Authors: Mikhail Elizarov
“Denis,” I whispered to Lutsis, “tell Margarita Tikhonovna that I agree.”
“Alexei?” he said, looking at me in amazement. “What are you talking about?”
“We don’t want money!” Marchenko exclaimed with dignity. “The only thing that will satisfy us is the dissolution of the Shironin reading room. And in compensation for the death of our readers we demand the Book of Memory.”
“You can have this, scumbag!” said Timofei Stepanovich, weaving his fingers into an obscene sign and symbolically spitting on it for good measure. “Up yours.”
“I couldn’t put it better,” Margarita Tikhonovna said with a satisfied nod. “Up yours, Comrade Marchenko!”
“Did you hear that?” Marchenko asked furiously. “You won’t get away with that! Comrade Tereshnikov! Our reading room demands satisfaction!”
“And you’ll get it, have no doubt about that!” Margarita Tikhonovna replied.
Lagudov’s invited observers all got up at the same time and moved towards the exit.
Tereshnikov cleared his throat.
“I am no lover of violent solutions, but if there is no other option… Ultimately it’s not up to me… Thank you for your
attention and participation. The meeting is over. The time and place of the satisfaction will be agreed subsequently. The standard limit: forty people on each side. The defeated reading room will be disbanded and its Book will go to the Council of Libraries. I know that opinions in the region are divided. I request those who wish to support the reading rooms in the dispute to draw up their applications and submit them by tomorrow. All participations will be informed by our seconds… What else? I require the signatures of the librarians. Margarita Tikhonovna, are you still the acting librarian? Or is it the young man beside you? How do they put it, from generation to generation, right? Is the younger Vyazintsev now your librarian?”
“Not yet, but I think he soon will be.”
“Fill out the documents for him and send them in, they take these matters very seriously now…” Tereshnikov gave a slight bow and walked across to Marchenko.
We were surrounded by the people near us.
“Well, you Shironinites?” asked Burkin. “Will you cope?”
“We’ll have to, Vasily Andreyevich!” Lutsis replied cheerfully. “Our reading room’s like a Guards regiment!”
“It’s not the first time!” Timofei Stepanovich added.
“We’ll give you as much help as we can,” said Simonyan. “We have five volunteers. And that’s not all. There’s good news— Garshenin will be with us.”
“Thank you, Zhannochka Grigoryevna. Thank you, my dear, we never doubted your solidarity with us,” said Margarita Tikhonovna, hugging her gratefully. “Every soldier is precious. And Dmitry Olegovich is a genuine Ilya of Murom.”
Burkin beamed with his marshal’s face.
“Garshenin? How’s he feeling?”
“Excellent. The bones have knitted together and he has completely recovered the use of his arm. He claims that it’s even better than before…”
Burkin pointed to me.
“And what about him?”
“I think he’ll go with us,” Margarita Tikhonovna replied. “Right, Alexei? You are with us, aren’t you?”
For some reason I took that to mean I could suddenly be handed on to someone else, like a thing, perhaps to this Burkin.
“I’m with you, Margarita Tikhonovna,” I said cautiously.
Burkin sighed.
“Margarita Tikhonovna, don’t forget that forty genuine bandits will turn out to fight for Marchenko… Alexei is completely inexperienced. He’s barely even read the Book…”
“Alexei hasn’t read the Book. He knows absolutely nothing,” Margarita Tikhonovna said quietly.
Burkin was dumbstruck.
“Pardon me, but then why the hell did you bring him here?”
He led Margarita Tikhonovna aside and started passionately trying to persuade her of something.
Scraps of the conversation reached my ears. “…If he doesn’t want to, I’ll understand…” said Burkin. Margarita Tikhonovna protested: “…I believe in him…”
Burkin raised his voice.
“But I’ll tell you what will happen. After the resolution of the conflict, even if everything goes well for us…”
“Well, thank you, Vasily Andreyevich! Thank you very much for the moral support!” Margarita Tikhonovna fumed. “Most timely! Why, then, are you helping us, if you doubt our success?”
“In the first place, I’m your friend, so I’m helping… But I’m also a realist! God grant that we get off lightly, without too much blood spilled. Mark my words, after Shapiro’s escape they’ll slap you with an “A” penalty. The council will tot up its losses for non-disclosure, and then your Vyazintsev…”—he looked at me— “Forgive me, I mean this for the best… As a perfectly normal citizen, Vyazintsev will go running to the militia, and that will be the second “A”, for good measure! And there you have it, no more reading room!”
“So tha-a-at’s it,” Margarita Tikhonovna drawled comically. “With all due respect, Vasily Andreyevich, you’re an excellent librarian, but a terrible psychologist…”
“Do you really not understand what you’ve done? It’s not good, it’s not honest. Against his will! You have involved a complete outsider… How will you clear up the mess now?”
“He’s not an outsider,” Margarita Tikhonovna said with feeling. “He’s Maxim Danilovich’s nephew…”
“I give up,” Burkin capitulated in annoyance. “Time will tell…” He glanced at his watch. “And we have just over twenty-four hours of it left. We’ll call you, Margarita Tikhonovna.”
“See you soon, Vasily Andreyevich.”
The workshop gradually emptied. One of the observers took the keys to Kolesov’s Zhiguli from Pal Palych.
Simonyan said goodbye to us, once again promising the help of her much-vaunted Garshenin of Murom as she left.
A short man with a limp, by the name of Latokhin—the librarian of the Kolontaysk reading room—came over for a minute. He said he would send at least ten soldiers. This favour was clearly formal in nature and Margarita Tikhonovna signed a document for him.
“But will you not be there yourself?” asked Lutsis.
“Unfortunately,” replied Latokhin, slapping himself on his bad leg, “my health won’t permit it. My fighting days are over, Comrade Lutsis.” Putting the sheet of paper in a red plastic folder, he said goodbye and limped away, taking his people with him.
The first to sum things up was Igor Valeryevich Kruchina.
“Well, now, brothers, things aren’t all that bad. Eighteen of us, plus ten Kolontayskites. Simonyan’s giving six and presumably Burkin will do the same. We’re on the up, Margarita Tikhonovna!” he said and smashed his strong fist into the palm of his hand.
The lights were turned out in the workshop and someone shouted: “Shironinites, the meeting’s over. Wrap it up, we’re closing the doors! Finish your talking outside!” A steel door screeched and
blackness advanced, shutting off half of the entrance. A worker drove the massive bolt into the concrete floor.
We walked out into the yard. Larionov and Ogloblin suddenly realized that the RAF hadn’t been washed since yesterday and immediately ran off to get rags and buckets. A minute later they were joined by Tanya, Sasha Sukharev, Pal Palych, Lutsis and Igor Valeryevich.
Timofei Stepanovich and the four Vozglyakovs said that they had to catch the suburban train and said goodbye until tomorrow.
I was left alone with Margarita Tikhonovna. For a few minutes we watched the bustle around the RAF: Lutsis, with his sleeves rolled up, squeezed his rag out into a bucket; Pal Palych tinkered about inside the minibus; Tanya and Sasha washed the rubber rugs; and Igor Valeryevich asked the worker for a little drop of industrial alcohol.
Margarita Tikhonovna suddenly said:
“In many ways, of course, Burkin was right. I apologize for everything you have had to endure during these last two days…”
My eyes started to sting in pity for myself. I implored her in a whisper:
“Margarita Tikhonovna, I won’t say a word to anyone, I swear, only please let me go! The militia is out of the question. And take the apartment. I just want to go home. I beg you! My father’s seriously ill and my mother’s unwell too. She’s a pensioner… I’m… e-e-e-er… their only son,” I lied hopelessly and stupidly.
Margarita Tikhonovna laughed.
“It’s strange… Can a strong, young lad really be so afraid? I think that if I growled now, you’d faint. My poor boy… In actual fact, no one intended to drag you into this…” She paused for a moment. “In principle, you have behaved well, with no hysterics… And you really are very much like Maxim Danilovich to look at, and the boys and girls have already… well, really come to love you and believe in you as a good omen. But of course I’ll let you go…”
“Thank you, thank you,” I whispered gratefully.
“But I have two requests… Alexei, we have a very difficult job to do tomorrow night, and your presence would give the boys and girls moral support… Well, as the banner of our cause. And afterwards—as free as the wind. All right?”
“Certainly, Margarita Tikhonovna,” I agreed readily.
She pondered for a moment and asked out of the blue:
“Alexei, do you believe in God? Only answer me honestly, without any false pathos or sneering.”
“I probably do,” I said.
“Do you go to church?” Margarita Tikhonovna asked specifically. “Do you confess and take communion?”
I didn’t understand what she was getting at and answered cautiously, in order not to startle away her permission to flee.
“No, I don’t go to church. Basically, I believe in something, but I don’t know exactly what.”
“The court understands the facts,” Margarita Tikhonovna said with a smile. “Your life is hard, Alexei. Without a god, without inspiration. Nothing but fear. I don’t know how you haven’t gone insane… But I can give you a present to annul all the terrors that you have been through. I will give God back to you… No, don’t be afraid. I’m not talking about some sort of sectarian jiggery-pokery. No one will try to ensnare you. What you will soon become directly aware of is probably one of the proofs of His existence. In order to believe, for some people it is enough to see the sunset in the mountains, or the ocean, for instance. For you it will be a Book. While they’re tidying up in the minibus, I’ll tell you a little bit about Gromov… After all, you’re still completely ignorant…”
I
USUALLY HAVE
a good memory for words and details, but I retained very little from the first fifteen minutes—I was up to my neck in ice-cold fear.
A forgotten author, now dead, who had written magical books, was beyond my belief. What I had grasped was that I had fallen into the hands of people who were sick, monstrously cruel, delirious psychos.
I listened to Margarita Tikhonovna without interrupting, evincing an air of calm attentiveness with every fibre of my being. The last thing I needed was to anger her and the other lunatics just like her who were scuttling about nearby.
The history of the Shironin reading room was the thing I remembered best of all, because of the surprising and shameless details with which Margarita Tikhonovna embellished the narrative. This morbid geriatric eroticism finally confirmed my fears.
The reading room had originated with the typist Svetlana Alexandrovna Koltsova. Destiny linked this woman directly with Gromov and seems to have done everything possible to include an unexceptional typist in the ranks of the chosen. She had the good fortune to type out Gromov’s manuscript for the Book of Joy (
Narva
). And naturally Koltsova received the published novella as a present.
Life cast Koltsova into the provincial backwaters of Russia for many years. For about fifteen years the forgotten Gromov stood safe and sound on the shelf between Druon and Simenon. One
day, out of boredom, Koltsova decided to read the book in which she had once invested her labour.
Koltsova didn’t keep the plots of manuscripts in her head, because she never reflected on the text—that slowed down the work considerably. Koltsova opened Gromov’s book out of sentimental considerations. In those long-ago evenings she had been involved in a tempestuous affair with the husband of one of her workfellows. Her lover would race round to her place, drink tea and wait until Koltsova, already all of a sweat with passion, tapped out a couple of paragraphs in the name of prudish formality and then surrendered to him right there at her desk. Her lover always took her from behind and Koltsova, with her arms braced against the desk, watched as the penetrating movements set the sheet of paper loaded into the typewriter trembling, rendering its meaning illegible. At the instant of supreme gratification she would deliriously tap her fingers on the keys, leaving an alphabetical code of her orgasm on the paper, and her lover would kiss her tenderly on the nape of her neck. The page defaced by love had to be typed out again.
And so, twenty years later, she took up Gromov’s book, permeated with this aura of sensuality. As she read, long-ago scenes from her past life came alive again. The effect of the Book manifested itself in the form of a supremely powerful ecstasy. Koltsova quickly grasped the consistent connection between reading and gratification, after which she shared her discovery with her best friend. Naturally, after a certain time a reading room grew up around Koltsova, and my Uncle Maxim joined it—Koltsova took pity on this cultured individual whom drinking had reduced to a life of physical labour. And apart from that, Uncle Maxim resembled her former lover.
Koltsova was killed, falling victim to a raid by Mokhova’s old women, and the Book was stolen. This happened on the very eve of the Battle of Neverbino, in which the reading room participated, and Uncle Maxim fought with great heroism. He was the one who insisted at the council meeting that all reading rooms that had lost
their Books through Mokhova’s nefarious activities should receive a replacement.
Thanks to Uncle Maxim, the Shironin reading room received a Book of Memory to replace the Book of Joy that had been lost, and it was released from the payment of taxes under the Neverbino exemptions. Formally speaking, the Book belonged to Uncle Maxim, and so by right of my bloodline I had allegedly inherited the position of librarian…
“Alexei! Margarita Tikhonovna!” Denis shouted. “We can go!”
“Thank you. We’ll just be a moment,” Margarita Tikhonovna responded. She looked me up and down intently, with a vaguely derisive air. “Why don’t you say anything, Alyosha? Don’t you believe me?”
Her manner was not like Sukharev’s crude familiarity or Denis Lutsis’s amiable treatment of me as a peer and equal. There was something else behind it. An insistent effort was being made to initiate me into something; attempts were being made every second, against my will, to tap me on the shoulder with a ritual sword, so that I could be considered an insider and judged by their rules. I had to remain extremely cautious and not offer them my shoulder by implication.
“It’s hard to answer straight away,” I began judiciously. “This information is so unusual, and… But I believe you, yes…”
Margarita Tikhonovna sighed.
“You’re only agreeing out of fear. You’re probably afraid the crazy old biddy will go berserk and stick a knitting needle in your throat?”
Those words brought me out in a sweat as sticky as honey.
Margarita Tikhonovna went on.
“Forgive me for talking to you like a family member, Alyosha. No one can hear us for the time being in any case. I think it’s simpler, more open, like this… Have you never wondered why the apostles betrayed their Teacher, and then later died as fearless martyrs? At first they should have believed, but couldn’t, but after
His resurrection they didn’t believe—they knew. That’s a big difference. And I’m not appealing for you to believe in me either. Very soon, if you so wish, you will know, as Denis, Tanya, Sasha, Pal Palych and Igor Valeryevich do… You can sense that all this time I’ve been leading you up to my second request. Alexei, I promised that no one would force you into anything. We keep our word. We don’t want anything from you; it’s simply that we loved and respected Maxim Danilovich, our friend and librarian. We’d like you to declare your final decision once you have read the Book. That is the second request…”
“Are you done talking?” Tanya asked us affably.
“Yes,” said Margarita Tikhonovna. “I’ve given my basic literacy lesson. I had to enlighten Alexei about many things.”
“He’s a bright lad,” Igor Valeryevich said, praising me. “He’ll soon get the hang of it.”
By this time my fear had almost exhausted itself and run out of steam. I felt indifferent to everything. I wasn’t interested in Sukharev’s quips, or Tanya’s kind eyes, or Ogloblin’s story about how thirty years ago in Kazakhstan, when he was still an orphanage boy, he used to catch carp in the river: “They used to swim out into the shallows and stick themselves halfway out to feast on the fresh young grass, and I whacked them with a stick…”
We drove up to Uncle Maxim’s building, where Margarita Tikhonovna wished us good night and asked us not to burn the midnight oil, because we would need our strength tomorrow.
I was hoping that when we got back I would be left in peace. That didn’t happen. Sukharev, Lutsis and Kruchina followed me up, to guard and protect me. However, they were all considerate and polite. I could tell that these people felt at home in Uncle Maxim’s apartment. While Sasha deftly prepared supper—a ten-egg omelette—Denis and Igor Valeryevich made esoteric conversation.
“There’s obviously something shady about those Gorelovites,” said Igor Valeryevich. “The reading room’s not three years old yet,
and it’s on the ten-per-cent rate. Not a branch library, not even on an annual tax, but the ten-per-cent rate! Who ever heard of the like of that?”
“The council probably decided to try out a new scheme,” said Lutsis, munching zestfully on his omelette. “It’s very logical. They provoke a conflict and then inflate it at the district meeting. Either compensation or satisfaction…”
“And if the accused side loses,” Igor Valeryevich summed up, “the Book becomes the property of the winner: officially the Gorelov reading room, but in fact the library that set it up. Brilliant and simple!”
“But have no fear, Alexei,” Sukharev told me with a wink. “It won’t come to that.”
In the morning Margarita Tikhonovna, Pal Palych, Ogloblin and Larionov showed up, together with three Shironinites I didn’t know: Vadik Provotorov, Grisha Vyrin and Marat Andreyevich Dezhnev. This substantial escort was explained by the fact that all seven of them together delivered the Book of Memory, which was ceremoniously presented to me to read.
The new arrivals stayed and the others left. But for the axes and the shoulder belt with two sapper’s entrenching tools that were dumped in the hallway, all the indications would have been that these were peaceful people. Marat Andreyevich Dezhnev was a traumatologist, a tall, black-haired man of about fifty. He immediately apologized, saying that he was tired after his work shift, and went to the bedroom to catch up on his sleep. Beside him on the bed he laid a sabre that had been shortened by a quarter of its length, in a scabbard with its end broken off, which, it turned out, he had concealed in his trouser leg.
Vadik Provotorov, small and stocky, with the physique of a wrestler and a nose pushed slightly to one side, was an architect by profession, but he worked as a security man in an amusement arcade. He asked me for a screwdriver and a hammer, tipped out onto the table
about thirty metal plates with holes drilled along their edges and a heap of small screws and rivets, then pulled a broad jacket-shaped piece of thick, coarse leather out of his Turkish woven-plastic bag with a check pattern and started dexterously attaching the metal plates to it. The attack by Shapiro the day before yesterday had not had any serious consequences for his health.
Grisha Vyrin, a computer hardware engineer by education, worked for a private firm that sold domestic appliances. To look at, Grisha was more like a provincial rock musician in his frayed jeans and baggy sweater, with long blond hair gathered into a slightly greasy ponytail. He slouched and looked extremely thin, but when he sat down at the table and rolled up the sleeves of his old sweater a bit, the forearms exposed were as powerful and sinewy as a sailor’s.
Provotorov, Lutsis and Vyrin stayed in the kitchen and I withdrew to the sitting room—to read the Book.
I couldn’t get on with Gromov. Perhaps it was the effect of the mental and emotional fatigue of the last twenty-four hours and two sleepless nights. The novella itself was relatively short. At any other time I would have read a book of that size in a single sitting, but here I was still struggling after more than two hours and not yet even halfway through it.
The plot was as follows. The central character Mitrokhin, a forty-year-old correspondent with a Moscow newspaper, snared in domestic conflicts and problems with his writing, sets off on a long journey. His assignment: to gather information about farms in the Ural region. Mitrokhin stays for a month in the home of state-farm chairman Fomichev. The correspondent conscientiously takes his notebook and makes the rounds of all the farm’s various nooks and crannies—the specialized farm units, the cowsheds, the experimental stations and the new school. He meets remarkable people who are passionately committed to their work, such as the teacher Nikodimov, who has set up an agricultural-machinery design
club at the Machine and Tractor Station. The club is short of funds to turn a joint invention of Nikodimov and his pupils into reality.
“It’s just that we need to produce special vehicles for transporting grain,” Nikodimov repeated stubbornly, struggling to keep up with the chairman’s broad stride. “Or rather, not vehicles, but all-metal bunkers that are installed on the chassis of Kamaz or Zil trucks. The grain-carrier can transport grain straight from the combine harvester to the elevator without any intermediate sorting. The bunker’s airtight, so no grain’s lost because of the wind, or the state of the road, or how long the journey is.”
Fomichev thought for a moment.
“And how do you deal with bad weather? Grain often gets damp in the windrows and on the threshing floor. Your grain will get ruined. Am I right, Comrade Mitrokhin?”
Mitrokhin didn’t answer, and Fomichev exploited the pause for his own ends:
“There, the press agrees with me too.”
“But in our grain-carrier that won’t happen,” Nikodimov persisted. The bunker will be divided into two chambers of equal volume. If the grain’s damp, it’s loaded into one chamber, and as it moves along it’s tipped into the empty one. At the same time the grain is dried by a warm current of air and the chaff and weed particles are separated out…”
“What is it that you have, Yury Viktorovich?” Fomichev asked artfully and answered himself: “That’s right, a designers’ club and young technicians’ station. You attend to them. Your miraculous grain-carrier is just a dream!”
Nikodimov stopped, and Genka and Andryukha froze a little distance away. Mitrokhin looked at Nikodimov, who had fallen behind, then suddenly winked like a young urchin at the saddened young lads and dashed to catch up with Fomichev.
“You do wrong to reject Nikodimov’s proposal. I’ve seen the model myself; it works perfectly. Why not give it a try, and I’ll write
a big article about it. If it works, you’re bound to make the state farm famous right across the country. Is that so bad?”
The chairman’s eyes sparkled in the gleeful way that Mitrokhin knew so well.
“Well, OK, try it! I’m sure it will all work out just fine—it has to!”
I made a conscientious effort to read, but I failed miserably. My eyes skidded on the first line and I tumbled precipitately down from the top of the page as if I had fallen off a roof; the paragraphs flitted by like the storeys of the building and I read only the foundation: “Mitrokhin liked the teacher’s stubbornness and persistence— anyone else would have given up ages ago and decided the whole business was futile, but Nikodimov kept on searching for something, inventing something and, above all, believing in success.”
I set the unfinished book aside and glanced out into the corridor. I could hear three voices in conversation behind the closed kitchen door with its cloudy glass, like a thin patch in the ice on a river. The traumatologist Dezhnev snored intermittently in the bedroom.