt a strange nagging guilt. He was thinking of the Bible in his room and his conscience was not entirely easy. ‘What do you want with me?’ The question was not for the faces that turned to him, faces lit by the promise and excitement of the night. He realised that it was the Bible that had driven him out, that and the terrible, aching loneliness that always came upon him at night, especially in the brilliant, restless nights of summer.
Once it had been his friend. ‘My salvation,’ he even declared, the emotion in his eyes. Had he not taught himself Church Slavonic, in order to accept more wholly the word of the Lord, to take it upon himself and to give it to others? Had it turned against him, or was the fault his own? He could not understand where it had come from, this sense of reproach that he experienced now whenever he was alone with the Bible.
‘A man’s first duty is to himself,’ he pleaded. The silence that answered him held a devastating rebuke.
No, he could not go back home, to the emptiness of his room, and the Bible’s sullen presence.
It was all Gorshkov’s fault, no doubt. The words that man had said to him. ‘How dare he?’ Who did he think he was? Could Ferfichkin be blamed for the other’s improvidence? These people would bleed him dry if he let them.
‘I have to live!’ he called out.
The image of the man who had thrown himself off the Tuchkov Bridge came back to him. He too was probably some feckless wastrel like Gorshkov, a fool who blamed others for the consequences of his own sinful ways. Ferfichkin was not ready to follow him into the Neva, not yet at least.
As he rounded the tip of Vasilevsky Island he repeated the words of the twenty-third Psalm: ‘The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.’
Without pausing in his stride along the University Embankment, he took out a battered pewter flask from the inside of his frock coat. The squeak of the cork released a whiff of harsh spirit. He lifted it quickly to his lips, eager for the fierce communion, but also not wishing to spill any of the vodka through the jog of his step.
‘He restores my soul!’ Although his eye was eager now, and his voice enlivened by bravado, there was an edge of desperation to the words. It was more a plea than an assertion.
He was stitching his way across the city, west to east to west again, moving south all the time, and quaffing from the flask with almost every step.
There were tavern doors along his way, with steps leading down to them, but he resisted their beckoning wafts. He had no need of them, not while he had vodka of his own. Besides, he could hide from his enemies in a dark cellar but not from the eyes of the Lord.
He remembered, and recited in Church Slavonic, the words of the twenty-sixth Psalm. He believed he saw wonder in the eyes of those he passed. ‘Yes! I have the word of God within me!’ He shouted a Russian equivalent of the text after them as they fled his excitement: ‘I have not sat down with the vain, neither will I go in with those who dissemble. I have hated the company of evildoers; I will not sit with the wicked.’
He found himself crossing a great sea of paving stones, blue whorls that swam beneath his staggering feet. He thought of Jesus walking on the water. The blasphemy of the connection, to compare himself in a state of inebriation to the Son of God performing a miracle, both frightened and liberated him.
He looked up and saw the angel on top of the towering Alexander Column. ‘Come down from there if you have something to say to me,’ shouted Ferfichkin. But the heaven-distracted figure ignored him.
Ferfichkin stumbled on; the stone waters of the Palace Square grew turbulent and treacherous. The Winter Palace, recently painted red ochre, shimmered like a distant shore; the sky’s soft glow seemed to draw the substance from it and from everything around it. He looked again at the angel, almost fearfully now, as if he expected the statue to take flight, drawn by the weightless night. A leaden feeling gripped his heart, halfway between the dread of belief and the terrible loneliness of atheism.
The only thing left to him was the vodka. But it wasn’t long before he had drained that. A misery, a grief worse than the loss of his God, voided him.
His listing trajectory took him into the arms of passing strangers, who pushed him away in disgust. ‘Have I never believed, then?’ he demanded of them.
From one to the other he was passed, in a wilder mazurka than any danced inside the palace ballrooms.
‘In that case, what was it all for?’ But at the same time as he formed the question, the answer came to him, an answer he struggled to suppress, overlaying protestations of his piety: ‘No one, not even the holy brothers who clothe themselves in the Scriptures, the monks of Optina Pustyn, no one has immersed themselves in the word of God more than I. The hours of my life I have given to that book! And why? If I did not believe? You cannot tell me I do not believe,’ he shouted into the face of a cavalry officer who evidently had no such intention.
He hurried from the square on to Millionnaya. Between the gaudy millionaires’ palaces and the stinking Moika, a pack of wild dogs roamed. The dogs were of all sizes, the products of unimaginablemiscegenations, absurdly mismatched as a group, and yet bound together by some instinct of canine community. Restless and excitable, they sniffed the air and each other’s arses, nipping, yelping, circling, the smallest ones somehow seeming to be the most aggressive. No doubt they were animated by hunger. However, their banding together against it, their ragged solidarity, amazed him. He almost envied them. Ferfichkin had known hunger. But it had never occurred to him to seek its alleviation by associating with others in the same plight. ‘It’s every man for himself, ’ he shouted at the dogs, as if remonstrating with them. ‘Dog eat dog!’ It was a command, or at least an encouragement.
Ferfichkin stood and swayed. The pack of dogs paid him no regard but ran howling up Millionnaya towards the Field of Mars. He felt an instant nostalgia at their departure and realised in that moment how alone he was. He hungered after company, even though the whole basis of his life was self-sufficiency.
‘No man is my master,’ he shouted up the empty street, after the baying dogs. ‘God is my master.’ But the words rang hollow.
He set off at a run after the dogs; somehow it seemed important not to let them out of his sight. He was chasing not a pack of wild dogs, but the idea of kinship.
The idea took him across the empty parade ground, where the unseen ghosts of dead battalions were marshalled, into the Summer Garden.
As he entered the enclosure he had the sense of crossing over into a place of magic and awe, a grotto. The dumbstruck, sightless men and women that lined the criss-crossing avenues slowed his step and cowed him. Naked allegories, fabulous pagan beings, they inspired an irrational dread in him. He had a sense of them moving behind his back, but whenever he turned, they were frozen in their original positions, the lyre unplucked, the sweep of concealing drapery still miraculously in place.
In amongst the statuary, people of flesh and blood moved, a congregation of sinners, for the most part eschewing the formal paths, the women undoubtedly whores, the men drunks. Ferfichkin slurringly repeated the words of the Psalm: ‘I have hated the company of evildoers.’ There was laughter from the trees. He threw out a hand towards it and stumbled on, his step unsteady as much from exhaustion as from the drink now.
He lurched from statue to statue, passed now between a different set of strangers, who showed their disgust by keeping their stony heads averted from him.
He could no longer see the dogs but the din of their hunt was louder than ever.
He staggered into one of the sinners, who had wandered on to the path.
Ferfichkin looked into this man’s face. ‘You!’ he cried.
The man pushed him away, with the same disgust that those on Millionnaya had shown. Ferfichkin fell to the ground. The man stepped over him and went on his way.
Ferfichkin did not stir. No one troubled themselves about the drunk fallen to the ground. No doubt they had themselves slept in places just as strange.
Morning came more stealthily than usual. With infinite gradation, the soft etiolated light became emboldened. The old drunk was still there. He had not changed his position. The
politseisky
who found him couldn’t rouse him and when he turned the man over, he saw why.