Sometimes, though, a Riphean would survive an encounter with the Stone Maiden. Never again did a man like that venture beyond the city limits or have anything to do with the gem business, and according to rumors he couldn’t see himself in mirrors, as a result of which he lost his sense of self and would restlessly finger his own face, squeezing the solid parts hard and grabbing the soft flesh in thick folds. Whenever anyone addressed him, the poor man would immediately get distracted verifying his own presence and the presence on his person of appropriate clothing. The hesitation, which was accompanied by a survey of his buttons and a bow to his own trousers, was brief but so unpleasant to his interlocutor that a former rock hound who sincerely promised himself to henceforth lead only an ordinary, licit life could never get a career going. In rare cases, the Stone Maiden’s lover would run off with her, taking none of his possessions, and laying out his money—sometimes wads of dollars in rubber bands—neatly in that same obvious place where his last letter would have lain had he killed himself. Experienced cops who had studied the M.O. of these kinds of disappearances called this spot the “mailbox.”
Sometimes, if the relatives were especially insistent and refused to believe in the irrevocability of the event, the cops would manage to trace the first leg of his journey. For a while the police would work on a story about the standard runaway under the influence of drugs. According to witness testimony, he and his girlfriend had acted as if they didn’t know the city at all and every minute feared losing each other. All this was reminiscent of two butterflies dancing in the air, blindly following a bizarre curve—and then suddenly the moment came when one or the other sensed the hole they were seeking in space. The runaways’ friends, who didn’t know about his disappearance, would run into him sometimes on their illicit geological explorations: he would appear out of a ruddy darkness like you sometimes see under your eyelids or in the forest around a burning campfire; he would sit down to the shared meal and drink from the metal cup of Riphean moonshine, as strong as the whistle of a locomotive in your head. He would explain his gaiety and the lack of sleep on his gaunt, badly ground-down face by an unusual stroke of luck, and the team would explain his hasty retreat into solitude, where no one was sitting and where the corrosive, ashy smoke from the fire went, the same way. As they went to bed in their tents, the team would envy their friend; later, when they learned what had happened to him, they would silently raise their eyebrows and shake their beards. Who knows whether it was luck or its opposite that came to the man beyond the horizon of their ordinary shared life, beyond the limits of fate?
3
EACH TIME, THEY ARRANGED ONE AND ONLY ONE RENDEZVOUS. HAD it fallen through, Tanya and Ivan would have had no way of seeing each other again, no way of finding each other in this city of four million without outside help.
Because the dimensionless summer was unbearably brief, each time morning came Ivan experienced the previous day’s rendezvous as a loss. He took the banal fact that yesterday cannot be repeated and remains in the past with a painful literalness. This is doubtless how Krylov came to process each rendezvous in his memories and new episodes accumulated inside him that tore at his heart in his hours of solitude. However, there was one important reason why Tanya and Ivan had not given each other their addresses or exchanged telephone numbers (other means of communication like e-mail were forbidden, too). Each time they experienced each other (but not so much each other; both realized they were weak in the face of circumstances and their desires in fact meant very little), they were testing fate. If only Tanya and Ivan had been able to find some reason in or around themselves for what was happening to them! Then they might have figured out whether all this could vanish as suddenly and violently as it had begun. But for now they both required fate’s daily sanction.
At first they met in the same place, next to the Opera, which, in their reinforced concrete city, was one of the few places to boast any beauty—sculpted medallions and garlands—though its boxy structure looked like a bulldozer. Here, by the circular fountain, was a favorite meeting place for young people. Time and again another couple would kiss in the fountain’s spray and be off, while not far away, on the benches, the university exhibit of unmarried girls languished, each with a fluttering book on a tanned knee, every other one wearing fashionable sunglasses that looked like they’d been filled with beet juice. Soon, though, the usual place bored them; moreover, given the regularity of the afternoon hour when Ivan and Tanya could get away from work, this fixed spot stripped the experiment of its essential purity.
That was when they bought two identical street maps with the Opera lit in four tiers of tiny white lights on the front cover and with the latest information on municipal transport and a subway map reminiscent of a complex organic molecule. Now their rendezvous were arranged like this: Ivan would name a street from the index at the back, which was surprisingly long, half comprised of the clumsy names of obscure revolutionaries that reminded him of what it felt like to be going to visit his hard-drinking proletarian relatives; and Tanya would add an address, citing a number at random. The next time they would switch roles. Thus, they told their fortune on the city. Neither of them knew in advance what the building, which was held out to them like a ticket from a lottery drum, would turn out to be. The irrationality of the scheme was heightened by the fact that the maps themselves had been distorted back in Soviet times. The industrial city’s very proportions had been considered classified information, and the distortions, like polio, affected the city’s structure, conferring bizarre kinks on the streets and forcing the clumsy streetcars to make abrupt turns and detach from the overhead power lines.
The secrecy of the rendezvous themselves aggravated the situation; fate really did have to look kindly on the experimenters if they were to have any chance of locking themselves away in some pathetic matchbox for a couple of hours. Thus, fate joined battle with the environment, which seemed bound and determined to offer Tanya and Ivan the harshest options rather than the likeliest apartment buildings. One day, the address they had chosen turned out to be a brand-new private home behind a lattice fence on a burning hot, bare lot, like an elephant in an open-air cage at the zoo. While Ivan was marking time, trying in vain to make himself invisible among the popsicle-slim poplar saplings, the alerted guard checked his I.D. twice. A couple of days later, a random address led Ivan to a very rural street, or rather, what was left of a street, which ended in a huge foundation pit into which chewed-up bird cherry trees had been toppled, their leaves drowning in the clay. The address he was looking for—a dirty pink barracks with two mismatched porches—was barely clinging to the brink, where the soil had already rolled back like a droopy, worn-out mattress. Behind the long, accordion fence, which was black with damp, a wet dog panted and rattled its chain; and from the dilapidated window nearest Ivan, an ill-pleased female face kept an eye on him. This stranger loitering at their door must have upset the locals because a little later a tough-looking sort stripped to the waist sat down on the front steps and stared at Ivan, who found the man’s flab and thick skull, which was covered with a black nap and a few white bald spots, even nastier than the crowbar playing in his paws.
During their wanderings through the industrial zones, adventures were not only possible but highly likely. Lounging on crates beside grated shops, gloomy as prisons, where alcohol was sold, were the local youth. Girls with froggy little faces and large dear pink knees were exactly like the ones Krylov had hung around with in his own proletarian adolescence. There was no point teaching these girls dances, for instance; on the other hand, their physical existence had a language-free irrefutability; unlike young ladies from educated families, each of them had a natural right to have one of the future men put at her disposal. As for the boys, they were on the puny side compared to the crew where Krylov had been the boss twenty years before. In these boys today, impudence was interlaced with fear; the young working studs were trying to pick out a decorative bitch. The dyed hair on their heads reminde
d Krylov of ocean creatures—octopi or actiniae. They were aggressive, though. Krylov was aware that due to the difference in age he was practically a dead man in their eyes. Passing another zone of youths, he tried not to react at all to their hard stares, which couldn’t have risen higher than a meter and a half and nastily grazed his clothes, bag, and watch.
It was nothing short of a miracle that he had only one run-in. A gang sent its resident clown to cut him off—a fine-boned teenager with slender arms on which his jersey sleeves fluttered like red flags. This was a hero for name-calling, not mixing it up. Cupping his palms, he started shuffling and sniffing in front of Krylov, imitating an Asian beggar. Krylov didn’t like hitting someone like that, but to his left the other fighters were lazily rising to their feet. The warriors were in no hurry, but Krylov had no time to lose. He struck cruelly at the little guy, who dodged the blow, as if his being had a huge hole in it, big enough for Krylov’s small fist. Ahead, the narrow, thorny path ran into a wall covered with graffiti, where the letters were made for maximum resemblance to horrible monsters. But they didn’t let Krylov get as far as the dead end. He shook off the first ones hanging on his shoulders like a coat, but the others were more persistent, and their rough hands slipped into his pockets, tearing them and the lining out. They smashed a can of red paint over his head, and he landed one on someone, and again, missed, suddenly was on the ground and with one swollen eye saw gray and black sneakers raining down on him like garbage pigeons.
In a few jerks, as if he were a climber on a cliff, he got to his feet, and the evening in his eyes was instantly replaced by night. Then it got light again, and Krylov saw Tanya, disheveled, with wet down on her temples and a cigarette in her trembling fingers. She was looking at Krylov the way a commander might look at a soldier from his broken army who for some reason was getting up alive.
“What happened to you? My God. Oh my God. I’ve been searching for you in the bushes for a whole hour!” Behind her glasses, Tanya’s eyes burned with fury as her hands felt Krylov’s aching ribs and touched his fat left ear, which had swollen up like a blood-filled parasite.
Through the heavy haze in his head, Krylov was distinctly horrified at Tanya’s stroll through the local landscaping, in the twilight, in her light dress, which would taunt the monsters, who had obviously not gone to their houses to watch “Good Night, Young ‘Uns.”
“Are you all right? Is everything okay?” Krylov in turn grabbed Tanya by her smooth cold shoulders. “Why did you look in the bushes? Am I an alcoholic?”
“You tell me then. What else could I do? Where else was I supposed to find you?”
At this Krylov grasped that Tanya really did have absolutely nowhere else to look for him besides these trash thickets, in the area around the appointed building, on the ground or under it.
“Listen, maybe we could set this up some other way. What’s the point of all this? Now don’t get mad, please, calm down, think about it.” Frowning, Krylov leaned toward her face, which echoed his grimaces like a small silver mirror.
The kiss was painful. Ivan felt the firm lath of Tanya’s teeth, and his own, which were as wobbly as splinters. Pulling back, he was amazed at how badly Tanya’s red lipstick had smeared.
“You don’t understand! You just don’t understand!” Tanya suddenly broke down and turned away, hiding her expression, which was something like despair. “We can’t be like everyone else. I—can’t! Nothing good ever came out of ordinary life for me. And nothing ever worked out for anyone on this side of a television screen. You can take my word for it!”
The unattractive spot under Tanya’s nose oddly changed her, making her look like a fox. Suddenly Krylov grasped that this wasn’t lipstick but his, Krylov’s, drying blood.
The way of life Tanya and Ivan had chosen for themselves turned out to be not only dangerous—nowhere did anyone like the suspicious strangers—but unusually exhausting. Sometimes it took them all that remained of the evening to make their way back from the outskirts (like small towns that the megalopolis had swallowed but not digested completely, with their residual structure and their gypsyish flowerbed for a central square, usually as quiet as a hospital yard). Often, Tanya and Ivan never did get to a cheap hotel. Then their rendezvous consisted of agonizing kisses under the cover of rough bushes and of stupefying marches down a highway or paths like felled trees to senselessly distant bus stops. After a marathon workout like this, Ivan and Tanya didn’t have the strength to want each other. All they cared about was grabbing a bite to eat in some modest diner—and then it would be time to go to their respective homes.
This monastic routine was not to Tanya’s liking. Her need for physical contact was so strict, so insistent, that when luck was with them Tanya didn’t mind the overcrowded third-class hotels full of traders from the Caucasus or the nasty, grimy sheets. She fasted stubbornly and never complained of weariness; her tender, bony arches, which Ivan would massage sometimes, marveling at the violin shape of this perfect creation of nature, had been worn down by her straps to wet calluses, which then looked like they’d been sprinkled with lime and broken shells.
Ivan was concerned and touched by the fact that all the special difficulties, including Tanya’s refusal of multiple intimacies with him, had nonetheless in some higher sense been overcome for his sake, out of her feeling for him. However, he also sensed something excessive here. Besides the real Krylov, who could be ignored sometimes or even gotten angry at over little things, there seemed to be an imagined Krylov, too, an idea that pertained not to Krylov himself but exclusively to the woman who knew best how to handle him. It was this other man whom Tanya fed her selfless sacrifices. The Krylov who had had a part of himself taken away felt a strange emptiness.
A couple of times he tried asking Tanya cautiously whether she wasn’t too tired. Of course she was tired. She had grown noticeably thinner and had stopped wearing high heels, preferring flats for their expeditions, which made her step rather duck-like. But to Ivan’s questioning she energetically shook her head and latched on harder to his sleeve, as if to demonstrate her strength, which had not flagged from their dangerous and arduous journeys.
Ivan already knew that the most dangerous stage was hanging around the building once he’d found it, thereby provoking the local residents and worst of all the cops who protected that territory, so Ivan tried to make sure Tanya didn’t have to wait for him. As close to five as he could manage, when the sun’s light, still daylight, was growing heavy, and through the humid noises of his weary gemcutting the bells of the streetcar began to penetrate as it made its way down their side-street, Krylov aimed to flee the workshop. Sometimes he would cut the boss off in mid-accusation, obviously having gotten wind of Anfilogov’s success. The stones the professor had brought back the previous year, which had sent Krylov into incomparable rapture, had gone out through channels absolutely beyond the fatman’s reach. Nonetheless, the swindler had learned something—or, like a nervous aquarium fish, had felt the seismic shifts in Anfilogov’s business. Now he was trying to provoke Krylov into telling him something, inventing gracious grimaces and even showing him a dark bottle of some kind of alcoholic castor oil, which, since he was not a drinker due to his health, he always carried around the way a suicide bomber carries around an explosive device. As if on purpose, the clients who wanted to find out when the agate insets would be ready for their idiotic dye-cast goods would also move in along about five. To get rid of these people, Krylov would climb through the thickly painted bathroom window and come crashing down in the pointy wild shoots of tiny ox-eyed daisies, where the dog excrement smelled like rotten fruit. Farther, around the corner, was the freedom of Tatishchev Avenue, down which the antediluvian streetcars raced, rattling like cases of vodka, while overhead, across the trestle, the sound of the express light rail stretched out like a double bass. The clock over the Old Passage, yellow and convex, the size of the moon, had always been ten minutes slow.
The city, however, created its own obstacles
on Krylov’s route: the sudden cancellation of transport routes, traffic jams that moved from light to light like mercury in a giant thermometer. As a result, occasionally Tanya did arrive first. When he finally caught sight of her standing in the shadow, Ivan was struck by how lost she looked: literally like a lost thing any passer-by might pick up. The sum of his losses, that is, the sum of their previous rendezvous, struck him hard, and Krylov picked up his pace. She remained motionless, although she had seen Krylov running. Only at the last moment did she take a very short step toward him—and immediately, with a bend characteristic of her alone, she pressed close and snuggled in, closing her eyes for the first kiss, which was complicated, like the touch of a blind man. Feeling as if the woman had sucked out half his brain, Ivan hurried to lead her away—while her eyes were still shut tight and she was languid—but afterward he would imperceptibly scope out the location, always cutting off danger in the form of double-breasted security guards next to iron gates of unknown ownership or their possible opponents—sullen thugs with shaved heads which seemed to have been set on their short necks more than once, creating messy folds on their napes.
It annoyed Krylov sometimes that Tanya herself was fearless. She remained utterly calm and headed where Krylov, had he been alone, scarcely would have. Then he admitted that his forty years did not make him a young man. Dark, untidy parks with vanishing paths, dumps with automobile carcasses as empty as suitcases, suspicious decaying cellars—all this made Ivan tense up. No matter how he tried to remember himself as the kid who gladly went anywhere that hinted of adventure, he couldn’t drum up any enthusiasm for this. How old was Tanya? That he didn’t know. She seemed young but at the same time completely ageless; her paleness created a haze, and gray hair, if any could be found in her coarse, icy-feeling hair, was completely lost in her natural gray aura. Tanya could have been thirty or fifty. He didn’t like thinking just how old. Her perfect skull, which could be guessed through the tender fabrics much more distinctly than usual in a person, was not the image of death. Rather, it reminded him of a high-cheekboned pagan idol—and in some inaccessible way added to Tanya’s attractiveness, letting him understand that inner beauty is not always spiritual, that what can be beautiful in a person may, for instance, be her skeleton. At times Krylov thought Tanya was in some—by no means Christian—sense immortal.
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