The Librarian (24 page)

Before evening came I had finished reading and prepared myself for a revelation. The alarm clock ticked loudly in tense anticipation, but nothing miraculous was happening to me. I diligently drove all sorts of mental dross out of my mind, so that it wouldn’t cramp the space prepared for Meaning. Minute after minute I maintained this void, until, drop by drop, bitter disappointment seeped in and filled it.

I reluctantly admitted that the Book hadn’t worked, although I thought I had read attentively, without being distracted by the artistic aspect of Meditation. Perhaps the Book had a concealed inner defect or a lost page, otherwise why had it been sent to our
reading room? I scrupulously checked the page numbers—all the pages were there. There remained the faint possibility that I had been careless and missed a line or a paragraph somewhere.

I got up off the bed, moving ponderously, as if a ton of lead had been poured into me. Behind my keen disappointment, somewhere on the outskirts of my mind, a phrase that seemed absurd to me suddenly took shape: “Unsleeping Psalter”.

“
I
S THAT ALL
?” Margarita Ivanovna asked. “Nothing else, apart from this ‘Unsleeping Psalter’?”

For an entire hour she had gazed, mesmerized, at the Book, never once taking her eyes off it and all the while cautiously stroking its cover with trembling fingers.

I called Margarita Tikhonovna almost immediately after the failed reading and told her that a certain V.G. had sent me a package with “curious contents” and that I needed her confidential advice urgently.

We quite often spent time together on our own, so Margarita Tikhonovna wasn’t surprised by my request. After complaining briefly that she was tired, she came.

As was only to be expected, she was ecstatic at the sight of the Book.

“Alexei, I had a presentiment that something wonderful was going to happen soon!” she exclaimed. “I never doubted the chosen status of our reading room! Do you understand what has happened? The very rarest, the most essential Book has been found, and it has chosen us, or rather you, Alexei! This is no coincidence—this is the grand scheme of destiny!”

Strangely enough, Margarita Tikhonovna was not in the least concerned about how the Book had come into my hands.

“The name and address are probably fictitious,” she explained. “And the people who sent you the Book are dead.”

“Why?”

“They guessed that they would be killed soon and didn’t want this Meaning to disappear, but they couldn’t hand it over to the aggressors either… There have been rumours before that a rare Book had found its way into our region, but there was no way to verify them. To force the Book to the surface, a total purge of all the reading rooms was required. And, as you see, the plan was successful.”

“On the contrary,” I protested. “We have the Book now.”

“But you yourself said only a minute ago that a Book of Meaning is enough to buy off the council,” Margarita Tikhonovna remarked judiciously. “They took that into account as well.”

“But even so, things don’t add up. We would have heard about any battles…”

“Alexei, why do you think the council needed to quarantine us?” Her voice faltered. “We shall never hear of Simonyan’s and Burkin’s reading rooms again, believe me. And there’s no one in Kolontaysk either. We’re the only ones left in the region.”

I remembered the hospitable Kolontaysk reader Veretenov and the cantankerous, honest through-and-through librarian Burkin, and suddenly had a terrible feeling.

“Maybe they’ve been quarantined too?”

“I doubt it. Most likely while the Shironinites meekly sat under lock and key, punitive units picked off the undesirable reading rooms one by one. May God grant that I’m mistaken!”

After her initial emotions had settled down, Margarita Tikhonovna examined the Book thoroughly.

“Published in 1956,” she said, as if something had dawned on her. “The Twentieth Party Congress—criticism of the cult of personality. It’s obvious what happened. The Book was withdrawn from sale; in fact I think it never even went on sale. Gromov made a fatal mistake with his title. But how could he have foreseen that only three short years after Stalin’s death the name of the Leader and Teacher would be the worst possible of recommendations?
The fourth Book—that is, the Book of Joy—wasn’t written until 1965, when Khrushchev was removed from power. I was always bothered by that break in Gromov’s output. Now we have the explanation. In his naivety, Gromov sang the praises of a dead and disgraced leader, and the price he paid was ten years of silence…”

She touched the typographical miracle reverently while I recited the details of my failure from every possible angle. Margarita Tikhonovna herself asked me to do it. She thought that I might simply have failed to notice Meaning or hadn’t attached any importance to it.

“It’s too large and too complex to splash out all at once,” said Margarita Tikhonovna, stubbornly shaking her head. “But Meaning seeks a way to embodiment, it clads itself in minimal, compact forms, in the embryo of meaning, from which it will later reproduce itself to its full extent! You know yourself that everyone who reads the Book of Memory is given his own individual past. That means that everyone who reads the Book of Meaning will be given his own individual Meaning that only he can understand.”

“The phrase ‘Unsleeping Psalter’ doesn’t clarify anything for me! It’s an arbitrary oxymoron—wooden water, icy steam!”

“For the time being Meaning is in a dormant state,” Margarita Tikhonovna said patiently. “When circumstances are propitious it will unfold immediately, you’ll see!”

“Wouldn’t it be easier for you to read the Book of Meaning yourself, Margarita Tikhonovna?” I suggested.

She reached out uncertainly to the Book, then suddenly pulled back her hand and smiled guiltily.

“I’m frightened…”

“Take it, Margarita Tikhonovna,” I insisted. “You’ll manage better than me.”

“Do you think so?” She paused and then sighed, as if she had taken a difficult decision. “So be it then!”

“And what about the others?” I asked, touching on a sore point. “We ought to tell them about the Book, or they might be offended…”

“You say that very uncertainly,” Margarita Tikhonovna remarked astutely. “You feel that the Shironinites are rather unbalanced at present and any additional upheaval in the reading room can only be harmful. Do I understand you correctly?”

I nodded, although Margarita Tikhonovna’s way of putting it didn’t precisely correspond to my own feelings.

“Relax, Alexei, we’re not concealing the Book—we’re saving it. Like an ace of trumps up our sleeve.” She carefully wrapped the Meaning in newspaper and put the bundle in the very bottom of her bag.

To be honest, I had expected Margarita Tikhonovna to stay and read it at my place, but when I realized that she getting ready to go, it felt too awkward to object. What difference did it make where the Book was? I would actually feel better without it.

“Are you going?” I asked anyway. “Isn’t it risky on your own, Margarita Tikhonovna? Anything could happen.”

“Who’s interested in a sick old woman like me? And what valuables could I possibly have in my bag except for a hundred roubles, half a loaf of Borodinsky and some Validol?” Margarita Tikhonovna laughed.

“Let see you home…”

“It’s not worth the bother, Alexei, I can manage perfectly well without any escorts,” Margarita responded hastily. “But you’d better stay home and not stick your nose outside unnecessarily. It’s quite possible that the reading room is being watched. If they see you with me, they might think the Book of Memory has been left unguarded…”

“All the more reason not to let you go…”

“What foolish nonsense that is!” For the first time those steely notes appeared in Margarita Tikhonovna’s voice, but then they immediately faded away. “All right, since our reading room has
money to burn, let’s call a taxi to take me home. Hang the expense!”

About fifteen minutes later the female dispatcher called and informed us indifferently that the taxi was waiting outside. Just to be on the safe side I asked her for the number of the car.

It was an unnecessary precaution. It was too light outside and there were too many people about for enemies to spring an ambush. The children’s swings gave out long, rusty, creaking groans. Little schoolgirls skipped over squares scratched into the ground, raising tiny white tornados on the trampled earth. The old bench women, including neighbours from my floor, greeted us ceremoniously. I escorted Margarita Tikhonovna to the door of the battered yellow Volga and checked that the number matched the one I had been given—and that there was nobody but the driver in the car. The red-haired driver with one freckled hand dangling out of the window, holding a foul-smelling cigarette butt, didn’t arouse my suspicions either. The council wasn’t likely to employ such an eye-catching character.

I paid the driver. Margarita Tikhonovna got into the front seat, put her bag on her knees and winked at me in farewell.

When I got back in I phoned Lutsis.

“Hi, Denis,” I said cheerfully. “Tell me now, how are you getting on? Is everything all right?”

“Glad to hear your voice,” Lutsis replied. “By the way, we were starting to get worried,” he added with a hint of reproach. “Margarita Tikhonovna warned us not to bother you unnecessarily. She said you were dealing with some important business…”

“I wonder what that was?”

“Listen, Alexei,” Lutsis said apologetically, “only, please, don’t get angry. I know Margarita Tikhonovna promised you she wouldn’t tell anyone. Don’t take offence. It’s just that there are no secrets in our reading room. In the final event the move would have had to
be brought up for general discussion anyway. But I can tell you in advance that resorting to flight wouldn’t solve anything. It would just put the problem off for a while…”

“What flight?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“The one you’re planning,” Lutsis added impatiently. “I know you only want what’s for the best. Any day now they’ll expropriate the Book, and we won’t be able to put up any resistance, and the most rational thing is to flee… But the council will find us anyway. In a month, or a year. Chelyabinsk is absurd. We’re not Old Believers… Don’t you agree?”

“I do,” I said, catching my breath. “Denis, I wanted to ask you something. Do you happen to know what ‘Unsleeping Psalter’ means?”

“Say the first word again…”

“Un-sleep-ing,” I said, syllable by syllable.

Lutsis thought for a moment. “Well, now, Psalter’s clear enough—it’s the collection of psalms in the Bible. It’s used in the Christian services, like the New Testament. They read the Psalter over the dead… But I don’t know that much about religion. Why do you ask?”

“I probably just got something confused.”

“So what about a general meeting?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we’ll have one in a day or two.”

“All right…” Lutsis hesitated. “Only don’t let Margarita Tikhonovna know I mentioned the move to you, OK?”

“It goes without saying,” I promised.

I spent the rest of the evening waiting for a call from Margarita Tikhonovna, but it was Lutsis who called.

“Alexei, you weren’t mistaken. The Unsleeping Psalter does exist. Grisha was just here, and he explained it. I even wrote it down. The Psalter is read day after day, year after year, without a break. One reader takes over from another, and it’s best if it’s done with an overlap, so there’s no pause, because the devil can slip in through those pauses, as if they were cracks…”

In an instant some gigantic blood vessel swelled up and burst in my brain. Orange heat flooded my eyes. I just had time to say “Thanks, Denis” before I dropped the phone.

I was woken, lying on the floor, by a heavy ache in the back of my head. I raised myself up on my elbows and plum-coloured blood flowed slowly out of my nose, as if it were oozing out of a liver. Nothingness ebbed away and my head started feeling fresher. The words “Unsleeping Psalter” had acquired a specific meaning.

The Book didn’t have Meaning; it had a Design for Meaning. It was like a living, three-dimensional panoramic scene in Palekh—the Soviet icon-painting style on a lacquer background that I knew so well from my childhood, which used gold, lapis lazuli and all the shades of scarlet to depict scenes of peaceful labour: factories draped in fluttering silk, luxuriant fields of wheat and combine harvesters. Workers clutched blacksmiths’ hammers in their mighty hands, collective-farm women in turquoise sarafans bound up golden sheathes, cosmonauts in starry helmets and fluttering silver cloaks trod the ground of unexplored planets. A vehement October Revolution Lenin flung out his hand in eddying swirls of red, a soldier and a sailor carried an endless banner as light as if it were chiffon, and above them the cruiser
Aurora
pierced through the clouds like a beam of sunlight…

The Design for Meaning unfolded a sphere of black Palekh above me. The sombre events of past and future catastrophes stood out like red mercury on the polished surface. A blow of devastating force came crashing on the point where the heart of my Soviet Motherland was beating like a tiny red diode, and the slim spider-legs of geographical cracks ran out from that extinguished point. The glittering pipes of borders crumbled, the seams of republics split apart, and the ancient, eternal Enemy immediately appeared on the leaky borders of the new, weakened country. He scattered acoustic buoys into the seas, picking up every movement in the depths, and cast a seine of total control into space. An invisible
hand with a diamond glass-cutter deepened the cracks of the fragile federation. The schism of the future, crushing and conclusive, is scheduled for these contours. On the approaches to industrial cities special vaults have already been dug, and the only people who have access to them are arrogant Yankees with haughty faces who maintain close secrecy.

The Enemy has perverted everything he has touched. And now the Baltic, with its drowned-man smell, has pricked up its radio-location station ears, welcomed the Enemy into its barracks and opened its ports to his ships. Asia has concreted over its cotton fields, converting them into landing strips for bombers, and put up greenhouses after the Dutch model—to regale the Danish-American, Austro-Italian and Canadian-Turkish soldiers with soya and potatoes.

At the appointed hour the poisonous vaults will explode. Hostile submarines will sail into the Pacific Ocean and the Northern, Baltic, Barents and Black Seas. Morose soldiers in their grandfathers’ German camouflage suits will ride through transmuted Ukraine on growling military vehicles. Chechen warriors will fly in from the direction of Georgia in American helicopters. Predatory web-sailed junks will slide across the chilly waters of the Amur, carrying a piratical assault force to Russian shores. Slit-eyed peddlers, Chinks from Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk, will take Chinese-made Kalashnikovs out of their check-pattern bags and subjugate ancient Siberia. Japanese forces will land as the masters on Sakhalin, the Kurils and Kamchatka.