Authors: Mikhail Elizarov
Uncle Yasha wrinkled up his forehead pitifully, as if he was going to cry. He looked about fifty, but his little drunkard’s face had remained childish, like a midget’s.
“All right, Uncle Yasha, I was only joking,” said Seryozha, abruptly breaking off his fun and heading for the cupola.
Uncle Yasha blinked helplessly and tumbled back onto the sacks, certain that the cruel joke was something he’d seen in an alcoholic dream.
Meanwhile Seryozha had picked up a gaff and walked up to the tapping spout.
“I’m expropriating one ladle from you…” Kruchina warned him.
Seryozha was flabbergasted.
“But that’s… We’ve got the moulds set up for crosses!”
“That’s fine then. I’ll just take one cross.”
“That… Well… I don’t know…” Seryozha drawled. “We’ve got an order…”
“Seryozha, what’s wrong with you? Have you forgotten the meaning of fear?”
“Take them all if you like, Igor Valeryevich!” the tapper retorted furiously. Swearing soundlessly, he jammed the gaff into the tapping hole. Orange and white metal poured out of the hole in the clay and along the trough. The pourers picked up the ladle by its welded handles and carried it towards the moulding frame. The second pair immediately took their place at the trough.
The tenth ladle turned out to be the last one, and it was poured by Kruchina and Ievlev. I guessed that in Igor Valeryevich’s scheme this was the ladle in which Ogloblin’s burned-up remains symbolically rested. The casting was a multi-purpose embodiment of the cross, the coffin, the deceased and the grave.
We huddled round the cooling mould with Ogloblin in it like an honour guard and stood there until almost three in the morning. Finally Igor Valeryevich carefully extracted the still warm cross from the moulding frame and broke off the channel metal himself. The mould had obviously not been made very precisely—there were gas cavities on the back of the cross—but that didn’t really matter. Our dead comrade was back with us again. Staunch and unbending in life, in death he has become iron, I thought with solemn pride.
*
At dawn we arrived back at the Vozglyakovs’ place. The heavy cross was thrust into the earth under the crooked old apple tree in the yard, so that Anna could visit Ogloblin’s grave at any moment.
Then Sukharev drove the RAF to the reservoir—with Ogloblin’s death the minibus had ceased to belong to our reading room. At a secluded spot on the shoreline Sasha stuck fishing rods in the ground and laid out some simple snacks on a newspaper, with an empty half-litre bottle of vodka. If the militia started searching for Ogloblin after his disappearance, when they found the deserted site, the abandoned RAF and the rods, they would think the hapless fisherman had wandered into the water when he was drunk and drowned.
T
HE ANNIHILATION
of the Uglies’ gang didn’t cause a big sensation in the town. The massacre near Urmut was mentioned twice in the faceless news on the local TV channel, somewhere between “the Khokhlakov family wish their dear mum a happy birthday, good health and every happiness” and a homespun advertisement for the Paradise furniture store. They said: “gangland killings”, “the staff of the café were not harmed” and “the investigation is continuing”.
We learned that we hadn’t got away scot-free with the operation from the librarian Burkin. The council was holding a session in Izhevsk, and Burkin had gone there to arrange some business of his own. It came as a complete surprise to him to hear a report by a member of Shulga’s clan about the events at Urmut. It was discussed prosaically, without any pathos, with the flat assertion that the Shironin reading room had carried out an unsanctioned “clean-up” without warning anybody about it. Someone in the presidium remembered that Burkin had given us help in the satisfaction, and he was forced to sign a pledge of non-disclosure. Vasily Andreyevich was very alarmed by all this. He sensed danger and, in defiance of the law, warned us.
It was too late to guess how our misfortunes had been discovered. Lutsis suggested that there could have been a spy among the down-and-outs whom the Uglies fleeced, and he could have reported to Shulga. We had to forestall any possible penalties and report the incident with the Uglies to the regional prefect, Tereshnikov,
presenting events in the most favourable light. We prudently didn’t inform the council that Ogloblin had been killed. The last thing we wanted was inspectors and checks.
At first glance this move—the repentant guilty head that the sword does not hew—worked perfectly. We could not be accused of criminal concealment of the facts. The members of the council shrugged the matter off and muttered that we were obliged to inform them before the “clean-up” at the reservoir, not afterwards. It went no further than that. But unfortunately we had relaxed prematurely.
Yambykh showed up for what seemed like a trifling inspection. And on the next day, positively bursting with his own sense of importance, he declared that the reading room was under house arrest. The problem, which at first hadn’t even existed for the council, had suddenly in the space of a single day been inflated to the menacing proportions of a tribunal. And the most tragic thing about it was that the reader Ogloblin, who had disappeared like a little grain of sand in the sea of the world’s life, threatened to become a millstone round the necks of all the Shironinites. It was too late now to report what had happened to him; all we could do was hope that our inspectors wouldn’t notice he was missing.
Yambykh’s people scoured the town for a few days, trying to dig up dirt on us, but apparently they didn’t find anything. We didn’t want to provoke Shulga’s liaison officer unnecessarily and tried to comply with his absurd order not to leave our homes. During this period Yambykh contacted us twice.
Finally we heard from him a third time. “Comrade Vyazintsev!” his voice shouted down phone in shrill, triumphant fervour. “I have important information for you. Get the whole reading room together this evening!” I couldn’t tell what the cunning liaison officer was working up to. Probably Yambykh had sniffed something out and now he was trying to call our bluff with this general meeting. Then we would have to explain where our
reader Ogloblin had got to. “Roman Ivanovich,” I suggested cautiously, “perhaps we don’t need to disturb everyone? Why don’t I just call Selivanova and Dezhnev? They’re our most senior and respected readers…”
Yambykh didn’t argue and set the meeting for seven that evening.
“When you get right down to it,” I reassured myself for the rest of the day, “why would he want to count us? He can only know about the Shironin reading room from hearsay. Even if he has been shown a group photograph of the reading room, he’s hardly likely to have remembered every Shironinite’s face.” That was what I thought. “Yambykh is only here to find out why the Caucasian bandits latched onto us.”
It was that evening when the prickly hospital word “quarantine” was first heard.
“To ensure the objectivity of our review,” Yambykh explained sparsely. “By the way, do you have mobile phones in the reading room?”
“Where would we get them, if I may ask?” Margarita Tikhonovna said with lofty indignation.
“Oh, come on… This is the year 2000,” said Yambykh, pulling a wry face. “A mobile stopped being a luxury item ages ago…”
“…and became an adjunct of moderate prosperity,” Margarita Tikhonovna concluded. “Something that we cannot boast of, I’m afraid. But what’s the problem, Comrade Yambykh? Do you need a cell phone urgently?”
“Not at all,” said Yambykh, waving the question aside. “The first requirement of quarantine is a total information blackout.”
“Meaning what?” Marat Andreyevich asked cautiously.
“We insist that all your reading room’s external contacts be cut off for the duration of the review!”
“Do we have to have our phones at home disconnected?” Margarita Tikhonovna asked.
“Unfortunately that’s no solution. The entire reading room is ordered to leave the town.”
“And where are we to go?”
“A place where you will be isolated. That’s what we have to agree on.”
“Listen, Roman Ivanovich,” I put in. “This is overkill. We have no intention of hindering your work. Why isolate us? We’re not jaundice cases…” I smiled, but Yambykh remained sullen and intent.
“Shironinites, stop pretending the purpose of the quarantine isn’t clear to you! Do you think we have no idea who warned you about the inspection? Eh, Comrade Selivanova?”
“I simply can’t imagine what you mean!” Margarita Tikhonovna said with an imperturbable shrug.
“Drop all the play-acting,” Yambykh said wearily. “You understand perfectly well.”
A chilly breath of leaf-fall August wind set the curtains fluttering. Yambykh slapped the greasy locks flung up by the draught back down against the nape of his neck. Even the wide-open window was no help against the suffocating smell of sweat seeping out of the short sleeves of his shirt.
“But can’t you manage without quarantine?” I asked, trying to coax the liaison officer, but I ran up against the reverse reaction.
“What’s bothering you? The fact that you won’t be able to swap your secrets?” Yambykh asked with a pointed glance at me. “In that case the question that arises is what about and who with. What will you tell me to report to the council?”
“What secrets, Roman Ivanovich? You imagine plots and conspiracies everywhere. It’s damned inconvenient. Our comrades have to go to work.”
“Take unpaid leave. You’re not children, you’ll have to cope. And anyway it’s only for two weeks.”
“Listen,” said Margarita Tikhonovna, refusing to give in. “I’m an old woman, and I’m not in good health. What if I become unwell?”
“It seems that Comrade Selivanova has failed to understand the seriousness of the moment,” Yambykh declared in surprise. “The
fate of your reading room depends on the result of my investigation! Is that clear at least?”
“Without medical help I can die!”
“You should have thought about that sooner, and not gone organizing massacres before complaining about your health.”
“They’ve given a toady authority,” Margarita Tikhonovna exclaimed in a voice trembling with fury. “And he rolls around in it like a dog in shit!”
“We’ll pretend I haven’t taken offence,” said Yambykh, staring indifferently out of the window.
“Roman Ivanovich,” I said, grasping at a new idea. “Let us just move out to the country. Some of our readers have a private house outside the town. It’s a remote spot with no phone, perfectly suited for quarantine…”
Still looking off to the side, Yambykh tapped out a confused march on the table with his fingers.
“All right,” he said after pondering affectedly for a while. “I’ll accommodate your request. You can make the move tomorrow. The requirements are the same: all outside contacts and travel are prohibited. I urge you wholeheartedly to act responsibly, or the consequences could be disastrous.” He picked up a matchbox from the table, hooked out a match with his nail and clenched it in his teeth, like a cigarette.
“A day’s not long enough,” I said immediately. “Give us at least until the end of the week.”
“What’s the problem?” Twisting his grinning mouth, Yambykh poked between his samovar-like crowns with the match.
Margarita Tikhonovna turned away squeamishly.
“It’s a bothersome business, Comrade Yambykh,” I said, haggling. “Arranging leave, packing things, buying in enough food, organizing transport…”
“You used to have a minibus, if my memory serves me right…”
While I was feverishly trying to think what line to spin him, such as: we sold the RAF to pay our debts and cover our reader
Vyrin’s medical costs… Yambykh fortunately forestalled my cumbersome lies.
“OK, I’ll give you two days. But no more.”
He wrote down the Vozglyakovs’ address and said goodbye, promising to visit us.
T
HE DAY S PASSED
anxiously and uneasily. Although we put a brave face on things, we were in a despondent mood. Things were only going from bad to worse, as if after Ogloblin’s death the entire Shironin reading room had been buried under his iron cross.
Of course, everyone understood why the council had taken such severe measures against us. Not only did they know about Burkin’s secret assistance, but they had also foreseen his noble and imprudent act, and then exploited it to the maximum. Burkin had damaged himself, and we had been placed under lock and key out of considerations of higher security.
No one talked about our quarantine. On the contrary, we tried to imagine that our imprisonment was a holiday at a country dacha.
The Vozglyakovs’ little farmstead lay two kilometres from the nearest village. It was surrounded on all side by a silence that was only stitched along the edge by the clattering of district suburban trains.
The small house proved to be a hospitable refuge. The sisters, Margarita Tikhonovna and Tanya occupied two rooms. Anna whispered furtively to me that she would give Tanya and me a separate little room under the roof, but, to be honest, I found the idea of such open cohabitation embarrassing—it looked too provocative. We gave the little room to Vyrin—it had a hard trestle bed that was perfect for his injured back. We put a couch in the inner porch, where Timofei Stepanovich took up residence; just enough space was left for a camp bed as well, and Marat Andreyevich slept on that.
Kruchina, Ievlev and Sukharev slept in the bathroom, and Lutsis and I spent the night in the hayloft. Anna gave us quilted jackets and the late Maria Antonovna’s thick woollen coat—the nights were already cold.
The Vozglyakovs’ property was dilapidated and in need of repair, so there was plenty of work for everyone. We strengthened the posts of the lean-to shed for the motorbike, reset the corrugated asbestos on the roof, mended the porch, painted the shutters, straightened up the fence and replaced the rotten shelves in the bathroom with new ones. At one time the Vozglyakovs had kept two cows, but after Maria Antonovna’s death the cattle were sold. The only animals apart from dogs were undemanding chickens. We transformed the former cowshed into a woodshed, and in a couple of days Ievlev and Lutsis had crammed it with firewood right up to the roof. Tanya and the sisters whitewashed the cellar and Margarita Tikhonovna boiled up plum jam in a large copper basin.
By the end of a week everything in the house had been transformed and we had only leisure time left. In the evening the reading room divided up into groups according to interests. Timofei Stepanovich ceremoniously pulled tiny barrels out of a canvas bag, calling out the numbers in a ringing voice, and Margarita Tikhonovna, Anna, Svetlana and Veronika covered the matching numbers on lotto cards with buttons. The atmosphere at their table was impeccably childish.
Grisha tipped a chess set with some pieces missing out of its folding board, made draughts out of tar and white bread and played passionate sessions of Russian giveaway with Sukharev. A short distance away Dezhnev, Ievlev and Lutsis were totally absorbed in a game of preference.
Tanya and I, left alone together, played badminton in the garden. The shuttlecock, which looked like dead sparrow, made a special effort to get stuck in the knotty branches of the contorted apple trees all the time. I stirred the dense foliage with a ski pole, the shuttlecock fell down, and down with it fell an unripe winter apple.
It all came to an end in a single instant, rapidly and almost painlessly, like a bone crunching under local anaesthetic. It was the second week of our confinement; lulled into a false sense of security by the steady-paced country life, we now thought that everything would blow over.
On Friday morning a cavalcade of four cars drove up to the farm. Before the booming iron of the gates had even started rumbling to the blow of a fist, the Moscow watchdog Nayda broke into cacophonous, ragged barking and started circling round her kennel, jangling her long chain. Ogloblin’s Latka joined in, twisting her vulpine warbling up into the sky like a corkscrew. And it was only then that the gates pealed like thunder.
We weren’t expecting anyone. Somehow we’d forgotten the reason that had brought us all together in the Vozglyakovs’ house. I hid the case with the Book under a floorboard, took out my hammer and ran to the gates. Lutsis, Sukharev, Kruchina and Dezhnev had already gathered there.
The formidable Ievlev, holding a cleaving axe out in front of him, asked:
“Who the hell is this?”
“Friends, friends,” a familiar voice replied. “Open up!”
We drew back the bolt. Standing there in front of us was Yambykh, with two of his staff behind him, as alike as two cobblestones. A little farther away, craning his neck and smiling tensely, was Tereshnikov, looking like a goose in a white cloth cap with a plastic peak and the faded inscription “Theodosia”. I also thought I recognized the passenger loitering beside a car, despite the cumbersome glasses with smoky lenses that covered half his face.
“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…”