2017

by Olga Slavnikova

  “He didn’t have to go shooting that,” Farid commented, embarrassed and angry. “There’s zip operative information. It’s probably for his report to his client, so he can say, We’re working and here they are, the lovebirds.”

  “Download that for me onto my phone,” Krylov whispered, riveted to the screen.

  “Okay,” Dronov replied, softly running his index finger over the velvety sensor as if it were a kiddie slide.

  Next file: Tanya and Krylov roaming, craning their necks, amid five-story brick apartment buildings compacted like briquettes. Tanya’s limping much more than Krylov realized at the time they really were walking around in circles, in search of number 13 maybe. A shot at a bus stop, somewhere on the outskirts: the view from the highway onto a damp green field that looks like a scrap of velvet with a half-torn-off pocket—a crooked little house with a flowery vegetable garden. Tanya’s wearing Krylov’s jacket; all you can see of Krylov is his elbow; Tanya is telling him something, looking up—as if she were speaking a foreign language. Through the silence and light Krylov can hear Tanya’s voice: a little doll-like, a little bird-like. The impression of a foreign language probably comes from the fact that her lipstick is all smeared and her lips are blurry. And here’s the reason for the blurriness: a criss-cross kiss, noses red from the cold, and all this being shot unconscionably from behind intervening bush branches. Another outdoor café, little tables, more little tables, nearly all of them taken, in the corner, by the railing, sunspots like a flock of large butterflies, and when they land on Tanya’s pale skin, the tips of their wings turn pink. The camera is constantly jerking and capturing something extraneous, green, and living. Time and again someone walks between the cameraman and nature, dark and enigmatic, like the Snow Man.

  “Show file fourteen,” Farid’s stern voice comes from behind Krylov’s back.

  A hotel’s front steps, apparently. Morning, apparently. Tanya’s arm is raised and she’s stepping off the sidewalk in front of trucks that are flying across a huge pink puddle, like swans on broad watery wings. Tanya jumps back but her bright skirt is splattered with gray. Now an old Volga covered in suede-like dirt stops. The front door opens, Tanya says something in a foreign language and climbs inside, and the Volga pushes off and is lost in the stream of wet transport moving away under the hazy monorail where trains flash by as if someone were running a finger over a comb.

  “Stop! Do you realize what she’s doing?” Farid exclaimed, grabbing Krylov by the shoulder. “She’s giving the driver an address!”

  “Just don’t go fainting. Listen to me,” he continued in the kitchen, shaking Krylov, who was limp and kept dropping his ashdangling cigarette. “There’s no mystery here. Everyone knows you’re a little deaf. Everyone’s noticed that when you talk to someone you look at their mouth, not their eyes. That means you read lips! You don’t realize it because you’re used to it. But other people can tell that half of you listens and half of you finishes reading visually. That means the lack of sound is no obstacle for us! I’ve watched it a few times; the face is photographed clearly, and the words are literally sculpted in the air. Come on, concentrate!”

  “Yeah, it’s as if I can hear a voice. Only it’s like a doll’s, not a person’s,” Krylov mumbled.

  “That’s just great! If we have to we’ll enlarge it and run it slower!” Dronov rejoiced.

  “So, let’s get to work. The smoke break’s over,” Farid ordered, lifting Krylov by the elbow from the sunken stool.

  From time to time, Krylov felt like he was sleeping and seeing something absurd. “Quiet!” Farid commanded each time before Dronov, squatting, replayed over and over on the screen the little piece of that soundless wet morning. Bigger. Slower. Tanya’s face swells up, hisses, and whispers like soap bubbles. Silence stuffs his brain like cotton wool. From the top again: the pink pond slimy from the light and the hood of the filthy Volga, which looks like a battered spade. The image grows again, occupying the screen in jolts; Tanya gets closer and closer, more and more detailed, and more and more inaccessible on the screen; it was as if they were choosing stronger and stronger glasses for Krylov. Through the harsh optical fog, through the black, now nighttime silence, he couldn’t hear anything at all. The computer chair creaked and tilted to the side; sitting on it was like riding a camel. “Show it to me normal size,” Krylov asked almost without a voice, and once again Tanya, chilled in her thin cotton, is leaping into the street and pulling hard on the car door.

  Everything was in the present tense, as happens when you’re incredibly tired in the middle of the night. In the kitchen, all the leftover steak had been eaten, and so had the slightly soured cheese fritters, and yesterday’s dried-out pirozhki. They’d emptied the ashtray twice into the scorched trash pan, which was full of powdery peelings. A hinged window pane had been opened onto the cold autumnal darkness where web-footed creatures were flying around, like in a cave. The dregs of black coffee in the cups were cold, almost icy.

  “That’s probably enough for today. We have to let the man get some rest,” Dronov proposed, embarrassed, himself barely stifling a yawn that was trying, like Samson, to pry open the programmer’s leonine jaws.

  “I read lips best at the workshop. It’s always noisy in gemcutting,” Krylov muttered, propping his head, which seemed to be emitting an intense drone, on both hands. “There’s some kind of sleight-of-hand going on. I need to plug up my ears a little.”

  “The workshop, you say?” Farid perked up. “That means we need knocking and whining and whirring. We’ll sleep later.” With these words he opened the doors of his flimsy kitchen cupboard with both hands, and out of it tumbled black-toothed graters, sieves with plugged up holes, and pot lids, which meshed into a little bit of chaos.

  Soon he had a whole mishmash of steel in the room. Additionally, Farid and Dronov dragged in a rattling toolbox plus a good-sized old basin that was beaten like armor. They wasted no time in turning on the washing machine, which had been manufactured at one of the converted defense plants. This heavy metal object with the thrashing centrifuge inside skipped over the tiny bathroom, threatening to smash the tacky old tile. Blowing the hair from his forehead, Farid drilled holes in the basin; surprising even himself, well-behaved Dronov ran a file over the grinding grater and simultaneously kicked a tin can filled with nails. The wakened neighbors upstairs and downstairs banged on their radiators, filling the pipes with an outrageous din. Not a bad resemblance. Krylov even imagined he saw the cheerful Leonidich for a second holding a blinding stone spark in front of a loupe, like a beauty in front of a mirror. Nonetheless, the noise lacked a certain pneumatics, air pressure. Suddenly outside, somewhere past the tenements and park, there was a clap of explosions: the dishes clattered and the window shutter opened of its own accord. And in that very second Tanya said in her ordinary voice, “18 Dachnaya. Near the Zavokzalnaya Metro. Will you take me for two hundred rubles?”

  Part Ten

  1

  THEY’D BEEN HERE TOGETHER, TOO. THEY MET NEAR NUMBER 36, which turned out to be a low-slung clinic with a tiny park and flannel patients, even some on crutches. At the time a brief but considerable downpour had been passing through, barely wetting the asphalt, as if you could catch up to it and lead it downhill, toward the river. That was where Krylov was heading now, holding the hot cluster of keys in his pocket tight. He flew around the clinic park. Lightweight black plastic bags were dragging down the sidewalk with the leaves. Their dry twigs gently scratched the asphalt, rustling in the lee like torn cigarette wrappers.

  Before Krylov could determine which of the two five-story buildings, the brown or the dirty green, was number 18, he saw Tanya jaywalking. A separate, artificial light perpendicular to the ordinary daylight was falling on her. An exultant patch seemed to be playing on her face. “Tanya!” Krylov shouted, jumping up with an outstretched arm, but she didn’t hear him.

  She was heading almost straight for Krylov, bearing left, toward the bare square with the scrawny birche
s and the vague monument. She was better dressed than everyone around her. Something shiny and leopard-printed clung to her, the wind was blowing her opened pink fur jacket, and rhinestones sparkled on her legs, which wobbled in pink boots with mirror heels. Tanya was flying like a blind woman, her face was a spot, but on it shone such happiness that Krylov wanted to sit down on the asphalt and cry. A woman rushing to a rendezvous—that’s what she looked like. Tanya had exchanged her old haircut for serpentine locks. It was all so flamboyant and vulgar that it betokened Tanya a broken heart.

  At least they could talk. Grinning, Krylov rushed to intersect her straight across the wet grass, tangled like a mop—but Tanya turned abruptly. Now she was rushing ahead of him, and Krylov, his heart sinking, prayed she wouldn’t trip. Her life, entrusted to her alone, was like a spark in the lee; Krylov imagined that the energy of the chase itself might suddenly lead her out to the grassy crest over the abyss covered in slippery watermelon rinds.

  But Tanya was racing, not hearing Krylov’s shouts, oblivious to everything. Her life was flitting like a butterfly on a minefield, and these flittings made Krylov gasp. He thought he was just about to catch up to Tanya and grab her puffy sleeve.

  Suddenly, though, she ran up steep front steps, working her elbows, and vanished behind a heavy door sheathed in sugary fiberglass. Krylov threw back his bare head, which had been plastered down by the cold and wind, and even took a step back. The sugary door led to the lobby of one of those fanciful buildings built about four years before that stood half empty due to the high price per square meter. Glassed-in loggias loomed like stacked crystal glasses, and pointy little towers, also covered with tiles the color of fly agaric, rose symmetrically from the red brick roof. If Tanya had a rendezvous there, inside, with a man, then there was absolutely nothing Krylov could do by being nearby. On the other hand, this building was just the kind the set of keys that had tormented Krylov might fit.

  He had tormented himself because he himself had been like a lock the toothed metal had been left in, crackling and rattling the workings. He felt a physical need for a light turn and an easy click. In fact, he only hesitated a few seconds. Behind the sugary door there was another, a dull, stainless steel mirror. The button key with sparkles of chips evoked a welcoming clang in the outside sensor, and the door came unstuck with a sigh of relief, or so it seemed. Suddenly shy, Krylov stepped into the lobby, so polished it might have been sheathed in ice. If right now anyone had approached him, he would have slipped outside in embarrassment. But the concierge’s faceted booth was curtained and the way to the glassily tinkling elevators, which sounded like they were carrying a fine porcelain service to heaven, was perfectly free. Above the elevator doors a scrolling green light stopped at “22.”

  Under the call buttons there was a discreet triangular opening. In a flash of intuition, Krylov stuck in the object that had seemed like a crude nail. Nothing happened. But when he abruptly pulled the key out in fright, something suddenly opened behind his back with an otherworldly ringing. The mirrored cabin of the tiny elevator waited, gazing curiously from the ceiling with the magpie eye of a TV camera. “Twenty-two,” Krylov prompted himself, pushing the button. The ascent was swift. Krylov felt as if he’d been sucked in, held, and gently released by a glassy ocean wave. The metal doors parted, delivering him to a landing decorated with an artificial rosebush that gave off the strong smell of attar of roses.

  The next door had a small rug laid out in front of it in the form of a rainbow heart and blocked the hall to several apartments. In all, Krylov counted eight identical bells with numbers from 169 to 176. He could put an end to this trespassing and just press the buttons from top to bottom, offering profuse apologies to strangers and waiting for Tanya’s dear voice—from the acoustic mesh where a nasty darkness crackled. But the five-pointed bundle itself led Krylov on, as if his own fingers were wearing the serrated metal and eager to plunge up to their webbing in the ravishingly yielding mechanisms. The key that looked like the letter “p” came to mind with the simple and crude firmness so essential in a shaky moment. Krylov moved it forward.

  There were plump leather armchairs in the hall around a magazine table heaped with flyers. Someone seemed to be sitting in the nearest one, which had its glossy back turned to him: a checked sleeve hung down nearly to the floor. Even after he’d convinced himself, by walking around it on tip-toe, that it was just a checked throw left lying across the arms, his agitation did not abate in the least. Polished numbers shone on the identical doors, also upholstered in leather, and in the four corners of the ceiling gray TV cameras rotated like mechanical birds. The last two keys, the most intricate of all, suddenly seemed as fragile as icicles in spring.

  Trying not to make any noise, he began clockwise. The first fine-toothed keyholes wouldn’t take the keys, and there was no sound inside the apartment. The next latched on so firmly to the foreign object that a mere trembling wiggle, as if tapping out Morse code, succeeded in freeing it. Scarcely had Krylov touched the locks of apartment 171 with his scratched housebreaking tool than a storm of excitement broke right by the door, as if a New Year’s tree had been dropped there and was being shaken: it was a big dog dancing and whizzing his nails over the floor. Another attempt, a desperate chattering, and a crunch. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” An old woman’s cotton-wool voice rang out from what seemed like a very long hallway. “Zhenechka, I can’t be quick.” He heard shuffling, as if behind the door people were skiing ten kilometers over a thin crust of ice. Breathing through clenched teeth, Krylov cautiously pulled the key out of the gleaming lock, as if he were taking it out of a sleeping man’s hand. Apartment no. 173. Another failure. The shuffling was getting closer as if it were a champion athlete hurrying, not an old woman. The next to the last door. “Zhenechka, I’m home,” a crone a few meters away from Krylov said coquettishly and she started throwing bolts. And all of a sudden the long-suffering key, which looked like a crystalline dendrite, turned with magical ease in the upper keyhole. Then the second went right into the ring and gave a sweet click. The neighboring doors opened simultaneously, and Krylov, slipping away, caught a glimpse of the old woman’s blue curls and gilded glasses sparkling with curiosity.

  His instantaneous dissolution into free atoms and instantaneous coalescence into a stinging, formless lump told Krylov what kind of place had opened up to him behind the door, which from the inside was an armored plate. It was a refuge. There the pink boots were, on the wood floor, their unbuckled tops leaning against each other. He heard Tanya singing, off-key and sweet, and he imagined Tanya flying around the room like a magical bird.

  The long hallway ended in an archway filled with cold dancing light. Afraid of falling apart, afraid of breaking down in tears, Krylov leaned over to take off his boots. When he had pulled the wet weights off his cold feet and straightened up again, he saw a strangely narrow male silhouette, like the eye of a needle.

  “Hello, professor,” a shaken Krylov whispered with just his lips.

  This is exactly what he had expected, but he still wasn’t prepared. Professor Anfilogov, wearing a stretched out house shirt that looked like it was made of tissue paper, was standing in an iced-over puddle of sunlight but was not reflected in the hallway mirror. The observer’s imagination always had a hand in creating Anfilogov’s image, and now Krylov was certain that his imagination was working at full throttle. He tried but could not look into his green eyes, which were oddly blurry, as if a whole vial of medicine had been dropped into them.

  The professor nodded slowly—maybe to Krylov, maybe to himself and went off into the depths of the apartment, getting his dark feet stuck in the puddle of cold sun. Before he reached the turn he got very thin and then vanished, like a needle sleeping under the skin, as if his entire liquid content had been injected into the empty bright space. Tanya’s singing instantly became audible. In just his socks, dragging them like flippers over dry land, he wandered toward the sound.

  He obviously had poked his head
in the wrong place. A long built-in cupboard, as empty as a train car. The apartment had a lot of room but very few things. Two identical chairs with unforgiving straight backs between the two tall bare windows. New eggshell-color parquet that had never known the pressure of furniture legs or the material weight of life. All this could be held in one’s consciousness without the slightest trouble. Krylov now saw all this through the diagram of the deceased professor’s mind: lots of unoccupied rooms, lots of compartments and shelves covered with untouched, moon-cast dust. And once again Krylov imagined the professor’s eyes, like two big spoonfuls of water, looking straight at the back of his head.

  Tanya struck him in the eyes like light. She was alone in the conditional bedroom, which was marked, as if on a computer mockup, by an equally conditional bed in which no one had ever slept. The pink fur coat had struck a playful pose on the bedspread, which was as white as a piece of the ceiling. Tanya was standing with her back to him, for some reason plunging her hand into the round, roiled aquarium, where among the torn algae and clumps of rotten fish food pink fish as fat as pigs rushed about. Swelling, the aquarium splashed water on the glass table and from there dripped onto the wood floor.

  All of a sudden, sensing someone’s silent presence nearby, Tanya shuddered and pulled out her hand as if the water were hot, splashing the bedspread badly.