The Librarian (4 page)

The second group reading was not accompanied by any outbursts of aggression against Mokhova. The old women submitted to her completely, for which most of the credit belonged to Gorn, who influenced her comrades by using both argument and the club, which Mokhova had personally handed over to her, conferring upon her local authority.

Polina Gorn’s former garrulity did not return; her mind became rational and her thoughts succinct.

On Gorn’s advice Mokhova held new readings in different wards during the week. Gorn herself and about ten pacified old women attended the reading in order to suppress any possible focal points of rebellion.

The militia expanded every time that Mokhova was on duty. The Book had a salutary effect on senile organisms. In their normal condition, of course, the old women still did not possess even a hundredth part of the strength that the Book gave them, but their minds remained relatively clear.

In part they attributed the miraculous effect of the Book to
Mokhova. They were old, lonely and abandoned by their own children, and the lingering spark of motherhood still glimmered in their hearts. Not the raucously domineering kind, but the self-sacrificing kind.

Gorn picked up this mood among the old women. The next night Mokhova was dubbed the “little daughter” and the old women were dubbed the “mums”. Gorn had thought through the ritual of adoption very thoroughly. In Mokhova’s view it was not particularly pleasant or hygienic, but Gorn persuaded Mokhova to go through with it.

Every old woman smeared Mokhova’s face with her vaginal secretions, as if symbolizing in this way that Mokhova had appeared in the world via her womb, and swore to protect the “little daughter” to her last breath.

Sixty old women went through the ritual. Twenty or so recent converts watched them, raging and roaring—and in the meantime they were pacified by overseers who dealt them slaps round the back of the head to drive home the idea that the greatest happiness they could ever be granted was to become a “mum” as soon as possible.

That same night Gorn said to Mokhova: “The staff! Get rid!”— and ran her hand across her throat, imitating the movement of a butcher’s knife.

The time had come for decisive action. Someone had snitched to the director about the noise at night, the broken window panes and the bruises. It was obvious that these emergencies occurred during Mokhova’s shift, and she could have faced serious unpleasantness. To carry out the operation Mokhova had the faithful Gorn and a militia of about eighty old women in total.

Mokhova informed the director, Avanesov, that at the weekend she intended to hold a recreational reading session in the women’s section, because she believed that the old female patients needed it. Avanesov did not object.

At eleven in the morning the female half of the old folk’s home started stirring. The corridors were filled with the creaking of beds
being trundled about as the ambulatory old women moved their bedridden friends to the site of the assembly.

Mokhova was already experienced in reading rapidly and intelligibly, and she ran through the text in record time. Curious nurses came down several times from the men’s floor above. They were told that everything had been agreed with the director. One way or another, Mokhova won herself three hours’ grace. And when the duty sister called the director at home and complained about the pandemonium that Mokhova had caused, it was too late.

Avanesov arrived in time for the final pages. He curtly ordered the patients to be taken back to their wards. Mokhova openly raised her voice. Avanesov repeated his order, again in vain. He threatened to sack Mokhova for these outrageous excesses. The nurses and nursing assistants came running at the sound of his shouting. Taking hold of the heads of the beds, they started trundling the old women away to their wards. Seeing Mokhova still not responding to what he said, the director started walking towards her. And in that second Mokhova shouted out, “The End!”—and clapped the Book shut.

At that very moment the old woman Stepanida Fetisova grabbed the drip tube out of the vein of her ward neighbour Irina Shostak and deftly flung this improvised garrotte round Avanesov’s neck. Deprived of her flow of medication, Shostak fell into a coma, from which she emerged a minute later when the Book took effect.

The rebels were unstoppable. The slaughter began and Avanesov, strangled with a drip tube, became the first victim.

Mokhova’s army went through its baptism of fire at its official place of residence. As victims for its lynching it had four nurses, five nursing assistants, three female cooks, two dishwashers-cumservers, the building manager, the caretaker, who also doubled as the electrician and plumber, and all the patients in the men’s section, about fifty in total.

The old women had been divided in advance into squads of ten. Each squad was led by a sergeant-mum, who took her orders from Mokhova or Gorn.

Two squads were dispatched urgently into the yard to guard the gates and the fence—no one could be allowed to slip away.

The approaches to the director’s office and the reception area were blocked off to exclude the possibility of a phone call. From the cubbyhole of the caretaker Chizhov, who was drinking his vodka for the last time in his life, they took a wood cleaver, a carpenter’s axe, a small sledgehammer, a screwdriver with a long blade, a crowbar, a shovel and a spade for clearing snow.

The old women infiltrated the kitchen, where they found half a dozen knives and a meat cleaver, with which they promptly and pitilessly dispatched two of the female cooks and the dishwashers. The third cook, Ankudinova, was a massive woman: scattering the old women with her mighty arms, she managed to get to the door and hid somewhere on that floor of the building. They didn’t pursue her for the time being.

The cutting weapons were given to the strongest old women, those who in their previous lives had been used to slitting the throats of cattle and poultry. The sledgehammer went to a large individual of proletarian origin, a former structural fitter.

The death squads scattered across the various floors. The nurses mistakenly thought they could escape by locking themselves in the wards. The sledgehammer broke down the door and the old women poured in through the breach, jostling and growling. They threw the nurses on the floor and, not having any cold weapons, tore at them with their hands and gnawed on them with their false teeth or removed the rubber pad from a crutch so that it wouldn’t soften the blow and beat the nurses on the face, the breasts and the stomach with the wooden frame.

Three nursing assistants managed to get up onto the roof and batten the hatch behind them. They tried to get down the fire-escape ladder. Old women, prepared to die themselves in order to prevent an escape, jumped out of nearby windows and clutched on tight to the fugitives’ dressing gowns. Dragged down by the extra
weight, the nursing assistants tumbled off the ladder with a squeal and fell, breaking their bones.

In the men’s section a squad of ten old women with pillows ran from bed to bed, suffocating the paralysed old men. On Gorn’s orders the men who could walk were herded together and driven onto the knives. The old men went as meekly as sheep, making no attempt to escape.

Only one man managed to flee—a war veteran, the retired colonel Nikolai Kaledin. Despite his age, he had retained the ability to think and fight.

Kaledin, the cook Ankudinova, the nursing assistants Basova and Shubina, and the building manager Protasov offered worthy resistance. They managed to break through to the firefighting-equipment point and get hold of two crowbars and a gaff.

With courage worthy of the Ryazan folk hero Yevpaty Kolovrat, the small group broke through the lines of old women several times, but there was nowhere they could go to escape from them. The first to fall was Shubina, and then the building manager was killed. The cook Ankudinova, the nursing assistant Basova and the colonel were pinned against the wall and held there with crutch blows from a distance until the old women with the axes and knives arrived.

The old women piled corpses on beds to increase the force of the blow. Loaded up with bodies, the beds smashed into the small group like trucks with battering rams. The colonel, Ankudinova and Basova were crushed against the wall. Kaledin fell and was finished off immediately, and Mokhova ordered the old women not to finish off the courageous cook and nursing assistant

These women were no longer young and they possessed exceptional strength and fighting spirit—Gorn had informed Mokhova of this and suggested luring Ankudinova and Basova over to their side.

The outcome was that the nursing home was taken in less than an hour. Mokhova’s army lost only six old “mums”. Another ten of them were slightly injured.

On Monday a new shift came to work—a female doctor, a senior nurse and nursing assistants. These were easily captured, frightened and enslaved. No further killings were necessary; the old women had already realized their own strength.

Paradoxically, no one found out about the bloody battle. The building stood out on the very edge of town. Not many people visited the old folk. The last check had been a month before the skirmish and no review committee was expected now until the New Year. In any case, times were getting difficult and the authorities had no time for the elderly.

Mokhova made a careful study of the personal files on each employee of the Home who had been killed. In all cases personnel without families had been selected.

The old director Avanesov lived alone. They put an old woman in his flat, and she told everyone she was Avanesov’s sister. Any visitors and review commissions could be dealt with by the tamed doctor and senior nurse. Mokhova herself attended meetings at the social-security department, presenting a fake letter with Avanesov’s seal.

The nursing assistants proved to be gratifying material. These women, who had come here twenty years earlier from remote villages, had been completely written off by their relatives. Their lives were failures, they had worked hard, never married and vegetated in hostels. Mokhova sent appropriate letters to the hostels, saying that so-and-so had finally been allocated her own living space.

The caretaker Chizhov, two unmarried nurses and the dishwashers had been living temporarily in an outhouse on the grounds of the Home, so no problems at all arose with them. The dead continued to receive wages for many years and were then sacked retrospectively.

A document was cooked up, supposedly from Protasov, to say that he had been recruited to a job somewhere in the Urals. False documents were also used to dispatch the dead cooks to some remote back-of-beyond. The cohabitee of one nurse was sent a fake letter from her, saying that she was leaving for the Soviet Far
East with her lover. Another nurse was divorced and had only a mother and a son. They were finished off by a suicide granny who was sent to them and poisoned both her victims and herself with carbon monoxide.

That left the numerous dead old men and the problem of burying them. Even with the strength that the Book granted them, the old women could not have buried so many corpses rapidly. Mokhova simply hired an excavator, explaining that a foundation pit needed to be dug for a new laundry.

The excavator dug the pit in one day and they piled the corpses into it. The old men didn’t have any near and dear ones, and if any were to show up suddenly, there was an appropriate record of death ready and waiting.

The captured Home became Mokhova’s citadel. In civilian terms, it was effectively impregnable, with a three-metre-high wall and sturdy gates. A vigilant female guard was always on duty at the checkpoint and the wall was patrolled by an armed detachment.

The army was distinguished by iron discipline and obedience. Mokhova had found something with which to oppose both Lagudov’s select representatives of the intelligentsia and Shulga’s lumpens—the principle of collective motherhood proved to be a reliable ideological platform.

As a former dean of a faculty of Marxism-Leninism, Polina Vasilyevna Gorn knew many things, and in particular that no organization would survive for long without a General Line. “Promise them eternal life. And then we’ll see how it goes,” Gorn wisely suggested to Mokhova.

Mokhova lined up her militia in the yard and told them the story of the Books and the Great Goal. The conclusion to be drawn from her story was that anyone who stayed with Mokhova to the end would be rewarded with eternity. When they heard these dubious good tidings, the old women set the parade ground ringing with roars of triumph. They had acquired a Great Dream.

G
ROMOV’S
BOOKS
still had to be sought out, and in this area Mokhova was exceptionally successful. She began a lot later than her competitors, but she quite rapidly made up for lost time and overtook the leading libraries where collecting was concerned.

Like the “steel bird” in the well-known Soviet song, the old women found their way into places that no armoured train could streak into, no surly tank could creep into and no search parties from hostile clans could penetrate.

The old women’s world was a separate, expansive universe, rich in opportunities and connections. The old women knew people right across the country, and the “mums” wrote letters, got on the phone and sent telegrams to their friends. Quite often trivial “natter sessions” at the entrance to some building were more productive than the months-long expeditions undertaken by Shulga’s or Lagudov’s scouts. There were old women everywhere who had access to bulk stores of information as they supplemented their pensions by working part time for pitiful rates as cleaning ladies or attendants in libraries and archives. Mokhova’s rivals referred to these women who wormed their way in everywhere as “mops”.

The old women entangled the Gromov world in the web of their espionage networks. They easily intercepted hostile agents returning home, all unsuspecting, with their booty. They filled those agents with fatal amounts of drink in trains, ambushed them in the night at railway halts and in pitch-dark entrances on deserted streets. The books flowed to Mokhova.

If the libraries had not taken countermeasures, Mokhova would certainly have acquired a complete set of works. They say that the list of Gromov’s works was stolen from the Lenin Library for Mokhova, but it never reached her—for which the credit must go to the now-defunct clan of Stepan Guryev, a former gold prospector.

His library was located in the Altai Mountains, close to the Bagryany and Severny gold mines. The gold works had been abandoned for a long time and the “readers” began working them again, thereby earning the means to live and to search for the Books. These men were old hands who had been around: we know that migrant Chechen marauders took a passing interest in the mines, but the overconfident sons of the Caucasus were burned alive, after being lured into a trap in a barracks hut…

Guryev’s men caught a female courier carrying material. Demonstrating exceptional self-sacrifice, the old woman ate the tablets of cheap cardboard. Hoping to reconstitute the books somehow, they dissected the old woman’s gastrointestinal tract. They extracted only thoroughly chewed, unreadable shreds, but from the number of cardboard scraps they could conclude that there had originally been seven Books.

Searches required not only patience, but also money. Mokhova conveniently got one of her women hired as senior accountant in the social-security department. This adroit bookkeeper managed things so that the nursing home somehow dropped out of the authorities’ field of view, and yet continued to be financed with government money for many more years.

The Home could hold as many as four hundred “mums”. The flow of pensioners was continuous: following established practice, the men were exterminated immediately and the women were put under armed guard.

After two years Mokhova possessed the largest and most powerful army of all the clans. And in addition, the relative age profile of the “mums” gradually grew younger. From the example of the cook Ankudinova and the nursing assistant Basova, Mokhova realized
that the army needed younger recruits. The decrepit old women had shown that they were outstanding warriors, but only when the Book transformed them. For the rest of the time most of the army had only a third of that strength. Literally a week after the Home was captured the recruitment of fresh forces began.

The idea of eternal life in one’s own body had a lot in common with the ideology of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Perhaps that was why Mokhova often reinforced the ranks of her middle-aged warriors with members of the sect, who gladly made the switch to her, preferring the knife and the axe to handing out stupid leaflets.

The old women involved their own elderly, but still sound, daughters. Semi-alcoholics, divorced or simply solitary, bitter and angry at the whole world, they stayed in the Home, opting to commit to the struggle for immortality.

No one was taught to fight. Gorn wisely assumed that there was no point in disturbing old reflexes. The women were given items with which they had been familiar throughout their lives. The village women were equally skilful with an axe, a knife, a scythe or a flail. Those who had worked at transport depots, factories and construction sites or mended roads were issued with the familiar orange waistcoats, crowbars, sledgehammers, spades and picks.

It should be said that to believe these women were weak was a serious error. In years and years of heavy labour their bodies had all accumulated immense muscular strength. They had simply become psychologically decrepit and forgotten that they once used to swing crowbars and axes untiringly at construction sites, lug sleepers and sections of rail on the railways or carry buckets and stretchers filled with immensely heavy cement.

No one was surprised by the ability of some Chinese martial-arts master, a frail little man, to handle dozens of young opponents. The women, having worked all their lives, also possessed immense reserves of physical strength. The Book was necessary only to help them recall the blunted sensation of Strength.

This infantry of female road labourers and collective-farm
women, whose bodies seemed to consist of flesh that was moulded like lead, crushed the clans of Shulga’s former comrades in arms, Frolov and Lyashenko. In particular the fifty-year-old crane driver Olga Petrovna Dankevich distinguished herself in these bloody campaigns. She had grown so strong that her preferred weapon was the hook of a crane, which she carried on a three-metre-long pole. A blow from that mace would have flattened a rhinoceros. Dozens of readers, and even librarians, met their death from that monstrous hook.

When Guryev’s clan was liquidated and Mokhova took cruel revenge for the courier’s dissected gastrointestinal tract, the imminent danger became clear. For a long time after that an old woman was a symbol of danger and a synonym for cruel cunning.

In 1995 the libraries united against Mokhova’s tyranny. The coalition also had another highly important goal—to wrest from Mokhova the Book of Strength that she possessed. It was said that any copies of the extremely rare Book of Strength that showed up had been assiduously destroyed and perhaps there was now only one copy left in existence. Just how the libraries intended to divide it up among themselves afterwards was not clear.

The opinion was expressed that the Book of Strength would have to be burned or become common property, but no one explained exactly how. The question was swept under the rug to avoid introducing confusion and disunity. In any case everyone was unanimous that Mokhova had to be disposed of.

The coalition army included detachments from sixteen libraries— about two thousand men from various different cities: Saratov, Tomsk, Perm, Kostroma, Ufa, Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, Lipetsk, Sverdlovsk, Penza, Belgorod, Vladimir, Ryazan, Vorkuta and Chelyabinsk. They were joined by a militia of six hundred people fielded by reading rooms.

Mokhova flung almost three thousand mums into the battle. She herself wisely did not take part in the fighting. The army was commanded by Polina Gorn.