2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  Naturally, Krylov took advantage of one of those deserted narrow side streets paved with small potato-like stones and wrote down the scorching-hot Jap’s local license plate, which told him nothing. Maybe he would try to track down the owner of these wheels with the auto inspection bureau through one of his acquaintances, but Krylov had never done anything like that and couldn’t imagine where to start. The déjà vu experienced deep down in Krylov’s brain at the sight of the spy drove him wild. He thought his memory was just about to click and a name pop up, or the circumstances of some long-ago meeting, but clarity never did come. The spy kept changing his shirts and remained incognito—and elusive.

  The worst part was that the spy, while keeping careful watch over his charges, never expressed the slightest personal interest in them. He always looked bored. It was perfectly obvious that the man was doing a job and was probably working by the hour. Having gradually got a grip on his assignment and figured out his charges’ schedule (which was predictable, despite the map’s tricks and the city’s rather frightening surprises), the spy adapted to cheating his employer a little. Without abandoning his surveillance, he would find time to skip off to the markets and emerge with a fairly large bag of groceries. He also left some dark winter things whose thick woolen cloth resembled scorched peat off at the drycleaner’s; and several times he stopped in at the savings bank and pawn shop. Moreover, the man was mired in high-level negotiations with a garage over his warranty service and as a result was without his patched up Jap for a long time, so he carried his heavy purchases around by the sweat of his brow.

  The spy’s domestic cares spoke to the fact that he was not expecting anything momentous from his charges, such as a meeting with some unknown individual, a handover of documents, or anything else that happens in detective novels. This meant that nothing the watched couple did could impress the scoundrel, and no matter what the wrathful Krylov undertook, the spy met his deed with the same bored expression and indifferent eyes, which looked like firmly attached glass buttons.

  He couldn’t have come up with anything more insulting if he’d tried. The outside world, which Tanya and Ivan had torn themselves away from due to a lucky set of circumstances, had apparently presented them with a formal witness in whose eyes nothing was happening. By continuing his surveillance, the spy really wouldn’t see anything he hadn’t before. The couple’s visit to shady hotels, where the spy waited patiently in one of the sagging armchairs for his charges to fill out the idiotic “visitor cards” at the reception desk, were no secret to him. Not only that, but the spy took the trouble to make sure they weren’t renting the room to compile ciphers. One time Ivan, who had just that moment come, with sweat on his brow and a thumping in his chest, heard very clearly behind the thin wall, right where the narrow bed stood, the familiar ironic grunt. Thus the fleshy specter made a kind of threesome in their field bed. They could not get away from him.

  The spy had penetrated absolutely everywhere; he had wiped the fairy dust off the secret that had arisen between Tanya and Ivan on the train station square.

  It had become significantly harder to believe in what Tanya and Ivan felt. What had happened to them could not be proved. The field tests of fate that had made Krylov’s boots fall to pieces like old bark—his second pair—had not yielded a conclusive result.

  Holding his dead footwear, which had literally been gnawed by the earth’s teeth, Ivan realized that this was his only material evidence of the intangible that had come to him at mid-life. Somehow he knew that the most objective things were the intangibles. Though the source of this knowledge was unknown, it demanded faith—trust, for starters—but Krylov, Riphean that he was, viewed trust as nothing but a condition of deception, that is, the condition of a lie. In essence, all he had were these lousy boots. The journey he had taken hand in hand with this woman was, in his case, a literally physical journey across the Riphean land, whose look and composition made it unlike any other land on earth. No matter how built up or paved over the Riphean land was, its crumbled stone teeth and the profound cold of its native rock could be felt through any sole. The land got to your nerves; over dry land it penetrated footwear like dampness. Here and there, under the burdock or concrete, you could catch a glimpse of its characteristic, almost pickled colors with its impregnations of quartz and granite, like an element in a reptile’s pattern.

  It may have been this land, this stone creature with the crumbled skeleton, that had compelled Krylov to turn his relationship with Tanya into an exhausting adventure. His small homeland demanded of its inhabitants constant, senseless risk and wouldn’t let him trust in the mysterious something that happens to a man for a good cause, but rather incited him to turn his meetings into a simulacrum of leaps from the Toadstool. The specter of the killer tower, which in the years it had been in the Riphean air looked like it had been covered with galvanized metal, loomed over many of Tanya and Ivan’s routes and sometimes could be seen even from the distant outskirts, no less solid than the real industrial smokestacks. The tests of fate the lovers devised were like risky Riphean entertainments as well, because they gave no answers to any questions. What did a middle-aged muzhik with bark in his beard and soot on his scratched belly who had climbed a pine faster than anyone else get out of it? Or a crazy motorcyclist racing in a vortex of pulverized ice who had not cracked his head open on the frosty arch of the Tsar’s Bridge? What except what these desperate men—who tomorrow would have to scramble up a steep slope or dive at insane speed into a guttered ice tunnel, either saving their life or throwing off this troublesome burden—already had?

  Now, for the first time, Krylov understood that each time a Riphean started off on an adventure, he began from the same invariable fixed point. This small point of departure known as ordinary life evoked in Krylov a perplexity mixed with bitterness, as if he had not been living in the world. The extreme Riphean spirit suddenly presented itself to Krylov as the place’s curse. The world of the native Riphean, which Krylov was used to taking pride in, truly did look like the world of an insect instinctively crawling over tremendous obstacles. Why did people’s beloved risk-takers, the flower of Riphean-ness, have to rouse themselves to feel alive, the way people sometimes arouse themselves for sex with dirty pictures? Why did Ripheans, who knew how to fight for life in situations when the ordinary person would perish instantly, so readily disregard the result of their struggle and climb where it was most terrifying all over again? What made the fact that they were alive unconvincing? Krylov did not know the answer: he had ceased to understand the triumph of the insect flying like an iridescent bullet to its death.

  He could not stop, though, and kept meeting with Tanya according to the scheme they’d worked out. So he wouldn’t forget the next day’s designated address, he put a fat dot on his copy of the atlas. With sadness he saw this atlas falling apart in his pocket and the ragged pages coming away from the binding. The more the rendezvous accumulated, the more acute Krylov’s sense of loss. Never to live that again, never to return or explain anything to anyone.

  The interesting question was Tanya’s attitude toward the spy. She might have thought him a private detective, for example, hired by her ineradicable husband, to convince himself of his wife’s infidelity. However, the figure of her spouse had begun to look more and more like a collective image compiled from several men who had criss-crossed Tanya’s life. These former men probably had not collectively hired a spy to study the new guy better. If her spouse was in fact a real person—who may have had little in common with the product of imagination represented in the word “husband” and who like gas, filled the entire available space—then the only explanation for this persistent surveillance, which had yielded no new information for a long time, was paranoia or a healthy streak of masochism.

  To Krylov’s direct question as to whether she knew where the spy had come from or his purpose, Tanya replied with a grimace of displeasure, as if Krylov had said something incredibly stupid. But she wasn’t hard on the
spy. She considered him the third in their party and even urged Krylov to consider his domestic needs. Sometimes at her insistence they would wait for the spy if he were detained at the market or some repair shop, though once they didn’t, having hung around for half an hour at the market entrance, next to the iron cages of melons gurgling in the blazing sun like heated hot-water bottles.

  The ability to vanish was a special talent which the spy in all likelihood had been born with. When his shift was over, the man seemed to step politely aside, yielding his place in space to a suitable passer-by, and slip into a hole in the air, as if he were mocking the very idea of thinking about him logically. Although he did seem a figment of his imagination, Krylov realized he couldn’t have invented him entirely. The spy ate and drank and left behind messy, beer-soaked still lifes. There was more than enough material evidence for his presence. Even after he had finished work and dropped out of sight, the man sometimes dropped his large unwieldy package, which evidently would not pass through the narrow gap in space.

  It bothered Krylov that he couldn’t determine when the man had first appeared. It seemed as though the spy had always been looming somewhere nearby, but Krylov, who had tensely anticipated danger from cops and crooks in cahoots with each other, for some reason hadn’t noticed him. The spy’s omnipresence, in turn, gave birth to the idea of his omniscience. Meeting the scoundrel’s white, frozen-looking eyes, Krylov could find no corner in the past where he might have been safe from the spy. The spy’s omniscience—imagined, of course, but all the more certain for that—transformed the man into a caricature of that Omnipresent Being whose intent Tanya and Ivan had subjected so tenaciously to verification. The blasphemous thought that a clown had been sent to them as a representative of the Highest Office weighed unpleasantly on Krylov’s spirit.

  Yet this was the only explanation for the spy’s possession of certain information. Somehow the man knew the addresses of their rendezvous. He would turn up and wait modestly in the shadow of the appointed building, sniffing at his bouquet, which looked like a dead bird. Sometimes, if Tanya and Ivan got lost among the winding courtyards in search of the right address, he would make welcoming gestures from a distance and even blow kisses very fast, after which he allowed the arriving couple to familiarize themselves with the building, stepping aside like a real estate agent selling the residential tower or pigeon-infested shop stall.

  Sometimes Krylov was inclined to view the spy as a reflex of the environment. His Riphean experience suggested that if someone starts running, someone next to him will invariably be tempted by the flashing heels to break into a chase, without the slightest reason, just because, out of a desire to catch up to and touch the moving object. In exactly the same way, if someone tries to get away, someone will pursue him.

  However, common sense allowed only two possibilities: the uninvited guest could stay at the party either on the bride’s side or the groom’s. There was still some chance it was Tanya who was trailing this firmly attached spy, and Krylov had no intention of letting her out of his sight. If he was being honest, though, it was his fate that had someone in it with both the motive and financial wherewithal to hire a detective in order to learn more about Krylov’s life than he cared to reveal.

  Part Four

  1

  ALL IT TOOK WAS ONE GLANCE AT TAMARA’S HOUSE, WHICH LOOKED like a small train station, or spending some time in her central office, where the imported Swiss air that came out of containers froze the nostrils like cocaine, to tell you that she could have hired a fancier spy, a good-looking guy with a strong chin and a sarcastic mouth, one of those copies bred from the Hollywood actor Nick Lacey, the sixteenth James Bond. She wasn’t going to be happy with a fat guy who looked so little like an agent in the role of agent. She would have gone for higher quality—or at least something that looked like higher quality.

  Tamara had always tried to do everything top of the line. She adhered to the principle that a person is what he looks like more consistently than many people did. When hiring staff, she set up auditions, which made life at her house and office resemble a TV series. Looking at her secretary—a prunish young spinster in a narrow suit with a pencil-line part in her smooth hair—anyone would have said she was the secretary. What set her senior manager apart from her junior manager was the polish of his standard face, his brand of accessories, and the more expensive shimmer of his double-breasted jackets. Nonetheless, a fat clown might have gotten a cushy job from Tamara. He might have been able to convince her of his exceptional abilities through some sleight-of-hand, like disappearing in the middle of her office and reappearing on one of seventeen model Alpine meadows where her ideal raw air, infused with the ideal combination of pine needles and grasses, was collected.

  Tamara’s possible motives for hiring a private detective to tail Krylov were complicated. Their marriage, which had broken up four years before and cast, a very long shadow, seemed to have progressed to a second stage. The play’s main action, for which the first, with its simple joys and clear roles, had served as a prologue, had begun. Tamara insisted that a higher tie existed between her and Krylov than the one sundered by the civil court. Krylov, too, realized that their relationship had by no means ended the day of their divorce. He knew it would take time until their parting, and he had to earn it.

  For Tamara, losing Krylov now would be as dramatic as a director losing his audience or a writer his reader. Krylov was her audience, the meaning of her work on the forms her life took. Without him, all this impressive show, from the sedate business negotiations to the celebratory receptions complete with string quartet and a baton beating out the music, the movement of forks and knives, would have been for no one—except maybe God, in which she had not the least belief.

  In the time since his involvement with Tanya, who had changed Krylov’s name as well as his heart, he had seen Tamara only three times. Two visits he didn’t remember at all, but in late June he escorted her, battling boredom, to an art opening of he wasn’t sure what: maybe modern sculpture, maybe the latest kitchen units. Actually, all his forays with Tamara were more or less the same. Krylov performed his manly social duty without a murmur; in the summer months, to his good fortune, his duty was significantly lighter. Sometimes Tamara called him at the workshop, knowing it made no sense to give Krylov cell phones, which felt to him like her electronic tags, and because he didn’t want to be reached; he would toss the latest Samsung equipped with video conferencing into his littered desk drawer, there for anyone who wanted it to steal.

  Subconsciously, Krylov perceived all her elegant, purposely sentimental presents as spying equipment—even if it was an amusing beer mug, say, or a sculpted candle, which preserved its virgin white silky wick forever. Krylov liked the fact that he was as impermeable as a smooth wall to Tamara’s money and opportunity machine. This was not to imply anything against Tamara herself; it was just the sport of withstanding the pressure and weight, Krylov’s characteristic struggle against the superior forces of his environment. At the same time, he was gentle with Tamara and from time to time felt guilty that he couldn’t see her half-realized project through: to spend a lonely night in front of a lit candle, gazing at the teary vertical flame and recalling something romantic—Tamara’s first hat, which they bought together at a cheap sale, or their vacation in Italy, the gondola’s equine motion down a green canal, nights with a trace of tar, and dark wine.

  If he really thought about it, all of Tamara’s gifts contained a healthy dose of purely feminine, innocent banality, whereas Tamara herself, unlike the very good actors she hired, was the real deal. Every day a well-produced, well-paid scene played itself out, but she herself had no role in her own performance. As a result, her house conveyed a strange emptiness. Krylov was glad the house had been acquired when he, her divorced husband, no longer numbered among the proposed lodgers. Otherwise his soul would have ached at the thought that by picking himself up and leaving he had contributed to the desolation and lack of cheer in Tama
ra’s personal quarters. She had two enormous bedrooms with tall windows and identical views from those windows of the red paths of a brand-new park. Her two home offices were showrooms of Microsoft’s latest achievements, with fine lines of dust around the perimeter of each object. The space’s twinness helped soften for its owner the fact that she lived alone, whereas in fact her loneliness was doubled, and the black maid, a classically plump woman with beet-red lips and a white turban, sighed sadly as she pulled the unwrinkled sheets, cold as snow, from the broad bed.

  Among her own actors, Tamara invariably looked superfluous, as if a member of the audience had wormed her way onstage. Certain elusive markers made it obvious that she came from life. Unlike her correct staff, Tamara was not a typical businesswoman, that is, she did not emulate the Russian president’s wife, Darya Orlova, a powdered old woman with a field marshal’s face who wore epaulets, patch pockets, and a flawless pearl of maximum caliber. If she looked like anyone, it was a goddess—a tall Egyptian goddess with broad shoulders and a keen-eyed bird’s head. She had a pharaoh’s bearing and a tendency to right angles in her sitting, gestures, and relations with people. When Tamara rested her crossed arms on her shoulders, her large bosom seemed superfluous in that serious world fixed upon by the gaze of her luxurious eyes, which extended to her temples like sacred signs. In Tamara’s strong and soft veins mixed Tatar, Russian, and Polish blood, with an unconfirmed—and illegitimate—addition of something Turkish or Iranian. The result of mysterious reactions for which that illegitimate admixture likely served as a catalyst could not be reduced to its ingredients: a woman of a new nationality, an Eve without an Adam who so far—and this was partly Krylov’s fault—had not borne children.