2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  Soon after, it turned out that his castaway adventure in the center of the four-million Riphean capital was easier said than done. The city’s roots stretched into the battened-down room of his apartment. Old electrical wiring came in, a very substantial water pipe went through it that looked like it had been assembled from the remains of Jules Verne’s Nautilus and covered with a soggy crust of oil paint. Water, electricity, and gas were the municipality’s business, naturally, but their representatives had no access to his closed territory. Therefore Krylov had to handle all emergencies himself. The week after he moved in a faucet burst and crumbling bits of iron and greasy dirt gushed into the cast iron tub and boiling water spurted through some crack. Krylov got good and coated with rust and his own blood before he was able to shut off the red hot valve wrapped with a well-steamed rag. Soon after, his upstairs neighbor created a leak: returning from his workshop, Krylov discovered that his kitchen ceiling looking like a blotter. That same evening, the honest man showed up to pay and tried to get into Krylov’s apartment to assess the scale of the damage; it took quite a bit of doing to keep him from pushing through the cracked door, through which his neighbor tried to slip an opened bottle of vodka like a grenade.

  In time, Krylov learned to use monkey wrenches, pliers, and other household tools whose crude grip confused the fine tuning of fingers he needed for the tip of his lapidary tool. Under no circumstances could he have repairmen in, so he had to live with the stains on the ceiling. The dangling wallpaper, which at times made the room look like a canvas stage set, and the scabs on the window frames also demanded repair, which Krylov would have to do himself.

  Having left state power outside his door and shut himself off from the community of women, with their claims and local wars, Krylov in fact had wished for something that had never been anywhere before. He decided to free his territory from the influence of the force that permeated the world. Only religion gave this force a name. It was a low trick, but for the individual citizen all other human creatures were representatives of that force and implementers of its incomprehensible decisions. Thus Krylov had so decisively divided humanity up into himself and everyone else; thus he had avenged any loss inflicted by anyone on someone else with perfect cold-bloodedness and could not stand being in debt.

  Now, in his fifty square meters, he set himself the goal of not giving this force the slightest chance. Not a single object there could be moved without Krylov’s wishing it. Krylov alone was the source here of all the cause-and-effect connections, which were of necessity maximally simplified. Each thing in the apartment existed simultaneously in Krylov’s consciousness as a holographic copy. He could not imagine allowing himself to forget an object once he had put it on a far shelf. Therefore he ruthlessly rid himself of anything extra: he took out two boxes of his own and the old lady’s junk to the garbage, including broken figurines of dead porcelain, a pot with an unidentified withered plant, and hundred-year-old dust-scattering books—the verbose works of forgotten mustached men. What was left standing on the wiped surfaces demonstrated to Krylov that his mind was limited. But now he could be fully conscious of everything that happened in his refuge. After a while, he noticed that the apartment’s space had become transparent: nothing was concealed from the very first glance, but the possibility of penetrating from without was excluded. God, should he wish to get this human insect with his straw, would have to smash the refuge’s transparency to white powder.

  The sense of freedom Krylov experienced by shutting himself up here forever had no analogs in daily life and was like nothing other than getting rid of your clothes and their fastenings. In fact, Krylov acquired the habit of roaming about naked, thanks to the ancient radiators under the massive windowsills, which gave out a metallic heat that made water run down the glass, washing away the ice feathers. The absence of a mirror in the apartment allowed Krylov not to be shy; he threw a laundered towel over the kitchen stool, which felt clammy and cool on his cold-sensitive butt.

  Now he realized with astonishing clarity that any person, no matter how insignificant, drunk, and senseless, could drag God into his refuge. Krylov literally saw His presence shining through the crumpled or simply everyday faces of his neighbors. Once, going down the stairs, he ran into the muzhik who lived on the other side of his wall: too drunk to make any sense, the muzhik was practically crawling, and on his shoulder sat a creature that Krylov first took for a snowy owl. After staring at the phenomenon he still couldn’t get a proper look at the iridescent cocoon that the marvelous long-feathered wings stretched out each time the muzhik was about to ram his face into the sharp step and lifted its ward slightly into the air. Distraught, Krylov surprised himself by slipping the alcoholic a twenty-dollar bill. Goggling at the money squeezed in his blue (ink-stained?) fingers, he suddenly sobered up, and Krylov barely made it to the haven of his apartment safe from his gratitude, from the flashes from his agitated angel, and from the disgusting port splashing in the dirty bottle.

  Lying on his back on his trusty couch, holding a novel on his naked, sweaty chest, with a hot breeze from the radiator on his free belly, Krylov tried to imagine a stranger appearing in the apartment for the first time in thirty or forty years. He thought that the space, once presented to the stranger, would differ markedly from the usual inhabitation. A secret would be revealed to whoever entered that every person has inside and carries with him (a sad, unneeded treasure which can’t be spent on life or given to anyone), and in this way Krylov would unload this property inside his own walls—unwanted, perhaps, but not worthless either. He saw his objective after his death as spreading his soul in the air the way other people ask that their ashes be scattered in the air—and he felt an iron will inside to leave empty.

  As if leaving the limits of his own body (evidently rejecting the usual boundaries along with his clothes), he attempted to pinpoint his incorporeal presence on the surrounding objects. A few times he thought the apartment did have a mirror after all. Probably too little time had passed, though, for any permanent effects. Krylov had no doubt, though, that a stranger walking into the apartment would see it first—not his body, which would also be lying here, more than likely, but his quite authentic and moving image: a naked man with anxious eyes. This Adam would likely not disperse in the very first moment; there might be enough of it for visits by a few outsiders—and then everything would be the same as everywhere else. On the other hand, Krylov was not going to go meekly to Him Whom he had not asked to produce himself in the world, Who had not reached an agreement with Krylov about anything.

  Even before he met Tanya, who showed Krylov how one can suddenly, against one’s will, put himself at the disposal of fate, though, unpredicted difficulties arose in making his refuge habitable in comparison with which the plumbing leaks and neighbors’ sociability were as nothing. Due to the unusual freedom of Krylov’s loins, an unshakable caprice began to overtake him. Nothing like it had ever happened to him even when he was a teen and locked himself away from his parents in the bathtub, which was hung with laundered underpants that looked like the torn banners of a vanquished army—and each time he feared that his overused friend, turning the color of an angry octopus, would spray at their especially stain-sensitive, freshly whitewashed ceiling. At the time he thought all the objects in his parents’ apartment were allergic to his illicit sperm. Even now, locked in once again in the bathroom from he knew not whom, overcome by visions of women quivering like big fish on butchering boards, Krylov reached the same adolescent compromise.

  Thus, by tormenting Adam, his refuge demanded an Eve. These torments ceased only with the appearance of Tanya, from whom Krylov came home emptied and fell asleep with the sensation that his body was evaporating and that all that would be left on his pillow was his heavy brain, filled with color pictures, and two eyeballs, each of which had been screwed into a kaleidoscope. On the other hand, he understood something strange: because nothing could happen in the space without his conscious will, nothing was happening.
In the outside world, where Krylov had experienced a feeling of unexpected power for a strange woman, had fallen under someone’s higher tyranny, and had chased all over the city after God, like a crazy paparazzo, everything shone and breathed life, and each day could bring both happiness and dashed hopes—but on his sovereign territory, only the simplest physical and chemical processes seemed to occur. Everything else had to be done by hand. Putting out his own clothes, pouring himself cocoa from a crooked pot covered with burnt velvet, it was as if Krylov were purposely staging something, as if he were clumsily acting something out for someone.

  The empty apartment itself became an undiminishing temptation for Krylov. More than once, running up against the lack of hotels in an outlying neighborhood, he had barely kept himself from simply bringing Tanya back to his place. Often, tasting illness on Tanya’s cold, damp skin and observing the bandages covering her rubbed feet, he mentally cursed himself. Tanya, on the contrary, was unnaturally indifferent to her physical infirmities.

  “You love like a woman,” she said angrily when Krylov could not stop tears from welling up when she hacked into her caked handkerchief.

  “I’m afraid you’ll bust a gut,” Ivan tried to vindicate himself. “If you get sick and don’t come one day, what then?”

  “Have no doubt, I’ll come,” Tanya replied morosely, breathing after her coughing jag as if she’d just run five kilometers. “If I couldn’t come, I wouldn’t have a long time ago.”

  “Why did we ever get started like this?” muttered Krylov regretfully, watching Tanya nimbly set out her travel vials of gel and shampoo, which she rubbed into her own flesh like overripe fruit, in the bare hotel bathroom. “We ought to have—”

  “Just don’t start!” she frowned anxiously as she perched on one of the two meagerly made up beds. “You know perfectly well it can’t be any other way. Let’s try to keep away from each other a little more and remember that the best is the enemy of the good.”

  He might have insisted had it not been for the bundle of mysterious keys Tanya had given him for some unknown purpose—scarcely just to tease him. Krylov always carried them with him, and the metal cluster at the bottom of the pocket of his canvas trousers slapped against his leg. Two of the four keys with complicated bits obviously belonged to expensive, high-precision locks; the other two—one looked like the letter “P” and the other like an ordinary nail—opened something uncomplicated. They may have been for different spaces, but more than likely the second pair went to the interior doors of the apartment, and the first opened the safe-door—which was tougher than the one Krylov had coughed up for. The magnetic button with the icy granules of chips spoke to the fact that a computer monitored the lobby. By all accounts, Tanya’s apartment was fairly high-class housing—which did not in any way correspond to the poverty of her folkloric, practically vegetable-dyed clothing. At the same time, despite the presence of a husband, something told Krylov that if Tanya were to decide to end the experiment she could offer an option no worse than the refuge on Kungurskaya Street. And she had given Krylov the keys because sometimes, in a rush of optimism, she dreamed of this. On the other hand, in surges of pessimism, judging from the irritated looks Tanya cast at Krylov’s removed or donned trousers, which were loaded with metal and clanked like a horse’s harness, she thought about how most artfully to recover the dangerous souvenir. Krylov intended no matter what to hold on to the cluster, which kept getting heavier, as if it were ripening, which he had studied by touch down to the last notch, and which he apparently could read the information off, the way books for the blind are read by feel.

  Tanya’s appearance in Krylov’s life did not lead to her appearance in his refuge. As a result, not a single soul knew exactly where he was when after his conversation with Tamara—tired and dumbfounded by the non-genuineness of the world he was accustomed to considering authentic—Krylov went up to the fourth floor of the old entryway, which was as broad as a street, and unlocked his nice new steel door, which responded with a brisk soldierly rumble to the entering man’s push. In the hall, silence and a feeble band of light awaited him from the bathroom, where for some reason the electricity was on. Krylov gave the handle a jerk and was convinced that the bathroom was, of course, empty, and the leaky faucet, wrapped with dull tape so that it looked like a large insect crawling out of its chrysalis, was neatly aimed into the sink.

  In the kitchen, Krylov found two unwashed dishes with picturesque traces of scrambled eggs; soaking in the dishpan, full of nasty water, was a cup from cocoa and another, with a fly at the bottom, was white on the windowsill. It was as if the apartment had taken Krylov for two people at minimum. This was not the first time he had had the distinct sensation that someone had been in his refuge in his absence. Either he found extra dishes, like today; or it seemed to him that someone had touched the books and put them on the shelf in an unusual order not characteristic of their owner.

  Now, washing all the dishes, Krylov promised himself he’d be extremely tidy. Downstairs, in the shadow of the blinking monitor of an information kiosk, was a beggarly old man with a big, woolly beard who looked like a sloshed Father Frost left stranded in the summer in the big wide world. The time before last, a pale Tanya had been standing there next to him, waiting for Krylov. Actually, Krylov had long ago predicted that the fortune-telling on the city map would lead Tanya to his refuge; in enticing his woman away from his own windows and trying not to look up, he knew he was lying as he had never lied in words. Now, glancing down, he felt Tanya’s absence there, next to the old man and the kiosks, and he realized that his uncurtained window, like a picture in a frame, preserved the most acute image of her absence.

  Many women swathed in fashionable, wet-look dresses passed the old man. They were all as alien as Martians to Krylov. Across the way, on the other side of Kungurskaya, the district tax police’s old-time façade was decorated, on the threshold of the city holiday, with long silk pennants that flowed down the flagpoles like honey or jam. A little farther off, projected on the tall butt-end of the academic institute, a gigantic slide with the mayor’s portrait had started to smooth out but had gotten stuck and was jerking: all you could make out was his recognizable curly locks, which looked like a sheepskin, and his kind left eye, which the efforts of tiny workers had made wink joyously at the tiny passers-by.

  This, then, was why everything was like this. This entire world, with its sufferings, poverty, and diseases, was simply unreal. A few wise guys who had taken up residence, especially, in the concrete institution decorated for the holiday with the ruddy-faced mayor and his sincere congratulations, had created a reality, that, rather than embody authenticity, robbed everything of it. If you thought about it, Tamara’s message, which at first glance had seemed improbable, was confirmed by many facts—not even facts, really, but the quiet, hidden course of things. It had started about fifteen years before. The very air had come to seem used, which had made the richer folk rush to buy up containers of Alpine or Antarctic concentrate. Then it was the unrefreshed air of closed buildings, where unsealing windows was forbidden. There had been a format change, as the leading glossy magazines had written. Krylov recalled the avalanche of words on this topic, rivers of silky magazine pages where the multicolored portraits of lords and masters had floated and drowned like autumn leaves. The conservation of life served itself up as an unprecedented surge of novelty. Everyone suddenly felt like heroes in a novel, that is, like characters in a made-up reality; everyone wanted to speak without answering for a single word they said. Krylov had not forgotten how he and Tamara, young and happy, stylishly dressed (for the first time permitting himself, through Anfilogov’s generosity, expensive trash from jeans stores decorated to look like saloons), had been part of the mob scenes at rallies and art shows—which were essentially one and the same. All the politicians presented themselves as art projects: the president of the Russian Federation looked so much more like the president of the Russian Federation than anyone else that afterward peopl
e kept electing the same kind of blond security-agency types. The mayor of the Riphean capital, who was curly-haired, even slightly negroid, like Pushkin gone to fat, was reelected soon after, and soon after that he was replaced by someone exactly like him, and then another—so that people talked as if the memorable politician, and his successor, and the present father of the Ripheans, who now adorned hundreds of buildings’ butt-ends and facades on the threshold of the holiday, were one and the same person.

  What next? In some way everyone must have felt the world’s falseness; helping one’s neighbor in his inauthentic sufferings made no sense. A new culture had taken shape that had an internal unity, a culture of copies without originals regulated by hundreds of restrictions prescribed in the Consumer Rights Protection Act. People gave willingly only to the poor because they knew it was a business and all the old men in moldy tatters, invalids with obscenely wagging red stumps, and dirty children with chocolate-smeared faces were in fact not poor people and earned more than some designers and advisers. The poor became actors in a truly popular theater, representatives of the sole living form of art—the art of presenting misfortune in conventional commercial forms. Other troupes reached the same heights in their demonstration of human infirmity as the circus achieves in its demonstration of human athleticism. Gutta-percha acrobats who knew how to hide their healthy limbs, bending impossibly and transforming themselves from harmonious people into knotty snags; illusionists in cleverly fitted wheelchairs that hid nearly half the person; clowns, jugglers, aerialists on long stilts—in other words, the elite of a profession from which Krylov particularly recalled a big-nosed gypsy who carried her own child’s head in a pot in front of her—and very calmly let him run out from under her worn gathered skirts when there was no particular influx of an interested audience.