The Librarian (32 page)

I
HAVE MORE
than enough dramatic talent and artistic restraint to keep an ending secret, even when I know very definitely what it is. All that I have at the present moment is the closed space around me—a room eight paces long and the same across. A ceiling three metres high with a quietly purring, milky neon lamp on it. The sun’s light doesn’t penetrate in here. On two walls side by side there are dummy window frames, stage decorations flanked by heavy blue curtains. Landscape photo wallpaper has been stuck in the window spaces, representing the false views from the insultingly fake windows: one of Red Square in the morning, the other a view of a large city at night, with the tracer-bullet lines of car lights. And hanging on the wall like a small pictorial window is a reproduction of the painting
The Ice Has Gone
: a chilly bend in a little grey river, a sky the colour of frozen lead, an earthy bank, the ochre of thawed patches, snow, birch trees, a meadow on the far side of the river as red as a cow’s hide, and a distant fringe of forest.

The door in the room is real, made of riveted gunmetal, with a round peephole and two strong bolts—perhaps that’s why the room reminds me of a war bunker. The bolts aren’t shut, but the door doesn’t open anyway. The mica peephole is always black, its lens covered on the other side by a little curtain inaccessible to me—the peephole was designed for the convenience of those who are on the outside. Earlier I used to sit at the door, waiting for light to quiver in those black optical depths and indicate that, although locked in, I was still under observation. But alas, nothing
ever trembled in that bottomless, spellbinding blur. I’m afraid it is simply not permitted to observe me. After all, I am a sacred figure.

One of the walls contains the shaft of a dumb waiter. The only part showing on the outside is the cover, which looks like the damper of a stove. The dumb waiter comes to life four times a day. I say “a day”, but that’s an arbitrary definition. I don’t have a clock or a watch to tell the time by. If the dumb waiter contains a plate of soup as well as other food, I assume that lunchtime has arrived, and that outside the bunker it is day, and I put a tick in an exercise book. There are a hundred and sixty nine of them and I presume that a few days might have been missed—I didn’t start keeping a calendar of my incarceration immediately. I have been under lock and key for more than five months, and outside it is March or April 2001.

I can’t complain about the quality of the food—it’s regular canteen fare. The standard breakfast is vermicelli with a meat patty, salad and tea. Lunch is pearl barley (or pea, or rice) soup, mashed potatoes with a large frankfurter, bread and stewed-fruit water. The afternoon snack is cocoa and a curd-cheese pastry. Supper is a potato cake with sour cream or perhaps, for a change, flapjacks with jam and tea. The side vegetable sometimes changes: instead of mashed potatoes there might be boiled buckwheat or millet; instead of soup there might be clear broth or thick cabbage soup. On my nominal Thursday the frankfurter is replaced by fried hake. I have plenty of food.

I used to send regular notes in the dumb waiter with requests to increase the standard ration, but nobody responded to my requests. There’s a radiator in the bunker. The rusty pipe oozes hot water, which doesn’t affect its heating function at all. I have appropriated a glass and now I put it under the sparse rusty drops. In about one “day” it fills up to the top.

About two months ago I started laying in reserves. Of course, I can’t keep meat products—they go off. The only thing I set aside is bread, and I have almost a kilogram of rusks…

It is not possible to get washed in the bunker. The problem of personal hygiene is solved by a large packet of cotton wool and a five-litre canister of medical spirit. Every three “days” I moisten some cotton wool and wipe down my body. Sometimes I pour some spirit into the compote and treat myself to a cocktail. In the morning and the evening, in addition to everything else, the tray bears a fragrant strip of chewing gum—a substitute for a toothbrush.

For answering the greater and lesser calls of nature, I have a porcelain bedpan. Our dumb waiter is divided into two parts. In the top is the tray with the plates and glass, and in the bottom is the bedpan. I felt ashamed the first time sudden acute anxiety instantly affected my intestinal tract. But all the awkwardness is far behind me now.

There is an excellent writing desk in the bunker—natural oak, a time-honoured office design, with a fabric-upholstered top. One of its corners is broken and crushed—I tried to use the desk as a battering ram and hammered on the door with it. There is a table lamp with a green shade. There are Books laid out on the fabric desktop. So far there are six of them.

After about two months they sent down a Book of Strength that roused wild hopes in me—they couldn’t simply “bury” such a valuable rarity of the Gromov world. I even ventured an attempt to blackmail my jailers, writing notes saying that I would destroy this extremely rare, and quite possibly unique, copy.

The Books of Power, Meaning and Joy arrived, and I shuddered. The neon light went out and the air in the bunker immediately condensed into a prickly fish’s backbone in my throat—I realized why the librarian Alexei Vyazintsev had been locked up. After short intervals I received the Books of Fury and Endurance…

Every time I raise the cover of the dumb waiter, I pray that the Book of Memory will not be there, although I know that one day it will happen. Such is the will of Polina Vasilyevna Gorn.

In a drawer of the desk there were about ten ballpoint pens, three simple pencils and a pencil sharpener. In addition, I have
six general school exercise books—four with squared pages and two with lined pages. I wiped my behind the very first time with squared pages, and then my jailers took pity on me and sent down toilet paper.

In the first week they sent down the cotton wool and medical spirit, a comb and a Kharkov electric shaver, with signs of having been used; below the blades there was a lot of coarse, grey stubble that looked like a boar’s bristles—probably the old women used it to shave their hormonal moustaches. I kept my clothes on for a long time, but by the end of a month they were impregnated with the smell of sweat. I gave in and put them in the dumb waiter. In return they sent me hospital pyjamas, a dressing gown and stretched woolly socks.

For sleeping I have a couch—a sturdy, pre-war model. Instead of a pillow I have a cloth bolster under my head. There’s no sheet, but I do have a grey hospital blanket. In addition to the desk and the couch, there is a chair in the bunker. A fine chair with a soft back. True, it is a bit rickety, but that’s my fault. I smashed it against the door and then put it back together again.

The way the dumb waiter is built makes it impossible to climb into the shaft. And squeezing into the actual niche of the lift is quite out of the question. No matter how tightly I might curl myself up, there’s no way a man 190 centimetres tall can fit into a box the size of an oven.

I have studied the walls of the niche carefully. It is set in a solid metal beam that moves up and down the shaft in the manner of a lift. When the niche is in line with the cover, the cover opens and I can take out my food. For the rest of the time the cover is cunningly pressed closed by the edges of the beam. Using the Book of Strength, I have bent the cover slightly and seen the blank metal behind it.

I have tried to break through the wall several times. Behind the bricks there was concrete, and I abandoned any attempts to scrape through it with a splinter of wood. Soon I came into possession of a pair of nail scissors, but I felt reluctant to blunt them. Now I formally perform the ritual of “digging-out” with a disposable plastic spoon, which is already half used up.

My schedule is simple. I write or I read a Book—Endurance or Joy, depending on my mood. Twice a day I perform the ritual of “digging-out” by scraping diligently at the wall with the spoon. After supper I arrange myself on the couch and sleep until the dumb waiter creaks again.

I have got used to the views from the “windows”. I usually read by the “Avenue at Night”. But the writing goes better beside “The Kremlin in the Morning”—that’s where the desk is. In essence, nothing has changed since Polina Vasilyevna Gorn first brought me to the bunker—a former book repository. At that time I could still walk out of here…

I look at the dreary landscape in the wooden frame, and in my mind’s eye I see a different murky river with slippery banks. If you turn your back to the water and walk through the channel of a ravine for about ten minutes, you can climb up to a charred stockade. There is nothing there to remind you of the people who recently moved in here, the heroic defence of the village soviet, the blood and the death, but the deep ravine is a common grave, concealing for ever the bodies of thirteen Shironinites and about seventy of the deprived readers who attacked us.

Leaning my hands against the low window sill, I glowered as I watched the victors, supervised by morose female workers, carrying the bodies out of the yard. By evening all the seriously wounded had died—during the day they groaned, asked for water, tossed about, but at sunset they calmed down and went quiet. Then they were also carried into the ravine.

After dismissing her orderly, Gorn went through the bags in person. In one she discovered a portrait. Gorn broke it with a crunch, impatiently smashing the glass under her heel. She beat out the shards of glass by hammering the frame against the table. The photograph fell out and a small piece of paper with the title “ERRATA” swirled through the air to the ground…

T
HE NEXT EVENING
a UAZ van with a red cross on its side rushed us to the Old Folk's Home. I don't remember the roads we followed. I slept all night and half a day. The plain-looking exterior of the van concealed a perfectly comfortable interior, fitted with a couch, a chair and a fold-down stool. Gorn magnanimously let me have the couch; she took the chair and Masha, the orderly, installed herself on the stool. Gorn immediately started reading the Book of Strength. The vigilant Masha carried on guarding me. I stopped fighting my exhaustion and passed out.

I awoke in the afternoon. Gorn was reading again. I surreptitiously observed her, then dozed off again, until I was woken by lively chattering—it was Gorn talking to a sleepy Masha. After the Book, Polina Vasilyevna was clearly feeling an exceptional access of strength. The old woman amused herself for a while with little round pieces of foil that she folded in two or in four, depending on their size, and then set them out in a line on the broad armrest of the chair. Then she twirled around in her fingers a little rod that looked like a large nail, but was soft, as if it was made out of plasticine, and easily preserved the impression of every squeeze of her gnarled fingers. A silly kind of march started playing in her handbag and she announced triumphantly:

“I'm bringing something!… It's a surprise!… No, not that!… A grandson!…”

The old woman moved back the curtain and gazed out into the night for a long time. Out of the corner of my eye I saw smooth whiteness flying by, reminding me of flying above the clouds.

“It piled up overnight…” Gorn commented. “Winter…”

“He's awake,” Masha suddenly said in a hoarse voice.

Gorn immediately swung round. Her face lit up in a smile.

“Alyoshka! You do like your sleep!”

She leaned down to the armrest, took aim and flicked her nail, as if she were playing at Chapayev. A piece of foil was sent flying and struck me a palpable blow on the cheek; it turned out to be a bent coin.

“Arise, arise, you working folk,” the mischievous old woman said as she bombarded me. “Battery, take aim! Fire!”

“Stop it, Polina Vasilyevna,” I said angrily. “That hurts.”

Gorn burst into joyful laughter.

“Want a bite to eat? Mashka, give him some! Don't be greedy! He's a great boy! Our treasure! Our own flesh and blood.”

The orderly handed me a sandwich in a greasy paper bag and poured me a glass of tea from a thermos flask. I wasn't feeling hungry, but I obediently chewed the sour bread and stringy smoked sausage.

“Need to go to the toilet?” Gorn asked solicitously.

I thought and nodded.

“Number two, number one?” she asked, with a wink at her orderly, who knocked with her fist on the partition dividing us from the driver's compartment and called: “Lusya, stop!”

The UAZ swerved to the shoulder of the road and stopped.

“Only don't run off,” Gorn told me. “We'll catch up with you anyway… And put something on… It's turned cold… You didn't answer me… Shall I give you some paper?”

“There's no need…” I hissed through my teeth.

“Whatever you say… Masha, escort him…”

The snowy steppe washed over me in a chilly wave. Masha let me go ahead and climbed out after me. Swaying slightly on legs
that were still unsteady after sleep, I stopped beside some frost-covered clumps of burdock.

Without taking her stony guard's eyes off me, Masha used one hand to hold up the edge of her padded jacket and the other to pull down her trousers. She squatted down not far away. The yellow fluid gurgled as it ran between the coarse soles of her boots. Masha suddenly asked.

“And are you really Mokhov, then?”

“Yes,” I said without blinking an eye. “Alexei Mokhov.”

“You look like Yelizaveta Makarovna.” The orderly's voice sounded kinder somehow, and it had lost its spiteful hoarseness. She pulled up her trousers and adjusted her padded jacket. “Let's go then, love… Or else, God forbid, you might catch cold.”

I was looking forward with awe to seeing a bustling Babylon, an indomitable fortress of aged Amazons, but what I was presented with was a neglected soviet building—a long, three-storey, red-brick barracks-style structure surrounded by a wall made of concrete slabs and prison-style gates with peeling paint.

The door of the UAZ was swung open by a fat woman with a sheepskin jacket thrown across her shoulders like a Caucasian felt cloak on top of a white coat. The fat woman's face was rather beautiful, but it was disproportionately small, like an elegant carnival mask set on a pig's face with numerous chins and a bloated neck.

“Good afternoon, Polina Vasilyevna!” she gasped out joyfully. I was accorded a cautious bow. “How was the journey, Polina Vasilyevna?”

“Fine, Klava, fine…” Gorn supported herself on the hand held out to her and climbed out of the vehicle. “Report on how all of you here… have been getting on.”

I rejoiced in my heart that our arrival had not caused any serious commotion. The very last thing I wanted was to find myself in the centre of a jubilant or, on the contrary, morose, glowering crowd of decrepit female fanatics whose cruelty was legendary…

But there wasn't any crowd as such. About a dozen old women wearing astrakhan coats with the same old-fashioned cut were staggering along the paths of a small park between flower beds with a light covering of snow. Nurse-overseers were keeping an eye on them. All in all I counted about twenty fighting-fit inhabitants, including the welcoming escort of eight taciturn female bodyguards. The garrison was small even by the standards of the most average reading room.

We went straight towards the building, with Gorn and the wheezing Klava leading the way. Masha and I walked behind them. Klava recounted the news.

“We've received the annual reports from Novosibirsk, Chita, Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk. There's sad news from the Khabarovsk region—the regional prefect Shipova passed away at the age of seventy-nine. We've had correspondence from Tver, Vladimir, Lipetsk and Ryazan. And the most important thing. There…”—Klava handed Gorn an impressive stack of paper—“Stenographic reports and summaries. We recorded Piskunova, Belaya, Shvedova…”

“Not now,” Gorn said impatiently. “I'll look at them later… No, all right… Let me have them…”

The escort drew level with the herd of astrakhan coats. One old woman left the others and hobbled towards us, pushing her way through the bodyguards.

“Polya, Polya,” she squealed pitifully. “Where have you been?”

“Reznikova! My beauty!” said Gorn, stopping and tenderly putting her arm round the old woman's shoulders. “Are you married?”

“Polya… Polya…” The old woman caught hold of Gorn's hand and pressed the palm against her own cheek. “So long? Where were you?” Reznikova's seeing eye watered and glowed with the joy of recognition, while the other, with the dense, milky cataract, shimmered with insanity. “Polya… Where were you?” she repeated tearfully.

“I'll tell you later.”

Something inside the old woman made a liquid intestinal sound.

“Reznikova… My sunshine…” Gorn said tenderly. “Nadya-Valya-Galya-Tonya!” she shouted to the nurses. “Get everyone back to the wards! Wash them, dress them, feed them… And prepare them for a reading. Beginning at fifteen hundred hours…”

Reznikova was led away. She resisted desperately and howled something incoherent. The other old women also became agitated. One tried to take her clothes off, another seized her chance to grab something that was lying on the ground and stuff it in her mouth, trilling sickeningly, like a cockerel, when the nurse tried to extract the filthy thing from her ward's mouth. Startled by her cries, the old women scattered in all directions.

“Girls!” Gorn exclaimed irritably to her escort. “Don't just watch! Catch them! Masha! Do you need a special invitation?”

The bodyguards and the orderly ran to help the nurses. The old women who had relapsed into dotage were not particularly agile. They were quickly herded together into a knot and led towards the entrance in the left wing of the building.

“Listen, Klava,” Gorn suddenly asked. “How's Rudenko?”

“Fine,” the fat woman replied. “What's going to happen to her? She smeared the walls with shit again…”—she laughed—“If only that energy could be used for peaceful purposes!”

“She's a good housekeeper!” Gorn said admiringly. “And tough. It even makes me feel envious. Have they tidied up the wards?”

“Yes, Polina Vasilyevna. Komarskaya and Pogozhina were on duty. They whitewashed the walls too, though they swore themselves blue in the face…”

“Hey, you!” Gorn suddenly shouted to the bodyguards who were holding the aged fugitives by their astrakhan collars. “A bit more politeness there! They're really getting out of hand, the riff-raff!” Gorn watched the old women leave with a morose air and sighed: “There, Alyoshka… Take note… If you've got money, it's ‘yes sir, no sir'… If you don't have money, it's ‘bugger you'… That's the
gloria mundi
for you… They only needed to get weak… And there's no more respect… Not for age, not for title… It's just that they've
been without the Book of Strength… For more than two weeks… So their brains have given up…”

Klava moved ahead of us, ran up the steps of the porch and pulled open the glass door.

“Please, come in…”

We walked through a hall that was like an aquarium and into a corridor that ran off to the left and the right. Facing us at the centre was a broad stairway of speckled stone with plaster banisters. The landing between floors was decorated with a semicircular stained-glass window with a sky of heavenly blue, two drooping ears of wheat and a crimson star. Filtered through the different-coloured glass, the sunlight spread itself on the floor in a hazy petrol rainbow.

To the right of the stairway, a woman in a white coat was sitting behind a perspex window with the word “Administration” on it. She was holding a telephone receiver to her ear, evidently informing the upper storeys that the boss had arrived.

“Klava,” said Gorn. “Go on… Get the equipment ready.”

“Yes, Polina Vasilyevna,” the fat woman said with a nod and darted up the stairs. I was left alone with Gorn.

The corridor was genuinely gloomy—poorly lit and as long as a Metro tunnel, and in both directions it ended in twilight and shadows.

A line of matt spheres glowed on the ceiling, like an unknown planetary system of dull, identical moons, but they only lit up themselves, not the twilit expanse of the endless corridor.

“Let's go,” said Gorn, and led me along the corridor. The scuffed blue linoleum squeaked repulsively as if I weren't walking, but being pushed on a hospital bed. I heard the voices of nurses and the sandpaper shuffling of numerous slow soles from a distant stairway.

“Well, Alyoshka, are you disappointed?” Gorn suddenly asked. “Were you expecting more?”

“It's strange that there are so few people…”

“In recent times… many things have changed. Out of the old guard… only fifteen are still alive… You saw them… The ones who were walking in the yard… Former generals, regional prefects, centurion-mums. Before, each one of them had… three or four hundred people… under their command… So much for your Lagudov!…” Gorn lowered her voice to a half whisper. “I've been trying for more than a year to persuade them to take well-deserved retirement… But I can't do it… Be extremely cautious… They're only dead wood for now… After the Book of Strength they'll be themselves again. These ladies are very dangerous… and still influential… I'm afraid they won't go for the hogwash about… a newly discovered grandson… The younger ones will believe it… But you can't fool the old ones… God only knows what ideas they might get into their heads… Don't go wandering round the Home… Just to be sure… I'll give you Masha… Don't take a step without her… She may be stupid… But she's as strong as they come… Yes… And don't even think about mentioning the Book of Meaning to anyone… And in general… until the initiation, try… not to let anyone see you…”

“What initiation?”

“You have to be… consecrated as the grandson… Urgently… Without any precise status… you're an empty space… No one will stand up for you… And the elders… will be against any ‘grandsons' in any case…”

“Perhaps you shouldn't read them the Book of Power yet?”

Gorn frowned jokingly.

“Are you suggesting I should kill them? With Alzheimer's and Pick's? My battle comrades?”

“You misunderstand me, Polina Vasilyevna,” I said hastily.

“Don't make excuses… I understood perfectly well… We're here.” Gorn stopped in front of a door with a plaque that said “Director” on it and fiddled with her keys. “Basically, you're thinking… along the right lines. In my time… I suggested an idea to Liza… I had serious doubts… that one of the elders… as my Masha
would put it… was playing the rat… That is… hiding Books that had been found. Each of them effectively had… her own network of agents, with spies and scouts… fighters, theoreticians, couriers, suicide operatives… How could we find out? You can't climb inside someone else's head… And, after all, they're experienced and cunning… There's no way to get them to talk openly…”

The ponderous luxury of Gorn's office was impressive. The walls were faced with a honey-coloured, semitransparent material that resembled amber. The gleaming parquet floor was decorated with patterned inserts. Most of the furniture matched the ornate decor. An old writing desk crowned with a slab of marble, an armchair as sumptuous as a throne, a carved baroque secretaire, a grandfather clock that looked like an expensive coffin, a branching chandelier with garlands of crystal, velvet curtains, a palm in a tub. Discordant notes among all this lordly magnificence were struck by the office cupboards crammed from top to bottom with papers, the black leather sofa, the glass coffee table, the television, the two-chamber safe, the typewriter and the telephone.