Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [51]
Some automated part of Gabriel actually went there and prepared two cups of coffee. When he came back to the living room, Mugrabin had found the liquor bar and was drinking vodka directly from the bottle.
“Nothing like a drop of it in the coffee!” he hollered, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
Gabriel handed a cup to Mugrabin, noticing he was missing the last two fingers on his gloved right hand.
“Little accident,” Mugrabin explained, knocking his right eye with the spoon, so that Gabriel could hear the little dull glassy thud it made. “I also have metal pins all along my right leg. And a brass plate in my skull.” He took off his hat and bowed. His sparse fair hair was combed across his head but Gabriel could see more of the plate that he wanted to. Mugrabin knocked on that with the spoon as well. “Very uncomfortable here. Because of the frost. But these things can happen when you’re a chemist.”
Then, suddenly, he shifted to a more serious mood:
“Suffering, Mr. d’Allier, is part of the cause. We suffer in our flesh to pay for the pain we inflict on the enemies of mankind.”
“Who sends you?” Gabriel managed to ask between two yawns.
“My story is a rather long one,” said Mugrabin, as if that answered the question. “You care for a cigarette?”
Gabriel craned his neck, trying to decipher the Cyrillic lettering on the packet.
“Lacto,” said Mugrabin, squeezing the cardboard tip before putting it in his mouth. “Hard to find here, believe me,” he added as he helped himself with one-handed dexterity from a matchbox that bore a drawing of a revolver.
Gabriel declined (his code of honour forbade him to deprive a man of cigarettes that were “hard to find”), but Mugrabin went on to savour his silently for a long time, his good eye lazily following the smoke as it drifted across the room, while his host sat through what he had decided was a nightmare.
“We have to kill to put an end to all killing,” Mugrabin said dreamily, as if talking to himself. He nodded his head, lost in thought, as if it were a particularly worthy piece of wisdom that he had just proffered.
“I lost my faith before I lost my virginity,” he kept on, for reasons that eluded Gabriel. “I suppose it’s the same thing anyway.”
He rambled on. Between narcoleptic fits, Gabriel vaguely heard, as a hum, Mugrabin’s story as it unrolled its slimy meanderings. As was to be expected from a man with a supposedly long habit of clandestinity and false identity, his outpouring soon took on the proportions of a flood.
From what Gabriel could piece together, he understood that Mugrabin had been born among Doukhobors (“spirit-wrestlers,” as Mugrabin translated it), a community of egalitarian peasants who rejected any secular or spiritual authority except for the Bible. Mugrabin’s people lived in the Ganja protectorate, somewhere in Transcaucasia. Such radical Christians are always especially abhorrent to their lukewarm, mainstream coreligionists, and the Doukhobors were duly persecuted, but they refused to use violence even to defend themselves, and as a way of resisting the temptation to do so had destroyed all their weapons. “When I saw my parents take a beating from a sotnia of Cossacks,” explained Mugrabin, “I totally lost any respect I had for them. From that day onward I was finished with family and any kind of authority.”
He had fled to Baku, the nearest capital, a desolate, dusty, dreary jumble of derricks and minarets, of European streets, Persian bazaars, Tartar slums and wastelands—one of the most god-forsaken and violent cities in the world. “There’s a place there, not far from the city, Ateshgyakh, it’s called. It looks like a fort, but is a Zoroastrian temple. An eternal flame burns from the ground right in the middle of it. This is where I pledged myself to destruction by fire,” Mugrabin said, with intensity. “A sword of flame may defend Eden. A sword of flame will regain it,” he added, not without grandeur, and something in Gabriel—but he was tired—refused to find that as ridiculous as it was.
Mugrabin had