The original lied. The founding idea of the new art turned out to have deep roots. But these roots remained hidden. No one told a mother, for example, that her pitiful pension, which stretched far enough only if you bought the “charity” items in their dried gray packages, was nothing but a convention, a rule of the game. Her complaints about her swollen feet, her blood pressure, and the darkness in her eyes had long sounded like a lie—and she really was lying because she ailed on purpose, since objectively there were medicines that could refresh her inflamed kidneys in a few hours. How many times had Krylov been irritated not even at her complaining or her feeble voice from the next room but at the very sight of her slitted patent shoes, which looked like they had been coated on the inside with household soap. He was equally enraged by other manifestations of poverty, infirmity, and illness that couldn’t be laughed off. Now he realized why all doctors, even very high-paid ones, had such bad personalities and why it had become acceptable for women to pile on makeup so that their faces looked like big-mouthed masks. What was the result? The theatricalization of life, the positioning of any bar or coffeehouse as a stage, the waiters as actors, the abundance of grandiloquent TV shows in the absence of intelligible news and the endless beauty contests without any actual beauty. We are what we resemble. Is it really so hard to pretend you’re prosperous and healthy? It’s much easier than actually earning money and actually recuperating—but nothing more was asked of the ordinary member of society. In some sense that’s all he needed. What had Tamara been saying about half the Riphean population wishing they didn’t exist? Evidently, rock hounds and extreme athletes still had good taste since they wouldn’t participate in the casting.
This is what Krylov was thinking as he feverishly tried to formulate why he’d been caught. Apparently something authentic had happened to him, against his will, that is, by force. Something that had probably happened to lots of people before. From Krylov’s point of view, getting attached to a woman who wasn’t terribly pretty, and who was capricious and sullen, was absurd. His joy was just his memories of Tanya. For some reason he lagged behind himself and his own reality by several days. In order to be happy, he had to make all his days identical, that is, marry Tanya and lead an absolutely measured life, with today just like yesterday. Instead, he demanded (from an unknown, evidently heavenly office) that in his personal case the unverifiable be subjected to verification, and as a result he got a ghost for a wife.
Since nothing happened in the space freed from God’s presence, the sole event of that evening was Krylov’s dream. He dreamed of a dizzyingly deep mountain gorge with vertical cliff walls that looked like steel. Along its bottom, as detailed as a living map, a green stream rushed along with the rumble of an express train, raising clouds of water and smelling like wine. If he bent a little lower, literally ten centimeters, the distant noise of the water was instantly audible. His head was gripped by a sighing clatter, and the ravine’s sweet smell rose up with the fine water-dust. The abyss beckoned more powerfully than the abyss that had opened up from the top of the wonderful Toadstool. The height gave him a chill, and butterflies flitted in his stomach.
People were standing and sitting next to him (from the side, it was like the blurry silhouette of a smashed bus); gradually, like beasts to a watering hole, they crept up to the very brink of the drop-off. In order not to throw themselves over, each one took things off and hurled them in to feed the deep, enticing air: attaché cases, boots, and cell phones flew into the abyss, somersaulting, and dark hats skimmed, as if greeting the right and left cliff walls in turn. But not one of the thrown items reached the bottom. Just when they were about to disappear, they blazed up in the sun and dove into the dark blue shadow and disappeared, as if the height itself had dissolved them, the impossibility of the fall, which you could never wrap your mind around.
Like the others, Krylov threw in his heavy bag, nearly swaying after it, and tore his steel watch off his wrist. Distressed that he had very few things compared to his companions (in his dream this was logical and accompanied by some croaking off-camera commentary), he wiggled out of his old, useless coat and jacket, which gave off the slight smell of novelty due to the emptiness of their pockets. Following the fall of his clothing, which swished in the rising and falling air streams, Krylov noticed that many people along the brink were following his example. Some had already stripped to their underpants and looked like swimmers ready to dive into this lake of wondrous air. Resisting the call of the abyss, they clutched each other or lay prone, literally clinging to the cliff, which was firm and reliable but did slant. Their untanned bodies, covered with gooseflesh and stuck-on pebbles, shook in the trembling of the sparse grass.
Here, pant legs swishing and coins scattering, someone’s gray, badly creased pants flew off into the abyss. Looking more closely, Krylov saw that the same thing was happening on the opposite edge of the drop-off. People were lugging up their colorful clothing, hurling it away—even tossing it up a little—and then lying down naked on the stones, which shone moistly, as if they were greasy. Now both edges of the abyss looked like the beach; both here and there a broad-hipped female silhouette loomed, attempting to curl up into a ball. Suddenly, not far away, some stupid scuffle started that looked like beetles sparring: first a rounded piece of stone would roll and smash into the cliff wall, then one of the two fighting would wave his arms hard as if he were trying to backstroke away, break off, start getting smaller, shining white, and dissolve like a spoonful of sugar in water. Being omniscient in his dream, Krylov guessed what had happened: those who had nothing left to throw into the bewitching chasm had figured out that their yawning neighbors would do quite nicely for that purpose instead of themselves. Now Krylov’s vague companions, having scattered, estranged, so that each could be alone with the enchantment of the abyss, began to regroup. Two, three, four ungainly dolls flew off, close to the sunny walls, some quite resigned, others with some remnant of jerking life. Those who hadn’t had time to tear off their clothes were like flags.
Meanwhile, the gorge’s enticing bottom remained innocent—unstained by a single one of the objects thrown from above. “The orchestra pit of the world theater,” an off-camera voice said into Krylov’s ear. Indeed, the calls of the abyss suddenly intensified, as if new instruments had harmoniously joined in on its soundless music. Barely able to contain himself, Krylov gazed into this eternity, where above the distant river an ominous mauve rainbow hung like a con trail. He didn’t notice how they’d made their way to him. A half-naked fatman, cautiously bearing his nice little belly, as if it were sewn from silk, saw he’d been discovered and ran at Krylov with a desperate laugh, wounding his raw feet painfully on the sharp stones. He was as cold as a frog; his pale eyes dancing, he seemed to be trying to make Krylov sit on the ground. But just when Krylov thought he had almost wriggled out of his opponent’s slippery embrace, his soles couldn’t feel their support, and the void rushed up at him, like a grenade.
2
THE CORUNDUM RIVER GREETED THE EXPEDITION WITH A PIERCING chill. The stream, which squeezed their feet in their rubber boots, seized their very bones, and everything green on the banks seemed dark blue. Sweaterless, Anfilogov slowly caught cold; he strode mechanically over the grinding shingle and slippery roots, and his head in his sweat-soaked knit cap felt like it was floating along separately and a mighty power plant was rumbling inside it.
The professor had studied the corundum river’s depiction and the map for months, and he knew it better than the crack in his own ceiling. Everything turned up exactly where it had been the previous year: the wind-blown cliffs covered in lichen that looked like copper turned green or like bright spots of bird poop set out along the banks; and the long pebbly shoals where in the mornings the whitened stones stuck together like ice cubes from the cold.
The expedition was moving along without stopping to wash ore or collect samples. However, the journey proved much longer and more exhausting than the professor had expected. The stre
am bed seemed tilted: having taken on water, the stream leapt more quickly over the stones, and the shallows had swollen. Making their way to the upper reaches, toward the particular fold where the horizon was fastened on the wrong button, the rock hounds, bent half over under the weight of their backpacks, kept ascending the mind-boggling steepness.
Now the expedition had more than enough food. But the mountain spirits were making their presence known. The rock hounds had not been able to eat a hot meal or dry their socks for a week. Each time, the diligent Kolyan gathered some good, crackling tinder and some dried-out fir branches, laid them according to the rules, and placed a live burning light there, like a bird into a cage. But as soon as the flame crumpled the kindling and started licking the smoky, sputtering branches, suddenly, a pale fire shot up from below like from a rocket nozzle—and the water in the pot, which had just come to a boil, was instantly transformed into a spongy ice that looked like a piece of the moon. A fierce chill came off the magnesium white campfire, where the burned branches stiffened like welded steel.
According to Anfilogov’s calculations, the temperature inside the phenomenon was approximately seventy degrees below zero; at the bottom of the transparent white night, slightly crusted with soap-bubble clouds, the icy campfire eddied, like the flow at the bottom of a large, cooling bath. Extinguishing it, of course, was impossible. When Kolyan, out of stupidity, thinking to forestall the chilly flare, threw half a bucket of water on the steamed, still hot branches, it froze instantly, in flight, like an ice chip, and Kolyan’s wet paws, the flesh adhering to the dull iron, started to be covered in granular little white beards. Fortunately, Anfilogov thought to throw in a rock, and the bared ice, which looked like a delusion, showered on the campfire with a marvelous ringing. Freeing the howling Kolyan, the professor urinated warm piss on his cramped paws, in which the blanched bucket was clanking ice convulsively, and then, unknotting the rotten rope around the victim’s waist, forced him to do the same thing—moreover, despite the professor’s squeamish assistance, a substantial amount of his body heat landed on his trousers.
They had to get away from the ice fire as quickly as possible because you never knew about buckets, and something even worse could happen. Rolling up camp, Anfilogov kept glancing stealthily to see whether the Dancing Pyralid would appear in the campfire, and indeed, a couple of times he did see a lightly dressed woman about a meter and a half tall, who was changing shape like clay on a potter’s wheel, spinning in a snowy swirl; her narrow, browless little face, with eyes like drops of blood, was covered with transparent scales, or so it seemed to the professor. Remembering that the expedition could not allow itself to sacrifice its pot, Anfilogov, like a hockey player with his stick, knocked it out of the flame with a heatproof pole made for firewood; the pot stung for a long time and looked like a white fur hat. After dropping off to sleep in a kind of delirium in their Australian down sleeping bags (in anticipation of their profits, Anfilogov had not stinted on outfitting the expedition, although he did not allow himself to take any excess belongings), in the morning the rock hounds observed above the place of their former campfire a delicate luminescence: a colorful pancake, dribbling from the edges, was rising quite vertically toward the clouds.
The professor fought off his cold with the help of a powerful antibiotic; however, without hot food there was no way he could beat back the illness. Slaking his rough thirst with water from the stream was like trying to swallow a snake. The rock hounds did not deny themselves their fancy tinned goods or fatty “alpinist” chocolate. They applied themselves economically only to the professor’s flask of Chivas Regal; if they had enough strength before going to bed, they rubbed themselves down with alcohol. In town, observing Anfilogov’s food purchases, Kolyan looked forward to the expedition as to a picnic in the fresh air; now, when he was given something tasty he used to drool over at home, his appetite for some reason just didn’t meet its planned capacity.
“That ham is making me sick to my stomach, Vasily Petrovich,” he reported calmly, giving the professor back the can with barely a nibble taken out. “It’s awfully pink. I can’t.”
“Have some cheese!” Anfilogov said angrily, himself experiencing strange flashes of revulsion for intense colors.
“I can’t eat that either. It’s awfully yellow.” Kolyan made a face. “I’d like some hot tea, with sugar!”
“Don’t be maudlin. You know very well the Pyralid is drawn to treasure.”
“She’ll just freeze us sooner, Vasily Petrovich,” Kolyan responded indifferently, crawling into his sleeping bag. “I don’t even care. Why does she have such an ugly face, like a mutant? I heard from Farid she was a pretty girl.”
“All of Farid’s are pretty,” Anfilogov muttered under his breath, remembering how, a couple of years before, Habibullin, the old lynx, had suddenly introduced his friends to his absurdly youthful, unforgivably beautiful wife Gulbahor, who was unaware how rare her faintly drawn Eastern features, which looked like a coverlet of fine snow had been pulled over them, were. Of course, that had not ended well.
He himself had married this winter, too. The difference in their ages was also substantial, and inspecting his Ekaterina Sergeyevna without any concern for what she thought of it, Anfilogov did not find in her standard, somewhat papery appearance any specific signs of aging, but she did not at all match the subtle, milky, tear-stained image in which he dreamed of her by the corundum prospecting pits on the eve of his main find. Now when Ekaterina Sergeyevna slept in Anfilogov’s bed—on her belly, hugging the pillow, her solid shovel-shaped ass outlined under the field blanket, the professor had a sense of untidiness, as if his coat were in the bed instead of hanging on its hook.
The professor was not terribly interested in why Ekaterina Sergeyevna had agreed to marriage. He assumed that any woman preferred the married to the unmarried state, and he conceded the phenomenon its natural nature. He did not think about whether Ekaterina Sergeyevna might have felt anything like love for him, for example; the professor did not encourage her skittish contact, as if she were a pickpocket trying to pull out his wallet. Ekaterina Sergeyevna’s feelings and thoughts meant as much to Anfilogov as the feelings and thoughts of other people the professor dealt with, which is to say, nothing at all.
He had arranged his life so that every person from his so-called circle was a terminus, that is, a dead end. In the case of Ekaterina Sergeyevna, the professor had succeeded fully. There could be no question of informing the people around him of the joyous event, to say nothing of putting himself at the disposal of a wedding party. They had had the witnesses the law requires: Kolyan, who had decked himself out for the occasion in a turquoise blue silk suit with shoulder pads; and a meek woman with a fat face and a red crew cut whom Anfilogov had summoned by phone and about whom no one knew that she had once been the professor’s first wife, the beauty of her school year, and the provincial figure-skating champion.
Anfilogov had absolutely no intention of altering the structure of his own life for the sake of Ekaterina Sergeyevna and so had not moved her in with him but had bought (for himself) her shadowy, oddly angular little apartment, where there was something of Siamese twins in the layout of the rooms and kitchen. Ekaterina Sergeyevna had rented it for a few years, also from some distant relatives. The professor added a little furniture (a bed on piano legs and a desk for his laptop) and started spending Saturday and Thursday nights at his wife’s. He didn’t give his spouse money for clothes and intentionally put up with her faded wardrobe. For some reason the professor found the notion of Ekaterina Sergeyevna in a mink coat highly distasteful. On the other hand, he quietly rewrote his will (without informing his two previous wives—the fat-faced one with whom the professor was in his own way friendly, and another, who had longed to run away from the professor and fate by achieving, through multistage plastic surgery, a resemblance to an unaging Madonna, any similarity to whom slipped right out from the plastic surgeons’ hands). Now that all his personal property a
nd real estate had been left to Ekaterina Sergeyevna (who knew nothing about it either), Anfilogov felt himself a complete beggar.
He found few joys in the unforeseen marriage. He got some satisfaction from feeding Ekaterina Sergeyevna some specifically male dish prepared with all the fine points: roast beef, shashlyk. For some reason he liked to watch his spouse cut the juicy meat—pink in the very middle and almost alive—reverently, crosswise, and her dry, fine-browed face grow warm from an expertly selected wine. Actually, Anfilogov had done this only four times, considering it unnecessary to give himself or others an excess of pleasure. Ekaterina Sergeyevna’s presence conveyed nothing to his small heart, which was much like a beaker for chemical experiments—experiments that had entailed a couple of explosions, more like pops, but were naturally a thing of the past. On the other hand, her presence did remind Anfilogov that he would die one day. This unpleasant knowledge had never before occurred to the professor on lonely nights, as it does to other weak-nerved men who can’t stand their own company if someone doesn’t share this sad burden with them. The professor had always got on splendidly and had lived quite companionably with his library: his books, two colonies in the two apartments the professor personally inhabited (Ekaterina Sergeyevna’s one-room apartment could not lay claims to being his third, especially since it was the sixth the professor had acquired), were night creatures and protected Anfilogov from delusions, gathering under his lamp in the dark time of the day. They spoke three languages with the professor, moreover some lay opened flat for weeks at a time, sprawling in leaning poses characteristic only of books printed in Russian. On Saturdays and Thursdays, which were set aside for his wife, the professor was first a little bored and then unbearably so. The small, tattered collection of cheap paper on Ekaterina Sergeyevna’s shelf was as accidental as a collection of passengers on a Metro car, and Anfilogov, dispatching his spousal duties in fifteen minutes, preferred the despised Internet.
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