2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  Meanwhile they had thrown coils of tackle from the helicopters, and broad-shouldered figures packaged in something resembling a brownish-red chitin, were sliding down them. Simultaneously, from the side-streets, a double chain of riot police wedged into the motley crowd, their helmets catching the light. Now, for the first time, Krylov sensed a tectonic shift in the swaying crowd. Everyone standing nearby started falling the way people do when a Metro car brakes to sharply. They were crushed and knocked about, and the steps underfoot turned into pits of treacherous depth into which rows of people dropped like loose earth. Tanya’s green shirt flashed in Krylov’s eyes, and there was a flash and a gasp nearby, as if they had torn a piece of air and stone flesh out of the world with wooden tongs. Above Krylov, the layered branches of a now pink maple tree shook, and some kind of black berry suddenly started falling from there, lashing Krylov’s shoulder.

  The two and a half hours Krylov spent on the cordoned square seemed like an eternity, as the saying goes. The crowd was stormed. Squeezed in on all sides by frightened people close to fainting, Krylov was dragged first to one side and then back, all the while trying not to step into invisible traps, of which the most dangerous were the treacherously round and nimble bottles.

  At first he tried to go in the direction of where the green patch had last flashed, but he soon realized there weren’t any directions. The whirlwind from the chirring federal machines would let up and then swoop down again, not letting him breathe; the clutches of balloons beat madly, vibrating like colored turbulence. The trading tents drowned like sailboats; the speaker on the food van had lost his balance and fallen to his knees, and his white leaflets dropped out of his roomy jacket with a soft thud and immediately rocketed upwards, covering the square.

  For a while, Krylov stood on one leg, his face hidden in a woman’s fine hair that had stuck over his face like the barest cobweb; then, having attempted to move where it was freer, he nearly stepped on a child—a little girl of about four, tear-stained, with little eyes so wet each seemed to have shed a lake of water. The weakened child was trying to sit up on a paving stone, looking around and tucking in her checkered skirt. Praying to he did not know who that he wouldn’t lose his balance, Krylov picked the child up under his arm, grunted, and sat her on his shoulders, following the example of other men on the square who were holding their children up high, away from the jumble of feet. The child’s body was a little heavy and drooped; suddenly Krylov’s neck was wet and warm and smelled like chicken broth, and the little girl, sobbing in a whisper, covered Krylov’s eyes with her cold little hands. Grabbing the child by her soft little wrists wrapped in little bead bracelets, Krylov gave his passenger a ride, pretending to be a pony, and simultaneously tried to relax, obediently yielding this way and that along with all the other crushed bodies.

  He wasn’t thinking about anything anymore and only set his sights on anything green, catching sight of a shirt with mud streaks and then a giant carnival frog with a man poking his head out of it, pale, like white bread soaked in water. The poplar in front of the college was flooded and choking on the whitened greenery, the maple’s leaves were swimming in their own sap. At times it seemed to Krylov that nothing bad had happened yet. The main thing was not to fall. Instinctively, Krylov shied away from a package caught in the crush in which the humped pieces of crushed crockery were rubbing huskily and scratching the plastic. The crowd, pressed into a briquette, bore numerous inorganic admixtures: the most innocent objects—holiday purchases, umbrellas, even pens—which could cause injuries just as bad as small bombs exploding on the field of class warfare and which sprinkled Krylov with some kind of acrid, crumbly filth. Krylov was amazed he was still capable of thought. There was a doughy daze on most of the faces turned up and swaying around him and the languid child. Others, revealing their rush-hour habits on public transportation, pragmatically straightened their slipping eyeglasses on a neighbor’s shoulder.

  After a while, the swaying stopped. The crush rose and then began quietly thinning out. Krylov found himself in front of a chain of riot police who had evidently divided the human mass up into small, nonthreatening segments. “Respected residents and guests of the Riphean capital!” a pleasant woman’s voice that had some honey added thickly to its officialness, rang out, reverberating multiple times. “In connection with the terrorist act that has occurred, we ask everyone to pass through a document checkpoint. Please, show your passport as you leave the police cordon. Ambulance brigades are awaiting the injured. Please, remain calm. Our mayor, Sergei Ignatievich Krupsky, expresses his profound indignation at the acts of the mob that disrupted Ripheans’ long-waited holiday.”

  Meanwhile, the artificially cloudless holiday stretched on as before, and the wind died down, and there was so much sun that it spread like a layer of golden fat on the smooth surface of the pond, heated the broken glass, and sprinkled the anguished faces with a shiny white powder. The nearest riot policeman had some kind of dark, cooked blob on his shield, like spilled soup on a burner. Not far away, a lanky teenager with purple hair that looked like the result of electroshock, was pissing, having unfastened his Teflon trousers, against one of the interlocked shields. But the guardians of law and order were imperturbable and paid no attention to the wobbling stream of popular protest. The announcement about the document check was repeated every five minutes, like in the Metro. Someone in the crowd decided to light up, and streams of tasty smoke wafted by. Farther away, beyond the cordon, someone’s green Panama flashed by and then was lost.

  Suddenly a grinning guy was doing a kind of desperate Australian crawl in Krylov’s direction; his eyes looked like they were laughing, though in fact that was the bluish bags under his eyes twitching.

  “Papa! Papa! The nice man put me up high!” the child shouted and blissfully tumbled into the trembling arms, freeing Krylov from her moist, velvet yoke.

  Immediately Krylov felt as if he’d landed on the moon. The man fell to his knees and kept feeling and pulling, hugging and hugging again his little one, trying to wipe her face with his wet finger wrapped in a handkerchief.

  “You’re fine, just fine. I found you, Mashka,” the man murmured. “Mama, we’ll call Mama right now. Oh!” He discovered her wet tights and turned his helpless round face with its short, feathery eyebrows toward Krylov.

  “That’s all right,” Krylov said in a voice that stuck. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette would you?”

  “Of course, of course.” The man jumped up and held out a crushed pack of Parliaments. His last cigarettes rattled around like limp noodles. His lighter flicked. Krylov’s head spun from the deep drag, and his brain unclenched like a fist, releasing quick images that immediately whisked over the legionaries’ shields.

  “I can’t thank you enough. I don’t even know how to express it,” the man kept talking, greedily champing his cigarette and exhaling smoke through his tiny nose. “Anything you need from me—help, money—I have it. Not a lot, but some. I’m a programmer. I work at Riphvideoplus. I write games for computers, cell phones, children’s laptops…. Dronov! Pavel Alexandrovich Dronov.” The man stretched his still trembling hand out to Krylov, though his handshake was unexpectedly warm and a little much for Krylov, like a sheepskin mitt. “Here, let me give you my card!” His new acquaintance opened his wallet and took out several cards with the Riphvideoplus logo. He gave one to Krylov and dropped the other, just to make sure, like a letter into a mailbox, into the pocket of Krylov’s jacket, which had been scorched by vitrified chemical grit. “And by the way! Your clothes are ruined!” The card in his pocket was followed by a green hundred, silky from being carried around in his wallet, doubtless his deep reserve. “No, don’t refuse!” The man’s eyes implored him. “Put yourself in my place. A fine one I’d be if I didn’t clean up after Mashka!”

  “You talked me into it. I won’t,” Krylov laughed. “Krylov, Venyamin Yurievich Krylov, historian. I teach. Actually, your clothing isn’t looking its best either!”

 
With comic despair, the man spread the lapels of his velour jacket: its shredded lining was hanging like bast, and a hole trembled under his arm. Only now was it obvious that his new acquaintance was a whole head taller than Krylov. Despite his button nose, one sensed serious goodness, normalcy, in Pavel Alexandrovich Dronov’s appearance, and Krylov, who suddenly found himself without Tanya in a now alien, mercilessly sunny world, felt a little better at his massive presence. The little girl, who had already forgotten Krylov’s existence, was hanging on her father’s leg like a kitten on a tree and eating a huge messy apple, burying her wet rubbery nose into his leg.

  “I was really shaken when Mashka suddenly vanished from my arms!” the programmer told him in a happy voice, offering to share the last two cigarettes from his crushed pack with Krylov. “Actually, you were lucky. A homemade bomb blew up, like a school chemistry experiment, but dangerous. If it splashed your skin it would have eaten through to the bone. People say there was one other explosion, more serious, on Cosmonaut, close to Actor’s House. While I was searching for Mashka, there were all kinds of rumors going around. It was as if a group from Ural Heavy Machinery had been strong-armed by Red Army soldiers into sorting things out with the cops, who were protecting the historical clubs. Those bandits better change clothes because they’re giving themselves negative advertising. They order the fanciest style from the designers, paint designs on their SUVs, and drive all over town like a circus on wheels. No, these weren’t from UHM. But who were they? If they were music fans, then they’re a little old. And they’re not Islamic terrorists, or they would at least have been dressed up like the Basmach. You’re a historian. What do you think?”

  “It’s 2017. That’s the whole point.” Krylov, who really thought that he had caught something, some logic of this secondary world that existed in place of the real one, spoke slowly. “Hallucinations just like this are happening all over the country right now. Red Cavalry helmets and White Guard epaulets are going to be firing on each other everywhere, because of the anniversary, and it’s going to end in excess everywhere. Right at the most important public events. The form of clothing demands it. Understand?”

  “No,” the programmer answered honestly, raising his eyebrows on his prominent forehead. “I don’t know whether you saw it or not, but the blood there is in pools. But people were just going to a holiday parade. Does there have to be a real reason for this kind of outrage?”

  “The reason is the same as in the Great October Socialist Revolution,” Krylov said, mechanically looking around in search of Tanya. “The rulers are unable and the ruled ones are unwilling. Only in our day and age we don’t have formal forces capable of expressing the situation. Therefore they’re going to use hundred-year-old forms, because they’re the best we have. Even if they’re unreal, false. But history has a reflex to them. The conflict itself recognizes the maskers as the conflict’s participants. The conflict has always existed, since the 1990s. We just haven’t had these rags yet—the revolutionary greatcoats, riding breeches, and leather jackets. The conflict didn’t have anything to wear to go public. It’s been slipping. And now, in connection with the centenary, we’ve got all the rags you want. So we can look forward to some happy holidays.”

  “That’s more like mysticism than science.” Dronov laughed shakily, covering his child’s head with his capacious palm, like a cap. “People aren’t marionettes. I don’t care how you dress me up, I’m not going to shoot or get into a fight.”

  “But you wouldn’t dress up like that, either,” Krylov objected. “And those who would, well, revolutionary clothing inspires them. They don’t have anything else, right? No banner or leader. How else are you going to get them to fight?”

  The programmer shrugged his stooped shoulders, perplexed. Krylov, his eyes watery with exhaustion, looked at the line of riot police, which had not budged but seemed to have settled a little. Here were troops not fated to go down in history because history had stopped. Even at first glance, the legionaries’ uniforms looked contrived and upon closer examination were a jumble of details, including the “dog-ear” collars fashionable five years ago and yellow aiguillettes that might have been torn off the suits of movie extras. As a result, the riot police looked like identically dressed deserters. There ought to be a real world in place of our false one, Krylov thought, a world genuine in its every manifestation. Now he would have to distinguish intuitively the organic from the artificial and ask himself whether the sufferings of the injured and the coldness of the dead were genuine. Actually, the latter, as Tamara asserted, had crossed a line that was more genuine than anything in all human reality.

  Right then the programmer’s cell phone started playing a polyphonic ring tone at his waist. “Lelya! Yes! Everything’s all right! Mashka’s with me and we’re fine! No, don’t go anywhere. They’re just about to let us leave. What did they show? Oh, that’s nonsense! No! Don’t even think of it! We’ll be there very soon! Wait for us, put dinner on the table!” The programmer turned off his phone and turned a guilty red face toward Krylov. “Here, my wife’s worrying at home, and before you know it she’s going to rush out to the square for us. We must be just about to move. Over there they say they’re letting people with children out first.”

  “Naturally.” Krylov smiled. His despair, which had been quelled briefly by his conversation with this chance acquaintance, crept up and licked at his heart. Looking in the direction where the exhausted citizens were dragging along, Krylov saw that there, near the exit from the enclosure, they really were presenting children, who looked like they’d been put to sleep with a horse-pill of reality. All of them, even the big ones, looked like the doomed infants the beggars dragged around the Metro wrapped up in rags.

  “Be sure not to throw out my card,” Dronov spoke hurriedly. “I realize, in instances like this people usually don’t call, but you keep it and call! I’m not asking you for your phone number because no one gives that to strangers, but you’re not a stranger to me now. Come over for pie. My wife and I would be very pleased. Everything in life happens for a reason, not arbitrarily. What if we end up being good friends? You can’t rule it out! Especially with this prehistory. Mashka’s still small, and she doesn’t even understand anything, but I, it’s true …” At this the programmer’s eyes squinted and a tear glistened. He grabbed Krylov’s hand in both his hot paws, held it, and let go.

  “I’ll call,” Krylov promised. “Good luck getting out of here.”

  Looking at the programmer’s powerful shoulders, which Mashka, who had been picked up, was peeking out from behind, making energetic faces, Krylov took a while to realize that he could pass through the police cordon with them, at the front of the line. He decided he was never going to call them. Mentally he sent signals to Tanya, who might still be somewhere very nearby. If such a thing as telepathy existed, he would have heard her dolphin reply in his tense brain. But his brain had scanned the general background, the crackling, the muttering of stormily climbing bubbles of emptiness and the faint murmur of someone’s inarticulate thoughts, and over all this, this capacious void, relief from pain, and light, transparent and indestructible, triumphant and unreachable. Simultaneously, Krylov observed two men in rubberized suits, oblivious to the otherworldly light on their shoulders or their shiny clasps, were dragging the empty sleeves of fire hoses across the terrible paving stones. They let ’er rip, the hoses stiffened, they turned the rings over from side to side—and the foam that washed over the square was like what you see in a pot where meat is cooking. The streams rumbled, eating away the blood from the sticky stones and squirming over the cracks, but the pink was apparently ineradicable. A bright cameraman attempted to get in on the act by looking over a fireman’s shoulder, but he got water in his camera and face and passed out. Overtaking an overfull cloud that was slowly crawling into the unwatched holiday sky, the wind lashed the crowd with bursts of rain. Here and there, umbrellas popped open.

  At the exit, Krylov was vetted by the same police serge
ant who people had kept from quietly drinking his beer during and after his shift. The sergeant’s face was gray; the stubble that had popped up looked like iron shavings. Several times he passed his uncomprehending glance from Krylov to the passport photograph and back; apparently he could open his puffy eyes only halfway. Then Krylov was led through a metal detector where the gentle lilac slush had been trampled. A bell tinkled. Someone’s weary fat hands took Krylov aside and backed him up against a brown wall. The magnetic wand searched him crudely. The stuck cluster of Tanya’s keys chirped. Without any metal at all, like an angel, Krylov soundlessly, behind a narrow maidenly back with anxiously squeezed shoulder blades, sailed through the detector freely, like driftwood with the river’s current, and evening shadows spread. They returned his confiscated property to him without the slightest civility. Krylov felt as if he’d been freed from prison after a ten-year sentence—and had landed in a completely unknown, unfamiliar world where no one was waiting for him.