Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

  Grebenyuk had started eating. Rare steak. First-class veal. Shershnev knew about meat. The major had eaten half of a large chop, bloody juice dripping from the corner of his mouth. Shershnev cut off a piece from the edge and started chewing—fresh meat, where do they get it here? He cut off another piece, put it in his mouth, and he imagined the meat was mooing, mooing terribly and sadly. Shershnev dropped the fork, and Grebenyuk said, laughing, “I almost choked. There’s a damned cowshed on the other side of the wall. They keep animals.”

  Shershnev looked at the blood seeping out of the meat. At the tiny rosemary needles. He was dizzy.

  “You don’t like it rare?” Grebenyuk asked genially. “Not everyone does. I do. Ask the woman, she’ll cook it some more. Though that’s bad for the meat, it will be tough.”

  “Yes, I prefer it well-done,” Shershnev interrupted. “Let’s have another beer.”

  They clinked glasses again.

  When the bill came, Shershnev realized he had forgotten the pin code for Ivanov’s credit card.

  He remembered everything: old email passwords, code words to communicate with the embassy, phone numbers, but those four digits kept slipping away, showing off when he tried to visualize them, the six turned into an eight, the seven into a two, the three into an eight and back again.

  The old woman had brought in an old payment processing device and waited silently. Grebenyuk got out his card and smoothly entered his code; Shershnev realized how hard the day had been on him, if he had forgotten the number that he himself had chosen and connected to some date or event.

  The old woman led them upstairs, unlocked a room that was unexpectedly clean and cozy. Two beds by the walls, standing lamps, a wardrobe, an embroidered tapestry on the wall: hunters trumpeting, a dying stag at their feet.

  Shershnev undressed and set his watch alarm for six. He fell asleep hearing Grebenyuk turning in his bed, the squeaking of old springs compacted by hundreds of bodies.

  He knew tomorrow all would be well.

  CHAPTER 22

  Neophyte.

  Kalitin left for his house to get the substance; the pastor could not stop him. The word remained in the church’s dusky interior.

  So familiar. So far away.

  Neophyte.

  It reminded Travniček of his early years in the ministry. The first confessions he had heard. There were so many later on, brief and lengthy, eloquent and forced, sincere—and false from first word to the last . . . In forest villages, in mining settlements, in workers’ cities, he essentially read books of other people’s sins, saw the same birthmarks of evil, its monotonous faces. He learned to see the simple rules, unsophisticated themes, the particular features as clear as the signs of a profession, work calluses that differed in miners and loggers, carpenters and fishermen. He figured out the logic of the calendar: sins of autumn and spring, winter and summer; sins of poverty and wealth; vice and injured virtue, past and future; sins of strength and weakness, power and slavery, hope and despair, love and loathing.

  There were few confessions he could remember; probably for the best, thought Travniček. His memory was sound, and pastoral service had never become a routine; but once he released people from their sins, he did not keep them inside himself. They vanished, leaving behind empty, identical husks of words.

  There was only one confession he knew almost by heart; it sounded inside him unspoken.

  Franz. An old man, a former soldier. He had a beer hall and was chairman of a hunting club; every autumn, hunters gathered at his bar and drove to the distant bulrush lakes—and then returned to lay out rows of geese and ducks in the backyard. The next day Franz would come to church; he smelled of beer and singed feathers. Travniček was young then, and Franz always tried to take a dig at him, blame him for his inexperience. The former priest, Father Haschke, had understood him better and performed the service with befitting dignity. His sins were simple and strictly doled out, like an old man’s shots of schnapps.

  Before death, Franz called for him. The old man lived in one section of the beer hall, in the back rooms. When Travniček arrived, the bar was full of the noisy regulars, billiard balls cracking and cash register ringing; the pastor was offended by this marked contempt for the mystery of death. Franz lay in a bed, unexpectedly large for his desiccated body.

  “The beach. It was at the beach,” the old man said, and Travniček, truly still a student, a neophyte then, expected to hear a story about a long-ago salacious adventure by the sea, a seduced woman or girl.

  “It was at the beach,” Franz repeated. “They kept coming at me. What else could I do? Lieutenant Huber ordered us to open fire. So I shot. The bearer fed me the ammunition belt, and I shot.”

  Franz talked about the overheated barrel that had to be cooled; the thickness of the fortification concrete of their bunker; of how communications were interrupted; he told him about the long, long day. Travniček heard and saw only hundreds of American soldiers, jumping out of landing barges, running along the sand, and dying, dying, dying; he pictured the awful and empty tautology of evil, lasting and not lasting, reduced to a single movement of the machine gun’s trigger.

  “Our bunker was called ‘Franz,’” the old man said. “I thought it was a good omen.”

  The old gunner died.

  Now waiting for Kalitin to come back, Travniček thought about that story. He felt only exhaustion, immeasurable exhaustion. Kalitin’s confession, the story of his life, had astonished the pastor—but not at all the way the chemist had wanted.

  Travniček saw the same tautology, the chain reaction of evil; a pile of rotting fruit, infected by a black worm. He remembered all the things that had been sent to him—good things people needed, separated by an evil will from their purpose, turned—contrary to their essence—into weapons of torture; piled into a mountain of the meaningless.

  Travniček knew that Kalitin would return. With his gas.

  Well. He would wait here, in the church.

  Neophyte.

  How strange . . . Too bad Kalitin didn’t know.

  Neophyte.

  That’s what they called him in the operative file they had on him. Neophyte. The nickname the people from the gray house had given him. Others had more impressive, more colorful names: Inspirer, Missionary, Fanatic, Captain, Pilgrim, Apostle, Prelate, Treasurer, Miser. That was revealed once the archives were opened.

  When they started the file on him, they considered him a neophyte. A green boy. A beginner. Useless. The informers, the agents—he was Neophyte for them. A proper noun. That’s what they wrote in every report, in every surveillance account, as if they were trying to make the nickname stick.

  He hadn’t wanted to request his file at first. He sensed how painful and bitter it would be. He was far from the thoughts of the pastors who had gone into politics; vengeance did not seem to be the direct work of human hands. But then he remembered the most obvious: “There is nothing hidden that will not be made known.” He went to the archives; he wanted to know, for it was wrong to reject the truth. It didn’t matter if there was not only truth but also lies and deceit in the papers of the gray house; only the side that was visible and beneficial to the spies. So what. He would know for whom to pray.

  He saw his life through their eyes. An undemanding series of the commonplace. Because of the dry manner of narration, the days plucked out and added to the file were particularly similar to one another. But he could feel that even through the distilled monotony of reports, his torment, his insubordination, his work of resistance broke through in a way he had not seen before. He realized there in the archives how long he had not given up. It was a human miracle, and he had manifested it. He had renounced, but before that he had stood in the fire. There was no pride in that understanding and no justification.

  Travniček did not look at his watch. Time decided nothing. He just had to be ready.

  Long ago he had heard on the radio that Father Jerzy Popiełuszko had been recognized as a martyr. The past
or thought then of him and the many others killed—weren’t they worthy of living until freedom? Until the prison was destroyed. They were his invisible interlocutors, the distant confessors of his thoughts. Why was the miracle of salvation manifested in him? He, who was worse. Unworthy.

  “Others suffered mockery and beatings and shackles and prison. They were stoned, sawed, tortured, died by the sword,” he told himself then. “And all of them commended in their faith did not receive what was promised. Because God foresaw in us something better, for without us they could not achieve perfection.” It was then that he understood there was no point in looking for the devil’s hand in their death, to talk about God’s permission; there are times and countries that are like minefields, and the walker knows where he steps.

  And now it was in them, in their unforeseen sacrifice that he saw his lighthouse, his support.

  He fiercely regretted telling Kalitin he should make a public confession. He had overtaken the voice of conscience. He had been rash. He had been severe and insistent, tried too hard to persuade him. Then he realized that his regret was in vain; he did not know, could not know, what image would still appear to awaken conscience; how things would be resolved there, in the solitude of the night, between the fugitive and the Creator.

  He could only wait.

  CHAPTER 23

  Kalitin stopped the car at the very beginning of the drive shaded by apple trees leading to the house. There were blackberry thickets here, which occasionally provided privacy for the parked cars of teenage couples.

  These were his mountains once again. No shadows. He knew that Travniček had not lied, the agents had come, and killers could be lurking nearby. But he was no longer afraid of them, did not see the night as filled with immaterial ghosts.

  The only one he feared was the pastor.

  Kalitin sensed that he had not hurt, not even insulted the priest. He put his entire life into a single blow, a single confession—and it merely dissipated as if he had not existed. Nothing happened. The strength, the inner strength, everything that had accumulated, hardened, pressed, burned, driven—it vanished forever. Now there was only momentum. Idling in a meaningless direction.

  An old counting rhyme came to mind, something they had all whispered excitedly at Uncle Igor’s place before playing hide-and-seek.

  Diddle diddle, one two three

  You can’t get away from me!

  A bear runs here, a bear runs there,

  There are bears everywhere!

  Diddle diddle, three two one

  Bears are out to have some fun.

  One bear growls, one bear grins

  One bear hides—guess who wins!

  Even Vera’s death did not horrify or repulse the pastor. His response burned Kalitin.

  “Have you heard of Clara Immerwahr?” Travniček asked, as if he had the name ready at hand.

  “No,” Kalitin responded indifferently.

  “Fritz Haber?” Travniček asked calmly.

  “Yes,” Kalitin replied carefully.

  He knew the name from a special handbook with a tight thread sewn along the spine, so no pages could be removed unnoticed. When they were done studying it, they returned it to the safe in the special library. Haber. The father of nitrogen fertilizer—and the father of gas warfare, the grandfather of Zyklon B, invented in his laboratory.

  “Clara was his wife. And also a chemist,” Travniček said. “She tried to talk him out of it. When she learned that he was going to the front to oversee a gas attack, she shot herself in the heart. With his gun. No church approves of suicide. But I am not a good priest. There are times when one must not abet.”

  Travniček paused and then continued. “I think about the scientist who invented the poison used on me. About what you told me. It’s not just ethics: thou shalt not kill. You think that by violating the ban on testing on humans you are advancing along the path to comprehension. Taking a short cut. But that’s the point: the means begin to determine the goal. What you produce becomes a creation devoid of grace. The dimension of goodness. It is an act of the devil, I would say.”

  “One bear growls, one bear grins,” whispered Kalitin. “One bear hides—guess who wins!”

  He started the engine. He drove up to the house without fear. There was no one behind the trees in the dark, he felt sure of that. Maybe an hour earlier, an hour later, but not now.

  The moon laid a path on the dewy grass.

  Kalitin went down to the cellar, opened the safe, took out the steel box in which Neophyte slept. He opened it, for the first time in many years. A light blue bottle, looking like a wind-filled sail.

  Kalitin carefully shut the box and placed it in a special attaché case that had a compartment with clasps, clicked the locks, thumbed the code wheels.

  Slowly he picked up the case by the handle and set it on its bottom, feeling Neophyte flowing in the bottle, turning over in its sleep.

  He unscrewed the body of his computer and took out the hard drive. That was it.

  Kalitin put the attaché case on the backseat, fastening it with the safety belt.

  The house. He looked back. The ceiling lamp was on in the study. Let it be. The ones who come will think he’s there.

  Kalitin remembered that he had left the light on in his hotel room when he went out into the night, to flee. The light was similar, yellow with an orange tinge. Long ago, forgotten. The lamp on father’s desk had the same glow. He realized it was just a coincidence of visible spectrums but he had never felt such power, the inner meaning in a natural similarity of tones and shades.

  An unbearable desire engulfed him: to break this chain of dead-end escapes. To go back to where he was still the boy stopped at the door of the Third Entrance.

  The pine tree air freshener swayed in the windshield: diddle diddle, one two three.

  He thought he didn’t know where to go; he had forgotten the necessary turns, signs, the layout of the whole area. But he hit the gas; he couldn’t sit inert, couldn’t wait, couldn’t believe in the possibility of salvation.

  One bear hides—guess who wins!

  Second gear. The road was uneven. No problem, he would drive slowly. It wasn’t far to the asphalt.

  Kalitin pictured Travniček, dead, clumsy in his cassock, collapsed in front of the altar, and opened the window to breath the bitter night air. He would get out of here. Go to a distant country. But first he had to get rid of the witness.

  He thought he could smell success, the mindless, crafty success of fleeing fugitives who had followed these paths.

  The front wheel hit a stone. The car bounced, the undercarriage cracked.

  Kalitin fell asleep not knowing that he had died, as had the swallows, wood beetles, worms, woodlice, and moles. The car had rolled down the slope into a ditch, and the engine ceased in the moonlight. Neophyte vanished through the tiniest crack in the bottle’s spray pump, flew off into the astral plane, lost among the atoms and molecules.

  When the police car arrived, summoned by vigilant villagers who had seen the headlights shining motionlessly into the field, even the faintest odor had disappeared.

  The police officer called at Travniček`s door; some of the villagers had reported seeing the solitary newcomer the previous day. With the priest.

  It was still dark, with no trace of dawn.

  Travniček was absolutely exhausted. He was waiting for the visitor to return.

  But when he understood what happened, he thought about the men pursuing Kalitin. Men with hearts of steel. He was strangely sure they hadn’t arrived yet. But the police didn’t even know they were en route. It was up to Travniček to seal their fate.

  He hesitated a bit. Recalled Kalitin’s fear of the shadows chasing him. And merely said to the officer: It seems the story is not yet over . . .

  Shershnev awoke before the alarm. Grebenyuk, hunched over, was vomiting in the toilet. His face was white.

  “Shitty meat,” the major rasped. “Unused to it. You were lucky. My insides
are heaving. I can’t drive.”

  Shershnev dressed. He put the container in his inside pocket.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll pick you up on the way back.”

  Grebenyuk threw up.

  “Just don’t call for an ambulance,” Shershnev said. This situation didn’t seem odd to him. He thought it was as it should be. It would be easier alone. The thought that Grebenyuk poisoned himself or was good at faking it flew by and vanished. No, the major was just unlucky. Something bad was bound to happen, and it did.

  People were still sleeping at the parking lot. The helicopter was gone. Bulldozers crawled around the avalanche, moving boulders. One lane, marked with flags, was already open. A worker waved him on, and Shershnev hit the gas, enjoying the car’s response.

  He went down the serpentine pass and turned onto a side road. The valleys were still swirling with fog, even though the sun was rising over the ridges. It was the hour when animals awakened before the peasants, and Shershnev felt a new surplus of time, driving faster than Grebenyuk had the day before.

  Here was the town. The first trolley was at the terminal. The driver was smoking and drinking coffee from a thermos. Yesterday’s trees. Yesterday’s houses. Yesterday’s garbage in the can, even the traffic light was yesterday’s; no one had seen it yet today, no one was awake, only Shershnev and that driver. The ticket validating device in the trolley was buzzing, setting today’s date, but no one had yet had a fare card marked with the new stamp.

  Turn to the right. Church on the hill. He would make it, as if yesterday’s long day still continued.

  A black figure. Must be the priest departing after a service. Who knows what their religion is, what time they start.

  A priest on the road. Bad omen.

  A turn, the apple tree alley, a fresh break in the bushes—a truck must have backed into it. A narrow valley. Everything was just as the agents had described. The subject must be asleep. Everyone was sleeping.

  But one would not wake up.