2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  There were others besides these, too—solid, respected, welcomed rock hounds with the free-and-easy brotherly attitude accepted here, but nonetheless with a hint of gentle respect. Of course, Krylov realized he would never be like these men, that his place in rock hunting would always be well down the ladder. At the same time, something whispered to Krylov that he had in fact landed right where he needed to be. He was very important to the community, he just didn’t know yet in what way.

  The mystery was solved when Professor Anfilogov appeared and took up his place in Krylov’s life. Krylov entered the History Department in memory of the ethnographic museum that was now decaying in the steamy basements of the municipal administration building and of the mammoth bones that had fallen apart again as if there had never been a restoration on a metal carcass in the cupola hall. Now the painted bone beams had entered into a new oblivion and had much less in common with a dead giant than when they had lain there, washed away, in the dense, dull, prehistoric sand. From this example Krylov learned that there had been an irrevocable spoiling of history, and he guessed that this kind of thing happened fairly often.

  Professor Anfilogov lectured his novice humanitarians long and tediously on historical philosophy. Ordinarily the university administration, following their bureaucratic instinct, gave their blessings to bores, but they despised Anfilogov, and why they didn’t toss him out on his ear was anybody’s guess. The only way you could pass Anfilogov’s exam was with a knowledge of his lectures, which couldn’t be checked out of the library and which were a concentrated cocktail of sources whose recipe clearly involved a special trade secret. On the eve of the winter session, the department ephemeras, pale gentle truants on whom the boredom of Anfilogov’s lectures acted like chloroform, made up for their absence with the most complex mimicry—but virtually all of them died in the icy examination room, where the professor sat in his jauntily set coat, drumming his white nails on the table. Anfilogov was arrogant and almost never looked at the person he was talking to. The professor’s mind seemed rigged with a special timer that measured the precise length of any communication, regardless of his opponent desire; as soon as the device went off, Anfilogov interrupted the other person with his raised palm, which was covered with calligraphic lines that formed extremely insulting words in Latin letters. He himself, in turn, fit ideally into the academic hour; no sooner did he scrape the mottled pages off the podium than the electric bell went off in the hallway.

  In essence, the professor was trying to provoke those around him to search for the bases of that feeling of one’s own dignity that jabbed at their own sore spot. Some, the shy ones, were inclined to ascribe to the professor secret accomplishments, up to and including foreign medals; others no less cowardly declared Anfilogov an utter nobody. As for first-year Krylov, he saw the professor’s nature as a transparency of the highest quality, an absolutely solid emptiness inside of which there was nothing resentful people could detect, but it itself existed in a crystallized form worth top price per carat. In secret, Krylov admired Anfilogov: his grotesque features, his thoroughbred profile—the whole bizarre Anfilogov appearance, which the observer’s imagination seemed to help shape. At the same time, he realized perfectly that the professor had no need of any observer, least of all first-year Krylov. On the contrary, the ill-wishers around him needed the professor, if only to explain their need, and it was almost impossible to liken Anfilogov to the figure that appears when you tell fortunes on dripped wax or coffee grounds and testifies to or tells you about something. This made it sad to think about the disappearing generations of student synopses—the multivolume manuscript edition of Anfilogov’s works, where the professor’s original thoughts may have gotten lost, thoughts he had no desire to mull over for the moderately filled audience of bored moon-faces.

  Naturally, lecturing to the ceiling as he did, Anfilogov didn’t notice first-year Krylov, who preferred sitting in the balcony, in honor of his schoolboy memories. But he did notice him at the exam, when he pulled on his cheek with distaste and scratched “satisfactory” into the brand-new exam record. That spring, though, at Farid’s apartment, where they brought the equipment before heading north and where in the morning a faded truck from some friendly topographers was supposed to show up, Anfilogov immediately fixed his gaze on his student in the crampedness of the six-square-meter kitchen, where the smokers were standing as if they were on an elevator. “Vasily Petrovich,” the professor introduced himself anew, moving his narrow hand in Krylov’s direction. Shaking it, Krylov felt its bony power and rough calluses. He’d never expected to see at Farid’s this harmonious and agile Anfilogov, wearing an ironed checked shirt that looked like it had been overstitched with cotton wool and camouflage trousers held up by a well-polished belt; even less had he expected the professor to turn out to be the very same Vasily Petrovich (the elite just called him Petrovich) people said was on business terms with the Stone Maiden and impervious to her inhuman enchantment because he was impervious to enchantment in general. They also said Vasily Petrovich had more money than that other wholesaler who had skipped to Israel to cut the Riphean stones he had from the rock hounds.

  Apparently Anfilogov, too, was planning a trip into the field. His serious backpack, which he’d placed next to the expedition equipment that filled the dark, mirrorless corridor, was the ideal backpack. A little later the professor addressed Farid, pointing to the confused Krylov with his eyes.

  “This one going?”

  “No. Helping,” Farid answered deferentially as he stirred a thick layer of swollen pelmeni in a purple pot.

  “And he’s okay?” Anfilogov continued his questioning after a little while.

  “Quite.”

  “I see,” the professor took a drag on the lady’s cigarette he’d taken from his chest pocket, something he never did at the university. “Making any money?”

  “Mmm …”

  Farid was shoveling food onto the cracked plates offered him on all sides, and the smokers, airing out the layers of tobacco smoke with the outside cold coming through the window, filed into the other room. Krylov definitely did not understand what had piqued Vasily Petrovich’s sudden interest in his person. Downing his burning hot portion at the far edge of the table, which was bending not under the plates but from the elbows of the noisy crowd, Krylov, modest guest that he was, walked over to Farid’s display cases and there for the umpteenth time fell under the spell of the sleeping substance, the futuristic architecture of the druses, which scarcely let in the muffled electric light, which was inadequate for the room. While Krylov was standing there, Anfilogov loomed up behind him for a minute, perfectly silent, and appeared in the glass, like a hologram trapped inside, with his sleek curved nose and distinct shirt checks; it seemed to Krylov that the professor was just about to tap him on the shoulder—but instead he moved away and disappeared.

  Later Krylov decided Vasily Petrovich’s curiosity about him was nothing special. Anfilogov liked people and knew how to organize them, choosing them for himself wherever he found them, on the basis of characteristics that for the professor were absolutes. A group had formed around him that was structured completely differently from the rock hounds. Even though the professor brought a lot of people together, he never got chummy; by introducing people, he became not a bridge between them but an impenetrable barrier. Subconsciously, everyone was well aware that before understanding each other they had to figure out Anfilogov—which was precisely what they could never do.

  The professor’s system was founded on an artistic conspiracy in which the professor had natural proclivities evidently akin to mathematical and to some extent musical ones. You could visit Anfilogov on business for years and assume your partners, whom you met regularly in the entryway, were the professor’s neighbors. The pseudo-residents somehow looked more convincing than the real ones—downtrodden supernumeraries in that recognizable kind of clothing that says it’s been produced in the same invariable form by the same factories for twenty
years. This curious contrast, had anyone noticed, gave you a sense of Anfilogov’s inner makeup: he was trying to control reality by replacing it partially with something transitory, fantastic even.

  By gofering (delivering nearly empty envelopes containing tiny objects that poked through the paper, like thumbtacks, in their lower corner to an old foreign woman who looked like a pirate’s parrot), young Krylov gained entrée to the professor’s quarters; the proportions of his sole room, where the professor, aristocratically not recognizing kitchen seating, received his pupil, reminded him of a construction site office. This real estate obviously did not correspond to Anfilogov’s financial means. The rumors meant nothing, of course, but at the professor’s Krylov saw with his own eyes a wallet that had so many dollars in it that at first Krylov mistook it for a thick book. It was no stretch to conclude that Anfilogov was setting funds aside, probably for a future abroad.

  Meanwhile, the professor’s past, embodied in his beat-up iron cot, which looked like a pregnant dachshund, and his old-man dishes with the gray fillets where the gilt used to be, became more and more entrenched as a result of their owner’s thrift. It was as if the decrepit cups and saucers, having survived their set, would never break or get lost, and the small change that had petrified on the bookshelf like a trilobite would never be spent. Something told young Krylov that the past doesn’t lose time and soon no monetary levers would be capable of launching Anfilogov into a bright future.

  Their conversation took place in a perfectly human if perhaps not intimate setting. The professor served his pupil very strong, resinous tea that turned bitter the moment it cooled. The host himself poured four spoonfuls of sugar into his outsize mug, but instead of stirring, swirled the drink around and slurped it in layers until he got to the thick sweetness at the bottom. When Krylov tried to do the same, he discovered that the bottom mixture tasted like fresh blood. Gradually he told Anfilogov the story of his childhood enthusiasm for famous diamonds and the magical crystals in the museum. The professor listened attentively, although he looked straight past Krylov, as if he were listening to the radio, not a guest in his room. In return (over the course of several months) the professor showed Krylov his legendary collection, which he kept not in display cases, like at Farid’s, but in cardboard banana and cigarette cartons that buckled under the weight.

  A glimpse of the first examples (the battered side of the box pulled out from under the cot broke away completely) told Krylov that he was looking at something very specific. By then he already knew something about the laws of crystal formation and their resemblance to living nature, which was expressed in their feeding and growth. Anfilogov’s collection was a cabinet of curiosities—a collection of freaks in an altered habitat. Here Krylov saw products of all the unfavorable conditions and crippling events in the life of a crystal. The hellish tightness of subterranean cavities, the sprinklings of pyrite and other parasites that suffocate the mother crystal and provoke multi-headed growth, the super-immobility of the nutrient medium that produces “starved” skeletal forms that look like fish frames—all this brought into the world bizarre objects that only the loving knowledge of a specialist could serve as an explanatory mirror. Krylov looked at one grotesque druse after another where you could see the eternally frozen, tortured struggle of crystal embryos, the geometric tragedy in the crystal’s milky haze; predatory crystals with their victim inside—replaced by a crystal-phantom left only in the form of a hologram, a transparent wedge; crystals with fissures, in various stages of regeneration, resembling swollen joints or viscously glued ice cubes. Krylov saw a petrified cinema that demonstrated the struggle between the oriented field of the crystal, its unimaginably slow rocket launch, accomplished in its own time, into space, and the chaos of horizontal events and ordinary time crumbled into small coarse bits.

  It wasn’t hard to realize how valuable Anfilogov’s cabinet of curiosities was. Such expressive rarities were valued highly by collectors, so there was an entire fortune gathering dust under the professor’s cot. The nature of the collection might make someone suspect the professor of a psychotic break, a gemological variation on sadism; however, to Krylov he seemed more like a medical man collecting instances of pathology while bearing in mind the ideal of health: the faultless, energetically optimal crystalline individual. In the struggle between order and chaos, Anfilogov was obviously on the side of order. Meanwhile, his freaks, preserved in deep pockets lined with soft nests of tissue paper, also had something inexpressively touching about them; the small zones of transparency in their stocky, Siamese, dystrophic bodies were like their incredible souls. Krylov managed to get his idea about the souls across to the professor. Anfilogov looked at his student with detached surprise, and for a while his eyebrows wandered over his forehead in perfect freedom.

  “Show me your hands,” he suddenly demanded in his examination voice.

  Mechanically, in the same ritual gesture of an adolescent showing his parents or class monitor that his hands are clean, Krylov showed the professor his not very clean hands, where the lifelines were like the iris pattern on the wings of a cabbage-white butterfly. Anfilogov took a look and for some reason actually gave them a squeeze, feeling the tautest, most sensitive vein in his right wrist.

  “That’s just fine,” he said at last. “Now I see. Oh, all right. It’s time the young man got down to business. The day after tomorrow we’re going on a little excursion. I hope you understand that I’m taking a nondisclosure statement from you. We’ll see whether anything comes of it.” After which the professor drummed rhythmic codes on different surfaces for a while, chuckling archly.

  3

  THE EXCURSION TOOK PLACE A WEEK LATER. ANFILOGOV LED KRYLOV, who was so excited he had put on his first hundred-dollar tie in his life, to a square earthen courtyard surrounded on all sides by sodden buildings from the century before last. In the entryway where Anfilogov graciously directed his excursionist, what remained of marble steps, now worn nearly straight through, led to the upper floors, but next to it was a steel door to a half-cellar equipped with an ordinary apartment doorbell. The professor pressed the button and looked around in amusement at Krylov, who had already rubbed his stiff jacket sleeve in the yellow lime.

  The door was opened by a bouncy fatman on the top of whose head a tender bald spot shone like the moon in a curly cloud; none of the stuffy secondhand stores that later came to know the owner would have recognized their glum acquaintance in this fresh little man.

  “Tax man?” the fatman slid his cheerful glance over the embarrassed Krylov, at which the professor spread his hands comically and sighed contritely. “I’m joking!” roared the little fatman, and without waiting for anyone else, he burst into laughter.

  Very quickly, the little fatman locked the combination of locks behind the arrivals and skipped down the narrow iron staircase; at the very bottom, Krylov heard nagging, gnawing noises interspersed with a light tremor—the sounds of stone polishing. Then he felt an unpleasant vibration on his lips, like a fine and rough sound-dust, and he licked his lips nervously.

  The place they had brought Krylov to, slapping him on the shoulder, was, as he immediately guessed, a private gemcutting workshop. He had never seen gemcutting before, and the contraptions at which two workers with identically protruding ears were cutting pieces of malachite scored with complex lines looked like pedal-operated sewing machines. Next to them, staying moist in a steel tub, grinding wheels and the items firmly fastened to them were spinning, sputtering like coals. It was warm in the room and damp, like in a cooling bathhouse, and the gemcutters were wearing sweaty T-shirts and canvas aprons, their wet, smoke-dried necks tensed as the effort of man and machine were applied to the piece. Amid all this, Krylov looked like a newly minted graduate. For some reason he had thought when he was getting ready to go with Anfilogov that he was being taken to get to know the old foreign woman better, that it would be somewhere sophisticated, fancy coffee with cinnamon, a kiss for the old woman’s knobby hand, a
conspiratorial conversation.

  The next room differed markedly from the previous one. Here it was relatively clean. In front of the gemcutters in white, fairly fresh coats, equipment was laid out that reminded him of a cross between an antediluvian record player and a schoolboy’s microscope. The worn discs spun, waltzing over the bald patches, and the faceted dies held to them by hand extracted a hissing, strangely hypnotic music. Around the “turntable” lay—and stood—many curious small objects; glancing over the nearest shoulder, Krylov saw in a box two half-cut, felinely lazy, golden beryls. He realized immediately what those “tacks” in the Anfilogov envelopes had been.

  Meanwhile Anfilogov, silently parting his lips, which looked like they’d been elastic-taped together, was saying something in an impenetrable drone and nudging Krylov through a side door, where he found a small, smoking-cum-coffee room and the extremely slovenly makings for coffee or tea. Two gemcutters were concentrating in the corner over three dueling bottles of beer; many other bottles had been set on the floor, like captured chess pieces. They glanced simultaneously at the two men entering with their wet pink eyes and then exchanged looks and disciplinedly moved out, from which Krylov concluded that the conversation between the partners was going to be financial.

  Vexation battled inside Krylov with the foretaste of changes to come. He no longer regretted the abortive society event; a presentiment was ripening in him that he was being offered a chance to do something about his unfortunate inexperience here and now. Therefore he sat patiently, squeezing his toes in his inappropriate dress shoes and trying not to kick over the empty bottles. Meanwhile, the partners were indeed wrapped up in finances, every so often showing each other their calculators, which evidently came out with different numbers. The more cheerful Anfilogov became, the gloomier the little fatman got; he kept missing the little buttons with his curly-haired index finger. Finally, they finished their calculating, and money was handed from Anfilogov to his partner, bypassing the table and observation. Then the fatman, with the important look of a bream which has just had the hook taken from its mouth, turned his entire short body toward his young visitor.