Authors: Mikhail Elizarov
A
READING
ROOM
was the name given to a small group organized round some particular Book—of Joy, Memory or, more rarely, Endurance.
The entire Gromov world had begun with small communities like this. When a solitary individual who had penetrated the mystery of a Book turned up, a reading room would form around him, including those comrades whom he had decided to take into his confidence. If someone with a family became a member of a reading room, then soon his nearest and dearest became members too, and that was tolerated indulgently. But every piece of string comes to an end, and at a certain stage the community stopped expanding.
A reading room was the foundation or basis on which, in time, a library could spring up. The opposite also occurred. Following an armed clash a small clan might be reduced to a reading room.
All kinds of people were taken in, from all age groups and all professions. Every reader was free, both morally and—more importantly—financially. This was an advantage that reading rooms had over libraries, where people donated part of their income, the so-called “membership fee”, to fund the search for Books and support the administrative structures.
Just like a library, a reading room had a leader, who was known as the librarian. He or she was the owner of the Book or the person to whom the reading room had entrusted it. Reading rooms did not become involved in the search for Books; people were satisfied with what they had and honestly waited their turn to use it.
At first there were no points of intersection between the libraries and the reading rooms, although they knew about each other. Later the libraries built up their strength and accumulated more Books. The existence of competitors was incompatible with their totalitarian plans.
Reading rooms were blackmailed and intimidated. Suggestions were made that they should voluntarily give up their Book, and they were promised a place in a library if they did so. Sometimes Books were expropriated. There was an official explanation for this blatant banditry: the reading rooms were declared a hotbed of copyists and the leaders of large libraries called for copying to be halted at any price.
From out of a black void the “torch-bearers” appeared—hellhounds spawned by the will of the large clans. The torch-bearers attacked reading rooms, stole their books and burned them. These losses had practically no impact on the libraries, which had numerous spare copies in their depositories, but the wretched readers who had been deprived of their only Book were left with nowhere to go except into a library.
Against the background of this contradictory situation Mokhova’s star rose high in the Gromov firmament. Following several successful raids on the depositories of influential libraries it became clear that a major battle was inevitable. An appropriate field for it was found in the north of Russia, beside the abandoned village of Neverbino.
And then the members of several clans, including Lagudov’s and Shulga’s, appealed to the reading rooms for help in the struggle against Mokhova, promising them absolute immunity from all financial levies in the future. That was why so many volunteers assembled near Neverbino. They came from every corner of the country to bear arms and stand up for their own reading rooms and Books.
T
HE
COALITION’S DETACHMENTS
were organized in a primitive fashion, after the example of the Russian forces at the Battle of Kulikovo Field. The individuals in its staff headquarters were remote from modern military tactics, but nonetheless—as became clear later—quite practical in their approach.
The avant-garde of the formation consisted of the patrol and advance regiments, made up of reading rooms. Located behind them was a large regiment made up of brigades from six libraries, with its flanks protected by right-flank and left-flank regiments, each consisting of four combined brigades. Sheltering behind the large regiment was Shulga’s clan, which called itself the reserve regiment, and the ambush regiment stationed in a small stretch of forest nearby was the detachment from Lagudov’s clan, which also had only moderate claims to excellence as a fighting force.
Books of Endurance were extracted from secret depositories. Special readers, gathering groups of fifty people around them, read through the Books, straining their voices as they rendered the listeners’ bodies insensible to wounds.
The allusion to Kulikovo Field was reflected in the challenge to a duel issued to all comers by the crane driver Dankevich as she whirled her terrible hook round her head. No duel took place, however— no Peresvet could be found among the ranks of the libraries.
Battle commenced at about two o’clock in the morning. Pumped full of strength, the “mums” moved in to attack the patrol and
advance regiments. After suffering heavy losses, the reading-room militias pulled back.
Polina Gorn issued orders from a low hill where she was surrounded by her guard. Seeing that the frontal attack had run out of momentum and was threatening to turn into a pointless, drawn-out battle, Gorn created an advantage of numbers on the flank by throwing six units of a hundred women against the left-flank regiment, which fifteen minutes later no longer existed, having been crushed by the hammers of former railway workers.
Shulga’s reserve regiment, which was responsible for preventing outflanking movements, abandoned the left-hand regiment to its fate, swung round the right-hand regiment and made straight for the high ground where Gorn’s headquarters was located.
The detachments led by the mighty Dankevich emerged at the rear of the combined forces, creating a genuine threat of encirclement. Lagudov’s ambush regiment struck at the rear of the mums who had broken through. The sudden introduction of fresh forces did not change the situation significantly. What saved the coalition was the passage of time. The effect of the Book of Strength had partially worn off—it had been read to the old women in advance, to provide the strength required for the forced march from the railway line to Neverbino.
Gorn’s bodyguards perished in the cruel skirmish. An old woman who looked very much like Gorn was cornered by Shulga’s soldiers. She fought desperately until she suddenly weakened and Shulga, goaded on by the Book of Fury, split his opponent’s head open.
The death of their general was the signal for mass flight by Mokhova’s army. Weakening as they ran, the old women were pursued like Mamai as far as the railway station. No more than a few dozen survived.
Rumours circulated that Gorn herself did survive, that it was her double who had been killed, that Gorn and two dozen of her closest comrades in arms who had retained their agility managed to hide and several days later reached their citadel,
the nursing home. But it was preferred not to broadcast this information widely.
Many clamoured that Mokhova should be polished off in her lair and the Home should be taken by storm, otherwise the hydra would sprout more grey-haired heads, but this suggestion was stifled with the argument that Mokhova was finished anyway and “her fangs had been drawn”: a scorched fragment of the Book of Strength was found at the site of Gorn’s headquarters—it was believed that Gorn, sensing defeat, had destroyed this unique copy, probably the only one still in existence.
The price of victory was great. The combined forces had lost about a thousand men in the battle and hundreds had been wounded or maimed. Needless to say, the reading rooms had lost most of all.
The bodies of the dead were carried to a deep ravine, covered with caustic fertilizer to accelerate decomposition, and earth was scattered over everything, so that no pit remained. Seeds of common burdock and other fast-growing weeds were also thrown into the earth. In spring, burdock of gigantic size sprouted across the ravine, concealing for ever the bodies of those who had fallen at Neverbino.
On their way home, the reading-room militiamen and even the leaders of libraries that had taken a mauling spoke bitterly, in half whispers, saying the Neverbino bloodbath had been deliberately planned by Mokhova’s, Lagudov’s and Shulga’s analysts in order to cut back the exorbitantly swollen numbers of people who knew about Gromov. The battle had reduced that world by a quarter.
At about the same time a new agency of power and administration was established—the Council of Libraries. Lagudov, having emerged from the battle with minimal losses for his clan, had more influence than ever, and he promoted the idea that only “natural librarians”—that is, those who had independently penetrated the essence of Gromov’s Books—should have the right to be the chairman of the council. And after the Battle of Neverbino, there
were officially only two of those left—Lagudov and Shulga. The Krasnoyarsk librarian Smolich, Nilin from Ryazan and Avilov from Lipetsk had been killed.
The council confirmed the official decision to grant the reading rooms financial immunity. A thorough census was carried out; reading rooms were normally named after the places where their members lived, or sometimes the name was derived from the surname of the librarian or founder.
All the reading rooms, with the exception only of those who fought at Neverbino, undertook to pay the council a tax of ten per cent of members’ income. Naturally the proceeds were deliberately reduced by readers who concocted false documents. The council therefore toughened up the rules and replaced the moderate tithe with a unitary annual tax—a specific sum was set for every individual Book.
At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, it should be said that the council did not rest on its laurels at this stage and went on to repress the independent groups completely. The reading rooms were coerced into becoming branch lending libraries. Henceforth a Book only nominally belonged to a reading room—the true owner of the Book was the council, which rented it out.
A table of fines was also drawn up. Any reading room that was heavily fined twice was disbanded in the name of the council and its Book was subject to confiscation. Non-compliance was punished with great severity.
Offences included, for instance, the presence of a copyist among a reading room’s members, excessive garrulity on the part of any reader, theft and concealment of a newly found Book—any action capable of posing a threat to the conspiratorial secrecy of the Gromov universe.
Unfortunately the edict of immunity was systematically violated, if only because by no means every library accepted its legality—those who had not taken part in the Battle of Neverbino, for instance. These clans, who were not members of the council, acted crudely
and cruelly, like all aggressors. Even if a reading room successfully defended its Book in battle, it lost so much blood in the process that it became easy prey for looters or other predatory clans.
Artfully engineered provocations also took place. It was enough to discredit an undesirable reading room twice for the council to take an immediate decision to disband it. For situations like this several programmes of social rehabilitation were developed. It was considered a great stroke of luck if the readers were all registered with the nearest library, without being broken up—and the concept of —near” was distinctly relative: quite often people had to travel more than a hundred kilometres to a Book. Membership dues and the cost of travel together took a heavy toll on readers’ pockets
More often a different, tragic scenario was played out. Local or regional libraries refused to take all the strangers at once, arguing that they were already overfull. Preference was given to applicants who earned at least a minimally acceptable wage, out of which membership dues were then deducted. The readers with low incomes were scattered to any libraries where there were vacancies. We can imagine what an assignment to Irkutsk or Krasnoyarsk meant for someone who lived in Omsk. Many refused to make the move and joined the queues of “victims”. As a rule these broken people went to seed, becoming vicious and violent. It was from their numbers that the council formed its brigades of torch-bearers. These mercenaries willingly carried out even the very vilest of missions since, after all, the reward for the job was a Book.
Readers who rejected this situation could only accept the challenge and face up to an enemy who outnumbered them many times over. It is obvious how these battles ended, when twenty brave defenders of a reading room fought against hundreds of choice warriors sent by the council…
During these troubled times I became a librarian. My reading room owned a Book of Memory and was frequented by seventeen readers.
I
MYSELF
DID NOT
read the Book of Memory until a month after I took up the job, and I must confess that I have not reread it often. The “memory” induced has always been the same, and it sometimes seemed to me that it might be worn out by repetition, like a pair of trousers.
Actually the sensation experienced cannot really be called memory or recall. Dream, vision, hallucination—these words also fail to capture the essence of the complex condition in which the Book immersed me. Its gift of deception to me personally was an entirely invented childhood, full of warm emotion and joy, and I immediately believed in it, because the sense of living this vision was so total: in comparison, real memories were mere bloodless silhouettes. In fact this three-dimensional phantom was experienced more brilliantly and intensely than any life and consisted only of little crystals of happiness and tender sadness, shimmering with the bright light of one event after another.
The “memory” had a musical lining, woven out of many melodies and voices. I caught echoes of ‘The Beautiful Distance’ and ‘The Winged Swing’, a polar-bear mother sang her lullaby to little Umka, a troubadour lauded a “ray of golden sunlight” in a velvety baritone, a touching little girl’s voice asked a deer to whisk her away to magical deerland, “where pine trees sweep up to the sky, where what never was is real”. And following those pine trees, my heart tore itself out of my breast and flew away, like a bird released out of warm hands.
To the accompaniment of this pot-pourri filled with rapturous tears, I saw New Year round dances, fun and frolics, presents, sleigh rides, a puppy with dangling ears yelping clamorously, thawed patches in spring, little streams, May Day holidays with banners and streamers, the unbelievable height of a flight on my father’s shoulders, a vast expanse of smoky dandelions sprawling in front of me, cotton-wool clouds drifting across the sky, a picturesque little lake, pierced through with reeds, trembling in the wind, silvery small fry darting through the warm, shallow water, grasshoppers chirring in grass tinted yellow by the sunlight, purple dragonflies suspended motionless in the air, swivelling their precious, spangled, glittering heads.
I “recalled” my school years. There was a new little satchel, coloured crayons lying on a desk and an open copybook with my favourite words for ever—“Motherland” and “Moscow”—scrawled in awkward handwriting. My first teacher, Maria Viktorovna Latynina, opened her register and gave me a red “A” for penmanship. There was a new maths textbook with a wonderful smell, in which rabbits were added together and apples were taken away, and a nature-studies textbook as fragrant as the forest.
Imperceptibly the lessons matured, moving on to algebra and geography, but all this knowledge was grasped with mirthful ease. The winter holidays spilled out into the smooth, frosty surface of the skating rink and a snowball fight started up; then came spring with its chatter of starlings and a hand traced out some funny love note that was passed two desks along to the girl with the cute, light-brown plaits.
Holidays soared through the air like balloons, bright with the rainbow colours of flower beds, and the sun glinted in every window. Summer came and the euphorically blue sky of July swept across over the earth and fell, becoming the Black Sea with cloud foam on its waves. The cornflower-blue mass of Kara Dag loomed through the southern heat haze, the air was a-rustle with cypress trees and fragrant with juniper. With every caressing gust of the
wind the bright two-storey building of the Young Pioneer Camp surfaced out of the greenery. Lenin, as white as sugar, towered up on his granite pedestal and bright-coloured alleys of flowers ran out in all directions from the statue like the rays of a star. Scarlet, resounding happiness fluttered on the slender mast of the flagstaff…
Described in words, of course, this doesn’t sound particularly impressive. But that evening, when the effect of the Book came to an end, I gazed for a long time at a cloud as dark as a liver, creeping across a stormy sky. And I realized then that I would fight for Gromov’s Book and my invented childhood.
It’s incredible how easily my memory accepted this distinction. The phantom from the Book had no claim to kinship with me, and in the final analysis it was no more than a glossy heap of old photographs, the crackle of a home movie projector and a lyrical Soviet song.
Even so, my real childhood—that long, hateful caravan of commonplace events, for which I cared nothing—was immediately relegated to the sidelines.
But all that happened much later; for the first few weeks in the Shironin reading room I cursed my inheritance—without even wishing it, my late Uncle Maxim had played a really dirty trick on me. Together with my uncle’s apartment I had inherited the position of librarian and the Book of Memory.