2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  “I understand. Talent and creative plans! A major professional opportunity!” he went on with enthusiasm. “After all, you can collect the stones after they’re cut, too. You can trust me—I’d agree! After all, those Israelis and Amsterdammers don’t have anyone better than you. You’re a master. You can be the author of unique stones. Unique! People will give them names! And they’ll pay you more for them than that weirdo professor of yours!”

  Stunned, Krylov looked at the spy as if he were looking at himself in some live convex mirror. This fat clown had somehow managed to guess Krylov’s deepest desires.

  “You oaf, the stones aren’t mine. Don’t you get it?” he asked with savage amazement, irritated that he’d let him suggest a dirty trick like that.

  “Whose are they?” the spy flew up. “The state’s maybe? Or the Stone Maiden’s? Are you a total idiot? Your professor—you know he stiffs everyone. He’s been smothering my uncle for twenty years! He and my uncle were partners first, with equal capital, they went in together. Then Anfilogov took his money back and my uncle was left empty-handed! Even though my uncle could have got in touch with his cops and wouldn’t have been any the worse off. But for the professor, you see, every little person is separate, like a collection. That’s his principle!”

  Krylov thought the spy, who’d suddenly turned as purple as grapes in a press, was about to bust a gut. But the spy recovered his breath. Pulling off his cap, he wiped his sleeve across his sweaty forehead, which was crossed by a nasty pink dent that looked like a bite cast, and slapped his head gear back on, leaving a wet semi-circle on the table, the way a glass would.

  “I don’t rat out my friends,” Krylov said distinctly.

  “Glory be, how very noble we are,” the spy puffed up at the insult. “And how convenient for you. I end up wasting my precious time with you again. You know, you hero-lover, while I was shepherding you and your lady friend, I had a deal, a profitable deal, go south. And I got such a toothache I thought my skull would crack! You think they’re going to let your professor make his hideous profit? Go stick a nuclear warhead up your ass! You’ll remember my generosity and it’ll be too late. Hey, garçon!” the spy shouted for the guard, who immediately jumped up, his striped acetate tie hanging like a cat’s tail when he made a little bow. “Tell me, good man, where’s the toilet here?”

  “The café doesn’t haven’t one. It’s in the arcade. Take a right and down the escalator,” security informed him concisely, casting nervous glances at Mr. Krylov, who had gotten into their ordinary establishment he had no idea how.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Krylov tried to hold the spy back by the hem of his short jacket, where he could feel his heavily loaded pockets.

  “What, I can’t take a leak?” the spy grumbled dully. “I’ll be back in five minutes. If you want to you can come along.” He waddled toward the glass doors, which parted in front of his concentrated weight with a roguish whistle.

  Krylov sat there a moment gazing dully at the arcade’s tropical depths, which were full of artificial sunlight. He was ashamed to say it, but he was held back by the thought of the ten or even thirty they charged in places like this to use the toilet. All of a sudden he jumped up, slapping his forehead.

  Krylov took the sloping escalator in three bounds, fed the coin slot, which giggled as if the coins he dropped in were tickling its insides, and burst into the men’s room, which here was the size of a Metro station. The few men standing with tensed necks along the green urinals or washing their pale hands in front of the mercury mirrors did not include the spy. From the stalls came the sounds of toilets flushing, as if they were starting the ignition on a shuttle, but the emerging gentlemen, who were zipping up their trousers not without some satisfaction, did not include the spy. It took Krylov a minute to realize that the scoundrel had had no intention of coming here. Without partaking of the blessings of this elite sanitation, which looked like it had been washed in bubbling champagne, he made a dash upstairs, wild-eyed.

  He was surrounded by the spacious, ballroom flashiness of glassed and mirrored retail shops. Amazingly few items of clothing were on display in the boutiques that shone along the cool gallery fanned with a minty breeze; the bioplastic mannequins with their little bilberry mouths, wearing silks caught up low at the hips, seemed to be waiting for an invitation to dance the husky foxtrot coming through the hidden speakers. The shoe departments looked like bird cages where the narrow men’s models looked like geese and ducks and the women’s like hummingbirds. Real birds were flitting high up under the green glass arches filled with blind sunlight, like happy bathers in a huge upside-down pool. And everywhere there were changing rooms—invitingly open or with the curtain pulled and feet stamping around that you couldn’t quite see. After running the length of two or three stories and discovering new commercial infinities in the depths of which hundreds of plasma televisions were on simultaneously and glaring with intricate worlds more like planetariums, Krylov stopped to catch his breath on a blue bridge that hung over an elegant presentation of umbrellas shooting their colorful cupolas as if they were firing a salute in their own honor.

  It was unlikely the spy had gone down to shop. More likely he’d simply made himself scarce. Each of Krylov’s feet felt as heavy as a hundred pounds of lead. There was absolutely nothing to do in this retail paradise, so once he’d made his way out of the arcade from the quite unfamiliar back side—into a narrow almost car-free alley that looked like it had slumped on its side—Krylov dragged himself away from his failure. Rewinding his conversation with the scoundrel in his head, he thought he ought to have agreed and sweet-talked him because now the spy was going to hole up, of course, and there wasn’t the slightest chance left of catching him again and entering into negotiations.

  That day, though, fate evidently was firmly moving people toward their intended denouement. It was present and getting ready to come to pass. A ferocious chill stirred in Krylov’s hair when he saw the spy in a niche between some disemboweled old buildings covered in flapping plastic where he was happily pissing on the graffitied wall like the punk he was—much more his style than the perfumed paid toilet. There was an inscrutable mysticism in him materializing yet again, appearing on the backdrop of these must- and decay-filled architectural frames, as if he really were a figment of Krylov’s mind, Krylov’s projection onto suitable landscapes and circumstances. Krylov suddenly fancied that he couldn’t lose the spy because he kept him close all the time. Thus a man takes a walk with himself but sees his own reflection, which he doesn’t recognize at first, if he happens across a mirror on the street.

  Meanwhile the spy was attending to business, tightening his crude belt in its loops. Pleased with himself, he headed for the exit and immediately noticed Krylov, his jaw dropped, on the other side of the alley.

  “My bosom buddy! Why is my life like this?” The spy slapped his sides and, nearly crying, spread his short little arms to either side. “I just can’t shake you! Tom and Jerry! Fuck! You mean you still don’t recognize me? It’s me. Me! Look! Look at me!”

  Krylov staggered back. Viktor Matveyevich Zavalikhin’s apoplectic face seemed to be vibrating bizarrely and swarming into his eyes. The plastic sheeting on the ruins was being sucked into the gaping cavities with a rustle and then billowing out with a light slap. Some obscure obstacle was billowing and collapsing in exactly the same way in Krylov’s brain.

  “Come on you stupid jerk!” the fat scoundrel mocked him and suffered, taking a few discreet steps back. “One time I thought you’d figured it out. I followed you like a grenade up your ass! Why are you sniffing me out then? What are you trying to do to me? Get me in trouble again? I don’t want to! Hear me? I’d rather scram than get tempted again! I believe in God now!”

  With these bizarre words, the spy pulled off his comic cap and crossed himself with emotion. Then, tossing his head gear aside, which flew off, wobbling, into a pile of dead construction trash that had turned to cement after the rains, the spy b
ent his strong crimson head and ran straight ahead. Krylov instinctively shied, freeing the path to freedom for the spy. Looking around wildly, the spy dashed down the curving alley, as if he were following flashing blips to where everything was just about to happen.

  Starting from that moment (maybe even earlier), events unfolded with the incredible precision that stuns you on a videotape run in reverse: wet shards pull together across the floor, collecting the puddle into the unharmed delicate vase, which kisses the spot where it fell and magically rockets onto the shelf; a suicide who has thrown himself into the sea jumps out as if he’d been spat out by the water gathered and turned inside out around him, and drying off instantly, stands up on the cliff with the grace of a circus gymnast. All the participants in what followed acted synchronously and deftly, like a team of professionals. Krylov felt the feedback from this inhuman agility when he was running after his absconding foe over slippery pipes, over the flimsy gloating little board thrown across a repair dig. Simultaneously, two sober and formidable plumbers, happy at the warm weather, were sitting on some rough scrubby grass over a scowling cliff at the bottom of which stretched railroad tracks that looked like they’d been spilled on by bright water. The men were taking their time nibbling the ripe flesh of an Astrakhan watermelon hanging out of its leather rind in cock’s combs and discussing wages. Simultaneously, a long freight train was setting out from the marshalling yard; moreover, a handsome segment of it consisted of flatbeds on which new Ladas were stacked two stories high and secured in latticework. One car, a modest beige, seemed to be signaling to someone with sharp flashes of sun in the corner of its windshield.

  The exact same kind of car, only good and ragged, almost ran Krylov over when he and the spy jumped into the stream of cars, which were spinning like herring from a seine. This was not according to today’s rules, though, so Krylov wasn’t even frightened, and the driver of the car, whose hands, turning the wheel, seemed to Krylov as if they were swathed in white gloves, was also nonchalant. From time to time, Krylov tried to attract the spy’s attention with challenging shouts. The spy stepped it up without looking around. It was like a movie. They were crashing across the slate roof of some warehouse that crackled with stiff fried trash, like the drip pan of a stove that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time—even though above the roof was only sky. Then they dashed nimbly, like lovely ladies table-dancing, across the top of a long van in which booming loaders were dragging something around, and leapt off, one after the other, right in front of the angry expeditor flipping through the flimsy bills of consignment.

  Meanwhile, the earnest plumbers suddenly experienced a wave of enthusiasm and decided to return immediately to their interrupted work. Neatly, so as not to spoil the landscape, they camouflaged their watermelon rinds right at the brink of the precipice and headed amicably toward the co-op tower going up nearby where they were installing complicated whirlpools that looked like Martian devices from a book by H. G. Wells. Enough invigorated dexterity had been communicated to the plumbers by their nicely fitting participation in the moment-to-moment realization of fate to fill their quota threefold and really earn some decent money. As they walked away from the railroad, they saw a freight train crawling out around the bend, as endless as the Great Wall of China, and they cleared out just in time for the spy, who had forced his way through a thorny thicket of wild raspberries, to find the way along the precipice completely free.

  Charging in his wake, Krylov was now shouting nonstop. His voice was instantly drowned out by the rumble of the freight train. The path above the precipice, trod ceramic-hard, first ascended and then descended. Krylov felt as if he were chasing his enemy inside the train, from car to car and vestibule to vestibule, in the opposite direction of the train, and so was standing in place. Below, closing in on his clumsy run, open cars of silvery coal and smudgy cisterns were crawling, then picking up speed; the greasy bushes, which felt as if they’d had cabbage soup poured over them, trembled at the weight passing over the rails. The spy scrambled up a steep slope; he’d already climbed to the peak, after which he would be hidden at the bend in the path. Tears came to Krylov’s eyes, and colored dots lit up: the cars on the flatbeds.

  “Stop! Wait! I agree!” he shouted, but not very loudly, trying not to break the thread stretched taut inside him.

  At that, the freight train jerked and a rumble passed from its head to its tail, as if the train were an artillery gun firing a ceremonial volley. Destiny must have been a few seconds shy, although it was beyond human understanding why that beige Lada caught its fancy so. This time, despite the steel din, Krylov’s words reached the spy. Finally he’d heard what he’d wanted to hear. Hands on hips, he stood in the sun, whose sharp rays pierced his clothing. But all of a sudden he gave a quick wiggle and, like a video on rewind, seemed to dance a quadrille ass backward. This awkward dance allowed him to push off the clumpy edge of the precipice in a way he never could have even if he’d undergone long training. The next second his body flashed in the air and plopped onto the windshield of the beige Lada, which had just rushed up; the movement of the train threw him forward, head cocked, into the angrily gasping rush, and the Lada, with a frost of cracks instead of a sunburst, passed smoothly by Krylov, who was standing on half-bent legs.

  Instead of descending to the track bed, Krylov for some reason started scrambling uphill, where the spy had just danced his last dance. There, on the flaccid grassy crest that hung over the precipice, he saw the squished pink watermelon rinds and the dark, spat-out seeds on the damp piece of newspaper. All of a sudden the freight train came to an end, as if it had been chopped off, and there was a silence into which the dry dragonflies rushed with their cellophane rustle. Krylov had a hard time straightening up from the watermelon mess. From here, from this crest, he had an excellent view of the perfectly still body. The spy was sprawled out in the wrecked vegetation, like a reveler on a slipped mattress. His head, scratched bloody, was oddly twisted, as if the spy had tried to take it under his arm.

  Suddenly the height gave Krylov a chill, as if someone had passed a bow over the strings stretched taught across his legs, groin, and cold belly. The height wasn’t that great, but the distance from the squished watermelon to the lacy acacia bush that held the dead body in its arms seemed impossible to traverse—and live. The boundary poor Tamara had always sensed must have passed. The railroad ravine with its empty rails below now seemed as if it were half filled with transparent death—and you couldn’t plunge into it. Now Krylov remembered—not even remembered but was beset by a huge specter through the rough reality—a recent dream: a fantastically deep mountain gorge and the enchantment of the abyss. Immediately he wanted to hug the earth and latch on hard to something.

  Nevertheless, he had to climb down to the victim and find the thready pulse. Formally, there was still hope, although even from here, up top, he knew that spy didn’t have a pulse. Krylov couldn’t see where his twisty feet were stepping, he just grabbed onto everything, letting the burning branches with their shredded leaves pass through his fist. Suddenly he dove into the shallow pit full of leafy mold and gaping tin cans—and bumped into a damp foot in a stained reddish-brown boot.

  Why did it take him so long to identify him? His facial features were like a fly killed on a white wall. Probably the identification that sounded in Krylov’s soul like a mute thundering chord was waiting for that expression to come out—as if someone had played a trick on the spy and done something unimaginable to him. Here he was: Leonidich’s murderer. Greatly aged, although just twelve years had passed. At the time he’d looked like an undernourished teen. At the time, death had passed through him like an electrical current, but he had jumped back and saved himself. In the place of his white crest, in all likelihood dyed, was emptiness and fuzz and the dulled luster of a bald spot covered with swollen scratches.

  Dead. No question. Moaning, Krylov tried to find a heartbeat on his fat neck, but all his fingers felt was the faded warmth of heated paraffin. The m
otionless body seemed unnaturally warm and puffy—warmer than Krylov’s bony wet hands, which were green now from grabbing at leaves. The dead man’s head wasn’t lying there, it was lolling—quite independently—and flopped from side to side like an empty beer bottle. Now Krylov could easily have been convinced that he was the man who had murdered citizen Zavalikhin—pushed him off the precipice, for instance, after first cracking the base of his neck. He’d have believed that more willingly than the loaders and expeditor who’d observed the wild chase. More willingly than the security guard and waitress who with their own ears had heard Zavalikhin say, “Him threatening to kill me, that’s just his way of joking! He makes jokes like that! By the way, his name is Krylov.”

  So that’s how it was. It hadn’t been some stranger hanging around the workshop then. This man knew that the gemcutters had been given their pay and would come out with money after a little drink. That’s probably what the nephew fetched up from his uncle for shitting on the place where he ate. Zavalikhin had been locked up for burglary and theft, but he hadn’t gone down for the hit. Leonidich’s murder, committed that spectral June evening, may well have been Zavalikhin’s only experience. He must have lived under the impression of it for a year. The paint never dried on that painting for him—especially the red paint. And now his kind uncle had sent him to keep an eye on that same bad kid who’d been walking a little ahead of the gemcutters in their drunken haze and the only one to see the criminal straight on. It would be interesting to know, by the way, what kind of image, what kind of instant picture of Krylov had been retained all these years in Zavalikhin’s memory. Probably a vague smear, a glass vessel filled with smoke. Or, on the contrary, a distinct mask of frightening firmness that couldn’t fit a living face or express anything but a threat. Nonetheless, when he set out spying, Zavalikhin knew who he was dealing with. The constant danger of being recognized baked his face hotter than the summer sun that tanned him so deeply during their wanderings. Now, after a month shut in his damp tenement, the traces of his tan were like the gray film you see on pale toadstools. Still, you had to respect him for his restraint. What had he said then about temptations? Panic had shouted into his hairy ears to spit on his uncle’s plans and get rid of the dangerous witness. He’d frozen in fear but hadn’t tried anything. He and Krylov had been tossing a grenade with a pulled pin back and forth—and Krylov hadn’t even realized.