2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  Although the expedition was still inside the same basin lightly encircled by the asymmetric mountains, Anfilogov could not shake the feeling that he and his fellow worker had in some way reached that unusual fold in the horizon, like a mismatched pattern glued together, that he had been seeing all these days in the river’s upper reaches. “The edge of the world”—these were the words the professor might have used to name his sensation, even though he was standing with both feet on what was solid ground in all directions. The rock hounds wasted a precious half-day breaking camp and neatly concealing their supplies from the rodents rustling in the grass. The first blow of the miner’s hack on the desolate rock broke off a piece that looked like raisin-studded farmer’s cheese. The corundums, however, were not transparent: the densely sugary, rectilinear crystals did not hold a jewel gumdrop.

  “Here’s what I say, Vasily Petrovich. We’re not going to get anything off the top,” concluded a beaten Kolyan, who tossed and turned all night in their tent. Outside, a northern rain sighed and shifted like a passenger in the next compartment—the first in the whole time of the expedition.

  Anfilogov, too, realized that they had to dig prospecting pits. In the morning the bowed spruce looked like dark umbrellas, saturated with damp, and the streambed, although still without water, had swollen noticeably. What was bad was that the trees on the slope were sparse and virtually everything was visible from the river. Any recreational kayaker could spot the fresh holes and become curious about their contents. Counting on his luck, Anfilogov chose a spot for the prospecting pit under cover of some small cliffs that the wind had turned into melted snowmen. However there, in the humid dark, they had as much luck as inside a turned-off refrigerator: the top, easily broken layer still taunted the frenzied Kolyan with stone raspberries, and under that they found bedrock, practically iron granite, which the miner’s hack skipped off with a piping song, sending an electric arc through his shoulders.

  They had to go back to the previous spot. But the vein, despite their original impressions, took a sharp turn. Only the fourth hole gave the expedition its first gem-quality stones: small, a little cloudy, not good for faceting but maybe for cabochons. Anfilogov had the feeling that somewhere close by, literally underfoot, lay true success, that the expedition was maybe a millimeter off.

  The millimeter turned out to be a big one, though. The expedition lost a whole day waiting out a windy rain, which swept over their sagging tent in gusts and down the swollen river, where the water’s fur seemed to stand on end at the uneasy element’s blowing. After the rain, the prospecting pits were half-filled with dark, debris-filled water that had to be scooped out with the mug and bucket. Even without any precipitation, though, the fissured rock seeped moisture, which ran down the walls slowly, as if groping its way; overnight a bucket and a half of water collected in the prospecting pit. For some reason, the subterranean water was as heavy as molten lead, and when it splashed it left a dark spot in the grass that would not heal over.

  The morning began with the whistle of a sugar-stealing chipmunk. Every morning Anfilogov knew for a fact that they had to leave that day, camouflaging their promising works until the next summer. Without a word to each other, though, the rock hounds would hastily eat a few spoons of floury skilly, unembarrassed about licking the sour mugs, and walk mechanically to their corundum servitude. They started in on yesterday’s and the day before yesterday’s like machines, as if magnetized by this strange spot, as if they’d been wound up; doing anything that was not part of this daily rhythm felt as if it would cost them much more effort than continuing to wield their hacks, burying all the weight left in their body in their blow.

  Hunger crept up on them like a long French kiss. Anfilogov caught himself thinking that he had completely stopped thinking—about anything. The point when they met with success seemed to have been determined by a fateful error, and now the resources of food and life were dwindling to no purpose. “Just a little more, just a bit!” a nearly bent over Kolyan, who had been bitten under the eye by a spider, would yell to buck himself up. Periodically he would literally tear himself away from the hypnotic dolomites, bury himself behind a bush so that a grayling looking up wouldn’t see the hunter’s shadow through the water, and toss in a splint with a tuft of bear fur. Lured by the “fly,” the graylings would soar out of the water like small northern sunbeams, but in the air their rainbow skins quickly turned pale; the rock hounds instantly tore the meat off the baked fish, down to their pink skeletons, taking turns dipping their sticky fingers into the salt tin and wiping the last sweet grain from its smooth walls.

  “Once we get back, Vasily Petrovich, the first thing I’m going to do is learn to cook,” mused a languid Kolyan by the damp hissing campfire. “As good as the Metropol! Cakes with roses and salads with mayonnaise. You don’t think I can read a book? If only I had the ingredients.”

  Anfilogov, who had been left with a dead aftertaste in his mouth from the unsalted fish, well understood these culinary dreams. He himself now could have performed some magic with a good fillet, some spices, and wine; at the same time he knew that Kolyan wasn’t really going to do what he said because in the last ten years he’d never learned to do anything. What Kolyan knew how to do he knew how to do by nature; as for Anfilogov, for all his experience as a businessman and rock hound, he was utterly incapable of wresting food from the wild taiga.

  Meanwhile, the jokes were bad. The noodles had run out; what was left of the buckwheat groats was practically dust; and some animal had shaken out the last of the flour all over the tent, as if it had torn the cellophane with a steel fork. They hadn’t had cigarettes in a long time. This didn’t affect Anfilogov, who occasionally would smoke a slim Vogue exclusively for the sake of the perceptible haze in his brain, but Kolyan was miserable: he would dry rotting clumps of used tea on hardened newspapers and crawl on all fours in search of sharp grass and dry fibrous filler; this whole mess rotted poisonously in his little tubes of newspaper, as stiff as twigs; and sometimes they would flare up like a torch, singeing Kolyan’s gray whiskers.

  In point of fact, the rock hounds had nearly eaten up their return trip. Anfilogov knew that a man can go without food for a month and live. But that’s if he’s lying in a bed under the supervision of doctors and a strike committee. It was a different matter altogether to escape the taiga when thirty kilometers a day turned into ten, and later five. You just might not hold out, not coincide with your chance of survival. Anfilogov knew that hunger. Once it overtook you, it was capable of special effects: some wild spot might suddenly seem as familiar as your own summer vegetable patch. Just when you thought you were about to come upon inhabitation, you couldn’t get out. Without himself knowing how, a man would eat a poisonous mushroom, which looked like the finest dessert skewered on his napkin-wrapped knife. Anfilogov knew that hunger is like hypnosis; now, waking, he could feel the first onset of this gentle trance. Every morning he thought he had decided to wrap up camp and was now doing so. Simultaneously, he felt utterly at home near his prospecting pits; hunger’s kisses awakened in him a dreamy sensitivity, the desire for a woman, subtle and pale, with delicate bones that fit together into a perfect skeleton, with small teats, puffy, like children’s tonsils.

  2

  THAT NIGHT, UNDER THE MUFFLED, MACHINE-LIKE SOUND OF THE rain, the professor dreamed that this woman had come to him. Naked and very skinny, she was as perfect as a Latin letter, a sample of a special human typeface. Tucking up her angular elbow, she lay on her back, and her belly was as white as a mug of milk. There was nothing special in the lizard-narrow creature, but all the beauty on the banks of the corundum river had been a preface to this body, to the maddening shadow under her breast, like a delicate half-moon. For some reason the woman was crying, her bright temples were wet, her eyes underlined with moisture, Egyptian. In his dream, these soundless tears aroused Anfilogov incredibly. At the same time he was aware that the woman was by no means a stranger to him; moreover, it was very defin
itely one of his distant relatives, a decent, ordinary young girl to whom Anfilogov occasionally slipped a little money and who, in thanks, dashed over to clean his inviolable apartment and once broke a delicate porcelain teacup that had lived a grand life.

  Anfilogov awoke with an unresolved anguish in his loins. Tears had turned the hair under his creased cheek into a wet clump. Kolyan, sprawled out, was snoring, and his mouth gaped like a dark rabbit hole. The professor went down to the fogged-in river, where the distant bird cherry trees looked like bouquets in tissue paper. Having done the necessary with his cupped red hand, Anfilogov released a hot, luxuriant spot into the water, like the fortune-telling wax from an entire burned down candle. Then he splashed himself with fistfuls of icy water, and buttoning his pants, tried to clear his head. The beauty focused on Anfilogov was straining to achieve maximum concentration, but the professor’s mind was working clearly. He understand all the hints and instructions that gave the Mistress of the Mountain away in the humanitarian girl. Even the arbitrary fact that the girl was Anfilogov’s third cousin was inherent in this dangerous scenario because, according to the legend, the Mistress of the Mountain and her chosen one are seen by people as similar, like brother and sister.

  This was simply too much! Anfilogov knew that there were plenty of ladies around who were much more attractive—even, if it came to that, some of his numerous female relatives. But at the thought of this schoolmarm of a woman, always dressed in crummy little sweaters and stupid jean skirts that looked like they’d been dyed with ink, his heart for some reason contracted.

  After the chilling freshness of the early morning, it was as stuffy as a rubber boot in the tent. Kneeling, Anfilogov shook Kolyan, who was reedily gurgling some mosquito-y song.

  “Huh? What’s up? Hell, right away, I’m coming.” Kolyan tried to open his cloudy, senseless eyes, opened and shut them, but just couldn’t wake up.

  “We’re leaving today. Time’s up. We’ve got a lot of work and a climb,” Anfilogov said jerkily, dragging the twisted sleeping bag off Kolyan.

  “What’s wrong with you, Vasily Petrovich? Where the fuck are we going? Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed?” Kolyan tried to push the looming Anfilogov away and collapsed onto his back again.

  “Where? Home! To the grocery store! You’ll croak here, you idiot!” roared Anfilogov right in his small, drawn face.

  “Na-a-ah…. Not on your life…. You’re the one, Vasily Petrovich, you shouldn’t …” wagging his wild head, Kolyan crawled out, got up on his shaky legs, and, as if testing which was shorter, meandered over to the wet, silver-gray bushes.

  Anfilogov shrugged and dragged their two backpacks, which were now compressed and covered with mouse droppings, out of the tent, left them there to air out, and unfastened the polyethylene fly, letting the yellow water spill onto the grass.

  “I’m alive! Alive!” The shout came from the glistening bushes.

  Anfilogov, trying to be unflappable, busied himself with the campfire, where the damp twigs would only smoke, not burn, and the homey stove-like smell of the campfire stirred his soul.

  “I’m not croaking, Vasily Petrovich, see?” Kolyan, tottering, collapsed in the tent again, and the tent started rocking.

  At last the fire was crackling, emitting blue, messy fumes, like an old engine, and the transparent water had begun to tremble in the sooty pot. Trying to figure out what to make the most satisfying breakfast possible from, Anfilogov headed toward the tent, and at the entrance his nose was struck by the smell of rotten flesh. Kolyan, kneeling in front of a savagely opened can, was chewing greasy tinned meat. At this Anfilogov realized he didn’t know whether there was any tinned meat left. The hollow lightness of the sack when the professor, cursing softly, found it in the corner, left him with no illusions on that score. Kolyan, smirking in the half-dark with his glossy maw, held the can with the remains of his feasting out to the professor, but the crudely hacked lid, the sucker of congealed fat, and the putrid smell that wafted from the tin nearly made Anfilogov throw up.

  Instantly, Kolyan’s cheeks puffed out and he bent over completely. Anfilogov barely managed to pull him out, bowels gurgling, to the tent opening. Kolyan vomited tortuously, the unchewed meat coming out of him along with the bile of his many days’ hunger. The liquefied tinned meat even spurted out of Kolyan’s nostrils. At last, after long convulsions, he calmed down and, in tears, stretched out on his sleeping bag, which Anfilogov had thrown down near the quaking, almost extinguished campfire.

  After making him drink some watery, almost yellow tea, Anfilogov forced Kolyan to swallow through his tears and snot another mug, into which he’d tapped the sugar dust from the empty box. Then, ordering his fellow worker to join him, he went off to camouflage the prospecting pits, which looked from the river and their camp like large dark anthills. It started to drizzle again. The sky seemed to be spraying its silver paint on the winking leaves, the moss, and the stiff bilberry bushes; the path that nonetheless was left trampled from the camp to the prospecting pits and now would give their work away to a close gaze was brighter than the dormant grass, and it reflected the raw boulders, as in a stream.

  It was very quiet. The noise of the river reached them like a wind-blown stream. Suddenly Anfilogov imagined the sound change, as if the river had turned around. Simultaneously he noticed next to the first prospecting pit, which the rock hounds had long since abandoned due to the meagerness of the find, a woman’s silhouette as if through tissue paper. The woman was standing under a deep umbrella, and he couldn’t see her face, but Anfilogov recognized her by her slender legs and her laced boots sunk in the clay. The woman turned around very slowly and began walking uphill, where last year’s leaves gleamed next to each birch, like next to a hairdresser’s chair; before the creature vanished, without reaching the limit of visibility but simply dissolving in the thickening drizzle, and the birch branches whistled sharply a couple of times on the wet umbrella fabric.

  Anfilogov stood there a moment collecting his thoughts. He was insulted that he was being taught an additional lesson, as if he were a little boy. Trying to walk decisively, feeling his heavy heart grow heavier with each step, he climbed up to where the Mistress of the Mountain had lingered a few minutes before. There, in the diluted clay, the traces from her heel prints were distinctly visible. Pretending as if nothing special was happening, Anfilogov descended into a hole with a small amount of scree that gurgled loudly into a large, dirt-filled puddle. Anfilogov had been planning, actually, to collect the tool he’d left on the wall—but when he grabbed the pick-ax, he mechanically struck a friable outcrop that had bothered him for some reason.

  The piece of rock came off easily, like a spout off a pitcher. Unremarkable on the outside, inside it was the image of a hedgehog. Large crystals strained by their efforts at growing, stuck out crudely from the dolomite, and in the crack that had formed from the blow he could see others baked into the rock and burning a deep crimson. The next piece to come off was as red as a banged-up knee from the corundum. Behind it he discovered something absolutely incredible. Not believing his own eyes, Anfilogov let out a triumphant holler, which echoed weakly in the milky overturned space, like the far-off howl of a locomotive. He suddenly felt he couldn’t hold onto the slippery pick-ax. Scrambling out of the hole over the icy, ragged rocks, Anfilogov kept shouting and felt the damp sky on his face, like an ether-saturated gauze mask. From far off he saw Kolyan running, dark in his silvery shroud, like a water-gauge on the rippling bright surface of the water. When Kolyan jumped up, plastered all over with some wet vegetative kasha, in his worn boots, Anfilogov felt a weakness come over him, as if all his blood had gone into the formation of the crimson fissure, this coagulated subterranean beauty.

  What Kolyan accomplished once he had realized the dimensions of the find is something one rarely gets to see in life. He beat his chest against the stone wall and fell, slipping, into the clayey swill; he screeched; in the corundum hole he was like a wet fledgling i
n an eggshell. Anfilogov observed him seated on a slippery old log; he couldn’t understand why this sadness had overtaken him. It felt as if as much of his soul had been ripped out of him as he had found in the corundum vein to which the woman’s blunt boot tracks had led him. These distinct tracks on the difficult hillock, where Kolyan’s boots left a greasy waffle, spoke to Anfilogov of his loneliness and his long waiting under the whispering drizzle that developed the landscape like a faded photograph of a watery path leading into emptiness; several times he thought he heard a recalcitrant umbrella shaving through the glossy spruces.

  After a short time, Anfilogov had to shout to Kolyan not to waste his strength on barbaric dances that had turned his clothes into a clinging peel. Coming to his senses, his insane eyes squinting toward the bridge of his nose and a cut on his forehead, Kolyan grabbed his tool. Before dinnertime, which no longer referred to a meal but merely to a time of day, he shattered the precious vein without letup, this paradisiacal subterranean tree, which to the rock hounds was one miracle after another; losing his balance over and over, thereby tumbling out of reality, he would fall into the puddle or spin around with his hack raised like a butterfly net.

  As he took the crimson hunks up from below, Anfilogov wondered at their outlandish booty and then ceased to wonder at anything at all. Figures started lining up in his mind, the chains of business that now would have a serious load to withstand—but all this was an entirely other world and had nothing to do with the heart pangs that made the stones being cleaned out of the rock fade oddly right before his eyes. After “dinner”—ten minutes of sitting with bowed heads by the damp campfire—Kolyan, in his now dry, clayey armor with a Morse code of midges next to his protruding red ear, stretched out on his litter. Anfilogov set about sorting their booty, throwing out everything they had collected before. Of today’s he packed away only what staggered the imagination; comparing stones, holding them between his thumb and pointer like coagulated, broken stars, he chose between the happiness of possessing them and survival on the hungry return trip, when every extra gram could be fateful. Nonetheless, he ended up with a considerable paper bag, which dragged down his framed backpack handsomely. He buttoned four crystals that on the larger scale of things would have been a sin to be let cut rather than preserved as witness to nature’s incredible generosity into the pocket of his sweated-through checked shirt, and through the fabric their little angularity felt like a bird’s foot on his full-to-bursting heart.