Krylov frowned.
“Maybe it is nonsense,” he said sullenly. “But that’s all I can do. Objectively. And those guys fighting on the streets for the Whites and Reds, that’s all they can do, too. They’re sinking into childhood. But it’s as if nothing were happening. Just think, a couple of hundred corpses have been created somewhere.”
“Remember how we used to say that humanism was over?” Tamara replied wearily. “You’re the historian. How much was a human life worth back in ancient Egypt or the Middle Ages? Well, right now it’s worth about as much. The Communist model failed thirty years ago, and now the Western model of democracy and its liberal values is blowing away little by little. All this may well be horrible. At the same time it’s all happening in the best way. The best possible way. With the fewest losses. Only not many people are capable of appreciating that.”
“But it’s also true that there’s a kind of person who can’t sit around and do nothing. Naturally they’re superfluous and there’s no role set aside for them. So they wave their arms, get all puffed up, and pretend to be brave. That’s what I’m like. As a result I come out looking like a total jerk.” Krylov slapped the couch in search of cigarettes and found a crumpled pack under Tamara’s heavy hip. “But the sick, the cripples, and the disabled look even more ridiculous than I do. The ones who don’t have enough money to pay for an apartment or send their children to a decent school where they might get taught something. What’s their problem? What are they complaining about? You see, this is all on purpose. In fact, a marvelous new world is being kept somewhere in the central scientific flask, a world where everyone is healthy, educated, and secure. True, no one told them that. So here they are playacting and looking awful.”
Krylov frowned and took a puff on the bent cigarette. It tasted shitty. After all of the day’s adventures, his eyes teared up, and his mouth kept filling up with a burning, viperish poison.
“I don’t remember the reason for your sarcasm.” A thick velvety flush crept up Tamara’s face like a cloud. “I’ll admit something to you. I hate the so-called common people. The moment they start talking about society’s shortcomings, they start cursing the corrupt officials and the stupid politicians. No one has the nerve to say that the main reason for this world’s idiocy is them, this mass of social idiots. This terrible, global passivity. You can’t give them themselves. They can’t stand themselves. The main secret of this marvelous new world isn’t the frozen scientific discoveries but the irrelevance of most of the population to the economy and progress. The minute that gets out, no matter in what form, we’re going to find ourselves a meter away from fascism.” Tamara caught her breath and continued, crumbling the cracker onto her tightly squeezed knees. “The common people have the sullen suspicion they’re being tricked in order to make the world worse. But here’s the paradox: if anyone wanted to make the world better, they really would have to trick them. All of them! Because they need a holiday, as they imagine it. They have to be told only what they want to hear.”
Krylov shrugged, sensing how bizarre all this was. Here he and Tamara had come together. They’d missed each other. Each had gotten into a bad scrape. And now they were talking about world problems. In the open window, the hulking poplar was as black as a mountain of coal; the patch of moon was burning faintly. Meanwhile, in the room, the air pressure seemed to have changed. Bubbles were stirring tensely in Krylov’s ears and also in sensitive intracranial pockets.
“I feel as if I’m still on the plane,” Tamara complained, plunging her sharp fingers into her matted hair. “It really is strange being at your place. You live like a teenager left behind by his parents. The furniture is children’s future, and the canned meat…. Eat.” She gave Krylov a cracker on which gleamed a moist mound of cellophane-like caviar, and at that he recalled his employer, up to his ears in happiness. His heart contracted as if the workshop owner had died as well.
“You know, I’ve changed a lot lately,” Tamara admitted, digging the pâté out with a big black-toothed fork from the remains of the old lady’s silver. “I feel sorry for everyone. Take these common people. In the old days, they respected artists, writers, and scholars and so on as their superiors. Now they don’t need anything beyond the limits of their understanding. They think everything’s boring and tedious and they aren’t buying that. I met this Russian in New York, where he teaches, a pathetic hopsack coat and eyes with pupils as sharp as two pencil sharpeners. He says that all the awful terrorist acts and disasters of the last few decades, starting with the Twin Towers and ending with the Rome bombings, are happening because people have stopped perceiving great art. They’re simple, crude, bloody substitutes for Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky. So that every soul can experience an upheaval at least once in his life. A repulsive guy, I’m telling you, fuzz all over his cuffs, stiff threads that looked blood-stained, although he wouldn’t have harmed a fly. But he may have been right. After all, what, in fact, is the worst horror? Every day of their lives so-called common people feel immortal. Therefore they think their mundane truth is immortal. Remember that pensioner, Parshukov, he had a red Zhiguli, and you promised to buy me one just like it to drive to the market? He was always telling me that in the old days they put people like me in front of a firing squad. That Comrade Stalin purged enemies of the people, but now, he said, we’d multiplied. At the time I was still in school, and I have no idea how I annoyed him so badly.”
“Parshukov died a long time ago,” Krylov spoke in a muffled voice. Before his eyes there suddenly arose the angry old man, as if he were alive, with a galosh drawn on his prosthetic leg.
“He died, but he didn’t understand that,” Tamara objected heatedly. “You probably wonder why I didn’t spend another week or so abroad. Here’s why: that’s what everyone expects of me, for me to get the hell out and live as far away from here as possible, in some nice comfortable European spot. For me to eat through the money I have left there—if anything is left. Riphean Industrial and Investros-bank closed my lines of credit. All my structures have had their accounts frozen. They’re looking for somewhere where we didn’t pay taxes. They’re really tightening the screws on Granite. Plainly they can’t take away a controlling or even a blocking package of shares. On the other hand, they aren’t letting us work, and they’ve sealed our warehouses and workshops. Clinics are refusing to lease to us. Issues involving earth removal that were all decided are now hanging. But people are dying every day, and someone has to see them off. Look, no matter where you look, another company, Final Journey, has popped up everywhere we used to be. Who do you think its owner is? You won’t believe this. Evgenia Krugel! The one who starts shaking and flashing all her jewels at the mere mention of a cemetery. Papa Krugel himself must have gone into the business. His Excellency the governor is going to be our main gravedigger now.”
“Suits him,” Krylov couldn’t help himself, remembering the television broadcast from the governor’s residence. His Excellency’s study had been finished in formal oak in the style of the most pompous funerals, and Papa Krugel himself looked like nothing so much as the seller of all this carved and polished luxury. Even his face, mournful on the occasion of civic incidents, fit.
“Only what they don’t know is that I’m not going anywhere,” Tamara declared, and picking up the bottle the wrong way poured what was left of the vodka into their mugs as if she were watering flowers.
“I don’t think you’re any more mature than I am.” Krylov grinned, taking most of the nasty stuff and leaving Tamara what was on the bottom. “You keep equipping a boathouse at the passage across the Lethe, and it has to be here instead of somewhere else. You keep trying to teach people a new way to die. And you want them to understand the right way. That’s what they can’t forgive you for. They’d stone you if they could.”
“They’re trying, but not everyone can. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to intervene until they ruin me to the point of no return. It’s a matter of days.” Tamara shook her head decisive
ly. “I didn’t take that flight for nothing. I found support and credit. Now I need to meet with someone here. Suggest cooperation. Give a nice personal bribe. No one here can replace me, you know that yourself.”
“Just don’t get caught, please,” Krylov begged, full of impotent vexation at Tamara’s obstinacy and the impossibility of intervening in her grand affairs. “If they catch you red-handed giving a bribe, you might as well get shot. Are you sure your supposed friend isn’t just going to hand you over to jail?”
“It’s not in his interests,” Tamara said sternly. “It doesn’t happen any other way, believe me. I’ll come back anyway. Right now let’s drink to everything working out for me. Then I’ll answer the question you want to ask me but can’t bring yourself to.”
Sucking down the last drop of vodka, Tamara gave a childish noisy exhale and smack into her mug. She attacked the fragile little sandwiches, not forgetting to take the soapy shreds of venison. Krylov, who couldn’t get the food down his clenched throat, had tried to determine whether it was worth listening to Tamara’s justifications or it was better not to know about the Severzoloto factory or the activities of Stroyinvest.
When had it happened? Somewhere around 1994 or 1996. The financial pyramids had collapsed. People were selling flat leather jackets and bootleg liquor in old entryways, perestroika public toilets, telephone booths practically. Rubles were mutating monthly, like generations of drosophila flies. Punks were driving around town in rusty foreign cars, drowning out everything with loud rock and roll as if they were music kiosks. That was when Tamara had bought her first BMW sports car. Fancy cars were few and far between in the Riphean capital, and passersby watched Tamara go by, leaning back in the driver’s seat, driving her white beauty onward over the Riphean dirt, which was puffy from the snow.
That was also the time of those strange business trips and the telephone silence, and trips for someone’s birthday to the first stone dachas, where mighty fireplaces fitted with malachite smoked like Vesuvius and the barbaric furniture upholstered in brocade was stunning. Some of today’s faces were already popping up then, faces that didn’t stand out particularly among the other faces, maybe even less than those who were later wiped out. At the time, Pavel Petrovich Bessmertny, a middle manager and permanent deputy to some boss, was wearing a part-wool brown suit that suited his pointed mustache’s color and texture. The graduate student Volodya Grechikhin looked blurry and downtrodden, and the young women obviously didn’t like his long, too-translucent ears, which stuck out of his fine, shoulder-length hair. The hosts of those celebrations patronized Tamara and listened to her intelligent speeches with tender emotion, the way adults listen to a child recite verse. What exactly she told the chubby old men in gold glasses and what exams she took Krylov didn’t know. He was always distracted by something uninteresting, an exhibit of dried-out stuffed birds or the polished jasper tile they were thinking of installing around the toilets. At the time he was still the family’s breadwinner, and he felt uncomfortable that business was being done in his presence but not with him.
“You just wouldn’t have signed onto it,” Tamara told him, reading Krylov’s thoughts, as often happened with her. “You were still untrusting and hardened, and you kept giving us wolf looks. You would definitely have asked yourself whether they weren’t trying to take advantage of you and get you to take the rap. Well, I wanted to stand out. I wanted praise and for everybody to say I was perfection itself. Just imagine, I worked out a scheme all by myself to respond to their precise wishes. I felt like their favorite assistant. And I loved them because these advanced, mature men let me join their game. Though the constellations taking shape at the time had room for everything under the sun except emotions.”
“You mean the idea was to grind you into dust,” Krylov clarified suddenly.
“That’s why I didn’t initiate you into anything,” Tamara replied in a cheerless voice. “I thought you were too spiteful. That you’d interfere and embarrass me in front of my friends, who hadn’t done anything bad to me yet. Just the opposite, they’d only helped.”
“Gee!” Krylov was indignant. “Fine discoveries I’m making in my old age! So as long as they weren’t putting you in jail or shooting you, as long as they weren’t saddling you with debts with interest, they’re holy men and it’s a sin not to believe them. Even though they’re the ones who created all these opportunities for themselves and others.”
“I created them myself,” Tamara reminded him quietly. “I took part in this, too, and very enthusiastically.”
“How did you manage to extricate yourself?” Krylov inquired sarcastically.
“Not in bed!” Tamara blazed up.
“That’s not what we’re talking about. Get to the point.”
Tamara hunched over, slipping her hands between her knees and rubbing her palms and knees together like a hobbled grasshopper. This was a habit from her teenage, high school years, which manifested itself only in moments of confusion, which were very rare in the adult, successful Tamara. She sat like that if she knew no stranger was looking at her.
“I realized it two weeks ago,” she finally spoke. “The truth came to me on the air, when they produced Mr. Goremyko and he started talking. You know, the thing is that they built those reservoirs for the cyanide solution. They really did! And for more than twenty years I’ve been certain there never was any such thing as the Severzoloto plant!”
“What do you mean?” Krylov was stunned.
“Think back to the early 1990s. Think back to what those times were like,” Tamara continued patiently. “It was as if everyone was drunk. It felt as though the new economic geniuses were just about to build capitalism here. They promoted every kind of project you can think of! Traditional bake houses, a fast food chain called Russian Blini. As if to say, let’s take the shine off all their McDonald’s! People got loans to do this, and they sold share certificates to the public. Note: not the shares! But the public didn’t see the difference. They just brought their nice money to these crafty firms. They stood in line.”
“But afterward no one ever saw any Russian fast food or bake houses,” Krylov recalled. “And for some reason they forgot very quickly, even what those companies were called.”
“That’s exactly it!” Tamara chimed in. “This was fraud in the purest form. No one had any intention of building anything. All those conjurors were shot or put in prison, especially after the MMM crash. Remember that Vasilisa trial? That traditional baker, Vasilisa Churkina, that huge woman, with a hairdo like a boyar’s hat and eyes like chicken eggs. She gave an interview from jail saying she’d just been getting ready to build her first bake house when the state swooped down and took away the money that belonged to her depositors. They didn’t let her off unscathed, meanwhile, but they let her go pretty fast. Then she became a folk healer and lifted curses on television, and she had people signed up for her to tell their fortunes six months down the line. Five years ago I saw her brochure in a shop: Vasilisa Churkina, hereditary folk psychic, charms for love and money. Two hundred thousand copies printed!”
“I still don’t get the connection,” Krylov interrupted.
“I’ll explain again. I thought Severzoloto a phantom like Russian Blini. When they started imprisoning the illusionists—though not all of them—I was sure my friends would cover for me. But there really was construction going on at Severzoloto, it didn’t matter what quality. That’s why there was never an investigation against Stroyinvest at the time.” Tamara took a few quick gulps of air and suddenly yawned tenaciously, without unclenching her jaw, and her eyes watered. “Stroyinvest was a fly-by-night operation,” she went on with a lump of yawning in her mouth. “The money landed in my account, the same loan, and spent a little over a week there. I’m not going to go into the details. I paid myself supposedly for a project that didn’t exist. That’s where it all ended. Even I’m amazed now at how strong the financial virtualities were then. After all, I’m over forty, and I never once got aro
und even to searching for Severzoloto on the Internet.”
“In the studio you were shouting something about the date of the photo,” Krylov recalled sternly.
“So! You did watch!” Tamara livened up. “Just don’t say you warned me. At least Dymov got what was coming to him. A concussion to that pea-brain plus damage to his pretty face. His loving Bessmertny took him overseas on dragonfly wings to consult American doctors. Do you think I haven’t wanted to do something like that all these years? And how!” Tamara gave an unkind belly laugh, which made it clear that without her diet and exercise she had grown a little belly. “Now as for the film. They took it on an old digital, and in the corner of the studio screen a date sometimes popped up. August 2010! That is, they knew about the cyanide leak seven years ago. They knew and they did absolutely nothing! Now they’re trying to saddle me with everything. We’ll just see about that! If we really dig, then Mr. Bessmertny, for instance, won’t be collecting his own dice. I have my lawyers negotiating right now. Damn, if only they’d unblock my accounts!”
Scowling, Krylov looked at the agitated Tamara from the far corner of the couch. He didn’t like her like this—as if she were pregnant with revenge. He suddenly thought that Madame Death had come to see him in his refuge after all and kissed him on the cheek, but leaving him alive for some unknown purpose.
“Don’t look at me like that!” Tamara began fidgeting angrily, pulling at the tight, crumb-strewn linen on her knees. “Do you want to know whether I’m tormented by pangs of conscience at night? No, I’m not. I’m sorry. When all this happened I was a little girl, and I would have been horrified at the death of the creatures and the poisoning of the forests. I would have sobbed into my pillow. Nothing would have made me take part in that. Even now I wouldn’t, but for other reasons. Too much water has passed under the bridge in twenty-plus years, and most of all what’s changed is me. If I can scramble out of this and afterward do something for the polluted area, I will. But don’t expect anything more from me.”
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