Meanwhile, blissed out, Tanya was still worried about something. Krylov even thought she might be seeing the professor popping up occasionally in the doorway, like the watermark of this space. But Tanya wasn’t looking in that direction and didn’t notice the dim thickening of the air in which one inferred more than saw the triangular eye sockets, the cheeks, and the grooved jacket buttons, which were so much more distinct than everything else that they looked like they were just about to spill on the floor. Tanya apparently had no inkling of her dead husband’s presence. Her attention was directed inward, where clockwork seemed to be ticking away, eating up the seconds.
“You seem so tense all the time,” Krylov noted without feeling the slightest sting of jealousy. “Are you expecting someone?”
“No, no one.” Tanya looked down. “But at eight this evening I have a plane to Geneva. Tomorrow my attorneys and interpreters are expecting me. You have to excuse me.” She stumbled and her glance flickered, as if she were trying not to look at some point known only to her. “I need to get something here. And pack my suitcase. Don’t wait to see me off, really, otherwise I won’t get anything done.”
“Fine, then. I’m leaving in a couple of days, too, for Novosibirsk, on business.” In order to keep his gaze from stumbling indiscreetly on the hiding place Tanya was dreaming of opening up as soon as she was alone, Krylov looked only at her. “I’ll be back in a month or so. When will you be coming back?”
“Oh, in six months or thereabouts. When I officially inherit. Unless there’s a revolution here, of course.” Tanya spoke quickly, choking a little. “It’s terrible what’s happening here! Officially they’re going to operate on the President, but in fact it’s house arrest, not an operation. A few days ago I saw a man dragging a machine-gun right down the street with my own eyes, just like that, as if it were a vacuum. No, for now I want to get as far away from here as I can. The accounts in the Geneva canton bank were opened in both our names, mine and Vasily Petrovich’s, plus I’ll take a few things with me, and that will be enough for a while. Then, if everything’s good, I’ll move into this apartment! I never imagined I’d have one like this!”
“Well, bon voyage. I won’t be bothering you. Maybe we’ll get together in six months,” Krylov said, standing. He was gripped by an infusion of unhappiness, as if a few thousand people were standing up in the room with him.
Jammed into a corner, Tanya was biting her bent finger. Krylov calmly headed for the doorway. Suddenly he understood what a man feels as he’s led to his execution. He’s horrified by every patch of earth his feet touch. What’s left of life in him tears him to pieces. A few meters before the spot he dreams of suicide. This whole realization suddenly came over Krylov halfway to being rid of the woman who was biting her bone, nearly dislodging tears. Krylov himself was perfectly fine.
“Wait!” The woman suddenly rushed after him and nearly fell, slipping on the wet floor.
“What do you want?” Krylov turned around woodenly. Once again he smelled that sweet, heavy smell he used to sniff. The smell stretched from the woman in sticky threads, blindly seeking someone’s breathing, catching it the way a predatory plant catches a butterfly’s flutter.
“Wait, hold on.” Shrinking, Tanya leaned up against him, and it was immediately obvious that she really was about five centimeters taller than Krylov. “All of a sudden it hurt so much. I really don’t understand what’s happening to me now. I’m not myself probably. Let’s not lose track of each other again. So it doesn’t turn out the way it did then, on the square, again.”
Krylov took a deep breath as an ocean surged into his soul.
“Why don’t I call you,” he whispered, his lips touching her firm cheek down which a salty drop was winding without wetting the surface.
“There’s nowhere to call,” Tanya said piteously, snuffling. “I won’t go back to my apartment. I’m just abandoning my things—and getting the hell out of there. All the walls there are papered in my unhappiness. And I never bought a cell phone here. I decided I’d buy one in Geneva. I saw a platinum Super-Com in a catalog. I’ve had my eye on it. I’m such a fool!”
“Never mind. Never mind.” Krylov stroked her narrow back and slender shoulder blades which had the marvelous perfection of crescent moons, or maybe heavenly grape leaves. “Let’s agree that you’ll call me. As soon as you land and get settled, so straight from the hotel.”
“I have to write down your number,” Tanya said through her nose, breaking away from Krylov. Her eyes were leaking under her glasses, and she had a wet mustache gleaming under her nose.
“How about here.” Moving aside the swollen jewels on the wet piece of paper, Krylov tore off a fibrous scrap, as if it were boiled beef.
“Only I left my pen at home,” Tanya mumbled, rubbing her swollen eyes.
They looked around for a while in search of something to write with or at least scratch his telephone number on the disintegrated paper. They circled as if each were dancing solo. Their transparent circling bore them into the other rooms. Nothing had been forgotten anywhere, absolutely nothing ordinary, just dust, mysteriously laid down by the emptiness, silver on the bare surfaces, suggesting that she write on them with her finger. Like astronauts in weightlessness, they floated from wall to wall, pushing off, spinning, finding themselves somewhere other than where they’d been looking, thinking they were looking ahead.
At last they met up again, shaken by the sterility of the rooms and the total absence in them of any human trace. Tanya was twirling her sole find in her fingers: a grooved, dusty man’s button.
“Fine, then you’ll just have to remember it,” Krylov said sternly, and Tanya nodded obediently. “Six hundred fourteen. Eighteen. Forty-one. Come on, it’s simple. One more time.”
Krylov declaimed Farid’s number slowly and distinctly, staring into Tanya’s face, where he was impeded by her glasses and the salty blobs drying on the lenses. It was as if he were trying to impress himself on her with his number and voice. He felt a limit in her, a block. She was so tense trying to remember the numbers that they leaped from her ringing consciousness.
“Enough, now,” she whispered, at last. “Enough, enough, enough.”
Never had Krylov kissed anyone so roughly. He held her, binding her in his arms, and standing on tiptoe, ate her vibrant, salty mouth, not allowing her to jerk away or take a breath. She seethed in his arms and stamped her soft black foot powerlessly. Finally he pushed her away, flying back toward the wall. Her features had blurred, and on her upper lip, which was swollen like a duckbill, there was a black drop of blood.
“Six hundred fourteen! Eighteen! Forty-one!” Krylov shouted in that plaintive and pathetic voice, and he ran down the hall, nearly knocking over the pink boots. He thought Tanya shouted something, too, but the armored doors had already shut, quietly clicking their stainless locks.
It was darker in the hall now than it had been half an hour ago. The blue-curled old lady who had been there before was sitting in the leather armchair, her very soft hands folded on the knob of her cane. “Six hundred fourteen, eighteen, forty-one,” thought Krylov, looking stealthily at the aging Malvina, who had raised her rejuvenated silicon face to him. The express mirror elevator bathed Krylov in bands of flickering life from below, as if it were taking a few Xeroxes of him. He felt no better in the fresh air. The low gray sky was slightly silvery, and there was a rustling coming from everywhere: the early Riphean snow, fine and stinging, was scratching the golden leaves, still in all their glory, and salting the drab grass. The patch of Tanya’s tears on Krylov’s cheek froze. He bore it and kept repeating, learning the telephone number for Tanya, repeating it to the rhythm of his broad, pointless steps. The strange lightness of his gait was explained by the fact that Krylov no longer had Tanya’s keys in his pocket. For months, the five keys on the wire ring had not cooled to the usual metal temperature, fed constantly by Krylov’s body heat, like a radiator with electricity. They were somewhere in the apartment and their fate
was unknown. None of this mattered. Krylov was worried that something might happen in the snowstorm-filled air to the plane to Geneva, that the takeoff strip would ice over. If he had any prayer he could offer up for Tanya to the nonexistent God, it was only this, “Six hundred fourteen, Eighteen. Forty-one.”
2
WHEN KRYLOV TURNED UP AT HOME, WEARING HIS RAINCOAT LIKE a frozen elephant hide, permeated with a syrupy perfume sweetness, and utterly out of his mind, Farid didn’t ask any questions.
“A little early for snow,” he commented, brushing the icy grains off Krylov. “But the forecast has it all melting in five days or so.”
That whole evening and the following day Krylov and Farid packed their backpacks, which rose like columns amid the instruments, clothing, and supplies set out around the room. A lot of what Farid had set aside for future use he rejected, sending it to the reserve pile. Krylov wondered whether this pile was going to outlive them. His hands worked intelligently, but his emotions and hearing were riveted to the old Panasonic. For Krylov, the telephone became like an artificial respirator; if it didn’t ring for too long, his chest tightened up as if someone were gathering Krylov into his fist. When the phone, buried under piles of expedition goods, did twitter, Krylov started flinging junk aside like a dog, but then, embarrassed, he let Farid take it. Arching one eyebrow, Farid would connect with the caller and start talking, and Krylov would realize that, once again, it wasn’t for him. Not wanting to listen in enviously to someone else’s communication, he would go out on the balcony. There, lighting up a damp cigarette that gave off an autumnal bitterness, he took a parting look at the piebald yard with the iced-over chinning bar, at the big trees and the last few reddish-brown leaves that had frozen in pinches, and at the human tracks in the petrifying clay, airy white from the fine snow, as if it wasn’t people who’d tramped through but angels dancing.
The day Tanya was supposed to have been settled and called from Geneva came and went. Krylov lived through those twenty-four hours as if he were on a planet with fivefold gravity. If the telephone hadn’t rung at all, he probably would have died. But the Panasonic did twitter frequently. Roma Gusev, Seryoga Gaganov, and Vadya Menshikov called; Vladimir Menshikov, who’d been shot in his left lung, called from the district hospital. The date of the October coup was fast approaching, and something was afoot in the country. Reluctantly, through their teeth, the media were confirming the rumor of the President’s illness. His ear crushed, the receiver in his hand damp from his breathing, Farid would drag Krylov in off the balcony and make him watch the television. There, instead of the ill but live head of state they showed the clinic where he was being kept: a compact building that resembled an old-fashioned Russian stove, where above the rectangular tower the gilded and eagled presidential standard listlessly licked its pole.
At three in the afternoon Moscow time, the presidential press secretary, an energetic functionary with an apple-pie Boy Scout smile, announced that the government had stepped down. The press release was shaking in his hands, as if the press secretary were afraid of spilling the leaping text from the page. At six he reappeared, covered with a motley-from-horror stubble that had bubbled up in this short time, and announced that in the absence of the institution of vice-president in Russia, power was transferring to the Provisional Presidential Council, which they showed: twelve people sitting in a row, slightly separated from one another. Two were wearing gold general’s uniforms and had gloomy, constrained faces; the woman from Women of Russia, wearing a baggy green suit and a short conservative haircut that stuck to her temples, was firmly pursing her tragic mouth; a former television commentator and deputy who had been in an endless number of congresses of various organs of power was looking at the journalist with goggly bare eyes that had no eyelashes whatsoever. Before they had even begun to act, these people looked simultaneously wound up and terribly weary. History seemed to have struck them simultaneously, like an infectious disease that had been produced by medics everywhere. Just how this had happened, the Chairman of the Provincial Council, former health care minister and academician Karenin, probably could have told them. But he himself looked infected. A lean and ungainly old man with a cloud of gray hair on his high aluminum skull, Karenin had never before been the focus of so many TV cameras and now was looking into them in turn, like a researcher looking into microscopes set up by his lab assistants. Under this piercing look, Krylov felt as if he could be seen straight through, like a transparent microorganism. Tall, lop-sided, his empty jacket slipping onto one shoulder, Karenin’s look alone suppressed the journalists’ chirping as they tried to get out questions about preparations for democratic elections and the reasons for declaring martial law in the capital. Anyone looking at him resting his straight bunched fingers on the stack of scribbled papers could tell that everything that was happening was the truth.
“I hope we don’t forget something because of that raven of a scholar,” Farid muttered as he returned to packing the backpacks.
The night passed in Krylov’s attempts to drift off, to get through the muffled hours when no one could call anyone. Opening his eyes, he saw to his right, on the stool, a glowing dial where the pressure of time was measured, mounting as the rickety minute hand took little jumps. He greeted the European dawn in the darkness, lying with his feet facing the ghost of a window. At that time a snowstorm was sweeping over the corundum river. Snow milk was flowing weightlessly from the cliffs, and the thickening river water was sticking to the icy edges in soft, seemingly warm patches. The black forests gave off a white smoke. In the freezing shroud a four-meter female silhouette could be made out just barely. The Mistress of the Mountain’s bright, faceted eyes were wide open, and a frozen pink fur coat that stung like a brush hung on her stone shoulder. Broken suitcases lay open at the feet of the richest woman in the world, on the snow-speckled boulders, and delicate women’s dresses fluttered, turning to ice.
Right then, Menshikov, who had been shot and whose dull pain kept him awake, went out to smoke, which the attending physician had strictly forbidden. Down the empty hospital corridor, slipping ridiculously on tiptoe so as not to click the heels of her short boots, a petite woman was moving toward him. She’d probably been sitting up with a relative, a brother or a husband, and now was hurrying home to get a little rest. There was something inexpressibly touching about her young neck, the soft brush of hair on her round nape, and the red ladybug of a cold sore on her upper lip.
“Tell me, please, what’s your name?” the brash Menshikov asked when the stranger, who had nearly come even with him, stopped to switch her heavy package from one arm to the other.
“Nadia, let’s say,” she replied cautiously, looking stealthily with her clear golden eyes. And she immediately asked, unable to restrain her curiosity, “And yours?”
“Viktor, let’s say,” Menshikov responded, delighted, feeling a burning desire to throw his arms around this warm creature of the night right then and there.
Krylov awoke with sore joints and an aching heart, at half past nine in the morning. In the kitchen, Farid was eating a dried-out potato turnover as he recounted the money.
“Here, take this.” He separated a good third from the plump packet of thousand-ruble bills. “Go see your mother today. Give it to her. I’m going to the station for tickets.”
In a dark funk because the phone, which had been silent through the night, was going to be left untended, Krylov headed out. Unwilling to risk the four stops on the Metro, he made his way through back alleys, which were sometimes completely deserted, sometimes thronging with the local population. Long-haired old men were strumming cracked yellow guitars, torturing the strings with their arthritic fingers; young men were perched on the backs of well-trampled benches, some of them with scarlet ribbons fraying on their satin quilt jackets. One time, some rosy-cheeked men who smelled appetizingly of watermelon and vodka started shaking Krylov’s hand and calling him comrade; then he saw ten or so saddled horses, stocky and worn, with manes
like old ladies’ hair. A dashing Cossack with a short forelock peeking out from under his cap was playing holographic Tetris and watching after the horses. Krylov zigzagged between stuck cars as he passed through—there were lots of people on foot walking in the middle of the street, as if it were a metallic mirrored river.
At home, as always, the half-witted electricity was on in the middle of the day; the glass jars that constituted a turbid mountain in the vestibule had accumulated all kinds of dust and dried insects. His mother emerged at the noise from her unaired bedroom, where even when it was light outside the air was like the darkish water you rinse your watercolor brush in.
“Oh, it’s you.” Over her robe his mother was wearing a thick, fluffy shawl, curly with age. “None of the radiators are giving any heat. There’s snow outside, and they’re not giving us heat. You should put on some kind of jacket, too.”
“I’m just here for a minute. I’m going to Novosibirsk on business,” Krylov lied, as if his mother and Tanya would try to find him in Novosibirsk, if anything happened. “Here. I brought you some money.”
“Money, money. Where’s that money of yours now?” His mother turned away in anger and shuffled to the kitchen, shaking her dead-looking chignon, which looked like it was made of cat hair, and dropping bobby pins on the floor.
Distraught, Krylov trailed after her. Almost all his life he had asked himself why he couldn’t pity this stranger, who did give birth to him after all and who had been through so much. Over that business with his aunt? Over the fact that he had nothing to talk to her about? Or because in the inauthentic world her sufferings were a sham? Today, as always, Krylov had no answer. At least, in the end—because he might well be seeing his mother for the last time—he wished he could feel something. And all of a sudden he recognized the felted clump pinned to his mother’s head. A long time ago, rummaging around in search of scissors, he thought, he’d seen it in the pier-glass drawer—the same drawer where he’d stolen his aunt’s photograph from and scattered it to the wind all those years before. The dry, motley tresses, which looked like they’d been drawn on with first a soft and then a hard pencil, was the very loss that his mother had stored away in a yellowed newspaper as she’d lost her hair. At the time Krylov had been stung by the thought that you see hair like that in a coffin; now all of a sudden he realized his mother was trying to do everything she could not to lose herself, to collect herself and keep it as a memento, the way people keep the cherished lock of someone dear to them. For some reason today she had decided to spruce up and pin on the little chignon; there was something so vital and human about this that Krylov suddenly felt at peace.
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