I ran to the slope. Looking back for an instant, I saw Timofei Stepanovich fling his sack. The mace struck Marchenko in the back like a comet and felled him. Marchenko growled and started crawling on all fours, slowly straightening up; in the anthropology textbooks, that was how they illustrated the transformation of a monkey into erect Homo sapiens.
I hurtled up the slope, stumbled, dropped my flanged mace and clearly heard Lutsis shout: “Alexei, come back!” A second’s paddle hummed past just above my head like a propeller.
I slithered back down on my knees and took off the chain with the Book. My first thought was to fling this awkward item aside in order to distract Marchenko. But the moment I looked into his bloodshot eyes with that trembling bulldog’s lip below them, I knew there would be no mercy.
And the chain was lying so conveniently in my hand. Then a second thought appeared. I swung the Book like a sling and brought it down on Marchenko’s head. The steel case slammed straight into the base of the skull. A vertebra snapped with a repulsive crunch. Marchenko crawled no more; he tumbled over onto his side, working his legs as if he were turning invisible pedals.
“The satisfaction is concluded!” a short, scrawny man of about forty with a terribly mutilated face declared in a loud, imperious voice. Margarita Tikhonovna took off her helmet. One of the lenses of her glasses was broken and her cheek was soaked in blood. Panting as she spoke, Margarita Tikhonovna said:
“Comrade Kovrov, do not prevent justice from prevailing.”
There, about fifty metres away from me, the finishing touches were being put to the battle. Kolontaysk fighters were vigorously beleaguering a lone Gorelovite. The Vozglyakov sisters rhythmically raised their spades and thrust them into squirming bodies. Timofei Stepanovich was crawling about, finishing off the wounded with an awl. Ogloblin and Dezhnev drove a solitary adversary onto the slope; the fugitive fought them off, backing away, until he took a blow from a paddle and collapsed, impaling himself on the pike held out for him.
Kovrov turned to the morose Tereshnikov, who shrugged and said in a loud voice:
“In the name of the council the battle is concluded!”
Tanya took off her battered mask; her cheekbone was decorated with a massive contusion. Lutsis was swinging his head about like a dog, trying to shake out his concussion. Ievlev was pressing his hand over a wound on his right forearm. Marat Andreyevich was wiping down the blade of his sabre with burdock. Margarita Tikhonovna, smiling broadly at me, blinked away the blood that had accumulated under her shattered lens with a cleft eyelid…
And then I puked up bile as caustic as acid into the grass.
The spectators left the slope and helped to sort out the mutilated corpses.
Ogloblin and Timofei Stepanovich laid out dead Pal Palych on the grass with his face shattered as if a tank had driven over him. Igor Valeryevich carried over the lifeless Larionov with a knife in his back. Vadik Provotorov had been killed—I hadn’t even seen how that had happened. He was brought out, his throat slashed, with the purple breathing innards peeping out through it. Maria Antonovna Vozglyakova had died of stab wounds. Grisha Vyrin was lying unconscious. Marat Andreyevich examined him and said that his spinal column didn’t appear to be damaged. I realized that I was partly to blame for what had happened to Vyrin. If not for me, those loyal Soviet roubles would have protected Vyrin’s back.
Our allies had also suffered serious losses. The Kolontayskites had lost three warriors, only two of Simonyan’s six volunteers remained, and only one of Burkin’s volunteers had survived the battle.
The Gorelov reading room had been reduced to five people. These survivors huddled together in a bloodied gaggle. The other thirty-something, including the librarian Marchenko, had met their death on the field of satisfaction.
THE RETURN
AT FIRST I SQUEAMISHLY wiped the metal corner of the casket on the grass for a long time. My former terror had disappeared and in its place a frozen, unnatural calm, verging on extreme fatigue, had swept over me.
The heavy, pine-tar smell of Vishnevsky ointment hung over the battlefield—Marat Andreyevich and Tanya were rendering first aid to the wounded.
Margarita Tikhonovna’s crushed eye was carefully washed and the fragments of glass were extracted from her eyebrow, but she spoke to me in a spirited voice: “Alexei, I’m proud of you, you’re a genuine hero!” The blood, mingling with peroxide, bubbled on her cheek. “How can you not believe in higher justice now? The fact that you were the one to crush Marchenko is a sign. I’m glad that I was not mistaken!” And these words settled in my head in a cold, ornate pattern, like hoar frost.
Sukharev’s shattered hand was bandaged up with parquet blocks from the dead Pal Palych’s armour. During this procedure Sasha kept exclaiming: “I don’t feel any pain at all.” But it seemed to me that he was simply in a state of shock.
It is true, though, that I didn’t hear a single groan or any of the sounds associated with torment of the flesh. Marat Stepanovich merely commented that you could take out an appendix under the influence of the Book of Endurance and carried on hastily applying stitches.
Timofei Stepanovich treated his comrades’ shallow cuts with iodine; Nikolai Tarasovich Ievlev gloomily sucked the blood out of his slashed arm and applied plantain leaves.
The Vozglyakov sisters, Svetlana and Veronika, leaned down over their mother’s body without a single tear; the eldest, Anna, was sewing up a deep, ragged wound in Garshenin’s shoulder with a stony expression on her face, and a Kolontaysk fighter was waiting his turn nearby, pressing a rag to his bleeding wound.
Four observers came towards us, including the deformed Kovrov. He limped on both legs, but walked without the help of crutches. A conversation was held with Margarita Tikhonovna. The fresh white bandage on her eye was already soaked with blood on the inside and her voice trembled slightly, but it was full of dignity. From Kovrov’s sparse words I understood that our debt to the Gorelov reading room had been annulled.
Then the observer started talking about the disposal of the bodies. The essence of the procedure, as Denis explained to me later, was as follows. The victors had the right to request an imitation of any everyday death for their dead—a road accident, an accident at a building site, a fire, suicide, but only such that it would not arouse the suspicion of doctors and the militia. This privilege provided an opportunity to give the fallen normal funerals.
The bodies from the defeated side were supposed either to disappear completely or to lie until they totally decomposed, and lost all the terrible marks of battle. Then, at the request of their nearest and dearest—if such people existed in the world of Gromov—the remains could be discovered by the official world, following a tip-off. Until that time the readers were simply considered to have gone missing.
Shulga’s library accepted all the bothersome responsibilities involved in the disposal—not, of course, as a free service, but in exchange for the Gorelov reading room’s Book.
“Well then, congratulations once again on your victory,” said Kovrov.
“The old school’s the best, Timur Gennadyevich,” Timofei Stepanovich said sadly, drawing himself erect. “We don’t have many novices, we pretty much go all the way back to the Battle of Neverbino.”
“Yes, Marchenko was inexperienced. He didn’t take into account how dangerous it was to go up against you,” Kovrov agreed. “You fight seriously…” he said, yawning, so that his jaw crunched. “Now, about this ambush of the purported killers of the librarian Vyazintsev and the missing reader Shapiro… Depending on the consequences, the council will reach a separate decision and then determine the letter of the penalty. I don’t think that will be soon. Carry on with your own business, you’ll be informed.”
Kovrov limped away majestically. But after a few steps he turned back, met my gaze, wagged his finger at me humorously and declared:
“Don’t run away any more!”
Naturally, I didn’t like this gesture and his derisive tone, but the
ultimate meaning of it all only hit me several hours later, on the way home in our RAF.
My memory of events is blurred, as if I observed them through a polythene bag. The observers carried away our dead comrades. We ourselves loaded the stretcher cases into the bus—the others walked to it themselves—and took them to various hospitals, providing them with the cover stories needed to account for all these breaks, cuts, contusions, broken noses and lost teeth.
One of Burkin’s volunteers, one Kolontayskite and Grisha Vyrin went straight onto the operating table. The first two had suffered severe craniocerebral traumas and Vyrin had a serious spinal injury. Lutsis had apparently escaped with only a minor concussion. Sukharev was left in the same traumatological department with a rather complicated break of the wrist, together with Anna Vozglyakova, who had a crack in her collarbone.
Margarita Tikhonovna categorically refused to see any doctors, declaring that her injury might look bad, but it was actually trivial. It was impossible to argue with her.
I asked how we could inform the families of Pal Palych, Larionov and Provotorov about the death of their dear ones. Margarita Tikhonovna’s reply shed some light on the membership of the reading rooms, in which individuals with families were the exception rather than the rule. Pal Palych and Larionov had lived as solitary bachelors, Provotorov grown up without any parents and had been raised by his grandmother. It turned out that there was no one to grieve for the dead apart from their fellow readers.
The Kolontaysk comrades prepared to go back home, and we moved from the bus into our RAF, after thanking them once again for their help. Margarita Tikhonovna spoke, and we all nodded in unison. Their leader replied morosely: “One good turn deserves another.”
The expression on Veronika and Svetlana’s faces was calm, I would even say exalted. I thought of offering them words of consolation, but I couldn’t find the right ones. The Vozglyakov sisters said goodbye and drove off on the motorcycle after the Kolontayskites.
Big-nosed Garshenin looked at the stumps of his fresh plaster casts, repeating over and over again: “I’ll be all healed up in no time…”
He was temporarily installed in Margarita Tikhonovna’s apartment. Then we drove Ievlev and Kruchina home, and the remaining six of us went to my place.
The same conversation continued. Marat Andreyevich declared:
“It could well be that we took out two or three of Shulga’s aces.”
“Precisely!” Timofei Stepanovich agreed. “I came across some really stubborn lads, and they fought stoutly. For sure Kovrov stopped the satisfaction because only his fighters were left.”
“And that means only one thing,” Marat Andreyevich concluded. “We’ve earned ourselves some serious enemies…”
I was concerned that the Shironinites would regard me as indirectly responsible for Vyrin’s injury. Margarita Tikhonovna’s passionate words made it clear how greatly mistaken I was: “Alexei, don’t even think about that! How could you ever get such an idea into your head?”
They showered me with a chorus of praise for a long time, although I think they all realized that my “heroic feat” was not the result of courage, but a fluke.
“I was so frightened for you,” Margarita Tikhonovna said agitatedly. “When I saw Marchenko break through and run at you… My heart sank, I couldn’t have borne it if anything had happened to you!”
“Ah, come off it!” Ogloblin responded. “Our Alexei’s a hero! Just look at the way he clouted him with the Book!”
“Yes, he’s got real spirit,” Tanya chimed in.
“It’s like I told you—blood’s thicker than water!” Timofei Stepanovich exclaimed joyfully.
“I’m glad things turned out that way and you didn’t lose your head,” said Marat Andreyevich, nodding.
Then the rapture faded and we drove on in silence. An overcast Monday was beginning, fine rain was sprinkling onto the windscreen, and the squeaking wipers smeared the drops like twin metronomes.
And that was when I remembered the observer Kovrov’s finger, as inexorable as a pendulum, in a completely different light. Overwhelmed by sudden despair, I realized that rhythmically swaying finger was the most terrible part of everything that had happened to me in the last few days. It was the beginning of the new rhythm of a different world, and all the indications were that escape from that world was only possible to the world beyond, and only through an extremely painful doorway. In one night I had been transformed from a witness into a fully-fledged accomplice in a massacre. I had been bound by blood. And in time there would be a reckoning for it. “There’s nowhere you can run to…” That was the warning, that was what the moving finger pointed to…
Behind me, Tanya Miroshnikova suddenly started crying. Timofei Stepanovich blew his nose loudly and Fyodor Ogloblin, who had lost his friend and “reverse namesake” Larionov, heaved a sigh. Margarita Tikhonovna furtively raised her handkerchief to her single eye.
Marat Andreyevich rubbed his temples with the palms of his hands, making his hair stand on end.
“The effect of the Book of Endurance has worn off now,” he explained with a bitter smile. “The live human emotions have begun. There’s nothing to be done. Now we’ll grieve…”
Thank God no one guessed that I was mourning for myself, not the fallen.
AT HOME
THAT EVENING BROUGHT yet another unpleasant conversation with Margarita Tikhonovna. Towards the end I worked myself up to a screaming whisper yet again. My nerves were shattered after the events of recent days. For half a day I had been running through past events time and time again in my memory, polishing them to a perfect, rounded state of terror. An entire appalling, hostile world was reflected in this convex, distorted perspective.
I kept asking Margarita Tikhonovna to let me go, but she patiently reminded me of our previous agreement, of which I had fulfilled only half: the Book of Memory had not yet been read.
I tried to persuade her that no Book would ever change my decision. Margarita Tikhonovna smiled meekly and assured me that destiny itself had appointed me a librarian.
“But Margarita Tikhonovna, you know I’m simply not ready to take my uncle’s place here with you. I’m a perfectly ordinary person. I don’t possess any special strength or courage. You have a mature collective; choose a new librarian for yourselves…” I appealed to logic and flattery. “Why shouldn’t you take the Shironin reading room into your own hands, Margarita Tikhonovna? You’re an excellent leader; everyone respects you. You are the most appropriate candidate for my uncle’s position,” I said falteringly, rubbing my sticky palms together. “If my Uncle Maxim could express his opinion, he would definitely prefer you.”
“That won’t work, my boy. I shall die soon…” said Margarita Tikhonovna, shattering my hopes. “Breast cancer—and don’t look at me with that clumsy expression of sympathy on your face. I’ve got six months left. A year at most. The most optimistic prognoses…”
I almost said that she could be the librarian for six months, and then the Shironinites could choose another one, that foundry worker Kruchina or the traumatologist Dezhnev, but I suddenly felt that would sound too cynical. So I said nothing and stared drearily out of the window, watching the white scar that a plane had scraped across the sky, as if with a fingernail.
“My heart aches for the Shironin reading room,” Margarita Tikhonovna continued meanwhile. “As long as Maxim Danilovich was alive, the problem didn’t exist. And my own position was perfectly clear too—I would have served the reading room right to the end, and departed when my time came. I wanted very badly to find a worthy replacement. Something told me that you would be a genuine librarian, like your uncle. Please, first read the Book…”
After all the beating around the bush, we had come back to where we started. Margarita Tikhonovna cut short my whinging by saying that at the moment it wasn’t safe for me to travel to Ukraine; there were many forces interested in getting even for the Gorelov librarian Marchenko, and from every point of view
it would be better if I stayed here, under the protection of the reading room’s members.
She certainly knew the right point to apply pressure to. I immediately fell silent, remembering that Marchenko was not merely some mythical librarian, but also a murderer.
“And I would recommend you not to leave the apartment in general,” Margarita Tikhonovna concluded in an pitilessly formal tone, and at the top of her voice, so that everyone heard.
The readers started coming into the room from the kitchen— Tanya, Fyodor Ogloblin, Marat Andreyevich and Timofei Stepanovich.
“Not even to go to the shop?” I asked cautiously.
“Of course not,” Margarita Tikhonovna confirmed. “Especially since our reading room has been weakened. And to be quite honest, it will be much easier for us and we will feel less anxious if you are at home, with the Book.”
“But how long will this go on?”
Margarita Tikhonovna shrugged.
“About three weeks. Perhaps a month. One of us will be on duty round the clock, but in order to venture outside one bodyguard is not enough. It would be preferable for you to be accompanied by three people at least.”
“Alexei Vladimirovich, I don’t understand: why do you need to go out anywhere?” Tanya suddenly asked. “We’ll buy everything you need, I’ll cook for you… I’m a good cook. And I’ll tidy up the apartment!”
“Don’t worry about money!” Margarita Tikhonovna added. “We take responsibility for your financial problems.”
This suggestion met with a positive response.
The Librarian Page 16