Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

  Shershnev was figuring out how to distract her. Drop his bag? Say something?

  “Ken ve go?” Grebenyuk asked, with a horrible accent and the supplicating simplicity of a confused foreigner scared by foreign customs.

  The official, as if waking up, nodded automatically. Grebenyuk adjusted the things in his bag without haste. As he closed it, the zipper caught on fabric, he pulled it up and down and then tried to pull out the lining from the teeth. She turned away. Other passengers, cursing loudly about the airport service, entered the corridor. Grebenyuk threw his bag over his shoulder. Shershnev felt sharp needles pricking his hands.

  “Dying for a piss,” Grebenyuk said. “Where’s the john here?”

  They walked past the drivers holding signboards bearing names. The air was filled with the odors of unfamiliar food, tobacco, and car exhaust, which seemed to smell differently than back home.

  In the toilet, Grebenyuk urinated noisily for a long time, while Shershnev couldn’t start. It was only when Grebenyuk headed for the sink that the flow began from his penis. A cleaner came in, and Shershnev felt an overwhelming desire to knock over his cart, break the mop, and splash the bucket water on the walls.

  He looked at himself in the mirror over the sink.

  His face looked the same.

  CHAPTER 11

  Kalitin had dozed off in his favorite leather armchair by the fire. The smoky warmth and cognac had put him to sleep.

  He dreamed that he was without flesh or memory and flying over a dark plain. He was soaring but he did not know his destination. The wind tossed him to the side, turned him upside down. Above him was emptiness, a malevolent sky without stars or planets. It was filled with visible wind, fluttering, flickering, like the potent milt of gigantic flying fish.

  A wave crashed below. The dull arrow of a river showed him the way. He flew and his flight stirred the water. The bewhiskered catfish, at the bottom for the night, and the spotted burbots awoke from their sleep; so did the golden pheasants in the rushes.

  A school of fish, his flock, swam behind him. Roe deer and hares, jackals, foxes, wolves, and boars ran along the banks—up, up, against the current, against gravity.

  The stars lit up, gathering strength. Strange lights of imaginary constellations: Hour Glass, Owl, Scepter, Sphinx, Rat. Where the Milky Way lay in the old world the constellation of the Snake extended glowing green and red; the Snake was wrapped around the bowl of the firmament, the bowl of the universe.

  As he flew, homeless, his memory returned—distant, cherished. He remembered how he was born in a transparent vessel, in the midst of shining whiteness and light; voices called him by name, joyous voices of gods dressed in white, celebrating his birth.

  But the gods immediately hid him in dark confinement, until someone released him. He dissipated, dissolved, got lost among dead smells cut off from their source, among yesterday’s shadows. But he did not vanish fully, because he was inherently alien to the world and it could not accept and dissolve him completely.

  Then the gods called him again. He revived from dispersal and was filled to the brim with himself; like a raindrop plummeting to earth, he raced toward the distant call.

  He flew above the river. The end of his journey was near. In the middle of the waters rose the enormous, the great Island, with searchlights running like lunar fingers through the dark. Fish leaped out of the water, dropping sparkles from their scales. Myriad animal eyes glowed in the dark of the forest and fields. The river retreated into its depths, revealing the Island’s foundation cliffs, covered in waterweeds. He slid down, growing smaller, thickening; flowed in a stream down the chimney, penetrated bars and filters, and then dove into the light from the lamp, the sun of the lab. In its encircling glow, he drew himself into the desired, soothing cradle, the narrow opening of a test tube. He filled it and lay still.

  The journey is done. He is home.

  Kalitin woke up. His hand was on the neck of the cognac bottle. His head was foggy, even though he had not drunk a lot. The last coals were burning down. He added logs and fanned the flames. He rarely remembered his dreams in detail, only the ones that literally reflected reality. Now he remembered only remnants of the breeze over vast spaces, a faint trail leading to the Island.

  Daydreams about the Island were his favorite emotional sustenance. The Island was his true birthplace. Recalling it, a place of strength and power, brought Kalitin a dull, sated drowsiness, as if these weren’t incorporeal images but real food, rich, harmful, but satisfyingly delicious, like the boar hams served at the restaurant outside town by the old water mill.

  Kalitin worried that one day the daydreams would stop nourishing him, reanimating him, encouraging him. They would just be memories, tasteless, useless, a burden. He tried to limit himself. After all, he had managed to quit smoking on doctor’s orders and now only drank moderately!

  But now, after his diagnosis, there was no point in postponing or hoarding the pleasure. He intended to take his tested remedy, have a feast, overindulging in the Island, the things that had given him a powerful, narcotic sense of immortality within the limits of life and beyond them, to stifle the banal, flat sense of death, to gain at least a week, a day, to awaken his strength so that he could reverse his fate and affirm hope for salvation.

  Kalitin poured more cognac. He prepared to remember. In the flicker of the flames, embroidered with the golden stitches of sparks, he saw the blushing gelatinous surface of the river at sunset. In the dark spots between the tongues of fire, the secret part, the hidden second nature, he recognized the duality of his gift.

  He drank, taking delight in himself remembering, creating a symphony, a mystical cosmogony of the Island, which had predetermined their connection, their preordained dependence on each other.

  The Island’s history began long ago. The mighty river destroyed the limestone ridge in its way. Inside it were hidden fossilized growths of coral; lily blooms on articulated stems, falling apart into rings; brachiopods like lacquer powder compacts. The river had washed away the limestone, leaving only one hill of the ridge that did not give in to the water surrounding it. Trees grew there, animals moved into the stone dens, and birds wove nests in the overhangs and slopes.

  The very first people to find the Island avoided living there, even though it had convenient, deep caves. Located in the middle of turbulent waters, isolated, closed, menacing—it was only during the greatest droughts, which occurred every ten years or so, that there was a narrow path to it—the Island had been created by nature as a place for solitude, otherworldly, for meeting higher powers.

  People built temples on the Island. It had seen tubby stone gods of the Paleolithic, gods of clay and of bone, carved wooden statues.

  Then came monks forcibly baptizing local tribes. They dug out and burned wooden idols that did not have the strength to protect themselves and the faith.

  The monks chopped down the sacred tree, the only oak on the Island, old, crooked, its roots deep in the yellow stone, and in its place built a chapel. They burned the former gods of linden and ash and threw the coals into the water. They could not break or move the ancient altar stone, washed in blood, a granite boulder alien to the region, which had been brought by unknown people to the Island from the north—by unknown means: barge, sledge over the ice; so it lay in the middle of the Island, like a dead but imperishable god.

  The chapel was the start of the fortress monastery that defended the edge of the state from nomads, guarded the natural border that divided forest from steppe; many fervent prayers rose beneath its vaulted ceiling for the government and troops. Then the steppe was conquered, although it exploded with wild rebellions more than once.

  The monastery expanded, built from the stone on which it stood. Above soared churches, belfries, chambers, walls, towers. Below, the paths of the quarry multiplied, descending ever deeper, turning into cellars, cells, storerooms, and crypts with the relics of the deceased recluses who had given the monastery its fame.

&n
bsp; Also there, in the deepest reaches of the lower Island, where there was only the slow time of stone, forcibly tonsured prisoners lived and died, exiled, stripped of all secular disguises, former names, actions, and destinies. They knew only years—in spring the high river water seeped into the cells; the stone bore their notches; blind writing snaked along the walls in a chronicle of darkness, despair, faith. The upper, reigning Island founded its growing strength on them, the nameless men buried alive; it grew on the slow, meager, angry yeast of their suffering.

  Then the lower levels were emptied. The former cells collapsed, burying the past. Prisoners were kept in the casemate above, built on the headland back in the days when ships plied the river under sail and robber gangs caroused on vessels propelled by oars.

  The Island was no longer on the frontier of the empire, which had pushed back its borders to the seas and oceans, conquering many languages. These languages were heard in the prison cells—the languages of rebels, languages of freedom, now accompanied by the clanging of shackles.

  They buried the prisoners on the headland. Limestone crosses of a different ritual, names in a different alphabet. The frosts, rains, and fogs ate away the stone, erasing letters and numbers. Scratched lines remained on the cell walls: poets’ verses, scientists’ blueprints, officers’ vows.

  By then the river was traveled by grain barges and paddle steamboats carrying passengers with a colorful sprinkling of hats and umbrellas.

  The monastery was getting fat on the relics of its saints, on the prayers and money of travelers, peasants, and aristocrats. An icon appeared, allegedly found by monks near the water during a storm. A new church with five golden cupolas, visible for twenty versts along the river, was built for the icon. An artist among the monastery novices, a young talented master who had grown up just in time among the brethren, ornamented it with paints he created, made of substances found only in the region. The painting was not bright. But it was clearly inhabited by the inexplicable mystery of the close interconnection of all existence, divinity and humanity. The monastery fishermen caught sturgeon in nets, the apprentices boiled fish glue that gave the paint a bonding strength, and the image lay on the rough, porous stone as if it were an intrinsic part of it, an expression of what was inside.

  The monastery was preparing to celebrate the anniversary of its founding. A church historian wrote a book; its rough drafts, which had absorbed many old secrets, remained in the monastery library. The photographer who made jubilee postcards for the festivities left a catalogue of his photos in the library. It included views of the famous icon, its angels and saints, earthly mountains and heavenly heights.

  These books and photos remained the primary testimony to the monastery’s past. For the wave that engulfed the unassailable Island had come.

  Landowners’ estates blazed in early autumn along the banks, beyond the low forests. When the river iced over, dark military coats, sheepskin jackets, and homespun clothes appeared on the white snow. The ice, still thin, sang, groaned, howled—the howl of saw blades, bridge trusses, stretched wires, ship hulls in a storm. Men came with rifles and pitchforks and with them a horrible soul-shattering cloud of sound gathered over the Island, and the deep bell sounding alarm from the belfry drowned and faded in it.

  For the first time since pagan days blood was shed openly on the Island and bodies were thrown in the river without cover. The monks and priests were killed or exiled.

  Soon the Island returned to one of its previous secret forms: it became a prison. A concentration camp. A rebellion was suppressed in the nearest town. The officers of the old army were brought to the Island. The breaks in the old walls were bound with barbed wire, guard towers were erected hastily, and Maxim machine guns, thirsty for water when fired, were mounted on wooden machine gun tables.

  Then, when the White Army, allies of the prisoners, reached the river downstream, the Reds brought a barge that had been used for transporting grain and forced the prisoners into the hold, telling them they were being moved to a different place. They padlocked the trapdoors, a tugboat led the barge into the waterway, the deepest part, and opened the seacocks. The barge groaned beneath the water, its voice metallic, deep, horrible. Then it choked and drowned.

  The summer brought drought, the worst ever seen. The Island seemed to come ashore. If you came close by rowboat, you could see the barge on the bottom, among the weeds and fish. Just a little more, it seemed, and it would appear, raising its tower and sloping sides above the water.

  The drought burned the harvest, and what did manage to grow and what was left from the previous year was seized by soldiers sent from the cities. The famine drove people to eat people. They dug up old animal burial grounds, no longer fearing Siberian anthrax. That was when they took down the crosses and bells in the monastery and took apart the icon stands—allegedly to buy bread for the starving with church gold. The region died out and emptied.

  The commission that seized the church gold also opened the crypts. It certified that the corpses had rotted and their saintly incorruptibility was a lie perpetrated by the church. They toured different cities with the skeletons, displayed them—look, here is the truth of materialism, the exposure of religion’s intoxication; then the skeletons vanished, probably dumped into a distant, deep ravine.

  A commune moved into the former monastery a year later: military orphans, homeless children. They scraped off the famous frescoes on the church ceiling. The teachers wanted to turn it into a House of Culture. But the children ran away from the commune, by land and by water, and the police tried to catch them at train stations and in cellars, in vain.

  For a few years, the monastery was abandoned. Fishermen avoided the waters of the Island, remembering the barge and the corpses in the metal hold, which had rusted into tatters.

  Then completely different people came to the Island. Truly new owners. They posted the land along the banks of the river. They took over the dead villages, the fields and groves in the lowlands, built barracks, a water tower, aerodrome, clubhouse, and warehouses. They cleaned out the former churches and old cells, reinforced the bars built into the stone, and built a sturdy pier. They renovated the guard towers and added some new ones.

  The Germans needed a secret location, far from the victors in Versailles, from the eyes of spies and snitches, to continue their experiments with chemical warfare and prepare to replay the lost war. The Soviets would get formulas, technology, methods of use; results, tables, reports, a schooling for their scientists. There, by the river, in Europe’s dark closet, both sides found what they needed: a remote place with a rich landscape, changeable climate, a large natural temperature range, in the high thirties centigrade in summer and up to minus forty in winter, so they could simulate using the substances in various theaters of war in various seasons. It was a location depopulated after the famine and with a citadel easily protected and controlled, the former monastery.

  Kalitin always regretted that he had not been there; that he had not been alive, had not existed then.

  He knew that most of the experiments of that time were obsolete a decade later. There was no cavalry, whose horses were to be stunned by clouds of gases. Airplanes flew three times faster, and aerosols were no longer suitable. New filters for gas masks, new damaging substances appeared. Most important, the World War, which his country had won without recourse to the Island’s creations, but with gunpowder and steel.

  The joint experimental facility was closed in 1933. Soon after, the river was confined and artificial seas were created. Nearby cities were drowned, entire cities with houses, churches, sidewalks, and cemeteries; inconsolable ghosts of the past settled in its waters. The Island was supposed to vanish, too: the dam for their area existed only in the blueprints. It was not built because of the war.

  When Kalitin looked at the photographs in the archive taken by Germans on the Island, which had been transferred to Europe and then returned—a horse in a gas mask, biplanes on the edge of a field, docks, a group shot i
n front of the lab building (every part of which he knew), the former church—he thought he was seeing paradise, an ideal conception of space and time.

  In that world, most people did not yet see the dark side of science, its evil twin. Science was pure, even though it was already marked by its latest inventions at the Somme and Ypres. The blame was placed on the politicians and generals. The scientists were free and not subject to trial. In those days there were different weights accorded to morality that made exceptions for people of knowledge. And Kalitin yearned for the gravity that he’d never experienced.

  He was born after millions had died in gas chambers and two of the German chemists in the group photo on the Island, captured by the Allies, were first sent to the defendants’ bench and then to the gallows. Science, his path to power, was besmirched, publicly declared evil—evil in the eyes of the masses.

  So Kalitin was forced to hide. Even without the death sentence pronounced in his homeland, he could not openly declare who he was. There would be journalists scrambling after sensational stories, there would be articles about the Island of Death—or whatever name they came up with for it—calling for investigation and a trial. So Kalitin sometimes dreamed about the Island of long ago, as the ideal refuge, the inaccessible land of the blessed. But he was ready to return to his own, usual one.

  When war broke out with Poland, they set up a concentration camp on the Island again and kept Polish prisoners there. Then, after the attack by Germany, there were German and Romanian prisoners from units shattered at Stalingrad. For some time only German officers and generals refused to collaborate. Then there were Japanese captured in the Far East. After a few years, the camp was empty, for the prisoners had been transferred to other places, ore mines and logging camps.