Truth and Fear

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In the debatable borderland between night and day, the city of Mirgorod softens. A greyness that is not yet dawn settles on rooftops and gathers in wide empty avenues and squares. Yellow lamp-lit windows grow bleak and drab. Things move in the city, but surreptitiously, in the margins, with a muted, echoless quietness of speech. Mud-footed night-shapes pad away down alleys. A boatman winces at the raw gunning of his barge engine. A waiter eases the iron shutters of the Restaurant Hotel Aikhenvald carefully open so they will not clatter.

Low on the city’s eastern horizon, a gap opens in the growing milky bruise of morning and a surprising sliver of sun, a solar squint, spills watery light. The River Mir that has flowed black through the night kindles suddenly to a wide and wind-scuffed green. An exhalation of water vapour, too thin to be called a mist, rises off the surface. The breath of the river quickens and stirs, and on its island between the Mir and the Yekaterina Canal, moored against the embankment of the Square of the Piteous Angel, the Lodka condenses out of the subsiding night, blacker and blacker against the green-tinged yellowing sky. Its cliff-dark walls seem to belly outwards like the sides of a momentous swollen vessel. The jumbled geometry of its roofscape is forested with a hundred flagpoles, and from every pole a red flag edged with black hangs at half mast, draped and inert. Banners hang limply from parapets and window ledges: repetitious, identical fabrics of blood and black, the officious, unwavering, requiring stare of collective mourning.

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