“‘We know all about you,’ this dirty little spy says. ‘We know you have sung at funerals and know the Georgian laments. We’ve gotten word from Moscow that they want you to keen for the Great Leader.’
“I don’t know the first thing about it, of course. I’ve sung at many funerals, but Christians don’t sing these pagan laments. It’s just wailing, not true song. Well, never mind, I think, I’ll go anyway! How could I deny myself the pleasure?
“It’s impossible to say how many of us there were altogether. Enough to fill an airplane, at any rate. Some of the others were weeping, some were proud, but all of us were shaking with fear. I admit, I’d never been on a plane before, and I’d never agree to do it except in that kind of situation.
“We landed in Moscow at night, and they took us in buses to some sort of hotel outside the city. They didn’t let us sleep our fill; some Georgian comes to fetch us. A musician, he tells us. He’d be directing us. His face looked familiar, I felt like I’d seen him somewhere before. I stare and stare, and he calls me over and whispers: ‘I’m Mikeladze’s brother.’ Oh, that Satan, how many died at his hands!
“So we wail and lament all day, wail and lament all night, wail and lament all the next day. I’m already sick of it. And we’re only just rehearsing!
“On the evening of the eighth, they announce that plans had changed, there would be no keening. Why they wanted it in the first place, then stopped wanting it, God only knows! Then they loaded everyone into the buses and took us to some godforsaken place. And I lie in bed, screaming to beat the band, ‘Oh, lord! The pain is unbearable! I’m having some kind of attack, oh, the pain!’ I’m thinking there’s no way I’m going back home until I see the two of you. Some bigwig tells me, ‘You’ll have to buy your own ticket, then.’ ‘Owwww!’ I cry. ‘The pain is too much for me to bear! I’ll buy my own ticket.’
“Pour me another glass, Vika. This is the first time in my life I’ve drunk vodka, the first time in my life I’ve ever lied, and the first time in my life we’ve buried a great villain.”
“Not so loud, Nino,” Ksenia Nikolayevna said, touching her shoulder.
Nino nodded and placed her lovely hands over her lips. Victor took her right hand in his left one and kissed it. Something in life was changing. For the better.
CHILDREN OF THE UNDERWORLD
Ilya dashed through the city, trying all the while to figure out where this extraordinary demonstration was headed. He had established that it had many tails, and one of them began—or ended—at Belorussky Station, while another started at the point where three boulevards meet: Petrovsky, Rozhdestvensky, and Tsvetnoy. He pushed his way there, then realized he didn’t have enough film, and, when it was already completely dark, he groped his way home. In one spot, next to the Central Post Office, he had to crawl over a fence. No one, not even the police in that precinct, knew the terrain like the local boys. For years they had played Cops and Robbers here, and they knew all the shortcuts, the back alleys, even the sewage drains and manholes, by heart. There were back stairs in many buildings. If you went in through the main entrance of the building, you could ring the bell at the apartment of one of your classmates, slip in and make a dash down a long corridor, and end up at a door that led to the back stairway, down through another courtyard altogether, and finally into another street.
On the morning of March 7, he loaded his camera, and as soon as his mother had left for work, he hit the streets. That morning, the crowd of people was even denser than it had been the night before. Now Maroseyka Street, where it runs into the square, was blocked not only with trolleybuses, but also with a second line of trucks. It was possible to reach the Hall of Columns only from the direction of Pushkin Square—but you could get there only through Pushkin Street, not Gorky Street. Later they let the crowd onto Neglinnaya Street.
All three of the neighboring boulevards were jammed with people, but at midday the crowd seemed to thin out. The mass of bodies that had been pressed from all sides started to move, and then to run. Some side streets and lanes were opened up and people streamed into them. No one ever found out who laid these traps and ambushes, who contrived these dead ends that people were herded into like cattle; but they eventually squeezed into the back alleys and passageways, through connecting courtyards. They poured in and poured in like water gushing from a burst main.
Imposing Studebaker trucks blocked the streets, and there were countless soldiers and police. Ilya, pressing his camera to his stomach, slipped in and out among the cars. He crawled under one of them, and when he emerged on the other side, he ran right into Borya Rakhmanov, an eighth-grader. Borya was determined to maneuver through the pandemonium to get to the Hall of Columns. For Ilya, it was the pandemonium itself that was most interesting.
This was not unlike the annual May Day and November 7 celebrations, with their serried ranks of vehicles and uniforms, cordons, and barricades. Boys who lived in the center of the city had long been familiar with this kind of holiday turmoil and never missed a chance to mingle in the throng. But this time something truly monumental was unfolding. Ilya wanted terribly to clamber up above the level of the crowd, so he could get a shot looking down on it. He tried to get Borya to come with him to a roof he knew of, but Borya didn’t want to.
Idiot, Ilya thought. I’ll get to the Hall of Columns faster by rooftop than he will on foot.
He decided to go by way of Krapivensky Lane. Just then the crowd staggered, then surged, carrying him off toward Neglinnaya, while Borya was swept off in another direction.
Ilya caught one last glimpse of him—his face gone red, his mouth agape. He was shouting something, but Ilya couldn’t make out what it was above the din. The air was filled with a strange, haunting roar—a composite of howls and screams, and something resembling song. For the first time in two days, Ilya was suddenly beside himself with alarm.
He had to make it to an archway that he knew led into a courtyard with a toolshed. From that roof he could easily climb up to the roof of the building next to it, a four-story structure. Ilya lurched off in the direction of the archway, but realized that people were trying to stay away from the buildings, keeping well within the throng so as not to be crushed against the trolleybuses lined up bumper to bumper along the edge of the street. People were thrashing and struggling on the road right next to the trolleybuses. Some people, crushed and lifeless, were slumped against the sides of the buses; others trampled them underfoot. In order to made it to the sidewalk, Ilya had to squeeze between these bodies—could they really be dead? No, it can’t be true. But there was no other way. He realized he would have to duck for cover immediately under the big belly of the trolleybus or get smashed against the side of it. All the while he looked after “Fedya,” his trusty camera—he didn’t want the lens to get smashed. He stamped out a tiny space for himself next to the wheels, then dove underneath. There, under the bowels of the trolleybus, it was pitch-dark and stuffy, crammed with bodies, arms and legs entangled, wearing heavy overcoats. He crawled over them, struggling through the dank stench. Someone moaned. He emerged on the other side, landing right in the arms of a fat soldier with a trembling, moist face. A little boy of about five, pale and immobile, dangled in his arms.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“This is where I live.”
“Scram. Go home, and stay there.”
The soldier shoved him toward the archway, and Ilya darted into the courtyard. The toolshed was still there, where it belonged, a wooden garbage-can shed flush with its outside wall. Ilya climbed up on the shed, then onto the roof of the toolshed. He knew that above it there were some convenient ledges and niches—he remembered them from the last time he had played Cops and Robbers—that made it easy to clamber up to the roof of the “spotted house,” made of alternating red and white bricks, provided that the third-floor window was still smashed and he could wriggle through.
The winds of fortune were still at his back. He had escaped the deadly throng unhar
med, and now there was another stroke of luck—the window had still not been fixed.
There was one terrifying moment when he tried to pull himself up by the window frame, and it wobbled unsteadily, as if it might fall off. But he didn’t plunge to his death: He made it onto the broad windowsill and scrambled inside. But another surprise lay in wait for him. The attic was locked, with a new big padlock dangling from hasps so sturdy he would never be able to break them off without special tools.
But the building was an odd design, and the windows in the main stairwell faced in two directions: on the third floor they looked onto the courtyard, and on the second and fourth, onto the street. Ilya went down to the fourth floor and peered out at the street. It looked like a black river. The heads on the surface of this river looked like curly clumps of fur, and they undulated and stirred like the pelt of some dreadful beast. Ilya got out his camera. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to get a good shot from this distance, so he decided to take it from the second floor. On the second floor he was able to open the window. From below he heard a sound that was not so much screaming as a rhythmic howling, punctuated with piercing shrieks and cries. From this vantage point the crowd no longer resembled a living pelt. The heads were like dark stones pressed tightly together. They oscillated in place, moving to and fro, locked in rhythm, but unable to gain any momentum and break free. It was a road of living cobblestones dancing in place.
Ilya took a few photographs, then decided that it would be more effective after all if he took them from the fourth floor. He had already gotten over his recent scare.
Suddenly, a drunken woman in a red housecoat poked her head out of an apartment and barked, “What’s going on? You got nothin’ better to do?”
She reinforced her indignation with a string of curses. Ilya was at a loss for words.
He was clever, so he didn’t bother to answer her back, but gestured to his mouth and waved his hands around his ears, as though he were a deaf-mute. The woman spat in disgust and turned away.
On the fourth floor, Ilya used up almost all his film, and started thinking about trying to head home. It was clear to him that his usual route up Rozhdestvensky Boulevard from Trubnaya Square, then crossing Sretenka and coming out on Chistoprudny, was impossible. But he thought that if he were able to push through the crowd on the square and make it to the other side, it might be easier. He had no way of knowing that the crowd was streaming down Rozhdestvensky to Trubnaya Square, where it collided head-on with the living human current emerging from Petrovsky Boulevard, forming a giant, deadly whirlpool.
He had no intention of holing up in this building forever, though, and his mother was already no doubt frantic with worry. He sat there on the windowsill a little while longer, wondering whether he should use up the last of his film now, since the light was fading, or save a few shots for later. Then he got sick of sitting and decided to get out of there, no matter what.
It was even harder to get out of the courtyard than it had been to get in. But he made all the right moves: he rang the doorbell of an apartment on the first floor and asked the resident, an old man, to let him exit through the other door, and thus reach the street. The old man shook his head, and struggled to explain, through inarticulate moans and gestures, that the front entrance was locked, but that he could go out through the boiler room.
This old guy isn’t just pretending to be a deaf-mute. Ilya laughed to himself, always amused by coincidences of this kind. The courtyard was completely deserted, but through the walls he could hear the dull but mighty roar of the compressed horde. Ilya saw the boiler room, but discovered it was locked. He went around it to the other side and climbed onto the roof, then scrambled up to the top of the outside wall and leapt down onto a stretch of cordoned-off sidewalk. Now he had to slip through the military cordon to blend into the crowd. He ran a ways to get nearer to the intersection, and slid between two soldiers onto the pavement packed with people. He understood immediately that he had made a mistake; he should never have left the building where he had taken cover. He was dragged off by an unremitting force, like the undertow in a great ocean. The traffic light was blinking up ahead.
Now Ilya became truly paralyzed with fear: he was afraid not for his Fedya, which might be smashed to smithereens against the pole of the stoplight, but for what might happen to his own head. He wasn’t even able to move his hands, which were trying to shield the camera from blows. The camera was pressing hard into his stomach. He felt no pain, but rather a terrible despair. He was carried along toward the traffic light, and just to the left of it. A man with a crushed face was pressed up against the pole. He was dead, but there was no room for him to fall down.
Suddenly, the ground under Ilya’s feet shuddered and opened up. He plummeted into a sewer—the manhole cover had given way under the trampling feet of the crowd. Ilya made a soft landing on top of a roll of oakum left behind by a water department crew. To his left was a grate, one side of which was slightly ajar. Ilya pulled, and it opened completely. He stuffed himself into this little burrow, and for some reason closed the grate behind him. This instinctive motion saved his life. People kept falling into the sewer after him for several minutes, until it was crammed to the top with bodies; as the one on the very bottom of the pile, he would certainly have suffocated. The bodies of the others were compressed so tightly and compactly that the thousands of people trampling over them had no idea they were walking on human flesh. Inside his burrow, he heard their screams.
Meanwhile, aboveground, a monstrous, invisible wave suddenly swept everyone off, hurling them against walls and barriers, into the sides of trucks, and against the chain of trolleybuses. The guards had opened a passage leading into the depths of a closed-off area, and people assumed that they were finally about to escape to safety, somewhere beyond the bone-crushing pressure. Ilya saw none of this. In fact, he saw nothing at all. It was pitch-dark.
Ilya lay in his dark burrow for what seemed a long time, then began groping the walls. He discovered a large pipe leading slightly downward. He started to crawl along it. He crawled and crawled, and then the pipe made a slight turn and started leading upward. He had wrapped his camera in his woolen cap and stuffed it under his belt. After some time, he paused and slept a little while, and when the bitter cold forced him awake, he couldn’t remember right away how he had come to be in this dank hole. He lifted up his head and saw a large, rectangular grate about six feet above him. It wasn’t that there was light on the other side—just that the darkness there was not as thick. He was terribly thirsty. The stench was foul, but not from sewage; it smelled of rusty iron and rats. He didn’t see any rats, though—they must have been running in a dense mass toward the Hall of Columns, too.
He had to get out of there. Thin, ladder-like iron brackets jutted out from the vaulted walls leading up to the grate above his head, and he began to climb. He made it to the top with ease, but the grate turned out to be welded shut. He couldn’t possibly force it open to get through. He descended again, curled into a little ball, and fell asleep. When he woke up, the light from above seemed stronger. He moved farther along the pipe—it grew wider.
He came to another grate, about fifty yards from the first. He felt around for the brackets and began to clamber up them. The grate wasn’t welded shut this time; it was secured fairly loosely, but there was a lock on the outside. Ilya kept going. The grates appeared at regular intervals, fifty yards or so apart. He passed eight of them, investigated each one, and found that almost all of them were welded shut, except for two, with locks on the outside. Soon he lost count. He dropped off to sleep several more times from exhaustion, woke up, then kept going.
Three or four grates in a row were directly under the feet of the surging crowds. He couldn’t see them, since there was no light, but he heard the dreadful roar, and understood that he shouldn’t even try to exit there. Once he came upon a broken grate—half a dead body dangled through the gaping hole.
He had no idea what direction h
e was headed in, but he understood clearly that the pipes were his only way out, and that he had to keep moving along them, though he didn’t know where they would lead.
He lost track of time. Suddenly, he saw a grate, beyond which shone a bright yellow light. He climbed the brackets, touched the grate, and it opened. He crawled out and discovered that he was standing under the streetlamp in the courtyard of the building where Sanya Steklov lived. He had just enough strength left to make it to Sanya’s door and ring the bell.
Anna Alexandrovna opened it.
Ilya collapsed. His hands were clasping his stomach, where Fedya was still safely tucked away under his belt.
It was eleven in the evening on March 7. Anna Alexandrovna did what she could for Ilya: she undressed him, carried him to the bath with the help of a neighbor, and waited for him to open his eyes. Then she washed him off with a big shaggy sponge, carefully avoiding his wounds. His whole body was black and blue; his stomach was one big bruise. She was surprised that this skinny boy, with a completely boyish face, was already so well equipped for manhood. He got out of the bath by himself, made it to the divan, and collapsed again. They put a woman’s nightgown on him, covered him with a blanket, gave him sweet strong tea. Then, stuffing a big pillow behind his back, they propped him up to feed him some soup. He fell asleep.
The Steklovs sat at the table in silence.
“Nuta, I think a lot of people must have died today,” Sanya said to his grandmother, his voice a whisper.
“Most likely.”
Then Sanya sat down next to the sleeping Ilya, hoping he would wake up and tell him everything that had happened. His feelings for his friend were strong and complex: he was proud of him, and a bit envious that he himself wasn’t like Ilya, but he didn’t really want to be, either. He also understood that Ilya was a man—and it was not only the dark fuzz on his upper lip that attested to this, but the dark path of hair under his belly leading down to his large male member, which was not made just for peeing. He had never seen a naked man before today: he had never been taken to the public baths.
The Big Green Tent Page 7
