Like the candle, Tamara’s gentle face filled with warmth and her eyes sparkled. Krylov already had an idea about the reason for this animation, this excitement, which made Tamara drink the young wine in greedy gulps. The mysteriousness of the topic of the impending conversation had cruelly deceived her. She had decided—or the idea had arisen in her unbidden—that Krylov had finally matured to the point of proposing to her.
It was not the first time this had happened. Krylov knew the fateful signs—the joy, the straight schoolgirl back, and the stars under her eyelashes. Each time, Krylov had to steel himself so that he didn’t say what people wanted so much to hear from him. He accepted this torture at least once every six months. Another mess, he told himself, pretending to take an interest in the menu, of which six or eight pages lettered in a rough, fairy-tale style were given over to vodka.
What was he supposed to do with Tamara’s loyalty? In all the four years since their divorce and the parasite’s departure for the producer she had never once had a lover. If Krylov didn’t spend the night once in a long while, when he was in a certain mood, in one of her two imperial beds, she wouldn’t have had any sex at all. No one but Krylov was allowed into these palatial bedrooms. Tamara herself never accepted anyone’s invitations to dine in an intimate setting. In the wealthy society where people bought themselves sensations more than objects, Mrs. Krylova’s position seemed almost scandalous. Tamara kept people from enjoying life. No one—least of all Krylov—could understand why Tamara didn’t like the handsome actor Shaforostov, who distinguished himself from all other representatives of his profession by his intelligence, or the Italian Count Riccardo de Cosi, who had taken up residence in the Riphean capital because of her and who nearly froze to death when his rented Volkswagen broke down on the way to Tamara’s residence on a spectral ribbon of highway gripped by the spirit flame of a ground blizzard.
Life offered Tamara every kind of bald and full head, every mustache and beard, every bearing and status you could imagine. The fact that she chose none of this for herself raised suspicions of perverted inclinations. For a while people were saying—and even hinting in the skuzzier magazines—that Mrs. Krylova suffered from necrophilia. Jealous widows organized a demonstration, calling on wives and mothers not to give their loved ones’ bodies to Granite. The rally was led by the spouse of the writer Semyannikov, who was still very much alive, although he was a rather tame and skinny old man whose bony forehead had fine gray hairs plastered to it. Mrs. Semyannikova had moved vigorously into politics and looked accordingly: that is, she was large, plain, nearly neckless, and had an angry head sitting firmly on her shoulders. Tamara had had to deliver an envelope of money in compensation to Mrs. Semyannikova, but even without that the rumors wouldn’t have kept up for long. Tamara was the embodiment of corporal and spiritual health. She was normal and so made people perceive all her actions as normal. In general, her frank loyalty to Krylov touched everyone—Krylov himself most of all.
But here she was sitting across from him, the soul of naturalness and warmth. A marvelous woman who was not to blame for the fact that after so many years her feelings had not dimmed. Krylov’s nerves flared up when a skillet in which white mushrooms were sizzling and jumping as if they’d been stung was suddenly plunked down in front of him.
“Shall we eat first?” Tamara suggested in her musical voice as she spread a cross-stitched napkin in her lap.
“You see, I’ve been having some trouble. A lot of trouble,” Krylov spoke in a muffled voice, trying to change the subject in the only possible, if not very honest, way.
“Is that so?” Tamara’s hands froze in the air.
“This guy has been following me for about a month,” Krylov informed her, looking straight at the tablecloth. “I have no idea what he wants from me. He’s fat and ridiculous, but nimble. He won’t let himself get caught.”
He rushed but described the spy as carefully as he could—his shirts, his skunk-like manners. Since Tanya was absent from the story, he had the feeling that something significant was lacking in his description of the spy. Meanwhile, a thick flush came over Tamara’s cheeks and descended to her neck, like sediment.
“You must have thought I hired a private detective to watch you, right?” she asked archly, hitting the nail on the head. Her insight had returned, and now across from Krylov sat a completely different woman: straight-backed, broad-shouldered, frozen in the throne pose of an Egyptian queen on an oaken chair as big as a porch and upholstered in crimson velvet.
Krylov himself, seated in the same kind of absolutely unmovable item of furniture, felt trapped. He already regretted his candor.
“You thought that because of that one single time when I watched you from the car, right?” Tamara inquired coldly, not allowing herself the slightest tone of reproach.
But in the first place, that was not the one and only time. More than once, more than twice, Krylov had come out of his workshop and seen her late model black Mercedes parked a little ways off, looking odd among the few grubby, rusted out Toyotas and Zhigulis. When he noticed his ex-wife, Krylov took a few steps toward the Mercedes. But Tamara, wearing her Nina Ricci sunglasses, her unfamiliar mouth looking like she had drawn it without a mirror, waved at him to walk on by. Krylov obeyed, reluctantly. Naturally, Tamara was spying on him. What had she hoped to discover? A young lady waiting for Krylov on a bench, perhaps? But in the black stalls near the entryways and along the perimeter of the guttered sandbox sat only old women—and they in turn kept the Mercedes in their collective field of vision, flashing their cloudy little eyes at Tamara.
Secondly, when it came to young ladies …
“You see, I’m not waiting,” Tamara interrupted Krylov’s thoughts. “I’m not waiting for you to understand a few of my motives. You know sometimes it’s hard for me to invite you over. You’re always so busy, you could be running a major corporation. It seems anyone can see you just like that, without any pretext—anyone but me. Doesn’t that seem unfair to you? How many times has it happened that you promised to call and didn’t? You don’t remember? I do. In the last four years—two hundred eighty-three times. Tell me, did I bother you very much when I parked a little in your courtyard? Did I take away some part of your life?”
Yes, Krylov thought, mechanically stabbing the fluffy deluxe blin generously coated in black caviar with his fork. If Tamara had her way, she would surround Krylov on every side: dress him, shod him, feed him, hang him with expensive electronics, and top it off with an icing rose from a cake. Indeed, what could he reproach her for? Just her reluctance to see that the main goal of a Riphean man was not to fit into society—including female society—in a nice way. His main goal was to remain an outpost unto himself.
Yes, there was a time, a few years ago, when the uncut gem-quality stones were running low and his orders were miniscule, and Tamara had instantly made money and fed Krylov. That is, the very substance of which Krylov’s body consisted had been earned by her. Tamara didn’t understand—or, on the contrary, she understood all too well—that ever since then Krylov had done everything in his power to flush the old toxins from his organism and get busy replenishing his cells.
“You remember, I never allowed myself to get in the way of your other intimate relations,” Tamara continued, raising her even voice ever so slightly, literally half a jot. “You could always come over on a holiday with your latest girlfriend. Why would I spy? I could see everything anyway. Not only that, I myself introduced you to attractive women.”
That was the very worst kind of spying. Tamara had never had girlfriends before. After the divorce they turned up out of nowhere: lightly dressed, with long, slender legs, capable of drinking one cup of coffee for two hours straight and smiling silently. These women did not look like Tamara’s business partners, or like characters from her Bohemian crowd—which meant they weren’t. They had first names but no last names: Marina, Inessa, Katya, Monika, Kristina. The casting principle was obviously being followed simulta
neously. All these young ladies had very smooth hairdos that flowed over their heads like water creatures, high-set eyebrows, and round childlike eyes, gray or blue. Their correspondence to the presumed model made it clear that they were on the job. Krylov always suspected that Tamara, with her straightforwardness and tendency to act in the simplest and crudest manner, had hired the girls through some agency, he hoped a model agency, and especially for him, Krylov. Therefore he would take any excuse to ditch the “girlfriend” foisted on him for the company of the bartender, observing from afar as the invited model sparkled, lonely, in the middle of the living room, like a New Year’s tree.
Actually, sometimes the young ladies got what they wanted, creating a situation that gave the man no way out. Contact with their long bodies and contact with their pretty seal-like heads were such different processes that sometimes Krylov doubted whether the next Natasha squeezing him with her muscular hips realized that she was she. Actually, this may have been a case of her professional training showing: to be just a body when a body was what was required. Krylov realized that Tamara was controlling him through these women—not so much making up for Mitya by giving him ten women as she was playing the vampire and invading a realm where former wives were not supposed to go.
In order to avoid the live traps awaiting him in the cozy nooks of her home, Krylov sometimes showed up with his own samovar, as they say. The women he brought were mainly clients on the prowl for inexpensive diamonds from his illegal stash. Or some aging classmate who looked a lot like his own mama and was perfectly free for the next two hundred evenings might suddenly turn up out of nowhere. Tamara welcomed the surprise guest with exceptional kindness and proceeded to keep her close, introducing her to one imposing man thinly coated in the highest quality grease after another, as well as to post-lipo women who were very gracious and had already begun to mummify under their golden tan. They all smiled at the guest with even rows of implants and said a few pleasant words. Extremely flattered, the guest would drink too much of the unfamiliar champagne too quickly and start chirping like a sparrow in an April puddle. All this would end in terrible tears—and, of course, with a breakup with Krylov. What was most insulting was that the women Krylov found for himself, away from Tamara’s efforts, looked even more alike than the young ladies she hired. No matter how Krylov maneuvered he invariably ran into the same type: a dull brunette with a mane of hair that smelled like cigarettes, a secret neurotic and bore.
3
WHILE KRYLOV WAS TORTURING HIMSELF WITH THESE THOUGHTS, the goateed maitre d’ of the folkloric drinking establishment had already peeked into their booth several times, disturbed by the fact that his important guests had yet to touch their food.
“Did I guess right? Do you think it was me?” Tamara asked, breaking Krylov’s stream of consciousness, which she may have scanned across the cold goose- and apple-adorned table.
“I’m sorry,” Krylov said flatly, and he girded himself for a new onslaught of her iron arguments.
Instead, Tamara suddenly softened.
“You’re so silly,” she said, making a sad and tender face. “If I’d put a detective on your tail, you wouldn’t even have noticed. The same way you don’t notice a lot of other things from me.”
“Listen,” Krylov couldn’t resist spilling his thoughts to someone. “This person who’s spying … I have the nagging feeling I’ve seen him somewhere, even that I knew him well at some point. It’s like having an itch in your brain—you want to sneeze so badly, but you can’t. Just when I think I’m about to remember, I can’t.” He fell silent, tilting his head to one side because the answer flickered again somewhere under his skull to the right, but it died out immediately, leaving behind the now familiar mental asphyxia. He took a gulp from his mug of pink kvass, which clunked him in the nose like a hefty fist. Krylov wiped his face and suddenly added, “This man … It’s as if fate were following me around. It’s as if I were going to kill him, or he was going to kill me. That’s the kind of hallucination it is.”
Looking up, he expected to see Tamara’s trademark ironic grin, which scared her sleek managers to death. But Tamara remained grave, and her eyes beamed softly, like saucers of dark oil.
“Not likely it’s a hallucination,” she said thoughtfully. “You have to trust your sensations. Sometimes they report interesting news. But I realize you’re hiding something from me.”
“Everyone hides something,” Krylov responded with a challenge.
“You and I are having a material conversation now,” Tamara pulled him up sharp. “No matter how important what you’re not telling me is, what I’m going to tell you now is much more important. You and your Anfilogov have a special kind of business. The issue is not whether it’s legal or illegal. The problem is that you want to go it alone. I mean all your friends who used to come over when we were renting that little place on Kuznechnaya and then stopped coming over. I want you to be clear about one thing: today, everyone belongs to someone, and you’re doing everything in your power not to. All people and all businesses are part of a single world molecule. This molecule is a lot simpler than the most primitive human individuality. Simpler than that homeless woman putting on her makeup today next to my car. Simpler even than my office manager, who sincerely believes that if you mix forty-proof vodka and eight-proof beer you’ll get a forty-eight-proof drink. Even inside the molecule the upper levels are much more primitive than the lower ones. You can’t even imagine how crude, coarse, and simple-minded the functions are at the highest stages of power, where I’ve only had a peek.”
“You’re right, I can’t,” Krylov agreed, recalling with a shudder the intelligent eyes of the big shot officials and financiers whose hands he’d had occasion to shake. Now these people seemed like flies caught in a spider web, living and breathing canned goods such as certain types of insects store away for their progeny. “On the other hand, though, rock hunting hasn’t done anybody any serious harm yet,” Krylov added judiciously. “And we have people making their living with bloody calluses. I’ve been through it myself!”
“Lord! Not glory to labor again!” Tamara exclaimed, flinging her napkin on the table. “Any pickpocket is more legal than you. Any murderer is more understandable than you, with your crude miner’s hacks and your flying saucers. The structure of the molecule I’m explaining to you has nothing to do with the state’s laws and the laws of economics the way they’re taught us. It’s international. The only rules that exist for it are its own. And the people who aren’t integrated into it don’t exist either. You and your friends are blank spots on humanity. You and I are lucky. We were born in a gorgeous place where nearly half the population wishes it wasn’t! There’s nothing surprising in the fact each of you is looking for a means of verifying whether he’s dead or alive. You’re not good for anything but landing on the moon. Why do you think the world is letting you remain as you are?”
“I had no idea you took all this so much to heart,” Krylov was taken aback.
“What do you know about my heart?” Tamara responded sadly, quietly straightening the knives and forks around her untouched plate. “When you and I were an official family, I could look on these independent occupations of yours as a hobby. Now you’re on your own with no one to protect you and nothing to justify you. In open country, outside the law. All alone with the fact that you don’t exist. Wait, don’t keep me from saying what I’ve wanted to for a long time. In fact, I understand quite a lot. I assure you, the funeral business opens your eyes to certain things. Actually, I’ve long suspected…. You have your own special rights. Regardless of who was born here and who came here, you’re autochthones, and all the rest are colonists. This beautiful location has in some way itself reproduced you—for its own, absolutely nonhuman needs. I heard my fill by your side about the Snake and the Mistress of the Mountain. I don’t know what kind of creatures they are, but everything that happens to you can be read as the story of your relations with them. On the other hand, the molecule I w
as telling you about possesses instincts. Believe me, it’s dangerous. It doesn’t tolerate blank spots, even if the terra incognita is only on the soles of your outrageously muddy boots. So what you say about that fat spy and destiny following on your heels may not be so far from the truth.”
“You’re amazing,” Krylov said dully.
He himself realized that the spy’s appearance was humanity’s reflex to a person’s behavior. Here, then, is where we all live. A gorgeous spot. Terra incognita. It is this quality of obscurity that the autochthones busy searching for rock treasures value in their small homeland. Pathfinders live by this quality to a much greater degree than they do by the sale of their loot on the black market. Obscurity is their daily bread. In this sense, autochthones always reside nowhere, in their own nonbeing. The obscurity of the Riphean land is inexhaustible, the mountain spirits immortal.
“Let’s take our head out of the clouds,” Tamara said wearily. “I see two possibilities: either the amateur detective is working for your and Anfilogov’s local competitors, or else it’s representatives of the international market showing their concern—the Israelis, for example. Let’s say you came across something major and were planning to supply not the raw materials but cut stones, which the gemcutting business could not possibly like. Then they would probably knock you over the head. That is, you personally and your workbenches and even your legendary artistry are no competitor for that industry. But if a unique find were suddenly added to your skills, then you would definitely be an extra cog.”
“That’s interesting.” Krylov grinned, feeling a sudden surge of life-giving adrenalin filling his blood. “Well, just let them try. First I’ll be running away from them, and then they’ll be running away from me.”
“What nonsense!” Tamara said angrily.
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