Part Three
1
THE STORY ABOUT TO BE TOLD TOOK PLACE TEN YEARS AFTER THE events already described. Professor Anfilogov, understandably, was still around. He never did quit his permanent residence for some more pleasant country—maybe because he still hadn’t amassed sufficient funds, but more likely because he didn’t want to retire.
All his old things still served him well and were by now irreplaceable. The main thing Anfilogov had acquired in all these years was a round aquarium with quite ordinary fish which sometimes, due to his ignorance, pecked each other to death, sending up clouds and twitching their tails amid the tender underwater bushes. The professor kept his largest stones, whose light refraction was close to the index for water, in the aquarium: the stones vanished, a slight optical colic on the bottom’s round, flat stones. The implacable fish got used to the huge whooshing object that made bubbles in the water; plucking out the raw treasures, the professor’s paw, pasted with wet fur, left the fish’s element unsettled and murky, like soup that’s boiled—and only the water’s indignant expression, which lasted several hours, might tell a potential thief that the aquarium served its owner as an optical safe.
Something may have happened in the world of mountain spirits. It had been several years since they had displayed any unease, scaring rock hounds with cold campfires where food that had just been boiling hot suddenly turned ice cold, covered by a layer of grease, or, more rarely, with a strange illumination that filtered out at night from secluded folds in the land, as if someone were secretly reading a very big book under the earth’s blanket. Old forest back roads with ruts like breeding grounds for waterfowl, where peaceful ponds slept back to back, would be blocked off by the fresh trunk of a cracked aspen; sometimes a tree would suddenly fall a few paces from a walking man who had just barely caught the mounting leaf noise, as if someone had splashed water from a giant bucket.
Chinks had probably formed in the coarse, depleted surface layer of the Riphean world. Disturbing rumors went around among the rock hounds. Once again legends were revived about the native gold on the Kylva River, which a hundred years before had been rich with gold that had vanished overnight, making its presence felt only in the yellow metallic sheen of the river surface. Talk revived about kimberlite pipes in the northern Ripheans; diamonds started trickling in from there, small ones, but at least VS1 pure: Krylov recognized them by their characteristic “Cape” tint, as if a little iodine had been dissolved in the stone, and by the unusual sparkle of the resulting diamond, which literally doubled before your very eyes under shifting light angles. They had assumed that Makar-Ruz, a modest ruby deposit in the northern Ripheans, was merely a dim likeness of what was supposed to exist farther south, and more accessible. Every rock hound knew that a high-class ruby was worth more than a cut diamond of the same quality, carats, and purity, so the latest rumor had had an especially disturbing effect. Even the unflappable elite succumbed to the bracing fever that had diffused in the air.
Fifty-year-old Roma Gusev—no longer a menacing warrior but the sentimental grandfather of a six-month-old grandson, the driver of a frisky blue stroller with little bells—was the first to make the observation, which stunned many because it was so obvious. He commented that many of the Riphean places where the deposits anticipated by their geological “address” were clean gone had in recent years been acquiring a visible authenticity, a density of vegetative, animal, and fish life. The impression was as if hundreds of square kilometers had existed in the form of copies, with intentionally decorative cliffs and trash accumulating in the ferns. Now where there had been old clearings overgrown with small-time twisty foliage suddenly full-grown cedars had risen up with long needles extended in a fist like a luxurious pelt; tall elk with pensive faces crossed busy tracts in places they shouldn’t have been. The rusty frames of abandoned equipment would suddenly disappear (returning a few hours later, though). In their place for a short time there would be visions: untouched hollows with languid, almost sleepy greenery drunk on lungwort; mysterious forest glades, gilded swamps, and mossy tree trunks like tenacious roots on chicken legs.
To prove that the phenomena did in fact exist, Gusev showed his comrades cedar cones impregnated with tar and insanely fragrant with life that had supposedly been picked up on the Kylva, where the rich primeval forests had been cut down long ago and gravel pits that looked like gigantic ashtrays collected dust on the lower bank. The cones weren’t gold nuggets, of course; nonetheless Anfilogov heard Gusev out very carefully. Anfilogov’s sole error was his presumptuous attitude toward the Riphean world. The professor perceived its beauty as a powerful but irrelevant irritant, a test of his nerves; he was appeased by forgeries of beauty that were for the most part acquired in the artificial urban environment. Nonetheless, the professor was prepared as always to set out on an expedition—to go where the usual Riphean logo disappeared and the scenes rose up that Roma Gusev had talked about with the old gleam in his mad, darting little eyes, as he squeezed the soft lumps of his fists—an old habit.
No one knew about the first expedition for gem-quality corundums; even Krylov was told that the professor was flying to Prague for a Slavic seminar. In the summer of 2016, Anfilogov and the inseparable and hardy Kolyan moved upstream along the bank of a cataracted river whose name they subsequently never told a soul. The river, boiling and thundering, unreeled like fabric from a flattened core on a shop counter. Like any stream in its position, it served the surrounding geological firmament like a small blood vessel carrying all the elements that comprised its banks. In the same way the river’s bottom was the rock that made up the long, deep notch, which was gloomily overgrown with bluish spruce, with rare deciduous spots over its sunken slopes, and with the asymmetrical outline of the main mountain, which looked like a scowling brow. The work consisted of endlessly washing the sandy and rocky slurry. The water’s harsh cold squeezed their rubber boots and fell on their necks and hot sweat, and stinging midges landed, despite their puffing and splashing. It was deserted; only one time, thoroughly drenched kayakers came galloping by in their diving catamarans, concentrating hard.
It was the eleventh day of their secret expedition. Kolyan, who had caught a cold and was armed with a wide aluminum mug, threw some coarse, soggy grain into it, added water, swirled the heavy suspension with a wet slosh and then poured the grumbling slush into the cloudy stream. The bottom of the mug was left with stripes of black basalt pebbles, brown granite chips edged in crimson flecks, and white and rust-colored grains of quartz with mica flecks. Lifting his mosquito net, Kolyan pecked at his catch and, not finding anything interesting, chucked it out. At that time, Anfilogov was roaming over the crunching pebbly shoal, sorting stones, which on top were hot and blue from the bright sky and underneath were damp and had a dark quartz ice. Gathering suitable samples in his sack (he looked for cheesy spots), the professor split them on a boulder that jutted its brow bullishly in the white stars produced by the professor’s hammer. The muffled stone tapping skipped up vertically and seemed like the only sound in the whole white intense blue, with the windy noise of the water spread out below and the barely audible drone of Esmark’s cod.
From a distance Anfilogov saw Kolyan suddenly freeze over his sluicing assembly, as if he suddenly intended to gobble up its sieved contents. But Kolyan skeptically examined the tiny fragment that had suddenly glittered in the loose sediment like a triangle of crimson fire. Assuring himself that this had to be his imagination, he cautiously plucked the stone out with his cold-crippled blue fingers. Leaving the curved saucer on a humpbacked stone, which the sleepy water embraced like a pillow as it fell over it, he freed his waterproof field watch from his sleeve and scratched it. A distinct white scratch formed on the tempered glass—and an odd feeling passed through Kolyan, as if were unreal above the knees.
Tugging at his stuffy nose, he rowed his boat-like boots toward the shoal, as the professor, utterly calm, walked toward him. He was vivid and small in the harsh sun, as
if he were wearing silver chocolate wrappers.
“Vasily Petrovich! Look! Vasily Petrovich!” Breathless, Kolyan was showing Anfilogov the blinding watch face when he was still far away.
“So what? I see it’s half past two,” said the professor coldly, as he tried to quiet his straitened heart under his burning jacket.
“Just a sec, look here.” Breathing from his warm, foolishly mustached mouth on the proffered sliver, he flicked it again: across the pale first line now lay another, fresh one.
“Aha,” said the professor. And that sounded rather foolish as well.
“It’s a corundum, Vasily Petrovich. A ruby even! Gem quality!” Kolyan cautiously unclenched his raw fingers, to which the vivid triangular crumb had stuck. Instantly a gust of wind carried the crumb off, and Kolyan, his soaking wet boots slapping, rushed for the shingle.
“A fine way to waste your time!” Anfilogov shouted from above, and Kolyan, spitting away his mosquito net, obediently got up from all fours. “You won’t find it anyway,” the professor said conciliatorily. “And there’s no need. The corundum was brought here from upstream somewhere. We’ll go up and take a look.”
Anfilogov had had a piece of dolomite with a large corundum spot that looked like broken chalk loose in his pocket, softly striking his leg, since the day before yesterday. The professor hadn’t told Kolyan of his find, afraid of sharing his joy, as always, and hiding his heart, which all this time had responded to the weight of the sample with the same weight and angularity, as if there were two stones, one in his chest and one in his pants pocket.
All the next week the expedition moved upstream along the ever-diminishing river, which was rapidly releasing its spring water, which first pooled up, as in a spoon, in a small natural backwater, then darted away, as if forking over a glittering bend, onto the shallow, rocky slope. On the sandbars they were constantly finding white pieces of host rock scattered with corundums, from which they were able to take a few slightly fissured tabular crystals, valuable only as collector samples. However, the white veins in the leeward granite, sometimes glittering like sugar cubes, sometimes like an old mark on worn asphalt, turned up empty. Now and again the two men, bathhouse red from the bites of the flickering midges, would climb away from the river over the slopes and crawl through close-set spruce whose dried lower branches caught at their tough pants like files. Anfilogov was interested in the upper outcrops of bedrock granite; sometimes, after disturbing the felt-like moss with his miner’s hack, he would see the same worthless veins, which ran, like mysterious paths, from bank to bank and then onward, into subterranean oblivion. The river continued to be a source of hope; where it flowed from and where the expedition was now heading, there was a blue and not always noticeable but at the same time terribly memorable fold in the horizon, as if something had been pushed up close together there, face to face.
Anfilogov had a sense that the events that had begun with the find of the first corundum spot were developing a definite rhythm; his dream was coming true (although at the last, or even any moment, it might simply not). Anfilogov was calm, even though he lived every minute with a heightened emotional pressure, which balanced out the pressure from the oversaturated outdoor environment. Kolyan was rushing desperately, as fast as he could, into the river’s upper reaches, and he was willing to abandon anything he was doing halfway; often, in town, standing at the tram stop, he would keep glancing at his steel watch, which was decorated with memorable scratches. Anfilogov knew they shouldn’t rush. He had gone over this exact same scenario in his imagination many times, from the first signal find to the semi-precious vein as rich as a vegetable patch, and just as many times his imagination had broken off abruptly, anticipating the crushing of his dream. Now that his dream was unfolding in real time, he had to maintain his awareness of reality and only reality, and not let himself get one step ahead of himself. He couldn’t explain this to Kolyan, who had become feverish, a bundle of nerves. His internal haste had made him voracious; Anfilogov, however, having listened closely to the rhythm of events, ordered that they economize on food. Now at their halts the rock hounds made do with a thin broth that was half-dried soup or fat noodles with occasional slivers of tinned meat. Sometimes Kolyan was lucky and caught slender minnows dancing like moths on his line from the stream; the fish were so tiny that all that remained of them in the boiling ukha was their skeletons, which looked like safety pins.
The area they were entering possessed precisely the characteristics Gusev had described. On one hand, this was good, because it spoke to the accuracy of their route; on the other hand, the undaunted Anfilogov felt himself on the brink of a serious depression. Beauty was pouring over him from all directions. Anfilogov scooped it up when he wanted to make dinner, out of the smiling river; sunlight fell on Anfilogov through this beauty—through the branches, through invisible aerial nets—and the sun itself was transformed from the ordinary natural lamp you don’t look at into the focus of the beauty, a radiant object that irritated the nerves. The locale was infected, not to say irradiated, with beauty. White nights had come here, to the north end of the Riphean range; the day faded infinitely, and the sky was like the nacre of an open shell—wavy, like pale mother of pearl. Then came a spectral, shadowless twilight, and the red tent turned an unusual, somehow cosmic purple, and the sleeping river frothed gently, like an infant in swaddling clothes. In spite of the infinite extension of time, air, and space, everything here, in the north, happened very quickly. One fine night, after the spring’s waters had retreated to the river’s banks, life blazed up everywhere. Overnight, the shoots of barely blossoming bird cherry trees went to sleep as if they’d been wound on curlers—and by four in the morning, when the sun was already beaming nonchalantly above the horizon, both banks were drowning in luxuriant white, and down the river, in its dropping rhythm, floated bands of stupefying bitter smells. Here the tiny-leafed birches, as transparent as dragonfly wings, threw out catkins, and luscious blobs of dust swallowed up by the channel bars slid over the water.
Anfilogov felt that all this was much too much for him; he, who had grown a solid but invisible shell on his face, felt as if he might start crying any minute. Never had Anfilogov felt so helpless. From time to time Anfilogov thought he was about to die in the face of this beauty, which was intangible but, nonetheless, adamant. For the first time he could understand those people who kept strictly within the confines of urban existence, the limits of the world that comes out of the human mind. Here, there was nothing manmade to intervene between Anfilogov and the elements acting on him, and he had neither book nor light for reading to fill the extensible time after his meager dinner—the hungry, soapy twilights with the river that would not die down but gleamed like a knife with traces of butter and soft rich crumbs.
On the twenty-third day, the expedition came out on a dark blue shoal as much like the spot where they had found the first transparent corundum as the footprint from a left boot is like the right; even the aerial outline of the peaks, with their blue petals of snow-fields, was the same. Anfilogov experienced very strong déjà vu when he saw the granite boulder where a week before he had smashed the empty dolomite with a hammer. This time, though, on the boulder’s brow was a big sloppy white mark—and the whole thing was definitely pointing to the natural fold on the frowning slope: a friable channel, run its length with clayey and sandy alluvium, with outcrops of fissured stone in which Anfilogov instantly recognized host rock strongly eroded by water.
The water had probably flowed down here in the spring, and now the stream was dry. The very first stone he picked up on the shoal was sprinkled like an Easter bun with corundum specks. It was amazing, but the stream evidently echoed the bends of the dolomite vein and for long years had done the work that the rock hounds now had to bring to a victorious conclusion with their miner’s hacks and chisels. Anfilogov had virtually no doubt that he was looking at the very same “pipe” from which the alluvial placer of corundum traces flowed. His last doubts scatt
ered when Kolyan dredged the mineral slush out of the riverbed and washed it in his capacious mug: four whole angular sparklets—the classic “blue blood” color, no less—turned his watch face into a spiky ice cube under which the blinded dial winked its second hand.
Meanwhile, according to Anfilogov’s calculations, they had no more than a week to work the vein. They still had a ten-day—and in bad weather a good fifteen-day—trek down to the last outpost of civilization: a sleepy train station with a defunct store and scanty potato fields. If the professor hadn’t sensed the latent rhythm of events and started economizing on time, the corundum shoal would have been the expedition’s point of no return. Once they’d reached this spot—where the déjà vu behind each bush (probably explained by the extreme fulfillment of their dream)—the rock hounds would have had to return immediately with empty hands. Now they had a little wiggle room, provided by their reserve of tinned meat, condensed milk, and noodles. However, their success had to be better focused: here their artificially extended stay in this alien element could not last long, and the irritatingly real beauty—down to the last butterfly spread out on a boulder—was at the very top of the atmospheric column.
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