Ice Trilogy

by Vladimir Sorokin

  He leaned over.

  “A little. Do you feel like getting together?”

  “No! Not at all.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know...I’ll go and read something.”

  “I’ll come to the library.”

  “Okay.”

  Olga walked out of the cafeteria into the hallway and went into a large, clean bathroom. After urinating into a Japanese toilet with a disgustingly warm seat, she washed her hands, looking at herself in the mirror. Next to her a Romanian girl, a tall, beautiful model, was brushing her teeth.

  “The chicken has a strange aftertaste today.” The Romanian spit out water. “They’re obviously mixing something into it for us.”

  “I had the fish.” Olga touched and smoothed out the wrinkles around her eyes.

  “A sort of metallic aftertaste,” said the Romanian, looking at her teeth. “What is it? Lead? What if it’s mercury? And my teeth are getting discolored. Some kind of metal...Haven’t you felt it?”

  “I ate fish,” Olga repeated, and left the restroom.

  Walking down the hallway, she reached the living quarters. It was very spacious, and fresh from the air-conditioning. Dim lighting illuminated rows of double bunks, stools, and shelves with personal items. The male and female sections were divided by a small passage with no doors. The walls and ceiling of the male half were a grayish green, while the women’s were pinkish gray. The men’s half was called the Garage; the women’s, the Ham. In the Garage and the Ham, dozens of empty beds awaited new owners.

  Olga went over to her bed, took a pack of super-light Chinese cigarettes and a tube of hand cream from her night table, lit up, squeezed out some cream, and, rubbing it in, threw herself on her bed with pleasure.

  “Oh my God...”

  From above, the golden-curled head of the Irish girl Meryl hung down. “Olga, do you have any pads?”

  “Yes.”

  “I forgot to order them. Would you give me a couple?”

  “They’re in the night table.”

  “I’m too lazy to get down.” The Irish girl grinned.

  “And I’m too lazy to get up,” said Olga, blowing a stream of smoke at her.

  Meryl got down, opened the drawer, and took a few.

  “I saw you eating with that yellow German guy.”

  “That’s right. He asked me to.”

  “So he’s got a thing for you.”

  “Probably...He’s an interesting old guy.”

  “They say he’s their old stool pigeon.”

  “So what? Do we have anything to hide?”

  “Well” — Meryl shrugged her shoulders, pulling down her pants and putting on the pad — “a lot of people want to get out of here.”

  “Somehow it’s not really noticeable,” said Olga, smoking with pleasure, staring at the plastic bottom of the upper bed where she’d scratched “Fuck off, Ice!” the first night she’d been there.

  “You’re new. That’s why you think everyone here is content. Everyone just dreams about waiting for the bell and standing up at the gates.”

  Smoking, Olga grabbed her foot and held her smooth heel with pleasure.

  “Meryl, I have neither the energy nor the desire to argue with you.”

  “So I’m right!” Meryl whacked Olga on the sole of her foot.

  The Ham gradually filled up. Conversations hummed, and it smelled of cheap Chinese perfume. Some of the women slept, some played cards, and others went over to the Garage. Men dropped by “to have a cup of water.” It was the only drink allowed in the living quarters; each section had automatic water fountains marked with the characters that meant “water,” which filled plastic cups with ice-cold or hot water. They drank water endlessly in the bunker, in large and small groups, in pairs and alone. The prisoners of the ICE respected water and the characters that stood for it. They invited one another to drink it, they marked birthdays and holidays with it, and with it they remembered the dead.

  After smoking two cigarettes in a row, Olga dozed for about forty minutes to the sound of women’s conversations and the clack of scissors; nearby one Lithuanian was cutting another’s hair. As soon as the click-clack ended, Olga opened her eyes and looked at the wall clock: it was 6:30. Stretching, she stood up, drank a cup of ice-cold water, and headed for the library. There was no television and not even a simple screen with a video machine in the bunker. They never brought magazines and newspapers here, either. Still, the library was quite respectable. Olga walked through the hallway, opened a door with a picture of an open book on it, and found herself in a long, light room with shelves and dozens of tables. The books were on shelves. About fifteen people were sitting and reading. It was forbidden to remove books from the library.

  Olga walked over to the bookshelves.

  Most of the books were in English. There were a few in German, French, and Italian as well. Trying to find something in her almost completely forgotten written Russian, just for the hell of it, the only thing Olga noticed was the collected works of Leo Tolstoy. After spending several hours in the library, Olga had understood its strict principle: Only fiction was to be found on the shelves. There were no books at all on technology, medicine, philosophy, history, culture, geography, or the exact and applied sciences. Likewise there were no newspapers, magazines, or other periodicals. Reference books were entirely missing. There wasn’t any poetry. On the other hand there were quite a number of dictionaries. The largest share of the underground library was occupied by world classics in English translation and a great number of collected works. The authors of detective and pulp-fiction novels were similarly represented in multiple volumes, and the books were at least thirteen years old. Contemporary literature was completely absent. There were very few individual works.

  Olga moved along the shelves slowly. Yesterday she had begun to read Nabokov’s The Gift, but quickly grew bored and picked up Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Reading about the charming Poirot was comforting, but when she was on page 62, lights-out sounded in the bunker. For some reason she didn’t want to return to the Orient Express now. She stopped at the shelf marked “F.” Flaubert? She’d read Madame Bovary in college. It was at the beginning of May when everything was blooming. The image of the decisive and passionate woman, eating arsenic by the handful, had merged with the aroma of blooming narcissus. A strange aftertaste remained in her memory, one which she didn’t care for at all right now. Faulkner? The Bear, which her parents loved, she had never read to the end. Feuchtwanger woke memories of something boring and German. Anatole France? She wasn’t familiar with the author. Fielding? Once again, probably an Englishman. Fitzgerald! Tender Is the Night had been one of her favorite novels when she was younger. She randomly pulled out the third volume of Fitzgerald’s collected works, opened it in the middle. The story was called “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Olga didn’t know it. She sat down at the nearest table and plunged into the story. Olga read quickly. In the charming language she’d loved since her youth, Fitzgerald described the diamond mountain, overgrown with thick forest, which a stingy, powerful man stumbled on by chance one day. He settled on its slopes. The fantastic treasure turned him into a monster. He imagined that he was equal to God, and built a marvelous castle on the mountain. With him in the fantastic castle lived his two enchanting daughters — Jasmine and Kismine — and his obedient wife, mute as a plant. Olga imagined the diamond mountain, covered with forest.

  “Diamonds look like ice,” she thought. “But diamonds don’t melt ...The ice mountain. And we live under it...”

  She raised her head and looked at the ceiling. Little lamps were burning there.

  “Fitzgerald? Boring!” said a woman sitting behind her, who had unceremoniously looked at her book. “Syrup with shit!”

  Olga looked around.

  The woman was plain, with tangled red hair. Her fading, pale-blue eyes looked at Olga with malice and tenaciousness. Her thin lips shook nervously. A whitis
h mustache grew over those lips. Olga hadn’t seen her before.

  “This is what you should read.” The woman showed Olga a book with comic depictions of a soldier on the cover.

  “The Good Soldier Švejk,” Olga read.

  “Do you know it?” the woman asked aggressively.

  “I don’t like army humor,” said Olga, and turned away.

  “Idiot! It’s the healthiest humor there is!” the woman shouted fiercely.

  “Doris, leave her alone,” advised a fat, rosy-cheeked Italian sitting next to the redhead.

  “Idiots! What do they read!” The redhead shook with anger.

  Olga continued reading, not paying attention. The redhead bickered lamely with the Italian. And suddenly, shouting out “Fuck you!,” she spat at her. The Italian slapped her in the face. The redhead began to beat the Italian with a book. They grabbed each other. The redhead’s cry turned into a hysterical, anguished shriek. People moved away; people sitting behind jumped up and tried to separate them. The rest of the library visitors hooted and whistled. Two Chinese guards rushed in the door, grabbed the fighting redhead, and dragged her out of the library while everyone else hooted and howled.

  Everything happened so fast that Olga only shook her head and laughed. “What a bunch of nonsense!”

  “That redhead’s a witch,” the Italian muttered, looking over her scratched hand.

  “Is she out of her mind?” Olga asked. “Who is she? I haven’t seen her before.”

  “She’s from South Africa. They let her out once in a while,” the Italian woman said, sighing. “Her and two other psychos. Why do they keep them here? They should just send them up there, to a normal psychiatric ward...”

  “A Chinese one?” joked a French guy with a buzz cut. “Maybe you’d like to go there?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, don’t forget what’s written on the walls,” a gray-headed old Icelander spat out.

  On the wall hung a black sign: QUIET!

  Everyone who was reading grew quiet. Again Olga immersed herself in the bitterly touching work of Fitzgerald. When the government planes bombed the castle belonging to the owner of the diamond mountain, when he himself grew quiet forever under the shards of diamonds and his lovely daughters became poverty-stricken orphans, Olga’s eyes filled with tears. She read...

  “I love washing,” Jasmine said quietly. “I have always washed my own handkerchiefs. I’ll take in laundry and support you both.”...

  “What a dream it was,” Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. “How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fiancé!

  “Under the stars,” she repeated. “I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to someone. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.”

  “It was a dream,” said John quietly. “Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”

  Olga shuddered, holding back sobs, and covered her face with her hands. Tears leaked through her fingers, and then burst out like a child’s.

  “Just hold on, honey, there’s only forty-two minutes left.” A tattooed fellow slapped The Spy Who Loved Me down on the table. “Bastards, they couldn’t have made the bedtime bell at eight!”

  “Quiet, Shtamp.” A strapping Serb tore himself away from Chase and glanced sideways at the observation camera. “Everything is just fine here. We’re happy with everything.”

  “I want to go-o-o ho-o-o-mmme.” Olga sobbed. “I have a p-p-par-ro-rot there...”

  It felt terribly sweet and bitter to feel tiny and helpless under this mountain of ice.

  A small, pretty American, Kelly, sat down next to Olga, hugged her shoulders, and said, “Sweetie, just hold on. It’ll be soon now.”

  “No, it’s even worse to wait in the library.” A gloomy, light-bearded German spoke up as he got up and put a volume of Simenon back in its place on the shelf. “Sally, let’s go have some water.”

  Sally, the senior inhabitant of the Ham who resembled Martina Navratilova, waved him on without looking up from Fiesta. The tattooed guy followed the German. And so did the quiet, sickly Estonian who had been reading Thomas Mann.

  “The men’s nerves break down.” Kelly took out a handkerchief and wiped away Olga’s tears. “Calm down, sweetie. Your home is here now. And we all love you. We...are your family...”

  “Your brothers and sisters,” muttered an Italian girl, leafing through the copy of Švejk that the redhead had abandoned. “Is this really funny?”

  “It’s a great book,” a Hungarian in glasses answered.

  Olga sobbed quietly.

  Bjorn entered the library.

  “What happened?” He went straight over to Olga, who was still crying. “Did someone hit you?”

  “No, she just got sad.” Kelly stroked Olga.

  “They beat me!” The Italian laughed and suddenly began to sing loudly and deliberately in a man’s bass voice.

  Kelly laughed and applauded. Sally whistled, without lifting her eyes from Fiesta. An old man with cornflower-blue eyes plugged his ears with his fingers. Bjorn sat down next to Olga.

  “Are you all right?”

  “It’s too...” Olga slammed the book, wet from her tears, closed.

  “Fitzgerald,” Bjorn read the author’s name. “I’ve heard of him. Is he the one who was an alcoholic?”

  “Yes.”

  “A lot of American writers are alcoholics.”

  “Yes, yes,” Olga muttered feebly.

  Bjorn stared at Olga. She sat, remote, in Kelly’s embrace.

  “Do you have a bonus today?” Bjorn asked softly.

  “I guess so...”

  “I do too.”

  Kelly’s ears perked up.

  “So you’ll come to us?” Bjorn asked, examining Olga’s ear.

  “Probably...”

  “Hey, big boy, you’re not the only one with a bonus.” Kelly’s yellowish-blue eyes stabbed Bjorn with a glance from behind Olga’s head. “Olga, you were already with us. Our corner is really tight. Really powerful guys. Did you like it yesterday?”

  “Olga,” Bjorn spoke up, “ours is cooler. The Swedish corner is the coolest.”

  “Don’t talk that nonsense in front of me!” exclaimed the Italian girl. “The Swedish corner! You’ll waste your bonus. Come to us. We’ve already merged with the French. And the Albanians are with us, the Romanian, and three Macedonians. The Greeks want to join too. It’ll be the coolest corner of all!”

  “Don’t listen to her, Olga. You know you’re one of us; Americans are the coolest of the lot! And not just up there.”

  “Our group is cooler. Much cooler.” The Italian wouldn’t give up.

  “Olga, you know you were invited to the Swedish corner — ” Bjorn smiled nervously.

  “Don’t go, you’ll waste your bonus for nothing!” Kelly didn’t let up.

  “Shut up!” Sally clapped her book shut and swung it down on the table. “You want to end up in solitary?”

  “There are rules about waiting for the lights-out bell, ladies and gentlemen!” The old man shook from indignation.

  “We’re all equal here, for God’s sake!” exclaimed a pockmarked Swede with bristling white hair.

  “Olga, make the right decision!”

  “Think, Olga!”

  “Quiet, all of you!” Sally clapped her hands. “Read.”

  She opened Fiesta again.

  Kelly stood up, put The Hobbit back on the shelf, and left, cursing. Bjorn sighed deeply, glancing at the camera. Olga turned to him.

  “It’s unbearable,” he whispered, wiping the sweat off his pale face.

  “Twelve minutes.”

  “Sometimes time is elastic,” he muttered. “It stretches and stretches...”

  “And then — snaps.”

  “Right. And then it snaps.”

  Olga sighed and stood up. “All right. I’ll go and drink some water.”

  “Great idea!
” Bjorn grinned nervously.

  Olga put Fitzgerald on the shelf and went into the Ham. Bjorn hurried after her. Inside you could feel the tension: women were sitting on the beds, gathered in groups; the conversation got quieter when Bjorn entered. All of the women held cups of water. The French girls sat near the water dispenser. They were embracing, entwining their arms, pressing their towheads together. Olga walked up, stepping over someone’s legs, pulled out a plastic cup, and pressed the blue button on the automatic water dispenser. Cold water flowed. A French woman with a luxurious mane of tight gold curls lifted her homely, pimpled, long-nosed face, and fastened her large gray-blue eyes on Olga. Olga took the full cup, lifted it to her lips, and sipped a bit. Cold water calmed her.

  “Can’t you come with us?” the French woman asked.

  Olga shook her head. And went to her bed.

  “I just shouldn’t look at the clock,” she persuaded herself.

  She sat down on the blanket. Drank a bit. And looked at the clock: four minutes till. Sally, the Italian, and two Ukrainians came in. Olga drank water in small sips.

  “Youth — is always a dream...” she recalled, looking at the plas- tic cup.

  “One minute!” Sally called out.

  Immediately everyone came to life and moved around. Dropping their things, taking their cups of water, the women went into the hallway.

  “Here we are. The eighth time,” Olga thought, mixing with the crowd and trying not to splash her water.

  In the hallway everyone got all mixed up — men and women. The crowd approached large doors of opaque glass. The doors glowed blue. Conversations and muttering quieted down, the crowd grew still. All the prisoners of the bunker stood next to the door holding plastic cups filled with water. A siren sounded and the door opened. The crowd slowly and tensely began to push into a passageway, which was illuminated by a blue light. In the wall opposite were five windows. Near the windows were two guards with clubs. The prisoners stood, packed tightly against one another, but tried not to push so as not to spill their water. Pressed against the back of a limping Ukrainian, Olga carefully held her cup to her chest, covering the top with her hand. Her heart beat rapidly. Its heavy beats cleared her head of chaotic thoughts. Olga only looked ahead, moving toward the bluish window. Someone cried out briefly, someone else pushed. But the calmness of the crowd controlled the nerves of its individual members. The crowd of prisoners dragged itself to the windows. Each received his own and immediately left the blue room.