The Librarian Page 4

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.

  The pacification was achieved with minimal casualties: Reznikova had a broken jaw and the old woman who got stuck in the window over the door had deep cuts on her stomach. The injured were carried onto beds and Mokhova gave them first aid.

  The effect of the Book was soon exhausted and the old women started dropping where they stood, like wind-up dolls in which the spring has run down.

  Mokhova dragged the bodies onto beds, washed the blood off the door and swept up the glass.

  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-h
igh 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.

  THE MOKHOVA THREAT

  GROMOV’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”.