Ice Trilogy

by Vladimir Sorokin

  Her heart was exhausted. She gulped at the air. Her face grew pale. I kneeled. I gathered wet snow from the sidewalk and sucked on it. Ep held me by the shoulders.

  “The circus,” I said. “They’re going to the circus.”

  Fer began to vomit. Then she came to herself.

  The Moscow circus was located on Tsvetnoi Boulevard. We bought tickets. That evening we sat in a circular hall. Fer and I immediately noticed our own. He was sitting next to the minder who was with him in the automobile. The four of us sat calmly. The hall was filled with meat machines. A brass band started to play a march. The curtains opened and the show began. Clowns and acrobats came into the arena. Meat machines applauded them. One clown hit another on the head with a large hammer made of papier-mâché. From each blow the other’s head rang loudly and streams of fake tears flowed. And the meat machines were happy that they weren’t as stupid as the clowns. The acrobats risked their lives, flying on trapezes right up under the cupola. They received money for this. The meat machines enjoyed the agility of the acrobats. And were afraid that the acrobats would fall. Then muscular meat machines came out into the arena. They lifted weights, tore apart chains, held three women on one arm. Then they began to fight. The ordinary meat machines followed the fight of the strong meat machines with great interest. Many in the auditorium envied their strength. After the strong men, little meat machines ran out into the arena. They began to goof around, dance the Charleston, and giggle in thin, high voices, depicting nepmen. Suddenly from behind the curtains a bear ran out. He was in a muzzle, in a large jacket with a red star on it, and wearing the apron of a yard keeper. A large red broom was attached to his paws. The bear ran at the little meat machines. And they ran away from him with a yelp, hiding behind the curtains. The audience whistled and laughed. The trainer ran over to the bear and discreetly stuck a piece of meat in his mouth. A loud voice announced that “a red broom would soon sweep the garbage out of the Soviet capital.” The audience applauded. Our brother sat and watched everything with interest. We calmly observed him. A female trainer in a bright dress ran into the arena. An elephant came out. In the trainer’s hand was a baton wound with a gold ribbon. On the end of the baton was a fuzzy ball. Inside the ball a sharp steel point was hidden. The trainer stuck the elephant so that it would follow her commands. The audience saw her touching the elephant with a fuzzy ball. The huge elephant was afraid of the little trainer. He climbed onto a barrel and raised his front legs. Then he stood on his front feet and lifted his back ones. He wanted this to end as quickly as possible so they would take him back to his cage where there was food. The meat machines clapped. They liked the trainer. The elephant was taken away. And three monkeys ran into the arena. They were dressed in tuxedos. They depicted Chamberlain, Curzon, and Poincaré. The monkeys scrambled up on a large drum with the inscription IMPERIALISM and began to jump. The audience laughed and clapped. The Soviet meat machines were happy that the monkeys resembled the foreign meat machines that criticized the Soviet newspapers. Then came a magician. He began to deftly deceive the meat machines. And they were in awe of his skills. He pretended that he pulled a rabbit and baby chicks out of his hat, pretended that he was sawing a woman in half. Pretended that he became invisible. The meat machines liked it that the magician could deceive them so deftly and discreetly. The trainer came out with a dog. He told the audience that the dog knew how to count to ten. But he was also deceiving them; in fact, the dog did not know how to count. It simply barked on time, in order to receive a piece of sugar from the hand of the trainer. But the meat machines clapped for the dog and believed that it knew arithmetic. After the dog came a meat machine in the costume of a knife thrower with his knives stuck in his belt. A wooden circle was placed in front of him. He asked for a volunteer from the audience. The volunteer turned out to be a woman who had been in the front row. In fact, she also worked in the circus. The knife thrower tied her to the circle, walked away, and then began to throw knives at the circle. The knives landed near the woman’s body. Then he gave a command and the circle began to spin. He was brought four knives with torch handles. The lights in the circus went out. A drumroll sounded. The knife thrower lit the knives and threw them at the circle. The meat machines enjoyed the knife thrower’s agility. But they didn’t know that most of his life he’d been throwing knives at the circles. The woman had been working with him for the last year. He had caused serious wounds to four women. This woman had nine scars from his knives. She was given money for this. At the end of the show came the gymnasts with the Soviet flag, sickle, and hammer. They played around, and then began to make a pyramid on the summit of which was a flag, and on its sides a hammer and sickle. The meat machines applauded for a very long time. They rose and began to move toward the exit. We had been waiting for this moment. We immediately pushed our way through to ours. He was accompanied by a thickset meat machine. I quickly looked through the minder and realized that he was a Chekist. And that he had been attached to the foreigner as a guard. The foreigner was important to Soviet meat machines. We followed him along the path. They exited onto the street. Near a church stood nine carriages with drivers and six automobiles. One of the cars was waiting for him. He walked over to the car, retrieved a cigarette case, and lit a cigarette. I stood close by and looked through him. He was connected with something underground: cement, earth, water, dirt, liquid, workers, hoses. He smoked. The minder also smoked, something cheap and unfiltered. A papirosa. He despised the foreigner. But he did his job. Fer, Ep, and Rubu stood a ways off. I waited, to see what to do. The foreigner laughed, finished smoking, and tossed the cigarette butt on the ground. The minder opened the door of the automobile for him.

  “No. Valk. Breaze,” the foreigner said in broken Russian; he turned and headed down the boulevard.

  The minder set off after him. The automobile turned around and drove behind them, keeping close.

  I took Fer by the arm. And we followed him. Ep and Rubu moved off. The foreigner walked along the boulevard ring toward Tverskaya. An occasional passerby walked down the boulevard. The foreigner walked to Petrovka and turned in the direction of the city center. Near the Petrovsky Monastery he stopped and shivered.

  “Sergie. Is cooled. Go home.”

  The minder made a sign to the driver of the automobile. The car drove up. The minder walked over to the car and opened the back door. I looked around: ahead a carriage moved off and a pair of meat machines laughed drunkenly. Here and there lampposts illuminated the street. A dog barked. I jolted the brothers’ hearts. They understood. The brothers grabbed their weapons. Ep hit the minder on the head with the butt of his gun. He fell. I aimed a pistol at the foreigner.

  “Ne bouge pas!”

  Rubu placed the butt to the windshield of the automobile. The driver froze.

  “Montez dans la voiture!” I ordered the foreigner.

  He began to sit down slowly in the automobile. I pushed him. Rubu sat on the front seat next to the driver. The Chekist who’d fallen moaned. Ep and Fer lifted and pushed him into the car. Fer squeezed in behind him.

  “Stay,” I told Ep. “Call Pilo and Ju.”

  And he moved away from the car into the dark.

  The foreigner was frightened. I sat next to him, pushing the pistol into his stomach. The cracked head of the minder was on my knees.

  “Sit still,” I told him in Russian.

  “Turn around,” Rubu ordered the driver, searching him.

  The driver obediently began to turn the wheel. He didn’t have any weapons.

  “Drive to Liubertsy,” Rubu said, putting the barrel of the gun to the driver’s temple.

  “There’s not enough gas,” muttered the driver.

  I saw that he was deceiving us. And quickly looked through him. “There’s enough gasoline. Remember your dead wife. Don’t be afraid of bees. They won’t sting you a third time.”

  The driver froze.

  “Take a swallow from your mother-in-law’s flask. And let’s go.”
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  The driver, not understanding, glanced at me. Then, with a trembling hand, he opened the glove compartment and removed the flask of buffalo-grass vodka. He took a big swallow. He closed the flask and put it away.

  And we sped off.

  Along the way the foreigner began to ask me in French who we were and what we wanted. I answered that we wouldn’t hurt him. The minder moaned weakly the whole way, then grew quiet: his heart had stopped. Ep’s blow proved too powerful. Arriving at our location, we drove on to the territory of the dacha. We tied up the driver and locked him in the cellar. We took the foreigner into the house. As soon as we closed the door, we jumped on him, trembling from impatience. Rubu grabbed him from behind and pressed against him. Squealing, Fer tore the clothes from his chest and grabbed him by the knees. He was extremely frightened because he didn’t understand our actions. He offered us money. Retrieving an Ice hammer from the attic, I hit him on the chest so hard that he immediately lost consciousness and blood flowed from his ears and nose. We fell on him.

  “Kovro, Kovro, Kovro,” he answered with his heart.

  We cried from joy. Our hearts rejoiced. Undressing brother Kovro, we washed him, rubbed him down, bandaged his chest, and put him to bed. His awakened heart brought him out of the swoon. Powerless, he lay in the light of the kerosene lamp and looked straight ahead with wide-open greenish-blue eyes. We sat nearby. And carefully touched his heart. We calmed him. We already had experience dealing with awakening hearts.

  Kovro began to mutter weakly in German. He lost consciousness, and again came to himself. The awakened heart made him completely powerless — he couldn’t move a finger. Fer stroked his hands, licked and warmed his pale face with her breath. We stroked his body.

  He was a German. In the world of meat machines he was called Sebastian Wolf. He had just turned thirty-five. He came from a prominent manufacturing dynasty: his father and uncle owned coal mines in Bochum and a copper-melting plant in Düsseldorf. As soon as he finished the gymnasium, he volunteered to go to the front, was wounded by shrapnel, and demobilized. Studying in Hannover and Oxford, he received two diplomas — architecture and electronics degrees. Turning down a position as director of his father’s mines, Wolf began to make his own career. The architectural bureau he founded began to work on projects with great prospects — underground communications. At the age of thirty, Sebastian Wolf had become well known in Europe as an engineer and architect. He constructed underground factories and citadels, tunnels through mountains, and mines for building metro systems. The firm S. Wolf and Company became fashionable in underground construction. The Bolsheviks offered him an enormous sum for the project of laying down communications for the Moscow metro. Wolf agreed. Arriving six months earlier in Moscow, he signed a contract. His name didn’t show up officially in the press: Soviet propaganda could not allow anyone to know that a bourgeois engineer was taking part in the construction of the Moscow metro. He agreed to this as well: what was important to him was the project itself and the money. The project was almost ready; in Germany Wolf’s wife and children were waiting for him.

  But his main passion was conquering the underground.

  For entertainment he loved horse racing, sword fighting, and the circus. The circus was connected with a childhood dream. The family lived on an estate near Düsseldorf. One time, his older brother took eight-year-old Sebastian into town to show him the French traveling circus that had come to the city on tour. The boy really loved the circus. He was particularly struck by the blue girl on the pink elephant. The girl danced on the elephant, and it bowed to the audience and doffed its hat. People threw money into the hat. Sebastian fell in love with the blue girl. The next day he demanded that he be taken to the circus again. But the circus had already left Düsseldorf. Sebastian became hysterical. His temperature went up that night. He had a dream: he was in an empty circus ring, in the middle of which was an elephant made of ice. The blue girl sat on the elephant. She invited Sebastian to ride on the elephant. He walked over, the elephant picked him up with its trunk and placed him on its back. Sebastian sat on the elephant. The girl hugged him by the shoulders. And commanded the elephant: “Olé.” The ice elephant walked in a circle. And squeaked. The squeak of the ice elephant made Sebastian cry sweetly. Because the elephant was very cold but very kind. And unbearably intimate.

  The blue girl embraced Sebastian from behind with her warm hands and whispered into his ear, “Un enfant ne peut pas pleurer!”

  After that Sebastian fell in love with the circus forever, although his father’s family considered the circus a vulgar spectacle. Sebastian went to the circus when he was in high school, before the war, and as a student, and after that. He went to the famous circuses of Paris, Lisbon, London, and Hamburg. But he never again saw the blue girl on the pink elephant.

  The ice elephant came to him in feverish dreams each time he hallucinated with a high temperature. And each time, Sebastian cried sweet tears in his dream, hearing the icy squeak.

  We protected the calm of brother Kovro.

  In the morning sisters Pilo and Ju came. They relieved us. They sat down near the bed of the newly acquired brother. Before the sun rose, we again got in the car with the chauffeur and rode farther from Moscow. We turned from the highway into a dense forest, shot the chauffeur, poured the remainder of the gasoline over the car and both corpses, and lit it. After that we walked for a long time to a railway station. We got on the train and traveled to Kazansk station. Fer and I were late to work by forty-four minutes. To make up for it, the boss required us to wash the floors after work. And he also “signaled the irresponsibility of the Deribases” to the Komsomol secretary, so that we would be “raked over the coals” at the Komsomol meeting. The boss’s face swirled powerfully.

  “Did you forget where you work? Forget whose name you carry? Discipline above all! The OGPU — is no circus!”

  The Search

  It took Kovro four days to recover. The blow of the Ice hammer had injured his chest muscles, which swelled up and hurt. But his awakening heart helped. We took turns on watch at the dacha, protecting brother Kovro. He was in shock and disturbed. His condition changed swiftly: sometimes he kissed us rapturously, pressing us to his broken chest, at others he would sob hysterically, calling on his mother and all the saints in German. His delicate fingers trembled, his eyes burned. And his heart quivered.

  Fer and I knew that his heart had to go through the crying. For this reason it was dangerous to let Kovro out. When he woke up, he rushed for the door. We seized him, pressed him to us, spoke with his heart. He shouted furiously, thrashed about in our arms, then calmed down.

  We knew that the OGPU was looking for him. And we tried to be extremely careful.

  Finally, on the fifth day, Kovro collapsed into the crying. He sobbed, submerged himself in sleep, awoke, and sobbed again. Sisters Pilo, Ju, and Orti took turns sitting near him. Brothers Edlap and Bidugo guarded them.

  Fer and I began the search again.

  At first we had luck: as soon as we entered the unemployment office, where there were crowds of unemployed meat machines, our magnet detected a sister. But she turned out to be a tiny infant. Her unemployed mother held her in her arms, standing in line. Waiting until the mother was turned down yet again and went home, we followed her. It cost us a great deal of restraint not to take the baby from her. But we couldn’t preserve the life of our sister. We simply had to keep track of her, once we found the address. Thus we found out that our nameless sister was growing up in Krivokolenny Lane, in a communal apartment on the first floor of house No. 6. The meat machine who had squeezed our sister out into the world from her vagina was feeding her with her milk. We had to wait until the breast of our sister was strong enough to withstand the blow of the Ice hammer. And it was necessary to help this meat machine. That evening we gathered all the money that we had, placed it in an envelope, and left it with the nursing meat machine. She was very happy with the find, thinking the help came to her from on high
. And in this she was correct.

  Continuing our search, we quickly understood: walks through the street at rush hour were much too difficult for Fer and me. Moving through the crowd, our hearts were torn apart. To illuminate with our magnet a crowd of hurrying meat machines, as opposed to sitting or standing ones, was immeasurably harder. The moving crowd oppressed us, it hummed and swirled, as though it intended to carry us off with it, back into that terrible and lightless life. It yearned to swallow us. The crowd knocked us off our feet, it forced us to hold on to our brothers. Our knees trembled. As soon as we began to illuminate the crowd, we grew instantly exhausted, and after a few minutes our legs literally collapsed. Then days were required for our hearts and bodies to get back to normal.

  We decided not to work anymore with moving crowds: it had become dangerous. We would instead illuminate meat machines in places where they worked, gathered, ate, watched shows, prayed, listened to speakers, and read books. Such places included plants and factories, theaters and movie houses, libraries, meeting rooms, churches, restaurants, and cafeterias.

  The first two outings brought no results. There were none of ours at the evening of proletarian poetry in the Polytechnic Institute or at the Komsomol meeting of the OGPU.

  However, we were very lucky on the third outing: we were able to acquire two free passes to the opera The Queen of Spades at the Bolshoi Theater. Squeezing through the cackling crowd into the vestibule, we sat in the gallery, high up amid the university students and Workers’ Faculty students. The brightly illuminated hall was full. The meat machines gradually calmed down and sat in their seats. The lights went out. The orchestra began to play. Meat machines in costumes from the beginning of the previous century came onstage and began singing in unison. All of them, thanks to their inborn characteristics and many years of training, could produce lengthy sounds of different frequencies and tones. The meat machines sitting in the audience weren’t able to produce those kinds of sounds. For that reason they came to hear the singing meat machines. The meat machines were pretending to be cardplayers. Then women appeared, dressed in crinolines. They began to sing in higher voices. The audience burst into applause; melomanes and students in the gallery shouted “Bravo!” The subject of the opera boiled down to two main themes — love and money, the merger of which, in the opinion of the meat machines, guaranteed complete earthly happiness. The orchestra played to the singers. The musicians tried hard to follow a particular harmony that meat machines had worked out over thousands of years. In these pitiful sounds, merging with the voices of the singer, you could feel an unconscious longing for a world of Higher Harmony, unattainable for meat machines.