2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  It was nearly four o’clock when Kolyan, blue with cold, presented Anfilogov with a clean pit that looked a lot like a scoured burned kettle. The professor lowered himself down the angular wall, and his sleeves soaked up the cold, slowly seeping water. The stone plug with which the rock hounds had sealed off their treasure the previous year had swollen and looked like a wounded knee. Smiling with his manganese-colored maw, Kolyan solemnly handed the professor last year’s lucky ax. Anfilogov took a swing and struck: the damp dolomite marble fell apart, and Kolyan and the professor brought into the light a crunching, ice-shedding polyethylene package, which looked like a package of frozen meat.

  Ripping off the frozen shreds with a crack, Anfilogov was amazed by its lumpy contents, as if he had not been the one to fold and fill this wealth into its stone womb spread wide.

  “Let well enough alone,” the professor spoke, after catching his breath. “If we don’t drown the backpack this time, we can lie under a palm tree to the end of our days.”

  “I don’t want to lie under a palm, Vasily Petrovich,” muttered Kolyan, drooping and averting his tearing gaze from the ruby bits. “I’ve traveled around and seen things. It’s a broom, not a tree. Nothing but hairs on a pole and a brush at the top. There’s no life to it.”

  “Well, buy yourself a foreign car,” the professor muttered through his teeth.

  “Have we been on our way to left luggage or something, Vasily Petrovich?” Kolyan exclaimed, almost in tears, moving his short straw-yellow eyebrows in anguish. “Come on. Let’s see what’s farther on there!”

  “You’d be better off squinting,” Anfilogov spoke softly and terrifyingly.

  But at that the fog suddenly dispersed, and the sun, striking the earth like a ringing ball, lit up the insides of the opened corundum vein. There, Anfilogov saw something that made his knees weak and made him clutch at his heart.

  And so began the second spate of ruby fever. The magnetism of the corundum river returned, and once again the rock hounds felt in their hands and shoulders the familiar mechanical pull of the pick’s blows. As if bewitched, insensitive to the bruises and little blue-gray wounds from the bits of stone, they destroyed the underground palaces.

  They couldn’t go back until they’d exhausted the grandeur that had revealed itself to the rock hounds in the light of their two headlamps, whose rays in the quiet, almost rustling air of the cave were like gray shadows. In order to move on, they had to destroy what daily arose before the rock hounds in the cold dolomite, in the fantastic voids, one of which turned out to be the geode of a huge agate almond, which was almost but not quite unbelievable. Each successive layer of underground beauty stripped any authenticity from the preceding one, the way, during a restoration, the painting of an earlier master, once revealed, strips the value from the removed layer of paint. Anfilogov envied the mountain spirits that moved freely in the underground stone environment, like fish in water or birds in air.

  The professor was still trying to pretend he just had a cold. Meanwhile, his workmate wasn’t looking so hot either. Time and again Kolyan gave a shudder and his maw turned unnaturally red and, when he yawned, looked like a hideous withered flower. When Kolyan rested, hanging his swollen wrists between his knees, his fingers twitched, as if they were playing scales. Once, right in the mine, a cruel cramp seized him. Rolled up in a ball, he got stuck between two fir struts, and Anfilogov had to chop through one, beating and crushing the wood, which was soaked through and sodden, like fish flesh. When the strut gave way and broke, streams of stone bits showered down, and the vault over the rock hounds shifted with a slow creak, as if it had dropped down like a dump truck discharging its load. Hurrying, Anfilogov strained and pulled Kolyan out of the pit and onto the grass, which was badly poisoned by the acrid underground water. The cramp was strong, like an armature. Anfilogov was barely able to loosen the seized muscles, while Kolyan was gasping for breath and baring his bloody steel at the cross-shaped tops of the firs. Abandoning the sufferer at the first improvement, Anfilogov leaped for the mine: the vault had swollen, but the slabs, which had pushed out slanted, had somehow wedged each other. Bits of dolomite were still rising underfoot like clouds of dust, and among the bits was a wonderful sample with a ruby fire inside, which Anfilogov kicked.

  The rock hounds lost count of the days. Déjà vu, which declared itself as soon as the camp was finally set up and things had been given a place, helped in this, and the men once again grew accustomed to the landscape’s outlines. First they mixed up the twenty-first and twenty-fifth of the month, which were full of holes and had unexplained losses of time and a general tedious rain that wouldn’t start or end but seemed to be roaming around in circles, dragging its tattered watery locks. Then the gap started expanding. They could no longer say with any accuracy whether it was yesterday or the day before that Anfilogov’s medicine had run out. The most powerful déjà vu occurred whenever they set to any kind of work. At any attempt to take a step into the future, the rock hounds wound up in the past. Time stopped; the white nights passed over the camp like the shadows of light clouds.

  They couldn’t judge the time by the dwindling of supplies. The high-calorie delicacies lay there practically untouched in sturdy sacks of crude plastic. The rock hounds didn’t eat any more than they had the previous year. Their stomachs were sensitive: the minute they were disturbed, bile gushed out with the same vile underground aftertaste. So open cans of pâté and ham lay scattered about the tent, their rusty lids flapping, until their contents were covered with a leathery mold.

  Meanwhile, mysterious water discharged by the drops in underground pressure drowned the workings regularly. If they were lucky, the bottom of the corundum pit, which was half a meter lower than the small mine, accumulated just a round puddle overnight. More often, the wood stood in the mine like a long mirror tongue where the dark reflections of the vault were as motionless as the stones themselves. But sometimes the puddle would first get sucked into a curving crack and then suddenly return with a gurgling and sucking, and the water, like a ditch full of litter, would rise all the way to grass level in an hour. Something anomalous had happened in the system of geological faults, and they couldn’t call the plumber in to fix the problem.

  There was plenty of work for the pump and motor. The gas can was half empty. The water, heavy and swollen, was now aggressive, there was no doubt of that. Anfilogov could no longer pretend it was harmless. Kolyan’s scarlet maw and his bright red nostrils, as if the hairs growing in them were burning, were sure signs of cyanide poisoning.

  Nevertheless, as had happened the last time, Anfilogov was reluctant to leave. His will was paralyzed, and layers of colorless fog swam in his consciousness. Time and again the professor was doused with the minty horror of death, and his old knees got as weak as empty cardboard boxes. But the extreme cold, which warned the professor of danger, simultaneously promised him release from all earthly cares.

  In point of fact, Anfilogov could not have found a better place to die had he lived another four hundred years. Here, in his corundum servitude, he recognized himself as both a prisoner and foe of that mysterious power he had so longed to reach. The terrible beauty that was dissolved in the thickest, bottom-most stratum of the undying sky, which here began right at the earth, an ineluctable beauty, cunning, diffused throughout, and painfully irritating to the professor’s nerves, had finally become vulnerable. With perfect certainty, Anfilogov sensed that the improbable corundum vein was the internal, vitally important organ of this beauty. Now, each blow of the pick at the next underground wonder was a blow at the beauty that trembled on the surface and was becoming gradually scarcer. Here was the river, where each ray of sun had had the beautiful form of a smile and which had lost its gleam and was flowing sullenly, with black shadows near the bottom; a luxuriant bird cherry had shriveled and shaken off the fine trash from its brief flowering like cigarette ash. Beauty still clung in shreds to the sharp points of the birch branches, which had tried to smooth it ou
t, stretch it out for the light, still clinging to the cliffs, which were polished here and there like slanted mirrors and here and there overgrown with fantastic moss. But the day began and the rock hands picked up their strong, worn picks.

  The professor was more removed from people than ever before. One afternoon, he imagined human shouts coming from the river, like the chatter of birds. It was an illusion. Diving behind the small cliffs and pushing the apathetic Kolyan in there, too, Anfilogov leaned against a triangular beam of light formed by the wind-swept plates lying up against each other heavily. Four kayaks, jumping and banging their bellies on the foamy splashes, were racing down the small but deep stream, which tried to turn them crosswise and smash their small vessels against the wet granite. Driven by their powerful titanium paddles, the kayaks suddenly turned up directly under the cliffs. Anfilogov could discern the buckles on their huge life jackets, which looked like orange suitcases, and their dark blue helmets with splashed screens; one kayaker lacked a helmet and his face was twisted from the tension and shining from the water and sweat, like a piece of silver. Anfilogov’s suppressed survival instincts cried out to him to wave, jump up, and call for help—but he kept squatting there, awash in horror at the thought that strangers would notice their tent and the fresh sauce stains from their workings, or that one of the kayaks would overturn and the blue-headed monsters would climb out on the shoal to dry off and be companionable.

  Anfilogov knew that he couldn’t withstand a simple human gaze now. He was numb, and he felt as if he had grown invisible wings beating on his back, or a large bird had perched on his shoulders to claw his cold spine. But Anfilogov’s angel flapped in vain: the kayakers passed through the rift like needles through a sloppy seam, the last paddler’s paddle flashed as it plunged into the tight dark jumble of water, and the kayakers were lost in the bubbling crevice, swallowed up by the solid, cave-stone shadow. Anfilogov straightened his tingling legs with difficulty and then helped the sleepy Kolyan, who hadn’t even glanced at the river as he stood there on all fours, drooling into his beard, get up. Slipping around in his half-empty, mud-caked boots, Kolyan looked at Anfilogov with an apologetic smile, and the professor was suddenly struck at how little remained of his hardy sword bearer and how strangely his breathing kept breaking off, as if he were trying to climb higher and grab some other, heavenly oxygen. Nonetheless, the professor did not expect that the next morning Kolyan would actually die.

  Especially because everything had been going as usual since morning. Kolyan had dug around among his greased blades and gone off like an automaton to pump out the underground water. His tottering figure subsequently appeared between the boulders as if were being born, like a torn banner, on a shaft of wood. Anfilogov was about to start cooking, but he spat and climbed into his still-warm sleeping bag, pulling the tight zipper right up to his nose. He woke up from the unusual, spacious silence. There were some sounds: a small bird was tinkling at the very top of a sunny birch tree, sounding like a spoon on a crystal glass, and the river was evenly noisy. But the space, to his perception, felt as if not a single radio or television station remained on air, as if the satellite network and the satellites themselves had vanished. The air was utterly empty, and the professor realized instantly that he was now alone.

  Kolyan lay at the bottom of the corundum mine, face down in the remains of the groundwater, which the pump was still trying to suck out as it jammed with sand. Anfilogov gave something a jerk and the equipment stalled. Up top, Kolyan, in his crushed and rusty canvas overalls, looked like the remains of a mangled mechanism, and his darkened hair swirled around his head as if machine oil were dripping out. At first Anfilogov couldn’t believe it. Lowering himself in three jumps, the professor tried to lift the heavy Kolyan up, but the body seemed to be glued to the puddle. Finally, Anfilogov pulled it away and dumped it on his knee. But no matter how much he struck Kolyan on the back, no matter how much he pressed, after turning the long-armed body over, on his recalcitrant ribs, he did not hear the saving cough or the cock’s crow of life return. His attempts at artificial respiration into the stuck-together mustached mouth ended with tight red circles in Anfilogov’s eyes. Finally, when his rib cage cracked like plywood, which made it look as if Kolyan were smiling, it became clear that there was no hope. Anfilogov sat there a little while, squeezing his pounding head in his hands to make it stay in one place. Then, leaning over and getting a better grip, he dragged his workmate up on the grass.

  In the very center of the silence and emptiness the professor acted automatically. He undressed Kolyan on a sheet of canvas and washed him from a pot of heated water. The emaciated body with the sunken ribs reminded him of a squeezed-out tube of toothpaste. When the professor splashed Kolyan on the face, cautiously, holding his damp hair aside, he saw that his workmate had died with that apologetic smile, which had petrified quickly: first the dead man’s violet mouth was covered with a gloss and started melting away inside, like a springtime icicle, then the transparent became solid—and soon under his mustache a mayflower bell formed out of a fibrous charoite through which his steel teeth gleamed like cleavage fissures in a crystal matrix. Observing this well-known metamorphosis for the first time, Anfilogov couldn’t help but stare at it. Spasms tugged at his weakened body, his flesh seemed to shrink, like fabric after it has been washed, and it became tight and uncomfortable for the lanky professor.

  Overcoming the odd daytime twilight, Anfilogov searched among Kolyan’s things for some clean linen, which smelled of cheap laundry powder. He could see that it had been put there beforehand precisely for such an eventuality. The package was carefully taped up, and inside a gilded paper icon of some saint that looked like a Christmas tree ornament was jostling around. Anfilogov was about to get angry at this kind of base precaution, at the ready-made invitation to death, but the feeling passed quickly. Somehow, by lifting the dead man’s legs, he pulled the faded knit underpants over his body. Then came the turn for the relatively white T-shirt, which he had to put on by holding Kolyan in an embrace. The professors movements were as awkward and angular as the dead man’s unwilling turns: one puppet dressing another. Anfilogov felt as if he had exactly the same kind of jutting bones as the dead Kolyan, bones that looked like rag-wrapped sticks, and he couldn’t figure out just what the difference was between them now.

  What for? The Stone Maiden, the Mistress of the Mountain, was probably displeased with the professor’s behavior. But Anfilogov had stayed true to himself—the only person he had never, under any circumstances, not even an iota, betrayed. Wasn’t this loyalty, this fidelity, worth something? You see, all his life Anfilogov had only done what rose in value! Even now, emaciated, poisoned, and frightening of face, like a bat, he clung to this unchanging, nearly undamaged “I,” which could gather its forces and carry him to civilization.

  Kolyan was lying on the canvas content, misbuttoned, and barefoot, because his boots, once they dried out by the fire, wouldn’t go back on his wooden feet. Kolyan’s eyes, clouded with a bluish milk, were still open; the professor brushed them with the palm of his hand and wiped the moisture off on himself. Then he went to the tent and dug around for a while, choosing the best stones and stuffing the rest willy-nilly into the unfastened sleeping bag. Returning, the professor stuffed all four pockets of Kolyan’s weatherproof jacket with choice corundums, surrounded the dead man with the rest, like a goose with apples, and wrapping the canvas, made a long cocoon with the help of a rope. The sleeping bag, which was stuffed with stones and tied up, too, came out looking like a rasping mummy. The professor dragged it on the folded tent toward the poisoned pit, shoved it into the collecting groundwater, which was lightly touching the walls, and then dumped it into the sunken mine, where the last shoring groaned like an old man under the ceiling’s slanted press. The motor and pump, most of the provisions, and the rest of the expedition’s goods went in after the sleeping bag, which was seated in a human pose by the polluted wall. The professor left himself just a few cookies a
nd jerky, which he intended to wrap up in the remaining sleeping bag and carry on his chest.

  Finally came the straps’ turn. Cutting them off the backpack, Anfilogov strapped Kolyan, who was supposed to serve as a container for the goods, under the knees and just below his heart. Lying across the swaddled corpse, the professor checked the straps, adjusted them, and moved his shoulders a little, feeling an elbow poking out uncomfortably under the canvas. Nonetheless, he could not bury Kolyan like a dog. He couldn’t bring rescuers here to collect the body either. Anfilogov had no intention of sharing the secret and letting people come to the deposit, which he wanted to possess alone, from afar. That was his decision. The corundum pit—more fully and clearly than those special cupolaed structures—had proved to be a place for encountering nonexistent God, and the professor had no intention of making his personal catacombs accessible to all. Here he had earned the chance to leave God the loser—and to take his loot, dragging it out by deceit, taking a favor from a dead man. Alongside the winter hut, as best the professor remembered, grew a conspicuous reddish-brown birch with bark like oiled paper. Anfilogov intended to trouble his workmate a little and bury the choice corundums until better times, and then traveling light, make his way to the lumber mill and make his statement. There was no question of reaching an agreement with the local police, as represented by the hard-drinking, pot-bellied policeman.

  Anfilogov spent the night under the open sky, across which spread a single flat cloud that rippled all the way to the horizon. He rested his head on Kolyan, the same way he always arranged himself on the backpack he took hiking, but the bundle with the body had hardened awkwardly, and the professor’s neck went numb. Anfilogov kept trying to drop off while simultaneously speaking to people. Kolyan wasn’t among them, naturally, but his former wives appeared in turn, Ekaterina Sergeyevna, his business partners, and his son from his first marriage—a sparrow-like man he barely knew who wore a tie that was a little too big and was tucked into his trousers under his belt. Some of his colleagues appeared before Anfilogov as if alive; others in the form of familiar photographs. The latter were precise, whereas the former got blurry and tried to slip away.