NINE

by Svetlana Alexiyevich

  But neither the globe nor the mammoth, to say nothing of the turgic cobra in green denatured alcohol, or the dusty dioramas on prehistoric themes, held any allure for young Krylov. His imagination was drawn by the crystals. They rested in the display windows in cardboard nests lined with cotton wool, and they also towered in the museum lobby, balancing out its patterned, cast iron plangency with their absolute and intact muteness. The most powerful rock crystal, inside of which iridescent mealy stone-snow seemed to be melting, turning into water, was taller than 12-year-old Krylov by its entire blunt fissured point. No less amazing were the black morions: two chunky druses, as if they'd been chopped out of solid resin with an ax. In the smoky quartzes called Venus's hairstone, through their tea-yellow, it was as if you were seeing bundles of iron needles, or the prickly leavings from a cut at the barber's. The crystals' sides, if you looked at them from a specular angle, were cross-hatched here and there, the way they teach you to cross-hatch figures in drawing class, while others had polished patches, as if they'd been through major renovations underground.

  The museum had other, nontransparent minerals, too. Visitors always took a special interest in the massive gold nugget that looked like the mummy of some tiny animal. The woman guide, whom Krylov remembered by her black skirt and heavy feet stuffed into her stretched out scuffs, would tell the schoolchildren that a miner who dies underground petrifies sometimes and turns into his own statue. Afterward Krylov wasted no time clarifying whether or not this was so. It turned out that, indeed, under specific conditions organic remains can be replaced by sulfur-pyrite. There was no impermeable boundary between the mineral world and living nature.

  Young Krylov, who often showed up at the museum despite the prohibitions of his mother, who feared for the exhibits, felt that he was closer to knowledge there than he was in his classes at school. Knowledge yet to be discovered but quietly promised held a pleasure shaped somehow like the complex space of an old cathedral, from volume to volume, its surfeit on top, where the white-washed dome was rough and uneven, like the shell of an ancient egg. Later on it occurred to Krylov that it was temple configurations that were best suited to the introducing, teaching, and placing of exhibits. In some prof ound way they corresponded to the templates of human thought. In any church he saw a misinterpreted museum.

  The conical crystals chopped off at the root and transferred to the plinths of rusty cloth possessed in full measure a quality that had bewitched young Krylov since his very first glimmers of consciousness: transparency. Man's early memories have an obscure and confused origin. When later Krylov had occasion to spend time on business in the ancient emir's capital where he had passed his first years, he had the feeling that he had not once lived amid these huge glazed ceramics and crude, oxidized copper engravings, this Asiatic vegetation, but that he had dreamed it all. The dream of his early childhood was vibrant and trembled at the mere sight of the marble-hard white grapes on the fruit stand under the harsh Ural snow — and then dropped right back into his subconscious. The episodes accessible to Krylov's memory as an adult consisted in part of his parents' stories and in part of restorations from his imagination; it didn't seem possible to separate out the grains of what was genuine and what was unconditionally his. Just one episode was steeped in ammonia-like reality. All he had to do was wish to see it and in his mind an osier bush immediately flashed above the soap-green irrigation water, and in his hand he found a sliver of blue glass, curved, from a bottle probably, through which the flashes of sunlight on the irrigation canal looked (this is a later insertion) like welding sparks. Something sticky was smeared along the edge of the piece of glass, and on his finger, buzzing and thick, there emerged, as if from a half-shut eye, a fat red tear. Who was that stout man he knew, who leaned over him, smelling of sweat through his clean, blindingly white shirt? He demanded that Krylov throw it away that instant, or give him the glass, but young Krylov, smeared all over with blood, as if it were chocolate, stubbornly held his find behind his back and retreated into the leafy shade, which was as hot as splashes of tea (this is a later insertion). He felt it with inutterable clarity at the time: the blue sliver contained something that almost never occurs in the simple matter around us: transparency, a special, prof ound element, like water and sky.

  Actually, it was dating from this episode that Krylov remembered himself, that he became aware of himself as an intact human continuity. His attraction to the transparent, to the mystery of the gem, which subsequently inserted Krylov into the true Ural mentality, must originally have been an emanation of the dry, flat Asiatic world, where water was highly valued, where everything earthly under the red-hot sky was divided into what would seem to be fit for being ground into pigment, on one hand, and untinted monotony, on the other. Young Krylov perceived transparency as a substance's highest, most enlightened state. Transparency was magic. All simple objects belonged to the ordinary world, this world. No matter how cleverly they were arranged or how tightly sealed, you could open them and see what they had inside. The transparent belonged to a world of a different order, and you couldn't open it up and get inside. Once young Krylov attempted to extract the orange glass-juice that was trapped in the thick walls of his aunt's vase and that was much better than the colorless water poured into the vase. One afternoon, on the balcony, on a carefully spread out newspaper, young Krylov struck the vase with a hammer, exploding its emptiness like a grenade in a war movie. The shards, though — some of them flew into the sneering sycamore or under his aunt's tubs — were just as self-contained as the intact object. Choosing the very best, bottom piece, with the thickest color, young Krylov continued to smash it on the scraps of the now slivered and silvered newspaper until he ended up with a totally white, hard powder. The only color in the powder came from his, Krylov's, unanticipated blood, which looked like a chewed up raisin. Not a drop remained in the powder of the transparency for whose sake his experiment had been performed.

  The experiment that ended in powder made a much bigger impression on Krylov than the fatherly beating that followed. He had learned that what is transparent is unattainable and, like everything precious, is connected with blood. What he gleaned about stones at the children's library, where the papery dust choked him (Krylov could barely remember a time when he couldn't read), confirmed his intuition's findings. «Great Moghul,» «Excelsior,» «Florentine,» «Shah» — the names of the world-class diamonds were as much music to him as the names of world capitals are to romantics of another bent. Famous stones were the heroes of adventures on a par with d'Artagnon, Captain Nemo, and Leatherstocking.

  Meanwhile, his mother and aunt had precious stones, too: large earrings on slender gold hooks, with pale blue stones, holding more patterns than a cardboard kaleidoscope; and four rings. One, bent, had a gaping black hole, but in the others marvelous transparencies winked like cat's eyes. Young Krylov was as certain of the high value of these objects as he was of the fact that the painting by Shishkin, Morning in the Piney Woods, hung in the living room of his neighbors, the Permyakovs, over their lumpy couch, whose solid dilapidation arose powerfully in his memory when a few years later young Krylov was secretly researching the museum's taxidermied deer and wolves. Later, when he had done some reading, Krylov learned that the picture was in fact held at the Tretyakov Gallery. It was hard for him to believe in the Tretyakov's reality and, consequently, Shishkin's painting itself vanished from reality. The world appeared to young Krylov as a string of copies without an original — assuming an original, striving to engender it with their spontaneous accumulation and merge with it, but in vain. All this wasn't formulated until much later, but the feeling joined the sum of those nonverbal intuitions that young Krylov was infatuated with and reveled in secretly from the adults. Even after his disappointment in the painting's copy, though, his belief in the precious stones kept in the shabby box covered in nettle-green velvet remained intact.

  Young Krylov understood from the grownups' conversations that they all earned very little
money. For some reason his aunt, considered a beauty, earned the least of all. She had a habit of puffing out her ribs, tensing the slender veins on her neck, and circling her waist with her hands so that the fingers nearly met in the crumpled silk of her shift; her hair, which poured smoothly down her back all the way to her waist, was piled up and hovered in the air like the striated smoke from his father's cigarettes. She was the first to lose her job. One day she came home walking — and looking — utterly off, as if her feet had kept landing in invisible holes, and to all questions she turned to face the wall. The old Yuryuzan refrigerator, which his mama and aunt had been planning to get rid of, chuckled with glee. To young Krylov, though, it seemed that both this refrigerator, and the worn red carpets, which in spots looked like colored batting, and the lack of a car of their own, which his father, who was nota thief, grumbled about on Saturdays behind his half-lowered newspaper — that all this was just a game because the family in fact kept a treasure. The certainty never left young Krylov that everything transparent was worth insane sums — and stones in gold settings weren't just any old buttons. In essence, he saw them as magical objects capable of granting Ivan the Fool's every wish. The very presence of these stones elevated his mother and aunt above ordinary laboring women with nasty-smelling kitchen hands into the ranks of titled ladies. That is, it gave them a special dignity, which later young Krylov dreamed of seeing in women but never did find. He dwelled for a time in the happy confidence that should some calamity suddenly befall them, the stones, sold to some fairy-tale merchants in luxurious turbans that looked like white roses, would save the day.

  * * *

  They did not save the day. Everything changed. Nothing seemed real anymore but rather as if you were seeing it in a mirror. You couldn't tell who was doing what in this mirror or who was going where. Young Krylov still didn't have the right words but he did have a visceral sense of the disorientation of things; he noticed that many people on the street now seemed off. Others, who didn't speak Russian well, seemed to double in this mirror: each time in the courtyard he ran into mocking Mahomet with his iron fingers, or Kerim with the blue-gray head from the seventh floor, young Krylov felt with his contracted shoulder blades that, while they were in front of him, they were simultaneously standing behind his back.

  Several times strangers came to the Krylovs' apartment: two who looked liked they were from the market, in identical jackets that looked like they had been glued on the inside to a piece of warped cardboard. The strangers walked through the house, looking around cautiously and meticulously, as if they were playing hide-and-seek and were ready to dash for the starting wall at any moment. One, with temples like pieces of gray coal under his skull-cap, was asking Krylov's frightened mother something, his angry, effeminate voice rising from time to time to a quizzical whine; the other said nothing but seemed to be thinking, and the wrinkles on his forehead were exactly like the ones you get on the front of crumpled trousers. One day these two, whom his parents referred to privately as «the buyers,» brought with them an utterly senile and bent old granddad, whose body looked like a skinny dog in man's clothing. While the young men were crawling under the bed and in the closets — now without any ceremony whatsoever, as if in hopes of finding hidden players — the granddad sat on a stool, his bowed legs in their soft, dusty shoes folded in an impotent curl. Granddad looked absolutely nothing like the rich merchant whom young Krylov's imagination had created with a little help from the Arabian Nights and the movie about old Hattab the Djinn. His robe, belted with a dirty cotton scarf, had burned up from the heat to shreds of brown batting, and his beard was like the threads from a torn-off button. When young Krylov happened to look into his eyes, where some kind of warm wax was accumulating, he felt — as clearly as if he had become transparent for a second — that Granddad didn't care what happened to him, or to these young men, or to the Russian inhabitants of this profane apartment, who to Granddad were no more than shadows on the unfamiliar walls around him. When they had completed this latest inspection, the strangers lifted the doddering djinn by his spread elbows and carried him off, adjusting to his small felt steps — but from the vestibule you could see the Permyakovs' door open across the landing and the anxious neighbors waiting inside. There were fewer «buyers» than «sellers.»

  The «move» dated from this time. Far from all the familiar items that disappeared here later showed up there, in the cold northern city where the trees' summer greenery functioned as raincoats, in the tiny apartment stingily lit by windows the size of an open newspaper. In the same manner his aunt disappeared as well — the princess, his friend, the beauty with the round face that had the ability to glow in the dark — she vanished without a trace, and young Krylov understood from the muffled tone of the new apartment silence that in no instance was he to ask about her. It turned out that the precious stones were all gone, along with Mama's savings, to pay for the containers in which their furniture arrived, crippled and suffering from, now chronic, dislocation of the joints. The wardrobe where his aunt's colorful dresses once hung now tended to come apart, the way the slick magician's painted box comes apart in the circus ring.

  No matter how hard his parents tried to get it out of him why he had done that terrible thing, young Krylov preferred to keep his own counsel. You didn't see him asking why they hid the only photograph of his aunt as far away as possible, under the technical manuals from the nonexistent microwave and sewing machine, although he suspected foul play — a reluctance to look at the person they had for some reason abandoned. One evening, scarily close to his parents' return from work, he up and poked into the stiff drawer under the mirror, which was stuffed like a briefcase. Hastily tossing the uninteresting papers aside, afraid now that what he'd been searching for would not turn up among these scraps, he suddenly saw his aunt — taken in the same studio where they had taken him, standing as if she were a singer on stage, in front of folded drapery which young Krylov remembered as red but in the photo was brown. All at once his urge to steal from his parents the sole copy, which had no original, was superseded by another. Feeling the tears that had welled up press on his nose, Krylov ripped the photograph into sticky pieces, some of which ended up on the floor. Then he managed to unseal the damp ventilation pane and released his aunt from his fist, like a small bird, onto the dark October wind, which was scraping its belly over the earth, so that she might overcome the mass of air and withered leaves pulling her down and fly south. He didn't notice that some of the scraps fluttered back into the room and got tangled up in his hair like confetti.

  So, when his parents, tired from the bus, dragged themselves and their bags of groceries into the absolutely quiet, unlit apartment with the electric drizzle on the unshuttered windows and the little criminal hiding in the dark W.C., all the clues were in evidence. Young Krylov couldn't remember another fatherly punishment like this one: the belt seared his clenched, trembling buttocks, and the pain made him wet himself on the clammy oilcloth his father had thrown down as a precaution on the new ottoman brought from the house. His mother, clutching her crushed beauty parlor hairdo, sat at the empty table in front of a solitary dish of marmalade and the remnants of some colored sugar — and remained sitting like that while the criminal, holding his trousers and upturning chairs, stumbled back to the W.C., where he kept tattered matches and smelly butts wrapped in paper behind the wastebasket.

  * * *

  Actually, what shook young Krylov at the time was not his parents' behavior but his newly discovered capacity to commit terrible crimes. He developed this capacity further in school and the yard, which was notorious for its drunken brawls, teen rumbles, and the giant puddle, shaped like a grand piano, that appeared spring and fall in an unvarying outline in the exact same spot — and which in the course of dangerous experiments with substances pilfered from the chemistry closet burned up and exploded more than once, splattering foamy water on the metal garages. After the «move,» young Krylov got out of hand, as they say. A ceasefire was in e
ffect only on museum territory, where, if his mother didn't pester him too much, Krylov quietly did his homework in the staffroom with the thick walls and sloping window, where the raspberry sun of the winter sunset sat like a loaf of bread in the oven, or the spring branches melted in the March blue. All the rest of the time he led an independent life.

  With his thrill-seeking buddies he would ride the freights that dragged past the gray buildings lined up in a long row — as if to demonstrate the relativity of motion to the abstract observer. Or he'd flatten pieces of scrap under train wheels, scrap that seemed to retain some of its monstrous weight and quaking power, like the echo of the caboose, as if the freight train, making its groaning sounds, were retreating from him in two directions. With that same enterprising gang, young Krylov climbed the abandoned TV tower the Uralers called the Toadstool. The town's main attraction, which had never been used for its designated purpose and for a good ten years had been deteriorating in a striated mirage above the cubist apartment blocs and cellophane river, was guarded by the police, but only very theoretically. There, inside the concrete pillar, which had holes like a whistle, the rusted stairs were rickety and some places were like a creaking swing. The wind up top, bursting through the cracks, instantly dried your sweat, making the thrill-seeker feel as if his whole body had been trapped in a sticky spider web. Despite the difficulties of the climb, though, the column was covered in all kinds of graffiti just as solidly as any proletarian entryway. At the very top, on the wind-lashed circular platform, which bobbed around like an airborne raft, he couldn't keep his feet at first, even in the relatively safe center; he felt like lying flat on his belly and not watching the skinny grating of the guard rail, buried by winding tendrils, ladle the sun-drenched blur, not watching the pink rag that was tied to it and ripped to shreds furiously flap.