Ice Trilogy

by Vladimir Sorokin

  Fer and I began to meticulously examine the hall. The meat machines sat immobile, enchanted by what was happening onstage. We could see them well. In the parterre where the Soviet higher-ups sat with their wives, we could see gymnasts and military uniforms; foreigners sat there as well; bureaucrats occupied the dress circle, the intelligentsia and music lovers sat farther up. We didn’t discover anyone in the parterre. But as soon as the magnet touched the dress circle, our hearts jolted: there was someone! We shivered: Fer squealed and ground her teeth; a loud moan escaped from me. The meat machines sitting nearby shushed us, taking us for half-mad music lovers. We were in ecstasy not over a German’s aria, however, but over a young woman in evening dress and a fur wrap in the third row of the dress circle. She was looking at the stage, frequently looking through a mother-of-pearl opera glass on a collapsible handle. Next to her sat a meat machine in a navy uniform. I didn’t try to see through her life — we were sitting too far away. During the intermission we came close to her. She was one of the “formers”: a private home on Piatnitskaya Street, a happy childhood with dolls, a dog named Rhett, a pony called Tsora, the gold epaulettes of her father, the plump hands of her mother, sisters, a brother, heavy periods, fear of losing all her blood, love for Antosha, marriage in Elokhovsky Cathedral, a miscarriage, Italy, another miscarriage, the Revolution, the death of her father, the flight of her mother, poverty, fainting from hunger, a second marriage, the heavy odor of her husband.

  After the intermission we began to watch the balconies and the gallery. But then a murmur went through the audience, and everyone turned their heads. In the former royal box Stalin appeared with his wife. This was unexpected for us. But not for the meat machines: Stalin often attended the Moscow theaters. The figures of bodyguards appeared in the aisles. Fer and I stopped. We ignored the crowd of whispering meat machines for a moment and turned our magnet on the new ruler of Russia. He sat in a shadowy box. We watched him intently. He was not one of ours. His heart was a simple pump for moving blood. He himself — was a powerful meat machine. From afar I dimly saw his heavily swirling life: there was nothing in particular to distinguish him from the other meat machines sitting in the audience and looking at him. He was like many of them. He had an enormous love of power. But many in the audience loved power just as much. The meat machines continued looking back at their leader for a long time. Stalin calmly watched the stage. There a corpulent meat machine was singing that life was only a game in which he who “catches a moment of success” is happy, and the loser is doomed to cry, cursing his fate. He finished the aria, eliciting a stormy ovation in the hall. And then we saw a new brother: an old man in the second level of the balcony. He clapped, shouted “Bravo!,” and was as joyous as a child. As a genuine music lover, he had come to the opera with binoculars. They lay in front of him on the velvet parapet of the balcony.

  Fer and I squeezed each other’s hands until they cracked, so we wouldn’t shout out from excitement. In the dark hall sat two of ours.

  Having calmed down, we examined the upper balconies and the gallery. There was no third to be found. When the opera finished, flowers flew out onto the stage, the singers were called back for bows and ovations. Stalin also applauded and disappeared with his bodyguards. We rose and realized that we were having difficulty moving. We were extremely tired. Holding on to each other, we descended to the cloakroom before the crowd, dressed, and began to wait for ours. First the woman appeared. The sailor led her by the arm. They dressed and began to leave. We followed and I looked at both of them: the sailor was her uncle and lived with her as with a wife. Ep and Rubu were keeping watch at the exit. I showed them the woman with the sailor. And they followed them. We waited for the old man. Fortunately, he walked rather slowly and lived close by. We were able to follow him to his apartment in Stoleshnikov Lane. I also looked at him: he had worked as a waiter at the Slavic Bazaar restaurant his entire life, but at the same time remained a passionate music lover; four times he had applied to the vocal department of the conservatory and four times he had failed; he was alone, loved cats, and was afraid of bandits, who had once mugged him, cracking his head open; he prayed to his deceased mother, inventing his own prayer.

  Ep and Rubu followed the woman. She lived near Kursk station.

  As we fell asleep that night, we decided how best to kidnap the woman and the old man and where to strike them with the hammer. But the new day changed our plans: Ig arrived in Moscow from Khabarovsk. We met him at Lubyanka. Embracing him, I felt how strong his heart had grown. That evening we all went to the dacha in Liubertsy and sat on the floor, taking one another by the hand. Kerosene lamps illuminated our faces. In the center of the Circle sat brother Kovro. He had gone through the heart crying. We spoke to our brother’s heart. It timidly answered.

  That night we devised a strategy for searching: Fer and I would look for ours, and then the brothers would follow them, kidnap them, bring them to the dacha, strike them with a hammer, and give them aid; if kidnapping were impossible — the hammering would be carried out on the spot. Ig found a car to transport the newly acquired. Its owner, Solomatin, a relative of Deribas’s wife, who’d had an auto-repair shop during NEP, had gone bankrupt, spent some time in the cellar of the OGPU, and was released thanks to the intervention of Deribas. He owed him his life. After the collapse of NEP, the automobile lover not only had no fuel for the car but had nothing to live on: he was barely making ends meet in the carpenter’s shop, and the Moscow automobile shops wouldn’t take him because he was a former nepman and member of the White Army. Solomatin would do anything for a piece of bread.

  Above all, our Brotherhood needed money, which played a huge role in the world of meat machines. And we decided to rob several wealthy Muscovites. In order to take their valuables, we didn’t even have to kill them. In the beginning I saw them in the crowd; Rubu and Bidugo followed them. Making use of my ability to see the secret of any meat machine with my heart, I found out where they kept their savings. One of them, a former court jeweler, was hiding his treasure in a brick safe in the attic of a neighboring house. Another, the son of a banker who had escaped to Paris, had buried a little box with gold coins in Neskuchny Park. A third kept several large diamonds hidden under his windowsill.

  As soon as this all became ours, we had solved the problem of money: the gold coins were sold on the black market, the other gold items were taken to a secondhand shop where they were sold for a low price. The price didn’t interest us much: I could find a lot more gold hidden by meat machines. We kept the diamonds: to reach its goal, the Brotherhood of Light had a long road ahead.

  Having hired Solomatin and his car, we began working. First we kidnapped the woman found in the Bolshoi Theater, and on the next day, the old man. Both of them were taken to the dacha in Liubertsy and hammered.

  Her name was Atlu.

  His was — Pcho.

  Brother Kovro was driven to the nearby Moscow suburb of Odintsovo, where, unshaven and wearing dirty clothes, he appeared at a police station. Giving his name, he demanded in his broken Russian that they inform the OGPU about him. The Chekists, who had been looking for the missing Wolf for two weeks, arrived immediately. Kovro told them that he had been kidnapped by bandits, taken somewhere blindfolded, and held in a trunk; the bandits tried to get money out of him, then he was taken to a new place. Along the way he managed to escape. The OGPU was very happy that he had turned up: the Bolsheviks needed Wolf badly for the construction of the metro, and they did not want any scandal with German businesses over “the disappearance of a well-known architect in wild Soviet Russia.” Brother Kovro returned to his deluxe room at the Hotel Metropol, where Sebastian Wolf had been living, and a few days later was again working on his drawings. His heart strengthened with every day. For us Kovro was the first hope of searching in Europe.

  Having an automobile with a chauffeur, we became freer in our search. Solomatin was paid pretty good money. He was told no details. I knew that he thought us some kind of Cheki
st born-agains, kidnapping people to rob them, so as not to share with the upper echelons. The cover of Deribas calmed him. In truth, Solomatin feared only dead children (his older brother had drowned as a boy) and hunger.

  On Easter, Fer and I looked through the crowd at four Moscow churches. But we found only one. Brother Tsfo was a large, filthy, illiterate peasant, who had escaped to Moscow from a remote village in the Tambov region. The peasant men of his village, brought to a state of desperation by Soviet power, used axes to hack up government expropriators who had come once again on requisition outings for grain and potatoes. The head of the Agricultural Soviet and three local Communists were locked up in a bathhouse, which was burned down. Then the peasants, with their families and cattle, disappeared in the Tambov forests. The punitive organs of the OGPU burned their village in response and followed their trail — to catch and execute the rebels. Brother Tsfo, who had lost his family as far back as the Civil War, while running from authorities, made his way to the railroad and rode to Moscow on the roof of one of the cars. Here he asked for alms and ate bits and pieces of whatever people threw away. Hirsute and strong as a bear, he resisted us furiously. Edlap broke four of his ribs before his warrior’s heart began to speak.

  Soon after this, what had happened to me in the library happened to Fer: she could no longer see pictures of MEAT MACHINES. The transformation came over her in the women’s bathhouse, where there was a large poster hanging in the dressing room: SOVIET WOMEN, STRUGGLE AGAINST BOURGEOIS PREJUDICE! On the poster these prejudices were named: manicures, pedicures, lipstick, rouge for the cheeks, removing moles and the hair on one’s legs, shaving one’s underarms, plucking one’s eyebrows, wearing corsets. The poster depicted two women: a tall, thin, corseted, made-up, manicured bourgeois lady, and a simply dressed Soviet Komsomol girl. Fer couldn’t distinguish one from the other: the pictures grew blurry. She looked at herself in the mirror and couldn’t see her face. However, she saw a woman sitting nearby. At the age of eighteen this woman had abandoned her newborn child. In order to check herself, Fer reminded the woman where and how it happened. The woman fainted. Fer shouted for joy: “A Gift of the Light!”

  Now Fer and I saw the surrounding world of brothers and meat machines identically. This vision opened new possibilities for us. Looking through yet another meat machine together, our hearts glanced at each other. Whatever slipped past me was noted by Fer; what she didn’t notice, I saw.

  Together Fer and I penetrated the hidden worlds of meat machines. Their secrets and thoughts became entirely transparent. We discovered that the essence of earthly life WAS OPEN TO US.

  A new Wisdom awoke in our hearts.

  And it brought in new corrections to the process of searching.

  One night Fer and I went up to the roof of the dormitory, sat down, and held hands.

  We saw the world.

  And we saw it in time. Meat machines moved around. Previously, each of them lived life in isolation. Now they joined together. The idea of a general brotherhood made them unify. In the past it had not had such power among meat machines. Now it would gather them in crowds. And make them forget about their former earthly goal: personal comfort. This new idea made meat machines suddenly feel a new kinship: the kinship of belief in collective happiness. It unified them. It pulled them out of their stone coffins onto the town squares! Forced them to forget about their families. It demanded self-sacrifice.

  This unification of the meat machines had never occurred before: only war could tear them away from their families, from the stone graves they called “houses,” from money and personal property. But wars were soon over. The meat machines, having killed others like themselves, again returned to their former values: comfort, family, money, personal happiness. Now they often declared war on these values and learned to live life only through the idea of all-around equality and brotherhood. Deprived of harmony in themselves, they furiously sought it in the crowd. The crowd swirled with collective life. Each meat machine tried as soon as possible to dissolve into the crowd. And acquire collective happiness. They experienced this new happiness. For this, meat machines were ready to kill those who didn’t share their idea of collective happiness. To kill those who didn’t want to unify, who didn’t share, and who lived according to their former interests. This was a new war, unlike the previous. It was coming closer. Quickly.

  And we understood why the Ice fell to the Earth at this moment, in the century of the unification of meat machines. Because in the crowd it was easier to search! In this lay the Highest Wisdom of the Light. When the meat machines were together, we could quickly find ours among them. We wouldn’t have to travel all over the Earth: the century of the unification of meat machines would gather crowds in large cities. And Fer and I would look through them. And we would find the 23,000 brother and sisters.

  Meeting in Sokolniki Park for a Small Circle, we reported to the brothers and sisters what we had realized that night on the rusty roof of the OGPU dormitory.

  The next day we continued the search.

  Over the course of 1929 Fer and I looked through dozens of Party, Komsomol, and union meetings. We sat through political classes, stood at demonstrations and sports holidays. Many times we searched in almost all the Moscow theaters and at the hippodrome. We weren’t able to get into the Fifth Congress of the USSR Soviets, but in one week we looked through the First All-Union Congress of Communal Farm Women. We watched the crowd at the opening of the first planetarium in the USSR, at the launch of the first electric train engine at the Dynamo factory, at Red Square during the festivities honoring the pilot Gromov, who had flown from Moscow to the European capitals in the airplane Wings of the Soviets.

  Altogether, sixty-two brothers and thirty-two sisters were found. But not all of ours survived. We were not yet prepared for certain eventualities. For the first time we experienced the loss of our brothers: Ache and Bidugo perished during the kidnapping of brother Sa, a Party functionary; sister Khortim, who suffered from hemophilia, died from loss of blood. At first this shook us. Fer and I held sister Khortim in our arms as she died. When I saw that the Light was abandoning Khortim’s halted heart and there was NO WAY I could help, everything in me shifted backward. Each cell of my body reached back to the Ice. I stopped breathing. And grew blind. The surrounding world disappeared. Only the DARK remained. And the hearts shining in it. They hung in the dark and shone. Then the Light left one of the hearts. And I understood that neither my heart, nor the hearts of my brothers and sisters, could help the Light remain in Khortim’s heart. These last moments of the heart’s flame dying were the most excruciating.

  It was extinguished. Forever.

  But Fer and I immediately felt that the Light that had left Khortim was incarnated in a newly born heart. Somewhere in the DARKNESS surrounding us. And that heart began to beat in a new way. It was no longer the heart of a meat machine. It had become ours. It was waiting for us.

  And I could see the world once again. The world we were in.

  We weren’t subject to earthly death. The Light that left one heart was reincarnated in another. But our bodies were mortal. They didn’t live long. We had to search. And search QUICKLY. So that the search didn’t turn into a vicious circle; in order to conquer Time.

  So that sister Khortim and brothers Ache and Bidugo would be with us again.

  So we searched.

  Among the newly acquired were soldiers, Soviet bureaucrats, engineers, Party workers, factory workers, “formers,” speculators, homeless, housewives, criminals, and one underground millionaire. They all passed through our hands; each of them Fer and I saw with the heart, the Ice hammer had struck each of their breasts.

  We had to give up the dacha in Liubertsy: it was occupied by a high-placed Chekist. But we rented two other dachas — not too far from Moscow, with large, forested plots surrounded by tall fences. In these places we could calmly hammer ours. Their cries and moans didn’t reach alien ears. No one hindered our care for the wounded, no one was al
armed by the heart crying. On being awoken and going through the purifying crying, brothers and sisters returned to Soviet life, merged into it as though nothing had happened. But the Primordial Light burned in their hearts. They were part of the Brotherhood of the Light. And they did all they could toward achieving our goals.

  The search continued intensively.

  Many of ours also stopped seeing faces and images and beheld the world with their hearts. The secrets of meat machines opened to them. This helped to keep the Brotherhood secure, to know where danger awaited us, where we shouldn’t tread. Knowing the secrets of the cities gave us the opportunity to be economically free. Money became easily available to us. Because we knew where it was kept.

  But in Soviet society, where there was total control, by no means was everything decided by money. Only power granted absolute freedom. And we were moving up. But very, very cautiously. Sister Morod, whom we acquired during a Communist “volunteer” workday, occupied a high position in one of the Moscow regional committees. Brother Sa was Party secretary of a weaving mill. We found two in the OGPU. But they didn’t occupy high positions.

  The search continued.