Krylov was all set to fight him for the business and out of pure rage beat up that big lug Lyokha in the boys room at school, somehow managing to jam this unzipped hulk under the sink right behind a wet pipe, where his head got stuck in an unnatural position. After they freed Lyokha’s head by pouring vegetable oil over it and his paws grabbed onto the parallel legs of the girl mathematician who’d rescued him, after he’d worked himself free, Krylov actually felt guilty at the sight of Lyokha’s tears smeared over his dirty, oily cheeks.
Lyokha wasn’t long in being avenged, though, and they made things hot for Krylov. After a chat with the unpretentious enforcers, who had managed to fit eight into a rusty Zhiguli, Krylov’s teeth were wobbly and salty for a long time, and his ribs on the right side felt like they had current running through them so that he couldn’t take a deep breath. It became perfectly clear to him that mixing with tattooed punks cost too much. The gang was a freak of nature, a genetic phenomenon, and occasionally, when he watched the tiniest residents of the courtyard banging their toys on the bench and running away in their flannel booties from their pale mothers mincing after them, Krylov would suddenly catch a glimpse of their future man—as if he were marked from birth by some secret sulkiness, a concavity in his hard forehead, the corporeal weight of his raw being.
Because of Lyokha, Krylov lost a substantial portion of his income, but he had no regrets, particularly as the romance of the supermarket, with its predictable Chinese-Turkish assortment, had lost its allure by then. On the other hand, he had other interesting occupations the thugs couldn’t touch. The thugs, whose main output was the physiological terror they produced in people, themselves went around full of that terror, like jugs, up to their ears in it, and so were incapable of pure and pointless risk.
The world was laid out for Krylov like one big amusement park. In his relations with the world he had worked out and followed his own rules of equilibrium. For instance, if some collector ripped Krylov off for a rare Soviet twenty, then Krylov, in turn, would rip off someone else, but only one someone, and not necessarily the same someone. What was important here was keeping it impersonal; the owner of a major collection of Soviet coins who looked an awful lot like and was known to all as Duremar could hang out right there, where the deals went down, but Krylov wouldn’t come near him. Instead, he would carelessly show a worn prewar lat to a snippety old lady with a puffy powdered face who looked like an owl-moth and who had shown up for no one knew what dividend, and when he’d made an unfair deal would feel perfectly satisfied. Teen Krylov didn’t want to hold on to anything extra, be it insults or the memory of all the people who had come and gone. He was like an ecologically pure contraption that returns to its environment precisely what it takes in. He thought that by maintaining this balance he was in some magical way protecting the world from collapse and preserving its substance. If someone lifted a book from his bag, he’d take one from a bookstall or the school library; if someone didn’t return the head-lamp he’d lent, he wouldn’t buy another, he’d pinch one from a subway construction worker, crawling through the gaps in the patched link fence behind which the dusty excavation site sputtered and boomed. For himself, Krylov made no distinction between the people who insulted him and the people who suffered at his hands. The “me versus everyone else” ratio was, of course, unequal, as it would be for anyone, not just a kid from the crummy projects who had the slimmest of social chances; but Krylov was not eager to admit any inequality.
In search of adventures for his own pathetic ass, teen Krylov tried to grasp the character of his new northern homeland, the essence of true Riphean-ness.
As in any Babylonian-type city, four-fifths of the capital’s population comprised newcomers, refugees, ex-convicts, and the graduates of thirty or so functioning colleges. Natives were in the minority. Given this spontaneous growth of the inhabited environment it wasn’t easy to understand what the city’s primordial territory, the expression and symbol of the Riphean spirit, actually was. Especially since the city itself originally had not been inclined to create a center. The old merchant mansions adorned with thick wrought-iron lace on front balconies the size of beds had been put up without any consideration for their neighbors’ style, as if they had no neighbors at all in fact. The city administration, experiencing a natural need for a proper center, responded by razing mansions and putting up new housing that combined the idea of a barracks and Peter the Great’s Monplaisir. The Ripheans were offered a choice of symbols: the open-air geology museum, where the big chunks of jasper flushed out by the dam looked like pieces of stone meat shot through with quartz veins; a life-size model of a locomotive, invented here, that looked like a meat grinder; or the monument to the city’s two founders, who stood in their stony German garb, their identical polished faces turned toward the black dam tunnel and waterfall, above which some hotshot, one of the ones who liked to dangle his legs over the abyss, had written in bright white waterproof paint, “There is no God.”
In reality, the true symbol and expression of the Riphean spirit was the bluish Toadstool that loomed over the city, the largest of those irrational phenomena that seemed to have come about purely to arouse the Ripheans’ principal instinct, which you might say was the instinct to climb something just because it was there, to conquer what you weren’t supposed to, or, even better, were forbidden to. The Riphean’s world was patently nonhorizontal and in this sense like an insect’s. The Toadstool was their cult, and for the town’s teens, it was an ant trail to heaven. The grown-ups could climb their 8,000-meter Himalayas, organize international (with only melancholy Finns participating) competitions for climbing the red sausage-like Riphean pines, and schedule crazy rallies over forest roads, which were nothing but raw steepness with boulders jutting out, and winter motorcycle races down the frozen river, which involved scooting nimbly under the vaults of the Tsar Bridge. Though what they were doing was much worthier of punks, the grown-up Ripheans nonetheless took it quite seriously, maybe because they held on inside to something solid, some cold, crystalline filler. Teen Krylov figured out early on that a true Riphean’s soul possesses the quality of transparency: you could see straight through it but never get inside.
Soon he had a similar formation in his own chest that consisted of tiny spots and fissures of insult from his earliest childhood that he could no longer return to his environment. Krylov learned that when something irreparable happens, then at first it’s interesting, like finding yourself in a movie. That’s how it was when his father drank his boss’s whiskey and drove the Mercedes into a silly but solid billboard. He was trapped by the air bags and got off with literally a scratch, whereas his boss had half his skull ripped off by a post that rammed through the car. Although the accident was the fault of a Moskvich that was never found and that skidded and clipped a line of cars (there were plenty of reckless drivers among ordinary engineers driving rusty old wrecks, not only among the new rich, on the Riphean roads), his father, as a consequence of the deceased’s stature and the alcohol he’d drunk, was put behind bars. Krylov saw him for the last time in the courtroom and fixed in his memory his small, focused eyebrows and his patient pose of an ice fisherman. After that his father went away in a convoy and never came back, honestly serving out his four years but, like many in his situation, making his escape from reality.
The splendid Toadstool’s dramatic demise made a much bigger impression on Krylov. Despite the special qualities of the reinforced concrete used in it, the 400-meter tower had deteriorated so badly as to be unsafe. Meanwhile, there was absolutely nowhere to drop it. During the years the Toadstool had adorned the low Riphean skies, around it were built, first, your standard nine-story apartment blocs and then prestigious housing complexes, and on the most dangerous, almost always windy side, there was a shopping mall that looked like a giant paradisiacal greenhouse. Delay threatened calamity, though, such as the Russian Emergency Administration had never seen. One fine summer noted for its mighty white rains, which rumbled in the d
rain pipes like anchor chains, the municipal administration summoned the will and the means and gave the go-ahead. Naturally, the Toadstool remained standing over the city all the next winter, sparkling like sugar and leading Ripheans into temptation to climb it with amateur radio equipment and drag a battery up for their broadcasting needs. Prices for suburban real estate went up like gangbusters, and insider realtors close to the mayor’s office made a bundle.
The following summer, which, unlike the previous year’s, was so dry the town stream turned to a coffee-like muck, military specialists took over the Toadstool. They spent two months evacuating the nearby blocks, which came to resemble a Martian city where dusty dogs ran in packs, while blasters drilled holes in the concrete, spread cables, and replaced the explosives looted the previous year. On D-day, it became obvious that these were pros at work: the air in town shuddered and the Toadstool was transformed into a neat pile of dust, like a candle that had burned down very quickly, plunging, halfway to the ground, into rising clouds of solid ash. Where it had just been, a blinding spot formed on the thin and cloudy amalgam. Even when the cumulus dust, thinning and translucent, rose to almost the full height of the vanished tower, the lambency didn’t disappear; the dusty specter of a fatter Toadstool lingered in the air for days, settling on the wan leaves and broken glass that crunched under the feet of the returned inhabitants and that sobbed under the janitors’ brooms, forming fragile, layered piles of trash. Even afterward, whenever the dust came up, it was like a faint impression being powdered in the air, or if the sun came out from behind a cloud at an unusual angle, the tower became visible; people saw it in a thick snowfall, as if it had washed the violet shadow with soap. Lots of Ripheans had trouble believing they’d ever physically been there, where now the wind roamed freely; drifting off to sleep with this thought, the punks and even college students who already shaved their soft beards flew in their dreams.
2
LIKE ANY REAL RIPHEAN, WHEN THE TIME CAME, YOUNG KRYLOV lit out for the mountains. He found out what it was like to hike with a backpack that gets heavier with every kilometer and smells more and more of canvas and sweat, exactly as if you were carrying an extra body of your own on your back. He found out what it was like to hammer test holes using someone’s great-grandfather’s chisels and hammers, and then chop the cold chunks up in the sun, letting stone chips fly like pointy stars.
Young Krylov even had some minor success: at home he assembled the standard assortment of newspaper-wrapped samples, and he even managed to sell a few pieces. He had one good find in the old tailings of an emerald mine that had been bought up whole by some Russian-Japanese firm and was lazily guarded by porky he-men in decorative camouflage. While the sportsmen, wishing to linger at their picnic, built a large fire, whose luxuriant smoke trailed off into the skies, the rock hounds calmly infiltrated. They had to be careful, though, climbing over the bare manmade inclines, which were held in place only here and there by a web of weeds: a man could be seen even without binoculars. Piles of angular rock that had been let drop over the decades ground tightly underfoot, but any loose piece could be the pedal that released a landslide. Nonetheless, the game was worth the candle: the poorly deciphered layer contained not only lightly fractured beryls, which the Russo-Japanese used for industrial purposes, but also gem-quality crystals. Krylov had the good fortune to dig up eight intact six-faceted bottles stuck in the layer of rock, and in their white and green veins he was thrilled to glimpse live zones of transparency. Even while fleeing the rangers through the booming pine forest, which resounded with their yells and shots, like an iron fence struck by a stick, Krylov continued to feel exaltation at this elucidated substance. His find yielded enough money to pay for his first year of university study and to buy his mother, who suffered from serious edema, a trip to a sanatorium. Still, Krylov couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d parted with his find with indecent haste, as if he’d missed something in it; his intuition was correct and subsequently wholly vindicated.
It didn’t take Krylov very long to realize that his luck wasn’t all that great, worse than average probably, and the industry, though it didn’t reject him altogether, would never feed him. It wasn’t that he’d had no encounters with the mountain spirits, either. Like many others, he’d seen lesser phenomena in campfires, when the flame, after crumbling the fragile blazing coals like wafers, suddenly seemed to rear up on its toes and start dancing, turning the team’s faces into a flickering movie. Later, in the ash-gray fire ring, they would find characteristic “bruises”: solid patches of dark purple which led prospectors in the know to gold-bearing sand within a twenty-meter radius. Once, Krylov even observed a flying saucer—not such a rarity really. Something elliptical literally galloped across the night sky sheathed in a thin ripple of soapy clouds and then disappeared behind a high-tension tower, drowning in the tower’s luminescence like a spoon in sour cream. But even apart from how the spirits behaved, among the rock hounds, Krylov felt like he belonged.
There was something of the little boy—even though he was at the university and had a prickly mustache—about the way he had latched onto those tough but good-natured aficionados who in their collective subconscious clung to the notion that only someone who has a conscience gets a gem. The secretive, nimble rock hounds, who stood out ordinarily only because of the particular sooty color of their tan and the white area on their jaw where they’d shaved their summer whiskers, which lent something apish to their faces, the rock hounds had found a way to exist independently of the authorities and the thugs. The authorities, focused on the big picture, preferred to turn a blind eye to small-time evil and even permitted one modest private firm to organize monthly mineral shows—whose true earnings might have amazed the tax agencies. In turn, the thugs had an inkling that somewhere in the forest lay real, unearthed money. This, of course, made the thugs take notice: they had divided up the turf with their fists down to the very last stall and then had suddenly discovered around them an irritatingly inaccessible terra incognita. But even they, with their identical heads as tough and hard as boxing gloves, realized that no matter how many times they descended upon nature, which scared them with its cold sameness in all four directions, they weren’t going to find any gems. The few attempts to put the business under their control ended in failure. The rock hounds wouldn’t subscribe to any extortion schemes the thugs understood, and the most zealous seller of protection, the ferocious general called the Wheel, was discovered one day beneath a prominent pine that looked like a hanger dangling wet winter caps, right at the cross-over from the northern tract—bearing no trace of violence but no signs of life, either. The autopsy showed that the small heart under his uninjured ribs had literally split in two, like an apricot. The culprits, naturally, were never found.
Krylov was drawn to the rock hounds. He realized that the gap between the millstones that ground the electorate into an endless stream of flour had to be defended not only by an economic conspiracy but also by a sustained spiritual effort, a constant churning of energy in a shared interior space and personal dues paid into the corporate moral capital. At the same time, Krylov observed substantial differences among the rock hounds. One man, for the sake of a single find, would process a full measure of stone and subsoil to the point that at night, eyes shut, he would still see the shovel taking dig after endless dig, letting the dark clumps fan out as they fell. Another could pass through a ditch someone had slaved over and abandoned, kick over a scratched rock that was sending him mysterious signals, and discover a crystal of excellent purity.
This difference was no accident; among the rock hounds there were a select few—though they were incapable of getting rich in a serious way. They probably dealt with the world according to the same principle of equilibrium that had been revealed to Krylov when he was a teenager: no one hurt them so much that they’d cash out and exchange their hard industry for a handsomer way of life. Krylov got to know a few of them pretty well. There was old Seryoga Gaganov, an adventurer
and scoutmaster, a strict teacher for quirky pubescent boys with mediocre grades. There was Gaganov’s friend Vladimir Menshikov, who was not only a lucky rock hound but also the author of a dozen different books, from the history of treasures to adventure novels. Farid Habibullin, a Tatar, practically the only one of the “old men” who was a professional mining engineer, looked the most oppositional. In town he always wore a wrinkled black tunic and cowboy boots and gathered his long hair streaked with lead gray into an uncombed tail. Habibullin’s secret was his goodness. Possessed of the greatest talent for the fortuitous kick to a cobble, sometimes, with a quick glance of his yellow eye, he would show a young man where to poke while he himself walked away indifferently, his bowed legs describing fanciful figures, as if he were riding an invisible bicycle across the stone talus. Having completed his training as a young man with some very special troops, Habibullin may have been the only one of the brusque rock hounds decidedly incapable of punching someone in the face. In contrast, the lucky, good-looking Roma Gusev, a stocky sculpture of a man with mighty rusty curls, got into a fight nearly every week. Stone sober, never favoring the bottle, when Roma was a little late for work he could go through different yards and break in on a group of far-gone lushes who ruled the ragged bushes. In literally half an hour, the conflict’s participants, their faces like a painter’s palette, would have crawled over to the police booth, and Roma—puzzlingly, no less drunk than the rest of the group—would have set out in the same direction, muttering and licking his battered fists in the manner of a large tabby cat.
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