The Porcupine (2 page)

Those inside the demonstration could distinguish from nearby the different notes that were being struck: the dead, dully echoing sound of aluminium on aluminium, the higher, more martial cry of wood on aluminium, the surprisingly light mess-time call of wood on iron, and the heavy, road-mending sound of aluminium upon iron. The noise grew fat, and huddled over the women as they set off, a noise none in the city had ever heard before, one made more potent by its strangeness and lack of rhythm; it was insistent, oppressive, sharper than mourning. A group of young men at the first corner shouted obscenities and raised stiff forearms; but the grand clatter reduced them to hopeless fish-mouths, and their insults reached no further than the jaundiced burn of their street-lamp.

The organisers had expected at most a few hundred women from the Metalurg complex. But the rampant noise which followed the glinting curves of Tramway 8 came from several thousand: from Youth and Hope and Friendship, from Red Star, Gagarin and Future Victory, even from Lenin and Red Army. Those with candles held them in the socket of their
thumb, with their fingers gripping the cooking pot or frying pan they had brought; and when the spoon or ladle held in the other hand came down upon the pan the flame of the candle shivered and grease sprayed over their sleeves. They carried no banners and shouted no slogans: that was what men did. They offered instead a battery of metallic noise and a sunflower field of yellow faces lit by candles which jumped at every drum stroke.

The women came out of Stanov Street and into the Square of the People, where the damp cobbles mocked them like a vast tray of shiny buns. They reached the squat, bomb-proof Mausoleum which held the embalmed corpse of the First Leader; but the demonstration did not pause there, nor did its volume of sound increase. It crossed the square in front of the Archaeological Museum, boldly skirted the requisitioned Office of State Security, where the old man strained and smiled and inched his foot against the white line, then rounded the elegant neo-classical palace which until recently had been the headquarters of the Communist Party. Several windows on the ground floor were now filled in with hardboard, and at the angle of the building an act of enthusiastic if minor arson had left a spreading swipe of black from the second to the seventh floor. But the women did not pause even here, except for some of them to spit – a practice which had begun cautiously a year or so ago, became a national necessity for a while so that the fire brigade would be called to hose down the cobbles at the end of each day, but which now had begun to decline in popularity. Even so, enough women chose to express their contempt for the Socialist (formerly Communist) Party to make those at the back skid on the spumed stones.

The steady domestic noise, the sound of national keening
and empty stomachs, passed the Sheraton Hotel, where the rich foreigners stayed; some of the guests stood expectantly at their windows, holding the candles they had been advised to bring, candles of a better quality than those in the street below. When they understood the cause of the protest, some drew back into their rooms, reflecting on the food they had idly left on their plates at breakfast: small cubes of local white cheese, a couple of olives, half an apple, a teabag used only once. The memory of their unthinking profligacy set off a brief match-flare of guilt.

The women now had only a short way to go until they reached the parliament building, where they expected to be stopped by militiamen. But the soldiers, daunted by the advancing noise, had already retreated behind the large iron gates, which they had locked, leaving outside only two of their number, one in each sentry-box. The guards were young conscripts from the eastern province, with brutally fresh haircuts and limited political understanding; each held a sub-machine gun horizontally across his chest and gazed sternly above the women’s heads as if contemplating a distant ideal.

But the women in turn ignored the soldiers. They had not come for an exchange of insults, for provocation and the lick of martyrdom. They halted a dozen yards before the sentry-boxes, and those behind did not press dangerously forward. Such discipline contrasted with the thunderous cacophony they produced, a beating, throbbing, dinning, hungry sound which reached its full density as the last protesters packed into the square. The noise eased through the railings in front of the parliament building, stalked up the broad steps and battered down the gilded double doors. It respected no procedural laws or rules of debate as it clattered into the
Chamber of Deputies, imposing itself upon a discussion of land reform and forcing a representative of the Peasants’ Agricultural Party to abandon his speech and return to his desk. The deputies were brightly lit, thanks to their emergency power supply, and for the first time embarrassed by their visibility; they sat in silence, occasionally glancing at one another and shrugging as the enormous protest, which contained no words but every argument, invaded the place where they worked. Outside the women beat their spoons and ladles on cooking pots and frying pans, wood on aluminium, wood on iron, aluminium on iron, aluminium upon itself. The candles had burnt down and the wax now splashed hotly on the thumbs that gripped them, but the noise and the flickering lights continued. There was no decline into words, for they had heard nothing but words and words and words – inedible, indigestible words – for months and months and months. They spoke with metal, though not with the metal that usually spoke on such occasions, the metal that left martyrs. They spoke without words, they argued, bellowed, demanded and reasoned without words, they pleaded and wept without words. They did so for an hour, and then, at eight o’clock, as if by a secret signal, they began to leave the square in front of the parliament building. They did not stop their noise, however; instead, the great hump of sound shook itself like an ox climbing to its feet. Then the protesters began to disperse from the city centre towards the apartment complexes beyond the boulevards: back to Metalurg and Gagarin, Red Star and Future Victory. The noise jangled down the broader avenues, clinked into alleyways, diminishing as it went; occasionally, at street corners, it would bang into itself again, startled and tinny, like a pair of cheap cymbals.

The old man on the sixth floor of the requisitioned Office of State Security was now at his deal table, eating a pork chop and reading that morning’s
Truth
. He heard a segment of din coming back towards him from the direction of the Socialist (formerly Communist) Party headquarters. He stopped eating to note its clattering approach, its inchoate climax, its leaking departure. The old man’s face was fully lit by the desk lamp. The militiaman on duty three metres away assumed that Stoyo Petkanov was smiling at a cartoon in the newspaper.

Peter Solinsky and his wife Maria lived in a small apartment in the Friendship complex (block 307, staircase 2) north of the boulevards. He had been offered larger accommodation when appointed Prosecutor General, but turned it down. For the moment, anyway: it hardly seemed tactful to accept any visible favour from the new government while charging its predecessor with massive abuse of privilege. Maria found this argument absurd. The Prosecutor General should not live in a law professor’s dingy three-room mouse-hole and expect his wife to use the bus. Besides, the place had almost certainly been bugged at some stage by the security police. She had had enough of their conversations and, God only knew, their occasional love-making being listened to by some thick-faced oaf in a mildewed basement.

Solinsky had ordered the apartment to be swept. The two men in short leather coats shook their heads knowingly as they unscrewed the telephone; but their small discovery did not satisfy Maria. They had probably planted it themselves in the first place, she commented. And of course there were
more: the one in the telephone was the sort you were intended to find and then imagine you were safe. But there would always be somebody interested in knowing what the Prosecutor General talked about when he got home from the office. In which case, Peter had argued, any new apartment we move into will probably have the very latest equipment installed, so what advantage would that be?

However, there was another reason why Peter Solinsky preferred to stay where he had lived for the last nine years. The windows of the even-numbered apartments of their block faced north, towards a low range of hills which according to military theorists had formed a useful defence against the Dacians when the city had been founded a couple of millennia ago. On the nearest eminence, which Peter could just make out above a layer of thickened and slowly churning air, stood the Statue of Eternal Gratitude to the Liberating Red Army. A heroic bronze soldier, left foot advancing steadfastly, head fixed nobly high, and higher still a brandished rifle with sparkling bayonet. Around the plinth bronze machine-gunners in bas-relief defended their position with principled ferocity.

Solinsky had visited the statue often as a child, when his father had still been favoured. A plump and serious boy in his starched Red Pioneer’s uniform, he would always be roused by the ritual on Liberation Day, as on the Day of the October Revolution, and the Day of the Soviet Army. The brass band, gleaming more brightly than the bronze bayonet prodding the sky, disgorged its sombre music. The Soviet Ambassador and the Commander of the Fraternal Soviet Forces laid wreaths as big as tractor tyres, and were followed by the President and the Head of the Patriotic Defence Forces; then all four retreated together, shoulder to shoulder
awkwardly, as if fearing a sudden step behind them. Each year Peter had felt flattered and grown-up; each year he had believed more headily in solidarity between the socialist nations, in their progress, in their inevitable, scientific victory.

Until a few years ago, couples on their wedding day often made a pilgrimage to Alyosha, as he was known; they would stand beneath him, all tears and roses, overcome by the grave momentary connection between the personal and the historic. In recent years, this habit had died away, until the only visitors, except on specific days of celebration, were Russian tourists. Perhaps, as they dropped a few flowers on the plinth, they felt virtuous, imagining the gratitude of the liberated nations.

The morning and evening sun spotlit the distant Alyosha for the city. Peter Solinsky liked to sit at his small desk by the window and wait until he sensed a tremor of light on the soldier’s bayonet. Then he would look up and think: that’s what has been stuck in the guts of my country for nearly fifty years. Now it was his job to help pull it out.

The accused in Criminal Law Case Number 1 had been informed that a preliminary meeting with Prosecutor General Solinsky would take place at ten o’clock. Stoyo Petkanov was therefore awake at six, preparing his tactics and his demands. It was important never to yield the initiative.

That first morning of his incarceration, for instance. They had arrested him, quite illegally, without mentioning any charges, and brought him to the Office of State Security, which they had given some new bourgeois name. A senior militiaman had shown him a bed and a table, pointed out a
semicircular white line on the floor round the window, and then handed him some confetti. That, at any rate, was how he had thought of it, and how he had treated it.

‘What is this?’ he had asked, tossing the sheets of coloured tickets on to the table.

‘Those are your ration coupons.’

‘So, you are kindly permitting me to go out and queue up?’

‘Prosecutor General Solinsky has decided that since you are now an ordinary citizen you will naturally be subject to the temporary stringencies which all ordinary citizens are undergoing.’

‘I see … So, what exactly must I do?’ Petkanov enquired, in a facsimile of senile submission. ‘What am I allowed?’

‘These are your coupons for cheese, these for yellow cheese, these for flour.’ The soldier helpfully picked through the various sheets. ‘Butter, bread, eggs, meat, cooking oil, washing-powder, petrol …’

‘I shall not, I imagine, be needing the petrol.’ Petkanov gave a chuckle which invited complicity. ‘Perhaps you might …?’ But the officer was already shrinking away. ‘No, I understand. And they would only add a charge of attempting to bribe a member of the Patriotic Defence Forces, wouldn’t they?’