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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
An epic full of video game-like battles, Russian landscapes and old babushkas, who fight with scythes... As the introduction to this book will tell you, the books by Gromov, obscure and long forgotten propaganda author of the Soviet era, have such an effect on their readers that they suddenly enjoy supernatural powers. Understandably, their readers need to keep accessing these books at all cost and gather into groups around book-bearers, or, as they're called, librarians. Alexei, until now a loser, comes to collect an uncle's inheritance and unexpectedly becomes a librarian. He tells his extraordinary, unbelievable story.
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MIKHAIL ELIZAROV
THE LIBRARIAN
Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
The working man should have the firm understanding that you can make as many buckets and locomotives as you like, but a song and a thrill cannot be made. A song is more precious than things…
ANDREI PLATONOV
Contents
PART I
The Books
GROMOV
THEWRITER Dmitry Alexandrovich Gromov (1910–81) lived out his days in total obscurity. His books sank without trace in a bottomless abyss of recycled paper, and when political catastrophes finally demolished his Soviet Homeland, it seemed that there was no one at all left to remember the writer Gromov.
Not many people had read him. Of course, there were the Soviet editors who assessed the political loyalty of texts, followed by the critics. But it was hardly likely that anyone had ever pricked up their ears in startled interest at the titles The Proletarian Way (1951), Fly On, Happiness! (1954), Narva (1965), By Labour’s Roads (1968), The Silver Channel (1972) and The Quiet Grass (1977).
Gromov’s life story progressed step by step in parallel with the development of his Socialist Motherland. He was educated at a Soviet seven-year school and a teacher-training college, and subsequently worked as the executive editor of a factory’s in-house newspaper. The purges and repressions passed Gromov by and he calmly carried on as he was until June 1941, when he was drafted into the army and found himself on the front line as a war correspondent. In the winter of 1943 Gromov suffered frostbite in his hands—they managed to save the left one, but his right hand was amputated. After the victory was won, Gromov took his family from Tashkent, the city to which they had been evacuated, to the Donbas and stayed there, working in the editorial office of a municipal newspaper until he retired.
Gromov took up the literary pen late, as a mature forty-year-old. He often drew his subjects from the development of the country as a whole, celebrating the everyday, plain, cotton-print life of small provincial towns, settlements and villages, writing about mines, factories, boundless expanses of virgin soil and battles fought for the harvest. The heroes of Gromov’s books were usually “Red Directors” or collective-farm chairmen, soldiers newly returned from the front, widows who had preserved inviolate their love and their civic courage, and Young Pioneers or Young Communist League activists—resolute and jovial, ready and willing to perform some heroic “feat of labour”. Good triumphed with excruciating regularity: metallurgical combines sprang up in record times; a young man who only yesterday had been a student was transformed into a seasoned specialist after a mere six months of practical work in an industrial plant; a factory workshop over-fulfilled the plan and took on additional obligations; in autumn golden rivers of grain flowed into a collective farm’s storage bins. Evil was always re-educated or clapped in jail. And amorous passions also developed—but they were very chaste: following Chekhov’s axiom on firearms in plays, the gunshot of a kiss that was promised at the start of a book was fired as a damp, slobbery blank to a cheek in the final pages. But so much for the subject matter—all of this was also written in a dreary style, in soundly wrought but incredibly insipid sentences. Even the covers, with their tractors, combine harvesters and miners, were made out of some trashy kind of cardboard.
The country that gave birth to Gromov could afford to publish thousands of authors that no one read. The books lay in the shops, their prices were reduced to a few copecks, they were carted off to a warehouse and handed over for pulping, and more books that no one wanted were published.
The last time Gromov was published was in 1977, but after that all those people in the editorial offices, who realized that Gromov’s writings were the harmless verbal trash of a war veteran and that, while there was no particular social demand for them, society had nothing against the actual fact of their existence, were replaced by different people. Everywhere he went, Gromov received polite refusals. The state, already celebrating its own imminent suicidal demise, was hatching out the demonic literature of its own destroyers.
Gromov, a solitary widower now, realized that his allotted time had expired, and he too quietly expired, to be followed ten years later by the USSR, for which he had once written his books.
Although altogether more than half a million volumes of Gromov’s works were printed, only scattered, individual copies had found miraculous refuge in the libraries of clubs in remote villages, hospitals, corrective labour camps and orphanages, or been left to rot in basements, bound round crosswise with string and squeezed in between the documents of some Party Congress and multiple volumes of the Collected Works of Lenin.
And yet Gromov did have his own genuine devotees. And they scoured the country, collecting the surviving books, willing to go to any lengths to get them.
In everyday life Gromov’s books bore titles with references to river channels and steppe grass. But the titles used among Gromov’s collectors were quite different—the Book of Strength, the Book of Power, the Book of Fury, the Book of Endurance, the Book of Joy, the Book of Memory, the Book of Meaning…
LAGUDOV
VALERIANMIKHAYLOVICHLAGUDOV could undoubtedly be considered one of the most influential figures in the universe of Gromovian discourse.
Lagudov was an only child, born to a family of teachers in Saratov. He demonstrated significant talent from early childhood. In 1945, as a youth of seventeen years, he set out for the war as a volunteer, but never reached the front—in April he contracted pneumonia and spent a month in hospital, and in May the war was over—the theme of a soldier who missed the war was an extremely painful one for Lagudov.
In 1947 Lagudov was admitted to the philological faculty of a university. After successfully defending his graduation thesis, he worked as a journalist on a provincial newspaper for twelve years, and in 1965 he was invited to join a literary journal, where he became the head of the review section.
Lagudov’s predecessor had departed from his post after letting a novel of dubious loyalty slip through. Khrushchev’s thaw had already taken place, but the boundaries of censorship remained blurred, and it wasn’t always easy to tell apart a text in the spirit of the new times and anti-Soviet propaganda. As a result both the journal and the publishing house had received a severe reprimand. And therefore Lagudov paid attention to everything that arrived on his desk. After glancing briefly through a story by Gromov one evening, he decided to polish the book off quickly and never come back to it. He had a positively warm review in mind—Lagudov’s conscience wouldn’t allow him to criticize a front-line veteran, even if the veteran’s politically correct text about anti-aircraft gunners was mediocre from an artistic point of view. Before nightfall he had finished the book. Without even suspecting it, the assiduous Lagudov had thus fulfilled the Condition of Continuity. Maintaining his vigilance, he had read the story from the first line to the last, without skipping the dreary paragraphs of nature description or any patriotic dialogue. And thus Lagudov had also fulfilled the Condition of Zeal.
He had read the Book of Joy, otherwise known as Narva. According to his former wife’s reminiscences, Lagudov experienced a state of turbulent euphoria and couldn’t sleep all night long; he said that he had subjected existence to a comprehensive analysis and had magnificent ideas about how to do good for mankind. He said that previously he had been enmeshed in life, but now everything had become clear, and he laughed loudly as he said it. By morning the emotions had subsided, and he drily informed his alarmed wife that it was too early to proclaim his ideas openly. That day he couldn’t go to work because he was in a depressed state, and he didn’t express any more ideas on the subject of universal harmony.
The substantive aspect of the euphoria that Lagudov experienced did not possess any conceptual points of intersection with Gromov’s storyline, and Lagudov himself did not link the events of the night with the book in any way. But nonetheless a certain emotional scar was left on his soul, which ensured that Lagudov did not forget the writer by the name of Gromov.
Eighteen years later Lagudov saw a short novel by Gromov in a seedy little shop at a railway station. Inspired by nostalgia for the happiness of that distant night, Lagudov bought the book; after all the reductions it cost only five copecks and it was not very large, about two hundred small pages—just right for the journey ahead.
In the suburban train circumstances once again assisted Lagudov in fulfilling the two Conditions. Some tipsy young louts travelling in his carriage were pestering the passengers. Lagudov, no longer young and not very strong, chose not to get involved with the burly yobs. As a man he felt ashamed of not being able to pull the villains up short, and so he stuck his nose into the book’s pages, pretending to be someone extremely interested in what he was reading.
The volume Lagudov had picked up this time was the Book of Memory (The Quiet Grass), which cast him briefly into a drowsy state. The book implanted in him a phantom of brilliant radiance, a mythical, non-existent memory. Lagudov was engulfed by such overwhelming tenderness for the life he dreamed of that he trembled in tearful ecstasy at this all-consuming, pure, lambent feeling.
Reading a second Book by Gromov wrought an abrupt change in Lagudov’s destiny. He left his job, divorced his wife and disappeared, leaving no tracks behind him. Three years later Lagudov surfaced again, and a mighty clan had already assembled around him, although its members called themselves a “library”. This was the term that came in time to be applied to all organizations of a similar nature.
In the first instance Lagudov’s library was joined by people on whom he had tested the Book of Memory. Initially he rather arrogantly took the miraculous effect to be the result of his own personal qualities. However, experiments showed that if the Conditions were observed, the Book affected everyone without exception. The psychiatrist Artur Friesman became Lagudov’s closest associate, although for the first few months Lagudov had doubted his mental health.
Lagudov was cautiously selective, recruiting members of peaceable professions that had been reduced to poverty—teachers, engineers, modest workers in the cultural sphere—those who had been intimidated and morally crushed by the sweeping changes of recent times. He assumed that the intelligentsia, humiliated by these new times, would provide amenable and reliable material, incapable of rebellion or betrayal, especially if the Books—and, by inference, Lagudov—could help realize the intelligentsia’s eternal yearning, as a class, for spirituality.
In many respects this supposition was mistaken. Gromov’s Books induced global personality change, and the circumspect Lagudov was merely fortunate with most of his new comrades, in addition to which he received professional assistance from Friesman, who by no means recruited anyone and everyone.
Those who joined the library usually felt profound respect and loyalty to Lagudov, and that was understandable—Valerian Mikhaylovich gave back hope to most of these despairing people tormented by poverty, offering them a meaning for their existence and a close community united around a single idea.
For the first two years the people whom Lagudov gathered under his banner were mostly humiliated and insulted members of the intelligentsia, but then he decided that the library was clearly lacking in a more robust kind of strength. And at this point Friesman came to Lagudov’s rescue. Men who had been shattered by the war in Afghanistan often came to his clinic for help. Friesman worked on these men first, and then handed them over to Lagudov. In 1991 the library was augmented by retired soldiers who had no wish to betray their Soviet oath. The former officers transformed the intelligentsia members into a serious combat unit with strict discipline and a security service. The library could turn out up to a hundred fighting men at any time.
Naturally, the system of selection did fail sometimes. Thoughtless prattlers appeared, who blabbed about the Books at every opportunity. On several occasions the shoots of conspiracy broke through the surface of the ground. But the mischief-makers all suffered an identical tragic fate—they disappeared without trace.
There were also cases of Books being stolen. Lagudov was betrayed by a rank-and-file reader, a certain Yakimov. After being issued the Book of Memory from the reserves when his turn came round, Yakimov duped the curator and fled to parts unknown. Lagudov had enough books, and the library was not impoverished, but the precedent was abhorrent in itself and, in addition, the traitor had managed to make his escape.
Other readers took their lead from this successful crime. These ones were caught. To restore Lagudov’s shaken authority and to deter any future miscreants, the book thieves were quartered in front of the entire library.
Yakimov was discovered by chance a year after the daring robbery. He had taken refuge in Ufa. A punitive assault force was immediately dispatched there, its mission to eliminate the thief and return the Book. Lagudov’s soldiers were greatly surprised when they discovered that Yakimov had not wasted his time in Ufa and had organized a library of his own.
Lagudov’s small detachment took the courageous decision not to wait for reinforcements to arrive. They openly informed Yakimov about the showdown in the laconic “we’re coming to get you” style. Cold weapons were agreed on and a spot outside the city, as remote as possible, was chosen.
It’s worth noting that the readers of Yakimov’s library lived according to the principle “the dead know no shame”. No one won the victory that night. Both adversaries withdrew, exhausted by the sanguinary conflict.
Lagudov didn’t hazard another punitive expedition. He needed to protect the book depository against the enemy closer to home and not send detachments off to the back of beyond, getting faithful readers killed in order to satisfy his own ambitions. His library was in any case surrounded by numerous aggressive rivals.
For a long time Lagudov assumed that knowledge of Gromov was being spread by traitors from his own library. He believed too strongly in his own chosen status and couldn’t possibly imagine that anyone apart from him had proved capable of penetrating the secret of the Books independently. Lagudov regarded all those who founded their power on his discovery as second-rate individuals, corrupt thieves. Even subsequently, when he was forced to abandon his ideas of exclusivity, he only accepted contact on an equal basis—and even then grudgingly—with initial, natural librarians: those who had solved the mystery of the Books with their own brains, without any prompting.
However, the proportion of those who became familiar with Gromov through information leaks was actually rather large and many new clans were organized around fugitive readers, without any theft necessarily being involved—at the end of the Eighties it wasn’t all that difficult to get hold of the Book of Memory if you really wanted to. The most important role was not played by renegades or by rumours, but by the missionary activities of the first “apostles”, whose names have long since occupied their posthumous places in the pantheon of this cruel and secretive society. Some of them are worth mentioning.
Pyotr Vladimirovich Shepchikhin. He worked in a print shop and typeset the Book of Memory. After confusing the dust jackets, instead of the detective novel he had set his mind on, he took home Gromov. By pure chance he got stuck in the lift with the book for the entire night, and when he was freed by lift engineers early in the morning, he came out a different man. A sensitive individual, Shepchikhin immediately realized that the reason lay not in his own physiology, but in the mysterious Book. Shaken by the mystery, he left his job and set off to wander the country, becoming one of Gromov’s most fervent propagandists.
Shepchikhin was killed—in fact he was probably bumped off by neophytes whom he himself had once told about the Book. They did away with him after deciding that Shepchikhin’s propagandist activities were too dangerous to the hermetic isolation of the Gromov world.
Yulian Olegovich Doroshevich. He was undergoing compulsory treatment at an occupational detoxification centre, and in order to avoid being driven insane by the sober boredom, he read. All sorts of garbage had settled in the libraries of those semi-punitive institutions—books that were even slightly worthwhile didn’t linger there for long. But thanks to that detoxification centre Doroshevich discovered Gromov and the Book of Endurance (The Silver Channel). This Book brought any afflicted soul a feeling of great consolation and reconciliation with life. It was said to be of help in cases of physical pain, acting as a general anaesthetic. The Book apparently had no substantial effect on feelings other than grief, fear and pain, but simply froze them into a general indifference. Doroshevich’s own psychological make-up determined the selective nature of his missionary work. He revealed the Book only to those people who, in his view, were the unhappiest. Doroshevich’s life was broken off in circumstances that have never been clarified; it is not known who killed him—probably someone who regarded the sin of murder as far less important than his own suffering.
It is possible that history exaggerates the spiritual qualities of the wandering “apostles” and that in actual fact they, like all librarians, coveted personal ascendancy and also tried to establish book communities, but failed to complete their mission.
Their strange selflessness rather contradicted the specific nature of the mystery. Every new reader who was introduced to Gromov realized that there would not be enough Joy, Endurance or Memory for everybody and it was better to keep mum about the author. In an organized community it was easier to keep the Books safe and increase their number, and therefore those lone wandering pathfinders died out. A library chose its own new readers, more readily recruiting solitary individuals without families and with some kind of mental problem, and examining each candidate at length to make sure they were worthy of communing with the miracle, and would be able to guard and protect it, and even, if necessary, give their lives for it.
In short, Lagudov had plenty of competitors. Soon not only the Books, but also the bibliographies of Gromov disappeared from every public library that was even slightly significant. Even in Moscow’s “Leninka” someone removed all the information from the card index. Consequently, during computerization the data on the missing author were not entered anywhere and Gromov formally disappeared. Someone also made free with the books on the shelves. Without the card index it was only possible to guess at the true number of publications.
By the beginning of the Nineties collectors of Gromov had a list of six already tried-and-tested Books. They also had information about a seventh, which they called the Book of Meaning. It was believed that when it was discovered the true purpose of Gromov’s creations would be revealed. As yet, however, no one could boast of having found a copy of Meaning, and some sceptics asserted that no such book actually existed.
All the libraries regarded a full collection of the works as an immensely powerful spell that ought to produce some kind of global result.
Lagudov’s theoreticians spoke of a “godlike condition” that lasted for the same length of time as the action of any particular Book. No one knew what benefits could be derived from this condition, correctly assuming that the ideas which occurred to someone inside God’s skin would transcend the human level. The rank-and-file readers were informed that, on becoming God, Lagudov would immediately make provision for his comrades-in-arms.
There were discussions about the end of the world, “book poisoning” that threatened the reader with death, or how all the Books, read straight through, would raise the dead. But these were only hypotheses.
It was assumed that Gromov himself might have had a complete set of works, but when Lagudov started searching, Gromov had been dead for a long time. When he died his apartment had gone to strangers and they had cleared out all the junk in the first week.
Gromov’s only daughter, Olga Dmitriyevna, lived with her family in Ukraine. One of Lagudov’s men paid her a visit, posing as a journalist, and was dismayed to discover that she had given the two Books she possessed to a casual visitor who had introduced himself as a literary scholar who was studying her father’s work. Olga Dmitriyevna did not remember the titles of the books either. They seemed to have been the Book of Memory and the Book of Joy.
Of course, Lagudov found out who had got there before him, but that was not much help. He didn’t engage in armed conflict with the competitors involved. After all, no one had deceived him, they had simply been quicker off the mark, and he only had himself to blame. Lagudov drew the appropriate conclusions for the future and tripled his efforts.
Gromov had a brother, Veniamin, to whom he also sent his books, and Lagudov had a stroke of luck with this brother—in addition to the Book of Memory and the Book of Joy, which Lagudov already had, a rather rare and valuable copy of the Book of Endurance (The Silver Channel ) was discovered. Acting like morphine, this book held all who were afflicted with pain and suffering firmly cemented into the library…
The years of systematic work were not entirely wasted. Rumour had it that Lagudov’s depository contained eight Books of Joy, three Books of Endurance and no fewer than a dozen copies of the Book of Memory (The Quiet Grass), which had been published last and was better preserved than the others: there were as many as several hundred copies of it in the world. The Book of Memory was strategically useful; its use made it easy to recruit and retain readers who were susceptible to tender feelings.
Two Books of Memory and an apartment in the very centre of Saratov were exchanged for a dangerous Book of Fury (By Labour’s Roads), which was capable of arousing a state of battle trance in even the most timid of hearts.
The other Books still had to be searched for. Lagudov had high hopes for the country’s outlying regions and its Central Asian neighbours, where Gromov’s Books could theoretically have been preserved, because by the beginning of the Nineties all the Books lying “on the surface” in Central Russia, eastern Ukraine and Belorussia had been picked up by collectors from various libraries.
But when the search became harder, methods that were far from noble came into play. Violent raids on depositories became more and more common.
At about the same time the so-called copyists became active— readers who made copies of the Books to sell for their personal enrichment. The copyists claimed that the effect of a copy was no different from that of the printed original.
But a manuscript almost always contained errors of some kind, or some words that had been omitted, and therefore proved ineffective. Photocopies that should have excluded the possibility of error also had no effect. It was thought that the decisive factor was the printing, and certain Books were reprinted. Rumours concerning the quality of a reprint “fake” were contradictory. In any case it was universally asserted that a copy would never compare with an original.
Forgeries provoked numerous skirmishes, which led to the demise of more than one library that had gone astray. The copyists were outlaws; they were liquidated by their own people and others alike. But they were highly successful in one regard—quite a lot of copies appeared.
That was when the cases of vandalism began. Original Books were sold and exchanged with a page skilfully removed and replaced by any other that was made of similar paper. Naturally, the mutilated Book had no effect. Whereas formerly people had restricted themselves to a cursory glance through a Book, after these incidents they went through the pages, comparing the typeface and the quality of the paper.
There had never been any great trust between the libraries—no one wished to reinforce the power of a rival. Exchanges or sales were extremely rare, and any fraud sparked a bloody conflict.
The resulting battle took place at a remote spot, with all due pomp and solemnity—members of the libraries brought Books attached to poles like holy banners. At first they were originals, later they were often replaced by replicas. Firearms were categorically forbidden. This was more than just some special noble warrior’s code. It was always easier to disguise stab wounds or crush injuries as accidents or ordinary “domestic incidents” for the outside world, with its morgues, hospitals and law-enforcement agencies. Bullet wounds could only be interpreted in one way. And apart from that, weapons of that sort were noisy.
Usually household items were employed in the fighting—knives as big as butchers’ cleavers, axes, hammers, crowbars, garden forks and rakes, flails. In general terms, the detachments of fighters armed themselves in the manner of Yemelyan Pugachev’s peasant army or the Czech Hussites, and the sight of these people inevitably brought to mind the idiom “battle to the death”, because with a scythe and a meat cleaver the sensation of death was especially keen…
No one saw Lagudov during his final years, apart from his very closest associates. It was said that Valerian Mikhaylovich went into hiding, fearful of hired killers from competing libraries.
SHULGA
NIKOLAIYURYEVICHSHULGA was born in 1950. He grew up a shy, timid boy, was a good pupil in school, but suffered from indecisiveness. A catarrhal infection left Shulga with a facial tic and he underwent several unsuccessful operations that left deep scars. Shulga was very embarrassed by his problem, which was emphasized by unwieldy glasses. He had almost no friends. In 1968 Shulga went to a teacher-training college, but in the third year he abandoned his studies and enlisted for a Young Communist League construction project in the north, where, as he put it, “people are not valued for their appearance, but for their labour valour”.
Defying his own nature as a member of the intelligentsia, Shulga spent a couple of years as a labourer in oil prospecting. The work was heavy and boring, and people laughed at Shulga anyway because he, with his far from heroic appearance, explained his tic and scars as the legacy of an unsuccessful bear hunt.
In 1972 Shulga signed on with a group of fur trappers. The team also included two hunters and a guide from the local population. A blizzard drove them into a hut and interred them under snow for a month. Centuries of human experience in the taiga warned of the dangers of collective incarceration and the guide worked a spell so that the men wouldn’t start shooting each other in their claustrophobic desperation.
The folk magic failed, overwhelmed by a mightier enchantment, and it all ended in disaster. In addition to salt meat and buckshot, the previous occupant had left behind about a dozen books, jumbled together with newspapers—as kindling. Out of sheer boredom Shulga started reading Gromov. He found himself with the Book of Fury (By Labour’s Roads). He didn’t understand much about literature, and the dreariness of the text suited his temperament. And so Shulga fulfilled the two essential Conditions of Zeal and Continuity.
And after the Book had been read, death came to the hut. In an attempt to conceal the crime, Shulga dismembered the dead men and carried them out into the taiga. The remains were discovered by a search party and the bodies were identified. Shulga appeared in court. He didn’t deny his guilt and sincerely repented of what he had done, attributing his appalling actions to intoxication by the sable poison that the hunting party carried—to avoid damaging the precious skins, the little animals were poisoned. He claimed that somehow the poison had found its way into his food.
Shulga told the court that he was reading by candlelight when he felt a “change of state”, as if boiling water had run through his entire body.
Very probably an offensive comment had been cast in Shulga’s direction. For instance, someone said: “Stop wasting the candles on useless crap, you twitchy wanker.” Men rendered bitter and exasperated by enforced incarceration are not particularly choosy about how they express themselves, and cramped conditions offer plenty of occasions for crudity.
Shulga experienced a surge of superhuman aggression, grabbed hold of an axe and did away with the guide and the hunters. After a few hours his fury evaporated and the realization of what he had done hit home.
Shulga underwent the relevant tests and no traces of poison were discovered in his body. Taking into account his confession, his cooperation with the investigation and the claustrophobic psychogenic aspect of the crime, the death penalty was commuted to fifteen years in a strict-security camp.
Shulga’s fearsome offence was no help to him in the camp. Ignorant as he was of the finer casuistic points of criminal culture, when questioned he mentioned in his ingenuous answers that he had spent two years studying in a teacher-training college. Lanky and scrawny, with spectacles and a twitching cheek, Shulga had already been dubbed “Head Teacher” at the pre-trial detention centre. He was a perfect target for mockery. Already depressed by his own unattractive appearance, he determined his own status in the camp: somewhere between a downtrodden “skivvy” and a lowly “gofer”—a perpetual “cleaner”.
Shulga was tormented by despair and fear. He was unable to put anything right in his life. On the front lines it was genuinely possible to make the move from coward to hero by performing some feat of heroism. But he didn’t know of any feat or action of any kind that would improve his position in the criminal world, and probably no such action even existed.
Shulga mostly befriended the same kind of misfortunates as himself, the “skivvies” and the “abused”. His neighbours in the barracks, who were “regular guys”, were loath to associate with him, realizing that he was sinking down the hierarchy, and they tried to avoid any unnecessary contact with a man whose excessive helplessness could lead at any moment to his being awarded “a plate with a hole in it”, that is, a demotion to the most despised and abused level of the prison hierarchy.
Shulga was unfamiliar with the prison-camp caste structure. Hoping to get his sentence reduced and receive privileges of some kind, he took the bait offered by the camp administration and joined the crime prevention section. And then he discovered that he had joined the ranks of the “scum”—that was what convicts who agreed to collaborate with the camp authorities were called.
Shulga became a member of the “team”. Wearing his armband on his sleeve, he stood watch at the checkpoint between the “living zone” and the “production zone” of the camp. Bearing in mind his liberal education, incomplete as it was, and his state of health—the tic had grown worse—Shulga was moved to a job in the library. Things were a bit easier there.
Shulga had been in prison for more than five years. In his free time he read compulsively, devouring anything and everything in order to occupy his mind. His fear had diminished somewhat and at moments of inner calm or in the peace of the night he often thought about what it was that had turned him, a good-natured and timid man, into a murderer. His reminiscences led him to that little book with the dirty grey binding that had perished in the fire.
Shulga found Gromov’s short novel Fly On, Happiness! in the prison-camp library. It was a completely different book, not the one that he had read, but he still remembered the author’s name. On Sunday evening, with his typical thoroughness, Shulga read the whole of the Book of Power. At a specific moment he sensed the inner transformation that had come over him, and his mind was suddenly filled with a pulsating awareness of his own importance. Shulga liked this new sensation very much and, even more importantly, he realized why it had happened and where it had come from.
Shulga observed that, thanks to the Book, he was capable of influencing people around him and imposing his will on them. Naturally, it wasn’t the world outside that had changed, but the man who had read the Book. A mysterious force temporarily transformed Shulga’s facial expressions, the look in his eyes and his bearing, operating on his opponent through his gestures, tone of voice and the words that he spoke. You could say that the Book helped Shulga to recruit the souls of those who were part of his social circle—the “scum”, “skivvies”, “gofers”, “stooges” and “lowlifes” (the downtrodden and sexually abused)—all the untouchables of the criminal world.
Meanwhile in the camp the old thieves’ elite was gradually supplanted by a generation of young bandits who no longer honoured the unwritten code of previous times that forbade the humiliation of anybody at all for no particular reason. The school of excess that had been born in the low-security camps invaded the relatively smooth-running strict-regime environment. Life became much more bitter for the lower castes. Downtrodden convicts were humiliated and even sexually abused for mere amusement, out of boredom. The reason for it could be anything at all—a cute appearance, weakness, excessive intellectual refinement.
One day an absolutely outrageous incident occurred in the camp when the lowlife Timur Kovrov “hit on” a young, promising criminal boss—Kovrov flung himself on the other man and started licking him. The high-status thief beat the lowlife almost to death, but he forfeited his previous authority for ever; even worse, now tainted himself, he joined the ranks of the outcasts and soon afterwards was found hanged by his own hand. Kovrov recovered in hospital and rumour has it that his sentence was reduced because of his serious injuries.
Probably no one even noticed that two days before this strange attack Shulga had a talk with Kovrov and urged him to commit the act. This Kovrov had been reduced to the status of a lowlife through trickery—as a novice he had been sat on the “sod’s seat” in the camp cinema. And certainly no one remembered that previously the young criminal boss had openly mocked and bullied Shulga, threatening to “shaft the four-eyed brainy scumbag up the back entrance”.
In this way Shulga invented his own means of defence against the criminal world—employing the inarticulate, filthy, tormented creatures with holed plates as badges of their humiliation and alienation, whose lot in life was merely to open their mouths and assume the pose.
In the space of a month several respected criminal bosses were hit on—all the ones who had ever molested Shulga. It should be noted that high-ranking thieves reduced to low status by a “kamikaze lowlife” didn’t live long afterwards; they slashed their veins and hanged themselves, otherwise their former victims would have raped and abused them with highly inventive cruelty…
Shulga read the Book regularly and every day it lent him an artificial, but nonetheless effective, charisma. Even seasoned convicts, quite unable to understand what was happening to them, couldn’t stand up to Shulga.
Word that he was inciting the lowlifes against the brothers reached the big boss himself—there were informers among the outcasts. The big boss was puzzled by how a worthless scumbag like that could suddenly have started radiating such psychic power. He had a gut feeling that Shulga was cheating in some incomprehensible fashion—and after pondering for a long time, he drew the right conclusion. That night the Book was stolen from Shulga. The big boss never figured out its secret, but essentially he guessed correctly about the source of the mysterious spell.
In the morning Shulga discovered his loss. And the barracks-hut skivvy passed on the message that the elders had summoned the Head Teacher for a parley. Shulga guessed how the meeting would end, but repeated experience of the sensation of power had turned him into a quite exceptional individual.
The showdown took place in the forestry plot. It was February and darkness came early. The big boss was not expecting any resistance. He only had one fighter from his immediate entourage with him, plus a “bull”, a man who had gambled away his life and become a “torpedo”—he was the one who was supposed to take out the upstart Head Teacher. But the big boss wasn’t expecting things to get that far. He intended to suggest that Shulga hang himself, so that the “bull” wouldn’t have to take the sin on his own soul. The noose had already been set up on a convenient branch.
Shulga looked so limp and jaded that no one even thought of checking to see if he had a weapon. But they should have. Hidden up his sleeve he had a heavy section of steel pipe, stuffed with sand to give it extra weight.
Gratified to note that the Head Teacher was no longer pulsating with self-confidence, the big boss was convinced yet again that he was dealing here with a faker who pulled off his trickery by using some kind of unusual hypnosis.
After hearing his sentence pronounced, Shulga merely asked where the Book was now, promising to reveal its fantastic secret. Intrigued, the big boss took the Book out.
Without hurrying, Shulga scooped up a handful of snow and waited for it to thaw into water, then shook his sleeve so that the pipe slid down into his hand and froze solid to his wet palm. He crashed the first blow down onto the head of the “torpedo”. The two thieves drew their knives, but the crushing weapon demonstrated its superiority. Shulga sustained serious damage too. He had just enough strength left to pick up the Book before he passed out.
There was a secret witness to the duel—the prisoner Savely Vorontsov, who had been under Shulga’s magical influence for a long time. Sensing that something was wrong, he had decided to follow Shulga, and had been proved right. Vorontsov’s help could not have been timelier for the librarian, who was bleeding to death. Prising the length of pipe out of Shulga’s hand, Vorontsov flung it over to the dead “torpedo” and raised the alarm.
After some stage-setting the scene looked different: the “bull”, who had lost at cards, had taken violent revenge on the criminal elite and Shulga had been injured when he tried to intervene.
The camp authorities didn’t really believe in this fairy tale, but they accepted it as their primary scenario, especially since there were only two witnesses—Vorontsov and the injured Shulga—and they both said the same thing. Shulga spent a month in a hospital bed and then returned to the camp.
Shulga was able to thwart a second attempt on his life by preventative measures. The thief who was preparing to attack that night was “tainted” that same day by the lowlife Volkov, who died from knife wounds on the spot, but saved his master.
The thieves wisely decided not to tangle with Shulga any more. They couldn’t show him respect, but it would have been stupid to mess with a man who could have an authoritative criminal boss shamed with a single word.
After that Shulga’s life was subjugated to an unvarying routine. In the morning he read through the Book and for the rest of the day he lorded it over the skivvies and abused lowlifes. The authorities thought it best not to interfere in this situation. Shulga’s role as a social counterweight had brought the camp the calm and order that the authorities needed, and for that he was given secret support. As long as Shulga remained in the camp, the thieves tried not to commit any more outrages, and all the castes coexisted more or less peacefully.
Shulga’s closest associates in his future library were the former lowlife Timur Kovrov, and the skivvies Savely Vorontsov, Gennady Frolov and Yury Lyashenko. They were released several years earlier than Shulga, who got out in 1986 after serving fourteen years of the fifteen to which he had been sentenced.
Shulga sought out his old camp comrades, and together with them he immediately began strenuous efforts to collect the Books, since life itself had appointed him a “librarian”. He didn’t share the secret with anyone at first, speaking only in allusions and innuendo. In fact Shulga didn’t disclose the entire truth for a long time, even to the devoted Kovrov. When the first Book of Memory and Book of Joy were found, Shulga was always present at the readings, insisting that the Books’ effect was the result of his own presence.
Shulga surrounded himself with ordinary human material that he dredged from the depths of society, from the low dives and rubbish dumps. Former “shit-shovellers”, “scumbags” and “cocksuckers” became a dangerous force under Shulga’s leadership. Their prison-camp humiliation merely gave them a sense of solidarity, an implacable hatred of society and a single great desire for vengeance—on anyone, on everybody at once. This contingent was the main difference between Shulga’s library and other structures of a similar nature.
As opposed to Lagudov, who had put his money on the intelligentsia, Shulga based himself on the outcasts. In addition to the humiliated strata of criminals, recruits were also gathered from among disenchanted members of religious sects, street bums, bottle collectors, low-grade lumpens who had taken to drink and handicapped individuals who were capable of working. We know that the library was joined by an entire workmen’s cooperative of deaf and dumb carpenters—fifteen hulking great men who were very handy with axes. At the beginning of the 1990s the number of readers had passed the 150 mark.
To finance the clan, its “civilians” skilfully practised their customary professions of begging, petty theft and extortion. The “infantry”—dedicated trackers—got hold of the Books.
Shulga was not mistaken in his choice of social milieu. It was a delusion on the part of the greater society to assume that its outcasts were weak, unreliable and cowardly. On the contrary, the status of outcasts bordered on that of the chosen. Shulga’s men, who communed with the mystery every day, were in their own way no less spiritual and intellectual than Lagudov’s engineers. For them Gromov’s books opened the door into a new universe—a secret, awesome universe, full of riddles and thrilling mystery; there was a struggle taking place there too, there were many dangerous adversaries, there were codes of law for life and for battle, and there was a place for nobility and valour. Everything was decided in honest combat, face to face, like in the olden times. There was an emotional reward, far more powerful than the lift from vodka—hope and faith in the as-yet-unknown gifts that would be bestowed by Books to be found in the future, the Books that had not yet been read.
But of course, not everything went smoothly. In 1989 the library suffered a schism, initiated by Frolov and Lyashenko. They hid the Books of Power that had been found on one of the numerous search expeditions. Frolov and Lyashenko were the leaders of that expedition and, once they got their hands on the books, they wanted leadership for themselves.
Shulga realized that any harsh intervention would only make things worse. A schism was inevitable, and in order to avoid its ending in bloodshed, Shulga decided to lead it himself. A general meeting was held, at which the establishment of two more libraries was announced.
The division went through peacefully. According to the rumours, Frolov took forty men away to Sverdlovsk, and about thirty followed Lyashenko to Sochi. Shulga wasn’t mean with the new librarians; he gave each of them some start-up capital—three Books of Memory and three Books of Joy each—so that the new libraries would have no difficulty in recruiting readers.
Of the “old guard” from the prison camp, Kovrov and Vorontsov remained with Shulga. The clan had been reduced by half, but there was no immediate prospect of any threat to Shulga’s absolute authority. Kovrov and Vorontsov were both reliable and would never think of trying to take his place. Shulga’s library possessed six Books of Memory, nine Books of Joy, four Books of Endurance, a Book of Fury and a Book of Power.
MOKHOVA
IN THE LATE EIGHTIES and early Nineties skirmishes between clans for Books were especially frequent and especially bloody. The viciousness of Yelizaveta Makarovna Mokhova’s library became legendary. The story of this woman, which in many respects determined the fate of all collectors of Gromov, deserves close attention, especially since a great deal is known about it.
Mokhova grew up in a family without a father. She was a withdrawn little girl who was an average pupil at school and had no close friends, since from the earliest classes she was distinguished by a morbid vanity. After graduating from medical college she lived for two years at her mother’s expense, officially working somewhere as a cleaner, then passed the exams to join the evening department of an institute of pharmacology. During the day she worked in a chemist’s shop.
After receiving her second professional diploma in 1983, Mokhova found herself a job in an old folk’s home.
She enjoyed preparing the medicines there and the laboratory was cool and quiet. Among her powders and test tubes Mokhova secretly revelled in the covert power she held over her decrepit wards, aware that her mere wish was enough for any medicine to be transformed into a deadly poison, and it would be quite impossible to expose the poisoner—Mokhova had been an assiduous student and had a good grasp of the finer points of her trade.
Sometimes, just for a joke, Mokhova would sprinkle some caustic muck into an ointment for bedsores, imagining some old woman scrabbling away in bed as she struggled to reach the source of that fiery itch with her arthritic hand, or goggling blankly at the black ceiling for hours, trying to fall asleep after taking a sedative half composed of stimulant caffeine.
Another few years were passed with these amusements. Mokhova didn’t marry, and for that she blamed her mother, with whom she shared an apartment. As a result of these reproaches, or perhaps of some inner melancholy, the mother died. Without her pension Mokhova didn’t have enough money to live on, and she got herself another job, working half time as a nurse in the women’s section of the Home.
She found it hard there at first. There was a terrible stench in the wards—the bedridden old women relieved themselves where they lay. It wasn’t possible to wash a good hundred patients several times every day, and some nursing assistants preferred to keep the windows open to maintain the flow of fresh air. At first the old women caught cold and died, but the ones who survived actually grew hardier, and the staff suffered more seriously from the freezing cold than they did.
Attempting to fight the stench at its origin, the nursing assistants frequently didn’t feed the especially messy patients adequately. The only thing that the old women were not denied was food for thought; they were always given newspapers, the magazines Health and Working Woman, or the books that were in the library.
Mokhova rapidly found her feet in her new job and, what’s more, she resolved the problem of the overpowering smells far more humanely than her colleagues. Her professional knowledge prompted the answer. Mokhova made up a binding medicine that the nursing assistants added to the old women’s food, and after that even the worst “poopers” relieved themselves in goat’s pellets, and no more frequently than once a week.
The decisive milestone in Mokhova’s life was the day when the extremely rare Book of Strength, known to the outside world as The ProletarianWay, came into the hands of eighty-year-old Polina Vasilyevna Gorn.
It was more than a year since Gorn had lapsed into senile dementia. She didn’t talk much, having lost the skill of speech, but her memory retained the ability to read. She didn’t understand the words very well, but was still able to construct graphic symbols out of them—she no longer needed the meaning. Because of her insomnia Gorn read the entire Book of Strength in a single session, satisfying the two Conditions, and arose like Lazarus. For a while the Book gave her back her pep and part of her mind.
Mokhova glanced into the ward at the noise and saw a bizarre scene.
Gorn, who always lay there in a filthy, soiled nightshirt, was dashing about between the beds with a rapid, mincing gait, grabbing at everything that came within reach. Suddenly halting in the middle of the ward, Gorn gave an agonized cry, as if she had forced a cork out of her dumb throat—“Ilya Ehrenburg!”—and burst into violent laughter. After that the words came tumbling out one after another, like grains of hail falling on a tin roof: “So long ago! It worked! Soldier, soldier! Lady’s! Raw! Lady’s! I forgot, you know!” Gorn tried to name the objects she came across, but her memory couldn’t manage that, and she described their qualities out loud. Grabbing the cushion out from under the head of the woman next to her, she growled: “Lopill? Wollyp? Soft, comfy! Sleepy time!” Or, when she knocked over a box of sewing accessories, she cried out: “Fumble, thumble. Mustn’t prickly! Jab-jab!”
The other old women started falling asleep and Mokhova got ready to tie Gorn down and give her a sedative injection.
Gorn saw the syringe of cloudy liquid in Mokhova’s hand and her eyes flashed spitefully. But she didn’t dare to attack Mokhova and chose a tactical retreat instead. Gorn skipped lightly over lockers and beds, like a goat. Mokhova, who was fifty years younger than her, simply couldn’t keep up. She felt ashamed of her slowness and vented her spite on the women who had now woken up, all popping up on their beds like little roly-poly dolls and following the chase. Mokhova dealt out stinging slaps left and right, knowing that the unfortunate old women’s sclerosis would never let the truth be known.
Mokhova pursued the nimble Gorn with the syringe for a long time, dreaming of jabbing her with the medicine that would freeze her high spirits just as soon as possible. Eventually Mokhova drove Gorn into a corner and tumbled her over onto a bedside locker. Gorn tried furiously to fight Mokhova off, kicking off her slippers and scratching furiously like an animal with all four limbs at once. She wheezed out words that almost made sense: “You’ll dirty! Prostitute! Infect me! Whore! How old are you?” And her hooked nails, which looked like excrescences of amber, ripped Mokhova’s white coat.
After her night-time injection Gorn lay without moving for two days, then she revived slightly and, early on the third evening, reached out her hand for the book. Mokhova didn’t bother Gorn, but as she walked through the ward occasionally, she heard intermittent muttering—Gorn was monotonously reading the book aloud.
At about midnight a racket broke out in the ward again. The same story was repeated, with the difference that Gorn had grown even stronger now and didn’t run away, but joined full-blooded battle.
Soon Gorn was lying strapped down on a bed, tossing her head about wildly, with a crimson bump swelling up on it.
Mokhova had been mauled as badly as Lermontov’s novice in his battle with the badger: her neck, face, breasts and arms were covered with deep, bloody scratches. She was very finicky about her appearance, and the wounds made her absolutely furious.
Mokhova darted across to the bed, swung her hand and punched Gorn hard on the jaw. Her fist felt the crack of the dental plate as it broke.
The old woman pushed the two fragments out with her swollen tongue and suddenly said quite lucidly: “Don’t hit me, Lizka!”
Mokhova had just raised her hand for a second punch… The old woman started squirming about and added resolutely, building sentences out of the growling words: “I’ll. Do. What. I’m. Told. Read. The. Book. There’s. Strength. In. It.”
Gorn told Mokhova everything that she’d understood about the Book. At first Mokhova didn’t believe what Gorn said, but she wiped away Gorn’s blood and applied a cold compress to the bump. Mokhova spent all the next day pondering something, then she volunteered to take a night shift out of turn. The nursing assistant who was supposed to help Mokhova was allowed to go home.
Mokhova hadn’t been intending to read the book herself; she was expecting Gorn to do that, and she was planning to observe her. But the bump on the head affected Gorn’s health badly: after the effect of the Book of Strength wore off, she didn’t even return to her former feeble, semi-demented state; she just slept, groaning intermittently.
Mokhova sat down not far from Gorn, in order to follow her reactions, and started reading aloud. It wasn’t easy; her voice gradually became hoarse and her attention faded. But Mokhova had completed courses in a training college and a higher institute, and she knew how to cram.
Early in the night Mokhova completed the Book. Silence reigned in the ward. Mokhova looked at Polina Gorn and shuddered in surprise. The old woman was already sitting up on the bed with her legs dangling over the side like black branches.
“Lizka!” Gorn barked, but in a perfectly amicable manner, and started darting about the ward, working off her excess strength.
Suddenly the other old women started getting up. A cold shudder ran down Mokhova’s spine. The Book hadn’t started to affect her yet. Reading aloud, directing the words outward, not into herself, had retarded the effect. Slipping out into the corridor, Mokhova locked the door of the ward and set a chair against it, in order to observe what was going on through the window above it.
What she saw was both terrifying and amusing. The old women were making extremely strong, sweeping movements with their arms, making it look as if they were hugging themselves, and jerking their legs out forward like the soldiers who guarded Lenin’s mausoleum. At the same time the expressions on their faces were a succession of every possible contortion and grimace. Sometimes the old women blurted out words—“intestine”, “health”, “labour merit”—or else they simply laughed.
Like Gorn on that first night, they tried to name the objects around them. “Spenil, Pilsen!” an old woman with tangled hair shouted out, looking at a ballpoint pen. “Make letters!”
“Plamp!” howled another, staring at the ceiling.
A third one chanted: “Kittle! With warm water!”
A fourth one grabbed hold of an alarm clock and wheezed intensely: “Lome! Lome! Tefelome! Don’t remember!” And she growled furiously: “Tame!”
When they crashed into each other, the old women tried to introduce themselves; “What name? Anna Kondratyevna! Forgot what I wanted! How old? And my name’s Tarasenko! What name? Krupnikova. Anyway, it was a good dress. And we ate well! What did you eat? Is your name Alimova? Galina! Alimola? I told you, old you, sholed you. You’re called Galina? Galila. Dalila. How old are you? Six point two roubles. No, point three roubles!”
When she saw Mokhova’s face pressed up against the glass in the door, the old woman with the alarm clock shouted out ferociously: “Mirror!”
Mokhova’s fear left her when she felt the Strength. And from that moment on she thought about how to make use of this property of the Book that had been revealed to her. Naturally, she didn’t intend to write a sensational article for a medical journal.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a heavy blow against the door. The old women had lined up into a live battering ram, determined to break out.
Mokhova wasn’t afraid of the encounter. She already knew that the berserk old women could be subdued and pacified. Gorn’s example proved that. Mokhova had prepared a club in advance—a length of high-voltage cable with a heavy tin-bound core of metal wires.
A blow shook the door. Bed castors squeaked across the linoleum. Mokhova understood the tactical concept when the glass in the window above the door flew out and an old woman appeared in the aperture. The metal mesh of a bed had served as an excellent trampoline, tossing the old woman two metres up into the air. There were still fragments of glass in the frame and the old woman had impaled her stomach on them. Bleating in fury, she carried on trying to crawl through. Inverted Himalayas of blood slowly oozed down the door, making it look as if the old woman had put out bloody roots.
The second assault was launched more successfully. First a mop flitted about in the broken window, knocking out the shards of glass. A metal mesh bed base creaked again and a different old woman flew into the opening and started climbing down the door into the corridor.
Before the old woman could crawl out, Mokhova stunned her with a blow of the club. Then she opened the door and skipped back a few metres.
The old women came piling out of the ward and surrounded Mokhova. Gorn stood beside the door, indicating that she wasn’t getting involved in the fight.
The old women raged and howled, but they didn’t dare attack. Anyone who bared her teeth, as if she was about to pounce, earned a heavy blow from the club. Eventually an old woman by the name of Reznikova assumed the role of leader.
Stepping forward, she fended off a blow from the club with the mop. She raised her hand, calling for silence. Mokhova was in no hurry and she let the old woman have her say. An utterance vaguely resembling coherent speech followed; “Now, in the first place, first of all! We have to do! The same way as yours, that time! Today I did forgot, as they say! I did very bad today!”
The old women started murmuring approvingly in response to this gibberish and only Polina Gorn asked: “Reznikova, are you married?”
“Four years already!” Reznikova snarled, then swung round ferociously towards Mokhova, flinging up the mop.
The heavy cable whistled through the air and reddish-brown glop splashed out of Reznikova’s mouth onto the wall. Mokhova swung her arm back again and the old women trudged into the ward, whimpering discontentedly.
