City of Ghosts by Ben Creed (most important books of all time txt) 📕

“Life has never been better, never been more beautiful,” and thud go their heads against the wall.’

Rossel got out of the car and began to walk through the still deepening snow towards the thin line of dark pines that ringed Vronsky’s island. Behind him he could still hear the voice of his former torturer shouting, as Nikitin banged out an accompanying rhythm on the dashboard.

‘I want you to sing it to me one more time! And make sure you sing it so convincingly that Comrade Stalin himself believes it. “Life has never been better, life has never been more beautiful.” Sing it to me now . . .’

*

Wind-whipped flakes whirled around him. Whiteness blurred into whiteness. If only the whole world could wipe itself clean like this, he thought, in preparation for the creation of some other, better version of itself.

Only the thin smudge of the distant horizon and the pines on the shoreline, now about two hundred metres in front of him, punctuated his sense of abandonment – of being lost, even to himself. He had, he felt, now become a mere thought in that other malicious mind, a minor character in the plot it had devised, an inanimate stage prop, as were the bodies on the lines. He, like them, had been arranged upon a page. Orchestrated. Scribbled into the margins of a score, as Vronsky’s imagination cast him as, no doubt, a dullard detective.

Although the distance was relatively short, it took him twenty minutes to cross the ice to the middle. He stumbled twice in the drifts but picked himself up and moved forward.

At last, Rossel reached a ridge at the edge of the island and crouched behind it. He caught his breath before making another three bounds forward. Then he stepped between the dark sentries of the shoreline pines and began to make his way toward the rotunda of the old house, of which Eliasberg had had such fond childhood memories. The island was only just a kilometre across; somewhere within were its grand mansion and gardens.

The trees were twenty deep but as soon as he emerged through the last row, the dacha came into view. Its walls were stuccoed white and so, in the snow, barely perceptible, making it appear as if the golden dome of the rotunda roof was hovering high above the ground.

To his left, near the shoreline, about one hundred metres away, a huge tarpaulin. Sagging with the weight of the fresh drift, it was hung between some pines. Beneath it were some rusting petrol pumps and five trucks, three looking in very poor condition, two as if they had been recently repaired and used. Leftovers from the war, he thought. This must have been one of the many temporary filling stations set up around Lagoda to fuel vehicles before they crossed the ice; there would be a fuel pit under there somewhere. They were all ZIS-5s – that old warhorse. One was fitted with a snowplough and caterpillar tracks.

To his right, about fifty metres away and surrounded by black stumps poking through the snow – the remains of thirty or forty trees – was what seemed to be the top half of an entrance.

A door to a cellar?

Rossel reached down and took out his gun.

He walked forward, pulling down his hat to shield his face from the wind that was blowing up the long drive leading towards the rotunda, still some distance away. When he got to the door, he could see it was half submerged and surrounded by the drifting snow. The building it led into was stone and brick, and looked as if a giant had pressed it into the earth. Six steps led down to it – recently gritted. A spade and shovel rested against the door post at the bottom. The wooden door was ajar.

As he shoved the door further open, the pale winter light showed a deep interior – six metres down, he reckoned, which felt deep and very cold.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was behind him and continued down the thin steps until he stood on the bottom. It was hard to make much out in the gloom. The space was obviously for storage of some kind. Forage, perhaps? No, ice – ice for the summer, cut from the lake in winter and packed in straw for insulation. But during the war anything could have been stored here – fuel, weapons, spare parts for the trucks that crossed the Road of Life . . .

The space was about five metres long and the same wide. He looked up to see frost glittering on the ceiling. The walls were for the most part unmarked but here and there he could see traces of faded graffiti. He took out his lighter to read it.

Hitler kaput, Sokolov was here. After Leningrad, onward to Berlin! Masha, I love you.

There were six small alcoves cut into the walls at about waist-height. Rossel thought he could see more clearly into one of them than the rest – the one in the right-hand corner, furthest from the door. He bent down, listening, but there was only silence. He crept forward towards a lump of stone, almost a cube.

The source of light became evident. Two candles on top of the stone. Rossel could see what looked like more graffiti. But it was different: five irregular lines carved into the stone.

And into those lines had been carved musical notes scraped. Five of them.

Rossel leant forward and traced a gloved hand over the carvings. Unbidden, the notes rose in his throat.

Fa, la, mi-bemol, si-bemol, sol . . .

F, A, E-flat, B-flat . . . G

Rossel shot to his feet, intending to race for the steps and the safety of open ground. It must have been then, he thought afterwards, that Madame Vronsky’s Cossack bodyguard hit him.

41

The sound seemed to be coming from somewhere distant. Out on the very edge of consciousness. Not from one point. But everywhere.

Now the noise changed in pitch.