2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  In the kitchen his mother was stirring something in a babbling pot; the black and white cat was washing her cunning face with her paw, as if checking just in case for a torn ear on her round head.

  “The police were here,” his mother said without turning around. “They asked about you, but I wouldn’t let them into the house without a warrant. Regular policemen, sparrows in glasses. As far as the money goes, I’ll tell you this. You shouldn’t have left everything to your Tamara. You were a real crook, after all, the kind that ride around in those super fancy cars, covered in gold. Your father and I were so worried about you. At least you got rich, but then you went and threw it all away!”

  Krylov plunked down on a stool in astonishment. So this was what his mother had been thinking all this time!

  “What are you laughing at?” His mother sat down at the table, took her knotty crocheting out of her pocket and from the other pocket, which bulged with a ball of something, pulled a smooth thread. “And you’re going to Novosibirsk in such troubled times? Is it something profitable?”

  “Yes, Mama, very profitable!” Krylov assured her earnestly.

  Right then he realized he hadn’t lied but had told her the God’s honest truth. And in a way this spoken truth let him feel that he might even return. His mother’s toothless, dropsical face smiled almost like a baby’s, and it occurred to Krylov that she had in fact performed the main purpose of an adult’s son’s mother: on the threshold of the unknown, she had made him believe he would come home.

  “All right, then so be it,” his mother said, gravely straightening her holey shawl on her shoulder. “Go, and put the money in the parlor. I haven’t straightened up here.”

  His mother hadn’t straightened up in Krylov’s room, which she called the parlor, either, but it wasn’t as gloomy thanks to the gangly plant, once as imperceptible and barren as an old wire, which had suddenly put out a striped bell of a flower that looked pinned on. Everything here was crammed in, as always, and the dusty things, if you happened to look right at them, got lost in the clutter. Krylov looked around, trying to decide where to put the envelope of money so it didn’t drown. First he decided to set it on the pier-glass, but that was so heaped with curly clumps of loose wool that he was afraid to touch it. Then Krylov cleared off a corner of his ink-scratched desk; there the white envelope stood out distinctly and could be seen right from the door. When he turned around, the layout of the place was drawn in his mind with uncommon clarity: the desk was the “mailbox.”

  Krylov came running back to Farid’s, puffing and panting.

  “No one called?” he shouted from the threshold as he pulled off his raincoat.

  “Pavel,” Farid replied, coming out into the corridor. “He’s taking his family to Losinkovo today; he’s got a house and garden there with potatoes. He told us, when we come back, not to go to town but straight there.” Farid paused, holding onto the doorjamb, and added, “It’s started in Moscow.”

  In the back room the television was on, its dying audio turned all the way up. A crowd was slowly pushing forward, down thronging Tverskaya, toward the Kremlin towers, which loomed like New Year’s trees. Its slow movement scooped up the White Guards in their battered caps and the Red Army soldiers in their pointy helmets equally; overhead, like a sailboat moving into a deadly storm, red, black, and tricolor flags and banners rose crookedly, bowed, and fell. Sitting on the equestrian monument to Yuri Dolgoruky, like a child getting his picture taken, in front of the blind metal prince, was the capital’s mayor, his bald head like a puffy dandelion, his hands full of proclamations that he couldn’t bring himself to fling from that dangerous, fall-threatening height. In the side street teenagers wearing blue Soviet kindergarten caps were taking a running job and kicking and turning over squawking foreign cars. A hunched monk with fine hair that looked like the wind had sucked it out, was mincing along, his bony hands raised, toward a snub-nosed machine-gun poking out of an SUV. On Lubyanka Square, a resurrected Dzerzhinsky was observing the thousand-fold rally, which when seen from above was as enigmatic as the dark yearly rings of a thousand-year-old tree. At the Duma, the dictator Karenin, clutching the official tribune like a stevedore clutching a crate, was croaking inflamed speeches into the microphones, but the focused men sitting in front of him in the hall of state were not for the most part deputies. Once again the TV cameras took the viewer out onto the streets. The TV commentators—not the venerable, fame-lacquered ladies and gentlemen who read the news on the main channels but obscure girls and guys, disheveled in their dock-tailed tweed coats, with trembling lips smeared with lipstick and the cold—were each shouting on a backdrop of clanking tanks grinding up the Ring Road.

  Nonetheless, this did not look like a popular uprising or a military coup. Moscow resembled a huge train station overflowing with troops and refugees where everyone was searching for their relatives. Those who didn’t have a Red or White army uniform had still left their buildings—and the virus of History, which you’d think had been suppressed long ago and barely existed anymore, was spreading freely through the civilian crowds and the police and army units. Once he caught the disease, no one was what he had seemed or looked like or considered himself to be before. Each person could now be someone else, with a surprising destiny and indeterminacy in each tomorrow. No quarantines now could hold back the events that threatened—without logic or benefit other than the logic and benefit of historical movement itself—to shake up civilization. The epidemic of History was spreading through Moscow, and people were searching for their near and dear, hoping to gather once more before being sent off into the future, listening to contradictory announcements, and not knowing the train schedule.

  “We can’t go that way in any case,” Farid spoke calmly, squinting at the screen. “I got us two berths on a train in transit from Kazan. Tomorrow, at eleven thirty.”

  “We may not come back to the country we left,” Krylov noted, restraining a shudder.

  “Why don’t we check the medicines and provisions one more time?”

  Strange though it may seem, Krylov got an excellent night’s sleep before their departure. He woke up clear-headed and immediately realized that he was now utterly free of everything other than the long-appointed encounter on the corundum river. The final assembly took half an hour. Then Krylov and Farid sat quietly for a moment before departing, each looking at his own sturdy, tar-coated boots, and then abruptly harnessed themselves into their backpacks. After the door slammed shut behind them the telephone twittered. It scraped in the curtained, stagnant half-gloom for at least twenty minutes, but who was trying to reach them and from where remained a mystery.

  Destiny was at hand. Solid ranks of special squads were marching down empty Ascension Avenue to a rock-and-roll tread; friable snowflakes, like tiny white inflorescences, were melting on their taut, honed faces. Marching in step, the woolen army units were drawing toward the center of town; snow was sprinkling on them as if they were evenly plowed rows of vegetables. The low white sky slanted. The demolished TV tower, barely visible as a blurry, almost colored shadow, was broadcasting. On the incline of the dam that dumped beery water into the soft icy flab the freshly repainted sign—“There is no God”—was tilted, like a lure or a runway sign.

  Out of the streets and side streets, straight and crooked, that led to Ascension, snow-flecked civilian marches poked their heads out, testing the air with their damp flags. Only one demonstration, which was dragging a small piece of pathetic red cotton, was moving behind the special squads, seemingly even following the elite unit at a distance of a kilometer. These were the old men and women in their shaggy wet coats, granddads in quilted camouflage and worn, plywood-like coats; some were hobbling like ungainly birds that for some reason had decided to go on foot. These were people from a bygone era who had not forgotten the genuine, salty, scorched taste of History. Pensioners, sellers of newspapers and counterfeit phone cards, petty swindlers, commuter train performers, decrepit shysters, home-based counterfe
iters, and criminals if only because they continued to exist and remind people of another, otherwise-arranged world, they stubbornly dragged their stiff legs, and their faces looked like rumpled pockets turned inside-out. At the head of the demonstration were the flag-bearers, two men. Under a real velvet flag, worn at the folds to its pink fabric, marched two old geezers, shuffling as if their feet were searching for their house slippers, wearing uniforms from World War II: an infantry private in a porous rusty helmet and a rusty-brown waterproof cape; and a tank lieutenant who, in his helmet and outfit, resembled a fly with its wings torn off, and who had glossy, unaging skin on his left burned cheek. Because there were only two of them—perhaps in all the four-million Riphean capital—and by some other cryptic but unmistakable signs, you could tell at first glance that these weren’t maskers: they were the real thing. The two old men were exactly what they were dressed up to be and what they appeared as at the head of their march of invalids—and this felt like a direct blow of authenticity.

  That morning the wet snow that stretched white nets over the streets and trickled off the sticky russet leaves never did let up. Many people were trying to leave the city, and many were dragging cumbersome, haphazardly crammed luggage, dragging children too tightly wrapped up by the hand, flagging down passing cars, and besieging the ticket offices. In the dense crowd no one paid any attention to the two men—the dry old Tatar and the other, younger, with a stony mouth and a pointed hood pulled right over his eyes—who were striding evenly under enormous, well-packed backpacks. Destiny was seeing them off, stepping across the snow barefoot. It safeguarded them from an encounter with the drunken Cossack patrol that was firing their long-nosed Mausers at ravens and citizens and quickly dragged them through an intersection where a Young Communist blew up an army truck with a grenade five minutes later. Their tickets had been purchased in advance, and they reached their destination safely.

  There was no one at the station to see them off.