Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

  Shershnev rubbed his temples. Yesterday came up in his memory. The mock execution of his son. The return trip, Maxim’s silence. The jokes and laughter of his friends. The Pioneer camp, a twin of the one left in the foothills of the Caucasus. The long line of trucks carrying shipping containers that crossed the intersection while they waited.

  It’s all nonsense, he told himself. The worries, false fears, imaginary signs at the start of a truly important case. Just don’t notice them. Endure them. Pull yourself together. He would talk to Maxim when he got back. There was no time now. Shershnev did not like putting things off like this until he got back; he usually felt that no loose threads should be hanging, but now he changed his own rule.

  He breathed in and held it. He waited thirty seconds. Blinked hard. And opened the file again. Well, he’d work with what they had. He would try to look into the abyss, into emptiness.

  Shershnev never believed that you could learn anything about a person from his childhood and adolescence. Take that field commander, who had been born in a mud hut on the steppe, who had returned with his pardoned people from Kazakhstan, where they were sent by Stalin, to the Chechen mountains that he had never seen, graduated from college and was elected chairman of a kolkhoz—could he have ever imagined on the eve of 1991 that he would be a commander in a few years, or how many soldiers would be in his unit, or how his life would intersect with Shershnev’s?

  Now however, with only the beginning and end of another man’s life, Shershnev felt a new kind of thrill.

  Shershnev undid the binding and moved the photograph submitted by the applicant closer to the light.

  CHAPTER 7

  Kalitin didn’t take a single photograph from his old life into his new one. He was allegedly going on a four-day business trip. He packed accordingly, in case they checked at customs. Four shirts, trousers, coat, a pair of shoes: the obvious necessities. He hid money in the suitcase lining. Neophyte went into his carry-on: concealed in what appeared to be a bottle of men’s toilet water, popular at the time.

  Later Kalitin realized he could have brought photographs, his furniture, a box of secret documents. His brand-new foreign passport had been marked in the border control system. The lazy customs agents didn’t even look at his luggage.

  Just a few years earlier, Kalitin would not have been allowed abroad. They would not have given him a passport. Had he requested one, they would have considered him mad, removed him from his job, turned him in, and started an investigation. Not just that—in those days, even his distant relatives were denied foreign travel, even when the travel had credible explanations.

  Now the state’s muscles were relaxed, like those of a dead dog used in Kalitin’s experiments. The defector walked unnoticed through the open jaws. Actually, it was but a brief moment of weakness; the jaws soon clamped shut again.

  The clothes he brought were what he wore for special occasions: Party bureau meetings, a delegation of high officials on an inspection visit. The trousers were too narrow, the jacket sleeves too long, the shirts too tight. Kalitin had bought them himself, after his wife’s death. His wife saw him intuitively, she did not make mistakes in size or style. But he seemed unable to even take the measure of his own body, he did not have a simple visual sense, the secret sign of harmony with the world of things.

  The first days. A foreign life. Foreign, like another man’s clothes. Constant fear that they would turn him in, send him back. Take him to the embassy. But one morning he got up and at first did not realize that his shirt fit; he had lost weight. That day they informed him that he would receive refuge.

  Kalitin kept that lucky shirt, white with light blue patterns. He threw out everything else, bought a new wardrobe, going to a store without guards for the first time. The container of Neophyte spent months in a hiding place he had created before turning himself over to counterintelligence.

  Now the container was in his home safe. The opaque bottle of men’s toilet water, long out of fashion and no longer produced, an eccentricity of a gentleman averse to change in his habits.

  Kalitin took that shirt with him to the hospital for his checkup. When he was released, he put it on, a talisman from the past.

  He looked at himself several times in the rearview mirror, trying to find signs of malevolent changes, wanting to compare his faces in the long enfilade of time. But he had only his present self for comparison. The old photographs were in his abandoned apartment. The investigators would have confiscated them and added them to his file.

  He didn’t take any new photographs. He tried to avoid being photographed, even in random tourist shots. Looked out for the omnivorous cars taking panoramic street photos for Google Maps. The video cameras in airports and train stations. That was the recommendation they made, since his doctors did not want him to have plastic surgery. Kalitin found an attenuated but precious pleasure in obedience, which he had felt more vividly in his former life when he filled out secret forms in accordance with instructions.

  Now he regretted not having photos from the past, it was as if the record of his activity had not been saved in a computer game and he was left unable to recall his own image. There were no subjects that had known him before. Kalitin thought about his old home, now covered with a patina of estrangement in his memory. The fingerprint men must have tested all the smooth surfaces, taken the impressions, since the investigators did not know for sure whether he had run away, or vanished, or had been kidnapped. And then what? What happened to the furniture? Did they take it away, throw it out? The couch, the stupid foldout couch with creaking springs where Vera conceived their unborn child . . . Kalitin felt the news of imminent demise squashing, chewing through all lines of defense, gradually turning his thoughts toward possible death.

  Home, he had to get home. Hide behind the solid walls. Rest. Gather strength. There was one more flight ahead.

  The turnoff from the highway. The road led to a wide valley. The city outskirts began. A garden center with a display of plants; chubby, red-cheeked gnomes in caps; and stout faceless nymphs, covered in road dust. Supermarket. Park.

  The central high street. Trolley coming from the train station. Cafe, kebab house. On the right, the cathedral, a large cathedral for a small city that had grown rich on the salt deposits in surrounding mountains, a city that worshipped salt but did not forget the church. The deposits were exhausted and abandoned: the last of the salt had been eaten with soup by the Kaiser’s soldiers. A miner’s body turned to stone was exhibited in the regional museum—put to work for the city even after his death, bringing in entrance fees. A small steam train drove children through a nearby tunnel; during the war, the locals used it as a bomb shelter, for the train station here was an important junction.

  The city was coming to an end. The road headed up the valley slope. Here he knew who owned the fields, whose cows were grazing on the slope, whose horses were in the paddock.

  Ruins of a water mill, a restaurant that serves roast pork and baked trout. The bright tiles of new roofs on village houses, floating in saccharine flower gardens. Smooth turn along a low cliff. A church on the stone ledge carved by a glacier that crept down into the valley a thousand years ago. The ancient church rejecting the confectionary luxury of the city cathedral, compressed by heavy, disproportional buttresses, which had collapsed and been rebuilt, retaining traces of various layers of brickwork. Below were enormous round boulders, clumsily worked stones, then neat rectangular blocks, and above them dark, almost soot-black, brick. The roof made of flat shale slabs was covered with moss. The cross tilted to one side. The carved stained-glass sun over the main entrance had dimmed. Beyond the fence—the cemetery arborvitae, the sagging headstones of salt magnates, rusted crosses. Even neglected and desolate, the church still amazed Kalitin with its grim, sleeping power; sometimes he compared himself to it and thought that their proximity was no accident.

  Kalitin looked back at the road, just in time. Around the bend, hidden by the cliff, Pastor Travniček was slowl
y crossing the road.

  He had arrived in these parts about six years before Kalitin. They said that Travniček had served in big cities, was considered on track to become a bishop. But suddenly he ended up here, in a forsaken corner, on an ancient mountain border, near a city with exhausted salt deposits, in a village where the old were dying and the young—those who had not moved to greener pastures—rarely went to church.

  Kalitin knew what had happened. He liked the knowledge, because it confirmed that the church was merely an institution, and a very earthly one at that.

  Travniček was a monster. He had suffered a rare skin disease, perhaps caught a virus, which was the eternal risk of working in densely populated areas, amid microparticles of other people’s skin, other people’s breath—and his face had turned to stone, a bumpy, lichen mask.

  They exiled the monster, thought Kalitin, so he would not scare parishioners, not ruin the solemn ritual with his face so like a humanized lizard, his snakelike gaze beneath scaly lids.

  Even now, with one foot in the grave, Kalitin still felt a fastidious gratitude that the pastor had taken on the horrible but singular misery that could have stricken any other person.

  Hearing the car, Travniček turned. The pastor always turned, bringing his face in the other’s field of vision so tactfully that Kalitin was revolted by his humility. Kalitin, despite himself, despite his scorn for faith, felt in Travniček a power similar to the one slumbering in the church where he served. He wondered what this man, capable of living placidly with a troll’s face, was doing as a priest, among all these pious nonentities?

  The pastor tried to wave down Kalitin. Kalitin opened his hands to show he couldn’t stop; it was rude, but he was in a hurry and someone else would give the pastor a ride. Then Kalitin remembered that Travniček had a car, not a big truck but a new compact SUV. Maybe it was broken? Kalitin considered backing up but the road was already going downhill before flying up the hill, where he would see the church in the rearview mirror for the last time, and then he would be on the dusty, unpaved road, apple trees, hills, hunter’s huts on the slopes . . . Home.

  Refuge.

  It was only then that he realized how desperately he wanted to be there.

  Kalitin was proud that he had guessed right away, had sensed the essence of his future sanctuary immediately.

  They had suggested he move to a rural area, where all the residents knew one another and would easily notice an outsider. Kalitin, used to a closed city, reluctantly looked at a few places. There weren’t many offers. People rarely changed their homes and fates in such areas. All the houses for sale were old farmhouses intended for large, no longer present families. They were crowded too close to neighbors. There was something pathetic and bewildering about them. It seemed to him that the houses themselves and not the bankrupt owners had suffered a life-changing collapse, and the connectivity of things had vanished from nails, cement, and spackling.

  Kalitin was ready to go back. But in the last town, the real estate agent, a thin and severe man of seventy or so, listened to his evasive explanation, intentionally ungrammatical, about wanting peace and quiet to finish his research, and then started his long green Mercedes, the size of a hearse, saying he had a suitable house.

  Kalitin was surprised that the agent must have understood more about him than he had wanted to reveal. In the vulnerable moment of moving, in the moment of a forced choice limited by time and cash, a person will show a little of his true self. Given his profession—finding houses, transforming clients’ secret wishes into walls and roofs, locating protection from displaced fears and hidden phobias, from a dangerous past—the real estate agent guessed what Kalitin was and what he needed as a defector.

  The agent died seven years ago. Kalitin had attended his funeral. The family thought it was a neighborly gesture. Kalitin had been accepted in the village, he fit in among these insular people who disliked strangers, because he was like that himself. Seeing him there, Pastor Travniček nodded his stone-like head in approval and benevolence. But Kalitin, he had come to bury a witness.

  He was certain that the real estate agent had not left behind any personal notes, any diary nonsense. Only receipts, accounts, contracts, disciplined and uncommunicative. The pastor gave a short sermon, something about the gift of honesty. Kalitin liked looking at the shellacked coffin lid, beneath a spattering of infrequent but large raindrops, like the ones that fell on the first day he came here.

  They had driven in silence. They passed the church, the village, the yellowed slopes billowing like sails, the dells overgrown with hazel and echoing with the sound of bells.

  The road, surrounded by apple trees, led upward. Boars ran out of the bushes, feasting on fallen apples. The entire valley was visible—without a single house. The eye could not find a place where it could be hidden: no clumps of trees, no hollows. It seemed the agent was driving for nothing. Kalitin would have stopped and turned around: they had passed some invisible line that marked the limit of inhabited places and entered into unpopulated territory.

  The road smoothly bent to the left, clearing away the optical illusion of the landscape that hid the upper level of the valley. There, in the shadow of a beech forest that grew along the ridges of the hills, stood a solitary house.

  The house was wooden. But the wood seemed to have ossified, the way the supports do in salt mines. A house composed of dark logs, as if the bitter, cool juices of this stony land still slept in the dry felled trunks. Blinds in the windows. A few apple trees higher up the slope, gone wild, losing variety and species. The nearby mouth of the forest where the road ended, sending the scents of the brook’s flinty coolness and the sweet rot of the broad, slow-dying beech leaves.

  Unexpectedly a blue-gray cloud rose heavily from behind a hill. Large drops, soft and lisping somehow, began to fall. The agent opened an umbrella, but Kalitin was already striding toward the house, feeling those insouciant drops falling from a nearby cloud.

  Kalitin expected furniture inside. For some reason he envisioned a grand piano, strangers’ photos over the wardrobe, redand-white checked tablecloths, stag horns above the fireplace, a worn leather couch. The house was completely empty. Just a pile of ash and coals in the fireplace, as if the previous residents had taken away everything changeable, which could pass from hand to hand and switch owners, and had burned everything important, essential.

  At first he was discouraged, upset, as if the ashes truly were the remains of someone’s life. But then, accustomed to semiofficial housing, he felt the strange charm of the emptiness that he would have to fill with new things that were his and his alone. He felt the twilight allure of the forest. The quiet call of the hills, their readiness to stand guard, shield, be vigilant in the night.

  It was at that moment that he decided to buy the house. The real estate agent carefully propped his damp umbrella against the wall and spoke slowly, ceremoniously.

  “I think you will like it here. It is a good place.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Shershnev was in the first row of economy. Next to him, in 6C, was Major Grebenyuk. His partner. They had been offered business class, but Shershnev refused: no need to be so visible.

  The lieutenant colonel looked at his boarding pass once again: ALEXANDER IVANOV, 6D. He had a passport and visa in that name. Although they were brought through a special corridor bypassing customs control and inspection, a border officer still stamped the passport.

  The crew—it was a state airline—had been alerted there were special passengers on board. His partner, a military technician, an engineer with epaulets, had a bottle of deodorant from an expensive toiletries line in his carry-on that complied with airline requirements: under three ounces or one hundred milliliters. The specialists chose the brand, deciding which bottle was more convenient to accurately reproduce. They had considered sending the substance by diplomatic pouch and picking it up on the other side of the border, but they decided that bringing it along was faster and safer, since they w
ould not have to meet up with the embassy courier, who could be tailed.

  They flew at night. A late flight that would land early in the morning, when the sleepy, tired border guards and customs agents would be less picky. His partner was settling down to sleep. He leaned back his seat, even though that was not allowed during takeoff. The cabin purser did not reprimand him—she knew who they were.

  The plane was still at the gate. They were waiting for some idiots in business class. Probably blotto, thought Shershnev. Afraid of flying, so they drank for courage.

  He wouldn’t have refused a shot himself. He felt uncomfortable. Behind them was a foreign couple—Czechs, he thought—with two children. The infant, despite his concern, fell asleep quickly. But the girl seated behind Shershnev, an active, skinny kid with thin blond braids, whom he had noted at check-in, when she tried to jump onto the baggage conveyor belt, kept kicking his seat.

  The blows hurt his lower back. It was economy class; the upholstery was pathetic. Shershnev regretted not taking business class. He had turned around once already, glaring at her. She seemed to quiet down. But a minute later, she was kicking his seat again, harder, more persistently.

  They were under orders to keep a low profile on the plane. No changing places with other passengers. No getting into arguments. The girl must have sensed it and mocked Shershnev. He spoke to the parents in English and in Russian. They either did not understand or because they could not control the child pretended not to understand. He made gestures to show that their daughter was disturbing him, but the mother merely smiled and shrugged.

  Passengers bored by the wait were looking at them from neighboring rows. Shershnev thought it better to get back in his seat and not call the stewardess. Everything the state had provided him with was useless against a little brat who took him for a weakling who could not fight back.

  He even thought about the bottle in his partner’s carry-on bag. How he could get it out and . . .