As if responding to Krylov’s thoughts, a report went out over several channels at once that in Gatchina, near the train station, searchers had found well-hidden storehouses with the same tsarist hats and caked greatcoats that had edible mushrooms as soft as cheese growing on them. These riches had emerged from underground at the very moment they had become important and meaningful. Young businessmen had made good money off those storehouses. On the news they showed the lucky ones from Moscow and Petersburg who’d managed to grab an antique uniform. As far as you could tell from the television picture, the fabric had faded over the hundred years and was the color of yellow and white grass like you find under rocks. The greatcoats’ sleeves, which wouldn’t unbend, hung on the Young Communists’ shoulders in long pieces of dried-up felt, and their caps fell apart. These rosy-cheeked boys seemed to be putting on the clothes of dead men taken from their graves. He had to remind himself that no one had died yet in those uniforms.
Actually, Krylov realized that the antique clothing would not be virgin for long. Highly solvent Moscow, which was sucking up more of the uniforms than anywhere else—and weapons, too, probably—was still quiet. Helicopters were patrolling above quieted Tverskaya Street and above befuddled Pushkin’s malachite head. Frivolous tents vanished from the hot streets, and you couldn’t buy any of the colorful, cheerful summer drinks. The All-Russia Exhibition Center, built like the ideal Stalinist collective farm, a palace of a collective farm, suddenly became a small military base, and the display models in several of the pavilions turned out to be real. There were now an unusually large number of sullen policemen and pregnant rats as big as porcupines in the Moscow Metro.
No matter how hard the authorities tried to pretend that nothing was going on, the maskers’ revolution took its toll on that most sensitive Russian substance: money. Prices in the bargain supermarkets climbed cautiously upward. Private banks, which had always played twenty-one with the state, suddenly went drastically over count. After banks attempted to freeze the deposits of frightened citizens, the state gave them a huge injection of tranquilizer in the form of loans, after which they quietly changed owners. The banking crisis was suppressed in forty-eight hours. The citizens who had run from ATM to ATM, from line to line, ripping out their cash earnings, suddenly were left holding these packets, like the remains of their own life, which could be spent in a few days. Almost to a man they brought the cash back, like last year’s snow to a big industrial refrigerator where at least it didn’t melt too fast in the overheated inflation.
As always happens in instances like this, the population swept the store shelves clean of cheap nonperishables: noodles, canned food, even gray past-date barley and clumpy flour. But the state acted amazingly intelligently. Literally immediately, on those same shelves, there appeared analogous goods—true, with an unfamiliar look and taste. Large crude packages, gray paper that looked greased, tin cans smeared in thick, almost weapons-grade grease with extruded rows of numbers on their impregnable lids—evidently the reserves from Soviet military storehouses had been put into circulation. The civilian population was offered spongy gray cookies that you could eat only after steaming them over boiling water until they were like putty; sugar that looked like granite; dry, clayey household soap in pieces that looked like they’d been chopped up with an ax. In an age of triumphant lighters, matches were a strange good; they were sold in blocks of twenty crude boxes, moreover the boxes lacked labels and were broken off from the blocks together with a plywood chip. Most of the canned meat was tender venison in a bloody bouillon with a greasy bay leaf in each greased can. Krylov vaguely recalled the history of the nuclear tests in Taimyr, which he thought had been conducted in the 1950s. At the time, the deer, which had cropped the radioactive moss, were killed off by the herd and frozen, like mammoths, in the permafrost, so that they could be taken out when the strontium and other dangerous filth degraded. In all likelihood, this was that meat. Its exoticness created the illusion of a rich array and even luxury, which combined paradoxically with the thick tin and the bare cardboard cartons.
Krylov thought it was odd to use food that was more than fifty years old. There was something biologically wrong about it, something that violated the natural cycles. But citizens, under the influence of their genetic memory of famine and wars (sparked as well by the stern look of the reserves), rushed to snatch up the army provisions, which cost mere kopeks. Actually, this didn’t last long. No matter how the stores emptied out in a day, in the morning the shelves were full again and loomed before the buyers like military fortifications. Eventually, after exhausting the possibilities of their home basements and meager purses, the civilians surrendered and retreated from the food fortresses that they had failed to seize or destroy. His mother, having brought in, over Krylov’s protests, a whole corner of kilo cans of venison, which even at home looked more like antipersonnel mines, now stumbled over them and couldn’t bring herself to eat them—not because she was afraid of radiation but because the very look of them gave her a feeling of a safe future guaranteed by the Homeland. Each tin can seemed to contain, in the event of war, life—or maybe death, which were practically the same thing in the stylistics of the Soviet state, which had suddenly emerged from underground storehouses to the light of day.
As a result of the strange and terrible events of the maskers’ revolution (which had already been palpably squelched in the media by the standard domestic and foreign policy news), people who hadn’t seen each other for years started calling each other and getting together again. Once again there were topics for discussion; once again people crowded into sleepless nighttime kitchens and confused thoughts puffed in cigarette smoke. Old friends gathered and drew close. They discovered that many were gone and the rest were tired of life, especially the women, who sat with destroyed faces over cold coffee grounds. Worry hung in the air and mixed with an impotent agitation; public passions didn’t flare but rather decayed and emitted fumes in the universal spiritual gloom that the glassy August sun barely penetrated.
Krylov kept planning to call Farid for a loan and ask about work and just to talk, but he never did. Farid himself sought Krylov out, rousing him with a phone call at eleven thirty one night and telling him about a gathering that coming Sunday. Leaving his sentry duty by the television and his post by the spy’s home (where four balconies there now bristled with nice new raspberry cotton flags), Krylov rushed across town to the familiar tenement, where a gnarled old lilac bush had become badly overgrown and its broad leaves had faded to gray.
The general impression that all was always well with Farid was maintained only because Farid would not have it otherwise. In fact, his days passed in measured, deeply concealed grief; Farid seemed to be taking this grief on an hourly basis, like homeopathic pills, and that was what was keeping him alive. The year before last he had married a young beauty, Gulbahor, who had just finished high school and had loved him very much then. After a brief while, Gulbahor meekly and guiltily gave back all of Farid’s presents and left him for young Gumar, a golden youth with hair thick as a stallion’s, a distant relative of Farid on his mother’s side. The catastrophe corresponded to the course of events and restored the natural order violated by the marriage between the semitransparent girl and the weathered-brick fifty-five-year-old. So the event was not a catastrophe in the strict sense, which deepened Farid’s loneliness. He put up no protest, to say nothing of complaint. Only he would suddenly frown as if he were now constantly looking at the bright sun. Farid’s friends were indignant, and Roman Gusev, ruddy from the port, raged especially, reminding him that the girl had herself hung on Farid’s neck, set up a watch around his building, and begged to mop his floors. Scoutmaster Seryoga Gaganov, a connoisseur of how high school girls tick, was the far side of forty, and had hair as smooth and black as a raven’s feathers and not a single scratch on his conscience, explained authoritatively that a woman at such an early age is a talking organism and has no understanding of her own words. To this, Farid fell s
ilent. Gulbahor’s hologram still stood on Farid’s computer desk. The young woman, as bright as the first snow, was wearing a fancy pink blouse with faceted buttons and holding a velvet doll.
By the time Krylov arrived, the main group had been sitting at the table for a long time. Gaganov was in fine fettle; leaning back in his chair, he was grinning dreamily at the ceiling, where a few flies were hovering, buzzing as if singing to each other. On the table was the same pink venison dumped onto a plate from several cans; in a deep porcelain bowl shreds of cold pelmeni were now stuck together in a mound. The men had probably been sitting there for a few hours—and drinking more than eating. They welcomed Krylov with raucous cries, fetched him friendly blows to his bones, and scrunched him over, shaking hands, onto a free stool. Instantly it felt good to be in this perfect, force-filled crowdedness, shoulder to shoulder with all his old comrades—who really had aged tremendously. Their rough tan and black apish paws and broken nails told you that most of the main guys had just returned from the forests. Always at August’s close, rock hounds back from expeditions looked as if they’d aged drastically. But now they seemed more rusty than tanned; their drawn sinews and piebald napes with defenseless red bald spots—all this was for old men.
Happily spreading mustard on a slice of jellied fish, Krylov looked around the familiar and dear apartment, which bore the spotty traces of bachelor cleaning. Nothing had changed on his glassed bookshelves; in front of the death-gripped volumes were washed druses of citrine, smoky quartz, and rose crystal. At the sight of these magnificent nesting places filled with beings whose firm mirrored or ribbed hides preserved marvelous mute zones of transparency, Krylov felt his craft sing out in his heart and the tips of his fingers. He wanted and could lay these eternal souls bare, give them a new faceted armor, force them to speak in the harsh, imperious language of refracted light, so that you couldn’t turn away. In combination with his thoughts about Tanya’s existence, this was like anticipating the Christmas holiday. Krylov thought he was happier than many at this table, though he did know for a fact that his comrades, on the contrary, felt sorry for him for having sat the summer out in the city heat, pale as street dust.
The conversation droned on, passing from the alarming and incomprehensible social changes to fresh forest stories and back. Two of them, Gaganov in Lyalinskoye and little Vitya Shukletsov not far from Lake Utkul, had seen the ancient silver-hoofed deer, the oldest of the mountain spirits, which had appeared the last time in the early 1950s to show the “tails” of gold sand to some poor devil by the name of Makeikin—who had gone to prison for fifteen years for his good luck. According to Seryoga and the blinking Vitya, the paleontological specter was tall and barely hidden by the stormy birch forest, and his rack, four meters wide, looked like eagle wings of bone and frightened the birds. The Pleistocene beast smiled with its black suede mouth, showing its scimitar-teeth, and the silver hooves on its powerful forelegs splattered with swamp mud were badly oxidized. Judging from Seryoga and Vitya’s contented and mysterious faces, Silver Hoof had not left them without a rich treasure.
The other prospectors weren’t complaining either. There had been many precious pangolins: the narrow, beaded-like creations were quite unafraid of man and romped, describing figure eights, on the grainy boulders. In the hot, silky grass, grass snakes had slithered like streaks of oil, which was also a favorable sign. A few times the prospectors removed from branches and rough cliff ledges a vibrant, sharp thread—a hair from Goldenhair, the Great Snake’s daughter, a woman three meters tall with an eyeless head wreathed in liquid gold who was capable of turning into a powerfully magnetized underwater snake. According to unreliable witnesses, occasionally glassy, crackled little eyes did gape on the creature’s flat face—and then the overzealous prospector, bathed in sweat and deadly trembling light, was instantly transformed into a gold mummy-like statue. Like any mountain spirit, the Riphean Gorgon was capricious; however, her hair placed in an ordinary bottle would live without taking in anything for several years and bring its owner fantastic good luck, if he wasn’t greedy. Reckless Roma Gusev had brought his fabulous sample to show off: the blue medicine vial closed with sealing wax looked like a flashing police light, and the blinding thread in it danced, imprinting a mad white spiral on your retina.
In general the season had been a success for the rock hounds. As usual among the main figures at the table, they kept mum about their own finds but talked a lot about the changes in the landscape, and their faces became distraught and emotional. They talked about how even the bright swamps covered with armfuls of vegetation and lustrous yellow globeflowers this year looked like paradise. Once again the forests springs had gushed, the fine sand in them swirled as if sugar were being stirred and stirred into the sweet cold water. The stream channels were so clean that the cornelian and quartz pebbles spread there made them like the window of a jeweler’s shop. The mountains smelled insanely of berries and pitch. The countless bird voices heard nearby and far away let you sense with your ears the forest depths—the damp, smoky chasms permeated with cigarette rays of sun and the equally incorporeal dark trunks out of which, here and there, wove more complicated, flexible, and bizarre specters. The mountain glades, forest edges, and even slopes of worn, rock-sprinkled routes looked just like the Red Books that listed endangered species, but opened up. Curly wild lilies filled with powder and spectral violet irises bloomed in abundance, as did fat-lipped lady’s slippers with their stitched leaves—to say nothing of the plain sweet William, abundant clover, and tiny rumpled poppies on slender yarnlike stems. The small black lakes had mysterious white patches of damp star lilies; the large, sturdy flowers surrounded an enchanted boat, and their stems, underlit by the sun, faded into the golden gloom, dancing with vivid flecks. It was hard to resist the temptation; your hands reached of their own accord to pluck the beauty—and the boat was pulled dizzyingly on its line until somewhere far away, deep down on one side, the tight umbilical cord broke and the trophy and its rubber hose ended up in the lap of the ecstatic poacher. As for the Ilim preserve, it was a functioning temple. The monolith of cliffs and the mass of transparent blue air were identically stone and identically air; round Lake Ilim was so transparent that it magnified, like a loupe, a small barge that had stunk there two hundred years before and that looked like an uneaten chicken. The rare white-tailed bald eagles released from the Central Riphean Zoo without any particular hope of success were raising fledglings.
Krylov might have told his ecstatic comrades a thing or two about these unusual phenomena. He imagined with terrible clarity the anomalous spots visible from the sputnik, their wet edges consuming reality. Everyone who described the unprecedented luxury of this refreshed nature had been there under the mantle of transparent, flickering Medusas—but had returned alive and well, perfectly real, although Krylov kept wanting to touch them.
“By the way, isn’t Petrovich back from the north?” A morose Menshikov inquired into space, having sat the entire evening over a full glass like a fisherman over his float.
Everyone gave Krylov a questioning look. to which he shrugged in silence. Now, in the last days of August, Anfilogov’s absence had become not simply tiresome but alarming. He alone was missing among the elders of the Riphean rock hounds, and this absence was suffered by everyone to some degree.
“I heard it’s practically heaven on earth in the north—and hell simultaneously,” muttered Roma Gusev, rubbing his chest under his wrinkled checked shirt. “Supposedly the Kama is brimming with fish, and even sturgeon are coming up from somewhere. But they say people have seen all kinds of small stuff floating belly up. It’s bad.”
“Maybe it’s algae?” little Vitya suggested hopefully. “It happens when the water heats up drastically.”
“Or maybe they’re deafened by explosions,” Vadya Soldatenkov, who was large and gray, as if he had collected the cobwebs and dust from many ceilings on his head, said softly. “It’s not just poachers doing business there. They say it’s l
ike a war.”
Unlike most rock hounds, who went on foot on principle, Vadya preferred traveling by boat. He had an inflatable polyplast Shark with a compact motor that fit in the bottom of Vadya’s huge backpack. This summer, Vadya had fumbled over tributaries of the Kama and seen horrible things. First off, he ran into a submerged chain stretched across the mouth of the Chusovaya and barely visible on the surface of the water, like a perforation on silky paper. The polyplast screeched, and the nose chamber expelled lots of yellow bubbles, and Vadya had to row forward onto a low bank. In the morning he was awakened by the damp, heavy smell of burning; the fog around him was oddly earthy. Hiding his possessions in the wet bushes, Valya traveled quickly upstream for about ten kilometers. First he ran across fat gray logs poking out of the river, sometimes so numerous they looked like outlandish canes and the formless remains of a ship’s steel. The water where these submerged things were was darkened by gelatinous patches that looked like scorch marks. Here and there along the river fiery tufts floated past, falling apart, hissing, an inflamed pink in the fog; quietly, an empty angular specter, a burned-out barge, slipped by.
Farther on, Vadya thought he saw two badly crumpled motor boats that had slammed into each other. But as they came closer, lashed by branches full of water, it became clear that there were many more vessels in the warped heap. Every ten meters another one turned up—crumpled, gulping water through its pipe, or the outlines of the stern barely glimmering, like a fishing line drawn low over the waves. Terrified, his heart pounding in his chest, Vadya halted. He had the impression that if he went straight up to it, the heap of distended, chewed, and lacerated metal would rise to the height of an apartment building. Slinking away, he turned back—especially since behind him mountain rifles were pounding tautly and almost silently, and his peripheral vision caught here and there, under the grassy and cliff banks, solid patches that could well have been wet human clothing.
2017 Page 27