Thirteen Years Later (24 page)

‘A few days?’ Kyesha expressed both surprise and disdain. ‘You still don’t remember me, do you, Aleksei Ivanovich?’

‘You’re not Maks’ brother, I know that. He was only a child when he died.’

‘What the hell are you two talking about?’ interjected Dmitry. He was still incapable of movement, but his weight was taken by his coat under his arms, so he was quite able to breathe and speak.

‘I think perhaps a little demonstration would assist you both,’ said Kyesha. He glanced around the chapel. Near him was a tall iron stand topped with three candles, none of them lit. Strips of flat, black-painted metal added some decoration. He took hold of one of these and tore it away. The iron was thin, and Aleksei might have been able to achieve the same with his own hands, but only after minutes of twisting and turning the metal.

The jagged, raw edge glistened clean in the candlelight. Kyesha sat down on the stone step in front of the iconostasis and placed his left hand out in front of him, splaying his fingers wide apart against the cold stone. In his right hand, he raised the iron shard above his head and paused. He glanced first at Dmitry, then at Aleksei, smiling as he brought his arm down, and not even looking where it fell.

Dmitry’s gasp was just audible above the clang of metal against stone. In front of the iconostasis, Kyesha’s little finger lay a few inches from the rest of his hand. His blood had already begun to
soak into the stone. Kyesha moved his hand a little, then turned to Aleksei once again.

‘One’s not enough though, is it, Aleksei?’ Aleksei shook his head. Kyesha raised the improvised blade again.

‘He’s mad!’ whispered Dmitry.

Kyesha’s arm came down. This time there was no sound but the chime of the metal, like a hammer on an anvil. Two fingers now sat on the step, in full view of the altar through the still open doors of the Beautiful Gate, as though part of some pagan sacrifice from a thousand years before.

Kyesha held up his left hand and showed it to Aleksei, the palm facing towards him. Aleksei raised his own hand in a similar gesture, the three fingers and two stubs an almost perfect match for Kyesha’s. Aleksei saw the blood dribbling down across Kyesha’s palm, and felt the warmth of his own as if it were flowing down from the stubs of his fingers, even though they had not bled like that for fifteen years.

Kyesha’s message to Aleksei was completed, but he still had more to show Dmitry. He stood and took a step towards him. He was close enough for Dmitry to reach out and grab him, but the shock seemed to have calmed Dmitry into inaction. Kyesha held his wounded hand close up to the young man’s face, so that the blood dripped down on to his coat. Even though Aleksei knew well what he was about to witness, still he gazed in fascination at the bloody mess Kyesha had inflicted upon himself.

And even as he did so, Kyesha’s fingers began to regrow.

D
MITRY HAD LONG SINCE GIVEN UP STRUGGLING. HE HAD
caught a glimpse of movement in the central chapel and had stepped inside. After that, he’d had but a moment to resist Kyesha’s attack. A heavy blow to his chest had lifted him off his feet and propelled him towards the wall. He had seen Kyesha’s face in front of him – calm, almost irritated – and seen his own sword raised in Kyesha’s right hand, poised to strike. As the blade started to fall, Dmitry had closed his eyes and begun a silent prayer he doubted he would ever finish. He felt the impact of the blow and wondered momentarily why he had experienced no pain, before opening his eyes to realize what had happened.

It was after his father’s arrival that events had taken their strangest turn. The conversation between Aleksei and Kyesha about Uncle Maks’ dead brother had been confusing enough, but it was Kyesha’s act of self-mutilation that caused a coldness to sweep through Dmitry’s body, as though his blood had frozen. He felt vomit rising in his throat and forced himself to swallow it back down. He heard a voice speak briefly and suspected it might have been his own.

As the second finger was severed, Dmitry realized what it was that Kyesha was doing – imitating the wounds Aleksei had carried for so long that Dmitry could not remember a time before them. But whatever reason Kyesha might have to mimic Dmitry’s father, how could it possibly be so important as to bring about
such a deformation? Aleksei’s reaction, as far as Dmitry could tell, had been one of realization and distant recognition, as though the matching disfigurements to their hands marked a common membership of some secret society. Was this some perverse evolution of Freemasonry, in which the covert handshakes that marked one member out to another had been abandoned as unsafe – too easily copied by the uninitiated? Had they developed a handshake that could not be so easily reproduced, since it required the hand itself to be a shape no normal man could – would want to – achieve? Aleksei had always said that it was the Turks who had cut off his fingers, as part of a horrendous torture in a Bulgarian gaol, but had that been a subterfuge? Had Aleksei once inflicted those wounds upon himself as part of the same brutal initiation ceremony? It was unthinkable, and yet it was only when Aleksei had witnessed what Kyesha had just done that he seemed at last to understand him.

Kyesha had not lingered in showing Aleksei the sign of their newly created bond. He had turned and begun to approach Dmitry. Dmitry stared, fascinated, at the bloody wounds. He remembered the sensation he had experienced as a boy when examining his father’s hand, by then healed – to the extent it ever could be. In his youthful innocence he had felt no sense of revulsion, but now, as an adult, having learned to fear what is abnormal and faced with the sight of mangled bone and sinew through smeared blood, he felt nausea.

But through it, he was still alert enough to wonder why Kyesha was making such a point of showing the wounds to him. They were a message for his father surely, who understood their meaning, where Dmitry could only speculate. Then it dawned on him. Was he too to be initiated that night? Would his own two fingers be joining Kyesha’s down there on the altar steps? Pinned as he was against the wall, he would be unable to resist, but his father would protect him – he would never stand by and allow such an act to be perpetrated on his son. Or would he? Freemasons were usually more than keen that their sons should join the fraternity. Aleksei
carried his scars with pride – mightn’t he want the same for his son? He had learned that the pain was something that could be endured. Didn’t the Jewish father happily watch as his baby son was physically marked out as one of the faithful, however cruel the ceremony might seem to outsiders?

But there was a difference between Dmitry and his father. Even when he had them, had Aleksei made any real use of those two fingers on his left hand? Had he spent hours a day practising trills in the bass, so that with those two fingers he had the dexterity and control most men would only dream of possessing with ten? For Aleksei, the loss was an inconvenience, but for Dmitry, it might almost be better to have his tongue cut out.

But Kyesha made no further move to approach Dmitry. He simply stood there, holding his hand up beside him, its three fingers stretched out in a bloody variant of the Polish salute. The stumps of his missing fingers wiggled slightly with involuntary movement; Dmitry had not noticed before, but almost the entire bottom of both fingers, below the second knuckle, remained in place.

No. Dmitry
had
noticed. He’d more than noticed, he’d felt it. As he’d watched the iron plate bury itself right into the third knuckle of Kyesha’s fingers, he’d felt in his own hand an echo of what he imagined Kyesha must feel as the blade insinuated itself between the two bones, breaking neither but instead snapping the sinews as it forced them apart. Dmitry glanced down to where the severed fingers lay. It was clear enough, even in the candlelight; all three bones of each finger were there in their entirety. He looked back at Kyesha’s hand. It didn’t add up. If those fingers could somehow be reattached to the stumps that remained, then the whole hand would be quite out of proportion – the last two fingers stretching out like elongated talons. Dmitry would have spotted the deformity as soon as he set eyes on Kyesha. And besides, Kyesha would also have required a total of four knuckle joints on each finger, since it was now clear to see that two joints still remained attached to his hand.

Dmitry comprehended at last what he was seeing. Kyesha’s fingers were regrowing. Each time Dmitry looked there was some slight change, but now he stared continuously, and the miracle – there was no other word for it – played out before his eyes. It was the skeleton that led the way, advancing fractionally ahead of the flesh and skin which wrapped itself along the straight length of the bone. The growth was quite fast, but slowed at the more intricate joints. The little finger was completed first, its tip arcing over the clean white bone to produce a nailless pink dome. Then, the nail emerged, the skin around it receding like a wave slipping back down the beach. The ring finger was almost complete too. Its nail popped out in the same way, and Kyesha flexed his fingers as though to check that everything was working. There were no marks or scars to show what had happened, only the drying blood that spotted his palm – that and the two dead fingers that lay in front of the Beautiful Gate.

Dmitry glanced at Kyesha’s face. There was the hint of a smile on it, but still that same suggestion of irritation, that all this was a distraction from what he was really trying to achieve. Kyesha turned back to Aleksei.

‘I won’t hold this against you, Aleksei Ivanovich,’ he said, bending over, without taking his eyes off Aleksei, to pick his now surplus fingers from the step and slip them into his pocket. ‘You are exactly the man I expected you to be.’ He gave a brief, informal salute, before adding, ‘Until tomorrow.’

He turned back to the iconostasis and flung himself upwards towards it. His leap took him not very much higher than Dmitry himself might have managed, but having reached that height he clung to the vertical surface in a way no human could. He gripped the ridges that delineated the various icons and used them to ascend the wooden panels. He was soon at the top, on a small platform where he could comfortably stand. But from there, there was nowhere for him to go. His last words had sounded like a farewell, but his actions did not reflect the notion. Above him now were only the walls of the tented tower, vertical at first, but
soon to slope inward, with few variations upon which a climber would find any purchase.

It was no obstacle to Kyesha. He climbed quickly up the vertical, then hung out above them from the inside of the sloping tent without any slackening of pace. How he managed to hold on, Dmitry could not tell.

Aleksei dashed over to his son and pulled out the sword restraining him with a single tug. As Dmitry dropped to the floor, his legs only just reacting in time to keep him upright, they heard the shattering of glass from above and looked to see Kyesha disappearing outside through one of the tower’s small windows.

‘Quick!’ shouted Aleksei. He handed Dmitry his sword and raced out of the chapel. Dmitry followed him through the cathedral’s narrow passageways, almost losing sight of him in the darkness. A flight of steps led them down to ground level, to the entrance through which he had stealthily followed Kyesha and his father earlier that evening, and out into Red Square. Aleksei walked backwards away from the building, gazing up at the brightly coloured domes, bland now with only the starlight to illuminate them. ‘Go that way,’ he snapped, pointing to the right.

Dmitry obeyed, circling the church anti-clockwise as his father went clockwise, in much the same way they had stalked Kyesha along the gallery inside. His eyes never left the towers. At one moment he thought he glimpsed the movement of a figure leaping from one to another, but then it was gone. He was almost at the point where he expected to reencounter his father on the far side of the cathedral when he heard the sound of feet landing on the ground. He looked and saw Kyesha running away to the east – the cover of buildings was closest in that direction.

‘Papa!’ shouted Dmitry, but even as he did he saw the figure of his father emerging from the other side of the building and dashing across the square in pursuit. Dmitry joined the hunt and was soon only a few paces behind his father, but not long after, Aleksei slowed to a halt, breathing heavily and looking in all directions for any sign of Kyesha.

‘He’s gone,’ said Dmitry.

‘He’ll be back,’ replied his father, panting.

Dmitry paused. He had not had a moment to think since they had been inside Saint Vasiliy’s, but now there was only one question on his mind.

‘What
is
he?’ Dmitry had seen enough to know that this was the correct formulation for the question. Not ‘How did he do that?’ or even ‘Did I really see it?’ He had seen it, and what he had seen was beyond his understanding. He had entered the world of folklore – a world his father had always been so keen to reject, and one with which he now seemed intimately acquainted.

Aleksei turned to face his son. His body appeared to straighten and grow a little taller, reminding Dmitry of the father of his youth. He raised his hand and held it to his son’s cheek. His lips parted as if about to speak and he seemed to look beyond Dmitry into another world.

But he said nothing. His hand dropped to his side and he walked briskly away. Dmitry trotted to catch him up, but Aleksei was walking at a phenomenal pace. Dmitry almost had to run to keep up with him.

‘Papa, tell me!’ he insisted, but to no avail. Aleksei said nothing more on the matter that night.