Ice Trilogy

by Vladimir Sorokin

  We ate the apricots, washing them down with water.

  “Tell me about the House,” Yus asked me.

  I told her. She listened with an expression of almost childlike amazement. When I got to the conversation with Bro and to his travels, tears poured down Yus’s wrinkled cheeks.

  “What happiness,” she said, pressing my hand to her chest. “What happiness to obtain another living heart.”

  We all embraced.

  Then Kha told her about the current plans. A complex task lay ahead of us. Adr and I listened to Kha, holding our breath. But Yus couldn’t listen for more than ten seconds: she jumped up, threw herself on me, embraced my legs, pressed against me, muttering tender words, then ran back to the window and stood there, sniffling and shaking her head.

  Her room was a chaotic mess of books and objects, and a German typewriter with a sheet of paper in it rose out of them like a cliff. In her former life, Yus had earned money at home by typing, and during the day she typed at the ministry where she worked. Like all of us, she had no financial problems.

  Yus begged Kha to take her on the work trip, but he forbade her.

  She began to sob.

  “I want to speak with you...” she whimpered, kissing my knees.

  “We need you here,” said Kha, embracing her.

  Yus shivered violently. Her dentures clattered and her knees trembled. We calmed her with valerian drops, put her in bed, covered her with a down blanket, and placed a hot water bottle at her feet. Her face shone with bliss.

  “I found you, I found you...” her old lips kept whispering. “I just hope my heart doesn’t burst.”

  I kissed her hand.

  She looked at me with profound affection and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

  We left, got in the car, and in an hour we were at the military aerodrome in Zhukovskoe. An airplane was waiting for us there.

  We settled down in the small cabin. The pilot reported to Kha on our state of readiness, and we took off.

  It took almost twenty-four hours to reach Magadan: twice we stopped to fuel up, and we spent the night in Krasnoyarsk.

  When I flew over Siberia and saw the endless forests sliced by the ribbons of Siberia’s great rivers, I thought about the thousands of blue-eyed, fair-haired brothers and sisters living within Russia’s unembraceable expanses, daily enacting the mechanical rituals imposed upon them by civilization, unaware of the miracle hiding inside their chests. Their hearts slept. Would they awake? Or, like millions of other hearts, having beaten their allotted time, would they rot in the Russian earth, never knowing the intoxicating might of the heart’s language?

  In my head I pictured thousands of coffins disappearing into graves scattered with earth; I felt the intolerable immobility of these stopped hearts, the decay of divine heart muscles in the dark, the nimble worms that devoured the powerless flesh. My living heart shuddered and fluttered.

  “I must awaken them!” I whispered, looking out upon the ocean of forest swimming below me...

  We landed in Magadan early in the morning.

  The sun had not yet risen. At the airport, two automobiles and two MGB officers were waiting for us. Four long zinc cases were loaded into one car, and we got into the second.

  After driving through the city, which seemed to me no better but no worse than other cities, we turned onto a highway, and after a rather bumpy half-hour ride, we rolled up to the gates of a large corrective labor camp.

  The gates opened immediately, and we entered the territory of the camp. There were wood barracks and, in the corner, shining white, stood the sole brick building. We drove up to it. We were met by the camp’s administrators — three MGB officers. The camp director, Major Gorbach, gave us a hearty welcome and invited us into the administrative building. But Kha told him that we were extremely pressed for time. Then he fluttered around and gave the order: “Sotnikov, bring them here!”

  A dozen or so exhausted, filthy prisoners were soon brought to us. Despite the warm summer weather, they all wore tattered padded coats, felt boots, and hats with earflaps.

  “Your people wear felt boots in the summer?” Kha asked Gorbach.

  “No, Comrade General. I was holding these in the hard-regime barracks. So I issued winter clothes to them.”

  “Why did you put them in hard regime?”

  “Well...it’s...more reliable.”

  “You’re an asshole,” replied the comrade general. Turning to the prisoners, he said, “Take off your hats.”

  They took off their hats. All of them looked like old men. Four were blonds, one an albino, and two had completely gray hair. Only four had blue eyes, including one of the gray-haired ones.

  “Listen, Major, is your head screwed on right? Haven’t had any concussions lately, have you?” Kha asked Gorbach.

  “I wasn’t at the front, Comrade General,” answered Gorbach, turning pale.

  “Who were you ordered to find?”

  “Blonds with light eyes.”

  “Are you color-blind?”

  “No, sir, I can see colors normally.”

  “What the hell kind of normal is this?” Kha shouted, pointing at one prisoner’s gray head. “This one is blond in your opinion?”

  “In his testimony he wrote that prior to 1944 he was blond, Comrade General,” Gorbach answered, standing at attention.

  “You’re playing with death, Major,” Kha said, throwing a piercing gaze his way. “Where is the place?”

  “This way...over here, please.” Gorbach pointed at another building.

  Kha took a cigarette out of his cigarette case, rolled it between his fingers, and sniffed it.

  “Take these four here, and follow the instructions.”

  “And where should the others go?” Gorbach asked timidly.

  “To hell.” Kha tossed the cigarette on the ground.

  Presently we entered the building. The biggest room had been designated for the hammering. The windows were shuttered, three bright lamps burned, and handcuffs were attached to the walls. The four prisoners were pinned to the wall, naked to the waist, their mouths and eyes bound.

  One of the zinc cases was brought in. Kha ordered everyone out of the building.

  Adr opened the case. It had thick walls and was filled with the dry ice that ice cream is stored in. The Ice hammers protruded slightly from under the steaming dry ice. I placed my hands on them. I immediately felt the unseen vibration of the heavenly Ice. It was divine! My hands trembled, my heart beat greedily: ICE! I hadn’t seen it for so long!

  Adr put on a pair of gloves, pulled one hammer out, and began his work. He struck the gray-haired man. He turned out to be empty, and quickly died from the blows. Then Kha took the hammer. However, that day we were out of luck: the others were also empties.

  Tossing aside the broken hammer, Kha took out a pistol and shot the crippled empties.

  “It’s not so easy to find our people,” said Adr with a tired smile, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  “Yet what happiness when we do find them!” I smiled.

  We embraced, pieces of ice crunching under our feet. My heart felt every single sliver of Ice.

  Leaving the building, we heard shots nearby.

  “What was that?” Kha asked the major.

  “Comrade General, you gave orders that the others were to receive the highest penalty,” the major answered.

  “You idiot, I said — to hell with them.”

  “My fault, Comrade General, I didn’t understand.” Gorbach blinked hard.

  Kha waved him away, and went over to the car.

  “All of you slobs need to be purged.”

  In the course of two weeks we traveled to eight camps and hammered ninety-two people. We found only one living one. He turned out to be a forty-year-old recidivist-thief from Nalchik named Savely Mamonov, known by the nickname “Blast Furnace.” The nickname had been given to him for the tattoo on his buttocks: two devils holding shovels of coal. When he walked the devils seem
ed to be shoveling coal into his anus. But this was not the only tattoo on Blast’s chubby, hairy, short-legged body: his torso and arms were covered with mermaids, hearts pierced by knives, spiders, and kissing doves. In the middle of his chest was a tattoo of Stalin. From the blows of the Ice hammer the leader’s face began to spout profuse amounts of blood. I pressed my ear to that bloodied Stalin and heard, “Shro...Shro...Shro...”

  My heart felt the awakening of another heart.

  This experience is comparable to nothing else.

  Tears of ecstasy spurted from my eyes, and I pressed my bloodied lips to the ugly, coarse, heavily scarred face of our newly acquired brother.

  “Hello, Shro.”

  We cut his fetters and removed the bandage from his mouth. His body slid powerlessly to the floor, his eyes rolled back, and from his lips could be heard a weak but angry whisper: “Fuckin’ cunts.”

  Then he lost consciousness. Kha and Adr kissed his hands. I cried, touching his gnarly body, which had carried the locked vessel of the Primordial Light inside it. Henceforth this body was destined to live.

  A month later, Shro and I were sitting in a restaurant atop the Moscow Hotel near the Kremlin. It was a warm, dry August day. A soft wind rippled the striped tent. We were eating grapes and peaches. Below, the great Russian city stretched out before us. But we weren’t looking at it. Shro held my hand in his rough, tattooed hands. Our blue eyes could not part for a second. Even when I placed a grape between Shro’s lips, he continued looking at me. We spoke almost no words in earthly language. Yet our hearts trembled. We were prepared to entwine our arms and fall down anywhere — here over Moscow, in the Metro, on the sidewalk, in an entryway, or on a garbage heap. Our feelings were so elevated, however, that self-preservation was part of them.

  We took care of ourselves.

  And our hearts.

  For this reason we allowed them to speak only in secluded places where there were no living dead.

  “Can we still croak?” Shro asked suddenly after a silence of many hours.

  “Death doesn’t matter anymore,” I answered.

  “Why?”

  “Because we met.”

  He squinted. Grew ponderous. Then he smiled. His steel teeth sparkled in the sunlight.

  “I got it, Sis!” he wheezed. “I got the whole fucking shebang!”

  We all understood everything: my young self, awkward Shro, wise Kha, ruthless Adr, and ancient Yus.

  We were engaged in a great undertaking.

  Time made way for eternity. We passed through time like rays of light through an icy thickness. And we reached the depths...

  In September and October we visited eighteen camps in Mordovia, Kazakhstan, and western Siberia. Almost two hundred Ice hammers were broken on the emaciated breastbones of prisoners, but only two hearts began to speak, pronouncing their names.

  “Mir.”

  “Sofre.”

  There were now seven of us.

  We continued our search among the lower echelons of society. Kha’s new arrangements were dictated largely by the times: the repressive state structure was destroying the Soviet elite too quickly and too unpredictably. It was difficult for high-placed people to survive the Stalinist meat grinder. No one was certain of his safety; no one was protected from arrest. Even those who drank and sang Georgian songs with Stalin.

  For that reason we made no attempt to find our own among the Party and military bosses. The losses of the ’30s and ’40s had sobered Kha forever.

  But the camps did not resolve the problem of our quest. The few brothers found among them were a paltry reward for the huge risk and painstaking preparations.

  Kha and Adr worked out a new search plan: we had to travel to the north of Russia, to Karelia, and the White Sea, to lands rich in fair-haired blue-eyed people.

  With the support of his patron, the all-powerful Lavrenty Beria, Kha created a special division within the MGB called “Karelia,” purportedly to seek out deserters and German accomplices who had taken refuge in the forests of Karelia. It was a small but mobile subdivision consisting of former smersh operatives called upon during the war to fight against German spies and saboteurs. However, in line with traditional NKVD practices, the smersh people were largely in the business of fabricating false cases, arresting innocent Red Army soldiers, and beating the necessary evidence out of them — after which the newly minted “German spies” were safely shot.

  The sixty-two cutthroat smersh operatives Kha chose for the Karelia Special Forces — which reported directly to Beria himself — were prepared to carry out any order. These truly merciless individuals viewed the human race as garbage and received great satisfaction from discharging large numbers of bullets into the backs of heads. Adr led the group.

  In April 1951 the division began a secret operation called “Dragnet”: arriving in Karelia, in the small town of Loukhi, the operatives set about arresting blue-eyed blonds, both men and women. They were taken to Leningrad, where, in the basements of the Big House, Kha, Shro, Sofre, and I hammered them.

  It was hard work. Sometimes we had to hammer up to forty people a day. By evening we would collapse from exhaustion. The laboratory where, in the past, three imprisoned engineers prepared the hammers, couldn’t handle the volume. Five more workers were added, tripling the production; they worked as much as sixteen hours a day, making thirty hammers daily. The hammers were brought to Leningrad by airplane so that we could pound the white-skinned Karelian breasts in the dusky cellar of the MGB.

  Our hands and faces were scarred by shards of flying Ice, our hands and arms became iron though our muscles ached and hurt, our nails sometimes bled, and our feet would be swollen from hours of standing still. Kha’s wife helped us. She wiped our faces, spattered with Karelian blood, gave us warm water to drink, and massaged our arms and legs. We worked as though possessed: the Ice hammers whistled, bones cracked, people moaned and wailed. One floor below us shots rang out incessantly — the empties were being finished off. As always, they comprised ninety-nine percent. Only one percent remained alive. But how much joy we received from each one of a hundred!

  Each time I pressed my head against a bloody, quivering chest and heard the flutter of a wakening heart, I forgot about everything else, I cried and shouted with joy, repeating the heart name of the newborn.

  “Zu!”

  “O!”

  “Karf!”

  “Yk!”

  “Owb!”

  “Yach!”

  “Nom!”

  They were few and far between. Like nuggets of gold in the earth. But they existed! And they glittered in our work-weary, bloody hands.

  The living were immediately taken to the MGB prison hospital, where the doctor, following Kha’s instructions, provided the necessary care.

  Gradually, their numbers grew.

  The special division completed the operation in Loukhi and moved south along the railroad — through Kem, Belomorsk, and Segezh, to Petrozavodsk. While the agents were combing each city, a special train stood at the station, earmarked for the transport of prisoners. After the town had been searched, the train full of fair-haired people departed for Leningrad.

  In the course of two and a half months of incessant work, we found twenty-two brothers and seventeen sisters.

  This was a great Victory for the Light! Russia had turned toward Light-Bearing Eternity.

  The Karelia special division was nearing the old Russian port of Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia, a large city with a population of 150,000, teeming with blue-eyed, fair-haired residents.

  To implement the Dragnet-Petrozavodsk operation, the special division was reinforced with twenty officer agents and fifteen wardens from the Lubianka prison.

  Dozens of Ice hammers awaited their hour in refrigerators.

  But the ominous month of July 1951 approached. The “Doctors’ Plot” being fabricated in the bowels of the Lubianka — an alleged plot of doctor-murderers planning to poison Stalin and other Party bigw
igs — had turned against the MGB. Abakumov, the minister of state security, was arrested. The threat of a new purge hung over the Lubianka.

  Beria’s old enemies in the Central Committee and the Ministry of Defense acquired new life. Denunciations of Abakumov’s deputies, of whom Kha was one, flooded the Politburo.

  Kha decided to halt the Karelian operation.

  The special division was called back; an empty train returned to Leningrad.

  We had to wait things out, to “sink to the bottom,” as Kha said. Adr and I received a month-long vacation and set off for one of the MGB’s resorts on the Crimean coast, not far from Evpatoria. Kha and his wife flew to Hungary to vacation on Lake Balaton. Shro lived with Yus. Mir and Sofre spent the summer working at one of the MGB’s Young Pioneers camps.

  After the cellars of the Big House, it was hard for me to adjust to the hot, indolent Crimea, where everything is designed for primitive Soviet “rest,” which involves an almost vegetative existence. Our thirty-nine newly acquired brothers and sisters would not leave me in peace. Hundreds of kilometers away from them I felt their hearts, I remembered each and every name, and I spoke with them.

  Adr, understanding my state of mind, tried to help. Early in the morning, before sunrise, we would swim out to the wild cliffs, entwining there and lying still for many hours like ancient lizards.

  But Adr’s heart wasn’t enough for me. I yearned for the prison hospital where all of my brothers and sisters lay. I wanted them. I begged and pleaded, crying.

  “It’s not possible Khram,” Adr whispered to me.

  And I beat my useless hands against the cliffs.

  Adr ground his teeth in futility.

  Soon something began to happen to me. It started on a Sunday evening, when Adr, who tried in every way possible to help me fight off boredom, decided to take me to the movies. They showed movies on Sundays in a simple summer theater. Instead of the promised new comedy, they began showing Chapaev that night. Someone shouted out that they’d already seen Chapaev twenty times. An old corpse countered, “No matter, you can watch it for the twenty-first time!”

  I had seen Chapaev as a girl. At the time the film shook me. I remembered it very well. But this time, when the first scenes began and people appeared on the sheet they used as a screen, I couldn’t see them clearly. They were just gray spots, flickering appearances, sputters of light and shadow. At first I thought that the projectionist had made some mistake. But I was able to read the list of captions and names. Everything else swam in front of me. I looked at the audience: everyone watched silently, no one cried out “Focus!” or “Murder the projectionist!”