“Vadim Leonidovich!” Tereshnikov called. “Come here, don’t be afraid. We won’t let anyone hurt you.”
And then I remembered—it was Kolesov, the false apartment buyer from the Gorelov reading room.
“May I?” Yambykh asked drily and walked in without waiting for permission. “I hope the dogs are leashed?”
He was followed in by a small retinue of men, who squinted warily at our axes. About ten guards remained outside by the cars.
Tereshnikov turned back casually and shouted to them.
“Wait, we’ll be back soon! And don’t do anything stupid; we’re not in any danger.”
After that he anxiously assessed the effect his words had had on the Shironinites.
“Genuine cut-throats,” he mumbled, jabbing his thumb back over his shoulder. “Maniacs. They don’t even need a Book of Fury…” he muttered, nudging along Kolesov, who moved awkwardly, as if he was hobbled.
They walked along our living corridor and stopped in the middle of the yard. Svetlana, with the kennel chain wound onto her hand, barely managed to restrain Nayda, who reared up on her hind legs. On the other side Anna was hauling on Latka’s leash, with the dog raging wildly. Tanya, Veronika, Margarita Tikhonovna and Timofei Stepanovich came running up. The powerful dogs and our weapons created the consoling impression that we had our uninvited guests under armed guard.
“Vadim Leonidovich,” asked Sukharev, unable to resist, “how’s the health? Are you going to buy the apartment or not?”
Timofei Stepanovich tutted admiringly and exclaimed:
“Alive, you louse!”
Kolesov shuddered painfully and looked down at his shoes as he said:
“Comrade Tereshnikov, I would very much like to leave this place as soon as possible.”
“You’ll leave, all right. But only after you do your job!” Yambykh interrupted him, and then turned to me.
“All your readers are here, right?”
I nodded, with a foreboding of disaster.
Yambykh rubbed his dry, rustling palms together like a fly.
“Well, and what do you say?” he asked Kolesov.
“Come along, Vadim Leonidovich, don’t be so timid,” Tereshnikov encouraged him.
Kolesov counted us with brief, fearful glances.
“There’s one missing. The driver.”
I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. My temples flared up treacherously and started running with sweat.
“Well, well…” Yambykh smirked. “Would you by any chance happen to remember the driver’s name?”
Vadim Leonidovich hesitated, then briskly pushed back the collar of his jacket and reached into the pocket.
“Fyodor Alexandrovich Ogloblin,” he read from a piece of paper, “born 1956… Now can I go?”
“Go on, go on,” Yambykh said. “Comrade Tereshnikov, you go with him. And I’ll have a separate little talk with the Shironinites here.”
“Will you be long?” Tereshnikov asked, backing away towards the exit. Kolesov retreated with him step by step.
“We’ll see…” said Yambykh, smiling at our disconcerted faces. “Well then, where have you hidden this reader of yours? Have you eaten him?”
“We haven’t hidden him anywhere,” said Margarita Tikhonovna. “Comrade Ogloblin is here with us… It’s just that we were irritated by the presence of those clowns…” She pointed to the gate that had clanged shut behind Tereshnikov.
“Don’t play games with me! What sort of bullshit is this?” said Yambykh, flying into a rage.
“Ogloblin’s here,” Margarita Tikhonovna confirmed, “but he can’t come to us.”
“Why? Is he sick? Wounded?”
“I’ll explain everything to you in a moment. Let’s go,” she said, beckoning to me. “It’s just over here, in the garden.”
The bewildered Yambykh and his companions followed her. I realized what she was going to show them. We walked over to the cross under the apple tree.
“There,” said Margarita Tikhonovna, pointing.
“Aha, so he’s dead, after all!” said Yambykh, sighing in relief. “God be praised for that!” And then, slightly embarrassed, he added. “I mean, it clarifies the case. So this is his grave then?”
“Not exactly. There isn’t any grave. Only the cross!”
Yambykh was triumphant.
“And why did you conceal his death from us right from the very beginning?”
“We didn’t wish to alarm the council once again,” I said. “It seemed to us that Ogloblin’s death was exclusively the reading room’s problem…”
“What happened to him then?”
“He was killed. Shot by gangsters…”
“The same ones who took such a keen interest in us…”
How much all this resembled a rout in chess, with the solitary king fleeing from square to escape an enraged hostile queen.
“You say they shot him,” Yambykh said with a sigh. “Sad, very sad… I have one other piece of bad news. We’ll have to exhume the body.”
“Not possible,” I said hastily. “The body was cremated immediately.”
“So you’re saying what’s under the ground is an urn? And we don’t know whose ashes are in it? Neat…”
“There aren’t any ashes either,” Kruchina said with quiet menace. “There couldn’t be. Our comrade was cremated in my foundry shop…”
“In a foundry shop…” Yambykh repeated in a mocking echo. “Cremated… Now let me tell you what really happened. He ran off, this Ogloblin of yours!” Yambykh snapped. “He ran off! And there wasn’t any shooting. The reader Ogloblin fled from you for the same reasons that Shapiro did! And to cover it up you blew away ten gangsters from the Caucasus so that you could write off yet another traitor afterwards. Ah, but then…”—he suddenly softened his tone of voice and spoke in an almost friendly manner—“…it is possible that I could be mistaken on one point. I admit there is the possibility that the fugitive Ogloblin fingered you to the gang…”
It was pointless to object or argue. The Shironin reading room was screwed on all points.
“Well, thank you for your attention,” said Yambykh, breaking into a foul smile. “As they say, the show’s over…”
A MEDITATION ON STALIN CHINAWARE
YAMBYKH AND HIS MEN went on their way, leaving us to await the council’s decision. Our prospects seemed dismal in the extreme: violation of the code of secrecy, the flight of a reader, concealment of facts representing a threat to common security, an unsanctioned operation to eliminate probable witnesses—all this was more than enough to add up to another “A” sanction, with the confiscation of the Book and the disbandment of the reading room already waiting in the wings.
The council was taking its time. They were in no hurry to deliver a verdict; they had the Shironin reading room in their pocket anyway. It was just a matter of timing the delivery of the fatal blow.
Our quarantine didn’t end with our return to town; instead it assumed different and disquieting forms. Margarita Tikhonovna spent days on the phone, trying to get through to our reading-room neighbours. In a week and a half the world around us had become extinct. There was no response from Burkin’s reading room and Simonyan’s also remained silent. No one answered the phone in Kolontaysk. A call to Tereshnikov was answered by a polite little patter: “Hello, you have reached number…”
We were becalmed in lethargy. The people around me behaved as if they had suddenly discovered they had been happily dead for a long time already. That was when I started feeling the same fear and unease as I had during my first days in the Shironin reading room.
Nothing else—neither anger, nor fear, nor even despair—would have had such a depressing effect on me as the shroud of pale, bleak, monkish asceticism that was spread over the reading room. Faces became strange, like the photographs on tombstones. Calmly spoken words sounded like a requiem mass, everyone bared their teeth in beatific, martyred smiles that made me want to lash them across the face to rouse t
hem from their trance. They read the Book more frequently than ever, as if they wanted to blot out real life with the apocryphal bookish phantom as rapidly as possible.
Marat Andreyevich became severe and withdrawn. Lutsis and Kruchina were unrecognizable. Some unearthly fire had scorched them from within and now eternal icon lamps glittered in their dilated pupils. This otherworldly solemnity even distanced Tanya from me. Dead before her time, she already made love differently, from a distance, as if she had been sprinkled with earth.
In this ambulatory graveyard the only person to remain alive and emotionally responsive was the terminally ill Margarita Tikhonovna. I had been certain that she would be affected more than the others by this state of suicidally rhapsodic fatalism. On the contrary, she became gentler and more warm-hearted.
“Don’t avoid the others, Alexei,” Margarita Tikhonovna admonished me meekly. “Zombies indeed! What an idea!” she snorted. “What makes you think they’re preparing to die? Quite the contrary, they want to get in as much reading as possible for the future…” Margarita Tikhonovna sighed. “But is it really possible to store up looking and listening? The flesh of memories is ephemeral. They are weak creatures; in order to survive they need to attach themselves to a strong body. The Book of Memory is the best possible donor—a powerful, unfailing generator of a happy past, a paradise regained. Feeble human memory cannot possibly keep up with such a vast, complex mechanism. You realize that yourself!”
“Margarita Tikhonovna, I’m not disputing the merits of this phenomenon, but essentially it’s a mirage.”
“A fine mirage!” she laughed. “One that’s better than the original! How many times have you read the Book? Four? Well, then… But our boys and girls know it off by heart! You still have only your own natural past, but they have two pasts, and one of them is genuinely beautiful. That’s what they’re clinging to. Only there’s a catch: to prevent the past from fading, you have to nurture it constantly, that is, to read the Book. Losing it means losing for ever the ability to immerse yourself in the happiness of the past—not merely recalling it, but reliving it anew, without any loss of sensual immediacy. That is worth so much. The others are all going through a kind of psychological test: are they prepared to die for the Book?…”
I plucked up my courage.
“Margarita Tikhonovna, please don’t take this the wrong way. I’m going to be absolutely frank with you. Of course, the Book is very important, but I don’t feel that I’m ready to go all the way with it… I mean, it seems to me that if push comes to shove, I can get by without the Book. Very probably I am mistaken, in fact I am almost certainly mistaken, but I don’t have any time to come to terms with myself. And I’m tired of the responsibility. I want to be alone…”
Margarita Tikhonovna remained compassionately silent. I was glad that she wasn’t surprised or offended. The next morning I passed the Book on to Lutsis for safekeeping, saying that my place wasn’t safe. The Shironinites didn’t actually require any explanations; my requests were carried out unquestioningly. The entire membership of the reading room took the Book to Lutsis’s apartment. Proud of the trust that had been placed in him, he promised to guard it like the apple of his eye.
After a week of solitude I realized despairingly that I didn’t have the slightest desire to lead the brigade of condemned men that was called the Shironin reading room. But neither could I abandon these people to the whim of fate. Something had changed in me for ever, and treacherous thoughts of flight stumbled into the bear trap of scaling shame at the very first steps. I sat there, tormented by pity, duty and panic, sipping sour, bitter coffee from my cup and squashing cigarette ends in the ashtray one after another, while hour after hour a sluggish September fly butted stubbornly at the window pane.
On the seventh day the doorbell rang. I pressed my eye to the peephole. The round lens stretched a bulky, elderly woman out into an idiotic tadpole. Her gauzy headscarf had slipped to the back of her head, revealing a parting in her grey hair, and she had a plump bag hanging from her shoulder over an unbuttoned knitted cardigan. The woman was holding a small package in her hands. After waiting for a minute, she extracted another viscous, lingering trill from the bell.
Naturally I didn’t intend to open up. Who knew why this creature had come here and whether she had an invisible helper nestling down by the door with a nifty little knife?
The woman trilled on the bell again, swore in frustration and set about the neighbours. At the third attempt she was lucky. An old voice responded: “Who’s there?”
“Galina Ivanovna, it’s me—Valya!” the woman with the bag shouted. “There’s a parcel for your neighbour and he’s not in. Can I leave it with you?”
An old woman in a tattered dressing gown appeared.
“Oh, hello, Valechka, hello. And there I was thinking you’d already brought my pension or something… What kind of parcel is it?” she asked, reaching out curiously for the package.
“Will you take it then?” the postwoman asked. “Oh, thank you… I crawled all the way up here to you on the fifth floor; my legs have all swollen up and the black veins have come up.” She lifted up her long skirt and showed off her affliction. “I can hardly even walk…”
She took out the receipt while the old woman gasped in sympathy.
“Sign here… What’s the new neighbour like?”
“Young…” said the old woman, taking aim with the pencil. “Says he’s the nephew…” She nodded significantly. “He brings people round too…”
“They say as the old one was murdered,” the postwoman said indifferently.
“That’s right. His boozy friends knifed him,” said the old woman, scratching at the receipt. “Almost a year ago…”
It didn’t look like a trap. I grasped the razor in my left hand and opened the door slightly, without taking it off the chain. If anyone tried to squeeze though the gap, I would have slashed them across the eyes with the razor, and then kicked the body back out.
The women looked round.
“Oh, you’re awake!” the postwoman exclaimed, delighted for some reason. “Good morning!”
“Hello,” I said, yawning widely just to be on the safe side.
“There’s a little parcel for you. I was just asking Galina Ivanovna here…”—she pointed to the old woman—“…if she would give it to her neighbour.”
The postwoman looked at the package, then at me. “Alexei Vladimirovich Vyazintsev?”
“Yes. Shall I show you my passport?”
“Why would I need that now?” The postwoman handed me the package and the receipt.
In the kitchen I studied the light package carefully. The mysterious sender was called “V.G.” All that was left of the effaced surname was its impersonal, unisex ending “…nko”. I strained my memory to recall someone with the initials “V.G.” and a Ukrainian surname (some Sayenko or other), but I couldn’t. The address, written in ink on the pale-brown wrapping paper, had also been blurred by water. The purple streaks seemed to bear the marks of fingers, or perhaps large drops of rain.
With some trepidation I tore the wrapping open and saw a book. The author’s name and title were stamped into the faded sky-blue cover in a severe typeface: “D. Gromov” and below that: “A Meditation on Stalin Chinaware”.
A fake! Someone had planted a copy on me. Cold, sticky sweat trickled down my back—the council’s crack special troops were already creeping over the walls, their steel-tipped boots not even touching the steps. Another minute and the door would cave in. Rapid, silent men would tumble the traitor to the floor and secure his arms; stern sergeants would enter into their report the confiscation of an illegal forgery—they have unmasked a copyist! Now nothing can save the Shironin reading room and its ill-starred librarian…
I caught my breath and examined the book more closely: A Meditation on Stalin Chinaware, Radyansky Pismennik, 1956. The lemon-yellow pages covered with ginger freckles looked untouched. The print was strangely raised. The tip of my finge
r could feel every word set in the swollen lettering.
I studied the title page. Editor: V. Vilkova—Design Editor: V. Burgunker—Technical Editor: E. Makarova. The cloth spine had an aroma of decrepit paper and stale medicines—a cracked, desiccated bookshelf. The stifling dust numbed my nostrils slightly. An insert with a title in capitals had been pasted to the end sheet: “ERRATA: P. 96, line 9 up. Printed ‘away’. Should read ‘way’. P. 167, line 6 down. Printed ‘glories’. Should read ‘glorious’.”
The phantom clatter of the enforcers’ boots faded somewhat. This couldn’t be yet another attempted entrapment by the council, I realized with piercing clarity. The fever heat of conjecture squeezed my head in a tight band. A Meditation on Stalin Chinaware—I knew the titles of all the Books in the Gromov world, but not this one. What I was holding in my hands was not a fake at all, but the Gromov Book that everyone was searching for, the renowned Book of Meaning…
My first feverish impulse was to summon all the Shironinites immediately. This find held the promise of wondrous blessing. There was no doubt that the unique Book could be used to buy off the council once and for all and demand the restoration of our immunity in perpetuity!
Halfway to the phone, my rapturous impetus evaporated completely and I turned back into the room. I was trembling in nervous agitation. I was only three hours from the truth. The person who sent me the Book had already been the trailblazer. But who knew about him and what was his Meaning worth?
I was swept away by the presentiment of being chosen. It wasn’t clear how long the Book would remain in the Shironin reading room. I had to seize the moment. I didn’t think about whether the consequences of reading the Book alone might be disastrous. It took me a long time to still my visual tremors, and my eyes kept slipping off the line I was reading. I gulped down two glasses of cold water. Things went better with chilled innards.
The Librarian Page 25