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By Root 544 0

then found work in the sulphuric acid factories and had trained himself as a chemist, quickly joining the thriving anarcho-communist movement. He had been part, he said proudly, of the most radical group of them all, the Chernoye Znamya—the Black Banner. They were the ones who put the Baku in Bakunin, he said with a roar of laughter, though Gabriel supposed it was hardly the first time he had cracked that joke. The Black Banner had started by murdering some strike-breaking capitalists but had soon diversified their activities to include holds-up and “ex’s” (expropriations, Gabriel understood), attacking armouries and police stations, dynamiting restaurants and factories, shooting on sight or fighting in pitched battle the pharaohs—as they called the police—and detectives. They were, Mugrabin explained, bezmotivny, motiveless terrorists, exercising violence for violence’s sake, just to purify the old world in the flames. “It was a great life. You would need a considerable amount of alcohol to imitate the intoxication of walking around with dynamite in your pockets, the detonator clicking as you walk.”

Which was how, as it turned out, Mugrabin had exploded in his room one day, while heating mercury fulminate to make a blasting cap. A good portion of him had gone to Heaven or Hell; he would never know. What was left was cared for in a hospital he then managed to escape from. Death could well be the sister of Liberty, but for all his courting of the first, Mugrabin had eloped with the second, younger one. But for the honeymoon he’d had to flee Russia. Baku was done with, anyway. Anarchy was not on the front page anymore. The suppression of the 1905 revolution had taken its toll, and now all the rage was about Tartars massacring Armenians in racial riots. The vandalized Bibi Eybat oil wells burned non-stop in the night, in true Zoroastrian fashion. He regretted that he had not done it.

It was his luck that Doukhobors were at the time leaving the country for Canada in massive numbers, on a trip that was partly funded by Tolstoy’s royalties. Relatives of Mugrabin and men from the Anarchist Red Cross smuggled him aboard one of the ships. He eventually found himself in the Good Spirit Lake colony (its real name was Devil’s Lake, but this clearly would not do) located in Canada’s Northwest Territories, in a village that bore the same name as his childhood home and looked uncannily like it.

He eventually emigrated with others to a place called Brilliant in British Columbia, where Doukhobors soon started to disagree over their degree of assimilation and their faithfulness to the old cause. Of course, Mugrabin joined the most radical branch, the Svobodniki, or Freedomites, though the sight of his scarred, sewn-up body during the naked protests they favoured did not always uplift the demonstrators. He came in handier when, at his own incenting, the Svobodniki turned to arson and bombing, destroying schools and transportation systems but also their own properties and money, all of this done in the nude. “Burning Money is truly exhilarating. And burning it naked is quite Edenic,” explained Mugrabin happily. “If you really want to drive people crazy, you should try it. Guaranteed or the ashes of your money back.” Mugrabin was in a good humour now. Obviously, his mood swings worked on a ten-second cycle.

The Canadian authorities got tired of his antics and he soon had to seek other, even less benevolent, climes. How he arrived in New Venice he would not exactly reveal, but he maintained he had found a home here, though not in the Novo-Arkhangelsk district, which was swarming with Bolshevik flies. It was a moral home, rather.

“The Eskimos. They remind me of us. The equality, how they share everything. This is how human beings should live, don’t you think? The True Community. I should really like to meet the author of this book.”

If Gabriel had been not unpleasantly lulled so far, this slapped him awake. His suspicion that Mugrabin was another policemen in (black) sheep’s clothing returned forcefully. The story was too good to be true,