The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

by The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  Maybe now would be a good time to mention a few things about my appearance, using as reference the letter my friend Repin wrote to the journalist Fingal. I quote it only to aid the reader’s imagination, and not to further my vanity. “His complexion is dark,” Repin wrote, “with a reluctant to everything expression of his regularly proportioned face, he cuts his hair short, speaks slowly and with an effort.” This was all true, but such a manner of speaking was not a consequence of illness—it stemmed from the sorrowful sensation, rarely even acknowledged by ourselves, that our internal life is of interest to a very few. However, I was fixedly curious about every other soul, and this is why I expressed myself little and listened more. And this is why when several people gathered, animatedly determined to interrupt each other as much as possible, to attract maximum attention to themselves, I usually withdrew to the side.

  For three weeks I slept in the apartments of my friends and friends’ friends, in a course of a compassionate relay. I slept on floors and sofas, on the kitchen stove and on empty crates, on chairs pushed together, and once on an ironing board. During this time I saw plenty of interesting things, the glory of life resolutely fighting for warmth, people dear to it, and food. I saw the stove being stoked by a china hutch, the kettle being boiled over a lamp; I saw horsemeat cooked in coconut oil and on stolen newels from ruined buildings. But all of it—and more, and much greater than this—is already described by many quills, shredding the novelty to bits, and we won’t capture it. Other events are pulling me along—the ones that happened to me.

  IV

  By the end of the third week I contracted acute insomnia. How it started is hard to say, I only remember that I fell asleep with greater and greater difficulty, and woke up earlier. During that time, a random encounter led me to a dubious shelter. As I was walking along the Moika Canal and amusing myself with the sights of fishing—a peasant with a net on a long rod sedately followed the granite embankment, occasionally lowering his contraption into the water and pulling out a handful of tiny fish—I met a store owner from whom I used to buy groceries; the man now had an office job of some sort. He was admitted to a multitude of homes on some official household managerial footing. I did not recognize him right away: not an apron, not a cotton shirt with a Turkish pattern, nor mustache nor beard; the former shopkeep wore severe military garb, was cleanly shaven, and resembled an Englishman, but with a Yaroslavl tint. Even though he was carrying a very thick briefcase, he lacked the power to just house me wherever he pleased, but he did offer me the empty quarters of the Central Bank, where 260 rooms stood like pond water, quiet and empty.

  “Vatican,” I said, slightly recoiling at the thought of such apartments. “But isn’t anyone living there? Or maybe someone does come by, and if they do, will the janitor call the police?”

  “Oh,” the ex-shopkeep said. “That house is not far; let’s go and see for yourself.”

  He took me through a large yard, crossed by arched gates of different yards, looked around, and, as there was nobody there, headed confidently to the dark corner, where the back staircase led us upward. He stopped on the third landing in front of an ordinary apartment door; there was trash stuck under it. The landing was thickly littered with soiled paper. It seemed uninhabited silence from behind the door seeped through the keyhole in slabs of nothingness. There the shopkeep showed me how to open the door without a key: pull the door handle, shake and press it upward, and then two halves swung open, since there was no latch.

  “There is a key,” the shopkeep said, “but not with me. Who knows this secret, can enter easily. Just don’t tell anyone the secret, and you can lock the doors from the inside as well as the outside, just slam them shut. If you need to leave, peek at the staircase first—there is a small window for that (indeed, at the face height in the wall near the door there was a spy hole with broken glass). I won’t come in with you. You are an educated man, you’ll see how to arrange yourself best; just know that you can hide an entire regiment in there. Feel free to stay for three nights or so; as soon as I find some other housing for you, I’ll notify you immediately. And to that effect—please excuse the delicate subject, but everyone needs to eat and drink—please accept this as a loan until your circumstances improve.”

  He slung flat a fat wallet and pressed into my silently limp hand, as if paying the doctor for a visit, several bills, repeated his instructions and left, and I closed the door and sat down on a crate. Meanwhile the silence we always hear inside us—the reminder of life’s sounds—already beckoned me, like a forest. It was hiding behind the half-closed door of the neighboring room. I stood up and started exploring.

  I passed from door to door of tall, large rooms like a man stepping on new ice. It was spacious and resonant all around me. As soon as I left one set of doors, I already saw others in front of me and to the sides, leading to the diminishing light of the farther away, darker entrances. Paper was strewn about on the parquet floors like dirty spring snow; its abundances reminded one of the heaps on the sidewalks of shoveled streets. In some rooms one had to walk on its wobbly debris, knee-high, starting at the very doors.

  Paper in every variation, of every purpose and color, spread its omniscient commotion with a truly magnificent scale. It swept up the walls in snowdrifts, hung onto the sills, flowed in white floods from one square of parquet flooring onto the next, streaming out of the wardrobes, filling the corners, occasionally forming barriers and plowed fields. Notebooks, forms, ledgers, dust jackets, numbers and rulers, texts printed and handwritten—the contents of thousands of cabinets everted before my eyes—my gaze wandered, intimidated by the magnitude of the spectacle. All rustles, all footfalls, and even my own breath sounded as if pressing against my ears—so grand, so engrossingly acute was this empty silence. The entire time the dull smell of dust followed me; the windows were double-paned. As I glanced through their evening glass, I saw either the trees by the canal or the roofs of the annexes or the facade of Nevsky Palace. It told me that these quarters circled the entire city block, but its size, owing to the frequent and tedious tactility of its space, sectioned by the constant walls and doorways, felt like the trek of many days of walking—the feeling opposite to what we mean when we say Little Street or Little Square. Even when I first started my exploration, I compared this place to a labyrinth. Everything was monotone—heaps of trash, occasional emptiness, marked by windows and doorways, and the expectation of many other doors devoid of human commotion. So would a man move, if he could, inside the mirrored realm when two mirrors repeat to the point of numbness the space they captured, and all that would be missing was his own face looking through the doorway like a frame.

  I have traversed no more than twenty rooms but I was already disoriented and started to note signs as not to get completely lost: a slab of drywall on the floor; a broken bureau over there, and here a torn-out door panel propped against the wall; the windowsill buried under lilac inkwells; heaps of used blotting paper; a fireplace; an occasional cabinet or an upturned chair. But even these signs started to repeat: as I looked back, I noticed with surprise that I occasionally happened somewhere where I had already visited, and only realized that I was mistaken by noticing an array of additional objects. Sometimes I happened upon a steel safe with its door hanging open like an empty stove, a telephone that looked more like a post box or a mushroom on a birch; a folding ladder; I even found a black hat form that included itself in this inventory for some unknown reason.

  The dusk already caressed the depth of the halls, glowing white with paper in a distance, the nexuses and hallways grew indistinct in the dusk and the clouded light twisted the parquet into rhombic patterns across doorways, but the walls adjacent to windows still shone in places with the tense glow of the sunset. The memory of what I left behind as I passed coagulated like milk the moment new entrances opened up before me, and I, at my core, only knew and remembered that I was walking on trash and paper through the
rows of walls. In one place, I had to climb upward, kneading the heaps of slippery manila folders with my feet; the noise as if through the bushes. As I walked I kept glancing back with trepidation—so thick, inseparable from me was the smallest sound, that I felt as if I was dragging bunches of dried-up brooms on my shoes, listening if all this walking would catch someone else’s hearing. At first, I trod on the neural matter of the bank, stomping on black grains of the numbers with a sense that I was violating the harmony of orchestral notes, heard from Alaska to Niagara. I was not looking for these comparisons: they, called forth by the unforgettable sights, materialized and disappeared like a chain of figures made of smoke. I felt like I was walking on the bottom of an aquarium after the water had been drained from it, or among the ice floes, or—and this was the most distinct and gloomy impression—that I was meandering through past centuries turned into the present. I walked the length of the inner corridor, so twistedly long that one could ride a bicycle along it. At the end of it there was a set of stairs, and I walked up to the next floor and descended a different flight of stairs, having passed a moderately sized hall crowded with armature. I could see orbs of matte glass, tulip- and bell-shaped lampshades, serpentine bronze chandeliers, coils of wire, heaps of china and copperware.

  The next confused passage took me to the archives, where in the crowded darkness of bookshelves, slicing the space in parallel rows connecting the floor and the ceiling, the passage was impossible. A mess of copied books rose all the way to my chest and higher; I was unable to take a good look around—so jumbled together everything was.

  I took the side door and followed the semi-dusk of whitewashed walls, until I saw a large arch spinning between the vestibule and the grand central hall, lined with two rows of black columns. The alabaster rails ran along the tops of the columns in a giant rectangle; I could hardly discern the ceiling. A person suffering from fear of open spaces would’ve left covering his face—so far away was the other end of this space that could accommodate throngs, where the opposite doors were black rectangles no bigger than playing cards. A thousand people could dance here. In the center there was a fountain, and its masks, with mockingly or tragically open mouths, seemed a mound of real heads. Abutting the columns, a long counter unfurled, guarded by a matte glass barrier and red lettering indicating cashiers’ and bookkeepers’ offices. Broken dividers and ruined cubicles, the desks pushed against the walls were almost invisible, swallowed by the hall’s enormousness. It took an effort for a human gaze to collect these objects indicating gutted life. I stood immobile, taking it all in. I started to develop the taste for this spectacle, to understand its style. Once again I understood the elation of a great conflagration’s eyewitness. The temptation of destruction sang its romantic insights—it was as if a unique landscape, terrain, or even an entire country. Its coloring naturally transitioned my impression into a suggestion, similar to a musical suggestion of the original motif. It was difficult to imagine that at some point a multitude of thousands moved through here, with thousands of concerns in their thoughts and briefcases. Everything was now stamped with decay and silence. But the air of unheard of daring blew from door to door—a magnificent, unstoppable force of nature, crushing everything as easily as a foot flattens an eggshell. This impression sowed a peculiar mental itch, pulling my thoughts toward catastrophes with the same magnetic force that pushes us to look into an abyss.

  It seemed that a single echoing idea surrounded every form here, and followed like ringing in one’s ears—a thought that resembled a motto:

  “Finished and is silent.”

  V

  Finally I grew weary. I could barely discern the passages and the stairwells. I was hungry. I could not possibly hope to find an exit to go out and buy something to eat. In one of the kitchens I slaked my thirst with some tap water—to my amazement the water ran, although weakly, and this insignificant sign of life refreshed me on its own. Then I started to choose a room. It took a few more minutes, until I came across an office with a single door, a fireplace, and a telephone. The furniture was largely absent, and the only thing one could lie or sit upon was a scalped and legless sofa, bristling in all directions with flayed leather, springs, and horse hair. In the alcove in one of the walls there was a tall hazelnut cabinet—locked. I smoked a cigarette or two, until I reached a relative mental equilibrium, and prepared for my rest.

  It was a long time since I had experienced the joy of exhaustion—deep and restful sleep. During the daylight I thought of the nightfall with the caution of a man carrying a vessel overflowing with water, trying not to get irritated, almost certain that this time my fatigue would win over the tedious alert consciousness. But the closer it would get to midnight, the more my senses confirmed their unnatural keenness; a dark liveliness, like flashes of magnium in the dusk, wound my nerves into a resonant to a smallest impression, taut string, and it was if I woke from day into the night, with its long journey inside a restless heart. My fatigue would dissipate, my eyes pricked as if by dry sand; every incipient thought immediately developed in every possible complexity of its implications, and the imminent long and idle hours made me indignant, like compulsory and fruitless labor I could not avoid. With my every fiber, I summoned sleep. In the morning, with my body as if filled with hot water, I sucked in the mendacious presence of sleep in pretend yawning, but the moment I would close my eyes I would immediately experience the senselessness of this situation, like does everyone who closes his eyes during daylight. I had tried every remedy: staring at motes on the walls, counting, immobility, repetition of a single phrase—and all in vain.

  I had a candle stub with me, an absolutely indispensable thing in the days when the staircases were never lit. Albeit dimly, it illuminated the cold height of my enclosure, and I filled the gouges in the couch with paper and constructed a headrest from books. My coat was my blanket. I needed to light the fireplace, so I could watch the fire. Besides, even though it was summer, it was not particularly warm. At least I had something to do, and it cheered me up. Soon sheaves of ledgers and bills burned in the roomy fireplace in a strong flame, crumbling into ash through the grate. The firelight pushed apart the dusk of the open doorway, spreading into a still shining puddle in a distance.

  But fruitlessly secretive this fire burned. It did not illuminate the habitual objects that we study in the fantastical light of red and yellow embers, and find there an inner warmth and light of our souls. It was harsh, like a thief’s bonfire. I lay, propping my head with my numb arm, without any desire to doze off. All my efforts toward it would be an actor’s pretense when he yawns as the crowd watches and lies in bed. Besides, I was hungry and to silence my hunger I smoked often.

  I lay, lazily watching the fire and the cabinet. Then it occurred to me that the cabinet must be locked not without a reason. But what could possibly be hidden in it, if not sheaves of dead papers? What could possibly not yet be taken from there? My sad experiment with a trove of burned-out electric bulbs in one such cabinet made me suspect that this cabinet was locked without intention, just because someone thrifty turned the key. And nonetheless I stared at the massive doors, solid like the front gates of the building, and thought of food. I was not very seriously hoping to find anything edible. My stomach drove me blindly, always forcing me to think in its own stenciled pattern—just like it summons forth saliva at the sight of food. To entertain myself I wandered through a few of the adjacent rooms, and rifled through in the light of my candle nub, and after I did not find even a bread crust, I returned, beckoned by the cabinet ever more. In the fireplace the last of the ashes were dimly burning out. My reasoning dealt with vagrants such as myself. Could someone have locked in a loaf of bread, or maybe a kettle and some tea and sugar? Diamonds and gold would be kept elsewhere, quite obviously. I thought I was in my right to open the cabinet, because of course I would never touch any valuables were I to find them, but as for the edible stuffs, whatever the law said on the matter, I n
ow had a claim.

  As I lit my way, I was not too eager to critique my own assertion so as not to accidentally lose my moral ground. I picked up a steel ruler, guided its tip into the keyhole, pressed against the lock, and pulled backward. The latch rang and came off, the cabinet creaked and opened, and I stepped back, as I saw the improbable. I threw the ruler on the ground in an abrupt movement, I shook and did not cry out only because I lacked the strength. I was stunned, as if by icy water dumped over my head from a barrel.

  VI

  The first tremor of discovery was at the same time the tremor of an instantaneous but terrible doubt. But this was no derangement of the senses. I saw a cache of valuable foodstuffs—six shelves, stretching into the depths of the cabinet, groaning under the heft of their load. It was comprised of everything that had grown rare—the choice groceries of a wealthy, well-fed household, the very taste and smell of which had become a hazy memory. I pulled a desk closer and started my survey.