Ice Trilogy

by Vladimir Sorokin

  “Olga Drobot, New York.” Olga shook her hand.

  “Olga? Are you Polish?”

  “A Russian Jew.”

  “Are you brand new?”

  “Well, not entirely. I’ve been here a week. And you?”

  “My sixth month.”

  “Yikes. Are you used to it?” Olga kept glancing at the moving cavity, the edge of which was covered in drops of sweat.

  “People get used to everything.” Liz’s eyes looked at her calmly. “Do you play with anyone?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “I’m with the Swedes.” Liz smiled slightly. “Come over to our Swedish corner. It’s nice there.”

  “The Americans aren’t bad, either.” Olga stood under an available shower, remembering that she had never seen Liz at the American corner. “I’ll come over sometime. Thanks.”

  The hot water embraced her body pleasantly. Olga moaned with pleasure, leaning back her head and putting her face under the stream of water. But she had to wash up quickly. Letting the water flow over her, she bent her head under a plastic faucet, and pulled down on a small handle. A silvery drop of shampoo dripped on her head like snot. She squeezed out a second on her palm, rubbing the shampoo between her legs, under her arms, and over her breasts. Then, turning to face the queue, she let the stream run down her back and washed her hair. For the first few days, she always looked at the wall when she showered, turning away from the line, not wanting to share this short-lived pleasure, not even a glance, with anyone. Now she liked to look at the naked women waiting their turn. They were all waiting. And in this waiting there was something helpless and inexpressibly intimate and dear. They all had marks on their chests, they had all tasted the ice hammer, they had all survived, they had all been lured here, under the ICE, and they were all like her. The estrangement of the first days had passed. Olga stopped feeling shy and wild. She had already grown accustomed to it.

  Olga put her soapy head under the shower and washed the foam off her hair. She put her thigh under the water and began to wash it with her hands.

  “Any dog fur grown in yet?” Liz asked and the Norwegians standing in the nearby line laughed.

  “It’s more likely bitch tits will grow in.” Olga grinned, washing her crotch and glancing at Liz’s one neat nipple. “The only problem is who to nurse?”

  “What do you mean who? The Chinese!” said a Norwegian, laughing.

  “There’s not enough milk for all of them,” Liz objected calmly.

  Everyone roared with laughter. There was a certain comfort and freedom in this laughter. A certain oblivion. Olga liked standing under the streams of warm water and listening to the laughter. It allowed her to forget about everything for a moment. She closed her eyes.

  “Sweetie, speed up!” others in line shouted.

  Olga came to. It was time to hand over her place of natural oblivion. She left the water, shook herself off, and headed for the exit. A Czech girl slapped her rear end and whistled at her. Kristina winked and poked a finger at her wet stomach. Olga, laughing, shook a fist at them as she walked by. Leaving the showers for the changing room, she took a thin but clean towel from her hook, rubbed her hair, then her body. Leaving her gray working clothes on the upper hook, she took down the “inside” outfit, a sand-colored pair of pajamas with the number 189 on the shoulders, and put it on. She took a short brush from the breast pocket and brushed her dyed hair while looking in a round mirror attached to the wall between the hooks. She observed that her natural reddish hair was already quite noticeable at the roots. Sticking her socks and underwear in a pocket, she put on her slippers and went into the cafeteria through an adjoining door.

  The spacious, calm, light-green cafeteria contained all of the prisoners in the bunkers. It smelled like boiled vegetables, and the same light classical music played. Men and women, coming out of the showers, lined up together for food. Olga looked for Bjorn in the crowd but couldn’t find him: he was probably still washing. However, she immediately noticed the Russians, who had a lively conversation going. She walked over to them.

  “Ah, here’s our Stakhanovite!” said Sergei, a tall guy with a white-toothed smile and a shock of smoky-blond hair.

  “What’s a Stakhanovite?” asked Olga.

  “It’s a worker who massively exceeds quotas,” explained Lyosha, a chubby fellow with a round child’s face and lively, dark-blue eyes.

  “Forgotten Russian in that America of yours, have you?” grinned Boris, a homely, thin man. “Go on, get in ahead of us.”

  “I don’t remember all the words,” said Olga, getting in line in front of them.

  “Well, that’s as it should be,” said the unsmiling Igor, gloomily scratching his unshaved cheek. “There’s all kinds of bullshit in Russian...”

  “Now, you blockhead, don’t go insulting Russia,” said the earthy, fiery-red-haired Pyotr, poking him in the stomach. “I’ll friggin’ lay you flat, don’t you worry!” he said in a comically threatening voice.

  “Get lost, Azazello,” said Igor, shoving him in reply.

  “Gentlemen, don’t quarrel. We’re on enemy territory,” said Sergei in a pretend official voice, and they all laughed tiredly.

  Olga looked at them with a smile. The Russians here in the bunker reminded her of her childhood on the outskirts of Moscow. Along with their words and jokes, the world of her earliest memories surfaced: gray prefab buildings, filthy snowdrifts at the entrance, kindergarten with a potted palm and songs about the little creature Cheburashka and Lenin, her hurried, frantic mother, her stubborn, incredibly talented, and very loud father, her sick grandfather, the “Red October” upright piano, strep throat and the customary Russian New Year’s tree, the neighbor’s cat Bayun, the first grade of Soviet school, the second, the third, the game of rubber bands at recess. And emigration.

  After that — it was only memory.

  For some reason, here in the bunker, Olga cherished first memories more than other memories. Distant and lost in the twilight as they were, it was more pleasant and comforting to fall asleep to these memories of snowdrifts, cats, and strep throat.

  Their turn in line had come. Two Chinese in white coats furnished her tray with the usual food: vegetable soup, a boiled egg with mayonnaise, rice, cabbage salad, two pieces of cold fish in tomato sauce, Jell-O with whipped cream, and a glass of orange juice. Picking up the tray, Olga moved to the third Chinese standing between two pans with the main course. On the left was fish, on the right chicken fingers. Olga chose the fish, and tray in hand, walked toward the Russian table. Three people sat there. But then someone from the American table called her name. A tall, golden-haired fellow, slightly resembling Bjorn, stood and gestured for her to come over. The Russian table was also actively waving at her...Olga halted indecisively, not knowing which to prefer — the forgotten, dimly familiar, but touching Russian world or the well-known, comprehensible, and reliable American.

  “Miss, would you deign to share this modest meal with me?” An old voice with a strange accent sounded next to her.

  Olga lowered her eyes and saw an old man sitting alone at a table. All of the tables here were for two, but most of them were pushed together to form national groups. Virtually no loners remained. She hadn’t noticed this old man earlier.

  “Believe me, I wouldn’t dare to insist. If you have other preferences, do not hesitate to follow them. But I would be extraordinarily touched even by your brief presence at this miserable little table.”

  He spoke perfect, terribly old-fashioned English. But the accent indicated that the old man wasn’t English. Olga placed her tray on his table and sat down across from him.

  “Marvelous. I thank you.” The old man stood, his shaking hands raising his napkin to his narrow, colorless lips and wiping them. “Let me introduce myself — Ernst Wolf.”

  “Olga Drobot,” she said, reaching over the food to shake his hand.

  The old man touched his lips to her hand. His bald head trembled slightly.

&n
bsp; “You betrayed us with the Jerries.” The Russian table laughed caustically.

  “Are you German?” Olga asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you sit at the German table? There are so many of you here.”

  “There are two reasons, my dear Miss Drobot. First, in the course of fifty-eight years of imprisonment, I have come to understand that solitude is a gift from on high. Second, I simply have nothing to talk about with my current compatriots. We have no common themes.”

  “And you think that they will emerge with me?” Olga broke off a piece of her roll.

  “You reminded me of a certain lady who was very dear to me. A very long time ago.”

  “And it was only for this that you...” Olga lifted her fork to put a piece of fish in her mouth but suddenly realized exactly what he had told her. “What? Fifty-eight years? You’ve been here fifty-eight years?”

  “Well, not exactly here.” He smiled, baring his old dentures. “But with them. With the Brothers of the Light.”

  The fork slipped out of Olga’s hand. “Fifty-eight?”

  “Fifty-eight, my dear Miss Drobot.”

  She stared at him. The old man’s face was calm and otherworldly. His pale-blue eyes were attentive. The whites around them were extremely yellow. Judging by the even features of his wrinkled face, now unhealthily yellow and liver-spotted, in his youth he had been a handsome man.

  “When did it happen?”

  “In 1946, October 21. At the villa of my father, Sebastian Wolf.”

  “They hammered you?”

  “Yes. And decided that I was ein taube Nuss. An empty nut.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I successfully became a slave of the Brotherhood. Although, in fact, I had been one before the hammering as well.”

  “They used you before as well? In what way?”

  “The most direct. It is quite easy to use children, honorable Miss Drobot.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My father, Sebastian Wolf, was one of the better-known members of the Brotherhood. And we lived with him. One fine day he decided to hammer me. And my sister as well. She perished, and I survived. Before this he had used us as obligatory decorations. And Mama as well. But she died earlier.”

  “But...how old were you when you were hammered?”

  “Seventeen.”

  Olga stared at the piece of fish on her fork. She picked it up and lifted it to her mouth. And once again dropped it on her tray. “I don’t feel like eating.”

  The old man nodded his yellow head with understanding. “Nor do I. After the final bell everyone has a poor appetite. But then in the morning everyone’s hungry as a horse! The reasons are entirely objective!”

  He laughed.

  There was a childlike helplessness in his laughter.

  “Solitude — is a gift from on high...” Olga recalled.

  “What happened to your father?” she asked, looking at the old man’s trembling hands.

  “The last time I saw my father was when he crushed my ribs. My sister, I admit, had tired him out. And he wasn’t very precise with me: the rib broke in and hit my liver. But I survived. Although since that time my face is yellow, like the Chinese. Believe me, Miss Drobot, in the first days after my arrival here they took me for one of them! I’m friends with the Chinese.”

  He pinched off a piece of chicken and put it in his mouth. His dentures clacked softly. He chewed as though performing hard labor. His thin white hair shook on his yellow head.

  “Tell me, why didn’t they just kill you...us? It would have been so simple. Keeping you and hiding you for fifty-eight years! What for? And us as well...”

  Wolf finished chewing and wiped his lips with the napkin.

  “You see, Miss Drobot, when a person is killed and then burned, something of him still remains. The ashes, for example. And not only that. Something more essential than ashes. When he leaves this world against his will, a man forms a kind of hole in it. Because he is torn from this place forcibly, like a tooth. This is the law of life’s metaphysics. And a hole is a noticeable thing, my esteemed Miss Drobot. It’s visible. It takes a long time to heal. And other people feel it. If the man continues to live, he leaves no holes. Thus, to hide a person is much simpler and more advantageous. From the metaphysical point of view, that is.”

  Olga grew thoughtful. And understood.

  “They killed ‘empties,’ as they call us, only in Russia. Under Stalin, when the Great Terror was on, and later, when the ‘small terror’ took place. The Brotherhood wasn’t worried about metaphysical holes created after the death of individual beings.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Russia itself was one large metaphysical hole.”

  “Really? When I lived there I didn’t notice it.”

  “Thank God!”

  “Why?”

  “If you had noticed it, Miss Drobot, you would have an entirely different expression on your face. And believe me, I wouldn’t have invited you to sit at my table.”

  Olga looked at him attentively. She laughed and clapped her hands. The old man giggled in satisfaction.

  “Eat, eat, Miss Drobot. There’s a long night ahead.”

  Olga set about eating. The old man took his portion of Jell-O and put it on Olga’s tray.

  “And don’t argue with me!”

  His hand and the Jell-O trembled in time.

  “Danke, Herr Wolf,” said Olga.

  “Pazhaluusta,” the old man said in Russian and laughed, his dentures clacking.

  Olga slowly ate half of her dinner. She wiped her lips with a paper napkin and dropped it in her soup.

  “I will take the liberty of asking, Miss Drobot, what is your profession?”

  “Manager. And you? Oh, that’s right...forgive me.”

  “Your question is utterly appropriate. During my prison affair with the Brotherhood, I have done time in seven places. Four of them had rather good libraries. Thanks to them I managed to master three professions: translator from the English (I translated three of Dickens’s novels for myself), cartography, and — you’ll find it difficult to believe, Miss Drobot — an ocean navigator, that is, a pilot.”

  “Cool!”

  “Cool! I love that American word.”

  The old man also finished his meal.

  “Tell me, is there any way they might let us out of here? Sometime?” Olga asked.

  “What for?” The old man’s colorless eyebrows arched, and yellow wrinkles ran across his large forehead.

  “They won’t...let us out?”

  “Miss Drobot, you are too young. That’s why you’re asking such questions.”

  Dejected, Olga fell silent.

  “Stay calm. And stop comforting yourself with illusions. Our life is now divided into two parts: the first and the second. And we can’t get away from that. Therefore we have to try to make the second part more interesting than the first. It is difficult. But it is quite possible. I, to give one example, have managed to do this. And you have to agree that the Brotherhood provides a great deal of help in this regard. Local conditions are incomparable to those in normal prisons. Despite all their ruthlessness, the Brothers of the Light have been extremely humanistic toward us empty shells. They know our weaknesses quite well, and the needs of the meat machines.”

  “Meat machines? Who’s that?”

  “It’s you and me,” said the old man, rising and picking up his tray. “So keep your chin up, Miss Drobot.”

  Smiling, he wandered over to the dish-washing window. The tray shook terribly in his hand. Olga remained at the table. The old man’s words had struck a deep chord in her, making her blood run cold.

  “Two lives. Before and after,” Olga thought, turning the empty glass dripping with orange juice. “So what now? Scrape hides forever? And wait for the lights-out bell to ring? Learn to be a pilot...Ridiculous! No, it’s not possible! No way! I’d rather hang myself in the toilet stall. So what then, aft
er the bell? I won’t go to the windows. They murdered my parents, David turned out to be an asshole...What do I have to lose? I couldn’t have children. Twice...What am I living for? For whom? For Fima? Here, or anywhere, what’s holding me back? I have nothing to lose. Pilot, pilot, now what shore should we head for...‘Baby can you twice find the way to fuckin’ paradise?’ I can’t find it, either...I’ll hang myself. Today. Tonight. For sure, as Pyotr says...”

  She closed her eyes.

  A large, familiar hand touched her back.

  “Bjorn!” she said, without opening her eyes.

  “Why do Russians wash and eat so fast?” Bjorn hung over Olga like a bell tower, smelling of cheap shampoo and clean clothes.

  “You know, I’m actually Jewish.” Olga opened her eyes.

  Bjorn’s face was content. His cheeks were flushed from the shower.

  “What a positive personality,” Olga thought enviously as she looked up at him. “A regular walking security complex. Healthy food throughout childhood...and they have good dairy products in Sweden...”

  “I just wanted to eat with you,” he admitted honestly.

  “Tell me, do you ever get depressed?” Olga stood, picking up the tray with the remains of her food.

  “It happens sometimes,” he said, taking her tray. “But I know how to fight it off.”

  “Teach me.”

  “There’s no basketball court here. Only a hockey rink!” Smiling at her, Bjorn took a few sweeping steps with her tray.

  Olga followed him.

  “I wonder, are there rebellions here?”

  “You already asked. No, there haven’t been any group ones.”

  “You already told me.” She yawned nervously. “Well, so, should we go?”

  “I have to eat.”

  She clenched and unclenched her fists.

  “Do you want to hang out together today?”

  “I wouldn’t mind...Which corner?”

  “We could go to ours, the Swedish table.”

  “They invited me over there today, too!”

  “We’ve got a tight group.” He set the tray in the return window.

  “Let’s try...” Olga yawned nervously again, and shivered. “Am I pale?”