2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” Ignoring the disarray, Tamara sat very straight, in a pharaonic pose, so her high feminine breast was utterly superfluous. “Krylov, you’re insane. It’s true. This is unnatural. This is worse than anything you’ve done before. I can’t even imagine what vileness this holds, but you’re not just mocking me. It’s as if you’ve hardly lived. Look what you’ve come to!”

  “Fine, I’m vile. I’m a scoundrel,” Krylov agreed irritably. “Only I know one thing. You collected information on that woman. I realize how much you hate all this. I’m sorry. But you can’t deny me, you can’t hide her address from me. At least the address.”

  Tamara sighed with restraint and looked down at her lap. Another rocket burst, quivered, and spat, and below they shouted chaotically, opening the tall windows, to judge from the close ringing. Tamara frowned.

  “Yes, you’ve studied me pretty well,” she said finally. “It’s true, I couldn’t have hidden that kind of information. Only here’s the problem: I don’t have anything on that spectacled blonde of yours.”

  “You’re lying,” whispered Krylov, feeling as if something heavy and viscous had grabbed him by the back of his neck. “You are,” he said, studying Tamara, her empty face, which seemed to hold nothing but red lipstick. “But why? Huh? Why this time in particular? After all, you’ve always spied on me. You’ve always taken a keen interest in my women. You’ve relished and envied each one, foisted young ladies on me yourself, just so you could participate and not feel left out. So why the sudden scruples? Have you decided to play the lady? Put me in my place? Or have you thought up something else?”

  “Did you think I was going to wait for you forever?” Tamara spoke in her iciest voice. “Did you think I was going to watch over you, protect you, be jealous of every skirt you latched onto? Have you counted how many you’ve had for my own Dymov? Eighteen, and the blonde is the nineteenth! Damn you and them, too!” She suddenly whacked the desk with her fist, and the silver eagle fell clumsily on Krylov’s boot, striking some sensitive bony protuberance.

  “Take it easy!” Krylov jumped up, stumbled, and reached for the bird from his chair, rummaging in the very thick carpet as if it were plowed soil.

  “Oh, it does hurt? You’ll survive.” Tamara, unattractive, swollen with anger, glowered at Krylov. “Yes, I was jealous of them, the blondes and brunettes, and I dreamed of becoming one of them so I could start over with you as if you were someone else. I was afraid you’d screw some bitch and bring me some nasty infection from her. I trembled over you like a mama. But I’m sick of it, do you hear? I absolutely do not care about this origami heron of yours that no man with taste would even look at. And you know what that means? That means I don’t care about you anymore, either!”

  “Well and thank God! Finally! I never thought I’d live to see it!” Krylov struggled to stand, grabbing the strewn printouts in both fists. “I’m tired of being on your leash, too. You’ve got a terrific choice. You can have Semyannikov or Dymov. Just let me go!”

  Tamara stood, too, trembling, and stepped back, trying to hold her ideally placed head as high as possible, as if the water were rising around her.

  “Excellent, Krylov,” she spoke calmly, looking Krylov in the face as if over this high water and not seeing all of him. “If it weren’t for today, it would have been a long time before I noticed how much you’ve changed. Now I can see how indifferent and vulgar you’ve become. You toy with things that every sane person ought to respect. You despise the simple gift of life and search for depraved forms of relationships. That’s why you’re not with me but with that woman, who agreed to share your mockery of both your mutual feelings. But that’s the last thing you’ll get from me. Get out of my house and out of my life. I’ve already forgotten your name.”

  “The best thing I can do for you is disenchant you,” Krylov cut her off.

  Seemingly, it was all over with Tamara. This wasn’t how he’d imagine this parting, but how had he? As a very private, very vague dream, in which Tamara, tear-stained and beaming, quickly told him something sincere and then left without looking back, with each long, divine step expanding the space for Krylov’s future life. Now Krylov understood the utter impossibility of that happy process. In fact, if people have loved each other that long and hard, the only way they can part is by figuring out a way to turn each other into enemies—so that they can bear the insane spasms of memory and the buckets of blood that fill their heart.

  The door from the office to the hall was ajar. Krylov stumbled into it, producing a series of clumsy shufflings with the wobbly door, and found himself on the dark side. To make sure he didn’t end up unintentionally in the middle of a badly heated-up holiday, he headed for the uneven and very narrow staircase that led to the back yard. Coming up toward him was big Zina holding an empty plastic container that was sticky inside. She let him get around her and proved to be bright pink under her blackness, like a petroleum-smeared lozenge. She seemed to want to tell Krylov something but just opened her mouth twice and stared goggle-eyed.

  Part Seven

  1

  THE SPY’S HOME, WHICH KRYLOV FOUND ON THE DEFILED MAP, WAS A reddish-brown, three-story sick man built for some reason in a damp pit filled with mud and stormy vegetation and sat much lower than the asphalt canvas over which the trucks raced at a rollicking gallop. The building’s plaster was covered with winding cracks that divided the damp façade into different states, sort of, with three or four windows apiece. Multigenerational life filled the twisty little apartments. Here and there dilapidated windows were flung open, and a flat-chested teen with an antediluvian Walkman would fill the opening, or a large materfamilias, cooling off from the kitchen heat, would gaze tenderly at nature as represented by woolly asters and tiny speckled sparrows. The windows to apartment number six were deader than the rest. No matter how much Krylov peered, he couldn’t see any movement behind the blue-gray windows; there was just damp muslin billowing and subsiding in the open window pane.

  Before, the spy had so often lingered near similar structures awaiting his two charges in the most visible spot that even now Krylov expected him to materialize out of thin air at any moment. But he didn’t. For a week, Krylov had been patiently loitering around the corner, standing a little ways from the transformer booth, in the company of his own wet cigarette butts, which had populated the old thready grass. From here he had an excellent view of the right entryway with the prisonlike metal door, which clanked against the concrete side of the settled porch whenever it opened.

  Meanwhile, the gemcutting workshop’s owner had vanished. His shaggy jacket was hanging on a chair in the smoking room, and embittered clients would come in to see this by no means blameless soul, but the boss did not show up or answer telephone calls. The craftsmen were getting gloomier and gloomier and would chip in for cheap beer, digging deep in their pockets. Everyone realized that the workshop faced a speedy and inglorious end. But the problem of money somehow never bothered Krylov. Having mentally gained and lost a fortune, he didn’t worry about the crumbs still rattling around in his purse. He was much more worried about the information the elusive spy had to possess. Krylov was being eaten alive by the hope of finding the real Tanya in the city’s catacombs, the Tanya who, like he himself, was directly linked to the lost expedition.

  Now Krylov spent his nights mostly at his old apartment, where the dusty television still worked. Getting the better of his mother’s dissatisfaction—she lived according to the popular soaps’ schedule—Krylov was glued to the news. The national channels gave scant coverage, with scarcely recognizable panoramas of the Riphean capital and the same disheveled Red Cavalryman raising his mighty red banner with the fresh wet spot in the middle to the blue sky and the carnage on the square. Local television channels showed the consequences of the explosion on Cosmonaut Avenue in more detail: the widened corner of the arcade, the policeman’s bloodied, sticky buzz cut, and the strange, tattered foliage where granules of unknown ch
emistry had spilled, just barely missing the demonstrators, fortunately.

  The commentaries weren’t much use, except that according to some reports (not all), criminal charges had been brought. Only Riphean Channel One gave viewers intelligent reports about the victims, including those whose identity had not been established. Krylov, whose heart sometimes plunged into the abyss, stared at the distressing photographs that scrolled down the screen. No one who looked like Tanya was among the eleven dead women, to whom, at week’s end, a twelfth was added: a petite upperclasswoman with little round eyes in square glasses who died from internal bleeding at the Fourth Municipal. Nearly diving into the electrified screen, Krylov thought that maybe Tanya was watching the same program right now, horrified, searching for her Ivan among the shaven and unshaven male shadows dropping smoothly into oblivion.

  Very soon, however, the otherworldly encounters came to an end. The television was flooded with more astonishing news for which the Riphean events served merely as a pale prologue. Krylov had not anticipated that his idea about a maskers’ revolution in Russia, mentioned in passing to a chance acquaintance, would start happening so quickly and ubiquitously. At first, confirming Tamara’s idea that the world consists of things, the changes were expressed in things. The popularity of Red Cavalry and White Guard uniforms emptied out the theatrical costume shops. Clothing factories, rushing to satisfy the mad market demand, were put on a military footing: the sewing machines stitched away and were buried in waves of crudely embellished fabric, drowned along with their single-minded seamstresses. Quick-thinking traders brought greatcoats and riding breeches in from a roused China, but the goods often turned out to have been lined with cotton wool or crunchy, nasty-smelling feathers. Separate workshops manufactured epaulets, cockades, and chevrons. All the market stalls were piled with pointy Red Cavalry helmets and new, acrid-smelling felt boots.

  Hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens wanted to dress up and join one of the participating sides. At first, municipal celebrations served as the occasion for the carnage, as well as other entertainments that crowded the August calendar. In Perm, the Reds, firing on an entire crowd with a single grenade-launcher, managed to sink an entirely innocent, decked-out motorboat on which the local White Cossacks had intended to sail to Astrakhan for their sweet watermelons. In Astrakhan, in a wooden and flammable part of the city, other White Cossacks, on a day of public merrymaking, torched fish warehouses belonging to the Communists. In response, high cheek-boned Young Communists, throwing their thick leather commissar jackets right over their soaked T-shirts, smeared the Cossacks against the white walls of the Astrakhan citadel. In Krasnoyarsk, costumed Kolchak soldiers who had decided to take the Siberian stronghold, which had once been so unhappily lost by Verkhovny, stormed the enormous opera house, which looked like an American gas station magnified many times over and where the troupe had taken up their post after changing into khakis and service caps with red stars. Simultaneously, in spotless old Irkutsk, where the wooden and brick architecture was all white, having been refreshed for the start of the new year with canticles and lace, other Kolchak men drowned by the hundreds in the Angara—because the Ushakovka, which a century before had taken the executed Kolchak under its Siberian ice, white like frozen milk, had silted up and barely stirred.

  In Petersburg, revolutionary sailors had seized a branch of the naval museum—the cruiser Aurora—and attempted to fire a tank gun at the damp Winter Palace; but everything on the cruiser had been welded shut and thickly painted, therefore the matter ended with just a large iron crash and the hooligans being brought in to the nearest police station. Meanwhile, faxes started coming in to Petersburg’s largest newspapers as the Separate Pskov Volunteer Corps of the Northern Army, under the command of Major General Van Damme, announced its existence. Intrigued reporters besieged the elderly Hollywood star, trying to clarify why an actor was taking part in Russian riots. To this, Jean-Claude Van Damme, who after the plastic surgeon looks like himself playing the flash-frozen Universal Soldier, distinctly reported that all his contacts with Russians were limited to a long-ago fight with a Russian congressman in some restaurant, and that had been the end of it.

  What they showed on the television news was not a Hollywood action movie. The victims of the costumed clashes numbered in the hundreds—and that was only what the official reports said. The most blood was shed in super-quiet Tobolsk. The town seemed to have fallen asleep long ago on the flat Irtysh, which looked as if it had been spilled on a table and flooded the rotting wooden towers that had once been the pride of Siberia’s historical capital; the walls of its citadel soared over this wooden swamp as peacefully as wet linen hung on clotheslines. Having its name appear in the media in every language in the world is never a good thing for a town like this. In Tobolsk, romantically inclined students declared the city the new Gallipoli and, dressed up like good Whites under Drozdov’s command, got into the habit of gathering afterward alongside the ancient, Riphean-made, cast iron cannons whose ominous black row entertained tourists in the citadel. In the last warmth of summer, the cannon muzzles were stuffed with sweet ice cream wrappers, and boys in service caps that were too big for them and sported raspberry bands were rehearsing a play. Reds appeared in a rank, all with tickets for the museum. Discovering the enemy between themselves and the start of the exhibit, some of the Red soldiers rushed to the attack, waving their model rifles, which were curved like goat’s legs, and the rest quietly ran off somewhere. The students dropped their soda bottles and scripts and were pushed toward the Swedish slope—a wide, paved conduit leading from the upper town to the lower, into an escape labyrinth of spreading vegetation and lopsided ruins. Right at the exit from the trap, though, the Whites were met by fast-thinking Reds, who had not left the fight and gone home at all but had taken up this strategic position.

  Before the forces of law and order, summoned by the museum workers, could arrive, the Swedish slope was turned into a bloodbath. The raspberry service caps were crushed and reduced in number as if they’d been eaten by the worker-peasant mass pressing in from above and below. Those who attempted to scramble over the smooth sides onto the grassy shoulder were met by trained and concentrated gunfire, shot point blank out of homemade guns that looked like prostheses with mechanical pointers jutting out in front. They also fired at their own, at the terrified faces of those who had had second thoughts and who blinked at the fat, freshly forged bullet coming for them.

  The slaughter was stopped only when tear gas was released into the formless jumble. When the heavy clutches of brawlers fell apart and dropped and the garishly colorful smoke dispersed, no one could tell the dead from the living at first. The boys (among the Reds there some were quite young) lay side by side, with scarlet bullet holes and thick bruises on their faces, as if they’d been kissed all over by greedy old lovers wearing greasy lipstick. The number of victims in the incident totaled two thousand one hundred thirty-two. The mayor of Tobolsk, a round-headed good soul known for his hospitality and well-repaired roads, at first stood firm, but the morning after the battle he suddenly resigned and, wiping away tears with both hands, suddenly started handing out scandalously large sums of money left and right—as a result of which the prosecutor’s office, yielding to pressure and dragging its feet, was forced to bring criminal charges against the former mayor under the economics article. Also arrested were several zealous participants in the slaughter. The cells were filled primarily with Red soldiers, but they also arrested the commander of the Whites, in real life a geography teacher who strangely, as if in a dream, resembled the Whites’ Major General Mikhail Drozdov with his solid gristle, his cleft chin that turned up at the bottom, and the artful fit of his steel pince-nez. Some of the Reds went down the Irtysh in a rusty barge that melted in the fog—a barge that, in the opinion of the port’s specialists, was definitely not seaworthy. Several other miracles occurred in super-quiet Tobolsk—just short of resurrection. Far-flung, unopened sections of the cemeteries accepted the
additions at a stroke and came to look like military bivouacs; sticky, nasty winds flowed down the Swedish slope, which had been washed with shampoo and bordered in crape.

  Naturally, there could be no victors in the maskers’ revolution because, strictly speaking, the warring sides themselves didn’t exist. The general impression that the Reds were winning was probably explained by them being more organic in the inorganic world, because their expressive and emblematic uniform had originally been created as a costume. Krylov could not remember exactly (the remnants of his historical education had drifted off into the gaps of destiny) for which event the last Russian sovereign had had the “bogatyrki” (the pointed helmets later called “budyonnovki”) and the greatcoats with the flaps created, whether it was the three hundredth anniversary of the House of Romanov or else the Russian victory parade in Berlin slated for the summer of 1917. In some sense, this transparent parade that never took place also demanded consummation and drove the young men with the five-pointed stars on their brow to their bloody rehearsals.

  One way or another, the “Russian style” developed by the ingenious Vasnetsov under the influence of his dream of folk hero pickets and handsome tsarist riflemen couldn’t help but give birth to this kind of historical dreaminess in their weak, impressionable heirs. “An insufferable dream,” whispered Krylov with his prickly unshaven lips, peering into the television’s flickering window. Now he was struck by the sweep with which the masquerade scene had been readied a century ago: the Bolsheviks who robbed the tsar’s military warehouses had had enough funny uniforms to dress the real army that crushed Russia and its entire colorful and gilded history. He thought it would be interesting to follow the role of theft as a factor in the development of design. Krylov now saw theft as a metaphysical act. Thanks to theft, some objects of the genuine world became toys because the thief didn’t understand their purpose, but something make-believe, like these masquerade uniforms, suddenly acquired authenticity and turned the world upside down.