Ice Trilogy

by Vladimir Sorokin

  On the weekends the four of us went to Sokolniki Park, secluded ourselves in the forest, and, holding hands, spoke with our hearts for hours. Fer and I taught Oa and Bidugo and learned from them. The wisdom of our hearts grew.

  We were waiting for the Ice.

  It arrived in Moscow on January 2, 1929, at the Kazan station, in the baggage section of the Khabarovsk–Moscow train. Brothers Ep and Rubu arrived on the same train. We embraced on the filthy, phlegm-smeared platform. Our hearts flared: Ep and Rubu! Our first brothers, sent to us by the Light, discovered on the rivers of severe Tungusia, then lost. We shouted and wailed with ecstasy, frightening the Soviet passengers. Ep was wearing the uniform of the OGPU; Rubu, civilian clothes. His outer look had changed; he had grown a beard, wore glasses, and outwardly looked like a Soviet engineer. The brothers accompanied four crates with Ice, the very same ones that we had hidden in Deribas’s attic.

  When the querulous porters hauled the first crate from the baggage car and placed it on the sleigh, a fog descended in front of my eyes — the Ice! I approached it, fell on my knees, and pressed my body to the crate. With a yelp, Fer pressed against the crate from the other side. Our hearts jolted from the presence of the Ice. And the Ice vibrated in response. The ephemeral earthbound world swayed beneath our feet. It was powerful.

  The porters stood waiting, sniffing their frost-blue noses in bewilderment. A passing policeman stopped.

  “What is that?”

  Fer and I didn’t move, kneeling before the Ice.

  “Very important equipment,” Rubu answered.

  “All right, then.” The policeman looked askance at Ep’s icy blue eyes, saluted, and moved on.

  In our theater there was no audience.

  Two crates of the Ice were brought to Lubyanka by order of Deribas and placed in the warehouse under protective covering. There the Ice could be safely kept until spring. The other two crates we hid in the basement of a burned-out house on Solyanka Street, not far from the dormitory.

  Deribas got Ep a job in the transport department of the OGPU, which allowed him to move around a lot and be nearby, with a means of transport at hand. With new documents and a new name, Rubu was made an agent in the procurement department of the Peat Institute, whose Party committee secretary had served in the same regiment with Deribas. Several weeks later our brothers Edlap and Em, and our sisters Orti, Pilo, and Ju, who had undergone the heart sobbing, made it to Moscow as well. They were young, energetic Komsomol activists according to their documents; all of them matriculated at Rabfak because of their proletarian origins and recommendations from the Komsomol organization of the Far East OGPU. The Bolsheviks’ idea was that this new educational institution would prepare cadres of young Red professors loyal to the Party’s goals, who would gradually replace the old “ideologically putrefied and petit bourgeois” intelligentsia.

  Now there were eleven of us in Moscow.

  The Ice was nearby. Everything was ready to begin the search.

  But our hearts restrained us: we still did not have the last link in the chain. We already knew how to search for our brothers. We had the means to awaken their hearts.

  However, we had to understand, once and for all, the correct way of doing this. So that all of us could do it correctly and safely.

  The Ice Hammer

  At the beginning of February the temperature dropped. Moscow’s women wrapped up in scarves; sparrows and pigeons hid under roofs; carriage drivers covered their horses with double blankets. Only the peddlers were happy: buns and loaves of kalachi froze quickly, so no one could check their freshness. The water pipes froze. People and animals were afraid of the cold, they kept close to houses and stores.

  But we weren’t afraid of the frost: the fire of the heart warmed us.

  One morning on our day off from the Stalinist five-day workweek, we all met at the Sokolniki tram stop. Silently, we headed for the park. In the minus-forty-degrees-Celsius weather it was completely empty: neither skiers, nor skaters, nor loud-voiced Soviet athletes, nor peddlers with cigarettes were there. Even the crows had hidden. There were only the trees in a web of hoarfrost, immobile, cracking occasionally. We walked past them along the promenade, our feet squeaking on the packed snow. The promenade ended and we stepped into the deep snow and waded through it until we found ourselves in a large glade surrounded by trees.

  Forming a Circle and taking one another by the hand, we sat down in the snow.

  Our hearts felt a jolt. And began to speak.

  We needed an Ice hammer. We wanted to know everything about it: what it was like, how to make it, how to strike with it, what to say with our lips while striking, and what to say with our hearts. In our Great Endeavor everything was clear as the Light and transparent as the Ice. Except for the instrument for awakening the hearts. What should it be like? We had struck the chests of our own nineteen times, and each time the hammer was different. Each time it was made in a hurry, using whatever there was at hand. The Ice was tied with strips of rawhide to a staff, with rope to a sawn-off rifle, with a shoulder strap to the pole of a Soviet flag, with a handkerchief to a stick, with a piece of wire to an iron pipe. Furthermore, the pieces of Ice were completely arbitrary in size and shape. We didn’t make the Ice hammers according to a single image. This was wrong. Our hearts warned us.

  And gave us ideas.

  We wanted to see a correct Ice hammer.

  Our heart created it.

  We became hot. Steam rose from our faces and clutching hands. Our faces were covered in sweat.

  And our hearts saw the Ice hammer as it should be. It hovered in the center of the Circle, like the arrow on a sundial, turning against the sun.

  We understood how we had to make a proper Ice hammer. The piece of Ice should be a cylinder with a round slot cut out in the middle of the side. The handle of the hammer should be placed in the slot, and it should made from a branch or piece of wood that had died its own death. The handle should be tied to the Ice with two strips of animal hide, taken from an animal that had also died naturally. The size of the Ice cylinder should be such that, Fer and I, as the first two acquired, could cover its surface with our palms. The hammer’s handle should correspond to the length of our forearms. The thickness of the handle should correspond to the thickness of our middle fingers. The width of each strip of hide for attaching the cylinder should correspond to the width of the middle fingers of two of the first- discovered.

  The image of the Ice hammer imprinted itself in our hearts. Now we knew how it should be made.

  The Ice hammer hovered in the center of our Circle.

  In order to awaken the heart of a brother, it was necessary to strike with the Ice hammer in the middle of his bare chest, while pronouncing in the language of people: “Speak with the heart!”

  At the same time we were to speak heart to heart with the brother as well as we could.

  Each hammer was destined for one brother. It could be used only once. The stick and strips remaining from the used hammer were to be thrown away. They could not be used again.

  That was all that we learned about the Ice hammer.

  The winter sun rose.

  And the revolving hammer disappeared.

  Warmed by hearts and faces, we sat in the snow, holding hands. Joy filled us. We cried out loudly. The echo carried our voices across the snowy forest.

  That very day we began preparing the first proper Ice hammer. In Sokolniki Park we found a dried-up maple tree and broke off branches from it. Near the tram stop we saw the corpse of a stray dog, frozen to death, in a gully. Ep cut off a strip of skin from its back with a knife.

  In the evening we gathered in the cellar of the burned-out house. Lighting a candle, we retrieved the crate with the Ice. And carefully sawed off the necessary piece of Ice. We filed it into the proper form, and carved out a rounded slot. Then Fer and I — the first-discovered brother and sister — grasped the piece with our palms. It turned out to be a little big. Brothers Ep and Bidugo filed
it down. We again checked the size of the piece. Our palms hid it completely. The head of the Ice hammer was ready. Fer and I bent our arms at the elbow and stretched our right forearms end to end in a straight line. Rubu placed our arms against the maple branch, checked the size, and sawed the branch flush. The handle was slightly filed down and inserted into the opening in the piece of Ice. According to the size of Fer’s and my middle fingers, Pilo and Ju cut out two bands from the dog skin and cleaned them of fur. Brother Oa tied them tightly to the handle.

  The Ice hammer was ready.

  Under the wretched light of earthly fire we held the Ice hammer in our hands, like a firstborn child. I took it and placed it to my chest, causing my heart to throb. With a moan I handed it to Fer. She placed the Ice to her breast and cried out. She gave the hammer to Ep. He grabbed the hammer, embraced it, and gave it to Rubu.

  In this way the hammer passed from hand to hand, until it returned to me. I squeezed it in my hands, swung back, and struck at the dark air surrounding us in the cellar. The hammer sliced through it with a whistle.

  We froze.

  The weapon of struggle against the hell of this earth was in our hands. But there was only one. To attain victory we required dozens, hundreds, thousands of such hammers. We needed an ARSENAL. We couldn’t start a war for the liberation of our brothers and sisters without having a mighty arsenal.

  And so we began the meticulous task of making the Ice hammers. We had to work at night. The lifeless cellar of the burned-down house was an ideal place for this: even the rats didn’t bother us. All through the night, by the light of candles, we filed down the Ice caps, sawed and adjusted handles, cut strips from the corpses of dead animals, set the Ice caps on the handles, and screwed them on. We worked silently. Cold and exhaustion didn’t hinder us: the Divine Ice was right there in our hands. Our fingers touched it, our hearts trembled. With our own hands we were creating our history. The history of the Brotherhood of the Primordial Light. Each hammer we created was handed around the Circle. It was pressed to chests, like an infant. It was spoken to. And reverently placed in crates — to sleep until the Main Battle.

  Before the end of February we had made sixty-four Ice hammers, completely using up two of the four pieces of Ice that had been brought to Moscow.

  Meat Machines

  Having created a store of Ice hammers, we began to think about where we could shelter the newly discovered. This was extremely important. None of our people had individual living quarters, we all lived in the Soviet collective, without the opportunity to be alone. But newly discovered brothers required peace, care, and isolation. Moreover, after being struck, many of them would have need of medical help. This created a serious problem. And it demanded a solution. We went to Sokolniki again, sat in a Circle in the snow, and spoke with the heart. The heart gave us an idea: a house out of town. Sitting in the Circle, we saw it. The house took form behind thick spruce — wooden, prerevolutionary, with an old attic and a weathervane in the form of Pegasus.

  The heart could not deceive: two days later we saw the actual house. It had belonged to a Moscow University professor, Golovin, whose son, a former White Guard officer, had been arrested and accused of being part of an “anti-Soviet plot.” Such an arrest at that time could have only one outcome: a bullet in the back of the head in the cellar of Lubyanka. Soon the old professor was arrested as well. His wife couldn’t bear the double loss and died suddenly of a heart attack. The Golovins’ Moscow apartment and dacha in the Moscow suburb of Liubertsy were confiscated by the OGPU. Some bureaucrat from the first department moved into the apartment with his family, but the dacha was officially transferred to the property directorate, to be given to some Chekist boss during the summer. Until then, it was closed and sealed. The Wisdom of the Heart suggested the necessary solution to Ig: a call from Khabarovsk to Arganov, beginning as a cheery chat about current events between two old friends, and ending with Arganov discussing the Golovin case and himself offering to let Deribas’s brother and sister live in the Liubertsy dacha until summer.

  The Power of the Light was present in this: our will parted the thickness of the surrounding world, taking what was necessary from it.

  Fer and I moved into the dacha, in order to “guard OGPU property.” The dacha was behind a fence, and the woody plot hid the house from outside eyes. A better place for sheltering the newly discovered could not be hoped for. With money we had saved, we purchased and brought to the dacha vegetables, bedclothes, and medications. We also brought thirty Ice hammers and hid them in the woodshed. We traveled to work in Moscow on the early trains.

  Everything was ready for the beginning of the search. Fer and I chose the day: March 6. It was a day off, so the other brothers could keep near our magnet. Without them we would be helpless.

  The Brotherhood prepared: when we met, we spoke with our hearts, marked the way, safeguarded ourselves. Ig was with us: from far-off Khabarovsk came the help of his heart. The tear-off pages of the Soviet calendar fell speedily, like autumn leaves: March 2, 3, 4. We readied ourselves.

  But on March 5 something very important happened to me. That morning, when I arrived at work, I was given an unexpected task: to go to the public library, pick up a file of information collected from the bourgeois press, and bring it back to Lubyanka. The colleague who usually did this in the archive department was out sick. Discovering that I knew two foreign languages, the head of the department entrusted me with the job. Arriving at the library by tram, I showed my identification and went to the restricted reading section. The library worker who gathered the information from Western newspapers for the OGPU said that he needed another half hour to look through the papers that had just arrived. He suggested that I wait in the reading room. I picked up several Soviet newspapers, went out into the general reading room, and sat down at a free table. Despite the fact that it was early morning, the room was almost full. Everyone was silently reading and writing, their heads lowered. On the blind wall of the reading room hung four enormous old portraits: Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Chernyshevsky, which had replaced the portrait of Dostoyevsky that had hung there formerly, since by then even Dostoyevsky had been denounced as a “reactionary writer.” The portrait of Chernyshevsky had been painted recently, and the liveliness of its colors stood in stark contrast to the aged depictions of the three Russian classics. Looking at the portraits of the writers, I vaguely remembered them, their presence in my former life. And I thought of how there was no difference for me now between Dostoyevsky and Chernyshevsky. Then I suddenly felt a very deep exhaustion. The last three days I hadn’t slept at all: at night we fixed up the dacha, which had been destroyed by the Chekists when they searched it; we prepared ourselves for the beginning of our search, and spoke intensively with our hearts. Lowering my eyes, I began to look through the new issue of Pravda. But exhaustion suddenly overwhelmed me: my arms stiffened, my eyes kept closing. I hadn’t felt so helpless for quite some time. My heart grew numb. The stuffy air of the reading room smelled like old books and furniture, and was quickly putting me to sleep, like ether. Blinking my closing eyes, I began to read a collective letter from the workers of the Red Vyborger factory, who were calling for a Socialist competition in all the factories and plants of the USSR. I dozed off, dropping my head on the table.

  I fell into a vivid and deep sleep: I dreamed I was in literature class at my gymnasium; I was sitting, as usual, at the desk with Shtiurmer; the classroom was flooded with rays of sunlight; outside the clean windows it was the beginning of summer; utter silence reigned in the classroom; the only thing audible was the scratching of pens and the measured steps of our literature teacher Vikenty Semyonovich, walking slowly between the rows as we wrote a final composition. I understood that this dream was from my old life, long forgotten by me; for that reason it seemed funny and pitiful, but I was watching it because I was very tired; everyone is sitting, leaning over their desks; before me is a sheet of lined paper with the blue insignia of our school in the corner; m
y hand writes the title of the composition on it, “Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky”; I dip the pen into the inkwell, hold it over the paper, and suddenly realize that I have completely forgotten who Dostoyevsky is; I raise my head and see the large portrait of Dostoyevsky leaning against the classroom blackboard; I look at it intently; but the more intently I look, the more clearly I realize — before me is the depiction of a bearded, gloomy man with a massive forehead, who is entirely unknown to me; he gazes at me seriously. I look around: everyone is writing compositions about Dostoyevsky; I try to remember and understand: What did this gloomy gentleman do? Why are we writing an essay about him? Who is he? But my memory is silent; not knowing what to do, I glance at my classmates: they are all industriously scratching their pens, all writing. I realize that I’m wasting time, I nudge Shtiurmer with my elbow; he turns unwillingly: “Who is that?” I ask, pointing at the portrait with my eyes; he retrieves a thick book from his desk — the collected works of Dostoyevsky — and hands it to me; I take it, open it, and suddenly realize clearly that this book, the sum of the life of the bearded man with the serious gaze, is only paper covered with combinations of letters: it is about this book, this paper covered with letters, that we are writing our final exam essay. Only about paper — and nothing else! Everything becomes incredibly funny to me, now that I have to describe this paper in an essay; I start laughing and interrupt the dream.

  Lifting my head, I opened my eyes: I was in the reading room. But in actuality, I was sleeping. And was already in another dream. All around sat the same people and the quiet rustle of paper. I raised my eyes. Four large portraits hung in their places. But instead of the writers in frames, there were strange machines. They were created for writing books, that is, for covering thousands of pages of paper with combinations of letters. I realized that this was the dream that I wanted to see. The machines in the frames produced paper covered with letters, that was their work. The people sitting at these tables were engaged in another kind of work: they believed in this paper with all their might, they measured their life and learned how to live from this paper — learned how to feel, love, worry, calculate, create, solve problems, and build, in order to teach others later how to live according to this paper.