Krylov preferred not to recall the event that had provoked their divorce four years before. Although it had not led to a final split: their relationship persevered and during their infrequent intimacy Tamara would do everything she could to make time disappear. There was nothing left to do but separate. Krylov had to have a separation from Tamara. The private event, which no one had recognized or witnessed, was for him more real than the memorable appearance before the district judge, who divorced them behind closed doors, time and again confusing Krylov with Tamara’s very proper bodyguard, who was pruned like a hedgerow.
But Krylov did not have the freedom to put an end to what related only to the past. Having his own money promised him freedom and the right to be in charge of himself. Up until recently, Krylov hadn’t known what exactly to do: leave Tamara forever, giving her in parting some neutral, very expensive gift; or arm himself with a bouquet of her favorite pink roses, as heavy as apples, and arrive in full dress to ask for her hand. Now, of course, his choice had been made—or rather, there was no choice left.
Had it not been for Tamara’s existence, Krylov might have considered his relationship with Tanya a continuation of his one continuous life. But there had been Tamara, and life had to be split into two unequal parts: he had to finish one and start the other. At the same time, he couldn’t know which of the parts would end up bigger and which more important. This obvious inequality held a secret, perhaps the most important in Krylov’s fate.
2
THE RIPHEAN MOUNTAINS, WINDSWEPT AND BLANKETED BY SMOKE that passes through hundreds of gradations of gray, look like decorative park ruins. There’s nothing left for a painter to do amid this ready-made lithic beauty. Every landscape, no matter where you look, already has its composition and basic colors, a characteristic correlation of parts that combine into a simple and recognizable Riphean logo. The picturesqueness of the Riphean Mountains seems intentional. Horizontals of gray boulders green with lichen and softened by slippery pillows of rusty needles are intersected by verticals of pines huddled in tight groups, and like everything in the landscape, they elude simplistic uniformity; overall it seems to have been constructed according to the laws of the classic opera stage, with its unwieldy sets and choristers facing the stalls. The Riphean waters are also distributed for picturesque effect. Some streams, poisoned by industry, have the workaday appearance of a pipeline accident, but others have retained the architect’s intent. Their banks, as a rule, are cliffs; the dark and fissured layers of slate look like stacks of printing spoilage whose dark layers probably contain illustrations; the pink-spotted cliffs seem stuck with pieces of cellophane, and their pebbles, which retain as one the idea of a cube, pour abundantly from the fissures. Each bend in a stream reveals new likenesses of what was just seen, which is why the banks seem to be moving rather than the water, which itself seems to be straining to retain the reflection of the sky and the silvered clouds.
The sky reflected in Riphean waters is much bluer than it is in reality because of the summer’s northern chill, which even on hot days can make itself felt in a gust of wind in the vicinity of the deeply frozen bedrock. Gentle lizards bask on heat-retaining outcrops of gold-laden quartz; these are the Riphean’s friends, living pointers to subterranean riches. The same is true of the tiny dark vipers that rest among the rocks in glistening ringlets; at the slightest disturbance one will tense like an arrow laid against a bow-string, but usually they slither away peaceably into a stone fissure, leaving behind a light rustling in the bitter green grass.
The lakes in the Riphean Mountains are numerous and huge. Their large, amazingly empty, glassy surfaces serve as a mirror not so much for material objects as for the weather. The slightest changes in the atmosphere are reflected as incorporeal images having no counterpart on shore, melting into dark oil and becoming solid at some indeterminate point. Often you can’t see the boundary between water and land. Sometimes atmospheric specters are not just reflected but seen above the lake surface quite distinctly. This Martian television is best observed from high up, where the boats near the cottage shore look like seed husks. Some lakes are stunningly clear: at a perfectly still midday, the sun-net on the sloping bottom achieves the perfection of gilt on porcelain; the fisherman in his sun-warmed flatboat, smelling of fisherman’s stew, sees the distant clump of bait and the dark backs of the big perch through his own shadow.
In the Ripheans’ bountiful southern reaches, where the homely forest strawberry, whose fruit looks like nodules but is amazingly aromatic, grows and the garden strawberry sometimes gets as big as a carrot, the lakes take up even more of the beautiful space. Looking down, you can’t always tell what you’re seeing more of, water or land; they envelop, blend into each other. There are islands all over; one, like a cup, will hold another irregular oval of shining water, though this is not a part of the mother water world but its own internal lake, fed by its own springs, and inside it is yet another little island: a decorative cliff with a scattering of pebbles, like a broken piggy bank. From a cliff leading to the edge of a neck of land, circles of water, land, and stone seem once again to spread out over the entire expanse; the place erases the boundary and distinction between the named geographical location and the unnamed object, like the burly birch on the tiniest island whose stiff little leaves shimmer in the wind as if it were adorned—to supplement its own weeping mane—with tinsel-rain.
The Riphean range is in one of those enigmatic regions where the landscape directly affects people’s minds. For the true Riphean, the land is rock, not soil. Here, he is the possessor of a profound—in the literal and figurative sense of the word—geologically grounded truth. At the same time his land is also fruitful. Just as the inhabitant of Central Russia goes out “into nature” to pick berries and mushrooms, so the Riphean drives his old jalopy out looking for gems; to him, a place without deposits and veins makes no sense. Far from everyone who grows up in the Riphean range later joins the community of rock hounds—unlicensed prospectors who, while having other professions, often intellectual ones, in town, structure their budgets around their illegal endeavors, which grow into a passion. However, virtually every Riphean schoolboy goes through a collecting phase; it’s the rare family whose attic isn’t strewn with fused cobbles and malachite scales covered with black oxides, quartz druses that look like the city’s spring ice, and polished chips of all the common gemstones.
Meanwhile, the Ripheans’ subterranean riches are not what they once were. Everywhere they go on the territory of known deposits, professional rock hounds and even ordinary tourists stumble across old mining pits. These might be flat holes long since grown over with wet bracken and made impassible by woolly-leaved wild raspberries; only the experienced eye would discern prospecting holes that date back to his great-grandfathers’ day. Sometimes a hole in the ground that looks like an old man’s toothless, sunken mouth leads the prospector to a mine from the century before last that looks like a low buried hut half crushed by a rock: cold larch braces flaking with dead, time-eaten splints, varnished on top with soot from the torches that stole the miners’ sweet subterranean oxygen, and noises that emanate from the darkness exactly as if someone were scuffling over the damp grainy stone. Sometimes the mine is located not in a remote mountain corner but on the edge of a potato field where a small tractor jolts around. It’s a common occurrence: from the substrate leading to the prosaic collective gardens, another diverges, fainter, and quickly climbs the slope, and from the slope the view opens out onto an old surface mine that surrounds, bezel-like, a strangely harmonious volume of air, like a tear of emptiness. You can’t tell right away that the surface mine is filled to a certain level with water. You can’t see the water. The reflection of the quartz walls, one of them burning in the hot noonday and the other icy, is so detailed and perfect that your eye doesn’t catch where the real cliff leaves off and its reflection begins. This marvelous symmetry is accomplished by the mirrored image of the reflected sky with the dots of birches leaning into
it. You have to descend into the surface mine down a well-trodden, rustling path, one hand touching the wall that rises by your temple; sometimes a flat pink stone comes out in your hand like a book from a shelf, and when you throw it down, a raw, piping sound leaps up. Only from the fat watery circles do you discover where you shouldn’t step; the water, like clay on a potter’s wheel, does seem to be trying to turn into a vessel. But it doesn’t. Slowly, after an almost endlessly long time, the disturbed perfection is restored—and suddenly the moment comes when the water disappears again right at your feet. Once again the viewer is left facing a stunning emptiness where the mountain was taken out. The sunny wall, amazingly vivid and finely detailed, seems lit from below by powerful electricity, and its sugar vein sparks.
Virtually everything that could be extracted from the top has been. The Ripheans’ surface has been played out. The same can be said of the surface of the Ripheans’ beauty. The nature logos that make it so easy to assemble the components of a recognizable landscape on canvas have always encouraged amateur rather than professional painters. Realism, be it a method of art or, more broadly, a way of thinking, has here been a characteristic of fundamentally superficial people, well-intentioned dilettantes who take the use of ready-made forms for a type of patriotism. In this sense, the Ripheans have been cunning. From the very beginning, there has been all the ready-made material you could ask for. As a result, a specific stratum of artists, poet-songwriters, collectors, and ethnologists formed who were seized by splendid impulses. These serious-minded fellows, who were old by the time they were thirty, who wore the ubiquitous sardine-gray jacket and carried various membership cards in their inside pockets, had the vague feeling something was expected of them by all this stone and industrial might, the loaded sky above it that kept transporting tons and tons of clouds without end—but they never got past the surface, which seemed to satisfy the demand for artistry and Riphean originality.
When an ecological crisis came that was as real as could be, it became clear that the true Riphean’s thinking was fantastic thinking. The farther from the soil, the better! It turned out that an anchorite living in Lower Talda and studying Sanskrit expressed the essence of his little homeland more accurately than the peony-ruddy composer of songs for folk chorus. At exhibits of new artists who had ascended to the astral heights of modernism, the perpetual Riphean’s darkened, heavy strokes disappeared from their painting for the first time, and the painting was purged; as a consequence, the new rich, who knew very little about it but were childishly drawn to clear colors, eagerly purchased their compositions, which looked like board games, drawn puzzles, and assemblages of young people’s electronic toys. This outburst of unpatriotic, demonstratively un-local art in fact expressed a purely local quality of mind whereby the Riphean, being down-to-earth, simultaneously thought of himself as someone else.
At the same time, the authorities, who were clueless, kept up official encouragement of ethnographers and folk collectives. They saw progress in matching a scenic peasant chorister with the conventional Orthodoxy that befit him. The ardent tenor in the silk tunic really was hard to swallow; he looked too much like a Young Communist. The transference of sacred notions from the factory to the temple was a better fit with his elegant artificial world festooned with rowans and dahlias. The stage-gentlemen officers with guitars, too, felt better and even strode toward life, marching through the rust-colored cube of the city’s commercial center in groups of ten or twelve. There was a return to roots observed everywhere. Young fathers with soft beards decorously spread on their chests drove through town in heavy black Volgas that looked like the province’s old official ones—the worse for wear, of course. The churches whose ownership had been restored reminded him with their twirling cupolas of a parade of blimps—without the advertising, of course. At the appointed time their bells pealed above the city, spilling through the air like a thin, oily stream of sound.
All this had little or nothing to do with the spiritual life of a Riphean, who did put candles in front of popular icons and during the Blessing of the Water at Epiphany readily took a dip in a moonlit ice-hole whose solid ice grabbed his wet soles like powerful glue. No matter how far from his ordinary place and life a Riphean’s intellectual interests might stray (many rock hounds, in the licit part of their lives, worked in space research and defense), he always knew that the veins of ore and gems were the rock roots of his consciousness. The world of mountain spirits where the Riphean has always resided is a pagan world. It includes, specifically, UFOs three to fifteen meters in diameter as well as the silky green quasi-men that outsiders take for extraterrestrials. In fact, these are the locals: clever reptiles guarding semi-precious lenses.
From time to time, prospectors have caught a glimpse of the Great Snake, a subterranean reptile with the head of an old giant. Its head is bald and has dark, burnished spots; its lips are fleshy and mottled, too, and it has a broken nose the size and shape of a boot. The Great Snake travels underground as if it were underwater. Its body, stretching out in rings in front of the dumb-struck prospector, looks like a stream of thundering gravel being dumped from the back of a truck: dust rises, whitened bushes stir, and the ground turns gray in patches, forming a wrinkly trench—and it is along this trench that you should search for the alluvial and vein gold that royally fills the prospector’s ruined trousers.
Sometimes a mountain spirit is hard to tell from a human. The Stone Maiden, also known as the Mistress of the Mountain, looks nothing like the beautiful actress in the fake blue eyelashes and green headdress who represents the Mistress in local theater matinees. The Stone Maiden can appear to a rock hound in the most ordinary guise—for instance, like the middle-aged vacationing schoolteacher stained with berries, besieged by mosquitoes, and carrying a pail of cucumbers; or like the woman at the little train station’s snack bar with the starched tower of bleached hair and puffy, yearning eyes; or like the fifteen-year-old girl who has a breeze flying down the neck of her loose t-shirt as she bends over and works the pedals of her rickety bike. The Stone Maiden doesn’t keep just to the remote parts of the forest and mountains by any means. She’s no beast. She feels perfectly free to appear in the city with its four million inhabitants, which is standing without realizing it on top of mighty knobs of malachite, a kind of subterranean cabbage field, and thick gold veins in ribbed quartz.
In the narrow eddies of the urban population, the Stone Maiden is recognized only by whoever she has come to see. Suddenly, at the sight of a perfectly unremarkable woman, the rock hound’s soul is strangely magnetized. Unfamiliar features and gestures suddenly compose themselves into a dear and desired face, and to the atheist it seems as if right before his eyes, out of ordinary matter, of which there is so much in a crowd, God has created a unique and miraculous being just for him, presented him with obvious proof of man’s creation by divine sleight-of-hand.
It’s not true that the Mistress of the Mountain needs gemcutting skill from a man. In reality, she, like any woman, needs love, but it must be real love of that special and genuine composition whose formula no one has ever been given. Any feeling has shadowy parts—sometimes it’s a shadow itself. Lacking any basis for comparison or real expertise, the Stone Maiden’s chosen one feels he has been granted much more than ever before. Doubts lay intersecting wrinkles on the chosen one’s face, and the lifelines that an ordinary man sees in his palm and in some sense holds in his hand appear on his brow. The subject alternatively does and doesn’t believe in the authenticity of his own emotion; one unsettled night, when his girlfriend’s perfectly still body suddenly gets very heavy in her sleep and crushes her half of the bed, like a toppled statue, it occurs to the man that it would be easier to rip open his own belly than to open himself up and check on his own soul—at least the former is physically possible. Suicide over a happy love, over a fully reciprocated feeling, is not such a rarity in the Riphean capital. If you dig through the police files, you’ll find quite a few puzzling suicides, when the de
ceased was found with a blissful smile on his petrified lips—that is, his mouth had literally turned to mineral, a hard stone flower, an eternal adornment on his sunken face. Somewhere nearby, in an obvious spot, lined up parallel to the furniture and room, there would be a document from the deceased—his suicide note, addressed to a woman and consisting for the most part of mediocre verse.
She whom the suicide addressed would have vanished completely, as if she had fallen through the earth. Descriptions of her, related by the deceased’s family and neighbors, would prove so contradictory, it was a wonder how the powerful optics of their collective and now even greater—dislike had distorted the suspect. Subsequently at the suicide’s grave, on the tombstone on any warm day, people might see a pretty little lizard, perfectly ordinary at first glance. Only a specialist, had he been there, would have realized that the creature did not belong to any known species and would have exclaimed, “Impossible!” at the sight of the fern pattern on its back and its tiny feet, which looked like they were wearing black gloves. Many imagined they saw on its flat head the flash of a crown no bigger than a gold tooth; at any attempt to catch this rarity the lizard would first fall still, imitating the caution of the stealthy incoming hand, and then all of a sudden draw a lightning zigzag and vanish into nowhere, sometimes leaving behind for its pursuer its pointy tail revealing bare cartilage.
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