2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  All the rest Anfilogov wrapped up in a warped scrap of polyethylene, and dragging it to the corundum pit, he dumped the raspy bundle into the jumbled vein, the way all the innards get tossed into the corpse’s yellow belly after an autopsy. Leaning with exhaustion against the wall, from which groundwater was seeping like from a lymph gland, Anfilogov had the distinct feeling that his incredible find had made the place’s attraction nearly insurmountable. The mysterious magnetism that had kept the expedition to the bank of the corundum river, the powerful force that each morning had put the starving muscles on their aching bones into motion, had now come so close that Anfilogov, shaking, felt a physical need to take up his work pose in front of the wrinkled corundum, red in the broken section, like crude coal. The vein demanded that the rock hounds die alive, that they burn the last calorie there was to burn in their human bodies and, emptied, remain here, so that they would always—with their dead sight—see this terrible beauty, this light mountain sketch, like a fold of transparent sky fabric, and the river, winding up under the precipice, and the dark, burnt-looking cliff granite. The obsession was so strong that time seemed to stand still for Anfilogov; deprived of the alternation of satiety and appetite, his biological clock had stopped, and the damp birds in the heavenly window opened from below seemed to be feeling out the solid air with a stuck feather.

  Anfilogov was dragged out of his oblivion by a staccato splash. Of the clumps of clay that had been copiously spit out into the puddle, one turned out to be a snake: its rhombic head glistening, making long water ribbons with its invisible body, the creature was heading for the professor’s chilled feet. Anfilogov immediately flew up, as if up a flight of stairs. His puckered hands swelled and ached, but his right hurt more. Bringing it to his eyes, Anfilogov saw that hanging from it, having latched on with its tiny maw, was a bat that had come from out of nowhere. There was something perversely attractive in this flimsy rag, in its tightly frowning little face, like a sinister velvety flower. The professor grimaced and tossed the creature away, and it hovered over the hole, emitting a silent SOS, and suddenly slipped from view; for a little while there was a curve in the air that looked like it had been chopped out by mad scissors, a dark hole.

  There was an ulterior motive to all this, and it had to do with the Mistress of the Mountain. The forest where the specter had gone this morning had plunged into the damp whiteness, and the trees close by were distinct, but the ones that came after them looked like their unfilled-in shadows on a white wall. Distracted, Anfilogov tried to remember the name of the humanitarian girl. Irina? Inga? He thought it started with an “I.” The names that collected in his mind seemed artificial. “Ekaterina,” a distinct, honey-filled voice said at the professor’s ear. Instantly the professor felt the charms of the corundum river recede and how much room there was everywhere. Pushing himself away from a moldering log, Anfilogov stood up and looked around. There, to the southwest, beyond the thick, furlike forests, beyond the modest, two-peak range, beyond the sleepy station with the closed store, beyond the three hundred kilometers of his humming railroad journey, in a city filled to the roofs with people figurines, there was a real woman for whom the professor was now experiencing a passionate and painful curiosity. He realized that the Mistress of the Mountain was herself dragging him out and back to life but he still couldn’t imagine how he would be able to take advantage of this.

  Things worked themselves out with amazing ease, though. To camouflage the prospecting pits, Anfilogov kicked down the clumps of dug clay that stuck out and immediately soaked up the ground moisture and swelled in lazy bliss, sealing the treasure; then he chopped down flexible young spruce that jumped under his ax and hid the blurred holes in the earth with a luxuriant deck of poison-green moss. After descending cautiously to the river, Anfilogov was satisfied that from the water the remains of their enterprise could barely be spotted.

  The next morning the expedition, which now consisted of two millionaires, started on its way back. The wet air snuffled in stooped Kolyan’s throat and his half-empty high boots. Time and again he ran his bony hand over his back to feel the corundum sack, as solid as if it were frozen, in his backpack. Anfilogov, who was going second, had the feeling that there was someone left standing stock-still at the prospecting pit, watching the treasure’s seekers leave, waiting for the expedition to drop from view. After many very approximately counted days—during which the expedition passed the first sandbar, spread with the rotted remains of blossoms, like old nets, and that rift, as indefatigable as a washing machine, beside which Anfilogov had discovered the first corundum—the professor retained the sensation that that figure had not budged once.

  The rock hounds barely said a word to each other. Each plunged individually into the green images covered by leafy masses and sudden dark patches of moss. Now the beauty was only overhead, hanging in the branches, and the damp, stony path underfoot was not much to look at; perhaps because the rock hounds had overdone their prospecting pit digging, all the tottery slate slabs and granite rubble in the lean, stony dirt seemed to them just plain ugly, like a dump mercifully covered over with a thin layer of northern woods. They were moving slowly. The first apricot-speckled leaves were sliding down the river, which was now rushing in the same direction as their small detachment, and swollen branches floated by, sometimes collecting, with crablike cleverness, on the overwashed stones. All this color borne by the water gently drove the men dragging along the bank onward. Their bodies held absolute lightness. Only their baggage had weight—but it weighed so much that sometimes they couldn’t take even one step forward.

  What was bound to happen did. At a spot where the corundum river, shivering under low bushes, fell modestly into a slow, navigable stretch, the weakened Kolyan fell off a cliff. The water was deep at the bank, and at first on the water’s surface Anfilogov saw something like a dark scorch mark—his hat with its clinging mosquito net floating away. But inasmuch as Kolyan was almost incorporeal from hunger, and only the bag weighed anything, the corundum backpack, whose straps were too big for him, quietly slipped off. Underwater, Kolyan felt as if his shoulders had sprouted angel’s wings. Then he jumped up vertically into the noisy air, batted away the forelock that had stuck to his face, and realized his loss—and nearly went under again.

  There was no point diving for the treasure, though: the large river’s current was pressing in earnest and had probably dragged the loss under the planking of orange logs that had become detached from their raft and that had jammed the small inlet. Fortunately, of the two backpacks, Anfilogov’s survived, and in it were two lighters that still worked, half a packet of stale biscuits, and an uncharged cell phone. Kolyan, however, who seemed blinded from his swim in the cloudy, pulpy brown water, wouldn’t leave the spot where his hopes had died—and there was a prudently sober, out-of-body moment when Anfilogov seriously thought about leaving him, deadweight, sitting on the bank with that odd smile snaking in his beard, like an unsteady flame in the kindling of a damp campfire.

  But their stores, even if divided in half, no longer promised salvation, especially when it came to the lighters and the last stuck-together matches; confronted with this simple reality, Anfilogov told himself he had expected nothing else. For some reason he didn’t show Kolyan the choice stones warming in the pocket of his checked shirt. His secrecy could be explained by a reluctance to share—not the income but the happiness that lit up Anfilogov’s entire return trip. Anfilogov felt that Kolyan would simply swallow the happiness with his gaping faintheartedness and still would not be consoled by the stones’ perfection because his heart had drowned with the sack.

  Kolyan spent the entire return trip talking to himself, cooing and smiling like a mother over her baby’s cradle.

  “We should come back here with divers, Vasily Petrovich,” he said one day quite distinctly. “What do you think? Offer them a tenth. God knows people hire them for less.”

  “Fool,” the professor replied good-naturedly.

 
“Vasily Petrovich, I want to buy a car,” Kolyan continued, striding freely, swaying from side to side, sometimes making a sudden move back and stepping on the professor, who took no breaks carrying the backpack and tent. “A foreign car for fifty grand American. I’ve wanted it since I was a kid. Why not? I’ll take a class. I’ll learn to drive as well as anybody else. I’ll take my car to see my sister in Solikamsk.”

  He babbled on like this, nonstop, for an entire day. The next day the rock hounds looked out from a high precipice and saw a dove-gray village, half deserted, with birches on the log huts and remains of fences mightily overgrown and knocked onto their sides. The shriveled old woman wearing a man’s fur cap with earflaps and a soldier’s waterproof cape, hacking away in a hummocky meadow with an ancient scythe, looked like death but fed the rock hounds frothing steamed milk that smelled of the cow’s womb.

  3

  THEY’D BEEN HIDING BECAUSE THEY WERE BEING FOLLOWED. KRYLOV had noticed the spy during a downpour, when he and Tanya had taken shelter under a narrow overhang covered with twisted ropes of water. Dark figures of pedestrians caught by the downpour were sheltering everywhere and looked like groupings of unlit mannequins. For some reason, Ivan’s attention was drawn to a plump man he could barely see through the white tons of rain going to the left and right. The man was standing half-turned in the ingenious little porch of some bank. There was something irritatingly familiar in the tight tilt of his head and his strange, almost inanimate stillness, as if he would have to leave a dark round imprint on the wall he was leaning against.

  The rain let up and then vanished. Tanya was frozen and her teeth were chattering. Trying to divert her—her wet hem was sticking to her legs—into a neatly lit bar, Krylov saw, out of the corner of his eye, the man descend from the porch as if lost in thought.

  Then the man moved away, pensively skirting the broad and complexly communicating puddles. Led away along this route in an unknown direction, he quickly was lost to view behind the newsstands, which looked amid the mirror flood like drowned barges. Ten minutes later, though, almost before the waitress could plunk a swollen menu down in front of Krylov and Tanya, the man nonchalantly appeared in the doorway. He bore a surprising combination of frank banality he was practically flaunting and a special, serious solidity to his corporeal makeup, as if the man worked with weights professionally and so had turned into a heavy, economically fashioned object. Without paying the slightest attention to the customers, the man went to the bar and hoisted half his butt onto a protesting swivel stool. He obviously was in no hurry to go anywhere. Krylov’s unease mounted, as if he had a speck of dust in his brain. He just couldn’t figure out how he knew this suspicious person, who had sat with his back demonstratively turned but who was nonetheless vaguely obtrusive, vaguely threatening, sipping at something, using his elbow to block off the well-dressed young woman next to him who was drinking through a straw—a butterfly with its proboscis—very quickly draining her cocktail.

  Ivan knew the man’s crushed wide shorts from somewhere, but he didn’t know that silk, obviously new shirt with the long label dangling out of the collar. As soon as the young lady climbed down, leaving a sudsy little bottle, Krylov apologized to Tanya and took the seat the silk skirt had only just slithered off. He was hoping the man himself would recognize him and start a conversation. His neighbor, however, immediately turned away, and his entire look demonstrated how ill disposed he was to conversation. In front of him was a beer mug as big as a dumbbell from which he took loud, round swallows at automatically even intervals, each more economical than the last. The man gave off a thick carnal scent of heated wool that made the hair on Ivan’s arms stand on end.

  Nonetheless, the man was an unquestionable specter, a fleshy vision born out of the depths of Krylov’s consciousness. The vision was independent, clearly able to order alcohol and buy new clothing in a store, yet in some way it was a parasite on Krylov’s brain. Indeed, Krylov had guessed this immediately, as soon as he had seen the motionless silhouette, as close to him as his own shadow, through the blurry downpour.

  “You don’t have the time, do you?” he addressed the bloodless ear, which was covered with stiff blond hairs and seemed as if it could rustle like burdock and which was propped up on the man’s fist.

  The man pretended not to hear him.

  “Do you have the time?” asked Krylov more insistently, overcoming his powerful reluctance to chat with the part of his own “I” that was concealed in this man.

  “It’s half past seven!” the man responded with surprising volume and good cheer. At the same time he looked pointedly at the television, where the news was just starting, blazing up with a stereo inset, and in the corner of the screen the number “18:01” was pulsing.

  Distraught, Krylov felt the onset of impotent vexation, while the man, apparently enjoying himself, was snorting into the short tuft of his mustache, wet from beer. Staring blindly at the television, Ivan felt as red and blurry as the flags on the screen where, on the threshold of the October Revolution’s centenary, they were talking about restoring destroyed revolutionary monuments and a nice new Dzerzhinsky was hovering above his pedestal, wrapped in the embrace of the long-armed proletariat. For the umpteenth time, Krylov thought how age takes its toll on a man. If he were younger, he would have smacked him across his crooked face—just like that—and felt no need to explain. Now he was constrained by the need to be understandable to the people around him. If he started a fight, everyone would look up and ask why, and to stay real he would have had to have a straight answer.

  Unlike Krylov, the stranger obviously felt no need to have anything out with anyone. Just his back, in folds of fat and silk, and his canvassed butt bulging on the stool, showed the smoking tables a model of disregard for any and all questions. The man bore an impossibly familiar absurdity. It seemed to Krylov that not only had he met this man in real life, but he had dreamed him as well.

  After that day, the spy picked up the habit of materializing in the evenings. Sometimes he made it by the beginning of their tryst, and if Krylov was late, the man would be waiting a few steps away from a displeased Tanya, his eyes cast down and for some reason holding wilted flowers. Sometimes he followed the classic surveillance method and accompanied the couple in his charge through the streets, stopping at shop windows and monitors for advertising firms, where search programs chirped when the spy hit buttons at random. He discovered the spy had a little car—an old Japanese model with a mud-splattered license plate and very noticeable signs of repair. Often Krylov noticed the hapless means of transportation parked at the bend in his side street. That meant its owner was somewhere nearby but out of sight for now. Maybe he was blowing the foam off a beer in a nearby bar. Sometimes the car looked as if it had been abandoned for several weeks at least. The weightless and tenacious shadows of rapacious crows roamed over its warmed hood, and homeless bitches with inflamed teats dozed in the shade of the red-hot wreck, blinking and shuddering. But the energetic owner would show up flushed to his ears, drive off the unwanted forms of life, and sit behind the wheel.

  Either the spy was not a professional, or else discreet surveillance was not one of his mysterious assignments. He was provocatively noticeable and bold as brass. Evidently he loved new things, and the upper part of his short torso had the advantage over the lower: the spy’s trousers were, as a rule, tattered and sack-like, while the man often spoiled himself with a designer jersey or a colorful shirt. This characteristic doubtless reflected the spy’s way of life. The man’s feet waded through all kinds of trash littering the streets, and his butt sat on whatever it found, but his torso was for show. In short, to the objects of his surveillance, the spy was a powerful irritant, and anything but invisible. His mustache looked like it had been drawn on by a graffiti artist provoked by all the blank space on his face. As if to confirm this, when the spy suddenly shaved off his jaunty adornment, it left a dark daub under his nose, like an erasure mark. There was always something embarrassing
and tauntingly wrong about his appearance, a big loop sticking out of the collar of his slick jacket, or his meritorious trouser fly unzipped to reveal the white of his bunched up boxers, like a handkerchief crumpled in a pocket. The man was so disheveled as to be alluring; he left you dying to go up to him and tuck in the loop, scrape the dried spot off his sleeve, and polish his shoes.

  The spy was mocking Krylov, whose hands were itching to do something to him. Through various spatial maneuvers he maintained a safe distance. Even driven into a corner—in buildings he preferred secluded niches, the kind a spider would like—the spy still wouldn’t have let Krylov get close. His frown made him look like a man trying to move objects with his mind, and Ivan’s feet started to feel as if the floor were beginning to slope. In front of the spy, next to his invariable beer mug, there always lay a notepad filled with information. This tattered object with its dog-eared yellow corners exerted a strong pull on Krylov. He was also drawn by a holster-sized, antediluvian cell phone that sometimes dangled from the spy’s waist. Krylov would have taken great pleasure in digging through the memory of that phone, which gave out instructions into the man’s broad ear while the man himself merely grunted, letting a stack of coins clatter through his hairy fingers.