Authors: Mikhail Elizarov
The Enemy cannot be stopped. The red button was ripped out of the black box long ago. But even if it still existed, it wouldn’t summon any missiles to life. The wombs of the bunkers have been curetted. A Peace Treaty sawed the heavy missiles into pieces long ago. Planes will not take off, atomic submarines will not be launched from their docks. The army’s electronic equipment was murdered long ago by the effects of baleful hostile signals. No one will be saved.
But there is a special, secret man with mastery of the occult Heptateuch. He knows that while the Seven Books are read one after another without a break the terrible Enemy is helpless. The country is securely protected by an invisible dome, a wonder-working veil, an impenetrable vault, stronger than anything else on earth, for it is supported by unshakeable pillars—kind Memory, proud Endurance, heartfelt Joy, mighty Strength, holy Power, noble Fury and the great Design.
A vista of countless years upon years unfolded before my eyes. In a little room with velvet curtains on the windows a man sits at a simple office desk. A marble lamp with a green shade pours electric brilliance onto open pages. No one enters the room and no one leaves it. We see the reader from behind, his hunched shoulders, his inclined head in a trembling diadem of light.
He who reads the Books knows no weariness or sleep. Death has no power over him, because his heroic labour is greater than death. This reader is the perennial Custodian of the Motherland. He stands his watch in the expanses of the universe. His labour is eternal. The country under his protection is indestructible.
Such was the Design of the Books.
T
HE NEXT DAY
Dezhnev, extremely alarmed, told me that Margarita Tikhonovna wasn’t answering her phone. Taking Sukharev along to help, we rushed round to her apartment, but no one opened the door to us. God only knows all the thoughts that ran through my head while Sukharev dexterously and silently broke open the lock on the door. I was already reproaching myself, because Margarita Tikhonovna, exhausted by her terrible illness, had died, overwhelmed by the stress of reading the Book of Meaning.
My worst fears were not confirmed. The apartment was simply empty. I would have thought that Margarita Tikhonovna had never reached home, if not for one strange fact that roused serious suspicions. Some elusive change had taken place in the little room that served as both sitting room and bedroom. At first I couldn’t spot which item had abandoned its long-accustomed place. I probed the room with my eyes. Protruding from the wall above the bed was an empty nail, with a rectangle of emptiness below it. Standing on the dinner table, leaning against the carafe on the brass tray was a photograph of Margarita Tikhonovna when she was still young—a portrait in a wooden frame. In this black-and-white snapshot she bore a certain resemblance to the actress Lyudmila Tselikovskaya. Cutting across the firm neck and the dimpled smile, like a crude slash from an anatomist’s scalpel, was an inscription: “To Alexei, as a keepsake”.
I picked up the portrait and was overwhelmed by a sense of unbearably bitter loss. Of course, I regretted the loss of the Book
of Meaning too, but only in a material sense—it could certainly have been used to raise an incredible sum of money in the Gromov world. Its Great Design of heroic self-sacrifice and individual immortality seemed more like hell to me. More than that, I even suspected that the Book’s appearance had been prompted by the similar disenchantment of its previous owners. But there was no longer anyone with whom I could share these thoughts.
Marat Andreyevich muttered in a bewildered voice.
“At least I haven’t found her passport. So not all is lost. We’ll wait…”
We left the deserted apartment and Sukharev neatly removed all traces of a break-in.
I repent that I didn’t have the courage to tell the Shironinites the truth about the Book of Meaning, especially after my visit to the taxi dispatcher’s office. The order that Margarita Tikhonovna and I placed was in their records. The red-headed driver made no attempt to hide and told me the disheartening details. He remembered his elderly passenger very well. She really did call in first at 21 Kontorskaya Street, where she asked the driver to wait and soon came out with a small suitcase. Her second and final destination was the railway station.
I forced myself to think that Margarita Tikhonovna was alive and acting for the good of the reading room.
The waiting dragged on for the whole of the next day, but without either sight or sound of Margarita Tikhonovna. By evening the feeble hopes of her return had faded completely.
I calmed the Shironinites and cheered them up as well as I could. But every cloud has a silver lining. The jarring shock roused them from their fatal, listless torpor.
At the meeting, which was held at Lutsis’s apartment, the Shironinites voted unanimously for flight. In light of recent events, this appeared to be Margarita Tikhonovna’s dying bequest. Feverish preparations began. Everything had to be done quietly, inconspicuously and as rapidly as possible. Items that had any value at all
had to be sold. No one thought about making a profit. Everybody clubbed together to buy a capacious trailer, and the essential tools, tinned food and clothing were purchased.
On the night before we fled we paid another visit to the deserted apartment on Kontorskaya Street. I wanted to collect the photograph that Margarita Tikhonovna had given me.
The moment we stepped out of the entrance on the way back, I suddenly sensed that we were being watched, and froze warily. The experienced Sukharev immediately lowered his hand into a bag of tools, took out a claw hammer and handed it to me, while he took a short crow bar and a screwdriver. Nikolai Tarasovich, waiting for us beside the Niva, had clearly also sensed that something was wrong—he was holding a weighty sledgehammer. Lutsis had hidden behind the car.
The bushes growing in an impenetrable wall along the ground floor suddenly trembled, as if from the wind, and two male figures stepped out onto the path.
The first man took a few uncertain steps towards us.
“Have you come from Margarita Tikhonovna’s?” he asked in a nervous voice that also sounded desperate to me.
“Perhaps we have…” I replied, playing for time while Denis crept up on the strangers from the rear.
“Then she’s home?” the man asked joyfully. “God, we’ve been keeping watch all day and all night!” he moved towards me confidently, as if he hadn’t noticed Nikolai Tarasovich.
Lutsis silently emerged behind the strangers’ back and readied his axe.
“And why are you watching Comrade Selivanova?” I asked pointedly.
“You’re Vyazintsev, Alexei. Maxim Danilovich’s nephew,” the man said in a confident voice. “Don’t you remember me?” He stepped into slanting light of a street lamp.
I had definitely seen that thin, haggard face with the long crooked nose before.
“You must remember!” the man exclaimed bitterly. “My name’s Garshenin. I’m from Zhanna Grigoryevna Simonyan’s reading room. And this,” he said, pointing to his companion, a stocky, blond-haired man with a boatswain’s beard, “is another of our readers, Yevgeny Ozerov. After your satisfaction I…”—he faltered, trying to find the words—“…visited Margarita Tikhonovna. It’s the only address we know, so we came here. We haven’t got anywhere else to go.”
Then I recognized him.
“But of course! They broke your arms that time. Dmitry… er…”
“…Olegovich,” the man prompted me eagerly.
“Why didn’t you tell us your name straight away?” asked Sukharev, giving Garshenin a friendly slap on the shoulder. “Nikolai Tarasovich,” he said impatiently to Ievlev, “put that hammer down, will you? These are our people…”
It was from Garshenin that we learned the whole terrible truth of the last few weeks. How Burkin’s reading room caved in to threats at the regional meeting and agreed to pay tribute to the council for the right to use its own Book of Memory—the so-called branch library arrangement—and a document was signed in confirmation. Burkin was counting on this to save his people from certain death. Simonyan categorically rejected all the council’s proposals and attempted to leave the meeting. The stubborn librarian’s way was blocked by the guards. It wasn’t clear who started the fight that immediately became a massacre. Burkin attempted unsuccessfully to halt the bloodshed and was mown down by the indiscriminately swinging axes of Lagudov’s and Shulga’s warriors.
Caught in a trap, Simonyan’s reading room made a desperate attempt to break out. Five readers managed to break through the enemy line, but only Garshenin and Ozerov escaped pursuit. Now they were outlaws, and every library or reading room was obliged to turn them in.
The fugitives made for Kolontaysk, but the new librarian Veretenov’s reading room had disappeared. Garshenin and Ozerov
discovered the well-concealed traces of recent carnage. Only one of the Kolontayskites had survived—Sergei Dzyuba. He had been buried while unconscious in a common grave at the bottom of an abandoned foundation pit. Dzyuba was lucky that the disposal had not been carried out by the council’s professional gravediggers— they always inspected the bodies carefully and no witnesses were ever left alive.
Dzyuba told us how the reading room was lured out of the town by the regional prefect Tereshnikov, but the executioner’s part had been played by quite different people—the Pavliks had secretly returned to Kolontaysk. The council also let the vengeful Chakhov have Voronezh, Penza, Kostroma and Stavropol to buy him off.
The basic policy of the large clans was obvious—to use someone else to break down the regional reading rooms, without formally violating the Neverbino convention on immunity. The calculation was simple: some of the recalcitrant reading rooms would be wiped out by Chakhov, which would serve them right—certainly the Pavliks would get another Book of Memory or even a Book of Endurance, but that was no great loss—and some of the librarians, seeing the lamentable outcome of independence, would voluntarily relinquish ownership of their Book and pay membership dues to the council.
Probably a similar humane sentence in the form of a library subscription was being readied for the Shironin reading room. But was it worth waiting for it? Especially since our Niva and the motorbike had unexpectedly been augmented by the Kolontaysk reading room’s bus, in which Dzyuba, Garshenin and Ozerov had arrived. It was a genuine salvation for them to find a new reading room; we had completely solved all our transport problems, and the collective had been augmented by three seasoned fighters.
Our impressive convoy set out at dawn.
A
FTER THE REGIONAL CENTRE
we turned into a forest. The tall crowns of the trees locked together over the bus and branches brushed its sloping roof like rustling twig brooms. After half an hour a gap suddenly appeared at the end of the gloom. The trees parted. We shot out of the forest thickets and the sky opened up above us, lofty and colourless, with smoky streaks. The bus bounced and rattled over the deep potholes, and it was easy to guess what kind of sludge the clayey ground was transformed into during prolonged periods of heavy rain. Only Ievlev’s Niva would get through here then, but fortunately the regional centre, with its shops, post office and hospital, was only about twenty kilometres away.
Immediately after the forest there was a meadow that had run wild, overgrown with tall grass and dry thistles, a line of black fences with gates in them, and village houses covered in patches of ancient blue moss.
We stopped outside the largest building in the abandoned village. Apparently during its best years it had accommodated the village soviet or some such institution. The traces of an administrative sign were visible on the wall beside the door, and there was a bracket for a flag hanging beside it. Unlike the peasant houses, the single-storey structure had been built with architectural pretensions—after the style of a poor landowner’s manor house. There were small false columns at the entrance. The broad porch expanded into a skirt
of stone steps. Little green tress had taken root in the cracks in the mossy foundations. The peeling shutters and door had been carelessly nailed shut. Not far from this village soviet was the bristling straw roof of a long, low, log-built shed with one wall missing—a former barn or storehouse.
Inside the building the air was musty and stifling. Grey clumps of spiderwebs hung everywhere, like yarn spun by old women. The previous occupants had not left any furniture behind. Here and there on the ceiling and walls the damp plaster had come away, and in places the planks of the floor were green with mildew. Ievlev stamped his foot and a half-rotten board immediately snapped. Garshenin and Kruchina climbed up into the attic to patch the holes in the roof before evening.
The building had two stoves—a large Russian stove that ran right through two rooms and a smaller Dutch stove. The stoves were very dirty, but looked in good condition. Anna scraped a bucket of ash out of each of them and checked the draught with a piece of burning newspaper. The smoke was safely drawn up into the chimney.
The village no longer had any electricity. Outside the building a transformer cabinet was hanging on a post with its open door creaking. Vyrin and Sukharev immediately set about it with their tools.
Timofei Stepanovich promptly took charge of the new boys Ozerov and Dzyuba and instructed them to clear up the yard.
Dezhnev, Lutsis and I walked round the local area. There was deathly silence everywhere, but I was haunted by the feeling that someone was studying us with suspicious, hostile eyes from the broken windows. The process of decay was still going on: everything was falling apart, creaking, collapsing, dripping, clanking, crumbling into dust. Looking at all this desolation I felt a melancholy uncertainty welling up inside me: was it really possible to build a life here?
We looked through all twelve of the village houses. People had left the village a long time ago and taken almost everything that was useful with them. The only things freely available in abundance
were planks, old sheets of corrugated fibre cement and leaky rain barrels.
There was no water in the black shafts of the wells, and down below they were clogged with greasy pond scum. Just outside the village, beside the ruins of the church, the old graveyard had rotted away almost completely.
While we were walking round the village, the women tidied up the village soviet building as well as they could, sweeping out the years of accumulated dust and removing the cobwebs. They dumped all the old lumber, leaves and rubbish in a ravine. Anna managed to light the stove—the whole place needed to be thoroughly warmed to get rid of the mould that had colonized it.
The first night, spent in the bus, was bleak and uncomfortable. The future looked as desolate as ever. I couldn’t get to sleep because of nagging rheumatic pains in my foot. The cold and discomfort had set the obstinate bayonet wound aching. I tossed about, listening to the sounds of the night. Long, lingering howls, dreary and despondent, came from the forest and our dogs replied with peals of melancholy barking.
During the night the dank gloom became bloated with moisture; even my hair turned wet and sticky. Every rag in the bus was heavy with dampness.
After a bad night’s sleep Lutsis said morosely:
“Why did we ever come out here into the back of beyond? We should have stayed in town…”
“Uhu, they’d have snuffed the lot of us there,” Igor Valeryevich objected in a hoarse voice.
“We did right to leave. Even dying’s better in the country,” Timofei Stepanovich explained ambiguously.
In the morning there was thick mist. When the sun rose, the mist melted away, lingering in the forest clearings. A damp exudation swirled above the wet earth. The hollows were filled with clammy, stagnant humidity and the sweet smell of thick, withering grass. We seemed to see the high, colourless sky through a layer of
turbid water and the wind swirled around light streaks of autumn fog. During the day we explored the boundaries of our settlement. To the north and east the forest was impenetrable. The trees grew close together and with every springy step we could sense below our feet a half-metre layer of foliage that had fallen over countless years: your foot could sink into it right up to the knee, unless it struck an invisible root. Beside the meadow close to the forest there were broad weeping birches, bowing their yellow caps almost down to the ground.
In the slope to the west there was a deep ravine with steep sides. Following its bed, choked with briars and burdock, we unexpectedly came out at a river lying between slippery clay banks. The murky, chilly, reddish water carried leaf litter and scraps of birch bark. There were blackened branches rotting in the swampy shallows and skeletal tree trunks lodged in the grey sand.
To the south the hills bristled with prickly spruce. Ancient knotty roots protruded from the crumbly slopes and sometimes we came across large white boulders. We walked along a depression cluttered with fallen trees as far as the brick wall that curved round the back yard of our village soviet. The village was hemmed in by forest on all sides.
We gradually rendered our new home livable. There was a sharp smell of wood glue, paint and varnish in the air. Sukharev, Kruchina, Ievlev and Garshenin knocked together trestle beds, a broad dining table and long benches. I also mastered the carpenter’s art little by little and made a spacious kennel for shaggy Nayda. Doddery Latka spent the night in the inner porch.
Thanks to the women’s efforts the house started looking a bit smarter. The floorboards were decorated with mats and runners. Curtains fluttered at the windows which still had no glass.
The whole of the next week was devoted to fortifying our homestead. The village soviet that had given us refuge was partly surrounded by a two-metre-high brick wall and low iron railings,
like the ones round graves. We took apart the six nearest log houses and used the logs to construct a stout stockade that took in the house and the farm shed standing nearby, which could serve as a garage for the Niva and the motorbike after it was repaired.
The cold wind grew stronger every day and by nightfall the stars were overlaid with hoar frost. We had to prepare for winter and lay in provisions. There were no problems with heating—there was enough firewood for the next few years; the rotten village was our woodpile.
There were still some unbroken windows in the village huts, so Nikolai Tarasovich didn’t even have to go into town for new glass. We weren’t able to repair the transformer. During the evening readings we had to light candles and kerosene lamps. For next year we were thinking of acquiring a portable diesel generator and already had a place in the yard in mind for the fuel tank.
But we were never to spend the winter there.
The first uninvited visitors were spotted by Timofei Stepanovich. In the morning the old man took a basket and went looking for mushrooms. One day he came running back to us with alarming news—there was a suspicious-looking character wandering along the edge of the forest. It was a mystery what a solitary individual who didn’t look like a hunter or a mushroom picker could be doing in these desolate parts. He had a camera or binoculars dangling over his canvas raincoat.
I can’t say that we were particularly alarmed by the news. It could be anyone walking in the forest in the early morning. Timofei Stepanovich had probably seen a harmless urbanite, a photographic tourist who wanted to take picturesque shots of rural decay. We didn’t have any time for anxiety; every corner of our homestead required attention and repair.
That night we heard dull, rhythmical knocking and scraping noises from the direction of the forest road. In the morning, after making their round of the local area, Sukharev and Kruchina
reported that the road had been blocked with fallen trees. It was clear at a glance that the stout oaks had not been felled by the forces of nature, but by the saw and the axe.
We were seriously dismayed by the nocturnal lumberjacks’ efforts. Any planned widening of the road could only mean that our isolated existence would come to an end one day and people would appear here. And it was disquieting that the mysterious woodcutters had worked at night and had not dragged the trees to the side of the road. It was still too soon to draw conclusions about definite danger, but the fact remained that the trunks had cut off the way out to the regional centre.
I limited my response to setting up twenty-four-hour patrols. For the whole day and the next night we listened in case the work in the forest was resumed. Nothing of the sort happened. We wanted to believe that the strangers had appeared by chance and now they had disappeared for ever.
The idea that the council might have tracked us down was voiced at lunch by Dezhnev. First a deathly silence descended, and then the reproaches came thick and fast: was it even worth leaving town if we had to scram again after only a month?
“This is going to go on for ever, until they drive us to the ends of the earth,” Kruchina said indignantly.
He was supported by the Vozglyakov sisters, who were missing their abandoned farmstead.
“I think you should meet your destiny face to face, and not run away from it,” Anna said morosely. “Isn’t that right, girls?” Svetlana and Veronika nodded uncertainly.
Timofei Stepanovich changed the balance of the situation slightly.
“What’s the point of getting all worked up about it? If they’ve spotted us, we’ve got a great chance to die with honour. You don’t need all the comforts of home for that, do you?”
“Well, in all honesty, I’m not planning to join the stiffs just yet,” Sukharev said cheerfully. “That wouldn’t be very interesting.
You’ve invented a problem!” he snorted. “We just hop in the bus, and then they can whistle for us—search the whole country if they like. ‘There’s nothing I like better than wandering the wide world with my frie-iends!’” he sang.
“I’d prefer a life on the road anyway,” Vyrin said pensively. “That’s even more interesting. You spend the night in the open fields. Baked potatoes, singing to a guitar… And you can always find somewhere to earn a bit of money.”
“Why not,” said Ievlev, scratching energetically at the back of his head, as broad as a spade. “I like that. Install a cooker in the bus, set up sleeping places, get the glass tinted. Make it into a motorized home.”
“Sure, step on the gas and away we go,” Lutsis grumbled. “They’ve already closed off the road over there. We’ll have to leave on foot, travelling light. Or on rafts.”
“Alarmists have the upper hand in our reading room now,” said Tanya. “Margarita Tikhonovna would be ashamed of some of you…”
“What’s alarmism got to do with it?” Anna asked with frown. “I say there’s no point in trembling over you own precious skin.”
“And no one is trembling,” Marat Andreyevich put in gently. “It’s just that this entire conversation is extremely impolite to Alexei…”
The Vozglyakov sisters and Kruchina lowered their eyes.
They were all waiting for what I would say.
“I was the initiator of the move, and I still think it was the right thing to do. It was what Margarita Tikhonovna was planning. I think all this alarm is rather premature. There’s no way the council could know which way we went, unless someone in the reading room passed on that information to them…”
For some reason everyone looked at Ozerov, who had turned sullen. He was the only one of the three new readers at the supper table—Garshenin and Dzyuba were on watch. Ozerov was delicately avoiding joining in the conversation. Sensing the Shironinites’ eyes on him, he turned crimson and got up from the table so abruptly
that the bench shifted back with a piercing screech, taking the substantial Vozglyakov sisters with it.
“What, do you…” Ozerov glowered and clenched his fists. “Do you think that we would snitch to the council?”
“Calm down, Zhenya,” Marat Andreyevich immediately intervened. “How could you even think such a thing?”
“It’s not a matter of you at all,” Lutsis began. “But Dzyuba… Don’t get me wrong, I’m not accusing anyone. But, for instance, the only one I knew well was Latokhin. And I can say for certain that Dzyuba wasn’t one of the ten fighters who helped us at the satisfaction.”
“That’s right,” said Sukharev.
“Alexei, Tanya, you were there at Kolontaysk,” said Vyrin. “Try hard to remember!”
“Why, there were almost a hundred people there,” Timofei Stepanovich said with a frown. “Almost thirty from Kolontaysk alone. And they were wearing ice hockey helmets, you couldn’t even see their eyes properly!”