“Here’s the deal,” the darkened Farid spoke gloomily. “Now you have to do what I tell you. Don’t look for anyone anymore. Don’t try to track anyone down. Sit tight and wait for Vasily Petrovich. Speak only to him and sort this out. And if anything happens hightail it over to your uncle Farid and don’t look back.”
2
NATURALLY, KRYLOV DIDN’T LISTEN TO FARID.
He made an honest effort to free himself of the woman who had taken possession of him, illegally, without any right. Mentally he searched for and found in Tanya many shortcomings. But the moment that infernal work (which reminded him in some way of efforts to mend hopelessly torn clothing while you’re wearing it) stopped, her image was immediately restored. Apparently, this image could not be done the slightest harm.
Krylov alone suffered the loss. On the one hand, Tanya’s betrayal flattered him no end. Only Krylov understood what it was to give a lover the keys to her husband’s refuge, even if she didn’t tell him the address. On the other hand, the feeling that someone spent time in his apartment in his absence strengthened manifold. For some reason, he collected too much trash when he cleaned up. That much couldn’t collect from one person in a half-empty space. Sweeping into the dustpan the transparent dust, which held nothing of the earth and was engendered by this space, Krylov discovered in it scraps of cellophane and tiny pieces of metal whose origin he couldn’t explain. Just in case, he inspected his spare keys, which he always kept inside the apartment and were never removed from it. Two spares round wound with waxed thread were rattling around the hollow drawer of the light orange cupboard. Together with the set Krylov carried around, that made three. But for some reason he imagined there had been four initially.
Wrapped up in all these worries, for a while he forgot all about Tamara, as if she’d never existed.
He barely watched television, where they were showing old movies now instead of news. From time to time when he stayed at his mother’s he channel-surfed mechanically and would come across the croaking of a Hollywood comedy, or the peacock howl of the latest girl singer dressed in fishnets and sequins. Once, hearing the bravura theme song of “Decedent of the Year” and seeing on the full screen the flashing face of Dymov framed in frosted logs, Krylov was just about to hit the remote when Dymov floated off and he saw the clapping studio with the mirror floor onto which stepped a magnificent Tamara, boldly placing her shoe on her dancing reflection.
Evidently the very broadcast they’d been negotiating over for so long was happening. Feeling a strange abandonment because what was going on no longer concerned him, Krylov prepared to watch. Tamara was ushered with all due respect into the chair for the main guest—a ponderous configuration of dark wood without armrests and with a Gothic back whose angle of incline, as Krylov knew, was invisible to the eye and did not permit the sitter to sit up straight. Tamara managed to seat herself handsomely, however, crossing her bright legs and holding her straight back an imperceptible millimeter away from the concave board. She was wearing a fiery dress that was unfamiliar to Krylov, and something was sparkling friably in her pinned-up hair. Through the screen’s dusty glass he couldn’t make out the details.
The camera passed through the studio, and Krylov was extremely unhappy with the guests. There wasn’t a single important face in the front rows, that is, not a single worthy opponent whose presence could guarantee the show a respectable level. The faces were all ordinary and common, and they all bore the deep stamp of dissatisfaction. Decorative coffins were floating through the air with their carved sterns forward, put in motion by a complex system of silvery blocks and tackles. The long-legged ladies who performed the program’s dance numbers were parading around this time in silk Red Cavalry caps, teensy jackets seeded with big red medals, and breathtaking fishnet stockings.
“Now let’s meet our experts!” the angelic Dymov announced in a festive voice. “Andrei Andreich Goremyko, doctor of engineering!”
The gentleman summoned shyly parted the bead curtain where the guests appeared, poked out halfway, and then all the way. His body, which was narrow in the shoulders and expanded evenly from his armpits, made him look like a large rodent; a gray stripe of vegetation did what it could to mask the absence of a chin, instead of which hung a sack. Mr. Goremyko’s looked like a trained animal. Cautiously, taking little robotic steps, the expert crossed the treacherous mirror and sat down, both hands clutching the edge of the square table on which lay folders of some kind.
“And Riphean Women’s Committee chair and City Councilwoman Adelaida Valentinovna Semyannikova!” Dymov exclaimed over the applause that burst up like a ponderous flock of pigeons.
Mrs. Semyannikova was undoubtedly in excellent form. You could have cut yourself on the lapels of her superbly ironed field jacket, and her head, driven firmly into her shoulders, sat there too firmly to be ripped off. If Krylov had for some reason created his own personal image of an enemy, he could not have come up with anything better than these gleeful bulging eyes and pickerel smile. Seated at a little table symmetrical to Goremyko’s, Adelaida gulped down a glass of mineral water, wiped her mouth with her handkerchief, and immediately drank down another.
“Today we have a very special broadcast,” Mitya began ingratiatingly and unusually literarily for him. “We have with us a guest whom we have been looking forward to ever since our program began. Mrs. Tamara Krylova is well known in this city as a brilliant lioness of society and a generous philanthropist. This dazzling woman, however, has a business that’s anything but feminine. Granite offers funeral services. Services, moreover, that are quite original, shall we say. Tamara”—he warmly addressed his guest, who was standing at attention and could be seen by all from the top of her head to the tips of her shoes—“tell us what awaits us when we die and find ourselves coming to see you.”
“After you die you won’t be coming to see me,” Tamara protested with a gentle smile, holding at arm’s length a furry microphone, which looked like a blue carnation. “Each of us is rendered to where we are according to our faith. Granite operates here, on this side of that line. We do our utmost for the living: the near and dear of the newly departed. We are by their side to ease their loss and make the job of a funeral easier.”
“Tell us! Tell us in more detail!” Mitya exclaimed impatiently, gazing greedily at his victim, who still had not displayed the least sign of confusion. Many in the studio leaned forward; here and there women’s eyes grew moist, and some scrawny activist who was so wrinkled he looked as though a pencil had been dragged up and down his angry face dropped his written pages from his lap.
“I’ll attempt to explain as clearly as I can,” Tamara began, gazing benevolently at those who had gathered. “We all want to live well, on a modern level. We’re interested in furniture, appliances, and clothing. But our farewell to those close to us is also a part of our life. Each of us must do this at some time. Isn’t it important for this ritual to be done with dignity? Doesn’t it ease one’s grief if the deceased leaves us surrounded by beauty? But look: everything around is getting better except funerals. Styles and technologies are changing. But we still have those vulgar paper flowers and lace on our coffins. All this makes us think of disability and prison. Who usually operates in our difficult field? Workshops for the disabled and convicts. This alone casts a shadow over a funeral. Relatives seeing off the deceased are given a feeling of doom, and many afterward suffer from depression.”
“You mean you want to turn funerals into celebrations?” the activist shouted from his seat in a squeaky voice.
“Friends, you will ask Mrs. Krylova your questions afterward,” Dymov, flushed, reined in the activist. He was noticeably pleased, though, that the audience was heating up, elbowing each other and fidgeting in their chairs.
“But why? Let me answer,” Tamara responded, sending the scrawny viper one of her most shimmering and precious smiles, the likes of which many high and mighty people dreamed of earning. “Not a celebration, of course, but a digni
fied, emotional pageant, like in a good theater. For this we want to do away with the traditional sordid environment and offer our clients completely different concepts for funerals.”
“But have you thought about people’s feelings?” a scandalized shout rang out suddenly in the studio. The camera quickly groped for the shouter: a tear-stained woman with yellow hair the color of a banana skin wearing a black gauze kerchief and a black T-shirt with an Adidas logo across her loose bra.
The audience began murmuring sympathetically. Dymov surrendered picturesquely, spreading his hands in their white lace gloves. One of the young ladies holding a Red Cavalry hat ran up to the woman with the microphone. Other young women from the corps de ballet, who had obviously been left without assignments today, were crowding around the decorative tombstones and whispering excitably, making idle dance movements with their identically fishnetted legs in their patent leather shoes.
“Hey, I already asked. Let her answer,” said the lady into the microphone in a surprising raw bass voice. “I’d like to know how she fired the disabled people from that Granite of hers.”
“Yes, I’d like to know that,” a confident woman in a light-colored business suit that was a little tight on her, grabbed the microphone away. “What happened to the workers from the Society for the Blind, who, as we know, are protected by law?”
“Not one disabled person was fired. We simply have the workshop making something different now,” Tamara replied with that particular, distinct grace that made it clear she had already dealt with the confident lady and had not formed a very high opinion of her. “Right now the blind are gluing together Christmas ornaments and garlands, and we’re buying all of this for children’s homes. I assure you, work that is full of celebration is much more suitable for the disabled. You see, they’re as naïve and sensitive as children.”
“I have different information,” the lady continued to insist, holding the microphone tight while several hands reached for it at once. “We have a complaint from Gennady Petrovich Serebryakov, whom you let go—”
“We did let Serebryakov go and sent him to a drug clinic for treatment,” Tamara interrupted, frowning quickly and unattractively, after which she returned her face to its icy graciousness. “If we hadn’t done that, Gennady Petrovich would have very quickly found himself among Granite’s special clients. I’m surprised that you were able to incite that poor man, who understands nothing, to write a complaint.”
Tamara’s last words drowned in a frothy surge of music, to which the young ladies who had not managed to disperse to their places automatically made several synchronized movements.
“We’ll return after these ads!” doll-like Dymov exclaimed, making an emergency appearance in the frame.
The coffins went round and round like a carousel. Evidently, Mitya had chickened out after all, in spite of his sanction to set up a kangaroo court, a sanction issued, presumably, by the media service of the governor himself. An A-Studio ad started across the screen: the sun, visible through a column of water, looked like blue scrambled eggs; and a cheerful rubberized dolphin with a head like a rubber boot. Then a long-haired fairy languid with pleasure put a mug under a smooth stream of a nonalcoholic ladies’ beer—and Krylov, fleeing the fateful beauty of the slick advertising creatures, headed for the kitchen, where the plastic, roach-infected radio was muttering. His mother, angry and sleepy, was sitting on a stool in front of a cup of yellow tea, and her mongrel kitty, spread out like a thick speckled pancake, was purring in her lap.
“That means they’re showing your ex on television,” his mother said listlessly, scratching the bristly hair on the cat’s little furrowed brow with her finger. “She’s still sending me presents every holiday. She won’t show her face, though, she’s afraid. She sends her driver. But I send it all back. Don’t even look at it. If she’d show up herself, I’d talk to her. As it is, sending drivers, and not even the same one, and all of them so young…. She has no conscience.”
Krylov’s face turned red but he managed to restrain himself. Tamara had always been a good and patient daughter-in-law, and if his mother had not held on with a death grip to these rotting walls covered in old wallpaper that was like a fur coat, she would have lived in a decent apartment long ago. For her deference and generosity Tamara had received from her mother-in-law only animosity—organic, with pursed purple lips, without rhyme or reason. Presents from her were accepted only in the form of heavy gold jewelry. Even now, a jumbled gold lump with large earring-flies and massive pretzel-bracelets was kept somewhere in the depths of the moldy furniture where even his mother had not looked in years.
“Go on, then. Run back to her. Admire her. She forgot all about you long ago.” His mother tipped the melancholy kitten, which had short torn scraps for ears, from her lap and turned up the radio, which was talking about unidentified flying objects.
There was no getting past his mother’s insanity. Today it seemed like everyone was denying Tamara justice. Equipping himself with a slapdash sandwich made out of a fluffy roll and stale slices of ham, as red as abrasions, Krylov went back to the television. The ads were over, and Mrs. Semyannikova was standing conspicuously so that she filled the screen and playing with her necklace of large, flaking pearls.
“… Krylova has good lawyers,” she said in a chesty, slightly gurgling voice that for some reason always mesmerized listeners. “We aren’t going to find minor violations at Granite. But that’s not the point. That’s not the point! Spirituality and morality! Spirituality and morality! That’s what’s upsetting people. And I tell you, you can’t trick people. No, you can’t!” Semyannikova took in the attentive studio with her light protruding eyes, her gaze brushing over the young ladies who reflexively squeezed their gorgeous knees together. “Mrs. Krylova thought that this program would be free advertising for her flourishing company. But you and I are not idiots.” Semyannikova chuckled sinisterly, as if a boiling liquid had bubbled up. “We know very well that they are experimenting with people’s feelings at Granite. People who have just lost their loved ones receive offers to play the lottery! What is this if not sacrilege?”
“She’s already been thrashed for that!” a gristly fellow in bottle-glass wire rims that flashed slantwise, jumped up and shouted from his seat.
“That’s nothing positive,” Mrs. Semyannikova said didactically, and the fellow, confused, felt around behind him and lowered himself into his chair. “We, the Riphean Women’s Committee, are opposed on principle to such excesses, but if Mrs. Krylova comes to us for assistance with this, we will render her all necessary aid.”
The studio audience began to applaud. Tiny bouquets flew in the direction of the now languid Semyannikova. Goremyko sat in a disciplined pose at his symmetrical little table; he had a water bath on his forehead. Goremyko probably didn’t understand what was going on very well and was extremely nervous before his own appearance. If Krylov could have destroyed this awful spectacle by smashing the dusty TV and everything in it on the floor, he definitely would have. But he continued to sit there and tear at the tenacious sandwich with his teeth, swallowing tough pieces, and bellowing powerless curses.
For some reason they didn’t show Tamara for a very long time. But now here she was in the frame sitting at the very edge of her medieval armchair.
“You talk about people’s feelings, but when you talk like that what moves you isn’t anything humanitarian. It’s cowardice.” Tamara’s voice was remote, and her wide-open eyes were looking past the studio, with its coffins, girls, and quiet Dymov, who looked like a chocolate rabbit in silver foil. “When we see our loved ones off, we’re crushed by fear. We think that on this day we and all our feelings have to belong to death. We make a symbolic sacrificial offering, not letting ourselves even think about the fact that life goes on and that life has its rights, too. We don’t let ourselves be alive. So even our grief rings false.”
“How dare you!” the gristly four eyes exclaimed, wrinkling his spotted forehead.
> “Here’s how,” Tamara cut him off without even turning to face her spiteful critic, who had nervously straightened his silk tie, which looked like a firebird’s feather. “I have those seeing off their loved one let them go. I break the cabalistic agreement allegedly reached between us and the old man with the scythe. Since everyone has been hypnotized, abrupt action is required, a trick, if you like. Our lottery suits this purpose very well.”
The camera held the confident lady, who had gathered her lips into a twisted thread at the ready, in close-up.
“Allow me if you would,” she interrupted Tamara, glancing over quickly at someone’s directorial signal outside the frame. “Three years ago the main prize in your lottery, a Caribbean tour, was won by Nina Sergeyevna Kucherova. Do you know what happened to that elderly woman who succumbed to your temptations?”
“Naturally.” Tamara shrugged her splendidly large shoulders, which flashed under the light fabric. “At the time, many Russian tourists in the Caribbean perished in a natural disaster—one hundred eighteen people altogether.”
“Don’t you think this was nature’s answer to your lottery?” Mrs. Semyannikova’s stealthily broke in, pointing to the screen that had come up in front of the studio’s viewers.
A newsreel came up and took up the whole screen. The sea, an unbelievable minty green, with zones of smoky, very gentle mirages, suddenly swelled up and lashed out, carrying the wicker furniture out of the nice little bungalows. The next frames were familiar from the news from three years before: the dead gray beaches that looked like they’d been poured from liquid lead; the boundary between the boiling sea and the land heaped with debris, like a barricade the sea simply could not destroy and carry away and the land could not withstand. The hurricane’s apotheosis was a furious mist and shadows turning, waving, angular in the mist, palm trees swinging as if they were stripping a raggedy wet shirt over their head. And there it was, the shadow itself, which looked neither human nor bovine, with a clumsily smashed head, a head of Russian origin, as was confirmed, soaring slantwise into the heavens.
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