He set off on shaky legs toward where the Mercedes ambulances’ flashers were spinning energetically and white coats were moving incorporeally. From the stretchers being loaded into the vehicles hung arms in woolen uniform sleeves, dark, as if they’d recently been digging in the earth; here, not far away, on the shaggy grass, which was already splattered with dead green, prematurely fallen leaves, lay a row of closed black bags. There were ten of them, if not twelve. Krylov caught a heavy bear of a woman doctor by the elbow, and her angry eyes stared at him under the fallen tuft of her pink hairdo.
“The woman’s name?” she snapped, interrupting Krylov, who had attempted through frozen trembling and cracked lips to tell her Tanya’s distinguishing features. “The lists are there!” the doctor, through talking, twisted her elbow away and rushed off, her white butt shaking, toward the emergency station awning.
Not knowing what that could do for him, Krylov wandered off in the opposite direction. There, on the same long brown wall to which the mustachioed cop had pinned him and where right now spread-eagled men were standing in a row with helpless napes, long lists of paper covered every which way by different markers were fluttering. Alongside each one craned the necks of squinting people; from time to time someone from the medical service pushed his way through to the lists, skewering a piece of paper, and added one or two sweeping lines at which several tear-stained women rushed at once. The released citizens quickly left the square through the wet, puddle-dotted side streets, and their tense backs shrank faster than the small amount of perspective allowed. Each one left behind a little emptiness for Krylov, and Krylov slowly turned around in this emptiness, not feeling the humped asphalt underfoot where the beer-colored spots of the streetlamps shone gold.
Suddenly he saw at the checkpoint next to the one he’d gone through a familiar rounded figure: the spy, frowning, was distributing the things that had been taken from him during the search in the various pockets of his hideous elastic-waist trousers. He looked like someone Krylov had for some reason just dreamed up without advance warning. Actually, there was only one option—to grab the scoundrel at last by his collar, where some soiled scrap poked out, as usual.
Krylov had absolutely nothing to lose. To cut him off, he climbed onto a slippery, soapy-feeling lawn; simultaneously his memory tensed and shuddered. There was something about this combination—the police and ambulance flashers, the black body bags, and the white figures of medics squatting—that reminded him of the very first time the spy had appeared in Krylov’s life. Holding his breath, Krylov stopped—and the memory immediately dimmed. He took a step—and once again something started working in his subcortex. A vague image began to shine in comparison with which the spy, who had pulled out of the heap of examined bags his own slippery bag made of ripping, lacily disintegrating plastic, was nastily material and excessively heavy.
At the sight of Krylov, the spy’s capricious face expressed a total absence of personal interest. The next second, the spy’s eyes rounded and he jumped up and seemed to click his heels. Abandoning his stuck property—something he had never once done before—the spy quick-stepped diagonally across the side street, where labyrinths of damp structures and sheds descended toward the river. Krylov limped after him, skipping, also reluctant to break into a run in front of the police. The spy, still simpering, ran down a small iron staircase the size of a sled and into a curved gateway and attempted to accomplish his usual sleight-of-hand: to slip behind a fold of air. But something jammed in the mechanism, and the spy, clipping his shoulder on a battered column, ran off with unexpected pep, flashing his black, flipper-flat boots. Krylov gave a threatening wheeze and rushed after him.
The spy wound his charge through passageways. He bolted with the enthusiasm of a cartoon character, tromping through puddles that looked as though the spy had drowned there running through. Evidently, though, he really knew these crazy labyrinths. He led Krylov in circles. A couple of time they raced after each other past a bleached wall of old bricks that looked like packages of farmer’s cheese covered with sour cream—first one way, then back. Deep arches, crumbly like anginal throats, led them into irregular tight spaces with dilapidated yellow windows, piles of boards, and dangerous holes deep inside of which burst pipes leaked. Scraggly cats that looked like caterpillars were darting in and out everywhere. The rare people they encountered were rather disturbing, like soft toys thrown in the garbage, and they made shamanistic gestures at the chase.
Looping around, the spy seemed to double right before Krylov’s eyes. Suddenly, after making some clever maneuver between the black sheds that Krylov, picking up speed, could not repeat, he jumped out and ran straight at his pursuer. Ahead was a bricked-in dead end without a single gap. Burning up, unable to catch his breath, Krylov started slowly for the spy, inviting him to pass with his shaky hands. The spy started backing up. For a minute they exchanged silly crooked smiles, and the fatman looked like he was trying to wink at Krylov with his watering left eye, which glittered like a pearl in its shell.
“I’m going to rip your head off, you bastard,” Krylov rasped, his hands on his spread legs and bodily blocking off the narrow path to the spy’s home labyrinth of human henhouses. “I’m going to ask you an interesting question, and you’re going to sing me an interesting answer.”
“You can kiss my ass, you little shit,” the spy whispered.
Right then, just as if he were giving his opponent the chance to make good on his offer, he turned and started climbing the brick wall. What through the salty blur had looked like the shadows of mighty rust-colored weeds suddenly turned out to be latticed boxes that might have been readied on purpose for extreme flight. With the caricaturish sport of despair, the spy clambered up this inauthentic, spectral construction, which fell apart as he climbed and stretched to the top of the wall, where tufts of hairy grass were growing. The restless no-good had his support moving out from under him, but nonetheless he managed to grab hold of the top of the crumbling layer. He squeaked and gasped for a minute, his legs dancing like a marionette, and then caught the tip of his shoe in a brick blister and scrambled up, grabbing at the dark branches with the dropping leaves that reached over from the other side. He tumbled over, flashing the sagging fold between his trousers and his hiked-up jacket. You could hear a tree crack, a curse of complaint, and a crunch.
Only then did Krylov come to his senses. Picking up a broken box in each hand, he stood in front of the wall, baffled as to how he could stack these flimsy, jerking things with the tin ribbons poking out to the sides. Close by, on the right, he heard hacking sounds, as if someone were trying to blow his nose: the scoundrel, who had survived, was starting his faithful Jap. Finally the motor caught and started running, and two nonidentical light beams—one a little stronger, the other as if sprinkled with dust—waved over the limp mass of leaves and the ulcerated plaster, which was as frightening as the plague. The scoundrel got off safely. Once again it was dark and quiet, and Krylov could hear the river water, as if it were slapping literally underfoot.
Krylov didn’t know why, but he smashed the boxes hanging in his hands against each other, like bird skeletons with dislocated wings. As he stood there he felt as if he were drowning, as the water of despair rose higher and higher, like a tight cold ring, touching his belly, his stomach, and his heart, and the cold dark slipped over him like a sock. Even in this dead darkness, though, you couldn’t really die: your body was still alive and felt like smoking, and your appetite was whetted by the evening air’s freshness and the smells wafting over from something searing in a skillet, and Krylov’s stomach twisted into an empty seashell. If he could have sat down on something and not budged, Krylov probably would have stayed right there and frozen. But the hummocky grass was damp and nasty, and an unfriendly creature of the cat species seemed to have put on mirrored sunglasses for the night and was following the outsider out of the brush, as if having taken over for the spy, who had driven off to have his dinner. Calming the echo of his heart
ache, Krylov quietly dragged himself uphill, and uphill some more, to the distant Metro.
2
KRYLOV’S SLEEP WAS DISTURBED, AND EACH TIME HE SURFACED FROM the watery fog of dreams, he remembered the catastrophe. Telling himself the expedition would return, maybe even the day after tomorrow, he felt that if he and Tanya found each other through Anfilogov everything would be different than they had arranged at the start, than the way they had taught each other. Everything would be in full view, entirely above board and monitored, added to the row of phenomena of the inauthentic world—and thereby destroyed.
However, hope remained—a lonely rock amid the seething black water that Krylov was holding onto so he wouldn’t slip off or surrender to the enormity of the disaster, which was immeasurably bigger than his point of support and so somehow truer. His hope consisted in the following, actually: Krylov did not believe that Tamara had actually refrained from keeping track of him, especially in this nonstandard situation; that would be utterly unlike her. Consequently, given how systematic she was, she already had the real full name, address, and other coordinates of the woman with whom Krylov had he didn’t know what kind of relationship. The invisible beings she hired may well have dug up more than a husband of ten years would know about his own wife. But Krylov had no need of any informational delicacies, fishy or not. All he needed was the address of the apartment the keys on the ring he had fit. Tamara could keep everything else for her own contemplation.
By the time the cold, sleepy abysses released Krylov, it was almost four in the afternoon. He spent two more hours rattling in the half-empty, sun-filled commuter train, hiding behind the folds of his silky raincoat, which was hanging on the hook. Today he had tried to look his best. He had pulled out of the solid press of his long unworn suits a bright ginger jacket from Kenzo that had stuck its sleeve out, found some coffee-colored trousers that went with it, and ironed his limp silk shirt, which smelled like baked peaches under the steam of the iron. Krylov realized that at Tamara’s party he would look like he had dressed from a secondhand store; but he hadn’t made the effort for the party. He’d made it for the moment he rang at that unknown door and heard her familiar, uneven steps. He believed that was going to happen today.
Every year, on the day after the city’s patriotic holiday, Tamara had a party at her private home for a mismatched elite rather the worse for wear, having overdone it the night before either at the governor’s ball with its warm parquet and strong vodka, or at the mayor’s reception in the cleverly lit park that looked like it had been mined by Tatishchev, or at the palace of the president’s viceroy, where they celebrated standing, in the middle of a military structure with white columns and state symbols on the walls that was capable of withstanding a direct attack by serious bombardment. Relaxed, mingling, the elite had a good time at Tamara’s without their ties. They ate and drank, hugged and kissed, teased the crocodile, lounged on the inviting velvet couches, blew in each other’s ears about their affairs—and left behind, along with their picturesque swinishness, a thin layer of gold dust that lent Tamara’s manse the status of perhaps the fourth residence in the Riphean capital.
Usually the house was shining by about seven. Today, however, there were no extra lights on the gloomily bright façade, and the tall windows of the first floor shone identically and looked empty. The half-lit sand of the driveway was pale and even, like untrodden snow. These changes could scarcely be explained by the black crape on the lowered flags: the state flag and the city flag with its heraldic, ratlike bear and stylized furnace. Lately hostility had been thickening around Tamara and her funeral business. When Krylov walked past the fluttering banners, an additional alarm went off inside him.
Despite his worst fears, a certain number of guests were nonetheless hanging around the reception hall. True, on closer examination, he discovered that it was mainly the second-tier people who had gathered: mid-level officials in gaudy tweeds, elderly lady advisors decked with cascades of beads, a few young public relations assistants—twenty in all, no more. The guests were floating through the hall with a vacant look, holding their almost untouched glasses in front of them, sometimes cautiously sniffing their aperitifs like tiny bouquets. All this reminded Krylov of a scene by a monument or fountain where tens of dressed-up people had made dates and dawdled, each unto himself, because no one had come for them.
Krylov found Tamara in the smoking room next door. She jumped up to meet him, dropping her unlit cigarette, which had long since wilted in her fingers.
“You were there, on that square!” she exclaimed, looking into Krylov’s eyes up close. “Thank God you’re all right! Do you have any idea how your outing might have ended?”
Krylov thought Tamara was about to cry, but she merely sniffed her abundantly powdered nose. Sluiced with a black lamé evening gown from her pierced ears to her ankles, with bare white arms and an artificial, luxuriantly bearded flower on her shoulder, today she looked weary, having dressed reluctantly, at the last minute, when she would have preferred lounging in her robe with a mug of milk. She took Krylov by the arm and led him over to the sofas, where, under the shelter of fluted tropical leaves and Chinese lanterns, the better society had arrayed itself—better, that is, than the society lingering in the reception hall on the bare mirror-bright parquet. True, even this society was palpably thin, which made the very air in the smoking room, where the cosmos seemed to shine through the blueness of the cigarette gas, seem thin.
To his surprise, the first person Krylov saw was golden-haired Mitya Dymov. Up close, the delightful child didn’t look so delightful. Rejuvenating nano-technologies were no match for the idol’s new raging masculinity, and the translucent skin on his cunning face was getting sugary. Dressed like a prince in a waisted dove-gray outfit and a silk jabot of pristine whiteness, Mitya, lounging, had sat Tamara’s favorite stuffed bear—which had always lived upstairs but for some reason had wound up here, among the drunken guests—on his knee. Krylov remembered that Mitya had liked to fondle this same bear with the snub-nosed face and rubbed belly back during his brief residence in Tamara’s bedroom.
“How did that get here?” he asked Tamara in a whisper, indicating the hideous phenomenon with his eyes.
“He came to apologize for the disruption on-air,” Tamara answered in a low voice. “He’s inviting me back to his studio. Over there’s the bouquet he brought. It’s so big I barely found something to put it in.”
Indeed, preening in one of the horrible tubs of Zairian malachite that had always offended Krylov’s professional taste was Mitya’s deluxe present: a bouquet the size of Australia, each rose like a head of cabbage.
“I hope you turned him down,” Krylov said through his teeth, trying not to think about the bedrooms, green and blue, where the orphan bear whiled away his days with no place to go, lolling over his parallel paws on the blue or green designer rug.
“Of course, not. You know very well I’ll go. That’s all I need, being afraid of journalists!” Tamara exclaimed louder than necessary, for which Dymov, who was eavesdropping, thanked her with an innocent smile and a fluttering of his lacy, painstakingly mascaraed eyelashes.
Infuriated, Krylov was about to inform everyone within hearing range that Dymov wasn’t a journalist, he was a small-time prig being kept by an old idiot, but just then his attention was distracted by an even more radical phenomenon. A live, neat, ordinary-size pig walked into the smoking room, delicately tossing aside the mother-of pearl beaded curtain. Those sitting on the sofas had a good laugh and reached for the alcohol. The pig was gray-haired and had intelligent little eyes that looked like tiny, fuzzy, half-open flowers. Stepping on its clean hooves, like a stout lady on high heels, the pig approached a platter of canapés amidst the bottles and began sampling them with pleasure, wiggling its wet button-nose in search of the tastiest morsels.
“That was a present for me for the holiday from Mrs. Adelaida Semyannikova,” Tamara informed with a false laugh, forestalling the stunned Krylov�
��s question. “She literally planted the pig on me out of the goodness of her heart. This morning they brought it in a special veterinary van with a note and best wishes.”
“Is she afraid you’re going to bury her spouse?” Krylov inquired, not taking his eyes off the blissful beast, which had left its greasy diggings on the platter and was grunting and rubbing up against a quaking little antique table.
“The spouse is alive and well!” Tamara announced optimistically and added under her breath, “Imagine, our classic suddenly decided to chase after me, which is pretty funny. He turned out to be such an enterprising gentleman that half the city already knows about his lofty passion. He says he’s started writing poetry again, like he did in his youth.”
“I think you’ve revealed your talent for getting into trouble,” Krylov said, wiping his cold forehead where the pain had condensed like moisture on glass. “Adelaida’s going to smear you all over the wall, write a slogan above it, and call a rally. Don’t you have enough problems with your funeral business? Now you’ve decided to contend with a pack of females in khaki?”
“I’m not interested in female politicos,” Tamara parried haughtily, her eyes, sunken from exhaustion, flashing. “What would you have me do, drive the old man from my door? The day before yesterday he spent three hours sitting in my waiting room, and then they called in cardiologists from the American Center for him.”
“Well, I don’t know. You used to know how to get rid of unwanted admirers,” said Krylov biliously. “That means you need this now for some reason, all these Mityadymovs, Semyannikovs, and all the other freaks whirling around you.”
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