2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  “I guess you’re not the tax man,” he said resentfully, staring at Krylov’s iridescent tie. “What makes you think your young friend has talent?”

  “He has a feel for stone,” the professor responded briefly, scratching the soft cellophane off a packet of lady’s cigarettes.

  “Can he do anything at all?”

  “Not a damn thing,” Anfilogov was unflappable.

  “That’s just great!” exclaimed the little fatman. “I’m not running a trade school here! I have people working for me with special training! Tremendous experience!”

  “Nothing but old men,” remarked Anfilogov, wiggling his eyebrows. “Not only that, they’re drunks.” He glanced expressively under the table, where there was a sudden loud crash of glass.

  “Oh, all right, all right,” the fatman spun around, avoiding the glass spilling underfoot. “But he’s going to practice on your raw material!”

  “Do you have any other?” Anfilogov asked slyly, delicately tapping his ash, like a bright little bird dropping, into a mossy sardine tin.

  At this the little fatman squinted for a minute, there was a pause, and in it Krylov sensed that the man was worried and that it had been pointless today to put on this woolen suit. Warm droplets were trickling down, tickling his skinny ribs. Nonetheless, even here, behind solid doors, the hoarse sounds of production plugged up his hearing, and the arguing men, literally looking each other in the mouth, sounded inside out, each in his own balloon. For a while Krylov heard snatches, “Abrasive’s expensive nowadays!” “The lease agreement …” “You never set me those terms …”

  Suddenly, outside, an ear-splitting mechanical ultrasound switched off, thereby revealing itself. In the ensuing clarity, the offended fatman shuffled through his papers, and the quietly beaming professor coughed distinctly.

  “Oh, all right, all right, you talked me into it,” the workshop owner stated mournfully. “Only he has to practice without pay. I won’t pay him a salary for four months.”

  Krylov did not like this at all, but he told himself, “We’ll see about that.”

  Inhaling through his little mouth, the workshop owner reached for the bell on the soiled wall and somewhere on the premises it sounded like a fire alarm had gone off. The chubby door flung open, letting in an angry sound like a motorcycle racing past and also one of the beer-drinking gemcutters—a powerful, slope-shouldered muzhik covered with oily patches of sweat and with a large, saddlelike face.

  “Come in, come in, Leonidich,” the workshop owner, who had slumped on his chair and undone his belt, welcomed him with malicious glee. “Since you’ve stopped by, I have a new pupil for you.”

  Krylov half-stood and leaned forward slightly, depicting a half-bow.

  “What for? I don’t need one,” Leonidich said in a surprising tenor without even looking at the proffered Krylov. Instead he looked at the beer bottles, his own and the other alternately.

  “We have no choice, Leonidich, none at all,” the little fatman responded in a Jesuitically kind voice, scratching his raised buttons. “My investor gave the order, and there’s nothing we poor folk can do.”

  “Come now, Leonidich, please,” the professor interposed gently. “The young man has talent, you’ll thank me yourself later.”

  “Oh we’re already very grateful,” the gemcutter grumbled and glanced covertly at the grinning Krylov. “Well, let’s go, let’s get that suit of yours good and dirty so you don’t put it on again.”

  Krylov’s training was longer and harder than the professor had supposed. After lectures—and sometimes instead of them—he would pad over to the workshop, stubborn and unpaid; in the evenings his head, which had soaked up the grinding, polishing, and other noises he no longer heard, hurt like hell, like he had a bad flu. Krylov irritated everyone by talking so loudly, as if he’d gone deaf. His seriously diminished mother was insulted by her son’s shouting; realizing that Krylov never had become a big-time criminal, she now spoke to him much more freely. To his own amazement, Krylov felt sorry for her. When she came home from work utterly beat (ever since his mother had been let go from the museum, long ago, Krylov had no idea where she worked from nine to five—and he never did find out), this woman, who was nearly an old lady by now, had struggled to take the shoes off her swollen feet, which looked like bear paws, and would rest for a long time in the hall on the low stool opposite the half-bad mirror.

  “You yell at me like your father,” she reproached Krylov. “You’re like two drops of water.”

  At the workshop Krylov was saddled with the clumsy nickname “Taxman.” “Where’s that Taxman of ours?” “Taxman’s cutting something.” At first Krylov thought the reason for this was his uselessness to his boss, who depended on the professor and had been forced to accept the pupil to pay some additional “tax.” The workers—who really were old men for the most part, at least Krylov thought they were, taking their red wrinkles for signs of pension age—took pleasure in sitting back, taking a shot at this “representative” of the ill-loved structures, “Taxman, get us some beer!” Soon, though, Krylov realized he was doing more good than harm: having learned the simplest operations, he deftly cut the material marked off by Leonidich and was better than anyone at cleaning the sticky tar off a half-faceted stone. Nonetheless, the fatman, who paid his gemcutters monthly according to some homemade register as fake as a thirteen-ruble bill, carefully avoided Krylov.

  Krylov wasn’t stupid, and he realized how much he could be asking for. A veteran of the Oriental Mart, not that long ago he would have slashed someone’s face over the least kopek. Here, though, at the workshop, he oddly had no thought of money whatsoever. Entranced and strangely indifferent to his own life outside the half-cellar walls, Krylov could spend any amount of time at his stonecutting. When he ground away a “window” in a dirty, shapeless piece of rainbow quartz, all that interested him was what he saw inside: transparency in its natural state, a zone where the substance turned clear. Plunging the stone into the immersion fluid achieved a truly poetic effect: as it sunk in the oily substance, disappearing from view, the crystal was bared as only a transparent thing can be. What happened was what Krylov had not been able to achieve in smashing his aunt’s vase on the newspaper shreds: the transparency opened up from within and slipped the bounds of its own vessel—the internal inclusions and fissures, sometimes like fragile metal insects, became visible right in the crystal glass, like in an X-ray.

  Thus Krylov conjured, without a care in the world. Outside the workshop he didn’t like the fact that his gofer spot under Anfilogov—and the little bit of pocket money, too, probably—had gone to the rather crafty, freckled Kolyan, whom he hadn’t known before. His unconcern did not leave Krylov entirely, however, when he left the half-cellar. As he climbed into the courtyard (the winter was damp and snowless), he saw the green earth under the trees—although if you looked at the lawns, in between the cold trash shining in the sun, you wouldn’t find a single live blade of grass where the mirage was, and the trees themselves, covered with some membranous vegetative perspiration, looked like malachite. Krylov guessed that things like this could take the place of money for a man, that there were quite a few things like that around. So he didn’t vie with Kolyan, although he found his new friend’s smile, accompanied by the sniffing of his insolent straw mustache, mocking.

  “Taxman’s” almost daily presence obviously irked the workshop owner. Krylov guessed that the fatman didn’t much believe in his apprenticeship or special talents but thought that Anfilogov had foisted a snitch on him. They were leery of Krylov. Absorbed with his transparencies, he sensed that much more was going on behind him than in front of him, which was awkward and unpleasant, like going around in a suit he’d put on backwards. Dubious individuals snuck around behind his back, dousing him with sharp smells that were only intensified by the desire to go unnoticed. Put a cap of invisibility on a hard head like that and he probably would have stunk like an invisible garbage can.

  Life at
the workshop never actually stopped; Krylov’s peripheral vision was constantly picking up spectral manipulations. In fact, he’d long since taken careful note of all his boss’s business acquaintances—who were also fat, or at least inclined to chubbiness—a kind of living catalog, from slight pudginess (a face like a liter of milk) to a sport of nature. Accustomed to showing up at the workshop as if it were their home, these specimens would start hollering merrily first thing; even though their shout could barely be heard—each word was immediately wiped out by the production noises—the boss would get scared and with a wagging motion point the stealth “taxman” out to the visitor, who would immediately slap his splayed fingers over his talking; his alarmed eyes would blink, and looking as if he had a full mouth, he would slink behind the worried boss into the secluded smoking room.

  The gravity with which the fatman treated his own secrets made him perfectly manageable, but his attempt to keep Krylov in this unpaid scut work came to naught. The merest raised eyebrow on Anfilogov, and asymmetrical Leonidich, whose sad eyes with the down-turned corners were streaked with an unhealthy gold and blood, allowed Krylov to work independently with inexpensive rock crystal.

  Once all the excess had been amputated, the stone became ridiculously small; the piece left for graduated faceting reminded Krylov of a jelly-filled chocolate.

  “Don’t make them big. Make them precise,” Leonidich taught him, and he ran the piece over the coarse abrasive, leaving just the “jelly.” “Don’t worry about the waste,” he advised, squinting at the future piece, which shone opposite the little window as if it were its window, a small copy. And sighing he added incomprehensibly, “Don’t worry about anything at all.”

  Leonidich was not Krylov’s friend; in point of fact, teacher and pupil had a hard time adjusting to working side by side. Both were too angular, their elbows clashed, and each needed more individual space than any fatman. Nonetheless, Krylov liked his teacher—the fact, for example, that Leonidich shaved so carefully, smoothing his long cheeks to a chalk-white cleanliness. This was important in a workshop, where words were mostly lip-read; unlike the bearded and mustached gemcutters, whose speech rustled like fingers in mittens, Leonidich’s narrow mouth, which looked lightly touched with chalk, moved perfectly distinctly, allowing Krylov to read what he said all the way across the room.

  In the beginning, the apprentice made all the typical novice mistakes. Out of some morbid loyalty to what was transparent, Krylov laid out the defects directly under the surface of the stone—and then Leonidich would give a little wink and scratch a silvery scale across the polished surface with his nail. If he rushed, the apprentice might find that the polished stone had been scratched up, as if a cat had clawed it, by the sand of the coarse abrasive. Stones split, cracked under heat, and shrank askew in the resin. Krylov’s hands seemed to be working somewhere very far from his head. Most importantly, he couldn’t seem to get the diamond’s proportions. His stones came out dull, “asleep,” leaden. With multiple sighs, Leonidich would pick up the “button,” reduce the height of the pavilion, and with light cauterizations to the circle bring out the facets: a flash, and the stone was shining and laughing. Krylov crammed the facet angles like his multiplication tables. Gradually he learned to do his work, except that it was coming out a little worse than Leonidich’s. Anfilogov’s notions about his talent just weren’t panning out.

  Six months later, Leonidich died, and Krylov received a strange legacy from his teacher, maybe because it had all happened in his presence. Leonidich always carried a dumb thing—a man’s puffy leatherette purse covered in gold rings for the zippers and closures—and an ugly stranger who’d been hanging around in the dark courtyard took a shine to it.

  That evening the gemcutters had had a good sit over a beer. It was a little after eleven when they tumbled out, humming, into the fresh lilac-scented air. The dusk of early July was transparent. You could still hear children’s voices in the courtyard, and a chubby child, his curls dangling, was being pushed in a sleepily singing swing. Leonidich, who preferred to keep to himself when he was a little drunk, in the stupor of his own halting thoughts, was walking slightly ahead, as if letting his widely planted feet measure the width of the path, which seemed to lead nowhere and be just bright patches in the gray grass. No one had time to note which direction the murderer came from. Small, with a white Adam’s apple, for a second he pressed up to Leonidich as if he were trying to hide behind him from his own slow mates—and then he jumped away with a twisted face, as if Leonidich had in some horrible way betrayed the trust of the little man who had clung to him, had done something unimaginable to him, so that the stranger’s features looked like a dead fly on a white wall. The little man dashed off straightaway, Leonidich slowly turned around, and his knees buckled to one side as he sank to the other.

  A woman’s hysterical shriek rose from a distant balcony, and the gemcutters were swept up by a sudden wind, like an intoxication, each separate at first, and then suddenly thrown together into one heavy wave. Krylov didn’t know how he came to be kneeling, helpless and drunk, over Leonidich. Leonidich hadn’t died yet but had turned oddly away from Krylov, smiling, showing his dingy teeth. Thick blood was gushing from under his ribs, and the t-shirt on his belly looked like a lung—organic and gently blood-filled. Tissue-thin blanket covers wafted quietly overhead. With a red hand, Krylov ripped a terrycloth towel from a branch. The rough, ice-hardened towel very quickly became soft, warm, and very heavy, as only a rag that has absorbed as much blood as it can does. To Krylov, the towel seemed to weigh almost more than Leonidich himself, as if the dying master’s life had seeped into the cloth—and so it was in reality.

  Krylov felt nothing but detached interest, as if he were observing events in a made-for-TV movie. After a short time, cars flew into the courtyard with cold flashing lights that were waning in the dusk, but neither the cops with their official faces nor the doctors walking around in white amid the jagged linen that had fallen from the branches could change a thing.

  After Leonidich’s death Krylov came to believe that a man’s emotions are the fruit of his imagination. There was the black plastic body bag they bundled Leonidich in. There was the dark track from the removed body, like a doused campfire. Where were his emotions, though? Not a trace. Meanwhile, it turned out that Leonidich had a family. Everyone had assumed that Leonidich lived a solitary life in some bachelor lair where the front door had torn oilcloth upholstery and an ax hanging on the back. But they said their farewells to the gemcutter in a spacious apartment fitted from floor to ceiling with rows of venerable, well-worn books. His tow-haired children sat quietly in one of the long rooms, and under her mourning scarf, the darkened face of his widow, who was smoothly carrying heaping plates from the kitchen, was silver.

  After Leonidich’s murder everything seemed to take a step back. Krylov couldn’t shake the feeling that the world around him had more to do with the dead man than with Krylov himself. At the same time he suspected that his presence at the unexpected death had changed him in some way. Right when Krylov was balancing Leonidich’s blood—not yet dormant, still alive, still eager to flow and pulse—in his arms like a newborn babe, something jumped from Leonidich to him. Not to say that Leonidich was such an unusually talented gemcutter, but some immortal element of his that contained the necessary ingredients suddenly merged with the potential that slumbered in Krylov’s subconscious.

  Krylov quickly figured out that he had been struggling with the cunning ways of his equipment, whereas his true instrument was the transparency that refracted the light. It felt as if he had shifted the lever from his left to his omniscient right hand; four days after Leonidich’s funeral he presented the fatman with his first independently cut oval diamond—which now possessed the very characteristic optical brilliance, as complex as a drawing of a bird’s feathering, that made Krylov’s diamonds instantly recognizable in every set Anfilogov spirited out via his clandestine and highly profitable channels.

 
Suddenly Krylov felt he had been set free from the facet tables. Now, the moment he put a piece of raw material up to the lamp reflector he understood its inner structure the way a mathematician understands a simple theorem; he could see the future piece lying inside, like the pit in a strangely skewed fruit—and immediately guessed the turns that would draw out its transparency. Color zonsality was no problem for him—more a puzzle on the thickening of the clarified substance, so that behind Krylov’s back people started saying the gemcutter was using some special treatment to color the stones. Krylov paid no attention whatsoever to tiny defects; the stone itself winked its motes out, like an eye. In its large inclusions and fissures he saw the history of the crystal’s development, its own unique system of light-bearing nerves.

  Once he had mastered the art of faceting and then carving, he never indulged in those venous, vegetative effects on oddball stones favored by Riphean craftsmen, who carved leaves and berries in them in naïve imitation of woods and gardens. Krylov chose only large, transparent crystals to work on and manufactured a collection of specters, many of which were virtual portraits of real people. Now he looked on a stone’s defects as the emotional state of these transparent beings. He even had Anfilogov with a cloudy patch on his forehead, and several of the grotesquely fat men of his boss’s acquaintance, and a little Leonidich, who looked like a wet icicle. One of the workshop owner’s acquaintances, an imposing man with a bosun’s beard and a face like a flounder in a bony bathing suit, took a look at the collection one day and immediately tried to lure Krylov over to Granite, his funeral business, tempting the gemcutter not just with money but with the creative possibilities, inasmuch as the firm was erecting illustrated lanes of criminal renown, with monuments in polished suits and burly colonnades amid the micaceous cemetery birches. The moment Anfilogov got wind of this, he invited his pupil over for some more tea-drinking. After examining Krylov closely across the table, the professor offered his protégé a cut—a percentage of every stone Krylov worked on from Anfilogov’s personal stash.