Twelve (39 page)

Iuda placed his hand on the back of Domnikiia's head, pressing her into him. He closed his eyes and raised his head to the ceiling with a smile of sexual elation on his lips. Then his head dropped and his eyes flashed open, gleaming victoriously out of the window and across the square.

And though the room I was in was in utter darkness, and though there was no way that Iuda could be aware that I was there, I knew he was staring directly at me.

I
FELL BACK INTO MY CHAIR. I HAD BEEN WARNED WHAT IUDA HAD
intended to do. I had flown from Kurilovo to Moscow to make it in time. I had stood at the very door of the building in which it had happened. And yet I had quietly and without intervention watched as Iuda had done everything I had feared, as he had destroyed yet another creature that was dear to me, as he had taken first Domnikiia's life and then her soul.

I dashed from the building and across the square towards the brothel. Halfway across, I glanced up at Domnikiia's window. Light still shone from it, but inside I could see no sign of either Domnikiia or Iuda. Even as I watched, the light was extinguished. I paused. If I went into the brothel, there was nothing that I could do. I was in no state to kill. If I went in there, I would be easy prey to Iuda and even to . . . I could not face thinking about it. I could not face anything. I turned and fled into the dark city streets. I would kill her tomorrow, and let her live tonight.

I do not know where I wandered that night. Every waking nightmare I had experienced on my journey during the day had come true. I felt a strange sense that Iuda had cheated. I had carefully worked out that he could not be in Moscow for several hours – certainly that he could not have arrived before I did. And therefore, if he could not have done so, it followed that he did not do so. Hence he had not just intermingled his blood with Domnikiia's and thereby transformed her into a creature as hellish as himself. It was an argument of perfect logic, except that I had witnessed the occurrence which I had just concluded could not have occurred. Domnikiia had become a vampire, and no amount of appealing to the gods of reason was going to change that.

And after all, it took only a little imagination to come up with a dozen ways in which Iuda could have made it to Moscow before me. How could I apply any physical laws to such a creature? By some legends, he could transform himself into a bat. How fast can a bat fly? It doesn't matter; a vampire in bat form may travel much faster. He could have reduced himself in size to some minute homunculus and been carried to Moscow in my own saddlebag. Preposterous? Who was I to say? Moreover, it did not matter. Somehow, Iuda had got to Moscow. In some way, it had been possible. I had smugly calculated that he could not make it, but I had observed rules to which Iuda had no need to conform. It was like playing chess against an opponent who could suddenly announce that his queen can move in a way that I had never been taught.

Even to invoke the supernatural was unnecessary. All Iuda had needed was another coach and a human driver. He could lie in the back, slumbering in his coffin, protected from the daylight by blackened windows, while his accomplice drove him pell-mell to his rendezvous with Domnikiia. I had already suspected that he might have some human servant, who could perform those daylight tasks that he could not.

There was no need to choose the correct explanation. The problem was that I had not considered the possibilities earlier. If I had not been so arrogant in my belief that I had beaten Iuda, then I could have stopped what had happened. I was horrified by my own stupidity.

But the real horror came in knowing that there had been no coercion on Iuda's part. Domnikiia had willingly done what she did. She did not love me, or God, or even life enough to resist the temptation offered to her of the prospect of eternity, even if that eternity came through eternal damnation. She knew that the Oprichniki were vampires – I had told her. She knew that they were evil. All the times that we had spoken of it – when she had said that living for ever was just a fantasy, when we had laughed together at Iuda's pompous letter – each time she had been hiding something away from me, some secret notion that in reality Iuda was right and I was wrong.

It was that betrayal that was so hurtful to me. If it had been some stranger who had chosen the path Domnikiia had taken, or even someone I knew and even loved, but whom I didn't expect to love me, then it would have been different. I would have felt some passing sorrow that the person was so foolish or so corrupt as to want to become a vampire, but that very revelation of their true nature would obliterate all genuine sympathy. Just as Iuda had said the desire to be a vampire was the only qualification required to become one, so that desire is also a sufficient disqualification from any expectation of the love of the rest of humanity. The convicted murderer cannot expect to be pitied for being what he is, except perhaps by his mother. Even then, is she not asking herself the question, how am I to blame? And so the sorrow I felt was not really directed towards Domnikiia. It was for myself that I wept. As in so many circumstances, my own self-interest was the matter at the front of my mind. It was
I
who had been betrayed. Domnikiia had chosen Iuda over
me
.
I
had failed to do what I could to prevent it. It was vanity, pure and simple. My pain came from my humiliation and from Iuda's ascendancy. Domnikiia was part of the mechanism of it all, but she was not the beginning or the end of my emotions.

And yet none of that was true. It all hinged on the fact that Domnikiia could not be worthy of my sympathy and therefore did not have my sympathy and therefore any sorrow which I felt could not be for her. But it was for her that I felt. I knew her. I knew that her decision must have been some tiny aberration and that somehow the one fragment of her mind that whispered 'yes' had spoken louder than the thousands which had screamed 'no'. Those thousands were now silenced for ever, I knew for sure. I knew because I had stared into the eyes of Matfei and Pyetr and Iuda and others and seen how little was left of them. It had been one, tiny, vociferous part of my mind that had originally persuaded me to visit Domnikiia for that first time, a year ago. The other voices that in unison shouted 'Marfa' had been drowned out then, and by now had been brought round in their way of thinking. From then on, until now, no part of me had seen my relationship with Domnikiia as anything but good and right. Was that how Domnikiia now felt about her newfound state? Did that one taste of Iuda's blood persuade her instantly and completely of the joy of the existence ahead of her, much as my first taste of her flesh had persuaded me?

It was a dangerous path to follow. I might allow myself during that night the indulgence of thinking fondly of Domnikiia and of looking for reasons not to judge her, but in the light of tomorrow I knew that she had to die and that I must be the one to kill her. Hard as it had been to drive out all sympathy for Maks when I had found out he was a spy, it would be so much harder for me to steel my heart enough to plunge a wooden shaft into Domnikiia's own heart – a heart that had so capriciously turned against me. True, a vampire is infinitely more deserving of death than a French spy, but then my love for Domnikiia was infinitely greater than my love for Maks. Not greater – different. Subsequently I had harboured, and still did, doubts as to whether the way I had treated Maks was right. Days, months and years after tomorrow I would wonder whether I had been right to kill Domnikiia. That was why tonight was a time to build up my hatred, enough to ensure that when the moment came, it would be the moment of least indecision. Once I had destroyed her then I could lie back and bathe in the luxury of doubt. It would be too late then to do anything more than to regret.

I found myself back in the churchyard in Kitay Gorod where Dmitry and I had stayed so briefly with Boris Mihailovich and Natalia Borisovna. I was sitting on the ground, the dampness of the snow seeping into me, with my back against a gravestone. I could not remember arriving there or how long I had been there. I was certain I had not been asleep and yet somehow the whole night had passed. The eastern sky had imperceptibly transformed from starry black to a dark, glowering blue, noticed only by me and by the waking birds who began to hail the rising sun. This time, my nightmare did not end as the birds sang to the dawn. It became worse. The horrors I had seen in the night were merely an overture to the horrors that the day would bring. I was going to kill Domnikiia. It was a horror made so much more dreadful in that I would not merely be an observer, but a participant. I could back away at any point and the horror would go away, only to be succeeded by the unthinkable prospect that she would live on. The price of my inaction of the previous night would be paid in the action of today.

But the day was long. There was no reason for me to go now, just as the sun rose. Yesterday I had had eight hours of daylight in which to race from Kurilovo to Moscow in order to save Domnikiia. I had failed. Today I had the same amount of daylight, and all I had to do was wander along a few Moscow streets, climb into a room and embed a wooden blade in a heart that was already dead. I could wait until lunchtime before I set out, complete the task, and still have most of the afternoon to myself.

I set off immediately. Domnikiia may not have been in any state to appreciate her hellish existence, but out of any love that remained in me for her, it was my duty to end that existence without a moment of undue delay. I scooped up a handful of snow to rub into my face, then noticed that it was stained red. All around me the snow was bloodstained. It was my own blood. The wound to my arm had reopened at some point during the night and had marked the snow beside me. I moved away to find some cleaner snow and bathed my face in it. I was cold enough already, but the icy contact refreshed and awakened me. I took a mouthful of the snow and let it melt on my tongue. Then I set out to do what I had to do.

I was scarcely out of the churchyard when my conviction failed me once again. I set off not towards Degtyarny Lane, nor away from it, but instead I followed a path that seemed simply to circle it, as if I were trying to trick myself into arriving there. My orbit was neither circular nor, like a comet, elliptical, but spiral like a meteor. Each turn I made took me closer to Domnikiia, but I never headed directly towards her. Just as when I had first arrived back in Moscow, after Smolensk, I was tricking myself into falling upon the brothel as if unintentionally. Then it was so that the thief of my desire could slip past the sentry of what I knew was right and wrong. Now my morality had to follow a path that was unnoticed by my sentiment.

Before too long, I was standing beneath her window once again. The ground-floor window below hers opened directly into the salon. It was easy enough to slip the catch and climb into a room in which but a few hours later I would have been welcomed through the front door as an honoured guest. The open window lay in front of me and beyond it the stairs that led to Domnikiia's room and hence to Domnikiia herself and so to Domnikiia's death, and now was my chance to leave.

I went in.

The silence and darkness inside were unfamiliar and unsuitable. This room above all in the brothel was where the sales pitch was made. Always before, it had been a happy, bright and noisy place. I had rarely wanted to linger here in the past, having in my mind a specific and singular objective in the room upstairs, and so the shopfront of the salon had scarcely been a distraction for me, never holding any allure. This time I almost burst into tears at the memory of it. I recalled the anticipation I had always felt on entering; the timid flick of my eyes from one girl to another until they fell upon Domnikiia; sometimes not seeing her there and having to wait until she floated down the stairs to greet me. Even in its darkness the room held those associations. I could hear the light chatter of the girls and the quiet, unnecessarily seductive murmurings of their suitors that had once filled the room. This would be the last time I entered. In its darkened, silent state I would, I feared, remember it always as the anteroom to a very different occasion. In holding back, I was attempting not only to relive happier times, but also to delay my journey upstairs to do what I had to do.

Though it was light outside, the heavy curtains over all the windows kept the inside in a state of muffled dimness. On a table was a candle, which I lit. The looming shadows cast by the flickering flame did little to rekindle in the room the vitality with which I had always associated it. I began to ascend the stairs. The third and the fifth step both squeaked loudly as my foot fell upon them. It was after half past eight, but I knew that no one in the building would yet be preparing to rise. Business hours extended long into the night and so almost the entire morning was spent in sleepy recuperation. The sound of my approach awoke no one.

I crossed the landing and put my hand on the knob of Domnikiia's door. I listened before turning it. Inside I could hear nothing. What I had expected, I did not know. Somewhere in me there had been the urge to knock. This slight pause of apparent politeness served as some form of substitute for that. I turned the knob and entered.

Inside, all was familiar. Across from the door, Domnikiia's dressing table was filled with her cosmetic paraphernalia. To one side was her window; the bright light of day barely glowed through the shutters and thick curtains. Opposite was her bed. I could hear her light breath and saw the blankets rise and fall in time with it. It was a cold night and she was heavily wrapped in bedclothes. Only her beautiful face peeped out. Her long, dark hair, plaited into a ponytail, adorned the pillow beside her.

It would have been easy to just fling open the curtains and shutters, and let the day outside cascade through the window and on to her bed, destroying her bodily remains as I had seen it destroy both Iakov Zevedayinich and Pyetr, but I remembered the look of terror in Pyetr's eyes as the sun had first caught him and the fearful scream that Iakov Zevedayinich had expelled as he had swung out into the light. This, it seemed to me, was the death that they found most terrible and most painful. It was not what I wanted to inflict upon Domnikiia. With those two, and with all the Oprichniki, I had wanted them to be aware of their own deaths – wanted them to understand that I was the cause of their demise. That was why I had gone to the barn before dawn, to be sure that they would still be awake. With Domnikiia, it was just the opposite. There was no need for her to be aware of the brevity of her life as a vampire, or that it was I who had terminated it. Her real life had been ended by Iuda the previous evening. I was simply tidying up the mess he had left.