Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

  For Easter, Uncle Igor’s table was laid with a long linen cloth embroidered with proverbs written in an old-fashioned script. On it stood a candelabrum for twelve candles and dark green shot glasses rimmed in gold. Uncle Igor took down an old guitar from the wall: the maker’s mark glittered gold in a circle beneath the strings.

  Uncle Igor, as small as a child—he needed a cushion on the chair—thin, with long gray hair, as luxurious as a woman’s, in a gray jacket of fine wool and a white shirt, looked like an actor, a bit of a magician, who knew how to enliven things. The glasses and cutlery in the hands of his guests seemed to be drawing a design, creating something that they were unaware of, not realizing that they were merely stand-ins for another gathering.

  Uncle Igor orchestrated the flow of conversation without any effort. The boy noticed how his father, usually unsociable, sat straighter and grew animated, how his mother grew lovelier, how the other guests relaxed, as if Uncle Igor were brushing them with a cheery gloss, an exciting glow, teaching them to appreciate once again the taste of food, the spiciness of spice and the saltiness of salt. Not a word about laboratories, state commissions, tests, aggregates, bonuses, formulas, equations, military acceptance, subcontractors—the adults didn’t really know what else they could talk about, so their embarrassment was amusing, and they drank more wine or vodka. Uncle Igor played the guitar and sang songs that the boy had never encountered anywhere else, and then he turned on the record player, and dance melodies flew from the black lacquer records and spun in the air, so foreign that he thought he was hearing not music but the voice of the record itself composed of an unnatural, implausible substance.

  Once the dancing began the children were sent off to play. That was what the boy had been waiting for. They played hide-and-seek, ever since he was little: only Uncle Igor’s apartment had enough hiding places for them truly to hide and seek, for a long time and without giveaways.

  The children were older now and kept up the old custom reluctantly, seemingly out of boredom. However, in fact, the game had a new meaning now: the boys listened to the girls’ breathing, the girls hidden behind drapes, sometimes hopping in order to be found. In the dimly lit rooms, their first feelings arose. Only one room, at the far end of the corridor, was always locked.

  The boy liked these hours of play. He hid better than the others, he could remain unnoticed in full view. The girls’ silhouettes did not excite him; his lust was for something different.

  The person hiding sees space inside out, with the eyes of subjects, walls, photographs. He tries to merge with the place, become part of it. For him, hide-and-seek was merely the prologue to a voyage, immersion in the attractive otherness, the life of and space inhabited by Uncle Igor.

  He held his breath, surrounded by things that had lost their corporeality, had turned into velvet ghosts, that might speak in the dark, convey something tactile. The distant locked room did not interest him; he did not think that Uncle Igor could have literal secrets hidden behind the door. Besides, he did not want to uncover some part of his hidden life; he wanted to know his everyday existence, his dashing, undisguised freedom of action and opinion, his ability to live without fear, treat everyone independently and at the same time be needed and universally respected.

  They played for a long time that evening. The thrill was gone. Hiding one more time, the boy noticed that the usually locked door was ajar, weak light coming through the crack.

  The sudden sense that this was no accident made him catch his breath.

  “I’ll just peek in,” the boy told himself. “Just a peek, that’s all.”

  The desk lamp was on. Probably Uncle Igor or the help left it on and forgot to come back in the flurry of holiday preparations. Its light, so personal, secret, the setting of Uncle Igor’s solitude and thoughts, beckoned irresistibly.

  “I wasn’t told not to go in here,” thought the boy. “I’ll say we were playing hide-and-seek. The door was ajar.”

  He walked around the room slowly, attentively looking at the cupboards, bookshelves, desk. A grandfather clock ticked loudly in the corner, marking the brief time he could spend here unnoticed.

  He wanted to leave and took three steps toward the door; he grew anxious. He realized that all the books here were about chemistry. The same ones that his father had. But Uncle Igor had more books; his father knew only German and here there were volumes in English and French. The boy took one off the shelf—yes, the same stamp of the Institute library.

  His father, when he worked at home, cleared his desk when he was done. If the boy needed to come into his room, he knocked first, and his father turned the work pages over. Uncle Igor left his desk as if he had walked out for a minute: tea in a glass, a viciously sharpened pencil on top of the pages. Typed pages, heavy honeycombs of formulas speckled with corrections.

  The boy turned away. He felt a mix of disappointment and vague hope. Uncle Igor could not be his father’s colleague. Yet he was. The books were evidence that he was merely a civil scientist, one of hundreds in the City.

  Suddenly the boy noticed a small triangle of fabric that stuck out of the doors of the clothes closet, like the corner of a bookmark. Military green. With embroidered gold leaves. A sleeve, probably.

  The boy pulled on the end but the doors were shut tight.

  “I’ll say that I wanted to hide in the closet,” he decided. “They didn’t forbid it.”

  The boy slowly opened the doors.

  The bulb in the closet glowed like a treasure hunter’s torch in a cave.

  The gold embroidery blazed. The buttons were golden flashes. The orders shimmered in gold, scarlet, steel, and silver; the orders and stars made of blood-red enamel, the gray steel hammers and sickles, plows and bayonets, a soldier with a rifle; gold sheaves and leaves, the gold letters of LENIN.

  A uniform hung in the closet. Covered in the heavy, round, scalelike discs of orders and medals from chest to navel. A major general’s lonely big stars sparkled on the shoulder boards.

  The uniform was small, almost a child’s, just right for Uncle Igor. Without the awards it might have looked comical. But the golden, ruby, and sapphire reflections imbued it with supernatural might. The boy could not imagine what a man had to do to earn so many awards. Was he even a man? A hero? A higher being?

  A cap on the shelf. Belt. A pair of boots.

  A different Uncle Igor. The true one. Who had the right to a special life.

  The boy had never seen such precious things up close. He ran his fingers over the gold, silver, and ruby scales, cold and heavy. The mirror on the inside of the door reflected a face made strange by confusion.

  The uniform, hung with medals that seemed an integral part of it, radiated pure, absolute power. The boy could not control himself. He didn’t think about being caught, punished, banished from Uncle Igor’s house. He so wanted to commune with that power, feel himself inside it, that he took the uniform off the hanger and with an unexpected, agile move, as if stolen from the owner, slipped his arms into the sleeves.

  His shoulders bent under the weight. You had to stand under the uniform as if under barbells at the gym. But the weight was inexpressibly pleasant, it both burdened and protected, it clad you in its thin silk lining.

  The boy stood and did not recognize himself, as if he had put on not someone else’s clothing but someone else’s features and character. The embossed symbols he had internalized in childhood made him part of something immeasurably bigger, as vast as the starry sky.

  He took a step toward the mirror. Blinded by the dazzling sparkle, he noticed the military emblems on the lapels almost accidentally.

  Not tanks.

  Not propellers.

  Not crisscrossed artillery barrels.

  Bowl and snake.

  A golden bowl with a snake wrapped around it, its head raised as if to take a sip or to protect the forbidden vessel.

  He had never seen an emblem like that. He didn’t know what it meant.

  In the midst o
f stars, sickles, hammers, and bayonets, the weapons of war and the weapons of labor welded into one, he thought, by the history of his country and therefore embossed on medals, the bowl and snake came from another, most ancient world when man was just beginning to name constellations. The boy suddenly understood that this inconspicuous and obscure symbol was the key; hidden, secret, it explained the orders, the general’s rank, Uncle Igor’s scientific path, combined it all into the secret of exclusivity, power, and strength.

  The boy carefully took off the uniform and hung it back in the closet, leaving a corner of the sleeve sticking out between the doors. The obsession did not go away. Blessed heaviness. Complete protection.

  He had found his idol. His path to becoming like Uncle Igor.

  The bowl and snake.

  Four years later the boy was the top student in chemistry. They were starting the last year of school. His father said that they would go see Uncle Igor to talk about the future. The boy guessed that his father, his kind father, milksop as his mother called him when she was angry, did not want him to repeat his path as the eternal number two, the reserve. His mother certainly did not want him to become a copy of her husband. They were prepared to give him to someone who knew how to forge destinies, change them for the better, higher, unattainable. The boy felt both rejection and joy. Their sacrifice was sweet to him. He knew now that the bowl and snake, the emblem of military medics, was just camouflage on Uncle Igor’s uniform. He was not a physician. He did not invent medicines. Much in their City was not what it seemed, and as he grew up, the boy accepted it without embarrassment, with a readiness that surprised his parents.

  He had expected a thorough interrogation and he was prepared to display his knowledge. But Uncle Igor asked a dozen rather simple questions, nodded, and said, “Fine, all right.”

  The boy felt Uncle Igor studying him. Looking at him absently, indifferently, weighing things that the boy did not know and could not imagine.

  As they said good-bye in the hallways, Uncle Igor said casually, “I’ll write a recommendation to the special faculty. But on one condition. Have him come tomorrow morning to the third entrance. I’ll write a pass.”

  The parents and the boy were stunned.

  The Institute’s third entrance!

  There were only three. Everyone in the City knew them.

  The First had the wide gates for vehicles and battered turnstiles for the workers. There was a line of people waiting for passes, someone trying to use the hard-to-hear internal telephone. Documents were checked by fat-bellied paramilitary guards, revolvers in scuffed holsters, and it was all redolent of boredom, sweat, and cabbage soup from the canteen.

  His father went through the Second entrance to go to work. Heavy billowing blinds covered the Institute’s glass vestibule, and it was only when the doors opened for an instant that you could see the gray marble lobby and the guards in gray suit jackets. The cardboard passes accepted at the First were not valid here. They had to be like his father’s: with a photograph and in a dark leatherette case.

  The Third . . . The Third was a metal door with a bell. A door in the brick end of the building without windows. Somehow everyone knew that it led to the same place as the other two: into the inner perimeter of the Institute, a city in the City. No parking was allowed opposite the Third, a traffic officer came over instantly. No buildings over two stories could be built next to it.

  But no one knew to whom the Third entrance belonged, who met visitors at the door. The ones who did know didn’t talk.

  “The Second,” his father either asked or corrected.

  “No. The Third,” Uncle Igor replied with a gentle smile. “At eleven.”

  The boy felt that answer cut the ties that connected him to his parents. His father had not been past the door of the Third. He couldn’t dream of being there. But he would be.

  Tomorrow.

  At eleven.

  In the morning, his father gave him his watch. The boy wanted the whole world to know where he was going. But there weren’t many pedestrians, and the street was completely empty by the Third entrance. If only someone would look out a window or out of the passing bus!

  The second hand made him hurry. The boy put his finger on the bell. Pressed. The button was rigid and immobile. Silence. Suddenly he imagined that he could still turn around and go; back to his mother and father, to his previous life. He looked around. A dusty street. A tall tramp in a dirty, black padded jacket stopped on the corner and was looking at him; where did he come from, this was the City, there were no tramps here! The boy pushed the bell as hard as he could. A harsh ring like an alarm sounded inside.

  A grumpy and surprised ensign took his new passport and copied his name. He moved a yellow notebook with curling edges toward him: Sign in. He called on the phone, dialing two numbers: 2-8.

  Another ensign came and said, Follow me. He had the bowl and snake in his buttonhole. The boy’s heart pounded at the discreet proximity of the secret. Hallway. A door padded with oilcloth. A narrow passage through the courtyard with a brick wall; whining behind it. Could it be dogs? The next door. Worn linoleum on the floor. The smell of a classroom not cleaned after vacation. Windows with a view of high brick walls. A labyrinth. He felt a chill. He was lost in space, he could no longer figure out where the street was.

  A safe door. A big empty room. Marks on the wallpaper showed where shelves had been. The boy was confused and depressed. Where was the equipment, where was the laboratory, where was the secret?

  Uncle Igor in a plain blue lab coat came through the door opposite. Yet another different Uncle Igor. He beckoned with two fingers: Follow me. A long, dark, dusty corridor brought them to the dressing room with wide metal lockers for clothing and to one side, a shower room, the showerheads the size of sunflowers.

  “Once, we used to change here,” Uncle Igor said. “The clean zone begins from here. Now this place no longer exists. On paper this wing has been razed to build a new one. But the builders are late. This place does not exist, understand? That’s why I could bring you here.”

  The boy stood listening to every word.

  “Your father is a good chemist,” Uncle Igor said. “But he is afraid of what he’s researching. Afraid. That’s why I will never take him into my laboratory. Are you afraid?”

  “No,” he replied without thinking.

  “Open the end one,” Uncle Igor said pointing to the lockers.

  The boy opened it. Something lay inside, squashed between the locker walls: a green rubber skin grafted to a gas mask. He pulled it out, extremely heavy, slippery with talcum powder, resembling the scales of a snakeskin shed years ago.

  “Put it on,” Uncle Igor said.

  He managed to get his legs into the rubber pants and pulled on the suit. The tight stiff collar constricted his throat. The cuffs were tight on his wrists. Breathing was hard and a fog appeared before his eyes. Uncle Igor’s hands straightened his back and closed the seam along the spine, tied the straps on his ankles—and he found himself inside a rubber womb, a live infant in the body of a dead reptile.

  “Turn around. Look in the mirror.” Uncle Igor’s voice seemed far away.

  He moved clumsily, as if learning to walk, shuffling the unwieldy boots. He desperately wanted to be out of the rubber womb and its slippery, deadening embrace.

  “Look at yourself,” Uncle Igor repeated out of the depths.

  Through the fogged lenses of the mask he made out the mirror.

  A monster looked at him. A horrible swamp creature with dull round eyes, mouthless, faceless, alien to every living thing, with no resemblance or relation to anything.

  It was him. A different him.

  Special. Unrecognizable.

  Suddenly the boy felt the unknown peace, the highest protection that the suit bestowed on him.

  The rubber folds no longer squeezed him. His throat got used to the collar’s hold. The boy stood without sensing the many kilograms of rubber weight, he seemed to be floating. T
he thing in the mirror was he, and he did not want the merging to end. This was more thrilling than Uncle Igor’s medal-laden uniform, more exciting than anything he had ever felt.

  In that outfit he feared nothing. Like Uncle Igor.

  When the boy climbed out, sweaty, reddened, smeared with talcum and a slippery paste, completely happy, Uncle Igor smiled broadly and slapped him on the shoulder.

  “That’s our old suit. We began with those. Go now, they’ll see you out. I’ll write the recommendation. If you graduate with honors, I’ll hire you.”

  He froze, he couldn’t believe it. Uncle Igor gently shoved his wet back: Go, go.

  CHAPTER 4

  Lieutenant Colonel Shershnev took the day off. He was on his way to celebrate his son’s birthday. Sixteen. Last year in school.

  His wife had divorced him after his third tour in Chechnya, when Maxim was three. Now she was remarried and Maxim had a stepsister. Shershnev tried to believe that the war had broken them up. The usual officer’s story, he wasn’t the first or the last. There had been a lot of divorces in his unit in those years. The country lived as if there were no battles on its territory. His wife, Shershnev kept telling himself, had joined the majority that did not want to know about blood and mud, the military and the victims.

  Yet he had not been able to convince himself completely, and this worried Shershnev, who could not tolerate ambiguity.

  He did not regret what he had done in that war—or the following ones.

  There was only one incident that Shershnev considered—well, probably wrong, fraught. He couldn’t find better words. Wrong, not in the moral sense, his conscience didn’t bother him. Speaking only of morality, he would have acted the same way again. Yet he sensed some kind of violation then, some twist of fate, that predetermined—not directly—his wife’s departure and the gradual loss of contact with his son, who had transformed, it seemed to Shershnev, into an alien, thin-boned, wishy-washy breed.

  Marina was overly sensitive, to the point of divination; she could guess something out of thin air and convey it consciously or not to their son. She did not forbid them from seeing each other; on the contrary, she sometimes asked him to come by and spend the day with Maxim. But Shershnev sensed that his son was not simply separating from him because he was growing older; he seemed to know something he should not about his father and seemed to be asking, looking for an argument, insults: Who are you really, Father? What is your true face? What did you do in the war?