The Blizzard (20 page)
Authors: Vladimir Sorokin
“
Wo yisheng, wo shi yisheng
…,” Platon Ilich rasped, his hand with the pince-nez trembling.
The older Chinese began speaking Mandarin on his cell phone:
“Shen, get a bag of some kind over here, there’s a bunch of little horses, and bring Ma, one of them’s alive, but he’s heavy.”
“Where were you coming from?” he asked the doctor in Russian.
“
Wo shi yisheng … wo shi yisheng
…,” the doctor repeated.
“He’s totally out of it,” said the other Chinese man. “Looks like his brains got frostbit.”
Two more Chinese soon appeared. One of them held a sack of zoogenous canvas. He began to grab the nervous, neighing horses and put them in the bag.
“No mare?” asked the older man.
“No,” the other answered him, and grinned as he pointed at the roan’s croup sticking out of Crouper’s coatsleeve. “Look where he crawled up!”
He grabbed the roan by his back legs and pulled him out of the sleeve. The roan neighed frantically.
“Talkative!” laughed the older man.
When all the horses were in the sack, the older Chinese nodded at the doctor:
“Pull him out.”
Two of the others began to pull the doctor out of the hood. It wasn’t easy: Platon Ilich’s legs were wound around the corpse’s legs, and his fur coat had frozen to the planks in the corner. The doctor realized that he was being saved.
“
Xie xie ni, xie xie ni
,” he thanked the men in a hoarse croak, trying to help them with awkward movements.
It took the four of them to pull the doctor out of the sled. They set him down in the snow. The doctor tried to stand, leaning on the Chinese. But he immediately crumpled in the snow: his legs wouldn’t obey. He couldn’t feel them at all.
“
Xie xie ni, xie xie ni
…,” he kept on thanking them in a rasp as he wriggled in the deep snow.
The older Chinese man scratched his nose:
“Carry him to the train.”
“Are we taking this one?” the young man asked, with a nod at Crouper.
“Xun, you know my stallion doesn’t like dead people.” The older one grinned, turning to look back with a half smile.
The man automatically looked in the direction the older man had indicated. There, about a hundred meters from the sled, stood a huge stallion, the height of a three-story building. A dappled gray, he was hitched up to a sleigh train carrying four wide cars: one green passenger car and three blue freight cars. The stallion was covered with a red blanket and stood with vapor snorting noisily from his incredibly wide nostrils. Crows circled above him and sat on his red back. The stallion’s white mane was beautifully braided, and the steel rings on his harness sparkled in the sun.
Two more Chinese, wearing green uniforms, walked over from the train. Together, the four of them picked the doctor up and carried him.
“
Xie xie ni, xie xie ni
…,” the doctor rasped. He hadn’t once moved his legs, which were numb and seemed utterly alien and useless.
He suddenly began to sob, realizing that Crouper had abandoned him forever, that he hadn’t made it to Dolgoye, that he hadn’t brought vaccine-2, and that in his life, the life of Platon Ilich Garin, it now appeared that a new phase was beginning, one that wouldn’t be easy, would most likely be extremely difficult and grim, something he could never have imagined before.
“
Xie xie ni, xie xie n-n-ni
…,” the doctor cried, shaking his head, as though categorically disagreeing with everything that had happened and that was now taking place.
Tears streamed down his cheeks, grown thin and covered with stubble over the last few days. He clutched his pince-nez and kept shaking it, shaking and shaking, as though conducting some unseen orchestra of grief, crying and swaying in strong Chinese arms.
The older Chinese looked at Crouper. He lay alone in the emptied hood, looking as though he’d been placed in a grave that was too large for him. His gloved hands clutched his chest, as though holding and protecting his horses; one leg was tucked under, the other was turned out, frozen in an awkward position.
“Search him,” the older Chinese commanded the younger.
The younger man reluctantly followed orders. A silver ruble, forty kopecks in copper, a lighter, and two crusts of bread were found in Crouper’s coat pocket. He had no documents with him. The Chinese began to search under his cold clothes, and discovered two strings around his neck: one with a Russian Orthodox cross, the other, a key. It was the key to the stable. The Chinese tore off the key and handed it to his superior. The man turned the key around in his hand and tossed it in the snow.
“Cover him,” the older man nodded.
The young man took the frost-stiffened matting, now hard as plywood, and covered the hood. The older man pointed at the sack with the horses and headed toward the train. The young Chinese picked up the sack, slung it over his back, and followed. The horses, already tossed about in the dark of the sack, had urinated on themselves and finally managed to calm down; now they just grunted and snorted. Only the restless roan gave a piercing neigh, bidding farewell to his master forever.
Vladimir Sorokin
is the author of eleven novels, including
Day of the Oprichnik
(FSG, 2011),
Ice Trilogy
, and
The Queue
; thirteen plays; and numerous short stories and screenplays. He wrote the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov’s
The Children of Rosenthal
, the first opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater in a quarter century. His books have been translated into thirty languages. He has won the Andrei Bely and the Maxim Gorky prizes, and
The Blizzard
was the recipient of both the NOS Literature Prize and the Bolshaya Kniga prize. In 2013, Sorokin was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. He lives in Moscow. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Jamey Gambrell
is a writer on Russian art and culture, and the translator of
Vladimir Sorokin
’s
Day of the Oprichnik
and
Ice Trilogy
. She has also translated works of prose and poetry by Joseph Brodsky, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Marina Tsvetaeva, among others. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
ALSO BY
VLADIMIR SOROKIN
Ice Trilogy:
Bro
Ice
23,000
The Queue
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Contents
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2010 by Vladimir Sorokin
Translation copyright © 2015 by Jamey Gambrell
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2010 by Astrel, Russia, as
Метель
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2015
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[Metel
′
. English]
The blizzard: a novel / Vladimir Sorokin; translated by Jamey Gambrell. — First American edition.
pages cm
Published in Russian under the title
Метель
.
ISBN 978-0-374-11437-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-70939-6 (e-book)
1. Dystopias—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Gambrell, Jamey, translator. II. Title.
PG3488 . O66 M4813 2015
891.73'5—dc23
2015010964
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Published with the support of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature