Authors: Mikhail Elizarov
Y
AMBYKH AND HIS MEN
went on their way, leaving us to await the council’s decision. Our prospects seemed dismal in the extreme: violation of the code of secrecy, the flight of a reader, concealment of facts representing a threat to common security, an unsanctioned operation to eliminate probable witnesses—all this was more than enough to add up to another “A” sanction, with the confiscation of the Book and the disbandment of the reading room already waiting in the wings.
The council was taking its time. They were in no hurry to deliver a verdict; they had the Shironin reading room in their pocket anyway. It was just a matter of timing the delivery of the fatal blow.
Our quarantine didn’t end with our return to town; instead it assumed different and disquieting forms. Margarita Tikhonovna spent days on the phone, trying to get through to our reading-room neighbours. In a week and a half the world around us had become extinct. There was no response from Burkin’s reading room and Simonyan’s also remained silent. No one answered the phone in Kolontaysk. A call to Tereshnikov was answered by a polite little patter: “Hello, you have reached number…”
We were becalmed in lethargy. The people around me behaved as if they had suddenly discovered they had been happily dead for a long time already. That was when I started feeling the same
fear and unease as I had during my first days in the Shironin reading room.
Nothing else—neither anger, nor fear, nor even despair—would have had such a depressing effect on me as the shroud of pale, bleak, monkish asceticism that was spread over the reading room. Faces became strange, like the photographs on tombstones. Calmly spoken words sounded like a requiem mass, everyone bared their teeth in beatific, martyred smiles that made me want to lash them across the face to rouse them from their trance. They read the Book more frequently than ever, as if they wanted to blot out real life with the apocryphal bookish phantom as rapidly as possible.
Marat Andreyevich became severe and withdrawn. Lutsis and Kruchina were unrecognizable. Some unearthly fire had scorched them from within and now eternal icon lamps glittered in their dilated pupils. This otherworldly solemnity even distanced Tanya from me. Dead before her time, she already made love differently, from a distance, as if she had been sprinkled with earth.
In this ambulatory graveyard the only person to remain alive and emotionally responsive was the terminally ill Margarita Tikhonovna. I had been certain that she would be affected more than the others by this state of suicidally rhapsodic fatalism. On the contrary, she became gentler and more warm-hearted.
“Don’t avoid the others, Alexei,” Margarita Tikhonovna admonished me meekly. “Zombies indeed! What an idea!” she snorted. “What makes you think they’re preparing to die? Quite the contrary, they want to get in as much reading as possible for the future…” Margarita Tikhonovna sighed. “But is it really possible to store up looking and listening? The flesh of memories is ephemeral. They are weak creatures; in order to survive they need to attach themselves to a strong body. The Book of Memory is the best possible donor—a powerful, unfailing generator of a happy past, a paradise regained. Feeble human memory cannot possibly keep up with such a vast, complex mechanism. You realize that yourself!”
“Margarita Tikhonovna, I’m not disputing the merits of this phenomenon, but essentially it’s a mirage.”
“A fine mirage!” she laughed. “One that’s better than the original! How many times have you read the Book? Four? Well, then… But our boys and girls know it off by heart! You still have only your own natural past, but they have two pasts, and one of them is genuinely beautiful. That’s what they’re clinging to. Only there’s a catch: to prevent the past from fading, you have to nurture it constantly, that is, to read the Book. Losing it means losing for ever the ability to immerse yourself in the happiness of the past—not merely recalling it, but reliving it anew, without any loss of sensual immediacy. That is worth so much. The others are all going through a kind of psychological test: are they prepared to die for the Book?…”
I plucked up my courage.
“Margarita Tikhonovna, please don’t take this the wrong way. I’m going to be absolutely frank with you. Of course, the Book is very important, but I don’t feel that I’m ready to go all the way with it… I mean, it seems to me that if push comes to shove, I can get by without the Book. Very probably I am mistaken, in fact I am almost certainly mistaken, but I don’t have any time to come to terms with myself. And I’m tired of the responsibility. I want to be alone…”
Margarita Tikhonovna remained compassionately silent. I was glad that she wasn’t surprised or offended. The next morning I passed the Book on to Lutsis for safekeeping, saying that my place wasn’t safe. The Shironinites didn’t actually require any explanations; my requests were carried out unquestioningly. The entire membership of the reading room took the Book to Lutsis’s apartment. Proud of the trust that had been placed in him, he promised to guard it like the apple of his eye.
After a week of solitude I realized despairingly that I didn’t have the slightest desire to lead the brigade of condemned men that was
called the Shironin reading room. But neither could I abandon these people to the whim of fate. Something had changed in me for ever, and treacherous thoughts of flight stumbled into the bear trap of scaling shame at the very first steps. I sat there, tormented by pity, duty and panic, sipping sour, bitter coffee from my cup and squashing cigarette ends in the ashtray one after another, while hour after hour a sluggish September fly butted stubbornly at the window pane.
On the seventh day the doorbell rang. I pressed my eye to the peephole. The round lens stretched a bulky, elderly woman out into an idiotic tadpole. Her gauzy headscarf had slipped to the back of her head, revealing a parting in her grey hair, and she had a plump bag hanging from her shoulder over an unbuttoned knitted cardigan. The woman was holding a small package in her hands. After waiting for a minute, she extracted another viscous, lingering trill from the bell.
Naturally I didn’t intend to open up. Who knew why this creature had come here and whether she had an invisible helper nestling down by the door with a nifty little knife?
The woman trilled on the bell again, swore in frustration and set about the neighbours. At the third attempt she was lucky. An old voice responded: “Who’s there?”
“Galina Ivanovna, it’s me—Valya!” the woman with the bag shouted. “There’s a parcel for your neighbour and he’s not in. Can I leave it with you?”
An old woman in a tattered dressing gown appeared.
“Oh, hello, Valechka, hello. And there I was thinking you’d already brought my pension or something… What kind of parcel is it?” she asked, reaching out curiously for the package.
“Will you take it then?” the postwoman asked. “Oh, thank you… I crawled all the way up here to you on the fifth floor; my legs have all swollen up and the black veins have come up.” She lifted up her long skirt and showed off her affliction. “I can hardly even walk…”
She took out the receipt while the old woman gasped in sympathy.
“Sign here… What’s the new neighbour like?”
“Young…” said the old woman, taking aim with the pencil. “Says he’s the nephew…” She nodded significantly. “He brings people round too…”
“They say as the old one was murdered,” the postwoman said indifferently.
“That’s right. His boozy friends knifed him,” said the old woman, scratching at the receipt. “Almost a year ago…”
It didn’t look like a trap. I grasped the razor in my left hand and opened the door slightly, without taking it off the chain. If anyone tried to squeeze though the gap, I would have slashed them across the eyes with the razor, and then kicked the body back out.
The women looked round.
“Oh, you’re awake!” the postwoman exclaimed, delighted for some reason. “Good morning!”
“Hello,” I said, yawning widely just to be on the safe side.
“There’s a little parcel for you. I was just asking Galina Ivanovna here…”—she pointed to the old woman—“…if she would give it to her neighbour.”
The postwoman looked at the package, then at me. “Alexei Vladimirovich Vyazintsev?”
“Yes. Shall I show you my passport?”
“Why would I need that now?” The postwoman handed me the package and the receipt.
In the kitchen I studied the light package carefully. The mysterious sender was called “V.G.” All that was left of the effaced surname was its impersonal, unisex ending “…nko”. I strained my memory to recall someone with the initials “V.G.” and a Ukrainian surname (some Sayenko or other), but I couldn’t. The address, written in ink on the pale-brown wrapping paper, had also been blurred by water. The purple streaks seemed to bear the marks of fingers, or perhaps large drops of rain.
With some trepidation I tore the wrapping open and saw a book. The author’s name and title were stamped into the faded sky-blue cover in a severe typeface: “D. Gromov” and below that: “A Meditation on Stalin Chinaware”.
A fake! Someone had planted a copy on me. Cold, sticky sweat trickled down my back—the council’s crack special troops were already creeping over the walls, their steel-tipped boots not even touching the steps. Another minute and the door would cave in. Rapid, silent men would tumble the traitor to the floor and secure his arms; stern sergeants would enter into their report the confiscation of an illegal forgery—they have unmasked a copyist! Now nothing can save the Shironin reading room and its ill-starred librarian…
I caught my breath and examined the book more closely:
A Meditation on Stalin Chinaware,
Radyansky Pismennik, 1956. The lemon-yellow pages covered with ginger freckles looked untouched. The print was strangely raised. The tip of my finger could feel every word set in the swollen lettering.
I studied the title page. Editor: V. Vilkova—Design Editor: V. Burgunker—Technical Editor: E. Makarova. The cloth spine had an aroma of decrepit paper and stale medicines—a cracked, desiccated bookshelf. The stifling dust numbed my nostrils slightly. An insert with a title in capitals had been pasted to the end sheet: “ERRATA: P. 96, line 9 up. Printed ‘away’. Should read ‘way’. P. 167, line 6 down. Printed ‘glories’. Should read ‘glorious’.”
The phantom clatter of the enforcers’ boots faded somewhat. This couldn’t be yet another attempted entrapment by the council, I realized with piercing clarity. The fever heat of conjecture squeezed my head in a tight band.
A Meditation on Stalin Chinaware
—I knew the titles of all the Books in the Gromov world, but not this one. What I was holding in my hands was not a fake at all, but the Gromov Book that everyone was searching for, the renowned Book of Meaning…
My first feverish impulse was to summon all the Shironinites immediately. This find held the promise of wondrous blessing. There was no doubt that the unique Book could be used to buy off the council once and for all and demand the restoration of our immunity in perpetuity!
Halfway to the phone, my rapturous impetus evaporated completely and I turned back into the room. I was trembling in nervous agitation. I was only three hours from the truth. The person who sent me the Book had already been the trailblazer. But who knew about him and what was his Meaning worth?
I was swept away by the presentiment of being chosen. It wasn’t clear how long the Book would remain in the Shironin reading room. I had to seize the moment. I didn’t think about whether the consequences of reading the Book alone might be disastrous. It took me a long time to still my visual tremors, and my eyes kept slipping off the line I was reading. I gulped down two glasses of cold water. Things went better with chilled innards.
Meditation was written in lyrical, celebratory style, abounding in internal monologues that were rhymed, like prose poems. A former front-line soldier, the Red Director Shcherbakov dreams of restoring production at an old chinaware factory ruined during the war. An incurable romantic, full of the ideals of Pavel Korchagin, he believes that the factory he raises up will supply high-class tableware to the workers of the entire world. He is a simple, honest man. His affected severity conceals a soul that is compassionate and attentive to people’s needs and is capable of forgiving anything except cowardice and betrayal.
The senior engineer Berezhnoi is written as a polemical counterpoint to Shcherbakov’s image. He has behind him the difficult experience of evacuating factories to the east. He’s a professional, and what attracts him in the reconstruction of the factory is the purely technical aspect. Berezhnoi is very far from being a dreamer; he is calculating and pragmatic. He is often right in a merely formal sense. For instance, by compromising on facilities and conveniences
in the workers’ housing estate, Berezhnoi frees up more funds from the budget for construction, but Shcherbakov judiciously tells him that it is wrong to forget about comforts in the lives of the workers who will man the factory. Berezhnoi finds out that in Moscow the attitude to the project is negative. He immediately retreats and writes a backdated report about the pointlessness of renovating the factory. But Shcherbakov is willing “to go on trial if need be” in order to prove that the project is valid. Shcherbakov’s enthusiasm triumphs in Moscow. In addition to all this, a personal conflict flares up between Shcherbakov and Berezhnoi. Berezhnoi falls in love with same girl as the director, and when he discovers that Katya has no feelings for him, he immediately hands in his resignation. Meanwhile, the construction work continues. Close by, the workers’ housing estate is growing, and the cultural life is already boisterous…
At a meeting the young design artist Gordeyev suggests producing a dinner service decorated with an image of Stalin. Everyone fervently supports the idea. And then the triumphant moment arrives when the artist removes the hot firing capsule with the new tableware from the muffle furnace. He joyfully carries the fired cups with Stalin’s image on them into the office. He is greeted with happy smiles by Shcherbakov, Katya and the new head engineer Velikanov…