The Librarian Read online

  My new purpose in life eventually robbed me of my “solid profession”. From the second year I hardly studied at all, but worked on the CJI. I was granted most of my course tests and exams as a gift, thanks to the vice-president for cultural affairs.

  My own gift for compilation, which had previously manifested itself in the writing of reports, came in handy in my new position. It was easy for me to design programmes for all the amateur concerts and celebrations devoted to the institute’s anniversaries, and I became an indispensable assistant to our club manager.

  A half-hour film about the institute was shot under my supervision. We timed the presentation just right, combining two round dates: the president’s sixtieth birthday and the institute’s sixtieth anniversary, and we said it was a modest gift from the student club.

  The film was called Our Beloved Polytech: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and it was pompously eulogistic. For several years the flattering video was always shown to high-placed guests from the ministry.

  The president was very touched by his present and money started being allocated to the club. Following these subsidies Galoganov, who bought himself a new television, a video player and a music centre, really doted on me.

  The institute’s petty bureaucracy invited me to its parties as one of its own. Sensing imminent promotion, Galoganov, in his drunken generosity, started predicting more and more frequently that I would be his successor in the post of club manager and was genuinely offended because I wasn’t ecstatic at the prospect.

  At the time I couldn’t understand that life had handed me a perfectly tolerable little pattern for a career—a calm, swampy haven. I indignantly rejected these gifts of fate. Instead of consolidating my friendship with Galoganov and the vice-president for cultural affairs, time after time I informed my benefactors with a condescending smile that I intended to take up art seriously and couldn’t give a damn for a future as a petty functionary in a college.

  My parents, of course, tried to change my mind, but I replied harshly that I had promised them a “solid profession” and not a life obliterated by boredom.

  Vovka kept quiet, because she had been morally compromised. She was a second-year student then, and I can’t remember which came first—the melon-shaped bulge of her stomach or the words about getting married soon. And so Vovka didn’t butt in with any clever advice, but devoted assiduous efforts to cajoling passing marks for her exams out of her lecturers, in order not to lose a year of study. For our part, we tried to like Vovka’s fiancé Slavik, a member of her study group. This didn’t prove too hard; at the very first viewing the defiler of virtue won us all over with his meek and obliging manner. He seemed really to love Vovka. They soon married and moved into our old folks’ empty apartment. In June Vovka gave birth to a boy, whom they called Ivan.

  In two years pride had blinded me. I associated freely with the vice-president of the institute and had my own desk in the office of the club manager. I wasn’t writing any diploma thesis at all. At Galoganov’s request an old diploma work entitled ‘Casting from Lost-Wax Models’ was extracted from the archives and the title page was changed.

  What else was there? In summer, at the end of the fourth year, I got married. At that time student marriages had assumed the proportions of an epidemic. My wife was called Marina. She had a rather pleasant appearance, with features so generically regular that she looked like a statistically average model of an attractive girl. That was the way the propaganda posters used to depict the striding ranks of Young Communist League girls, all with that same collective prettiness. After the first day we met, I wouldn’t have recognized her in the street. The only distinctive thing about Marina was her laugh. It was very melodic and resonant, and she mostly laughed when I flaunted my wit. Eventually I noticed her.

  Throughout my polytechnic years I was never short of girlfriends. I was a rather well-known celebrity. Even so, this Marina saw off her rivals pretty quickly, but I didn’t take that seriously at all: I was genuinely amused by the girl’s hunt for a husband.

  Marina wasted no time and cranked up the relationship so smartly that six months later I was surprised to learn that people were already talking about us as a soon-to-be family, and the strangest thing of all was that I didn’t feel the slightest desire to correct this evident misunderstanding. Even the vice-president, running along the corridor, congratulated me on my imminent wedding.

  My parents were also wholeheartedly in favour. They thought that marriage would make me settle down, forget my stupid dreams and opt for a happy family life instead.

  The part of my soul that was infected by the universal wedding fever falsely reassured me that a wife would not be any obstacle to the career of a future stage director. Everything was decided by a phrase uttered by my boss Galoganov: “What are you afraid of? If you don’t like it, you can get divorced.”

  Somehow it was that possibility of a future divorce that reassured me, and I proposed to Marina. The wedding was attended by a narrow family circle—Vovka was in her eighth month and charmed everyone at the feast with her impressive stomach. As a wedding gift my father-in-law and mother-in-law gave us an apartment, which, however, they registered in Marina’s name.

  Our marriage lasted just over a year. In that relatively short period of time I had learned that my spouse’s weeping, unlike her laughter, was incredibly unpleasant

  After receiving my diploma as an engineer, I started assiduously preparing to join a faculty of stage direction. I set out to reconnoitre Moscow. The Russian capital struck me a sly blow with the rouble. It had never even occurred to me that now I was a citizen of a different country and my education would have to be paid for.

  This woeful fact immediately put an end to any idea of attending a college in Russia. When I got back, I was able to look my acquaintances in the eye with no shame and say that the only reason Moscow was off the agenda was money. I reproached my parents: you see, I ought to have gone then, five years ago, when the Soviet Union still existed.

  What my home city had to offer for the realization of my dream was an institute of culture, a cauldron in which the flayed flesh of all the Muses seethed and bubbled. In among the faculties of music and those offering drilling in leftist decorative and applied arts, the custodians of academic and folk choirs, guardians of orchestras consisting of dombras and balalaikas and mentors of choreographic ensembles, there was a theatre faculty with departments for the art of acting, directing drama and directing theatricalized performances and festivals.

  More mature now, I took a more sober view of my abilities. My self-confidence had evaporated together with my youth. A week before the exams I found out that the competition for drama was rather high, eight applicants for each place, which was rather strange for our back of beyond.

  The competition for the acting department was a bit lower, but I suddenly felt ashamed of my age; at the age of twenty-two I felt like that late developer Lomonosov, smelling of coastal fish, among the crowd of young seventeen-year-old school-leavers.

  That left the direction of theatricalized performances and festivals, which had a tolerable level of competition at three applicants per place. They also required a document demonstrating experience of working with a collective. Galoganov’s secretary banged out one of those for me in five minutes flat, and the vice-president appended a positive reference to the note.

  I consulted my family. My parents and Vovka said unanimously: “Don’t take any risks—the important thing is to get in. You can change departments afterwards if you like.”

  Yet again I let myself be guided by cowardice. The documents were submitted for “performances and festivals”.

  But even so I was indescribably happy that summer. The girls applying for the acting faculty were so alluring, perched on long high heels and just barely covered by transparent chiffon that fluttered in draughts, baring their youthful charms to the July heat and the male glances of the entrance committee.

  When they heard that I had joined the dir
ection department (I wisely didn’t specify which one), these beauties asked me not to forget about them. They laughed as they said: “You just whistle, young director, and we’ll come flying instantly. You’ll see how affectionately we’ll thank you for a role, dear director…” they promised, laughing and glowing tenderly.

  And then, inspired by my summer ecstasy and my eagerness to whistle to those young actresses just as soon as possible, I showed up at home and informed my odious Marina that I was divorcing her.

  My wife responded with a howl like a police siren, which, fortunately, zoomed by as quickly as a yellow car with a flashing light. Literally one week later I was once again a bachelor and full of hope. My parents grieved for a while and calmed down, and kind Vovka said that she had never liked Marina anyway.

  My memories of the next five years are bitter ones. “Producing folk spectacles” turned out to be much the same as metal studies, only in the field of art. The people studying there were all grownup and ugly—dumpy young women, pushy thirty-year-old guys from the depths of the provinces, directors of small-town clubs who simply needed a diploma to hang on the wall.

  Acting skills were limited to the development of diction for the first six months: “Betty bought a bit of butter, but she found the butter bitter, so Betty bought a bit of better butter to make the bitter butter better.” The teacher of stage art taught us to bow and to deliver swingeing slaps to cheeks. The acrobatic classes would have done any rest home proud—forward roll, backward roll, half split, arms out wide.

  In directing class we ran through scenes with “justified silence”. These clashes between underwater divers, spies waiting in ambush and married couples who had quarrelled—that is, characters who were logically silent—inevitably turned into series of deaf and dumb convulsions.

  For the second time I took up sociology, philosophy and the forever-foreign English language. New things that were added included the incomprehensible subject of pedagogics, cultural studies and literary studies.

  After my first session in the dean’s office I learned that I wouldn’t be able to transfer to drama except “on a paid basis”. This news hit me so hard that for the next three years I meekly allowed them to mould me into an entertainer of the masses with a tin bucket on my head and a carrot for a nose.

  I should have offered my honest, thunderous repentance to my dream and fled from that den of putrescence, but I suddenly started lying monstrously to myself and everyone else, saying that I was very happy with my studies.

  I practised self-deception. Vovka and Slavik had survived the torment of their institute and little Vanya was going to kindergarten. Soon Slavik got a good job in a company that sold office furniture and Vovka fell pregnant again and delighted us all with a second child, Ilya, so she, Slavik and my parents had even more joyful cares to occupy them…

  By the fourth year of study the veil had fallen from my eyes. A belated rescue plan was hatched—to switch from the day faculty to the extramural one and immediately get a job in the old student club. I dashed headlong to the alma mater I had derided, but I was too late. No one remembered the creator of the film Our Beloved Polytech any longer. The president had retired, Galoganov had been thrown out for embezzlement and the post of club manager had long ago been occupied by a man worthy of it.

  Overwhelmed by the panic of an antiquated twenty-six-year-old, I transferred to the extramural faculty and laid siege to every House of Culture in the city in my search for work. Both the “Builders” and the “Railwaymen” rejected me scornfully. I was given refuge by the local television channel, where I tacked together scripts out of inarticulate raw text. Then I squeezed my way into a smalltime radio channel, where I edited an ignominious comedy programme.

  At the age of twenty-seven I was awarded my second degree diploma. In September I took part in a shoddy mass spectacle entitled Day of the City. The artistic director turned out to be shrewd and sticky-fingered. We presented the municipal executive committee with an impressive budget for all sorts of folk costumes, round bread loaves and linen towels representing Slavic hospitality and fees for the groups taking part, then made do with less and divided up the remainder among our artistic group.

  The petty copecks paid by the television channel and the radio were humiliating. I was short of money. In late December I was invited to play Grandfather Frost and, casting shame aside, I pulled on the cotton-wool beard and eyebrows, flung the sack over my shoulder and set off round the kindergartens. Our pitiful trio—Grandfather Frost, the Snow Maiden and an accordion player—gathered the toddlers together and swiftly taught them to sing ‘A fir tree was born in the forest’ and ‘Merrily we stride together through the wide expanses’. The ones who “sang along together” loudest were handed presents. After the children’s matinees, having parted from the accordionist and now drunk, I fornicated with my Snow Maiden, who was perhaps not especially beautiful, but most amenable.

  Thanks to my connections at the institute I was given a part in a New Year’s play for a children’s party, held in a former House of Young Pioneers. Dolled up in flared pants, a pink shirt and a tie, I shouted, “Oh!” in a hoarse voice through a hole in a papier-mâché mask that was supposed to represent a wolf’s jaws every time I saw the rabbit—this one was female—and pursued her clumsily round the stage. “Just you wai-ai-ait!” I growled, planting my feet wide, stumbling and falling flat, like a wardrobe, bruising my knees.

  The plot-line had me and Old Lady Shapoklyak playing all sorts of tricks on the positive characters—we stole the trunk with the fairy tales in it, we were exposed, we repented and were forgiven, and then we danced round the beautiful New Year tree with the sticky-handed children.

  The humiliation concluded with a modest buffet meal and the lovable rabbit led me away to spend the night in her burrow.

  THE INHERITANCE

  AND THEN, at the Russian Orthodox Christmas, the notification of Uncle Maxim’s death arrived. The police report informed us that M.D. Vyazintsev had been found dead with multiple contusions and knife wounds. A slip of paper attached indicated the row and sector of my uncle’s burial place in the Second Municipal Cemetery. The letter had reached our foreign parts only after a long delay—a month after the funeral.

  We were very upset by this tragic news. My dad pressed his fist against his lips and whispered, “Oh, Maxim, Maxim.” My mum burst into tears—she had always felt sorry for my dissolute uncle. I remembered that seven years earlier she had wanted to invite him to Vovka’s wedding, but Dad tried to dissuade her: “Maxim will get drunk and make a scene.” In the end we didn’t invite him. And now my uncle was gone.

  As far as we could tell, no one had found the killer and probably no one had even looked for him. My uncle’s former reputation would have suggested that he had fallen victim to his asocial acquaintances. But that was strange, after all, according to what we had heard; he hadn’t drunk alcohol for many years already. In any event the police had simply written him off and had him cremated. Dad kept planning to go to visit his grave, but the idea never got beyond words.

  It’s shameful to admit it, but my uncle Maxim’s death moved on quite quickly from the stage of grief to the routine of receiving the inheritance, in which the main item was a two-room apartment. My uncle didn’t have any family and we were his only blood relatives. This was worth doing. There was absolutely no hope that I could earn enough for my own living space independently.

  When I got married, everyone had assumed that the question of a domicile for me had been resolved. We had immediately given my deceased grandparents’ apartment to Vovka and her husband. My parents had once acquired a dacha plot outside the city, with a little house like the one that Nif-Nif the little pig built. My father kept trying to turn this hovel into a genuine house, but all in vain. A year later I presented my parents with my divorce and returned to my native hearth and home. From May to October my mother and father went away to the dacha, but we spent the winter together, and we were cramped…

/>   But now I could hope to acquire a little pad of my own at last. The only catch was that my uncle had not left a will. And that entailed a whole heap of exhausting bureaucratic formalities.

  According to law, if no claim to the inheritance was received within six months of the death, the apartment reverted to the city, and it had to be won back through the courts.

  We contacted the state notary’s office for the area where my uncle lived and exchanged letters with the Russian consulate. There were no grounds for refusing us. In March we received a document stating that from 1 June my father, as a blood relative, would come into the inheritance. We only had to pay some outstanding fees or taxes.

  The family council decided that I would go to arrange the business.

  I was taking on the difficult task of selling my uncle’s apartment. It was anticipated that if a potential buyer were found, my father would come to help me and collect the proceeds, so that he could check everything and make sure we weren’t swindled.

  We had serious discussions about the problem of moving the money across the border and even considered the possibility of transporting it in the urn with my uncle’s ashes. Mum immediately spoke up against such a sacrilegious conspiracy and said she had better come with my father, and then, with three of us in the same train compartment, we would get the money through safely. But in any case my father wanted to bury my uncle’s urn beside my grandfather’s and grandmother’s graves.

  We had a letter of attorney drawn up, giving me the right to decide all the legal questions, and I packed for the journey, hoping to have the sale completed in a few short weeks and start patching up my leaky life.

  The journey took almost three dreary days. I travelled in a third-class sleeper, so the ticket wasn’t all that expensive. A grey-haired woman who looked like a kindly schoolteacher timidly asked me to swap places with her. I gave up the lower bunk, and the grateful “teacher” plied me with home-made potato pies.