2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  Sometimes Ivan would spot Tanya on the bus on his way to their trysting spot and would try to keep from being discovered for as long as possible, in hopes of suddenly penetrating to the place where Tanya existed without him, slipping into the world barred to him and seeing the real Tanya, who didn’t suspect that he was already there, watching her from the thick of passengers being tossed around by the rough shakings of the bus floor.

  He was forced to admit that the world where Tanya sojourned without him was wonderful. In it, people, including the people crushing Krylov in the bus, bore some relationship to Tanya; they might be or become her neighbors, relatives, co-workers; therefore Krylov, clutching the slippery handle, agonized over these glimpses of boundless loneliness. One time, Ivan suddenly imagined that the man sprawled out on the small bench next to Tanya, this man with a head as hard as a turnip, was her mythical husband inexplicably escorting her to her tryst in some bedroom district. Two stops later, though, the man jumped up, revealing a childish snub nose on a broad face with fat circles. He then tugged at his jersey and made his way to the doors, which he slipped through sideways, barely pulling his disorderly briefcase out behind him.

  Rarely did Ivan manage to stay hidden all the way. Tanya’s long eye would discover him, and her face would be exactly the way it was right after waking up from a hotel room nap. She would stretch and push her way through to him, and Ivan, wrapping his arms around her delicate ribs, would take little hops with her at the mighty speed bumps. Even so, instead of getting off at the next stop and hurrying off in search of a hotel, they would ride to the appointed place. It was as if they had to register with some third party who had actually been designated. Being together intensified the bizarreness of them doggedly seeking out the randomly chosen address, questioning occasional badly dressed and uncomprehending passers-by, but never entering the building they’d finally found. The inhabitants of the building, that is, the address’s legitimate holders, were never anyone they might otherwise visit, and they shied away, hell-bent on not being overtaken on the way to their fortified entries; their tan, squarish soles matched the color of the clay characteristic of the outskirts of town.

  Indeed, Ivan and Tanya never could figure out how to fill those few minutes they felt they should spend outside the building they had gone to such trouble to find.

  “I feel as though you and I once lived here together,” Tanya said as she examined another large prefab bloc of apartments, with balconies and without.

  “We’re suffering from a shared false memory,” Ivan tried to joke, but that made Tanya sad, and she quietly picked up some bright piece of paper and a cork and crafted an origami doll.

  Krylov noticed that the more he joked, the more visibly Tanya plunged into an odd sadness, as if they were saying farewell at a train station, parting forever, and there was nothing to fill the final pause before the train pulled out. The pauses in front of the conjured-up buildings they had found together were just like that. Simultaneously, this was where they felt the presence of whoever had brought them together and watched out for them. They divined it in the mysterious image of the lonely bench, the lazy pink stars formed by the overlapping evening leaves, and the peel from a child’s ball, that orange of emptiness eaten up some previous summer. Sometimes the long evening shadows, forming a line of italics under the straight and crude font of the street, promised an answer to the puzzles of things—like the answers printed at the bottom of the page in children’s magazines. But sometimes the third party didn’t show up and it made no sense to wait. Then Tanya would say they needed to mark the spot in some way, and she would toss a few coins onto the shaggy lawn.

  This superstitious practice gave Ivan the idea of marking her. Ignoring the usual request of married lovers not to leave marks (actually, Tanya never did say this explicitly), Ivan would treacherously suck her pliable skin, leaving crescent-shaped bruises to swell up on her bloodless whiteness. These marks obviously went unnoticed, though; her husband apparently paid them no mind, and after a while the bruises would turn yellow and start to look like the nicotine stains you see on cigarette filters.

  Dissatisfied with the effect, Ivan gave Tanya little presents nearly every time they met. There was also a cunning calculation in this: the cheating wives who loved the treasures and surprises they expected from Krylov—who did work with precious stones, after all—never knew how to legitimize the bracelet or ring he had given them; some of these items, which accumulated a bitter film of disuse, were rattling around in Krylov’s worktable to this day.

  Tanya, however, accepted calmly and with dignity the jewelry that Krylov got wholesale, over the workshop owner’s bald head, from the skinny jeweler who worked for the firm. The settings for these knick-knacks were inexpensive, but Krylov chose the stones with taste: moss agates that the eye saw as soft March woods with soggy snow; agates with geodes where the blue amygdule was encased in quartz crystals like large grains of salt; picture jaspers with scenes of ancient volcanoes erupting; and brocade jasper, which made you think of the mystery of life as seen under a microscope. There were tiger’s eye cabochons whose vertical pupils seemed to narrow in the light; incrustations of uvarovite, a saturated, chemical green; peachy cornelians with soft spots; a little bit of real silk malachite, distinguishable even to the lay eye from the Zairian stones that were as tired as linoleum. All this, mined straight from the old land that surrounded the concrete city, cost mere kopeks. Krylov bought the stones in their raw state, after which he himself cut, polished, and selected the stones and came to a quiet agreement with the alcoholic who couldn’t seem to drink away the talent that rested in his hands.

  As for Tanya, the stones seemed to be magnetized to her and looked right, warm and heavy on her chilly skin. Tanya was obviously not trying to hide her pieces of jewelry and wore them constantly, showing up for their rendezvous decked out like the Mistress of the Mountain. At the thought that these knick-knacks spent time where Tanya lived without him, a strange agitation gripped Ivan. Gradually, this provocation made way for some minor shamanism. Passionately wishing to obtain some knick-knack from Tanya’s forbidden world (the way the Americans from NASA who launched the unmanned Voyager-18 dreamed of images of Saturn), Ivan now looked upon his gifts as souvenirs in reverse. A few days before giving them to her, he would carry them around in his pocket, imagining they had already been there; so he would get an inversion of time, a castling of the future and past—which eventually revealed a recyclable resource. Krylov imagined the stones pinpointing Tanya’s location for him, sending out faint radio waves that his tensed brain would detect and read.

  “Here, take this, it’s for you,” Tanya told him one day, digging up a handful of something metal from her purse.

  This happened downtown, where their lot had happily been cast. Nearby, drowning out the hum of Cosmonaut Boulevard, was the historic dam, whose waters spread the smell of blackened wood bathhouse rot and sprayed the air over the little tables at the shashlyk place and the wide flower beds that looked like children’s paintings—even though they still had to get to a hotel with acceptable prices and an obliging management. What Tanya held out to Ivan across her plate of charred meat turned out to be a ring of keys: the unexpectedly heavy, jangling bundle consisted of a magnetic button—the kind that opens front doors—and four works of the locksmith’s art, among which one, in the shape of a prerevolutionary “P,” stood out and felt more solid than the rest.

  “What’s this?” Ivan asked, although he had guessed and his heart had leaped to his throat.

  “The keys to my apartment,” Tanya explained offhandedly, squinting through her glasses, now cloudy from the drizzle, at the dark waterfall and the perpetually wet monument to the city’s founders, which from a distance looked like two tin soldiers.

  “What about your husband?” Ivan asked, who couldn’t resist, and at the sight of Tanya’s dewy face, where the eyebrows went up but the eyeglasses slid down, he immediately regretted it.

  “My h
usband is my problem,”

  “But what if I learn your address?”

  “You won’t.”

  “Still, why are you giving me the keys? I can see they aren’t extras. Someone’s been using this set.”

  “Well, you know, just in case. Think of them as a souvenir.”

  Meanwhile, the endless summer, which seemed as round as the heavenly cupola it filled, was moving fast, and the money he had taken from Anfilogov for gemcutting equipment but had spent on hotel rooms and dinners in bars was dwindling even faster. Something had been damaged in Krylov’s sense of self. The working hours spent without Tanya at the gemcutting shop had become tediously irrelevant. His soul was cramped, and he realized that in his condition he wasn’t even making a living and was existing on loans: every day he was borrowing against the future. As he pulled another hundred out of Anfilogov’s packet, Krylov tried not to test the envelope’s thickness; nonetheless, there came a moment when just a few bills were left from the fat wad, not enough now even for his splitting machine.

  Part Two

  1

  ON A RELIEF GLOBE, THE RIPHEANS LOOK LIKE AN OLD, STRETCHED out scar. There used to be a globe like that at the local history museum; its hollow bumps resembled a cardboard mask. You could spin the clumsy contraption caged inside four wooden ribs, and if you rubbed the globe’s rough side hard it would make three or four turns with a plaintive creak, tumble across its own axis one last time, and land with South America on the bottom. There, underneath, some irritating widget would keep rattling for a while. Young Krylov’s mother, in those days a thirty-year-old woman in high heels, had an old woman’s job at the museum. She sat on a plain chair among the museum’s marvels and kept people from touching the skeleton of the brown antediluvian mammoth, whose sole tusk looked like a broken ski with a splint jutting out in front.

  But neither the globe nor the mammoth, to say nothing of the swollen cobra in green denatured alcohol, or the dusty TV-size dioramas on prehistoric themes, held any fascination for young Krylov. His imagination was drawn by the crystals, which rested in the display windows in cardboard nests lined with cotton wool. They also towered in the museum lobby, balancing out its patterned, wrought iron plangency with their absolute and intact muteness. The most powerful rock crystal, inside of which iridescent mealy stone-snow seemed to be melting, turning into water, was taller than twelve-year-old Krylov by its entire blunt fissured point. No less amazing were the black morions: two chunky druses, which looked as if they’d been chopped out of solid resin with an ax. In the smoky quartzes called Venus’s hairstone, through their tea yellow, it was as if you were seeing bundles of iron needles, or the prickly leavings from a haircut at the barber’s. The crystals’ sides, if you looked at them from a specular angle, were cross-hatched here and there, the way they teach you to cross-hatch figures in drawing class, while others had polished patches, as if they’d been through major renovations underground.

  The museum had other, nontransparent minerals, too. Visitors always took a special interest in the famous gold nugget that looked like the mummy of some tiny animal. The guide—Krylov remembered her black skirt and her heavy feet stuffed into stretched out scuffs—told the schoolchildren that sometimes a miner who dies underground petrifies and turns into his own statue. Afterward Krylov wasted no time clarifying whether or not this was so. It turned out that, indeed, under specific conditions organic remains can be replaced by sulfur-pyrite. There was no impermeable boundary between the mineral world and living nature. Young Krylov, who often showed up at the museum despite his mother’s prohibitions, felt that he was closer to knowledge there than he was in his classes at school.

  Conical crystals chopped off at the root and transferred to the plinths of rust-brown cloth possessed in full measure a quality that had bewitched young Krylov since his very first glimmers of consciousness: transparency. A person’s earliest memories have an obscure and muddled origin. When later Krylov saw TV shows about the ancient emir’s capital where he had spent his first years, he had the feeling not that he had once lived amid these huge glazed ceramics and crude, oxidized copper engravings, this Asiatic vegetation, but that he had dreamed it all. The dream of his early childhood was vibrant and trembled at the mere sight of marble-hard white grapes sprinkled with harsh Riphean snow at the fruit stand—and then dropped right back into his subconscious. The episodes accessible to the adult Krylov’s memory consisted in part of his parents’ stories and in part of restorations from his imagination; he couldn’t seem to separate out the grains of what was genuine and what was unconditionally his.

  Just one episode was steeped in an ammonia-like reality. All he had to do was wish to see it and in his mind an osier bush flashed above soap-green irrigation water, and in his hand he found a sliver of blue glass, curved, from a bottle probably, through which the flashes of sunlight on the irrigation canal looked like welding sparks (this is a later insertion). Something sticky was smeared along the edge of the piece of glass, and on his finger, buzzing and thick, there emerged, as if from a half-shut eye, a fat red tear. Who was that stout man he knew, who leaned over him, smelling of sweat through his clean, blindingly white shirt? He demanded that Krylov throw the glass away that instant, or give it to him, but young Krylov, smeared with blood, stubbornly held his find behind his back and retreated into the leafy shade, which was as hot as splashes of tea (this is a later insertion). He had felt it with unutterable clarity at the time: the blue sliver contained something that almost never occurs in the simple matter around us: transparency, a special and profound element, like water and sky.

  Actually, it was dating from this episode that Krylov remembered himself. His attraction to the transparent, to the mystery of the gem, which subsequently inserted Krylov into the true Riphean mentality, must originally have been an emanation of the dry, flat Asiatic world, where water was especially valued and everything earthly under the red-hot sky was divided into what seemed fit for being ground into pigment, on one hand, and tintless monotony, on the other. Young Krylov perceived transparency as a substance’s highest, most enlightened state. Transparency was magic. All simple objects belonged to the ordinary world, this world; no matter how cleverly they were arranged or how tightly sealed, you could open them up and see what they had inside. Transparency belonged to a world of a different order, and you couldn’t open it up and get inside. Once young Krylov attempted to extract the orange glass-juice trapped in the thick walls of his aunt’s vase and that was much better than the colorless water poured into the vase. One afternoon, on the balcony, on a carefully spread out newspaper, young Krylov struck the vase with a hammer, exploding its emptiness like a grenade in a war movie. The shards, though—some of them flew into the sneering sycamore or under his aunt’s old tubs—were just as self-contained as the intact object. Choosing the very best bottom piece, with the densest color, young Krylov continued to smash it on the scraps of the now slivered and silvered newspaper until he ended up with a hard, completely white powder. The only color in the powder came from his, Krylov’s, unanticipated blood, which looked like a chewed up raisin. Not a drop remained in the powder of the transparency for whose sake the experiment had been performed.

  The experiment that ended in powder made a much bigger impression on Krylov than the fatherly beating that followed. He had learned that what is transparent is unattainable and, like everything precious, connected with blood. What he gleaned about stones at the children’s library, where he choked on the paper dust (Krylov could barely remember a time when he couldn’t read), confirmed his intuition’s findings. “Great Moghul,” “Excelsior,” “Florentine,” “Shah”—the names of the world-class diamonds were as much music to him as the names of world capitals are to romantics of another bent. Famous stones were the heroes of adventures on a par with D’Artagnon, Captain Nemo, and Leatherstocking.

  Meanwhile, his mother and aunt had precious stones, too: large earrings on slender gold hooks, with pale blue stones that held more p
atterns than a cardboard kaleidoscope; and four rings. One, bent, had a gaping black hole, but in the others marvelous transparencies winked like cat’s eyes. Young Krylov was as convinced of the high value of these objects as he was of the authenticity of the painting by Shishkin, “Morning in the Piney Woods,” that hung in the living room of his neighbors, the Permyakovs, over their lumpy couch, whose imposing dilapidation arose powerfully in his memory when a few years later young Krylov was secretly researching the museum’s taxidermied deer and wolves. Later, when he had done some reading, Krylov learned that the picture was in fact held at the Tretyakov Gallery. It was hard for him to believe in the Tretyakov’s reality and, consequently, Shishkin’s painting itself vanished from reality. The world appeared to young Krylov as a string of copies without an original. Even after his disappointment in the reproduction, though, his belief in the precious stones kept in the shabby box covered in nettle-green velvet remained intact.

  Young Krylov understood from the grownups’ conversations that they all earned very little money. For some reason his aunt, considered a beauty, earned the least of all. She had a habit of puffing out her ribs, tensing the slender veins on her neck, and circling her waist with her hands so that the fingers nearly met in the crumpled silk of her shift; her hair, which poured smoothly down her back all the way to her waist, was piled up and hovered in the air like the striated smoke from his father’s cigarettes. She was the first to lose her job. One day she came home walking—and looking—utterly off, and to all questions she turned to face the wall. The old Yuryuzan refrigerator, which looked like a Zaporozhets without wheels and which his mama and aunt had been planning to get rid of, chuckled with glee. To young Krylov, though, it seemed that both this refrigerator, and the worn red carpets, which in spots looked like colored batting, and the lack of a car of their own, which his father, who was not a thief, grumbled about on Saturdays behind his half-lowered newspaper—that all this was just a game because the family in fact kept treasures. The certainty never left young Krylov that everything transparent was worth insane sums, and stones in gold settings weren’t just any old buttons. In essence, he saw them as magical objects. The very presence of these stones elevated his mother and aunt above ordinary working women with nasty-smelling kitchen hands into the ranks of titled ladies. He dwelled for a happy time in the confidence that should some calamity befall them, the stones would be sold to fairy-tale merchants in luxurious turbans that looked like white roses and would save the day.