2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  “In 1919, as they retreated, the Whites destroyed the Kama fleet just like that,” the erudite Menshikov informed them, raising his tearing eyes in their bright pink, unstuck-looking eyelids, at Vadya. “Maybe you didn’t see it. Maybe you read it in some magazine, hm?”

  Insulted, Vadya sniffed and turned on his kitchen stool, which was small for him, like a stump under a bear. Stretching each leg in turn, he pulled two worn envelopes out of his tight jeans pockets.

  “Anything’s possible,” he said wheezing. “Maybe my brain’s turned to mush in my old age. But what do you say to this, sirs? What do you think this is?”

  From the envelopes Vadya shook out what first appeared to be serrated scraps of leather and dried paper. Upon closer examination, they turned out to be birch leaves—tiny, sub-Arctic, early yellowing. The strange part, actually, was not their premature autumn fading but the nature of it, the distribution of the color. There was none of the usual birch freckledness and northern rustiness. The leaves’ patterned, almost scaly surface looked like reptile skin. It was as if the swarthy, twiggy little trees they’d grown on had sucked up something unusual from the soil and the leaves had been given a mysterious injection.

  “I think it’s some kind of industrial chemical,” Gaganov said without confidence, examining the amazingly sturdy leaf flesh, which did not tear, in the light. “Or even radiation. It’s obviously poisoning. There you have it, gentlemen. What nature restores, man must defile.”

  “You can’t be certain it’s man,” Farid objected dispassionately, collecting the dirty dishes and passing out to his comrades clean ones with shining crackled cornflowers, serving up his bachelor cleanliness as the best fare, which the rock hounds had grown unaccustomed to in the forest next to their acrid campfires.

  The table fell silent. Once again they poured vodka, drank it down, and wiped their mouths on their sleeves. Then they started talking, lowering their muffled voices, about the strange disappearance of time. Virtually everyone who had been on expeditions this summer had encountered this phenomenon. At first, time moved normally, but then suddenly it vanished, like a river going underground, leaving the shining world in blissful stillness, in the distinctness of each and every being, in the childlike immortality of everything, from the black glacial boulders, like stones from a giant’s hearth, to the tiniest water skaters, which ran like a cursor over a liquid screen, moved by the wireless device of an invisible user. All the expeditions had a moment when the participants lost track of the days. Then both the days and the nights became amazingly transparent: the ordinary mechanisms of oblivion ceased to function and everything that happened happened today. The reason for this may have been the beauty dissolved in the air that had expressively renewed every stone and every beast; no matter where you cast your eye, beauty dispatched man into eternity. A sojourn in eternity—that was what the expeditions of the summer of 2017 were for the rock hounds. They didn’t know the date or the time and were unaware of being alive or dead. And then, due to a concatenation of events that seemed quite accidental, they left for the rail and bus stations, man after man, and woke up with a start in an unfamiliar land. Either the revolution of a hundred years ago was playing itself out in the form of sanguinary mysteries, or else, unfortunately, there had been an outburst of crime, or secret political strategists were playing games with the population in order to cook up some new leader in their cauldrons—maybe one hiding horny goat’s hooves in his elegant shoes.

  “What’s so characteristic is, it feels like nothing’s happening,” little Vitya Shukletsov reasoned, scratching his little beard. “No one I know has lost his job, the ruble hasn’t fallen, everything’s still in place. If you don’t turn on the television, you can live without a care in the world.”

  “It’s been an awfully long time since anything’s happened,” Farid responded from his seat at the head of the table. “Nothing has any consequences. There haven’t been any changes. They’re asking nervous people not to watch.”

  To this, Menshikov, who had taken the least part in the discussion, responded with a new shrug not characteristic of him before, as if he were checking for his head with this unconscious movement.

  “Do you want to see what happened to us?” he offered, addressing no one in particular. “I’ll show you right now.”

  Frowning, Menshikov reached under the table where he had lying by his leg, like a dog, a shapeless sack, and he pulled out a plump book. Its glossy cover, sticky it was so new, looked like it was filled with fruit gelatin.

  “What’s this?” Roma Gusev reached for it, curious. “Is this yours again? Aren’t you the writer! Good going! Let me take a look!”

  The book went from hand to hand to an approving rumble of voices. Everyone showed everyone else the photograph of a smug Menshikov where he looked like a canned apricot. The author, much paler than on the cover, even more faded than his own worn-out shirt, which was disintegrating at the folds like an old newspaper, shook the outstretched hands and made his way through the handshakes to the dark bookshelf.

  “Farid, can I rummage through your stuff?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “What’s mine is yours,” replied Farid with oriental ceremony, although in his personal case this formula of civility very often turned out to be the pure truth.

  Menshikov ran his fingers over the bindings and pulled out a small, naïvely blue book that evidently had something to do with the legendary times when the book’s price was on the back cover. He smiled at it tenderly for a minute, like at an old friend, or rather at his own photograph as a child. Then he put both books in the middle of the table, which had been cleared of dishes and crumbs.

  “Here they are,” he pointed to the blue one, “my first stories. Nothing special, really. I had a glimmer of an idea, but at the time I could do so little and I didn’t understand my own nature at all. But here it is, gentlemen, my best, I promise you.” As if giving an oath on a Bible, Menshikov rested his hand, covered in pale hair, on the fruity cover. “Compare them and draw your own conclusions.”

  Not everyone, but many at the table really did see what Menshikov was trying to show them. The blue book had solidity and weight and held something apart from the book itself—it was a valuable ingot you could feel with your hand, which couldn’t help but weigh and caress the object. The new one was as empty as a husked kernel, and this emptiness was not a function of the text but existed independently. The book was bookless. The large font for the illiterate took up nearly half its yellowish flecked pages. The novel seemed to have been spread on the paper in too thin a layer, the way an economical housewife makes one tin of caviar cover fifty pieces of bread—and because of this the novel lost certain properties, at least its taste.

  “Yeah,” a grumpy Vadya Soldatenkov, who, by the way, had an advanced degree in Roman-Germanic philology, began slowly. “For some reason I haven’t been able to read anything lately. You open it up and see that the point of the text is not to forget my letters. But I think I remember them. By the way, I wonder what weirdo drew your cover.”

  The cover’s stunning beauty would catch your eye a kilometer away, but somehow it was immediately obvious that the blonde with the hairdo like an éclair and the good-looking gay guy in the modest country lace had no connection at all to the novel’s heroes. The cover was like someone else’s clothing. In comparison with this edition, the little blue volume looked like a pure-bred object of culture and really did immortalize every printed word. The little book gave off the venerable, old-man smell of a library, whereas the new one was obviously not intended for long-term preservation. Somewhere in its publication data you should have found a use-by date, “Best before …”

  “My new novel could have as much in it as a Bulgakov or Olesha,” the imperturbable Menshikov announced, ignoring the disbelieving grins. “Only no one cares anymore. Nothing’s happening—and it’s not supposed to. Even the news on TV and in the newspapers the point is to make sure there isn’t any news. The flow of
information washes away everything that might have any meaning. They published my book just so there wouldn’t be an unpublished manuscript. So it wasn’t left lying around. And didn’t get into that flow. Oh, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Stop it, Volodin,” Gaganov smiled conciliatorily, topping off his untouched glass. “You writers have to have your insults. Life’s fine, basically. If people don’t appreciate your novel, you think it’s a catastrophe.”

  “All right,” Menshikov downed the very wet vodka in one swallow, jerking his Adam’s apple. “I have one copy. Who should I inscribe it to?” he asked, catching his breath in the sleeve of his gray jacket, which looked like it had been sprinkled with baking soda.

  “Me!” A joyous Gusev jumped up, forestalling his comrades who had stirred. “You know I love books,” he defended himself with a maidenly blush in anticipation of a gift.

  Smiling crookedly, Menshikov opened his luckless progeny until it cracked and scrawled a few lines for Roma in tiny script, attaching his long-tailed writer’s signature. Roma took the book carefully, as if he were afraid the fresh words would spill off the page. While he was beaming and grinning, trying to sort out the loops of the small spliced handwriting, Menshikov bent over his bag again. What he pulled out was an officer’s service cap with a St. George’s ribbon instead of an insignia.

  “Have you turned stupid or something?” Gaganov gawked after accidentally knocking off the table the pharmaceutical vial in which the relic hair, which had stuck to its sides, trembled like a little bolt of lightning.

  With both hands, as if he were doing this for the first time in his life, Menshikov put the cap on his bony, crudely coiffed head. Instantly, his rather loose and long civilian jacket seemed to disappear, his tautly stretched temples stood out, and in the cap’s predatory shadow his eyes became transparent, as if his brain were shining through an old cracked window.

  “Oh well, I’m off to war,” the transformed Menshikov spoke, looking from somewhere far away at this circle of comrades, at their large rounded shoulders and gray pates. “I want the Lord to say a few words to me personally.”

  “Who doesn’t?” the bulky Soldatenkov muttered as he rose, knocking the table from below and making the dishes jump.

  The party of men had grown cold and was starting to break up. The other guests followed Menshikov into the cramped vestibule. There, on a rather empty rack, in the vicinity of Farid’s rumpled jacket, was a homemade greatcoat, reddish-brown, a horse color, sort of. Despite the warm evening, Menshikov put it on. Its crooked seams showed through, and when you buttoned it up he looked nothing like his former self. Nudging each other, the rock hounds sorted out their heavy footwear, gnawed away by Riphean stones, slapped each other on the back, and lit up on the staircase. Written on many of their faces was a new interest in what was happening in the city. The night was quiet, like the rattle a mother takes away from her sleeping baby, sprinkled only lightly with the faint sounds of distant gunfire.

  Lingering, Krylov gave Farid a questioning look, and Farid indicated with his eyes that he should stay. Leaning his shoulder against the doorjamb, Krylov watched those leaving sadly, acutely aware of how vulnerable they all were because they always wanted to be in contact with their own destiny, to tug at its spy to make him turn around. Right now three or even four of them were holding themselves slightly apart in the crush, with minute fires in their squinting eyes—which spoke to the infectious example of the writer Menshikov, who obviously was planning to go straight from Farid’s building to the shooting. Krylov realized with unusual clarity that they would never gather in today’s particular configuration again.

  A little later, the light went out in a small, thoroughly smoke-filled apartment. Gusev, tipsy, covered in his shaggy worn checked blanket, was snoring on his sofa, his cheek pressed against his gift book. The August night came through the opened window pane in the form of black, grapey air, and the tobacco curtain was slowly washed out of the rooms.

  With an ache in his bones, Krylov was sitting in the tiny square kitchen under the bright white ceiling where little bats were flickering like stars on an old, breaking, black and white film. The money—a loan of a thousand dollars—had already been given, naturally, and put away in his rather fatter and firmer wallet. Now Krylov was telling his story—not hurrying, returning several times to the most difficult episodes, especially those where Tanya stubbornly repeated the fact of her nonexistent husband.

  Farid listened closely, and his long oriental wrinkles, which had been his real facial features for some time, softened a little. His yellow lynx eyes watched calmly.

  “This means you’ve had a visit from the Stone Maiden,” he said at last, pouring himself and Krylov some thick tea brewed to a brick red. “If you want to live, you’d better not go looking for her.”

  “I’m sorry, but when you have a relationship with a real person, it’s pretty hard to believe in fairy tales,” Krylov challenged—and then remembered something. The strange transparency of Tanya’s whole makeup, her fadedness, had always raised doubts about her reality that Krylov had hidden from himself. In fact, Tanya had always seemed like a figure showing through a page depicting the real world—and because of that she was filled with a light Krylov could not now exist without.

  “What fairy tales?” Farid chuckled, not answering Krylov’s quick-tempered retort immediately and looking as if he were listening closely to something. “Why couldn’t you do it the usual way? You could have rented an apartment.”

  “The usual way would have been … inauthentic, sort of.” In his embarrassment Krylov scraped the spoon in the sugar bowl, which was lined with sweet coarse clumps. “You see—”

  “Yes, I see everything!” Farid interrupted him, tearing open a solid cube-shaped packet and sending a silky loose stream into the sugar bowl. “By the way, about her spouse. They say that the women the Stone Maiden takes up residence in aren’t just plucked out of thin air. They have their own biographies, too, sometimes even children. This kind of woman will destroy a man, lead him into the mountains, and then, as if nothing had happened, go back to her job and family. Oh, she may scratch her pretty face with branches and then lie that she doesn’t remember anything. As for the husband, I don’t think you need to look for complicated options when in fact it’s all very simple. It’s Anfilogov.”

  “No way!” Krylov gave an unnatural laugh. “The ages don’t even work out,” he said, and he immediately recalled the impression Tanya had made at dusk and sometimes in her sleep when rather than warm up or flush, as happens with all young creatures, she cooled, oddly enough, and her mouth became fine, with soft pouches in the corners. She was ageless. Her few conventional wrinkles looked like they’d been penciled on wax paper that wouldn’t take lead. She could easily have been past fifty.

  “And by the way, I once had a peek at Vasily Petrovich’s wife,” Krylov hastened to add. “She’s old, and fat, and red-headed, and she was wearing a pink skirt.”

  “And I saw a blonde about forty, wearing a waisted outfit with a bow on her butt,” Farid informed him caustically. “Did Petrovich tell you in so many words that the fat one was his wife?”

  “No, you know very well he never says anything like that and never introduces anyone,” Krylov mumbled, distraught.

  “There you go,” Farid spoke hortatorily. “Petrovich could have four wives, and not because he’s a Muslim. He doesn’t care about Allah or Christ. He’s a law unto himself. That’s Petrovich’s principle: no one and nothing can be unique for him. Not a wife, or a friend, or a passport, or a home.”

  Krylov gulped down his oversweetened tea as if it were vodka, feeling the hot gulp immediately appear as sweat on his forehead. That was it. Anfilogov. No wonder vague rumors went around about the professor being a bigamist, if not a trigamist—and not out of any love for the fairer sex but, as Krylov had guessed, exactly the opposite. In any case, this was just like Anfilogov the conspirator: to avoid being pinned down, to clone hims
elf and his destiny, literally every hour of his own time, at the expense of other people, their lives, and their destinies.

  “And by the way, about his home.” Farid, hunched over, was looking out the brightening window where the remains of the pale moon looked like an aspirin. “Our Petrovich is rich, as you know. I’ve heard he bought himself a special apartment that he decided no one would enter until his death. Like he was cultivating his own ghost, the way people grow tomatoes in a hothouse. As if when he died this duplicate of his would stand sentry over Petrovich’s treasures.”

  Fighting a wobbly drowsiness, Krylov shuddered. Now he knew for certain exactly what door Tanya’s “souvenir” keys opened—the keys were on him now, on him like a node on a tree, like a cunning steel parasite.

  “There, you do believe in ghosts!” Farid exclaimed. “Fine, it’s morning. The cock’s crowed and the ghosts have melted away. It’s time we got some sleep. I’ll make up the chair for you now. Only here’s one last question.” Farid suddenly looked Krylov closely in the eyes, breathing warm alcohol fumes on him. “I’m only asking so that I can understand how bad things are for you. Tell me, the ruby mines people are yakking about, that Petrovich supposedly found in the north—do they exist?”

  Krylov smiled helplessly. He well remembered the rock hound’s rules, which said you weren’t supposed to talk or ask about big finds. But Farid was staring hard at him, hovering over the sugar-scattered oilcloth. Then Krylov nodded sharply a few times, swaying with the stool over a sleepy abyss. His heart beat strangely. He would have given a lot right now for maximum simplicity in his life. But he had absolutely nothing to give in return.