The Librarian Page 6

  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.

  PART II

  The Shironin Reading Room

  THE BOOK OF MEMORY

  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.

  UNCLE MAXIM

  MY UNCLE WAS a doctor by profession. At first his life worked out remarkably well. He graduated from school with a silver medal, second in his class, and went to study at the Medical Institute. After two years of practical work for an institute in Siberia, my uncle was recruited to work in the Arctic.

  I remember Uncle Maxim when he was still young. He used to come to visit us and always brought foodstuffs that were in short supply or things that were impossible to buy in the shops—imported anoraks, jumpers and shoes. One time he gave me a Panasonic twin-cassette deck that was the envy of many of my friends for years.

  We would sit at the family table—Dad, Mum, me and my sister Vovka… Actually her real name was Natasha, and Vovka was just her nickname at home. When Natasha was born, my father took me, two years old at the time, to the maternity home, promising to show me a real, live Thumbelina there. I stood outside under the window and called, “Mummy, where’s Thumbelina?”—and a half-deaf nurse, as kind-hearted as a St Bernard, who was gathering up the rubbish on the steps, smiled every time I said it and told me, “Don’t shout, little one, they’ll bring out your Vovochka in a moment…”

  Well, we would sit there, and Uncle Maxim would tell us all sorts of amazing stories, almost like fairy tales, about the Far North. “In one village a reindeer herder shot himself. They buried him and the next night a murrain broke out among the deer. An old shaman said that they hadn’t buried the suicide properly and he had turned into a demon that was killing the cattle. They dug up the body, buried it again face-down and nailed it down with a walrus tusk. And believe it or not, the murrain stopped immediately…”

  Unlike timid Vovka, I enjoyed these frightening stories. My father, it’s true, claimed that my uncle was rather partial to my mum and inclined to boast a bit in order to impress her. I suppose my father was simply envious of Uncle Maxim, who led such a colourful life.

  But then my uncle stopped visiting us. I heard from my parents that he wasn’t working with the expeditions any longer and had moved from the romantic tundra deep into the boring heart of Russia. But for me my Uncle Maxim remained the hero of an adventure film, a Siberian “Pathfinder”, for a long time.

  As the years passed, my uncle’s halo faded noticeably. “He’s a degenerate” and “He’s a disgrace to the family” my father used to say about him. Apparently while he was in the cold climate my uncle had developed a taste for alcohol, and perhaps the constant availability of surgical spirits—because of his profession—had also played its part, or perhaps he had just fallen in with drinkers.

  When his contract ended, my uncle worked as the head of a department in a hospital and tried to write his Ph.D. thesis. He never started a family of his own. Vodka ruined all his plans. First he was demoted to a neighbourhood doctor, and then sacked altogether for his drunkennes
s. Uncle Maxim rode around in an ambulance for several years, but then they got rid of him too.

  In the last fifteen years he had only appeared at our place twice. The first time he arrived on a plane for my grandfather’s funeral, drank heavily at the wake and even had a fight with my father, and the second time was when my grandmother died. My uncle arrived late for the funeral because he was on a bender and there weren’t as many flights as in the old Soviet days, so he had to come by train. My uncle made a trip to the cemetery, stayed with us for a couple of days, quarrelled with my father and went away again.

  After my grandfather and grandmother died my father used to say bitterly: “It was Maxim who drove them into their graves!” And he was partly right—the old folks suffered terribly over how badly their son’s life had turned out.

  Uncle Maxim only phoned us rarely, and always with the same request—to send him a money order. My father, who had learned from bitter experience, always refused him and one day my uncle called his older brother a “Yid” and disappeared for a very long time.

  Then he started calling again, but he didn’t ask for money any longer; he simply asked how we were getting on. There were rumours that he hadn’t drunk for five years. We found out about it from an old army colleague of my uncle’s, a doctor, who stayed with us when he was passing through and handed on some money from my uncle—two hundred dollars that Maxim had once borrowed from my father. My uncle’s army colleague told us that Maxim Danilovich had given up alcohol, but he suspected that my uncle had been sucked into a different kind of quicksand—apparently some religious organization or other, perhaps the Baptists or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  Uncle Maxim himself didn’t tell us anything specific; his voice on the phone was always cheerful, and when my father asked, “Maxim, have you drunk yourself completely out of your mind? Can’t you even be open with your own brother?”—he just laughed and sent greetings to Mum, Vovka and me.

  CHILDHOOD, BOYHOOD, YOUTH

  I ONCE USED TO DREAM of studying at the Medical Institute, so that, like my Uncle Maxim, I too could roam the country in search of romantic adventure. At the time I never even thought about the fact that a doctor’s profession is a stationary one and medical personnel don’t usually travel much.

  In the final year of school my plans changed. Everything was turned upside down by a theatre club that was organized at school. Unfortunately it was led by an adventurer who had absolutely no talent. After a year we had been irrecoverably inoculated with every imaginable failing of the actor’s art, but the most terrible thing of all was that each one of us firmly believed in his own genius. Instead of preparing for our future lives and choosing a profession to match our abilities, with a decent and stable income, we started dreaming about art.

  In its short existence the club didn’t stage even a single production; all we did was rehearse. Yevgeny Schwartz’s play An Ordinary Miracle, which we had arrogantly chosen to stage, never got any farther than the first act, but we already thought of ourselves as stage artistes.

  I remember what a terrible state of alarm I threw my father and mother into when I announced that I intended to go to Moscow, no less, and join the Theatrical Institute to become an actor.

  I must give my parents due credit, for they did try to rescue their son from the impending catastrophe. The only one who supported me in my vainglorious dreams was Vovka, but only until it was made clear to her that her brother Alyoshka was not going to end up on the practice stage at the Moscow Art Theatre, but go straight into the army. After this sudden enlightenment, Vovka fell silent and I lost my only ally. My parents had already launched a new educational campaign. Now, to spare my vanity, they started denouncing the nepotism inherent in theatrical institutions: “No one ever gets in there without graft.”

  My courage failed me and they cunningly tempted me with a different prospect. My father said that he didn’t want to destroy my dreams, but wouldn’t it be better first to acquire a solid profession in a technical college? And then, five years later, if I still couldn’t live without art, I would be more mature, I would know myself better, and I could go to college to study directing, which already sounded more respectable in itself. I thought about it and agreed to the technical college and a “solid profession”.

  To this day that expression reminds me of something rectangular and heavy, resembling simultaneously a silicate brick and a reinforced concrete pillar. I chose the most solid area of all—“Machinery and Technologies for Foundry Engineering”. In the entrance exams in Maths and Physics I made a whole heap of mistakes and got a pretty bad fright, but they pulled me up to a “B”. After an entirely fictitious exam—a composition—I was accepted for the first year of the course.

  I wasn’t interested in my studies; every subject was alien to me. But I didn’t skip lectures and for the exams I dutifully copied out heaps of cribs, which they didn’t take away from us.

  After the mid-year exams many students were kicked out of the institute, but not out of the Faculty of Mechanics and Metallurgy. They hoisted up our grades as high as they could, and I tried hard not to fall behind too. Doing all those drawings was hard, but even that problem could be solved—for a small reward, students who specialized in perspective geometry would do them for me. My grant was just enough to cover the especially hideous course requirements in the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms—TMM—which had been known since time immemorial as “This Murders Me”. I lived with my parents and didn’t have the kind of financial problems that students from out of town might face.

  It was 1991 and my assessments still contained, as a final flourish from the Soviet age, an examination on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which I passed with a “B”, and a test on Scientific Atheism.

  Of course, I didn’t forget what my true calling was and why I was there—to acquire that “solid specialization”, that indulgence from my parents and myself, so that, with a mechanical engineer’s diploma tucked under my jacket, I could stride fearlessly into the artistic world with a clear conscience.

  When they started developing a team at their institute for the Club of the Jolly and Ingenious competition, I dashed to join it. My first trial appearances on stage made it clear that I was “not funny”. Everyone realized it. I attributed this acting failure to my noble, entirely unclown-like stature and dramatic talent. Disappointed, I consoled myself with the thought that my natural gifts were not those of a buffoon in amateur dramatics, but of a serious artiste.

  I managed to make up two feeble jokes. One played on the name of Ukrainian vodka with pepper, horilka—“In Ukraine they’ve started making vodka for monkeys—Gorillka…”—and the other developed that Russian saying, “There’s no virtue in standing”— “There’s no virtue in standing. Take the weight off. Virtue’s in the backside.” They laughed at the second joke and ditched it. I also reworked the song ‘The Beautiful Distance’ to include the words, “I promise I’ll be cleaner and I’ll shave.”

  My hour of stardom arrived when our institute’s team got involved in the municipal festival. Three days before the quarterfinals, it turned out that the competition sections “Greetings” and “Homework” were still not ready. The Jolly and Ingenious were headed for the bottom, taking their captain with them. They laid out witticisms written on scraps of paper like a game of patience and couldn’t gather them together into a single whole. The mournful prospect of an exit from the festival loomed over us.

  The manager of the student club, Dima Galoganov, dropped in to see us. He was a recent graduate of the institute and now a petty bureaucrat. Galoganov sombrely swore to disband the team in the event of failure.

  During the castigation I looked through the archive, which contained the rejected dross, jumbled it up together with some lightweight jokes, and suddenly a complete plan of the performance took shape in my mind.

  Raking up the pieces of paper and the notebook, I announced that by the next day I would write a complete programme for all t
he sections. In one night of work I managed to sew those dismal scraps together into a colourful and entirely original performance. One leitmotif was particularly successful, using songs in which the words “go crazy” figured at least in passing: “He’s wearing a camouflage tunic, it’ll make her go crazy”, “I’m going crazy or ascending to a higher plane of lunacy”, “And the postman will go crazy trying to find us”, “I’m going crazy over you”. The moment the singer reached that phrase with “crazy” in it, he suddenly started pulling dumb faces, smiling, gurgling and dribbling. In the final song we really cracked the audience up when our entire line-up started gurgling like idiots. Our team triumphantly won through to the semi-final, and a star of Moscow’s Club of the Jolly and Ingenious who was on the jury said that our performing skills were worthy of a higher league.

  The president of the institute congratulated the manager of the student club, Galoganov, on our victory, and Galoganov didn’t forget about me. In three days I had become number one in the team. From being a rank-and-file writer of jokes, I was elevated to a position with obscure contours, within which the functions of a director could be vaguely discerned. Moreover, no one objected to my elevation. On the contrary, I was loudly congratulated and thanked.

  I made haste to inform my family about my success and they nodded smugly—“Well, what did we say?”, “Well, well, only a second-year student and already a director…”—and they winked at me cunningly, as if to say, “The best is yet to come.”