NINE

by Svetlana Alexiyevich

  Teen Krylov had already figured it out, though. If you wanted to be a real Uraler, you had to take risks — lots of them, and the more reckless the better. Standing at the very edge, feeling where the low wall stopped and emptiness began, just above knee height, like a cello bow passing across strung nerves, he was one of the few who could piss straight into the abyss, where his output scattered like beads from a broken strand. When out-of-town base jumpers first showed up at the tower and started jumping over the side, flicking the long tongues of their parachutes, Krylov decided he was definitely going to jump, too, but it was not to be. «Don't even think about it, buddy,» the guy with deeply set kind eyes that glistened amid his wrinkles and lashes like drops of dark oil, told him. «You have to train for sixmonths to base-jump. It's all a matter of seconds here, get it? You'd fuck yourself up good…» The good man explained what exactly would happen to Krylov, using an expression of exceptional profanity while watching good-naturedly the thrill-seekers' hangout, where an empty balloon drifted, drunk on the thin air and shining like a 60-watt bulb in absolute sun. «So I fuck myself up. So what? It's my right.» Krylov wouldn't back down, although his stomach was in knots and the abyss below seemed to turn like a hatch being opened. «See this parachute?» the good baser nodded over his shoulder. «It costs two grand. If you fuck yourself up, I'm not getting it back.»

  This argument convinced Krylov. The two grand figure made an impression. Krylov's activities outside the house now tended to be commercial. He and his buddies, wearing loose Chinese-made Adidas sweats, shoplifted on a small scale from «their» supermarket, the Oriental, keeping cheeky outsiders off their territory. They prospected at Matrosov Square, formerly Haymarket, where the river lay on the sand like a woman on a sheet, and under the sand, in the black, foul-smelling muck that used to be cleaned off the bottom by the municipal cleaners, they'd find different coins, gold ones even, the size of a Soviet kopek, with a two-headed eagle the size of a gnat. Soon teen Krylov's mind had come up with something like virtual bookkeeping. A parachute was two grand. A used PC — two hundred fifty. The new World Coins catalog — fifty-four. A headlamp for crawling through the vaulted shallow underground mines — eight hundred rubles. A sturdy Polish knapsack — four hundred fifty. Not all — or even many — of his dreams could come true. Teen Krylov adjusted to jumping from the Toadstool in his dreams. As he drifted off, his URL was a specific array of sensations — in particular, the image of a balloon being borne off, which tuned every nerve in his body to the four hundred meters of altitude, at which point the balloon reminded him of an astronaut stepping out for a space-walk. Not always, but often Krylov reached a state where everything was swaying, tossing, whistling. As in real life the clouds' wet shadows floated deep in the golden abyss and were greedily collected by the city blocks, the way water collects pieces of sugar, but the Toadstool's harsh shadow wouldn't dissolve — which made it hard to accept himself as a dot on the rim of a broken hat of shadows or on the crest of a small brown roof. In his dreams, Krylov broke away from the concrete by making a special effort with his tensed diaphragm; immediately, his ears and head felt like a jammed receiver, and the insane air slipping into his mouth fluttered his puffed out cheeks from the inside like tattered banners. After losing himself like a dot on the bottom of a prettier, livelier abyss, Krylov had an unbearably sharp presentiment of merging with himself as he hurtled down, like a crazed motorcyclist — but the paradisiacal two-thousand-dollar parachute on his back just wouldn't open, so he had to dissolve in the wind as quickly as possible and without a trace, which Krylov set about doing quite practically, surrendering utterly to the logic of his dream and its vibrating, vanishing words.

  When he started earning some money, teen Krylov felt more grown up than he really was. He'd been through all the trivial agonies of a self-centered young oaf with a laughable father (by this time his father had become a toadying chauffeur for a piss-ugly boss and was driving a Mercedes, just like he'd always wanted), and things got much easier for him with his parents. His silence in response to their helpless cries now seemed perfectly natural, and from time to time he would even leave his school report in the kitchen, by way of impersonal information, a perfectly proper school report with good marks. Studying came easy to Krylov, it was as if there was no science at all. Everything bubbled up and evaporated, like steam: quadratic equations, English verb tenses, and Einstein's definitions, which were in some way like Krylov's dreams. What was worse was that his parents' mere presence kept Krylov from having a good read. They obviously suspected him of hiding a porno magazine under his algebra textbook, not a Frederic Paul novel. All in all, relations between teen Krylov and his parents consisted of endless suspicions. Imagining what they were imagining while they waited up for their sonny boy at night under their stupid kitchen lamp, Krylov admitted that no matter how hard he tried he could never be as bad as those two, who had once conspired to give birth to him, thought he was. Looking at them, dressed at home in identical old jeans with saggy butts, which looked like identical shopping bags, Krylov could more readily have believed that he'd been conceived in a test tube. Even more, he could not imagine why they'd needed to do it. He was perfectly well informed about where children come from, and he had enjoyed the favors of Ritka and Svetka — two sisters one year apart who never said no and who had coarse kissers and soft asses that afterward got hot spots on them that blossomed like roses. Krylov could not possibly imagine his mother and father getting it together to have him; if any sound ever reached him at night from their dark, gloomily smelly bedroom, then it was nothing but the unending family opera.

  In short, his parents believed that Krylov committed all the crimes in their neighborhood, just as in the past common people thought that Lenin had invented the electric bulb and Stalin everything else. The image created by his parents' imagination coincided with Ritka and Svetka's ideal — someone to share, like all their boyfriends and their cheap dresses with golden sparkles and puff paint designs. They pictured this ideal as a tough guy who saw life as having control over everything that moved, and who was controlled in turn by a benign papa-thug, whose thick shaved neck looked like a cold meat patty with a layer of white fat and who sported a gold chain as chunky as a tractor tire. All the guys — from the clean-shaven lookout, whom Krylov had only seen from behind, to puny Genchik, famous for his ability to send his bubbly spit flying several meters — possessed a common quality: a nauseating «soulfulness». They took serious offense if something seemed amiss to them — and some fuzzy-eyed jerk with a head no more complexly constructed than a gearbox could for some reason remember a guy and chase him like a jackrabbit, becoming the ubiquitous godling of their home courtyards and garages as far as his victim was concerned.

  These tattooed punks horsed around for a long time before installing their own general at the Oriental — Krylov's classmate, Lekha Terentiev, who'd repeated two grades and whose concave forehead and thick-lipped smirk, hanging as it were from his left ear, provoked a rush of malicious energy in Krylov, an urge to crush not only Lekha but the store he'd taken over as well. Actually, Lekha himself, being both curious and clumsy, had overturned a rack of housewares, and as a result of the crash the unfamiliar object that had caught his eye was buried under a heap ofenameled cookware and detergents gurgling in plastic squeeze bottles, a heap that looked like ruins of antiquity. Ever since, the general, rather than working personally, had just shot the breeze with the guard while the guys, shielding each other from the TV eye, lifted the expensive compacts and perfumes he'd told them to get. Ritka and Svetka worshipped Lekha and marked his presence with the highest sign of respect — silence — which made their little mouths look like lipstick-smeared baby belly buttons. Krylov was all set to fight him for the business. Out of pure rage he beat up that big lug Lekha in the boys room at school and somehow managed to stick this unzipped hulk under the sink with his head right under a wet pipe, where his head got stuck in an unnatural position, making a gurgling noise. After t
hey freed Lekha's head by pouring vegetable oil over it and his paws grabbed onto the parallel legs of the girl mathematician who'd rescued him, when he'd worked himself free, centimeter by centimeter, and sat down, making strange movements as if he'd suddenly landed in a full bathtub, Krylov actually felt guilty at the sight of Lekha's tears smeared over his dirty, oily cheeks.

  Lekha wasn't long in being avenged, though, they made it hot for Krylov. After that chat with the gang (the victim's sneer had drifted even farther back toward his ear, as if after rubbing against the pipe it just wouldn't go back in place), Krylov's teeth were wobbly and salty for a long time, and his ribs on the right side felt like they had current running through them so that he couldn't take a deep breath. It became perfectly clear to him that mixing with tattoos cost too much. The gang was a freak of nature, a genetic phenomenon, and occasionally, when he watched the tiniest residents of the courtyard banging their toys on the bench and running away in their flannel booties from their pale mothers mincing after them, Krylov would suddenly catch a glimpse of their future man — as if marked from birth by some secret sulkiness, a concavity in his hard forehead, the corporeal weight of his raw being.

  Because of Lekha, Krylov lost a substantial portion of his income — which he didn't regret particularly as the romance of the supermarket, with its standard Chinese-Turkish assortment, had lost its allure by then. On the other hand, he had other interesting occupations the thugs couldn't touch. The thugs, whose main output was the physiological terror they produced in people, themselves went around full of that terror, like jugs, up to their ears in it — and so were incapable of pure pointless risk. All of them, striving for outward gang unity, were copies without an original — without the ideal that Krylov's parents had glimpsed and that Ritka and Svetka had seen in their maidenly Siamese dreams. Krylov didn't want to be a copy, even of someone or something that actually existed.

  Nor did he want to resent the world that lay before him like one big amusement park. In order to achieve this in his relations with the world he had worked out and followed his own rules of equilibrium. For instance, if some collector ripped off Krylov for a rare Soviet twenty, then Krylov, in turn, would rip off someone else, but only one someone, and not necessarily the same someone. What was important here was keeping it impersonal; the owner of a major collection of Soviet coins could hang out right there, where the deals went down, but Krylov wouldn't come near him. Instead, he would carelessly show a worn prewar lat to a snippety old lady with a puffy powdered face who looked like an owl-moth and who had shown up for no one knew what dividend, and when he'd made an unfair deal would feel perfectly satisfied. Teen Krylov didn't want to hold on to anything extra — not insults, not the memory of all the people who had come and gone. He was like an ecologically pure apparatus that returns to the environment precisely what it takes in. He thought that by maintaining this equilibrium he was in some magical way protecting the world from collapse, maintaining its substance. If someone lifted a book from his bag, he'd take one from a bookstall or the school library; if someone didn't return the head-lamp he'd lent, he wouldn't buy another, he'd pinch one from a subway construction worker, crawling through the gaps in the patched link fence behind which the dusty excavation site sputtered and boomed. For himself, Krylov made no distinction between the people who insulted him and the people who suffered at his hands, especially since many of those remained unknown to him. The «me versus everyone else» correlation was, of course, unequal, as it would be for anyone, not just a guy from the crummy projects who had the slimmest of social chances; but Krylov had no wish to admit any inequality.

  * * *

  In search of adventure for his own pathetic ass, teen Krylov tried to grasp the character of his new northern homeland, the essence of true Ural-ness. As in any Babylonian-type city, four-fifths settled by outsiders, refugees, ex-convicts, and the graduates of thirty or so functioning colleges, natives of the Urals' capital were in the minority. The city, by taking people in, had subsumed carbon copies of all the geographically proximate towns and urban settlements — in some instances copies bigger than their original size. Plus it exchanged bureaucratic elites with an ever-watchful Moscow, as a result of which its low-slung architectural landmarks changed hands and were repainted more often than the pale landscape could withstand. Given this spontaneous growth of the inhabited environment it was hard to understand what the city's primordial territory, the expression and symbol of the Ural spirit, actually was. Especially since the city itself originally had not been inclined to create a center. The old merchant mansions adorned with thick cast iron lace on front balconies the size of beds had been put up without any consideration for the style of their neighbors, as if they had no neighbors at all in fact. It looked as if the willful prospector, in erecting his beloved monstrosity, had known for certain that it would outlast the surrounding structures, which the beauty of his mansion had already eclipsed. In short, the old part of town didn't have a basic notion of its simultaneous existence. The city administration, experiencing a natural need for a proper center, responded by razing decayed mansions and putting up new housing that combined the idea of a barracks and a Petrine Monplaisir. The Uralers were offered a choice of symbols: the open-air geology museum, where the big chunks of jasper flushed out by the dam reminded him of pieces of stone meat shot through with quartz veins; a life-size model of a locomotive, invented here, that looked like a meat grinder; or the monument to the city's two founders, who stood in their stony German garb, their identical polished faces turned toward the black dam tunnel and waterfall, above which some hotshot, one of the ones who liked to dangle his legs over the abyss, had written in bright white waterproof paint: «There is no God.»

  In reality, the true symbol and expression of the Ural spirit was the bluish Toadstool that loomed over the city, the largest of those irrational structures that seemed to have arisen purely to arouse the Uralers' principal instinct, which you might say was the instinct to climb something just because it was there, to conquer what you weren't supposed to, or, even better, were forbidden to. There was a special connection here. The place was a physical password to which any Uraler deep down had a ready response. The Uraler's world was patently nonhorizontal — like an insect's, in this sense. The Toadstool was their cult, and for the town's teens, it was an ant trail to heaven. Grown-up guys would climb, with God's blessing, 8,000-meter Himalayas, they would organize international (with only melancholy Finns participating) competitions for climbing the red sausage-like Ural pines, and schedule insane rallies on forest roads, which were nothing but raw steepness with boulders jutting out, and also winter motorcycle races down the frozen river, which involved scooting nimbly under the vaults of the Tsar Bridge, which looked like iced-over runny nostrils. Though what they were doing was much worthier of punks, the grown-up Uralers nonetheless took it quite seriously — maybe because they held on inside to something solid, some cold, crystalline filler. Teen Krylov figured out early on that a true Uralers' soul possesses the quality of transparency: you could see straight through it but never get inside.

  Soon he had a similar formation in his own chest — an accumulation of the tiny spots and fissures of insult from his earliest youth that he could no longer return to his environment. Krylov learned that when something irreparable happens, then at first it's interesting, like finding yourself in a movie. That's how it was when his father drank his boss's whiskey and drove the Mercedes into a silly but solid billboard. He was trapped by the air bags and got off with literally a scratch, whereas his boss had half his skull ripped off by a post that rammed through the car, and his hairless scalp lay there on the back seat, like a scrap from a torn ball. Although the accident was the fault of a Moskvich that was never found and that skidded and clipped a line of cars (there were plenty of reckless drivers among ordinary engineers driving rusty old wrecks, and not only among the new rich, on the Ural roads), his father, as a consequence of the deceased's stature and the alcohol he'd
drunk, was put behind bars. Krylov saw him for the last time in the courtroom and fixed in his memory his small, focused eyebrows and his patient pose of an ice fisherman. After that his father went away in a convoy and never came back, honestly serving out his four years but, like many in his situation, making his escape from reality.

  The splendid Toadstool's dramatic demise made a much bigger impression on Krylov. Despite the special qualities of the reinforced concrete used in it, the 400-meter tower had deteriorated so badly it was unsafe. Meanwhile, there was absolutely nowhere to drop it. During the years the Toadstool had adorned the low-slung Ural skies, around it were built, first, your standard nine-story apartment blocks and then prestigious red-brick housing complexes, and on the most dangerous, almost always windy side, there was a shopping mall that looked like an enormous greenhouse. Delay threatened calamity, though, such as the Emergency Administration had never seen. One fine summer noted for its mighty white rains, which rumbled in the drain pipes like anchor chains, the municipal administration summoned the will and the means and gave the go-ahead. Naturally, the Toadstool remained standing over the city all the next winter, sparkling like sugar and leading Uralers into temptation to climb it with amateur radio stations and drag a battery up for their broadcasting needs. Prices for suburban real estate went up and down, and insider realtors close to the mayor's office made a tidy sum.

  The following summer, which, unlike the previous year's, was so dry that the town stream turned into a coffee-like muck, military specialists took over the Toadstool. They spent two months evacuating the nearby blocks, which came to resemble a Martian city where dusty dogs ran in packs, while blasters drilled holes in the concrete, spread cables, and replaced the explosives looted the previous year. On D-day it became obvious that these were pros at work: the air in town shuddered, and the Toadstool turned into a neat pile of dust, like a candle that had burned up very quickly, plunging, halfway to the ground, into rising clouds of solid ash. Where it had just been, a blinding spot formed on the thin and cloudy amalgam. Even when the cumulus dust, thinning and translucent, rose to almost the full height of the vanished tower, the lambency didn't disappear; the dusty specter of a fatter Toadstool lingered in the air for several days, settling on the wan leaves and broken glass that crunched under the feet of the returned inhabitants and sobbed under the janitors' brooms, forming fragile, layered piles of trash. Afterward, whenever the dust came up, it was like a faint impression being powdered in the air, or if the sun came out from behind a cloud at an unusual angle, the tower became visible; people saw it in a thick snowfall, as if it had washed the violet shadow with soap. Lots of Uralers had trouble believing they'd ever physically been there, where now the wind roamed freely; drifting off to sleep with this thought, the punks and even college students who already shaved their soft beards flew in their dreams. Maybe it was thanks to the Toadstool phenomenon that young Krylov — who at the time of the explosion was studying in the history department and almost nightly took himself up with a heavy breast-stroke into the inauthentic air to see the abyss turning beneath him, like a foggy dial — kept growing until he was twenty-five and had markedly exceeded the genetic limit set by his parents.