2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  “Stop there and zoom in, please,” Tamara’s calm voice was heard outside the frame.

  The newsreel shuddered, rewound a little, and the silhouette of the man-cow froze and started enlarging in jerks, coming closer to the viewer. But instead of getting more detailed and precise, it got more and more incorporeal, more and more transparent, until it seemed that the viewers could walk right through it, as through darkened air.

  “It’s a computer graphic,” Tamara commented with a satisfied smile. “It’s a forgery, and not a very high quality one at that.”

  “That doesn’t change anything!” people shouted at her from the studio audience.

  Actually, some of those invited, in spite of their class hatred for the gorgeous undertaker and the strict instructions they’d been given before going on air, were obviously starting to have their doubts that they were on the right side. Coarse faces softened. The yellow-haired woman in the clumsy mourning, her mouth half-open, gazed perplexedly at the gray screen, where only emptiness remained.

  “That isn’t you shouting, it’s your fear. But I’m telling you that you don’t have to be afraid of death.” Tamara, pale now, with a wet patch on the bridge of her nose, and rocking slightly on her chair, holding the wrist of her hand, which was holding the fuzzy microphone close to her face. “Did you know that many pathologists secretly write poetry? I discovered this when I began working with Granite. This is one of the mysteries of the borderline between life and death. I’m not very fond of poetry. But individual lines have a strong effect on people like me who don’t use poems. When I was just starting my funeral business and setting up my first office, a coverless notebook came my way along with some old furniture. It had been left by a doctor who at that time had also passed on. I don’t remember the author’s name right now, but here is what he wrote, “I want the trace of my gloves left on the face of death.” I realized that this was about me. I don’t want death to dare take more than it’s due. And since we’re living in a material world, I’m trying to achieve this by material means. That’s all.”

  Krylov relaxed and took a deep breath on his complaining couch, only now realizing that he had not had a lungful of air in quite a while. He didn’t want to watch Tamara, who had obviously triumphed again, anymore. Even less did he want to admire Dymov, who was raffishly leaning an elbow on a gilded tombstone decorated with the oval portrait of some red-mouthed blonde.

  Something in the rascal’s expression stung Krylov again, though, and he stayed on the channel, at the disposal of the studio cameramen’s generous zoom. It was good he did because on the screen, as if the director had overlooked it, a completely different newsreel suddenly began. Judging from the mountain outlines and the predominance of right angles, this was the Riphean north, fairly close to Pripolyarye. They showed a large territory of perfectly bare land—land that looked more like petrified scum than land, without a trace of the variegated Riphean figuredness or a single blade of grass on its sloping humps. Along the territory’s perimeter was a low forest as boring as a fence. The camera took a closer look and the reason for this boredom became clear: the forest was half-dead. The scabrous remains of small pines looked like rusty iron rods; bare, dead branches poked out on the deciduous species, and their sparse crowns were the color of bile.

  “Dear Andrei Andreich. Now we need your help.” Dymov turned graciously to Goremyko, who had jumped up. “Sit down, please. Sit down!” The expert plumped down awkwardly, looking fearfully at Dymov with the cloudy gray eyes of a two-week-old kitten. “Tell me, do you know this place?” Dymov gestured discreetly at the screen.

  “Uh huh. I do. Of course. Yes.” Goremyko cast a quick glance at the frozen scene and shuddered. “It’s one of the cyanide heap leaching sectors for the Severzoloto gold-processing plant. Former plant, so to speak.”

  “And what position did you hold at Severzoloto between 1998 and 2004?” the moderator asked insinuatingly.

  At this Goremyko turned pale, like a sweating window.

  “Chief engineer,” he managed to say, mopping his forehead with a gray wad.

  “Now tell us what cyanide leaching is.” Dymov measured out the perimeter around the expert in resilient steps, and the cameras devotedly followed first this and then that advantageous angle on his face, which had been powdered to a moonlike glow.

  “Cyanide leaching is one of the ways of processing gold ore,” Goremyko began muttering obediently, rustling his prepared documents with trembling fingers. “The method is based on cyanide’s characteristic of dissolving noble metals in the presence of oxygen. The solution uses sodium cyanide.”

  “Is this substance toxic?” Dymov, who had never understood anything about chemistry or any of the other subjects he took at school, interrupted the expert. Now he was apparently quite happy with his role of slick prosecutor questioning the trembling witness in court.

  “The problem is that the cyanide ion forms compounds with many elements,” Goremyko was still mumbling, his eyes darting, so he wouldn’t have to look at anyone specifically. “Some are toxic and some are relatively safe. The most toxic form is molecular hydrogen cyanide. But this is a short-lived toxin. Therefore, at Severzoloto, as all over the world, they used passive detoxification of cyanide heap leaching areas.”

  “You mean, the ore left over from the cyanide is just left to lie there and detoxify?” the quick-witted Dymov clarified, ignoring his opponent’s scientific explanations.

  “A reinforced screen is laid under the ore piles!” the expert exclaimed in a whining voice.

  “Fine, then.” Dymov locked his arms behind his back and stopped in front of Goremyko who tried to make himself smaller and sat as compactly in his chair as he could. “If this screen of yours cracks and substances end up in the groundwater, could they become poisonous again?”

  “Under certain circumstances,” Goremyko whispered, screwing up his eyes.

  “So what is this?” Dymov exclaimed with pathos, pointing to the screen, where under the dead branches it showed some dead animal that had only its dirty hide and tiny bony grin left.

  “Certain circumstances … or rather, uncertain …” Goremyko’s voice rustled even more softly. There, on the grass, they could see inexplicable patches, as if someone had run green oil paint over the dried feathers and stubble. The camera showed a panorama of two or three sectors of overboiled land divided up by eyelash-sparse zones of birch grove and a small UFO that looked like a child’s balloon and was hovering low over these barren fields, testing the soil with a lowered thread.

  “What happened to your plant in 1994?” Dymov asked another leading question.

  “The plant was shut down in 1994,” reported Goremyko, gasping a little. “The Zayachye deposit played out and was judged unpromising. It was considered safest to pour the solutions into specially constructed reservoirs with antifiltration protection. The remains of the cyanide salts from the chemical storehouse were also preserved.”

  “You mean they shut down the plant and abandoned the poison without supervision?” Dymov commented caustically, looking the pale expert over from head to toe.

  “You have to understand!” Goremyko shouted, raising his face, twisted from grief, to his elegant tormentor. “Taking cyanides out over those bumpy dirt roads—there was just a major accident in China. And we don’t have the transportation, and the treatment facilities aren’t operating anymore. Everything’s ass backward! If the proper technologies had been used in constructing the reservoirs, there would have been exactly no danger! Guaranteed!”

  “If!” Mitya raised his slender index finger significantly. “What an interesting subjunctive. But we’ll return to this later. Right now let’s watch a little more of the newsreel.”

  What looked like the inside of a huge concrete egg appeared on the screen. The light, first skewed and pale, then rounded out to the full vividness of a summer’s day, penetrated through an upper hatchway into a damp cave. The dampness thickened the stagnant air and ran down the wall
s like the last of the jam. There, on the walls, you could distinctly see dark strips—some thinner, some fatter, some closer, some farther apart, as if the cave were a vase that a hideous bouquet was drinking blossoming water from. Through the hatch hung a slender rope ladder that kept trying to twist, and down it, slowly, lowering their fat legs in formless shoe covers one at a time, climbed two clumsy figures completely upholstered in crumpled silver fabric.

  Something about these figures reminded him of the chalk outlines left on the floor when dead bodies are taken away for further investigation, as if these outlines had stood up and started moving around. The filming wasn’t professional; the camera bounced around, and obviously some third person was shooting, and sometimes his fat-fingered ribbed gloves ended up in the frame. To the side, on the wall, a small equipment balconette of eaten-away steel popped up. There, the first two, reflecting each other in their face shields, set about assembling the apparatus, which consisted of spiral cables and mirrored cylinders, and the camera, together with the flashlight’s beam, looked down nearly from the root of the scattered gray gloom. Down there lay the bottom: cracked, it looked like a hardened dead cobweb in an abandoned corner. You could tell the concrete of the underground space had originally been a sand pie. The cyanide solutions poured in here fifteen years before without any purification, leaving something like a dark jelly—the sediment of an evil whose sticky moistness was maintained not by the remains of the solvent but by the groundwater that breathed heavily and noisily around the destroyed reservoir in which the silvery crumpled cosmonauts seemed to be swimming.

  “Looks like your solvents have all gone into the ground,” Dymov said.

  “They cut so many corners,” Goremyko spoke wearily and bitingly. “No hydraulic seal for you, no drainage layer, and the cheapest possible brands of concrete. With a little extra sand.” Leaning on his elbows, he covered his pale face with his dark hand with a raised pinky that looked like a swollen gray caterpillar.

  “Andrei Andreich, don’t fall apart, please,” Dymov began to fret, stepping closer to the expert. “We have one question left, the most important one. Who exactly cut the corners? Who stole the money allocated by the provincial government to bury the cyanides?”

  “The general contractor stole it,” the expert woke up, wiped his face, and glanced behind his back. “Stroyinvest. Its director and owner is Mrs. Tamara Krylova. She’s sitting over there.”

  But Tamara wasn’t sitting there anymore. She was standing alongside her unshakable throne, in her twisted skirt, trembling on her high heels.

  “What’s the date of that film?” she shouted in a little girl’s voice, brushing the hair off her forehead. “I saw numbers in the corner, the date of the filming, please!”

  “Mrs. Krylova, right now we’re not talking to you. Right now the experts are having their say!” Dymov signaled to someone from the studio staff. “Turn off microphone one! Adelaida Valentinovna, please!”

  At that, Tamara’s suddenly young voice disappeared from the acoustic system of the light-filled studio. Her own barely audible shout was drowned out by the cooing of Semyannikova, who was holding her microphone like a delicacy and touching her kinky curls with her tapered fingers.

  “Look at how simple human truths are revealed to us,” Semyannikova said, smiling maternally at everyone, even the now somber Goremyko. “Look at where the money comes from that Mrs. Krylova is using to build her suburban mansion and to found Granite. But it isn’t money she stole. No, not money! She stole life from nature and maybe even people. Yes, people! There are four settlements in the area of the ecological disaster! One of them has a high school! And after this, Mrs. Krylova is going to say she’s an opponent of death? Why, she is Mrs. Death! Look at her!”

  Everyone was already looking at Tamara, who had suddenly thrown the useless microphone away, behind her carved chair. Striding tall and shakily, as if she were trying to disengage herself from her own reflection in the mirrored flower, she headed for Dymov, who had suddenly started to smile a human, pathetic, trembling smile. The slap from Mrs. Krylova’s hand, which was as heavy as a gold ingot, was crushing. Losing his balance, Mitya hung from the carousel with the rocking coffins, and a crimson calamus blossomed on his cheek. Mitya’s eyes were weepy and completely senseless. The whole studio jumped to their feet, and so did Krylov. He managed to see Mitya being picked up and disengaged from the warped carousel tacking and the coffins collide in mid-air, scattering the tenacious heaps of artificial flowers. Then, without any caption, an animated insert, “Decedent of the Year,” ran across the screen: paperclip-shaped skeletons danced the can-can.

  Part Eight

  1

  KRYLOV’S FIRST IMPULSE WAS TO CALL TAMARA’S CELL IMMEDIATELY. He screwed up his courage several times and picked up the phone—but at the third or fourth number his agitation became unbearable, and cursing himself, he slammed the receiver down. He had this crazy idea that Tamara could grab his hand over the telephone. Finally he punched out the eight-digit number that was as kin to him as his own birthday, only to hear a polite message that the subscriber was unavailable.

  The next day and the day after that all the numbers Krylov knew were either turned off or else answered with endlessly long signals. Suddenly, a wall of telephone muteness had arisen between him and Tamara, a wall that seemed made of impregnable, resilient glass. At every attempt to break through, Krylov felt its taut power, the responding vibration of a hostile dimension. Only once did her office cell phone, which was usually with Tamara’s driver, answer in the expectorating voice of Kuzmich, Granite’s former owner. Krylov rejoiced even at him, as if he were dear to him. Only Kuzmich wasn’t in any mood for long chats. He was at his wits’ end, shouting over the snip-snap of some highway, and from time to time he dropped out, as if cut off by a chain saw.

  “You saw it. They want to shut our girl up! They brought charges! Why don’t you quit calling here. This isn’t any of your business, ex!” With these words, Kuzmich hung up and plunged into wherever all of Tamara’s colleagues and staff had vanished, her entire business machine, which had been working so superbly so recently and now had disintegrated into tiny pieces.

  In the mornings, Krylov bought up all the newspapers and rummaged through the colorful stacks with one single goal: to find information about Tamara, to read something between the lines. Finally the wild Young Communist of the Ripheans, which consisted of nothing but pictures, devoted a whole column to relations between Tamara and Dymov; moreover, the faces of all the characters were the color of sausage. The more respectable Provincial Gazette ran commentaries by a lawyer and an ecologist. Tamara’s prosperity apparently rested literally on the misfortune of the entire Riphean region, and some of her actions constituted various crimes, including minor assault, inasmuch as TV commentator Dymov had received a concussion on a live broadcast. A lot of the rest was sinister, vague, and alarming. Glib pens wrote about a “cyanide autumn,” mummified trees, and a mass die-off of fish. They wrote about game wardens allegedly seeing the corpses of tourists whose mucus membranes were like rotten tomatoes, obvious testimony to cyanide poisoning. All this was directly linked to Tamara Krylova, “Mrs. Death.” The journalists didn’t worry about lawsuits and pushed on, stopping at nothing, from which Krylov concluded that they had been given the go-ahead from very high, almost inaccessible spheres.

  Everyone who could piled on to the bandwagon of harassment sanctioned from on high. The Riphean Observer, a contentious tabloid scattered with the grain of misprints, came out, by the way, with a column-long interview with Granite’s former owner. There, the kind-hearted Kuzmich, shown in a photo with spread hands and an open mouth that looked like the hollow of a tree, amiably shared the details about how he had had his cherished, thoroughly traditional, and highly law-abiding funeral business taken away from him.

  The mystical feeling of any Riphean that everything involving the forest, woods, and beasts has something to do with him personally had somehow dulled in Kry
lov. To be truthful, right now he couldn’t care less about the ecological catastrophe or the dubious origin of Tamara’s business. He wanted one thing: to talk to Tamara for half an hour and make sure she wasn’t miserable and knew what to do. Her irritating absence was especially painful in the context of thoughts about the missing Tanya, as if the women had plotted to create for Krylov a personal hell.

  Dragging himself out of the house, breathing in the cold delicate smell of the early autumn, Krylov sensed around him a strange unresponsiveness, which made him realize that Tamara’s professionals had continued to look over Krylov until the very last moment—and now were gone. The city’s population seemed to have halved. Maybe there were more police dressed up in new gray uniforms criss-crossed with white straps on the occasion of the universal military masquerade. The more guardians of law and order there were, the smaller and punier they became, as if they had created two policemen out of one. Nonetheless, these boys were omnipresent and were fiercely checking the documents of anyone wearing a counterfeit uniform or carrying large bags.

  Abandoned, forgotten by everyone, needed by no one but old Farid, Krylov now had only one worthwhile occupation: standing sentry at the spy’s lair, which is what he did, adapting himself to sitting on an enormous old stump that looked like a turntable with a record on it and occasionally shaking the brazen ants from his jeans. He could not believe his eyes when Viktor Matveyevich Zavalikhin in person stepped out on the cement-patched ruins of his porch. The spy had filled out and was as pale and gray as a mushroom. He was wearing a boy’s jacket with little buttons and shoulder straps that was way too short for him, and on his round head was a flat leather cap. From his paleness Krylov guessed that the spy had been sitting inside all this time, behind those gray windows and faded, clay-colored curtains, without stirring once. Now the criminal squinted matter-of-factly at the pale sun as if it were a light bulb he personally had screwed in and that had meticulously turned on.