2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  “Sorry, that was stupid,” Krylov said irritably. “If those fatasses want to knock my block off, then I can’t stand up to ten of them.”

  “Whether you like it or not, you have me,” Tamara declared calmly, but her voice held an insult so suppressed and so longstanding that Krylov was pricked by remorse. “I look at your amateur business from a position you can’t. In the last three or four years, the market for precious stones has been unstable. The Diamond Club is supporting diamond prices by brutal, artificial measures. Some deposits—in South Africa and Brazil—are being strictly conserved. No one has any interest in finding major new deposits of gem-quality stones. I’ll tell you something else. Today the technology exists—it has to do with weak ultrasound, but I don’t really understand it—that allows them to take pictures of the entire contents of the earth’s crust from a satellite. That is, they can see right through our dear Ripheans like a silk stocking stuffed with presents. They can assess the ground reserves of gem-quality diamonds within one or two tenths of a carat. What does that mean economically? It means that tomorrow I can calmly throw the Liz Schwartz necklace I paid fifteen thousand euros for yesterday into the garbage. Now you have to understand what your whole way of life is today. You dig the earth and split rock until you’re sweating blood just to reach a crystal—meanwhile they can see you and the crystal from above. You’re a muddy wildling nobody needs. Because they’ve figured out a way to synthesize any mineral very cheaply. The cubic zirconiums that fill the jewelry shops by the Metro are a thing of the last century. You can decorate your New Year’s tree with them. The crystals grown right here, by the way, in the Riphean branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are not likenesses but absolute examples of diamonds and corundums. Stones of any size, color, and purity. You can decorate New Year’s trees with them, too, and give them to children for toys. Naturally, if you allow the use of technology created five blocks from where we’re sitting right now.”

  Under the table, Krylov’s left knee had started vibrating very lightly, shuddering like a wind-up alarm clock. The washout from the adrenalin was hard and cloudy. Krylov imagined Anfilogov and Kolyan being photographed from a satellite using weak ultrasound. He imagined them walking far below, like two transparent minnows in the middle of thickly cast ruby lures.

  “Hasn’t it ever seemed odd to you that the world has so changed in the last ten years?” Tamara continued, frowning pensively at her undrunk wine. “Think about 2008 and 2009. So many things were new then: cell video, bioplastics, super-thin monitors, holographic videos, the first chips in medicine and cosmetics, even in laundry detergent. And then all came to an abrupt halt. Do you have any idea why? It turned out that an economic bomb is worse than an atomic bomb, and it can be created not only by physicists but by any smart guy who comes along in any field of science. Today, humanity is holding in a secret pocket a fundamentally new world in which it is incapable of living. Because in this new world most types of activity—yours, for instance—are pointless. Of the eight billion Homo sapiens, seven and half aren’t needed for anything. The specialists most in demand will cost more than they produce. It will be cheaper to feed them than to keep their jobs. On the other hand, if these new achievements are lost, no one will survive anyway. Everything will lose its value, currencies will crash, and I’m not even talking about the stock markets. Chaos will ensue, and the best solution will be war: refined, anonymous, and nearly silent. Only war will be able to absorb and spew out super high-tech technologies, so that the surviving monsters can exert themselves fully on the radioactive tillage, just as the Bible says we all should.”

  “Forgive my stupidity,” Krylov spoke cautiously, not understanding whether he did or didn’t believe in a secret pocket where humanity had hidden its deliverance from the biblical curse. “Of course, you are much better informed than ordinary mortals. You’ve basically told me that we can feed, dress, and put in good houses everyone who is living in poverty now.”

  “We can, only why?” Tamara smiled. “There’s no technical problem with feeding tens of thousands of voters five loaves of bread. Some politicians have even tried to do just that. It’s a good thing the structure we’ve chosen to call the world molecule put a stop to them in time. The sins of highly placed officials, specifically, greed and the thirst for power, have never let anyone into heaven—though maybe into Armageddon. Sins are our salvation until we all die.”

  “A more than cynical point of view,” Krylov commented.

  “Just don’t remind me that I’m a woman and a gentle creature! That’s not your place!” Tamara jumped at that. “Are you suggesting the values of humanism? Humanism has collapsed. It’s not even an idol; it’s last year’s snowman. There will never be any humanism again. But let’s assume we do manage to feed the hungry and by some miracle don’t get burned. What are these full bellies and shod feet going to do with themselves, existing in the form of albuminous bodies for a hundred and fifty years apiece? Have you considered how much about human beings is human? Twenty years ago, there was a devaluation of all creative achievements. Are we supposed to start liking poetry again? For me, personally, words written in a column remind me of arithmetic, not poetry. It’s as if you were supposed to subtract one from another or, at best, add them up. What about the poets? Where are they now? They’ve been fired. I have one author of poems, Vitenka Astakhov, the village idiot. He looks like a poet because he walks around in sandals and wool socks in winter, can sleep at any time of the day or night, and has never once in his life earned a kopek. Sometimes I give him a little something for vodka. But I, a serious, successful person with property, would never admit that that frozen scarecrow might say anything I should listen to with respect.”

  “Hey, aren’t you late for your wine club?” Krylov, who had long wished to be left alone, reminded her.

  “I’m late already,” Tamara replied cold-bloodedly. “Since I am, I’ll probably go to the office. As for your problem, I’ll give the assignment to my chief of security. My boys will suss out who this fatman is and who’s behind him fast.”

  “No!” This was exactly the turn of events Krylov had feared. “You answered my question, and I learned everything I wanted to know. Please, don’t do anything extra.”

  “Why not?” Tamara was surprised.

  Both fell silent because the goateed maitre d’, pining with tenderness for his high-level guests, had brought and respectfully served Tamara a decorated box with the check. While she was getting her credit card out of her purse, Krylov realized the full horror of his situation. In fact, he realized where his girlfriends had come from since the divorce. Formally free, he had become for Tamara the only dimension where she could encounter her own kind in order to wage a war to extinction. Now Krylov himself had arranged the decisive encounter. He could already imagine wending his way to the formal dinner Tamara gave every year in honor of the city’s patriotic holiday and seeing Tanya there, invited through some distant acquaintances and wearing a pathetic evening dress from some Chinese stall.

  At long last, the goateed maitre d’, powerfully hindered by his caftan in his bodily displays of servility, got the hell out.

  “Listen, I’m asking this favor,” Krylov followed an arrogant Tamara in rising from his crudely set chair. “I really don’t like the idea of someone else tailing me in addition to that fatman.”

  “I only wanted to help,” Tamara replied coldly. “But as you like.”

  With a sigh of relief, Krylov thought privately that Tamara’s help, including her presents, was always beside the point and pointless. But she had never known how to really help, the way close friends do, even in those thirteen years they lived together. Meanwhile Tamara had clicked her purse shut and placed a $600 bill on the table in front of him.

  “Take it. You need it,” she said with emphasis. (It was the truth.)

  “Thanks. I’ll pay you back,” mumbled Krylov, embarrassed.

  “The least you could do is not insult me that way, my frien
d,” Tamara spoke gaily, fixing the pointed locks on her shoulders with her quick fingers. “You know very well I’m not going to the poor-house.”

  The $600 bill was very new and as maidenly crisp as new-fallen snow. Instead of the usual $100 Franklin, he was gazed upon by President Pamela Armstrong, an imperious woman with a rabbit nose who had held the world community in her fist for eight years and just four months ago had perished in Beirut, when the newly built American Center suddenly swelled up and distorted, like in a delirium, to the glory of Allah. The use of the vibration charge, as the respectable world media called it, was so unlike anything known that the newspapers started absolutely howling about an alien attack. Frames from the catastrophe, which looked exactly as if it had taken place in a giant blender, flashed by just a time or two on television. First four heavy drops fell into the heat-bathed hexagon, as if it were a reflection in the water, then the surface shuddered and stretched thin, and an insane whirlwind rose up, without hitting anything but the Center, but slicing the cypress standing at the entrance from top to bottom, like a cucumber. What remained of the Center looked like coarse instant coffee, and most terrifying of all was its perfect homogeneity—and perfect dryness. Afterward, though, all commentary disappeared with incredible speed (taken by someone professional to the point of the absurd), and in Pamela Armstrong’s biography, which was published with lightning speed in every language, the main emphasis was put on the future president’s difficult adolescence (she took care of lions and tigers at the New York zoo) and at her adoption of eighteen orphans of every existing skin color, from a Yakut as yellow as melted grease to a blue-black girl from Ghana.

  This book in its iridescent holographic cover and the $600 bill were all people actually had left from the bewildering incident. Not only had Krylov never held a bill like this, he hadn’t even seen one anywhere yet, other than on the posters pasted up at the currency exchanges. He noted with interest that, despite the global preservation of novelty, Tamara always had all the newest doodads, jewelry, and gadgets before anyone else. She must have felt the stuffiness in which, if he were to believe her, the world community lived, and so pressed up to the cracks to get a whiff of the fresh breeze of death—and maybe even the air of the future.

  “Well, I have to go.” Instead of a kiss, Tamara pressed her perfumed cheek to Krylov’s hot stubble. “If you have far to go, my driver can be here in ten minutes.”

  “No, thanks. It’s close.”

  “That’s what I thought. Then good luck. Call me. Don’t forget.” Tamara’s heels clattered on the wooden staircase to the first floor, where he heard the mosquito-y buzzing of two balalaikas and diffuse shouts.

  Part Five

  1

  INDEED, KRYLOV DID NOT HAVE FAR TO GO. HE SAUNTERED DOWN Pushkarsky Lane, which was paved in rough stone. The stout little cannons dating back to Peter the Great that stood here and there on the porches of private homes and simply on granite pedestals warmed themselves peacefully in the sun like large black cats. At the World of Housecleaning store, Krylov bought a cheap but reliable mixer. When he reached a mustard-yellow apartment house, Krylov walked through the front door, which looked like an old kitchen cabinet, climbed to the fourth floor, and unlocked the door, behind which the powerful infusion of a silence many days in the making awaited him.

  At that moment not a soul on earth knew exactly where he was.

  Last year, in November, Krylov had had a windfall. His share from the sale of the stones Anfilogov brought back from the first expedition in his shirt pocket totaled an amount that wasn’t bad at all for everyday life but solved nothing in his basic prospects. Then all of a sudden, on the god-forsaken, frozen trunk of a linden tree on his way to the steaming puddles of the Metro, he saw tacked up a note written in a lady’s calligraphic handwriting. The fact that the sheet of paper was coated in a reflective frost made the lines look as though they’d been engraved on metal. It was a for-sale notice for a one-room apartment practically downtown, at literally half the usual price. Krylov dropped everything, called immediately, and when she invited him over, he rushed there headlong—seeking out analogous notices on his way in order to destroy them. Amazingly, though, he didn’t see a single one.

  The owner of the property for sale was an almost incorporeal old woman with a face like a musty rose and wearing a maidenly dress of worn silk. The dress with its fading cuffs and her crimped hair gave off a powerful smell of camphor, which made it seem as if the old woman lived in her massive armoire, which took up nearly half the room. The old lady’s beautiful manners could not conceal the fact that she was rather foolish. To Krylov’s attempt to be honest with her about real estate prices, she responded, rounding her r’s and croaking, that she found conversations about money traumatic. The old woman was flying off to France, where she had received an inheritance from her deceased sister. The deal was done in a flash. The shaggy young realtor whom Krylov invited to verify the legality of the contract looked at the apartment’s seller with poorly concealed hatred—obviously calculating how much he could have pocketed had the old bag not written one notice on a piece of paper torn from a cookbook, in the unruffled confidence that it would do the trick.

  For another month or thereabouts, Krylov helped his benefactress with customs clearance and shipping her furniture. Finally the old woman embarked, leaving behind a happy Krylov in his resonant space with the pink squares on the brown wallpaper and furniture marks on the reddish brown parquet. In those first few hours, Krylov dreamed of settling in here and inviting Anfilogov, Kolyan, Farid, and all the others to a housewarming party. Overexcited and tired from seeing people off and from the old lady’s rickety suitcase, which might as well have been stuffed with stones and cotton wool, he fell asleep instantly on the short little mattress, his long leg in his half-removed sock hanging out. While he slept, mysterious processes went on around and inside him. Krylov woke up the next morning—not in someone else’s apartment but in his own, as if he had been born here. Out the frosty window, thick gold smoke floated by like garlands of balloons, and the pock-marked parquet pieces burned like amber where the winter sun lay on them. Krylov glanced at the face of the antique marvel with the porcelain figurine fragment and figured out he’d slept for eighteen hours. In that time, no one had disturbed him. All his cares and worries were somewhere far away, and the walls of his empty inhabitation stood fast. Then Krylov decided he would never invite anyone here.

  Before this, no walls had ever defended Krylov. He had lived within the confines of his own body, bearing up to the press of the surrounding world. Now the situation had changed, and it occurred to Krylov to create out of the apartment a dimension where not a single human being would enter until he died.

  At first glance it was a wild idea, but at second there didn’t seem to be anything impracticable about it. Fortunately, Krylov hadn’t had a chance to brag to anyone about his lucky purchase. His mother, who was none too pleased with her son’s return from his rich wife, thought he was spending the night with a woman and that he was gradually taking his razor, and sweater, and for some reason his old armchair there. Actually, she was almost impossible to shock. Very white and puffy, with feet like balloons and dyed black hairs on her little scalp, Krylov’s mother was losing her mind before his very eyes. Unlike the usual insanity that concentrates on itself, as it grew, her insanity demanded an expansion of the space under its control. For a while now his mother had not thrown anything out that might prove useful for her waning life. She gathered up stray threads from the floor and tugged them from any clothes if they were dangling and fixedly rolled them up on slips of paper. These multicolored little skeins that lay about everywhere were like a picture of her damaged reason. In the kitchen, hall, and living room, entire fields of glass jars from pickled vegetables gathered dust under the table. Rattled by their close mates, they murmured in their glass throats. Naturally, Krylov’s mother needed his room. While allowing the presence of this junk on his floor, the windowsill, and other
free surfaces, he retained his right to the old couch, which had come from his very first homeland and occasionally would suddenly remind him of it.

  No one knew his apartment’s address or telephone number. No one guessed it even existed. After the expeditors from the consignment store came in and took out the old-fashioned furniture (amusing constructions made of metal tubing, plastic shelves, and big and small pillows as colorful as new watercolors), and after workmen from Safe Partner had installed a mighty steel door, sending smoke and rustling sparks flying in the vestibule, his territory’s boundaries were under lock and key.

  At Krylov’s disposal were fifty square meters of security. The first thing he realized was that since no one was ever going to come in here, the laws of the state did not apply here. If previously from time to time vague thoughts about the illegality of his business and the possibility of seizure (of a shipment of goods, of Anfilogov, of the workshop’s owner, of Krylov himself) came to mind, then now he knew that he could stash a sack of diamonds or a crate of Kalashnikovs and no one would ever be able to get to him personally. At the same time, Krylov realized that even his steel door could easily be opened with a laser, and there was also the window, through which the authorities could fly in a SWAT team on ropes if they really wanted to. Simultaneously, he knew that he and reality had reached—or rather, broken—a certain agreement. Krylov had locked up fifty square meters forever and taken them out of reality’s jurisdiction.

  When the steel door shut behind him and he flipped on the heater, Krylov exited reality. He felt his bodily makeup thin in a split-second, and having lost half his heat, he tried to come to grips with how he felt. The chill of disappearance quickly passed after a cup of hot cocoa, which Krylov made nearly as thick as cream of wheat. Spending the night here stretched out on the orange and blue sofa with some hefty, old fluff of a novel, Krylov was absent from the outside world, not only by force of the law which says that one body cannot be in two places at the same time, but in general. There, on the outside, nearly every person, lugging his electronic devices, received and emitted weak signals and himself was a kind of amplified electrical impulse, but Krylov followed a regime of silence so his location could not be fixed. He never used the telephone, fearing caller ID, although the antediluvian red plastic phone, which rattled in its cradle, like a piggy bank with coins, emitted a proper bass ring.