He was summoned back to Moscow immediately. He hung out somewhere for a few days, then appeared at the institute. It was hard to tell whether he was the victor or the accused. They demanded a report, and he wrote a very reasonable one, in which he explained why he had requested the dating analysis: because among the bones he found close to my old dig, he’d discovered a human skull.
15. After That They Fired Him
He brought us the skull.
The skull was new and smooth. It wasn’t some kind of Pithecanthropus either; it was a contemporary skull, the same, for example, as mine, except even more contemporary, since this skull still had all its teeth, which is more than I can say for myself. The skull looked so new that we immediately ran an analysis to date it, in order to rule out the obvious possibility of a counterfeit or fraud. The analysis came back: five thousand years old. Well then!
This all looks good, does it not? No, it looks bad. At the end of his report he had written: “In addition to the bones of extinct animals there was found a sculpture of a woman of extraordinary beauty.”
“What woman?” We were stunned. “Where is she?”
“I took her home,” he said. “I’ll bring her tomorrow.”
“We’ll see you tomorrow, then,” said the director.
I did not intend to wait until tomorrow. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. What the hell kind of woman was this, for god’s sake! I was tied up on the phone all evening, trying to reach someone on the expedition. I finally got through in the middle of the night.
“Hey, it’s me.” I say. “Yes! Hello! How are things?”
The distant squeak of a girl’s voice: “Fine… Going well…”
Another voice cuts in: “Are you connected?”
“Yes, we’re connected.”
“Go ahead then, talk…” the voice says encouragingly.
“I am talking!” I yell.
“Did something happen?” asked someone at the other end. “How was the report?”
“The report was not bad,” I answer. “Tell me, what do you know about this woman? Where did he find her?”
“Oh, she’s a beauty!” they squeak. “Have you seen her? What do you think?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll see her tomorrow.”
“Are you still talking?” interrupts the voice.
“You’re the one who is talking! Let us talk!” I scream into the receiver.
“Your time is up,” says the voice.
“Hello! Hello!”
That was it.
The next day we gathered in my department. So many people showed up that we had to push all the tables to the walls and stack them on top of each other. Pasha Bidenko stretched out regally on top of the highest table, close to the ceiling, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t believe anything, and he looked down upon the proceedings both literally and figuratively. A chess table we had dragged in from the lounge stood in the middle of the room, hemmed in on all sides by senior scholars. The table supported a plywood shipping box. Cotton padding protruded from its half-open top. Silence reigned. The only sound was the unpleasant scrunch of nails being pulled out of wood with the pliers wielded by Soda-Sun.
He removed the top and plunged two hands into the dusty cotton.
“Hold onto the box,” he said.
Hands reached forward and grabbed the box.
He pulled out a dark pillar of padding and set it down on the instantly cleared table. The box was already floating over peoples’ heads and toward the door, through which it crashed to the floor in the empty hallway. Layer by layer, swaths of cotton dropped to the table, each layer lighter and whiter than the last, until it looked like a pile of sea foam. Everyone held their breath. If it weren’t for the buzzing in one’s own ears, it would have been possible to hear the steady beat of a single collective heart when all that remained was the last swath of cotton, finer than mist, just a shadow of fabric, through which the features of a beautiful face with half-closed eyes became visible.
All hearts stopped. Hands moved the last veil aside. A sharply defined upper lip. A thick, lush lower lip. The dusky golden color of old wood. The mouth was just barely smiling. She looked a little bit like Nefertiti, but in a different mode. More like Aelita, the Martian princess. She glanced out knowingly thorough lowered eyelids.
Something crashed. Everyone jolted, as if from an electric shock. It was nothing. Pasha Bidenko had tumbled down from the ceiling.
Everyone looked stunned. The director swallowed with difficulty. Something moved through the solid mass of people. It was Pasha Bidenko.
“… an analysis,” he wheezed. “I don’t believe...”
“I forbid it,” said the director and licked his dry lips.
“Why not?” said Soda-Sun.
He grabbed the pliers and quickly broke off a chip of wood near the base of that beautiful neck. He handed it to Bidenko.
“You are a barbarian, a vandal,” the director said to the poor clown. “Get out of here!”
“Thank you, everyone,” said Soda-Sun. “Honestly, thanks.”
He sighed deeply, smiled his smile, and began to squeeze his way toward the exit.
The director pushed everyone back from the table. With trembling hands he gathered up the cotton and began to re-wrap the beautiful face. He clucked something to himself and his elbows flailed out, so that he resembled a large hen. Everyone understood that this was his expression of winged exaltation. We had never seen our director like this before.
“Vladimir Andreyevich,” clucked the director. “Call security… get the key for the safe… we’ll lock the safe.”
If he could have, he would have called in the tanks. I hesitated. He looked at me with fury.
“You, too?” said the director. “Really, even you? Bidenko can be forgiven… although you don’t need to be a specialist to see what we have here.”
“True, you don’t need to be a specialist,” I said.
I left to carry out the director’s orders.
The next morning Bidenko confirmed, smiling guiltily: “Yeah… the same five thousand years.”
I called the clown.
“Why did you do that…” I asked wearily.
“I was joking,” he said.
“What are we going to tell the director?”
“The truth,” he said.
The truth was that I’d seen a photograph of this woman in his possession already back then, during the war.
What amazed me was how quickly the sculpture had been made. After all, the wood was real – ancient – which means he had found it in the excavations, which means the sculpture had been created within just those few brief days after he was summoned back, before he showed up at the institute. I knew his friend Kostya Yakushev was talented.
He pulled everyone’s leg, but most of all his own. It is one thing to laugh at people’s pride, but another thing to laugh at real feelings. You should have seen the director when I told him the whole story. He was silent while I talked, then he removed his pince-nez. His eyes were like a child’s.
After that, Soda-Sun was fired.
16. “Welcome, Junk Dealers!”
So in the end we set off on the expedition without him, spent the summer there, discovered much that was interesting, and quickly wrapped up the work. As it happened, I sent everyone back home, and only Pasha Bidenko and I remained at the base camp in the desert.
After we had finished our work and the expedition had departed in a despondent rush, I was faced with one persistent question: why had I stayed?
Everything emptied out. There was nothing left but indentations where the tent poles had been, along with cold stars and an even colder wind that pierced through your soul. That, and the solitary figure of Pasha Bidenko, who was fussing around our beat-up all-terrain vehicle, and also the thin notes coming from a radio – a piece of jazz music that sounded ludicrous over this cemetery of dinosaurs.
It made me think: only a very fine membrane divides our world f
rom the world of monsters.
The batteries died, the radio went mute, and once again, nothing but desert and swirling dust. This is the place where we’re digging our own grave as well. We busy ourselves trying to understand humanity, and then these same humans invent a nuclear bomb, which can no longer be wished away.10 If humanity doesn’t succeed in understanding itself, it will end up in only one place – with the fossils. A thousand years from now, a new race will arrive, and they will uncover deposits of bones, and from the looks of our darkened skeletons they will know why these creatures, so unlike dinosaurs, disappeared from the face of the earth.
Well, if the purpose of archeology is to help humanity understand itself, then at least it’s worked for one person. Actually, for two: Bidenko and myself. In fact, it’s fair to say that not a single one of us remained the same as the person we were before that expedition. I know there were many reasons I began to change my views, and therefore it is hard to identify any one factor that brought about the changes in every participant of that absurdly truthful, and therefore fantastical expedition. What is the fantastic, if not the truth carried to the point of absurdity?11
The expedition was deemed a success. We found a lot, and what we found was worthwhile. There is no way one could characterize this expedition as unsuccessful. Why, then, the withering disappointment felt by every single participant, from the auxiliary workers, who had never seen monster bones before, to the most qualified researchers, whose absolute disdain for all counterfeits and frauds was a fundamental principle? Maybe it was because the expedition had gathered the most talented people, and in science, talent and fervor are almost inseparable. Or maybe it was just the wind.
The wind was debilitating. The sandstorms began almost as soon as we arrived. By following the lead of the previous research group, we discovered new deposits of bones, as well as three “shelves” of dinosaur bones that were well preserved, though rusty from the iron oxide that had seeped into them. It was a rich haul, although not exactly what every participant secretly wished to find. Yet even so, I seriously considered calling it off because of the wind. Then we came upon an ancient abandoned ore mine and the entire expedition basically moved underground. At night, it was rough outside. The cold blew through our tents. The drive to the nearest water source was long and exhausting. The thick reddish-brown dust penetrated every pore, went up your nose, dried out your throat. The constant winds blew so hard that they lifted not only sand, but even small rocks, which could break the glass of our protective goggles. The wind never ceased, day or night. Our clothes, our beds, and our provisions were full of thick sand. If it weren’t for our quiet underground haven, it would have been impossible to work at all. But the point is not to describe how this expedition resembled other ones in the usual hardships, but to describe how it did not resemble any other. It was different because of a kind of indefinable despondency and the spirit of the clown that seemed to hang over the entire enterprise.
Like it or not, the sad silence and darkness that reigned in those old mines created an atmosphere of stern concentration. It affected everyone, old and young. Bidenko’s journal contains the following lines:
“It no longer matters if it is day or night on the surface. Sometimes you pass along sheer, high faces, and your own steps echo and the beam of your headlights is lost; sometimes you can barely squeeze through the narrow passageways; other times you scramble along well shafts that rise up to a different horizon. Here you start to measure time differently, because some of these ore mines go back to prehistoric times. They run along bands of Permian sedimentation partly mineralized with copper, forming so-called copper sandstone and shale. I slipped and fell down one of the miner’s drifts, sliding downwards at an angle of about 40 degrees, and landed in a steep well that disappeared deep into the bottomless darkness. Fortunately the well shaft was so narrow that my shoulders jammed against the walls and I was stuck like a cork in a bottle. It took me a while to get out. When I did, the first thing I saw as I climbed back over the edge of the well and turned on my lamp was a notice scrawled in bloody letters on the wall: “WELCOME, JUNK DEALERS!”
17. Why Did I Stay?
That was how our dear friend left us his first message.
By the way, about Valya Medvedeva. Things with her were always complicated. After the incident with the “creativity pills,” we dispatched him on the expedition, and she went also. At first I didn’t even recognize her when she dropped by my place, because I had never seen her fashionably made-up.
“Vladimir Andreyevich,” she threatened in her best Commissar’s voice, “You either send me on this expedition, or… or…”
“Or one of us dies,” I said, maintaining the gangster tone. “Valya, your lipstick – where did all of this come from?”
“From the Wanda.”12 Vladimir Andreyevich, you must understand me,” she said in the dramatic voice of an Italian actress, sinking into the armchair.
“Valyusha,” I said, “you’re a down-to-earth girl. Why the theatrical pathos?”
“I’m not myself anymore.” This time it came out in the voice of Sarah Bernhardt.13
It was hopeless. I decided to let her go on the expedition.
Only now, when Bidenko found that bloody note, did Valya understand where her precious Polish lipstick had gone.
Everything about that ill-fated expedition was off kilter. Like brown dust, rumors swirled around our expedition, which should have returned to Moscow a long time ago but instead continued to search for who-knows-what with absurd persistence. We never wrote a single report about the latter part of our extended expedition, and our expenditures were written off as part of a cultural program of some sort. The worst that happened is that something managed to seep out into print. Some journalist wrote a column in the “Did You Know?” section of a popular science magazine, in which the sculpture, the skull, and the question of what had served as the prototype of the devil were all discussed. The word “devil” did not escape notice, and another article popped up, playing with the expression “what the devil…?” to make fun of our expedition – and, along the way, to discredit all of archeology. In the end, this commentator posed the question: “Isn’t it time for our ministers of finance to take a closer look at how our national funds are being spent?”
One could have answered the commentator quite simply: funding science funds the search for truth. But he probably wouldn’t have understood.
The unseemly press coverage finally forced our return to Moscow. On top of it all, there was the matter of the letter…
When the clown and I had last parted, he gave me a sealed package and made me promise to open it when we found the notorious devil. He was sure we would find it, and not only that, he acted as if he already knew what we would find. Everyone on the expedition knew about the letter, and naturally we were not searching for any devil, we were searching for a way to disprove the whole notion that he could know about the unknown in advance. We all remembered the insulting “creativity pills” hoax, so at this point we were maniacally determined to prove him wrong: there was no such thing as a special way of thinking, and it was not possible for him to guess what exactly we might find in the depths of the earth. We wanted to vindicate ourselves.
Somebody went ahead and opened the letter, thereby violating the rules of the game. It gave him yet another chance to laugh at us. It felt like a slap across the cheek. We received a second slap when we read what was written.
“I will go ahead and assume that this letter will be opened before you find what you are supposed to find,” he wrote. “I will assume that one of my female friends will be the one who opens it. Don’t blame her – sometimes it is impossible to resist, especially when you are young. They say the same thing happened to Eve. Inside this package is a second one – with the answer.”
Indeed, there was a second packet inside. Valya Medvedeva left that very evening. The same evening, I arranged to wrap up our expedition.
He could read people well;
more to the point, he understood their weaknesses. But that does not add up to a special way of thinking…
We loaded up quickly and glumly. The campsite emptied out. Only Bidenko and I stayed, along with the all-terrain vehicle, the radio, and the nocturnal emptiness punctuated by prickly stars, which watched over the dinosaur cemeteries without blinking. It was then that I asked myself: why did I stay?
18. With Whom Was He Talking?
I feel as though I was contracted to write this story and got quite carried away with it, until suddenly I lost interest and ran out of steam. I need to finish, but I don’t feel like it. It is spring again, and spring is when one feels like avoiding one’s duties. Spring is when our desires seem to bifurcate in two directions. We want to think about the future, but we look over our shoulders into the past. We always transfer our unfulfilled desires to a place where we are not. That is why the past seems better than the present, and the future seems more desirable. We either run forward or scramble backwards in our effort to glimpse the merry face of happiness. Reminiscence is a wrenchingly bitter sweetness.
I remember everything. I remember my last conversation with Soda-Sun, and I remember the real reason for why he was fired. The real reason is quite simple. I betrayed him. Nobody knows about it, not even him. I am the only one who knows. I was the only one who could have defended him at the moment that was most crucial, and I did not do so. Nobody can accuse me of having done anything wrong – from any point of view, it seems that I acted correctly. That is, from any point of view other than my own. He taught us a good lesson, that clown, who was interested in science least of all. In fact, he was not interested in any enterprise that could not give an answer to the question: “what does this do for humanity?” In our final conversation, when it became evident that our paths were parting forever, I could have fixed things, if I had not clung to my pathetic need to salvage my dignity, as if dignity in a scientist is not defined precisely as the willingness to examine a new idea, even if it overturns your own.
Red Star Tales Page 31