2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  One day, squinting at the sunny window while outside the wind bore radiant golden rubbish, Farid said as if by the way, “I think I need to make a quick trip to the deposit before winter.”

  “Are things going well?” asked Krylov, sitting down to the sugary buns and the ashtray, which was full of tightly screwed butts.

  “They’re going fine,” Farid confirmed. “Pavel just has a few steps left. Only I don’t think we’re the only clever people around. If you and I sit here until the spring thaw, we’ll get there and find barbed wire around the perimeter and guards with submachine guns. We don’t even know what turn things will take in the spring. Yesterday Menshikov was wounded on Green Hill. General Dobronravov was pensioned off, and there are new tanks at the marshalling yard, supposedly brought for an arms expo. So we’d be better off taking care of this before the November seventh national holiday.”

  His announcement brought Krylov back to reality. From time to time he had turned on the television, which seemed to swell with the crackling from the plugged-in electricity. Almost nothing remained there of news, and the news announcers, drawing the viewers’ attention to amusing items like the regional housewives’ contest or a zoo birth—back in June—of a pair of bear cubs, spoke with the intonations of the “Sweet Dreams, Baby” show. Odious signs kept slipping by everywhere, dark spots of reticence. Life was overflowing its banks, but not because it itself was overfull; rather, it was as if a huge, muffled, alien body had plunged into it, and life had splashed over the edge, leaving half a bucket’s worth.

  “I probably should tell you something,” Farid spoke looking at him stealthily. “You don’t really have to go. Whether we come back alive or not—it’s fifty-fifty. Petrovich and Kolyan didn’t, for instance. For most people, life’s more precious.”

  Krylov grinned. Fifty-fifty was the exact ratio a Riphean couldn’t pass up on principle. A maximally uncertain outcome opened up the broadest possible channel for communication with the force the Riphean spends his whole life trying to get to turn around and look. He couldn’t imagine what those eyes would be like, but after the demise of the first expedition, the corundum deposit really had become akin to a launch pad into outer space.

  “You know I can’t not go,” Krylov replied calmly to the perfectly still Farid, who at that moment became a very old man completely detached from everything. “And you can’t for the same reason as me. What’s to discuss?”

  “Right, that wouldn’t be in the cards,” Farid agreed with restraint and ceremoniously poured a strong, nearly taiga-quality drink from the stained teapot full of hot, plump, tea-leaf kasha.

  The corundum deposit was now something like his life’s crowning moment, a cleared spot in the usual order of things. There is a precise time and place where a man meets his own destiny. Not showing up for that rendezvous would be insanity for any Riphean. The friends didn’t discuss it, but Krylov might be wanted for Zavalikhin’s murder. Krylov simply wasn’t where his old life was—if, in the light of revolutionary events, that place even existed. But if he was going to be going wherever his feet took him—among the multitude of directions, he would find the true one.

  Krylov simply could not turn down the expedition. In spite of the emptiness Tanya had left him, in spite of the vibrating, blaring Asiatic summons, inside he kept hearing the Riphean’s chief demand, “God! It’s me! Talk to me!” Actually, only now did the extreme literalness of this demand become clear to Krylov: “Talk to me, God! Or else I’ll do something that won’t let you sit this one out anyway!” Long ago, Krylov hadn’t been able to turn away from his gemcutting tools and the infinite world in the crystal’s depth. Now he had been presented with a ready-made platform for an experiment to make God manifest—plus the understanding that you only conduct this kind of experiment on yourself.

  “We’ll give Pavel his share,” Farid proposed, enjoying the tea and sugary buns. “He’s been working with us, and he has Mashka. Twenty percent, what do you think?”

  “Suits me,” Krylov replied, knowing perfectly well that if the expedition did return and bring in the stones, the income would be divided into three exactly equal parts.

  Now Farid did not object to Krylov leaving the apartment once in a while for fresh air. Weakened, holding one hand over his heart and the other on the wall, he was hardly fit for their arduous prewinter dash. In the afternoon, Krylov sat like a pensioner on the damp courtyard bench, wrapped up tight in a warm coat, and looked at the frowning wet asters and the bedewed spiderwebs that sparkled everywhere and reminded him of cracks in cold glass. At night, when only three or four oily-dim windows in the whole courtyard were lit, Krylov went out in Farid’s woolen athletic wear and did pull-ups on the chinning bar, from which abundant streams of cold water flowed up his sleeves. Then, radiating heat and fanned by the air’s chill, he would run the paths of the half-wild park, where, in the darkness, among the trunks, fallen leaves rustled over the earth and rotten wooden gazebos with vaguely Chinese contours were occasionally illuminated by mellow lights from marijuana cigarettes. At first he had no luck with the running or the pull-ups; but suddenly it was as if something freed up inside him and he now he could pound out kilometers of damp asphalt for hours in his running shoes.

  Meanwhile Farid prepared systematically and stubbornly for the expedition. Somewhere he got a hold of a not very new but sturdy winter tent with inflatable insulation and down army sleeping bags with sleeves like the ones used to fit out mountain game wardens. A corner of the kitchen was taken up by a tower of canned fish and meat that slid apart like heavy little pucks if Dronov happened to tramp too hard. Farid’s pride and joy were the polymer balloons for water that did not lose their elasticity down to forty below; demonstrating to Krylov the tautly coiled, sticky pods, he explained for safety purposes they would have to carry their water from a settlement as well.

  Finally, the apotheosis of Farid’s scavenging abilities: the very same silvery biohazard suits Krylov had seen on television. Their seams were like tractor treads, and you could feel flexible pipes through the layers of fabric. After dinner, the delighted Farid demanded a fitting. Krylov was by no means able to get into the opened sack on which the boots hung immediately. He got all bollixed up, wagging their corrugated metal soles. Finally, the dressing was complete and Krylov found himself inside a kind of fabric bathtub with a stiff load tied to his soles; something like the cap of the armature rose up behind him and had a transparent face-guard that clicked into a hermetic slit. Immediately, breathing became work. From the outside, Farid waved his huge white glove with its ribbed fingers at Krylov. The mirror in the crowded hallway reflected two whitish figures who looked like hares from a child’s New Year’s party, only without the ears. Because the silvery cocoon isolated him from the world, and because the glass-reinforced plastic shield emitted a scratchy turbidity; the mirror with the two formless creatures looked to Krylov like a television screen seen from a distance running a broadcast from the future. But a future that was right around the corner. For a minute a chill ran through him, like in the oncologist’s waiting room.

  “You realize, you and I are going to be working in diapers!” Farid’s voice, which was little, like a rattling pea, boomed in Krylov’s ear. “How do I sound? How’s the reception?”

  Farid believed that Krylov did not leave the safety of their courtyard during his afternoon outings. However, his feet in their donated army boots sometimes took him fairly far away. A couple of times he was on Kungurskaya. For a long time he stood in front of the safe door decorated with a dead little bell that had dried up on its wire. No one answered his knock. Due to the steel plate on his feet, an emptiness tugged at his heart. His refuge doubtless had worked just as Krylov had intended. When Tamara went inside, she stepped out of reality, and not because when she hid there she could not simultaneously be with her officials and lawyers; she disappeared altogether. This was as impossible to comprehend as it was to imagine eternity. From the outside his refuge’s windows now looke
d fake, and the balcony hung on his promise, as if it had been tied to the house with the old lady’s rope.

  Krylov also made a trip to Eremenko Street, getting there with three transfers on the Metro, which was lit at half-power and had strange drafts blowing through it and where the human masses flowed over the escalator, which was on the blink, in a slow, muffled rumble, as if they were crushing ore at an enrichment plant. In any case, Krylov had prepared a note for Mrs. Ekaterina Anfilogova; in it he indicated Farid’s telephone number and asked her to contact Ivan, who had made her the bracelet, as soon as possible. But he saw that the deceased professor’s aged door was already planted with many notes stuck into the tattered leatherette; and the mailbox, its stuffed slit grinning, was also overflowing. Apparently, news of Anfilogov’s death had only now begun to spread. People who Krylov had previously taken for the professor’s entry neighbors were crowded on the stairs. None of them was talking to anyone, but they were all looking at each other with a question in their eyes, which seemed to be searching for someone who was missing. It was as if they were expecting some administrator to come out of the professor’s apartment at any moment and tell everyone what they should do, collect their notes, and send them on to their proper destination.

  It took Krylov a moment to realize that these definitely weren’t neighbors. These were the same people who Professor Anfilogov had kept strictly separate, and now they didn’t know how to communicate or span the void that had formed between them. This meant the professor had succeeded. Without him, the void proved even stronger than his separating presence. Nonetheless, Krylov stuck his note behind some upholstery that had come away from the door, poking other people’s crowded pieces of paper inadvertently inside with the scraps of insulation, which looked like old caked-on scrambled eggs. Feeling as though he were turning around at the halfway mark, and whispering apologies, he started pushing his way downstairs. Now people looked up at him, briefly thought they might have recognized him, and immediately turned away, disappointed. It wasn’t hard to guess that they were waiting for the professor himself, not some administrator. They were waiting, despite the dull dark news, because they couldn’t get along without him.

  Downstairs, in the courtyard, a tall woman wearing a narrow black suit that revealed her bony knees and a huge black hat that looked like a slipcovered typewriter was walking around in circles over the bright yellow scattering of leaves. From far away, through the fine veil, he could see her thick pale curls, her long chin, and the vivid line of her delicate mouth, which was so still it might have been drawn on with a ruler in red pencil permanently. There were people hanging around here, too, and on the bench by the entryway a bottle of vodka that didn’t seem to belong to anyone.

  “When’ll they bury ‘im?” a decrepit old woman wrapped up in an alpaca shawl over a synthetic purple quilted jacket asked Krylov, who had lit up.

  “Not yet,” Krylov answered into the open space, wondering whether he should ask someone about Ekaterina Anfilogova and realizing there was no point.

  “D’they put Vasily Petrovich upstairs t’lie?” the old woman was indignant. “Yest’day people were standing, and the day before, and t’day, there’s a whole stairs full of people. Startin’ t’stink. Shoulda brought the coffin out long ago!” And the old woman, shaking her little head, as if saying no to everything that had happened, dragged herself to the entry, on her way deftly dropping the unclaimed vodka into her scruffy denim bag.

  3

  WHEN KRYLOV RETURNED, WORN OUT, HAVING BREATHED HIS FILL of wind, Farid and Dronov greeted him with a meaningful silence. They had obviously been waiting a long time for the second member of the expedition, killing time over a small chess board with pin-pieces, over which they often sat now, as if they were tatting lace together. Krylov thought that now they had a right to lay into him for his long and unsafe absence. No one said a word until he had taken off his leaden raincoat and sat down at the table.

  “Well now.” Farid rose to his feet ceremoniously, stood there blinking, and then got a topographic map out of the refrigerator. “The lower bounded aquifer gave us a very hard time, it was so atypical, but we found it!” Dronov commented, carefully putting the board with its miniature black-white group away in the corner. In the free space lay a tattered map, clearly military, with the coordinate markings restored by these clever do-it-yourselfers.

  “Here it is, that little river. It’s called the Pelma.” Farid pointed with a quarter of a pencil to a winding blue vein. “The deposit is either here, or else here.” The pencil airily touched two nearly symmetrical ends between which was probably about a hundred kilometers.

  Krylov looked like a man bewitched. The Pelma River, whose small channel’s movements reminded him of a lizard, seemed like the perfect image of happiness. All of a sudden Krylov had an acute desire to go there. He felt as if he had discovered a mysterious new way of seeing the reddish brown autumn water shrouding the stones on the shallows, swaddling them like infants in a taut blanket. He saw the tiny yellow sprays of birch leaves against the spruce darkness and the boulder with the large brow on the long pebbly bank, which looked like it had frozen into its own shadow. It was as if he were going upstream on aerial stilts. The windswept cliffs revealed themselves—outcrops of powerful stacks of stone pressed together by some terrible shift, friable karst holes, high terraces edged with beaten slabs, lichen, green and coppery, slanted slabs with darkness beneath, retreating into the wave. The shadows beneath the cliffs were deep and vibrant; the stone masses were reflected in bright patches on the racing river. Here and there, its breadth sufficed to reflect the sky as well, and the river stuck to the sky from below, like a body to a blue cotton shirt. Above, the sky’s blue was almost unbearable; the mountain summits, with their folds of snow like bird feathers, hung in it without any buttress. Insane beauty permeated everything, and where the sun’s cold ray with its dusting of metal did not reach, a birch leaf rushed over the water like a carved, capsized little boat.

  “Well, do you like it?” Farid asked, returning Krylov to reality. “We head out in less than four days. I still have things to do at work. And I have to choose some comfortable footwear and buy some more rope, tea, and groats. But basically you and I are pretty well fitted out. Just look at what Pavel’s put together for us!”

  With these words, Farid handed Krylov the spy’s phone. which was back in its case but equipped now with some new jacks—slender funnels where liquid metal seemed to be circulating.

  “This is a three hundred-hour battery,” noted Dronov, beaming modestly. “And you’ll have five extras with you. You aren’t going to have to pay B-Line or anything; the phone itself will pick up any network and it can’t be blocked from outside. It picks up in a cellar or a cave. Just in case, it has an external antenna. It charges itself if there’s wireless electricity anywhere nearby. It picks up all TV channels and decodes everything, and the screen has holographic expansion up to fifteen inches. You can watch movies at night!”

  “And, what’s most useful for us—satellite navigation!” Farid added with pride. “A GPS module with thirty channels! Over our Pelma, of course, you can only get four satellites. But Pavel plugged into the American master station in Iraq, so we’ll know our position’s location with an accuracy of less than a meter!”

  “Awesome,” Krylov mumbled. “You mean you couldn’t get the old information off it?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

  The friends exchanged glances.

  “Not quite,” a distraught Dronov said, with his glance imploring Farid for restraint. “I lay in wait for a long time, and last night I tried to catch it. It turned out to be pretty cunning. It learned a lot on its own. Only seventeen files didn’t die. The biggest ones, because they’re videos. The rest just scattered like beads off a thread.”

  “But there is something you’ll find interesting,” Farid weighed in. “I think you lucked out. Pavel downloaded the film onto his own computer so you could see it. Only eat first or yours w
ill get cold.”

  Although he hadn’t eaten anything yet, Krylov’s throat felt as though an unswallowed morsel had stuck there like a tight knot. He threw down his fork and silently rose.

  In the room Krylov saw that the electronic device that only this morning had covered the worn crimson rug had been wrapped up and packed away in cardboard boxes, leaving angular marks, velvet marks, like the snaky traces of wires, on the graying rug. Like a concerned doctor, Dronov sat a subdued Krylov in the old computer chair. Squatting, staying half a head higher than his patient, he awkwardly slapped the keyboard, letting his large, soft pinkies stick up.

  “The camera in the phone is excellent and the sound card is the best there is,” Dronov went on, launching his homemade program by unleashing strings of symbols. “Only the microphone was directional, and the user was unskilled. He should have held the directory arrow down, but he just moved it by hand. So there isn’t any scale at all; it’s mush. Here, now look”—and with his index finger he clicked “Enter.”

  A soundless, sunny mix of sun and leaves, light-filled and honey-sated. Now it blurred and jumped to the side as if it had been wiped with a rag. Tanya was sitting on a bench in her spreading peasant skirt; a couple of swallows were hopping near her dusty sandals like windup toys. She was smiling and frowning into her open compact, as if she were holding herself, reflected in the mirror, in her own lap, like a child. Here she was at a table, under a striped awning advertising German beer. Someone’s hands were serving her a parfait glass of ice cream that had already started to melt, as if the sun had licked the treat with its hot tongue. The person sat down and turned out to be Krylov. He didn’t look much like him. Tanya had light in her hair. They were talking and laughing. So young. As if years had passed, not months. The camera followed Tanya’s pale hands, which looked covered in hoarfrost, get something out of her purse (the same compact again, banded for safety with a pharmacy rubber band), and then dropped under the table, where Krylov’s dilapidated briefcase stood like a ruin and two pairs of knees touched and rubbed, as if the man and woman were sitting at oars.