2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  “It’s not all that simple,” muttered Farid, digging through the stale archival bounty. “It’s not all that simple, my dear fellows.”

  So as not to disturb the apartment’s owner, Krylov installed himself at a slight distance, in a shabby armchair, and for lack of anything better to do started examining the spy’s cell phone. The standard keyboard was as worn and gray as a seed hull. But when he tried to turn the phone on, ten boxes came up, not the usual four, and the quality of the video display, which this time depicted a sleek reddish-brown cat that looked like a chocolate roll, was so fabulous that Krylov could even see the wet fur going the wrong way because the beast had been licking itself before the shot was taken.

  “What’s that you’ve got there?” Farid inquired during a smoking break.

  “It’s that trophy cell phone.” Krylov handed Farid the clever toy with the video-cat clawing some furniture ruin. “The owner’s dead, but the cat remains.”

  “Yes, interesting.” Farid turned the nonstandard electronic device in his hands. “From its looks, it’s like the ones flopping around in women’s purses. No one would ever want to steal it. But in fact it’s got a processor like a souped-up laptop. My old piece of junk doesn’t even compare. If only we had a hacker!” Farid squinted dreamily at his cigarette smoke. “To unlock the codes in this fucking thing. You never know. We might find something useful. To tell you the truth, I can’t tell you how badly I need a techie! The district was badly reconnoitered and there are more contradictions than you can count on your fingers. Those meteorologists have dynamic models, very effective. I wish I had one!”

  “Couldn’t we find someone we know?” Krylov asked hopefully. “Together you and I know half the town.”

  “No, you and I can do without someone we know.” Farid heaved a sigh, propping his head on his hand. “An information leak won’t do us any good at all. Now, if we could just find someone who was completely out of the loop. But who had reasons to help us. Only where are we going to get him, our benefactor? Unless he falls out of a clear blue sky.”

  At this, Krylov choked on the smoke and slapped his icy forehead. Apparently he had to be grateful to himself for having so few pieces of clothing in circulation. Paying no attention to Farid, who had half risen, Krylov headed for the wardrobe. Inside the bare hangers, yellow as bone, with women’s sashes in different colors hanging on them, he got a sharp and ragged whiff of camphor. There it was. The jacket Krylov had been wearing that day on the square. He hadn’t even taken it to the drycleaner but had simply washed the shoulders and back off by hand. It had turned into a loose sack speckled with moth holes and eaten into by the explosion’s filling, which looked like bits of halvah. However, Krylov had continued to wear it, humbly, keeping all his pocket contents. Now the bent business card was right where it had been, where his chance acquaintance who had implored him so to call him had stuck it.

  “We have our man,” Krylov told Farid, placing in front of him the business card of Pavel Alexandrovich Dronov, creative systems designer at Riphvideoplus.

  Dronov could not bear to wait a minute. He came at that late hour, huge, wearing a fresh white shirt and tie, with a Browning High Power, as precise as a drafting instrument, tucked into his belt.

  “I’m very very glad to see you!” He gave Krylov a big smile, shaking and warming his cold hand for a long time with both of his large, warm, goldenly wooly paws. “Lelya and Mashka send a big hello! I’ve thought of you often, you know. You and your words about future excesses. You predicted it all so accurately! Even I’ve already taken part a little, and you know I so didn’t want to! The day before yesterday, it wasn’t even dark yet, I had to shoot at these scarecrows in overcoats. Over their heads, of course, and they’re shouting at me, ‘Gold, dollars, chase him, a bourgeois!’”

  Collected and kind, Dronov looked like a doctor on a house call where the whole family was ill. Leaving Krylov, he formally introduced himself to Farid. The specialist kept running into lamps and seemed to shake the cramped apartment with his steps as he was led into the kitchen, which immediately became tiny and poorly lit. Farid heated what was left of the Ceylon tea until it was red hot, and in honor of their guest put out a Tatar honey treat, chak-chak, that was obviously not from the pastry shop but homemade and brought to Farid on a handsome blue patterned dish as a present.

  Dronov listened without interrupting to the brief exposition of the extraordinary circumstances. This took quite a long time. When he learned who the famous Tamara Krylova was to his friend, he looked at the younger man with new respectful interest.

  “She’s an amazing woman!” he spoke with enthusiasm. “Such a rarity. My God! Such beauty! You wouldn’t think, no one would believe, she alone was to blame for this contamination in the north. The newspapers are blowing this out of proportion, that’s all! In fact, officials are mixed up in this story. It’s great you helped her!”

  After this Dronov wiped the honey off his big white fingers and asked them to show him the mysterious cell phone. For only a minute he fingered and examined the device, which looked like a little black larva in his hand.

  “But I was the one who made this,” he reported in amazement, testing the case’s fastener with his index finger. “That’s the way it goes! This earned me a Volkswagen for my Lelya, who really wanted one. I was doing all kinds of moonlighting, and this sad guy comes to see me, about fifty-five, and he asks me to make him a super-phone, only without any flashy design, so it would look like something old. His business required confidentiality, he said, so no one could get to the data. He paid well! So I did my best.”

  “You mean you can get the information out?” Krylov, who suddenly imagined his search for Tanya had come to a happy conclusion and he had only to live until the morning, rejoiced.

  “That’s hard to say right off. I’m saying I did my very best,” Dronov replied guiltily, looking first at Krylov and then at Farid with childishly bright eyes. “Well, it was interesting for me. I used a few sweet innovations in this phone. You’re not going to capture the information here that easily. Inside, it’s almost like it’s alive. That is, it’s not recorded in a specific place; it’s constantly flowing around, stirring, moving back and forth. Like a lizard or a centipede. It has lots of room. I got it to be very sensitive. The instant you touch it it slips away. And you just can’t hurt it. It’s got a small but nasty terminator sitting in a dark corner. The moment it determines the lizard’s had its tail torn off, for instance, it instantly pounces and gobbles it down. It’s not even a matter of codes. We can pick up the codes.”

  “I guess we’re out of luck again, then.” Krylov waved his hand, accidentally knocking over his glass straw and releasing a heavy white stream onto the floor. There didn’t seem any point in living ’til the morning. Now all Krylov wanted to do was sleep—sleep for a year or four, so no mornings bothered him.

  “You mustn’t get so upset,” Dronov was concerned. “At least I can try! I do know its habits, this lizard-centipede. I’ll find a way to grab it from behind. I’ll synchronize with my laptop and try something through a network. If the terminator crawls out, we’ll take him to pieces right away!”

  “He needs to sleep. The man is completely exhausted,” said Farid, whose wrinkles had turned to putty in the dreamy haze.

  “Then let’s put him to bed,” Dronov began to whisper, putting down his cup.

  Together they picked up Krylov, who shuffled his legs awkwardly over the spilled salt as if he were drunk. Their faces blurred in the middle from the spot where their voices were coming from. The bed seemed as deep as a pit full of water, and he practically floated out of the clothes concerned hands freed him from.

  “Now let’s go take a look at your computer,” said the invisible Dronov, covering Krylov with a quilt.

  2

  FROM THAT MOMENT ON, KRYLOV LAPSED INTO A HEAVY TORPOR. The same state of sleep went on and on, with breaks for wakefulness to which sleep was a dark alcoholic admixture. In turn, his
wakeful state persisted in his sleep. Immobilized and breathing heavily through his nose, Krylov continued to sense the dark, narrow room around him where he actually lay on his left side. He had lost all sense of time. He might wake up in the afternoon to an empty apartment pierced by the pale autumn sun, an apartment he had now studied much better than his parents’ junk-filled tenement and even his own refuge—better, probably, than neat and thoughtful Farid knew his own residence. He could wake up in the middle of the night, make his way to the middle room, and see Dronov, concentrating, rustling the keyboard of his transparent notebook, and Farid taking a bite out of a sandwich distractedly, his elbows resting on the heavy hydrological maps, which looked like they were covered in ice.

  Dronov was now coming over nearly every evening, bringing with him the cold smell of his will, and hauling in fruit-colored—rosy apple and ripe pear yellow—pages. He and Farid had found common ground very quickly and genuinely so. During breaks they sipped smoky tea and chatted, nodding at each other, amiably tapping their hot cigarettes, smoked right down to the filter, on the ashtray. Farid’s old computer was deemed a pensioner, wiped of dust, copied onto disk, and banished to the balcony. In its place, Dronov brought a new machine that consisted of not only a laptop but also a pair of holographic monitors and lots of electronic innards that looked like beadwork on fine steel. All this he spread out on the computer desk and mainly on the floor, spending a long time installing the parts so that they were oriented toward each other properly for Dronov. Now half the room was taken up by something resembling an electric train set, where each ribbed block held in its field of vision several others, exchanging arachnoid signals and winking drops of green and gold electricity. Placed in the middle of this spiderweb was the spy’s phone—or rather, what it had become after Dronov removed its case and added boards, glassy displays, and colored cables. It was as if an insect had hatched from the larva, a very stubborn insect that would not surrender the spider and from time to time emitted a delicate chirring that made you cover your ears.

  Dronov walked through this whole setup with high cautious steps, managing not only not to graze a single piece of metal but also not to touch a single one of the invisible threads woven above the dusty floor into an information cocoon. His main craft of toymaker suited Dronov very well because in his big hands everything became trusting and toylike. He managed to type very quickly on the tiny keyboard, flitting all ten of his blunt fingers in a way that seemed to make his subject even prettier and inherently fancy, like a box of candies. He zipped onto corporate networks and downloaded for Farid incredible gigabytes, after which he wrote his own program using analogs: the concentric lines on the monitor went into motion, like the waves drawn by stones thrown at random. Meanwhile, with Dronov’s appearance, the bachelor shut-ins started eating very well. No matter where you went there were homemade meat patties oozing warm juice and varnished pies with all kinds of fillings. Often, waking in the afternoon, Krylov would find on the kitchen table a basket of fresh, sunflower-gold curd tarts complete with a friendly note and covered with a clean dish towel.

  For Dronov, Krylov was evidently an inexhaustible source of a special kind of satisfaction. Looking at him, the huge programmer experienced over and over again Mashka’s miraculous rescue, the happy fact of Mashka’s very existence. Dronov probably saw Krylov, who had unhappiness written all over his face, as a distressingly black spot. Krylov noticed that the new friends who had unexpectedly found each other through the bent business card with the cataract of a sodden hologram treated him as if he were gravely ill and did not summon him to their quiet war councils.

  He had no objections or aspirations. His mental process, which resembled a book with agonizingly familiar and marvelous illustrations and a worn, vanished text, kept developing steadily. Out of the blue the Asian city of his early childhood started surfacing in his memory, piece by piece. The dark claret peaches that looked wrapped in gray cotton wool were always hot, the grapes cool. In winter the trees’ bare branches gleamed in the sun, as if they had a metal armature growing out of their knotty trunks. Did all that really exist somewhere now? The elephant legs of the minarets, the stork nests at their tops, which looked like old sheepskin caps. The echoing narrow streets, the tiny carts made of two boards and covered with insanely complicated and worn-away carving on their tops and sides, and the rusty gas lines. The perfectly still pond with water like buttermilk, men on a platform laid with rugs bowing their bald brown heads in black skullcaps tightly to their drinking bowls. What was that place called? The Hotel Lyabi. I could get a plane ticket and be there in a few hours. Go there and find myself a job. Do something totally ordinary, plunge into the street life of my childhood, tan until I’m black, drink green tea in the evenings, gape at the scalded European tourists, and sell them lousy trinkets for a few dollars. Find some five-story building with faded roses by the entrance and under the windows an irrigation ditch lined with blue bathroom tiles. There are people today living there, on the third floor, in apartment 12, who have no idea of Krylov’s existence. A beautiful unmarried aunt there twirled barefoot in front of a trifold mirror and fastened something around her neck, under a smooth electric wave of hair—laughed, put lipstick on, and fixed her braid, which, with its red ribbon, looked like a long fat, gladiolus; she let young Krylov pluck the rainbow stones out of her darkened brooch—magical pieces of glass that called up the first impulse of this ineffable knowledge that Professor Anfilogov later defined as a “feel for stone.”

  His beautiful aunt—how many years had it been since Krylov had thought about her? And how old had she been when the family left and she stayed behind for some reason? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? No, of course not! Nineteen! That impossible figure was suddenly swapped for the adult Krylov’s seniority, and the light maidenly specter suddenly lit up the depths of his memory with a strange, nonliving, flickering light, as if a flare gun had been fired into a dark mine. What in fact had happened then? What could have been done to the beautiful Russian girl by sweaty, compact, shrill men or jeering teenagers with clutching fingers? In the daytime they all still looked almost like ordinary people, although they refused to understand Russian and wouldn’t sell anything; but in the night they did something together around the campfires, and the nights smelled of meat, and after those nights sometimes strange corpses were found stuffed into very narrow cracks. Two representatives of the police surfaced in Krylov’s memory—identical, nasty, with faces like whiskery butter, who had for some reason come to the house, where his aunt had been absent for several days. For some reason his father first spoke with them in a demanding and angry voice and protested when the mustaches shook out on the floor the contents of their suitcases, which were packed for departure, and rummaged through the clothing and linens with their feet. Then something happened (or was that the next time?) and his father, with a trace of sweat on his left temple, humiliated, handed the mustaches a packet of money for some “respected man,” and the policemen ate something from a plate, licking their fingers, and casually counted out the reddish-brown tens, bossily frowning and capriciously exclaiming. To cap off their pillaging, they rolled up his aunt’s colorful, defenselessly elegant dresses in a ball and took them away, and that evening his father hissed at his weeping mother, repeating, “She had no call. Because of her it all nearly fell through.”

  Was his mama’s younger sister still alive when the rickety, wheel-whining train hauled Krylov and his parents across the steppe and into the unknown? Where do people go who are neither dead nor alive but simply went missing one day? Just as the spy and Leonidich’s little murderer suddenly converged into a single person lying dead for all to see in the bushes, so, out of the strange inertia of this convergence, Krylov began to imagine some mysterious similarity between his aunt and the missing Tanya. There was something similar in the drawing of their eyebrows, the set of the head, and most of all, the perfection of the inner foundation, the architecture of the delicate skeleton. In the absence of bot
h originals, the similarity took on increasing power. This third had no name or face and he could not love it any more than he could live on the moon.

  Nonetheless, Krylov could not stop wanting to see Tanya, to live with Tanya, and he had no interest in knowing any Ekaterina Sergeyevna who had suddenly taken her place. Their meetings had been a succession of losses—and now Krylov had lost more than he could imagine. Tanya seemed to have taken away everything that had been in Krylov’s life up to the time he met her. What had been taken away was nothing more than his soul’s childhood property, which lay at its very bottom: those hot pears in the bowl, the warm cake in his school bag, the blue, almost armored-looking domes on the old clay city, the dirty worn street, and in a gap, like the cover of a book of Oriental fairy tales, a marvelous Islamic arch leading through the golden darkness straight to the adventures of Sinbad and Aladdin. Apparently, evil Asia had once again become Krylov’s one true homeland. If people who found themselves in the same position as he was asked him to share his experience, he would say, yes, only your childhood remains unpillaged, absolutely nothing else.

  He also discovered that time does not heal pain; rather than possess any healing properties, it has the ways of a vampire. Living through an hour, let alone a day, was grueling work. No one had ever taken the trouble to tell Krylov—starting with the cold autumn sky, increasingly free of leaves, birds, and other flying objects—how long this would go on.

  Silently, his illness’s perpetuity made Krylov and Farid closer. Sometimes, in Dronov’s absence, thinking Krylov was asleep, Farid spoke with the hologram of Gulbahor—not as if it were a living person, but as if it were a cat or a canary. Such was one of the forms of existence for the missing, a lesson Krylov learned standing quietly in the doorway.