Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

  They tried to turn him into an informer for so many years! To make him tell what he heard in confessions, to inform on his parishioners, his brethren! They were pressuring him, aware of the hidden features of his character: his perceptiveness, his ability to judge a person from the tiniest details, and they tried to make the argument that they needed his reports because they trusted his judgments and wanted to act justly and honestly. And he had had the shameful thought of playing with them, to deceive them and agree—while in fact reporting false information that could not harm anyone. He rejected those thoughts. But he remembered them and never forgave himself. So now he did not rely on perception. It was enough for Travniček that it was he, and not someone else, who learned what was happening; that meant his experience was needed—with all the extremes, narrowness, dead ends, scars of injury, and knowledge of salvation. But how this experience would come in handy, what would happen and what would not, Travniček did not ask himself. His task was simply to be present, here and now.

  To pray about the enlightenment of existence. And to wait.

  Travniček could not have said exactly when he first realized something special about the man on the hill. He did not have a clear guess or strong suspicions; those concepts were alien to him now.

  Weren’t there a lot of dried-up scientists, aging bachelors, who liked solitude and lived on their former ambitions? Travniček could name a few more in the area. Did he feel a dark shadow over the house in the beech forest? No.

  His flawless pastoral sense was subdued: the man on the hill seemed to be protected by supernatural barriers; cut off from life, from its currents and impact. Hidden in a capsule a priest could not penetrate. Even one like him.

  The pastor had never encountered barriers that were fierce on their own. Such extreme suffocating insularity of the spirit, as if a man afraid of living had moved into a coffin.

  That is why Travniček knew that the proximity was not accidental; he was there as a sentry, on guard duty. In other places, others guard. But he was given this destiny, this door.

  He would do it right, Lord.

  Travniček knew that few people took him seriously. In part, he was happy for the mask placed on his face. The ugly muzzle helped to hide his inner tragedy. But now the pastor sensed that the forces of fate had come into play; he would have to reveal his real face.

  He was sent—or exiled—to these parts decades ago. From the start, long before his meeting with the man on the hill, he did not seek meaning: Why here? He knew that he was paternally punished by the simplicity of daily life.

  “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” Travniček repeated the familiar and yet unfamiliar words from Revelation, each time unfading and new in the truth directed at him.

  But there had been another truth in his past as well.

  For the apostle had said: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” Travniček not only knew these words by heart, he had experienced them in spirit and flesh; and he re-experienced it, saying the words.

  Words about miracles.

  With the idea of miracles, he came to the church as a youth. It was many years later he realized that in fact he feared miracles. Feared God, feared the truth of revelation, preferring the God of sacred books, the God of churches and scripture, the God of saints—true but mediated, interpreted, explained, elucidated, expounded. His faith was the faith of culture, artifacts, tradition.

  Acutely sensing evil, able to recognize it, he ran to the church from evil, hoping to find salvation in righteousness. But ritual, literal righteousness became something like insurance, a guarantee that God would notice him and forgive his weakness, his fear, and protect him from encountering evil face-to-face.

  How long ago that was!

  He remembered the early postwar years. Brief years of confusion and hope, when it still seemed that the new civil authorities would restrict the church but not destroy it. Talk of points of conversion. The rejection of open conflict. Of humanistic analogies with Communism.

  How quickly that had ended!

  When the real persecution began, when youth organizations were branded illegal and criminal, when church meetings were disbanded, when provocateurs were sent in—he had naively hoped that this would lead to a renewal, a rebirth, a return to the heights of faith that had existed during the Roman persecution. He thought it was time for the church to separate itself from the state; to give up that shameful semidependence, full of compromises, that had existed under the Nazis. If the authorities force it to break with them, all the better.

  Dreamer!

  Alas, he did not understand in time that a path of other compromises was beginning. He could not flee to the West, he could not abandon his flock, even though he often thought that people today would be better off with another priest, more sensitive, gentler, earthly, and understanding. “We are the church of the weak, and we must go to the weak, to the doubters.” A celebrated pastor was supposed to have said that.

  He turned out to be firm of heart. Another seed grew out of his weakness, the seed of resistance, which made him wonder if it were too human. Did it have any connection to faith? To biblical truths? “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you,” he read the words of the epistle. He asked himself: Are you interpreting it correctly? Isn’t it a lie to identify civil authority with the devil’s evil? He could not find a clear answer.

  He kept feeling something he could not name. Thirst? Longing? Dissatisfaction? Sehnsucht, a passionate yearning for saintliness?

  That lasted for years. He was moved by the energy of dissatisfaction, a feeling of crowding. He began distributing underground Christian literature, samizdat, as they called it in the East. Writing articles under a pseudonym. Collecting money from trusted parishioners to help the persecuted.

  Then people from the gray building noticed him. The ones who are supposed to notice. He accepted their approach, their surveillance with anxious joy. It seemed to be a sign that he was acting the right way. Of course, his longing never found either incarnation or release.

  How many years he had lived with them, in their shadow! Irredeemable, irreplaceable years! Slow years, like the ripening of juniper berries in the churchyard.

  He grew accustomed to them. To the surveillance from nearby houses. To the cars that followed him on the empty highways at night. To strangers who deftly tried to worm their way into his trust. To secret searches of house and church, the feeling that nasty fingers had touched his things. To ears eavesdropping on his telephone conversations. To eyes reading his mail and following him on the street. To marked letters. To denunciatory articles in the newspapers. To faked “demands” to replace him with a pastor who would be more attentive to the parishioners’ needs. To petty and consequential nastiness.

  He prayed for those who persecuted and tormented him. He developed an acute, borrowed sense of deceit, surveillance, bugs, dangerous, ambivalent things offered as gifts or appearing accidently. He tried to live in knowledge but without the poison of suspicion; the latter was rational but meaningless, for within it lay the victory of evil; to be not blind yet not unnecessarily seeing in the whirlpool, the circle dance of faces, any of which could be false.

  He became inconvenient. For some in the hierarchy as well. He was transferred—away from big cities to modest village parishes; there was both care and concern that he was becoming too visible, too irritating to the authorities. Some of his fellow pastors said that he was led by the sin of ambition, sought personal glory rather than the good of the Church.

  But he was led by his yearning, his will to sainthood that found no outlet.

  Evil was approaching, palpating, testing. Three times women tried to seduce hi
m: one, he was certain, of her own free will, but the other two . . . When they dispatched him to the sticks, he bought a car. Friends helped. But soon he lost his driver’s license; he was stopped on the road, they did a blood test, alleged he was driving while drunk. You managed to repeat Christ’s miracle, he said at that trial, turning water into wine. He bought a moped, it didn’t require a license. The moped was stolen. He knew that one day they would deal with him seriously. He even desired it—not petty attacks, adolescent pranks, but true martyrdom, the redemptive crown of thorns. People gathered around him, people who expected something from him, seeing him as a man who had the right to speak.

  But when God appeared to him and said the Word, he was not prepared. He did not understand. He did not accept. He did not recognize. He rejected Him because in his pride he thought he knew how He would act. He thought he would recognize His will and would not allow secular voices to lead him into error.

  He was blind!

  Now when his life was almost at the end, he had become neither bishop nor preacher. He had not cultivated his original talents, and the borrowed ones were taken away. The Lord crushed his pride and gave him faith. That was why he could focus on the daily affairs of the church: roof repairs, balancing the books, registering births and deaths.

  He thrived in unexpecting expectation.

  He had been tried and set aside; now the time had come.

  Events were set into motion, the masks were about to fall, the protective seals would vanish. Travniček understood that the man on the hill could cost him dearly; people like him were very expensive goods. They had hidden him, given him shelter and money; that meant that there were others willing to do so. Other people might have fears and temptations, responsibilities, rules, orders. So he would take his man upon himself. No matter what lay hidden in the locked vessel of another’s soul.

  He was the only one who could do this safely for everyone.

  Travniček started praying—for enlightenment for the man on the hill; for those who did evil and were now persecuted; for the hounds, the people with dead hearts.

  For the gift of the incomprehensible.

  CHAPTER 16

  Usually, if he could not sleep, Kalitin listed the formulas of the substances that failed testing. They were never again synthesized; they vanished from the world, remaining only in lab notes; their names led to emptiness, to nonexistence.

  But the time for long portions of dreams had ended. The clever god Hypnos had left the house and his sleepless brother stood at the door, refusing gifts.

  Kalitin felt alone facing death and memory. He remembered almost everything he liked to remember and much of what he hoped to forget. He was ready to stop and fall asleep. But memory—unwanted, rejected—had come to exact a penalty for its long incarceration.

  Kalitin got out of bed, fanned the flames, added kindling. Yesterday the eastern sky would have been getting light over the ridge by now. But today brought heavy clouds and rain beyond the mountains, hiding the dawn.

  He needed just a few hours of sleep. And then he would leave. Had he been invited to join the investigation? Yes. So he would go away. The decision about where came on its own. The shore of the Arabian Sea. To a country run by the army and intelligence service; they would have a real appreciation for Neophyte and its creator.

  Kalitin didn’t bother to search for the embassy address online. He had walked past it once, he had a vague recollection of the building, recognizably faceless. He wondered if it was under surveillance. Probably. A permanent post in some nearby apartment. Cameras with face recognition. Well, the main thing was to hand over his letter. The embassy people would find him. He would buy a new SIM card at a street kiosk. He’d have to leave all his things behind. Like the last time. In his new life, everything would be new.

  The only things from the past would be Neophyte and himself.

  Neophyte. When Kalitin finally had a full-fledged laboratory again, it could be moved from its travel container into a stationary vessel. He would be able to see how it was affected by the passage of time. That was the main enemy of all preparations of its class, hyperactive but not very stable. So it was a question—was it Neophyte in the container? Or just Mr. Fizz, bubbly water, no more harmful than children’s shampoo? That thought caused Kalitin pain. He couldn’t even imagine the death of Neophyte. Substance. Being. A cherished being.

  Vera had wanted a child. A son. She must have known that he could have only one child: one born in a test tube. He sensed that children would not be given to him. He saw it as a kind of scientist’s blessing. But Vera . . .

  Kalitin had blamed himself so many times for the marriage, planned to get a divorce. But he knew too well why he had married. For the same reason he had joined the Party, had gone to rallies and subbotnik volunteer activities.

  The Island protected you, but it demanded loyalty. Beyond its borders lay the terrarium of science, where predatory monsters of various eras lived, as if in a crazy garden of time.

  Elders. Abettors of the bloody destruction of scientific schools that culminated in execution and exile. Collaborators in murders executed with the help of critical articles. Connoisseurs of fatal polemics in the scholarly argot poisoned by Marxism, rivals for the attention of Stalin, the Giant of All Sciences. Creators of false doctrines born of ideological dogmas that destroyed, like decay, entire branches of knowledge.

  Kalitin had met them in the hallways of institutes and ministries—the influential gray undead, who extended their time thanks to former privileges, medicines, hospitals, mineral spas, massages, and transplants. They were still deadly and could still devour you—if not alive, as before—if a new theory disproved their work of forty years ago, for which they had received bonuses, orders, and the title academician.

  Youngsters. Shrewd Party activists, who did not write their own dissertations, scions of prominent families set up in science. These sleek creatures were as bloodthirsty as the old men, even though they did not have fangs and claws: the breed had degenerated. But they knew how to spread rumors, start an intrigue, pilfer a topic, steal an idea, become a coauthor, cut off financing.

  On the Island, close to Zakharyevsky, Kalitin was practically invulnerable. But on the Island, the substances were only born. They had to be promoted, brought out into the world, albeit a secret one, and there Kalitin was, and therefore the products were, in danger.

  Kalitin knew the strong and weak points in his CV, his tested and retested biography. When Zakharyevsky gave him the friendly advice to start a family because it would help his candidacy advance through the Party bureaucracy, Kalitin already knew his choice.

  Vera.

  Forgotten name.

  Once he and Vera watched an episode of Animal World. It was about iguana fry spawned on the beach: thousands are born, many hundreds die, dozens reach the water, three or four survive, one will live to sexual maturity.

  That was when Kalitin was seriously thinking about the idea for Neophyte. It was like seeing a reflection of his own thoughts: thousands of neophytes, nameless numbered substances born in test tubes; most will be useless, dozens will show some capability but will have flaws that override it; only two or three will get indexed and early names; they will fight the real battle for life, for realization, for a place in the registers and production plans.

  There will be only one Neophyte with a capital N.

  He felt his loneliness acutely, the useless burden of their marriage: Was Vera capable of sharing that? Understanding that he was also a neophyte, one of the few who thirsted for fulfillment more than anything?

  Vera, whose name meant faith. He could say the word without meaning her.

  It turned out that there was meaning in their marriage. She had saved him. And given him a discovery.

  He was required to run the test with Neophyte’s first, experimental version. Predecessors of the substance. He was unhappy with it, he imagined that a mistake had crept into the calculations and the mixture was not strong enough.<
br />
  Vera volunteered. She was qualified to do it.

  A crack in the valve they’d overlooked. The valve exploded, a metal shard broke the plastic box and the super reliable protective gear. The exhaust ventilation worked well, only a minuscule amount got inside the clothing. Just a few molecules, you could say. But it was Neophyte, the real Neophyte. Kalitin had correctly guessed the base composition.

  Neophyte had killed Vera instantly.

  It was the first thing it did.

  It took payment for its birth.

  Neophyte was exactly what Kalitin had dreamed.

  Not just a substance.

  It was that, and not his wife’s death, that stunned Kalitin. He could not admit that he was afraid.

  Frightened not as a chemist whose substance turned out to be devilishly effective. But as a creator, whose creation, intended to be a faithful servant or loyal soldier, came to life beyond measure, escaping obedience, insubordinate to its creator.

  Neophyte was too fierce. It should have been forgotten, written off as a failure, the way they put down mad dogs of fighting breeds that cannot be trained.

  But Kalitin could not give it up.

  He had put everything into it; he knew he would not have a second enlightenment.

  Neophyte was so secret that Vera’s body could not be sent to the hospital morgue. Neophyte had touched her and she became a vessel for the secret.

  The autopsy showed there were no traces of the substance. Kalitin’s hypothesis was confirmed. Neophyte was untraceable.

  They expressed condolences, gave him leave, wanted to send him to a sanatorium in the south. He said he wanted to return to work. It would be easier for him there. For Vera’s sake.

  They allowed it.

  He began his attempts to tame his creation, solve the problems of preservation, stability—without that he could not hope for certification, for its production.

  But Neophyte turned out to be excessively sensitive and high-spirited. If he changed the original composition just an iota, the whole became unbalanced. Neophyte was born to be just as it was; limited in use because of its wildness, its instant passion to kill.