2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  On Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, though, he now experienced a completely new kind of sensation, as if the night before his execution had come, and the texts in his now alien books had become senselessly long, beyond the limits of understanding and life—and something important about the professor himself that had not found its way into a single one of the volumes that exist in the world had not been expressed. Ekaterina Sergeyevna must have had a long-distance effect on the professor. Approximately a week before the expedition’s departure, Anfilogov, who had not contemplated anything like this the night before, suddenly told his wife the codes for all his credit cards and gave instructions for accessing nearly all his cached material valuables, including the contents of his aquarium. Her fright, her wet, wide-open eyes, which looked an overcast, moist grayish blue, suddenly softened the professor’s heart. In the last few days, cautiously getting to know each other, they spoke in new voices, and when Ekaterina Sergeyevna, sniffing her pink nose, stroked his head, the professor did not get up angrily but sat patiently, as if he were at the barber’s. They went to the opera, where in the crowded box they held hands to the aria of the fat toreador, who in his embroidered costume looked like a gold turtle. It was as if Ekaterina Sergeyevna were looking to the professor for protection from the dangers that threatened his expedition, and Anfilogov, inspecting her dried lips, which looked like air-dried orange slices, thought that he might, in principle, kiss her.

  Now that Ekaterina Sergeyevna was back in the city, though, the sole heir and mistress of all his secrets, Anfilogov had the feeling he would never return.

  They didn’t reach the spot until the fourteenth day. That winter, after Anfilogov bought off the sector chief at the nearest (two hundred kilometers away) timbering operation and got him drunk, by some miracle he reached the river in a borrowed Buran, but he couldn’t identify the small cliffs that concealed his first prospecting pits with confidence. Where the stream had been there was a white blank, as even and aimless as the empty sky with its small harsh sun, which completed its low arc in four hours. The steep bank stood over nothing, its snowy ledges, bitten away by the wind, hung utterly silently in the air. The beauty was terrifying. Everything was colorful and unreal except for the man—Anfilogov with his clumping white eyelashes, a mane of ice on the fur of his hood. The professor unloaded a gasoline can, which tore at the down mittens he was blowing on, into a cliff fissure covered with white webbing, and the can quietly drowned, leaving a round hole. This foray of the professor’s might have ended badly but didn’t. The cold of the sub-Arctic night weighed on him but the darkness didn’t. In the light of the barbed stars the untrodden snow was like a television screen flickering on an empty channel; the northern lights flickered in the sky like a flame from burning alcohol. Following his own tracks, the professor reached the winter quarters—a half-ruined hut that looked like a small canvas airplane that had crashed—without incident. Now Anfilogov had in mind this route as well: to the southwest, via the winter quarters, where according to the unspoken law of the taiga there were always supplies and matches.

  Indeed, Anfilogov had not missed the mark that winter. The gas can was discovered literally a hundred meters from the previous year’s camp, firmly stuck between granite walls spotted with condensation. They freed the can and rolled it toward the tent. The stream, which had loosened up the dolomite, was still snarling, its water seething as if it were being poured from a boiling kettle; last year’s tracks from the expedition stood out on the old biscuit-color grass the way the rectangles of removed pictures stand out on wallpaper. Only here, at last, the fire got hot and crackled; a much-cheered Kolyan blew the acrid, garbage-fed flame to the very skies, so that heat blew on their caps. The hot food lacked all flavor: the rock hounds absorbed only the warmth, sucking the liquid up with their baked lips and stuffing their bellies with steamed bread. They didn’t have the energy to move away from the dying fire and hissing mounds of coals where the heat rustled, rang, and overflowed under a skin of gentle ash. They felt as if they were in front of the greatest possible treasure, for the sake of which they had traveled across wet windfallen trees and the Lenten stone porridge of the endless shoals.

  While they were setting up camp, Kolyan plucked low-growing, mousy-wool mayflower bells. Half-reclining in his sleeping bag, he sorted and sniffed the faded plants and lounged in silence such as he had never before maintained for a single hour. Anfilogov noted for the umpteenth time that his sword bearer had undergone a powerful change. For some reason this change gave the professor a bad feeling. Last autumn, after reluctantly selling the incredible rubies to the most discreet of all the agents (a pale Pole with a very odd, layered, doubled shadow whose solid little core was always darker), the professor for some reason gave Kolyan an unfairly small share. Previously, Kolyan had invariably rejoiced at receiving money, any money, even a ruble, unaware of whether it was a lot or a little, whether he had come out ahead or behind—which is what had made him invaluable to Anfilogov, who calculated all too well. This time his sword bearer didn’t even peek inside the shiny envelope, as if he had guessed at the insult. In depriving Kolyan, the professor had naturally not been seeking advantage; indeed, he had felt revulsion for the excess that remained in his pocket. It was just that Kolyan had somehow become superfluous. Ever since, last summer, Anfilogov had led his irreplaceable workmate over the glossy slide-rocks and cold, bile-filled swamps, to inhabitation; ever since he had taken him, whimpering in the upper berth, to the train station and his little house on the outskirts of town, where the traveler was met by his ninety-year-old granny, who looked like a bandaged finger in her kerchiefs; ever since these humiliating actions, Kolyan’s presence had become a burden to the professor. In Anfilogov’s eyes, he had become as good as dead, and giving him money now was like throwing it in the garbage. Kolyan sensed this, of course. The strangest part was that he seemed to agree.

  He virtually never showed up idle now, and if he did have occasion, as before, to overstay his welcome at the professor’s, he didn’t start in about car prices or a book he’d just read but fell quietly silent, plunged in his own thoughts. In the interval between the two expeditions, Kolyan visited all his fairy-tale kin, which consisted primarily of women scattered throughout dreadful, inhumanly remote little towns and settlements. Each time, Kolyan returned from his sisters and aunts quieter and more subdued; he returned from Solikamsk, where he had once dreamed of driving in a foreign car, without his mustache for some reason, with a bare pink spot under his nose that looked like a bandaid. Somewhere during these winding wanderings, Kolyan had been baptized. Now he sometimes crossed himself modestly, as if he had buttoned his clothes on the woman’s side. A dark, damp silver chain stuck in the gap in his shirt, with its equally dark sticking cross.

  With mounting irritation Anfilogov observed his workmate prepare for death, quietly and systematically, without asking anyone’s permission. It was stupid and just plain dangerous to drag someone like that along on an expedition. Kolyan seemed to have a presentiment of a fateful coincidence and was mentally preparing himself for it, which was just legitimizing it, asking it to happen. The likelihood that those circumstances would hook the professor, too, was virtually a hundred percent. Simultaneously, Anfilogov could do nothing against these moods of Kolyan’s—and he couldn’t replace him with another workmate because then he couldn’t count on the deposit’s secret being kept. Somehow there wasn’t anyone suitable among the professor’s painstakingly separated partners, who existed in strict isolation. Because no candidate was better than another, they all blurred and became a single face—infinitely alien and utterly uninteresting to Anfilogov. As it turned out, he and Kolyan were each other’s only kindred beings.

  Among other options, Anfilogov thought about the possibility of setting off north alone. But once informed, Kolyan viewed the upcoming expedition with such a pilgrim’s awe that he couldn’t refuse him the trip. Meanwhile, he knew how to wound Anfilogov by constantly remi
nding him of the ill-fated envelope. Instead of spending his miserly share on false teeth (as the professor insistently advised, with false cheer), Kolyan invested his last kopek in equipment. He bought a pump for pumping groundwater out of the corundum prospecting pits. Actually, by Kolyan’s logic, there was no point in new teeth for him. Anfilogov had been trying without luck to drive away the vision of a skull smiling a metal, slightly rusty smile.

  He dreamed of this skull the first night at the corundum vein. The skull was dry and looked like it was made out of cardboard, and it was hanging in a banner-crimson, sun-heated tent in the manner of a wasp’s nest. Anfilogov’s mouth was as hot as a sauna inside, and he realized he still had a cold. His fat tongue touched his teeth, and Anfilogov was convinced that they were falling out of their sockets quite painlessly.

  Waking in a sweat, not yet opening his eyes, which were stuck with tears and the first soft swarm of midges, Anfilogov did not immediately realize that his American implants were just fine. A milky fog was covering the surrounding area with a skin, each stand of trees, transparent and curlicued, was in its own striated cloud, as if in its own atmosphere—and nothing around was moving except for the rapids-filled river, which seemed to have filled its stone jugs and be continuously and noisily overflowing.

  Tendrils of acrid smoke were still rising from yesterday’s huge fire, which looked like the remains of a burned hut. The rock hounds washed haphazardly from a gushing rock and breakfasted on the remains of yesterday’s feast, which they had thrown for themselves to celebrate being rid of the Dancing Pyralid. Before going to the prospecting pits, Anfilogov checked Kolyan’s injured paws: the burns from the frozen bucket had tightened the thin, bright pink skin and made his palms as hard and smooth as a baby’s bottom.

  The path trampled from the camp to the site of their slave labor was, strangely enough, intact and dark on the silvery slope, as if it had been drawn with a finger on a sweating glass. Anfilogov was extremely worried. Once again he felt that same attentive gaze on himself that last year had accompanied the expedition from this spot all the way to the train. In the distance he could see the rusty patches of fir twigs the rock hounds had used to camouflage their find from chance competitors. When they came up to it, the teensy needles turned out to have almost all dropped from the branches. Through the naked branches, which looked like a rust-eaten sewer drain, the water shone quite close by.

  “Take a look, Vasily Petrovich! The spot’s high, but it’s full of water!” Kolyan was amazed as he threw the camouflaging aside. “I thought it would fill up less!”

  Last year’s pit with its walls of wounded stone exhaled a melting underground cold on the rock hounds’ faces, and a puzzling odor added in—a very faint, bitterly synthetic smell that dissolved when you tried to sniff it. Kolyan leaned over the pit and flared his reddened nostrils.

  “It’s some kind of salt, Vasily Petrovich!” he reported, coming up on all fours. “Or maybe not …”

  The still water in the prospecting pit looked like an inverted saucer. Lots of tiny trash had accumulated near the walls—frozen crumbs from the needles, some kind of wool, fir twigs that looked like little crosses. Risking falling in, Kolyan stretched his fingers to the still surface. The water cautiously took them with its black lips, the way a harmless goat takes a piece of sugar. Somewhere under the water, in one of the walls, there was an untouched underground treasure—plus a polyethylene package with the discards from last year’s good fortune, which was also worth at least ten thousand dollars.

  Sniffing his wet hand as red and dirty as a carrot, Kolyan did not come to any specific conclusion right away.

  “Let’s pump it out, Vasily Petrovich!” he exclaimed brightly, wiping his paw on his pants. “Did we bring the pump here for nothing? And we have the gas. Fill ’er up!”

  The professor didn’t like equipment and understood nothing about it as a matter of principle. On the other hand, Kolyan literally adored metal and happily spent an hour at it, after which it started banging, smacking, and splashing in good order in the mine workings. The pit, however, bared itself slowly. Several times Anfilogov went to see how matters were progressing. The damp walls, coated with half-liquid clay, as if they’d been plastered with rusty wet gauze, were dark and angular. Trembling water was seeping out of them here and there, water much brighter than what was pumping out through the clear annular hose and plopping out thickly, soaking the nice new grass. As the water level dropped, rather than dissipate, the strange smell got stronger. The pit smelled like the maw of some fatally ill stone animal.

  Kolyan’s reddened eyes were tearing, and his eyelids were like fat abscesses. Time and again there were small accidents at the outflow. The cloudy hose sucked and swelled. Then Kolyan, swearing lovingly, pulled the clogged bell out of the water, twisted out the mesh, and poked out some rotten feathers and something that looked like a clump of velvet scraps.

  “A year’s a long time, Vasily Petrovich!” Kolyan commented didactically, stirring the muck at the bottom with a pole. “All manner of beast drowned!”

  Just in case, before starting the motor up again, Kolyan scraped the fattened bottom with a bucket attached to the pole. His catch consisted of two decomposing, by now unidentifiable birds, the scraggly felt frame of a small hare, the round little bodies of small rodents, and wet flocks of bats. Observing his workmate strain this black soup and bones, Anfilogov felt an unfamiliar tightening in his chest, as if air had stuck in his lungs at an angle.

  Halfway back to camp, he again felt as if he were suffocating, and this time the spasm lasted much longer. “Mining gasses,” thought Anfilogov when the wooden pincers that had grabbed his ribs eased up a little. “Or maybe it isn’t gasses. It’s more like industrial waste. Even thought there isn’t a plant around for hundreds of kilometers. The cleanest spot. It really is strange.” The bitter synthetic stuffed his nostrils and glued over his mucous membrane, which made his nasal septum itch like crazy. “Could I still have a cold?” the professor asked himself, sensing that if he sneezed right now, his life would spill out. “I think I still have the capsules left. Did the gemcutter bring the sweater or not? Or was Ekaterina Sergeyevna supposed to get it? Probably she was, otherwise why come to the station? Yes, she was holding some kind of bag. She forgot to give it to me. Women are always forgetting things. And now, because of her …” At this the professor’s mind cleared, as if a breeze had blown through it. “We’ll gather up last year’s stones and leave,” he told himself firmly, standing in the camp on the edge of yesterday’s big fire. “Enough’s enough. But for what, actually? If you count…. That’s nine hundred thousand…. There’s a million and a half in euros…. Plus interest … I’ve already got more than seventy. Enough for Kolyan’s Mercedes? It’s idiotic…. Anyway, no more stone quarries. We’re leaving as fast as we can.”

  Despite the decision taken, Anfilogov was busy until four setting up camp. There was absolutely nothing to do. Kolyan, soaked and dirty, kept fussing around the prospecting pit, sometimes running up in his sloshing boots, which were as full as buckets, to grab a sandwich with his unwashed hands. He didn’t need help. The professor was presented with an unforeseen, utterly superfluous opportunity simply to be in a space that he remembered less from his waking hours than from his own dreams. A lot had changed, although to the outward, approximate gaze nothing had. Storing the food so that chipmunks and other voracious beasts wouldn’t get at it, Anfilogov suddenly realized that the tiny thieves had vanished. Nothing was rustling, and nothing was busy in last year’s stalks. Something was wrong with the grass, too. Here and there it was white at the roots, like the gray hairs in a grown-out head of dyed hair, and in places it had detached from the soil in felted scraps, in the shape of inhumanly large inner soles. Mountain spirits, concerned by the fate of the underground store, must have been watching, but they, of course, had nothing to do with the departure of the grass’s inhabitants because they lived in a complex symbiosis with all creatures and in a sense con
sisted of their organic lives. The reason for the damage was, of course, man. Maybe some experiments with clouds, or radiation from the space stations that swarmed over this spot like metal ants.

  At the same time none of this looked like an ecological disaster. If there had been certain effects, nature had resisted them. The thick midges, the beauty and scourge of the corundum river, continued to pound in columns in any space of air, splashing the skin like oil from a red-hot skillet. Unseen birds lifted their voices first here, then there. The sounds were mechanical and slightly husky, like an old clock chiming half-awake; and the small bird cherry bush kept ringing like a sack of silver coins. The sounds roamed, losing their original source; the pink sun didn’t so much shine as pierce the cloudy air, and the granite cliffs looked like blobs on a porous blotter. The beauty which the professor, in setting out on the expedition, had hoped not to see anymore, was not going anywhere; it had merely levitated, making it seem as if the sky began literally a meter above the ground.

  Looking around, Anfilogov felt as if he’d been poisoned. For the first time in many years of illegal expeditions, which had always brought the professor money and a sense of freedom, he wanted to be home with his legs wrapped in an old-man’s blanket and treating himself to some new tea. At this it suddenly dawned on Anfilogov that his incredible corundum luck might be Kolyan’s, not his. Not for nothing had his sickly sword bearer prepared so fervently for the expedition and kissed his sweaty cross, which looked like a fly, whispering to himself.