Aurorarama (18 page)

He eventually emigrated with others to a place called Brilliant in British Columbia, where
Doukhobor
s soon started to disagree over their degree of assimilation and their faithfulness to the old cause. Of course, Mugrabin joined the most radical branch, the Svobodniki, or Freedomites, though the sight of his scarred, sewn-up body during the naked protests they favoured did not always uplift the demonstrators. He came in handier when, at his own incenting, the Svobodniki turned to arson and bombing, destroying schools and transportation systems but also their own properties and money, all of this done in the nude. “Burning Money is truly exhilarating. And burning it naked is quite Edenic,” explained Mugrabin happily. “If you really want to drive people crazy, you should try it. Guaranteed or the ashes of your money back.” Mugrabin was in a good humour now. Obviously, his mood swings worked on a ten-second cycle.

The Canadian authorities got tired of his antics and he soon had to seek other, even less benevolent, climes. How he arrived in New Venice he would not exactly reveal, but he maintained he had found a home here, though not in the Novo-Arkhangelsk district, which was swarming with Bolshevik flies. It was a moral home, rather.

“The Eskimos. They remind me of us. The equality, how they share everything. This is how human beings should live,
don’t you think? The
True Community
. I should really like to meet the author of this book.”

If Gabriel had been not unpleasantly lulled so far, this slapped him awake. His suspicion that Mugrabin was another policemen in (black) sheep’s clothing returned forcefully. The story was too good to be true, and calculated to fit some of Gabriel’s pet interests, even if those interests were purely theoretical. For people like Gabriel, whose social status was going down the drain, radical politics was the cheapest commodity there was and a good thumb to suck on during daydreams. He knew that well, and kept it to the level of
motiveless
fascination.

“I do not know him,” lied Gabriel.

“That’s not what the dedication suggests,” said Mugrabin, patting the book.

“Are you a professional policeman or just an informer?”

Mugrabin went mad at this. Jumping to his feet and advancing threateningly, he flourished a Nagant gun that made Gabriel shiver as it was agitated under his nose. “If there is one thing that would give me as much pleasure as killing a cop,” howled Mugrabin, his face even more noticeably red, “it is killing someone who calls me a cop. I may not look like it but I have some self-respect, you see.”

“I’m sorry if I was mistaken,” said Gabriel grimly, as he was more than fed up with people menacing him. “I see more policemen than I would like to these days.”

“Ah, who doesn’t?” said Mugrabin, who now settled down quickly. “It makes my heart bleed that you do not trust me. What can I do to prove my friendship to you? Oh! I know. What if those two pigs I have seen going out of your building had an accident? You know, some little explosion of their Bollée sled car?”

“I do not know much about Russian terrorism, but enough to know that some infiltrated agents do no hesitate to kill policemen or even state ministers.”

Mugrabin laughed at this.

“Those SR clowns, really! They were too naïve with that Azev thing. I am an anarchist, Mr. d’Allier. I live on highly different moral grounds.”

“I’m sure of that.”

Mugrabin nodded his head.

“I admire your loyalty, to speak frankly. I would even have been disappointed in you if you had told me who wrote that book. Imagine it as a test. We will contact you, and in the meantime, if you’re in need, you will find us.”

“Us?”

“It’s more impressive when put that way, isn’t it?” said Mugrabin with a smile that revealed his ceramic teeth.

And with that he suddenly dashed toward the door, with, Gabriel noticed, the vodka bottle bulging in his coat pocket.

“Drink to my health, Mr. Mugrabin.”

“I certainly will do that. I hope it will be more beneficial to yours that it is to mine,” he chuckled while putting on his rubbers. “I’m not like this character in one of our greatest novels, who thinks he should have gone to the North Pole because he had the
vin mauvais
and wanted to get rid of the habit.”

Gabriel nodded, though the reference eluded him. However, he would have plenty of time to look through his books while tidying up the mess.

“Who sent you?” he asked again, his head whirling with fatigue.

“You’ll know. Or you won’t.
Da svidania.”

Gabriel could sleep a little at last, and soon found himself in a strange dream. It was about a polar expedition that was abandoning ships (though the ships seemed to be inside a gigantic cavern or underground cave). The sailors and officers were filling up trunks and crates, not with food or any kind of gear, but with the icicles dangling from the masts and ropes, as if they
thought these were precious diamonds and did not realize they would melt inside their crates.

When he woke up, night had fallen again, and his oozing brain seemed stuck to the pillow. What had awakened him was not the dream but a pulsating void he could feel in himself and identified as the absence of Stella. It had been nagging him all day, and as soon as he had allowed himself to unwind, it had come back to the surface and it was now punching holes in his guts with its clenched little fists. His brain lit up like a Stellarama, repeating endlessly the same recorded loops of memories and fantasies. What he was doing here, away from her, he could no longer understand. The stars above his head were a cruel mockery compared to her celestial tattoo.

He got up, and turning on the lights descended drowsily into the maelstrom of his scattered books. The apartment had been desecrated and seemed to have lost all its power to attract or retain him. He did not feel like sorting things out or cleaning up. It simply disgusted him, like finding a stranger’s hair in one’s ice cream. The only thing that did not revolt him was the idea of spooning naked against Stella and holding her in his arms, his face buried in whatever horoscope her back would trace for him.

He returned upstairs to fill a Poirier packsack with clothes and toiletries, a bit haphazardly, and gathered all the money he could find. Just before leaving, in a last flash of lucidity, he realized that at this very moment Stella would still be at the Trilby Temple for tonight’s show with that magician of hers. While reflecting that he thus still had some time on his desperately empty hands before meeting her, he tripped on a book and recognized the Sommer edition of the Arthurian romances. Getting down on one knee, he turned over the book to look at it. It was about Lancelot.
Le chevalier a la charrette
who had
preferred his love to his honour. Of course. Gabriel relished the coincidence but was not that surprised; more astonishing things had happened. Books knew more than you did, as a rule. But who had told him about Lancelot today? He remembered Brentford’s story. The dead woman in a coffin on a sled. Now that he was the Knight of the Cart for good, he might as well spend the remaining hours on that quest. With a little luck it would distract his mind and belly from Stella, while he waited to see her again.

He left the flat, and in New Boree Street jumped into the first eastward jitney taxsleigh that happened to cross his path, not knowing when he would come back, wondering if he ever would.

T
he Blazing Building, home to the Council of Seven, was located at the end of the Cavendish Canal. Its golden dome, which always seemed freshly polished, had a peculiarly blinding, almost white sheen that seemed to radiate from itself rather than from the reflected daylight. It was especially spectacular when it contrasted—as was now the case—with a dark cloudy backdrop of afternoon skies that looked like an emanation from the black airship above.

“Snow clouds,” thought Brentford, as his gondola, crunching pancakes of thin ice, approached the mooring post. He was
paying no small amount of attention to meteorology these days, as if some part of his mind were always computing, in a more or less idle way, the chances of his making it to the pole by way of ice yacht. It also diverted his thoughts, doubtlessly, from the gnawing concerns of city poletics. But as he jumped onto the embankment and headed toward the colonnade that marked the entrance, he readied himself to face them again.

Though it was not his first visit to the Blazing Building, such occasions were sufficiently rare to keep him in awe, even if he did not like to admit it. Behind the rather sober, classically designed exterior, which paled a little in comparison with, for instance, the Arctic Administration Building, the place displayed a grandeur and a certain craziness that was as pure an expression of New Venetian spirit as one could hope to meet.

The entrance archway opened onto the vast rotunda of Hyperboree Hall. Its floor was a circular map of the polar regions, where the Arctic seas were made of white marble and the islands were cut-out slabs of polished granite decorated with little figures in minute mosaics, drawn, if Brentford remembered correctly, from the Olaus Magnus and Nicolo Zeno depictions of the North. It mixed almost accurate cartography with phantom islands, mythological monsters, and imaginary people, among whom New Venetians were prone and proud to count themselves.

In the very center of the Hall, the North Pole was represented by a fountain rising from a basin of snowflake obsidian; its dangling stalactites, kept constantly frozen, were sculpted in the shapes of Northern divinities from different traditions. Through the stained-glass openings in the base of the lofty dome overhead, various shades of light fell on the translucent fountain to simulate, even by day, the colours of the Northern Lights.

The dome itself, supported by white pillars, was of jet-black jasper encrusted with diamond stars and silver filigree work that
drew a map of the night skies centred on Polaris and the Great Bear. A motto ran around its rim in both Greek and English versions: OVER THE WHOLE SEA TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH AND TO THE SOURCES OF NIGHT AND TO THE UNFOLDINGS OF HEAVEN AND TO THE ANCIENT GARDEN OF PHOEBUS.

Between the pillars, toward the rear, stood twelve tall marble statues of polar explorers, their eyes fixed firmly on the fountain, their stone fingers pointing toward it. Their pedestals were ornate with episodes that somewhat belied the noble demeanour of the heroes: Barents agonizing, surrounded by his men; the abandoned Henry Hudson adrift in his small craft; the discovery by Rae of the infamous Franklin’s expedition lifeboat; Hall half rising from his bed in the throes of poisoning; the starving Greely sentencing the thief Charles Buck Henry to death; Melville finding in the snow the protruding arm of De Long; Andrée frozen within the folds of his useless balloon; Dr. Svensen putting a rifle to his own head while Sverdrup ran to stop him in vain; Dr. Dedrick amputating Peary’s toes; Ross Marvin shot in the back by his Eskimo guide; Fitzhugh Green shooting his Eskimo guide in the back—these were among the many incidents recalling the sacrifices and villainies that had always accompanied the conquest as faithfully as a shadow, and all were depicted in a ghastly realism that did not exactly encourage Brentford to go to Helen’s rendezvous.

Behind those statues were mirrored doors that led to the various parts of the building. The Council Cabinet’s was opposite the entrance archway, and this was where Brentford was introduced by one of the gigantic Varangian guards of the Council of Seven’s Security Company, who wore the usual uniform of figure-eight ruff, black doublet and black and white striped pluderhosen and held a halberd in his enormous hand.

A flight of stairs led to a corridor down which an icy draught, strong as an upwind gale, was blowing, probably,
thought Brentford, as a reminder of the hardships of going
there
. And yet, cold as he suddenly felt, he nonetheless did not hate the idea. He was, after all, as much a New Venetian as the Councillors were, and could relate rather easily to some of their notions and actions—as long, at least, as they concerned interior decoration.

As he hurried, head to wind, through the corridor, he could perceive rooms whose open doors revealed the strangest scenes, all intended to evoke memories of past events and important symbols in the dreamlike manner of a Memory palace. To the untrained eye, these scenes appeared more like a jumble of absurd props and kitschy figures. On his right, for instance, a huge stuffed seal with wings was leaving the imprint of his greasy muzzle against a snow-white sheet held by a scantily clad marble woman (oh yes, Brentford thought, this must be the
Seal
of the City), while on his left an automated gentleman in medieval garb repeatedly plunged a pointed flag into the heart of a supine Viking (this one left Brentford totally clueless).