Ice Trilogy

by Vladimir Sorokin

  Uf stood up.

  “You’re going back.” Khram understood.

  “I must return.”

  “I know you are needed there...The meat is coagulating. You will hold it back.”

  “I’ll restrain it. And I’ll keep the Brotherhood together.”

  He turned away and walked down the stone path.

  “Keep it well,” said Khram’s old lips.

  Olga Drobot

  The toaster beeped and two pieces of toast jumped out. Filling half of a large glass of pineapple juice with ice, Olga went over to the toaster.

  “Papa and Mama,” she thought to herself instinctively, taking a sip from the glass and putting the toast on a plate.

  But in a loud voice she immediately forbade herself to think those thoughts. With an English imperative she dismissed them: “Begone!”

  The psychologist had been right: “A sword, slicing off a difficult past.” At first Olga didn’t believe in it. But six months after that day the “sword” began to work and help. It chopped off the ghosts of her parents that arose in virtual space in any pair of things or beings — in a pair of shoes, in cooing pigeons, in stone figures next to corporate gates, in Adam and Eve, in the president’s two lifted fingers, in a pair of gold earrings, in the number 69, in a two-volume edition of Edgar Allan Poe, in copulating flies, and finally in the three-year absence of the twin towers, which had been standing then and had been visible to all three of them from the south window of the loft. Now Olga looked out of her sixth-floor Manhattan apartment alone. Not at the place where the World Trade Center towers had stood three years ago, but at the funny water towers on the roofs of the neighboring buildings, which always reminded her of Martians from the cover of Welles’s War of the Worlds. A novel that her father had loved. And she had never read...

  “Olechka’s a gooooood girl!” said the parrot in the cage next to the window.

  She remembered him, old Fima, walked over and poured some food into his cage, added water to his bottle, cut off a piece of apple and wedged it between the bars. Fima began to peck at the apple with his terrifying beak, while squinting at Olga.

  “He remembers too,” she thought.

  And she immediately swung her invisible sword, cutting it all off: “Begone!”

  Fima chewed away, showing his thick tongue, and said, “Don’t worry!”

  “Be happy!” Olga nodded and laughed.

  It was time to begin the day.

  Olga spread salty goat cheese on a piece of toast, put three circles of sliced cucumber on it, and covered them with two lettuce leaves. She slapped down a piece of turkey on the lettuce, circles of tomatoes on the turkey, then added another piece of toast to make a fat sandwich before biting into it. And then, grabbing her glass, she sat down at the computer. Washing down a piece of sandwich with the icy juice, she hit a key on the keyboard. The monitor came to life and a deep male singsong voice greeted her: “Hi, O-ol-g-a-a!”

  “Privet saliut,” she answered in Russian.

  She glanced at her e-mail: four messages. One from work (a reminder that after vacation, on the sixteenth, Olga had to be in Philadelphia with a contract for the delivery of marble). Another was from Liza in Chicago (for the sixth time she swore that she would come “to eat, drink, and shoot the bull in Russian”). The third was from Peter, a colleague of her father’s (he invited her to a barbecue this weekend).

  “He always wants to introduce me to someone, the old geezer.” Olga grinned, remembering openhearted, fat Peter, a fancier of German beer, free jazz, and picnics. “No, Peter, I’ll already be far from here on Saturday...”

  But the fourth...

  “Yes!” Olga joyfully stamped the floor with her bare foot.

  Hello, Olga.

  Yesterday I sat on the site almost all night. There’s some news. First of all, I finally wrote to the elusive Michael Laird. And he answered me! He has in fact been the coordinator of the Society for the last two years. I sent him your letter, with the story of your abduction, with photographs of you and your deceased parents. Now you and I are in the database of the site. Soon we’ll have a lot of friends. The headquarters of the Society is located in Guangzhou (southern China). Michael advised us to fly over for a more substantive conversation, since he doesn’t really trust e-mail. And he has something to show us in Guangzhou. The Society will help with visas, they have a standard invitation with a hotel as well. The invitee only has to buy the ticket. In connection with this I was thinking — why not combine our journey to Israel with a visit to Guangzhou? After all, China is closer to Israel than Göteborg and New York! That’s for starters. Secondly, we’ll kill two birds with one stone and save time. And honestly, I’m sick of all these months of living on conjecture and guesswork. I feel like getting a move on, doing something.

  I await your reply eagerly,

  Yours, Bjorn Vassberg

  Olga gleefully clapped and, forgetting about her sandwich, began clattering on the keyboard.

  Bjorn Vassberg, greetings!

  Your idea is wonderful and I like it a lot. I’m sure that the information that we’ll get in Tel Aviv will be very important and explain a lot in our story. After that we can fly to China and meet with Laird. That would be fabulous! Especially since I’m on vacation at the moment. I await the invitation from you and then I’ll go straight to the Chinese embassy. As far as Tel Aviv is concerned, everything is in order, I reserved two rooms in our names at the Prima Astor hotel. It’s right on the seashore, I’ve stayed there before. As soon as you get your visa and buy a ticket, let me know. I would like to meet in the airport. My password for meeting is: Odin v pole voin. I await yours!

  Till we meet!

  Olga

  That evening, when Olga returned from a bicycle ride in the park, Bjorn’s answer was waiting for her. It included the invitation to Guangzhou and the password: “Kräftskivan.”

  “Something in Swedish...” Olga laughed and rushed to look up the address of the Chinese consulate in New York.

  “Tomorrow, tomorrow!” she thought as she printed out the invitation, found two photographs, and placed it all in her dark-blue American passport.

  She made herself a large coffee with milk, sat down at the computer, and typed in the address: www.icehammervictims.org. A picture emerged on the monitor: a girl and a boy naked to the waist were pressing their palms to the wound in the center of each others’ chests. Above the picture were the words “Official Site of the Society of Ice Hammer Victims.” Below were the usual links: History of the Society, News, People, Photo Gallery, Personal Stories, Publications, Conjectures, Join Us! Olga clicked on Personal Stories. She skimmed over well-known text — she’d already read all of them a long time ago. At the end she found three new ones.

  Stephanie Treglown, fourteen years old, Newcastle, Australia

  A week before Christmas holiday two women came to our school, assistants to a director who said that they were looking for girls to play extras in a remake of Peter Weir’s well-known film Picnic at Hanging Rock. Everyone in Australia knows this film — my parents always watched it, even when I was little, we have a VHS cassette and a DVD of it. My parents and I visited the cliffs of Massedon where those tragic events of February 14, 1900, took place, when the senior class of the Abelard Girls’ School set off on St. Valentine’s day for that very cliff to have a picnic, and three girls disappeared without a trace. All the girls in our class really wanted to be in the film. These director’s assistants, Debora and Ellen, said that the director of the remake would be David Lynch, that the casting was taking place now, and that Lynch was choosing completely unknown schoolgirls for the parts of the girls, so that it was quite possible that one of us might get to play a real role in the film, with lines. They chose three girls from our class, including me, and another seven from the school. We were all blue-eyed and light-haired. I was so thrilled when they chose me! I especially liked one of the girls in Weir’s film — Miranda. She’s so pretty and gentle, like an an
gel! She has incredible blue eyes and lovely blond hair. And it was quite a shame that she didn’t really become a Hollywood star, that she acted again only in Mad Max, and that was it. Ellen and Debora said that after Christmas we would have to go to Sidney where everyone chosen would get together, and Lynch himself would make the final choice among us. They would pay our way. And Mrs. Halle, Suzy Halle’s mother, went with us. We arrived in Sidney around noon and went to the opera on the shore. It’s an enormous building, I was there twice when I was a little girl — for the opera Peer Gynt, and the ballet Giselle. We were taken into one of the auditoriums, and the entire room, with 1,500 seats, was filled with schoolgirls! And all of them were blue-eyed and light-haired! I had never seen anything like it! And among them were lots that looked like Miranda. Of course I immediately realized that there was no way they would ever choose me — there were so many beautiful girls in the hall! We waited for Lynch. But instead of him, three people got up onstage — a kind of plump guy, an old woman, and a thin, bald man, very serious. The old woman told us that Lynch was very busy, and therefore his assistants would do the choosing. The woman introduced herself as the author of the film script. And these three sat in armchairs in front of the stage and asked the girls to come up to them in pairs, in turns. The girls began to do this. The three looked attentively at each pair, and then asked them to come over and the old woman placed her hand on each girl’s chest. Right where your neck begins. It continued like that for almost four hours. And during this time, out of 1,500 only 36 were chosen. I was one of them. Then they wrote down my phone number and address and said they’d be in touch with me by e-mail. And I went home, terribly happy. I was in seventh heaven! Out of our entire school I was the only one chosen! I began to wait for news. But day after day passed and no one wrote to me. I had to wait. My parents and school friends tried to reassure me — films aren’t made that fast, just wait. And so I waited. But a terrible accident prevented me from becoming an actress. When I was coming back from school and crossing Main Street, a car stopped and a woman sitting in the driver’s seat asked about the road to Sesnok. I said to go straight and turn right at the light. She laughed, and pointed to her ears: “I can’t hear!” I went over to her and repeated it. The last thing I remember was that the woman was holding a broach shaped like a little musketeer’s gun. When I came to, I was already in the hospital. My neck and chest hurt terribly. My chest was bandaged up, I was wounded. Later they told me that I had been found on the highway. A car hit me when I was talking to that woman. And the woman had disappeared.

  “That’s right Stephanie, you didn’t become an actress.” Olga smiled sadly. “And David Lynch is unlikely to film that remake.”

  “Fimochka’s a go-o-oo-d boy,” the parrot cried.

  “The best of all.” Olga nodded.

  And she began reading the second story.

  Dzhamilya Sabitova, thirty-eight years old, Temirtau, Kazakhstan

  I have been working at our municipal market for four years. My husband, Taimuraz Sabitov, and I had our own stand, Beshbarmak. We cooked hot meals for the traders at the market. We made beshbarmak, pilaf, baursaki, and lagman. The merchants were always pleased because my husband and I are good cooks. And the management of the market was happy with us. On April 4, 2005, I was working at the stand with my sister Tamara, since my husband had gone to Karaganda to buy kitchen supplies. Tamara is seven years younger than me and has always helped me when my husband is busy. That day, as usual, we cooked everything in the morning, and at about 1:00 p.m. we opened the stand and began serving. Merchants came to us, took the food, and went back to their places with it. Everyone really loved us at the market because Tamara and I are very pretty. Our mama is Russian, and our papa is Kazakh. Mama’s blond and her eyes are dark blue, very beautiful. And the main thing is Tamara and I have the same eyes and the same light hair. From Papa we got our nose, lips, and black eyebrows. And everyone always joked that we were Mama’s girls. In Kazakhstan there aren’t many people with blue eyes, and there’s not many blondes, either. Because of that the men always flirted with us when they bought their food, they’d say all sorts of silly things. That day a man came over to the stand. He wasn’t local, I’d never seen him before. He was a tall, well-built blond with blue eyes, handsome and well dressed — you could tell he was rich. He asked if our pilaf was tasty or not. We said — try it, everyone says it’s good. He took a cup of rice and tried a little. Then he said — it’s delicious, probably because you two are so pretty. And he began talking about how we were such beauties and all. I asked what he bought at the market. He said he just came to take a look at his friend Tofik Khalilov’s market. That was the owner of the market, a very rich man. And the man said that he liked the market, especially if beauties like us worked there. He was just having fun, joking around with us. Tamara asked what he did and he said he had a business in Alma-Ata, two restaurants, and that he came to Karaganda on business and dropped by Temirtau to visit his old friend Tofik. And he asked — what were we doing that evening? We answered that we were washing and putting away the dishes, and going home to our husbands and children. Then he asked us to go with him to Tofik’s for pilaf. We turned him down, we said that our husbands wouldn’t let us go out at night, and that we were really busy. Then he offered to take us to a restaurant right now. And he was in good spirits, joking around with us in a cheery sort of way. He made Tamara and me laugh, he was so funny. He said that sometimes you have to take a break from wives and husbands, so you’ll love them even more. And he kept on trying to talk us into going with him. So we said — all right, but only for an hour. He said — all right, you choose the restaurant. Tamara says — Zhuldyz. That’s the most expensive restaurant in Temirtau. He says — no problem. So we locked up the stand and went with him. And when we left the market, he walked over to his car, a really expensive one, brand new and gorgeous, and he opened the back door — have a seat, ladies. We sat down, he drove, and turned on the music. And then suddenly a partition went up, and we were behind glass...and there was something sour in the air, and I fainted. I came to on the ground. I raised my head — it was the middle of the night, my head was in the sand, and a dog was barking somewhere. As soon as I tried to sit up — my chest began to hurt terribly, like someone had hit me really hard. I looked around — I was somewhere in a wasteland outside of town. And I saw Tamara lying next to me. I touched her, but she didn’t move. She was dead. So I sat next to her all night. I cried and sat. I didn’t have the strength to go anywhere. In the morning some workers were driving along the highway from Sarani and noticed us, picked us up. They called my husband and took us to the hospital — my whole chest was beaten up, one big bruise. But on Tamara it was even worse — everything was broken, her breastbone was broken, her ribs were broken and stuck out through the skin, I couldn’t look at the wound. I spent a month in the hospital while my chest healed. Then the police said — it was a maniac.

  “Uh-huh...the usual story,” said Olga. “He didn’t take you and your sister out to Zhuldyz after all...Of course it’s a maniac, Dzhamilya. A maniac. Who flies from New York to Sidney, from Sidney to Karaganda. And then...voilá! He’s in Zürich again! This maniac sure lives the good life...”

  Thomas Urban, fifty-two years old, Zürich, Switzerland

  Three years ago I was in a car accident and for a time I completely lost all short-term memory. I forgot my wife’s name, didn’t believe that I had a daughter, didn’t know that I was an architect, and so on. My long-term memory, on the contrary, became so vivid and strong that events from my early childhood and adolescence began to surface, memories that I had never recalled before. For example, I remembered in great detail how my fifth birthday was celebrated at home, who was there, what we ate, what we said, what presents I received. I also recalled many other things. During the six months I spent in the clinic, I remembered quite a lot. It was as though I were being shown a film about myself. Among the myriad episodes from childhood and youth one very strange
one arose. I still can’t find a sensible explanation for it. It was the summer of 1972, when I was fifteen years old. My older sister, Miriam, bought me a ticket to a Led Zeppelin concert in Zürich at the Hallenstadion. I didn’t know this group very well at the time, but a lot had been written about it in young people’s magazines, and it soon became a super band. My sister bought me an expensive ticket, and I turned out to be right in front of the stage. The concert was amazing, I was seeing these great musicians for the first time, I saw Robert Plant up close, I heard his incredible voice. The concert made a huge impression on me. Before that I had only been to see the Who and Chicago. But Led Zeppelin was a head above those bands. I especially liked Robert Plant — he was tall, slim, with a golden mop of hair, blue eyes, and a “golden” voice. When the concert was over, the audience went wild. We ran onto the area in front of the stadium stage and shouted, “Led Zepp! Led Zepp!” And then I saw two girls, very pretty, curly-headed blondes, holding a poster that said ROBERT PLANT FAN CLUB. Young people crowded around them. I went over too. Next to the poster there was a table where a third curly-headed blonde was sitting and signing up fans for Plant’s club. I read the conditions for membership on the poster: long blond hair and blue eyes. I was eligible! My hair nearly reached my shoulders at the time — I was imitating George Harrison. The girls wrote down my address and telephone number, saying that they would call. And I set off happily for home. At home I broke open my piggy bank, went out and bought two Led Zeppelin albums. I listened to them constantly. And a few days later I got a call and they said that the Robert Plant Fan Club was holding its first meeting. I got right on my bicycle and by 4:00 p.m. I was at the address they’d given me, in a rich area of Zürich on Hadlaubstrasse. There was a big old villa, covered with wild grapevines, a poster saying LED ZEPPELIN on its gates, and a large portrait of Robert Plant. I left my bicycle at the fence, rang the bell at the gate, and stated my name. I was let in and I entered the villa. It was an old, richly furnished house. And the song “Whole Lotta Love” was playing nonstop! It was so strange in that old-fashioned setting, amid Victorian furniture — and then the music of Led Zeppelin! One of the curly-headed blondes met me in the foyer and guided me into a spacious living room. About thirty kids were already sitting there: light-haired, blue-eyed girls and guys. For the most part it was people my age, but there were some who were older. There was a table of nonalcoholic drinks, cigarettes, and chips. First we listened to the music. Then we started talking, getting to know each other. During this part other blond kids came in. The whole hall filled up gradually and then the music stopped. And a blindingly beautiful woman came out — tall, stately, with bronzed skin, goldish hair, a proper aristocratic face, and dark blue eyes. She was dressed all in blue, wore blue gloves, even her shoes and all the jewelry on her was deep blue. Standing in the middle of the room, she began talking to us. Not in the Swiss dialect but in pure German. She said that Robert Plant was an angel who fell from heaven and got lost among humans, that he sang in the language of the celestial spheres, that in listening to his voice we would become freer and kinder, that we would understand what heavenly love was, that today we would begin our fellowship, that the music of Led Zeppelin would help us to become beautiful both outwardly and inwardly. Her deep, calm voice was mesmerizing, and we couldn’t take our eyes off her. She picked up a flat blue box with a picture of a falling golden angel on top, opened it, and offered it to us. In the box were small chocolate figures of this same angel in gold foil. “Commune with the music of the celestial spheres!” she said with a smile. And at the very same second Robert Plant’s voice rang out, powerful and poignant: “Baby, I’m gonna leave you.” We all began to take the chocolates from the box, unfold the foil, and eat. It was good Swiss chocolate. I ate my chocolate. A few minutes later I fainted. I woke up at night lying on some pavement somewhere. Two cops were shaking me. It was in the center of town, near the Odeon bar, where students drink. My mangled bicycle lay by my side. My head was spinning, I was nauseous. And my chest hurt horribly. It was completely crushed, and the police told me that most likely a car had hit me. They called my parents and I was taken to a clinic. They found alcohol in my blood. Then I fell into a feverish state, and my temperature soared. They bandaged my chest and gave me a shot to help me sleep. I spent two weeks in the clinic. A small dent remained in the middle of my breastbone. I still have it. No matter how I described the Robert Plant Fan Club to my parents, whatever proof I offered that I had actually been in the villa, they didn’t believe me. They were certain that I had been drinking with friends in some bar, ridden off drunk on my bicycle, and got hit by a car. Then I went to Hadlaubstrasse and rang the bell of that very villa. A maid opened the door. Naturally, no club had ever existed in this villa, the maid had never heard of Plant. A family of Hassids lived in the house; many years later I learned that they were the biggest diamond dealers in Switzerland. My peers and friends didn’t know anything about this club, either. Once in the tram I met a girl who had been at the villa that time. I recognized her. But she smiled and said that she had never been there. And so all this was forgotten, like some strange dream. Until I got in an accident and lost my short-term memory. And then I remembered, remembered everything that had happened after I ate that damn chocolate! I crawled from the chair onto the floor. But I didn’t fall asleep, I just couldn’t move. I couldn’t move a finger. But I was conscious, I heard and saw the red-gray pattern of the rug near my nose. And I heard what was happening to others — they either froze stiff in their chairs or fell on the floor. Then I heard several men come in. A kind of muffled hustle-bustle could be heard. Then I was grabbed under the arms and dragged down some steps. I ended up in a basement. I was trussed up and chained to the wall. Next to me some guy and a girl were in chains too. Someone’s strong hands ripped my shirt off, and I saw them open a sort of long case. There were strange hammers in it; at first I thought their heads were made of glass. Some muscular light-haired man took one of those hammers, swung back, and slammed the guy next to me in the chest with all his might. That same woman in blue went right up to the fellow and pressed again his chest. Then she shrank back. The man hit him again. She came up again, and then said, “An empty nut.” The guy was taken down from the wall and dragged away. The man took another hammer and began to strike the girl’s chest in the same way. The lady in deep blue pressed close to her, like she was listening. The man had struck such a blow that the hammer had shattered and pieces flown off. Again the woman said, “An empty nut.” The girl was unchained, but when they dragged her away, I noticed that blood was trickling out of her mouth, and her legs were thrashing convulsively. At the same time they dragged in another two and started attaching them to the wall. Then the man came up to me with the hammer, swung back, and struck me in the middle of the chest with all his strength. The blow was so powerful that slivers sprayed from the shattered head of the hammer. Everything swam before my eyes from the pain. But I still couldn’t move. The woman in blue pressed her ear against my chest, listened, and shrank back. He hit me again. Everything went blurry. The beautiful woman came up close again, wiped shards of the hammer off my chest with a blue glove, and I realized that the hammerhead wasn’t glass at all but ice! She pressed her ear to my chest. I began to lose consciousness. The last thing I heard was “An empty nut.” Then everything was just like it was — the Odeon bar, the police, alcohol in my blood, a broken breastbone, a crushed chest...This affair surfaced in my memory a year ago. I wrote it all down immediately so I wouldn’t forget anything. On leaving the hospital after the accident and thinking about the girl who had been beaten to death, I went straight to the library and dug out the newspaper files for the summer of 1972. And I discovered something striking! It turned out that that summer in Zürich four girls and two young men disappeared without a trace! Their photographs were published in the paper. All of them were blond and blue-eyed. In the very same summer, forty-eight people in a condition of alcoholic and narcotic inebriation had been hit b
y cars. All of them had serious wounds to their chests. The chief of the Zürich police in an interview in Neue Zürcher Zeitung declared that he had never seen such a mass series of young people being hit by cars during his entire twenty years of service. With great difficulty I found three of the forty-eight, all my age, who had suffered that summer. All of them had blondish hair (two had already gone gray) and blue eyes! And all of them had seriously scarred chests. One even showed me the scar in the center of his breastbone. And all of them had been at that Led Zeppelin concert! And later, as I did, had signed up for the Robert Plant Fan Club. But they hadn’t been in any villa. And to my stories about the basement where we’d had the breath knocked out of us with an ice hammer, they reacted, to put it mildly, with skepticism. My attempts to contact the owners of the villa were also unsuccessful. My family basically thinks that I dreamed all this up when I lost my short-term memory. My doctor is certain that this is a temporary aberration caused by the memory loss. Let God be their judge...When I took to surfing the Internet, curious about abductions, and I finally came across your site, I shouted out for joy! I have read so many testimonies! So many people were kidnapped and beaten with an ice hammer, beaten till they died! So that means that I’m not insane! That means it all happened! Who did this? Why? Who are these vile beings? How I would like to find out!!