The Librarian (37 page)

This state of suspense was worse than having my conviction put into effect. But they left me alone for three months as if on purpose. My storage bins were bursting. Like a miser, I arranged the slices of bread I had saved into loaves like bricks—I had fourteen and a half of them. These reserves would last me until summer, and even longer if eaten like Leningrad siege rations.

I was bored now; my writing task was basically completed. I had begun with a brief overview of the Gromovian universe, on the basis of materials found in Gorn’s archives, and also described my own brief time as a librarian, the glorious death of the Shironin reading room and even my first months in the bunker. Now the narrative had taken itself by the tail. There was nothing left to reveal, except by supplementing what had already been written…

One morning in April or May I opened the cover. The Book of Memory was lying in the top and the bedpan in the bottom. There wasn’t any food or water.

“
W
E OWE AN IRREDEEMABLE DEBT
to our Motherland. Her gifts to us are priceless. The ruby-red stars of the Kremlin shine for all of us, warming us with the rays of freedom, equality and brotherhood. What else is needed for happiness? Our Motherland is kind and generous; she does not count our debts. But there are moments when she reminds us of them. That means the Motherland is in danger. And our debt must be repaid to her in courage, steadfastness, valour and heroism.”

I learned this excerpt off by heart in the third year at school. Our school, which was named after Lenin, was preparing for the May festivities. The bosses of the district party committee were expected. Under the supervision of a department head from the local school board our frightened headmistress personally knocked the stuffing out of the juvenile orators who were privileged to tread the boards of the school-hall stage, which stank of polish. For the final few days the chosen ones were excused from classes and drilled from morning to evening. Even now if I am woken up in the middle of the night I can still rattle off without a hitch: “We owe an irredeemable debt…” This excerpt has remained branded into the skin of my memory.

I had already been a Young Pioneer since 22 April, but for the sake of the holiday they took away my necktie and those of several other third-year pupils, so that our visitors from empyrean realms could participate in the ritual and welcome us into the ranks of the pioneers for a second time.

“If we compare countries with ships, then the Soviet Union is the flagship of the world fleet. It leads the way for the other ships. If we compare countries with people, then the Soviet Union is a mighty knight who conquers his enemies and helps his friends in need. If we compare countries with stars, then our country is the Pole Star. The Soviet Union shows all the peoples of the world the way to Communism.”

This is the extract that I was given at first, and then it was replaced with “We owe an irredeemable…” At the time I was very upset. I liked the solemn words about the flagship, the knight and the star better. Not even the words themselves, but myself proclaiming them, as sonorous as a ship’s bell.

Changes were made to the script, the head of department placed the “Union” right at the very end of the programme, and the excerpt was given to some older girl whose father was the chairman of the district soviet executive committee. And the sensuous paragraph about Lenin—“For ever shall the human river flow to the Mausoleum”—was read by the proud son of the first secretary of the district Party committee

The stupefying smell of polish fogged my reason, which was already wrought up to the absolute limit. I declaimed my section after: “Our country’s shores are washed by twelve seas, and two more seas lie set upon its land” and shouted my text out into the hall without hearing my own voice, deafened by the beating of my heart. We were applauded. The secretary of the Young Communist League district committee knotted my necktie and pinned the Young Pioneer badge onto my white shirt…

And now, from out of oblivion, the country that has disappeared has presented the grubby promissory notes that I rashly signed so many years ago, demanding payment in steadfastness, valour and heroism.

It was all quite fair. Although there was indeed some delay, I have received the incredible happiness promised by my Soviet
Motherland. Granted, it was a false happiness, instilled in me by the Book of Memory. But what difference does that make? After all, in my genuine childhood I believed absolutely that the state which was eulogized in all the books, films and plays
was
the reality in which I lived. The earthly USSR was a coarse and imperfect body, but dwelling apart in the hearts of romantic old men and the children of prosperous urban families was its artistic ideal— the Heavenly Union. When the mental dimension withered, the insensate geographical body also died.

Even when society regarded hatred of one’s own country and its past as a badge of good form, I intuitively steered clear of the debunking novels that screamed with the gluttonous voices of seagulls about various Gulag children of the Arbat walking about in white clothes. I was embarrassed by literary half-truth, and especially by its morosely frowning authors, hammering on the table with the reverberating skulls of victims of the bygone Socialist era. This skeletal rat-a-tat-tat changed nothing in the way that I felt about the Union. When I grew up a bit, I loved the Union, not for what it was, but for what it could have become if things had turned out differently. And is a potentially good man really so very much to blame if the difficulties in his life prevent his splendid qualities from blossoming?

And there was another key moment, the significance and paradoxical character of which only became clear to me years later. The Union knew how to make Ukraine a Motherland. But without the Union, Ukraine has not managed to remain one…

The country in which both of my childhoods—the genuine and the fictitious—were simultaneously located was my genuine, unique Motherland, which I could never deny. And the Book of Memory lying on the tray was my call-up papers from it.

Of course, I didn’t reason in this philosophical manner from the very beginning. At first, the moment I saw the Book, my legs went from under me, as they say, and fear drove the blood into my solar
plexus so fiercely that for a few minutes I couldn’t take a proper breath, but only open my mouth. It’s strange: I had spent three months preparing, but the fateful day still caught me by surprise. I reached out for the Book of Endurance, but put it down—I wouldn’t have got through a single page. With my teeth clattering against the glass, I drank the water I had already gathered, filled the glass up to the brim with medical spirit and downed it in one. My throat and oesophagus were charred. A pillar of fire struck me in the head…

It helped. I realized that when the suffocating heat receded, as if the part responsible for fear had burned out for ever. I have nothing left to be afraid of. I have calmed down for ever.

It was the second week at my post. There were heaps of rusks and I was not suffering from hunger. There was a suspicious noise in the radiator and the yields had fallen slightly. During the last twenty-four hours only a glass and a half had accumulated. The heating season was clearly coming to an end, and soon they could turn the water off completely.

In the morning my personal clothing was in the lift and also— an unexpected surprise—the late Grisha Vyrin’s jacket. Someone in Gorn’s female brigade must have taken a fancy to this unusual trophy on that occasion at the village soviet and appropriated the anonymous dead man’s cuirass.

I didn’t feel the slightest shudder. I simply pulled on the jacket that smelled slightly of smoke over my sweater and felt perfectly protected.

They sent me a Solingen straight razor. I took this as a joking reference to my “slashed wrists” and felt offended. I stuck the razor in my pocket and drank my rusty “tea” through pieces of rusk.

Those were probably the most serene days since I had been incarcerated. I could even have killed myself, if only I had wanted to—I was not by nature inherently afraid of death. In fact, almost
until the third year in school I was sure that I would grow up to be a soldier and one day I would be killed, and a solemn salute would ring out over my grave. Most often I imagined death with a grenade. I’m fighting off my advancing enemies’ fire. My sub-machine-gun falls silent—the clip in my pistol is empty. I conceal my last grenade under my tunic so that I can easily reach the safety pin. I raise my arms, emerge from cover and say I have an important message for their commanding officer. He comes over to me—the complacent enemy—his soldiers surround me. And then I pull out the safety pin with my teeth and depart into eternity, into the granite forms of a monument and the gold letters on the commemorative plaque: “Senior Lieutenant Alexei Vyazintsev died a hero’s death…” For the minutes that my fantasies lasted, my eyes blazed with tears and my cheeks burned with the heat from the martyr’s flame of that unexploded grenade…

Now that I had grown up, my task had been simplified for me—I had been offered a simplified version of heroism. I don’t even have to die. On the contrary, to live for ever for the good of the Motherland—what is there to be afraid of in that?

I was not particularly worried about what would happen if I suddenly broke off reading after, let’s say, a year. Whether I would emerge from hibernation like a bear or crumble into dust, whether the much-vaunted mechanism of immortality supposedly embedded in the Books would even work…

I suddenly started dreaming of people I had killed. I didn’t have nightmares at all, but calm, epic dreams. In one I was transported into the dismal landscape that adorned my wall. I wandered through birch trees, breathed the damp coolness, chewed on melting snow, glanced across the river. On the opposite bank a little Pavlik, as white as if he were woven out of cobwebs, was scurrying about, shouting something and waving his plaster arms around, but the wind carried away his weightless words.

In another dream the Gorelov librarian Marchenko came to me. He brought a rejigged song for the Institute’s Club of the Jolly and Ingenious team: “Though grieving and alarmed, do not stand in the doorway, I’ll show up when the snow melts.” I objected that this was gruesome humour about corpses. But the Shironinites sitting around me said that I was wrong and the parody was very funny…

I tried to remember my family as little as possible. It was too painful to think of what they had endured in recent times. The first squall of grief had probably already blown itself out. Six months is a long time. They’ll come to terms with their loss. Our fecund Vovka will have a third boy and they’ll name him after me—Alexei.

Lulled by the Book of Memory, in the darkness I fell into a doze with my ear pressed against the radio and slept through the first part of the musical broadcast.

“…from the film
Moscow-Cassiopeia
…” the female presenter announced in a joyful, breathy voice, merging her words into the surging bell-chime violins of the orchestral introduction.

In the pitch-black abyss of the ceiling a planetarium of the universe suddenly lit up, a cosmically infinite mantle of stars, a magical, tilted swirl of minute heavenly bodies, like a distant reflection of sleeping cities, observed from the fast-moving window of a train that is hurtling past nameless lunar way stations, mysterious nonhuman dwellings that entice with orange shards of electricity, past a purple sky with the blinking scarlet bead of a nocturnal plane, past cast-iron railings above anthracite rivers, past the smell of
industrial iron warmed by the sun, the black plumes of poplars with the peacock flashes of semaphores.

With agonizing, sobbing tenderness, I listened to the simple conversational melody, devoid of all pretentious affectation. The words about parting and the long road ahead moved me to the depths of my soul. The voice was a solicitous mentor, deftly stuffing my kitbag with everything essential, everything that might be needed on an expedition from which one is not fated to return…

Something infinitely dear, woven out of poplar fluff and rays of June sunshine, touched my cheek and flooded my meagre saliva with the taste of pear drops and the viscous intoxication of Hematogen candy, then turned its youthful face towards me and waved its hand once in farewell.

The warm, happy tears were cooling in my eyes. I knew that I would no longer need the rusks and the rusty water, wearing down the glass drop by drop…

What year is it outside now? If the Motherland is free and its borders are inviolate, then the librarian Alexei Vyazintsev is keeping his watch steadfastly in his underground bunker, tirelessly spinning the thread of the protective Veil extended above the country. To protect against enemies both visible and invisible.

I would like to think that on a summer evening someone walks along the high road outside town, past cherry orchards and glittering tin-plate roofs. The sunset has spread along the horizon in a thick beetroot trickle. Mulberry trees beside the road rustle and drop berries into the dust. The shoulder of the road is covered in mulberry blots. A slow truck with a loose, rattling frame has daubed a stroke of warm petrol fumes through the air; a goods train has clattered by behind a distant embankment; the wind has pulled the tall grass erect by its topknots…

This has not happened yet, but it will be so.

I shall finish writing the final words. I shall place the notebooks—a black one, a grey one, a light-blue one and three brown ones—in the niche of the lift. I shall close the hatch.

Then I shall sit down at the table. I shall pluck up my courage. I shall open the first Book. I shall start in chronological order, with the Book of Strength.

I shall never die. And the green lamp will never go out.