The Librarian Read online

  Perched opposite us was a red-cheeked maiden in the collective-farm style. She was travelling with a large bundle wrapped in check cloth, which wouldn’t fit under the seat. During the day the farm girl guarded it vigilantly and at night, just to be sure, she lowered her solid foot, still in its shoe, from the bunk and set it on the bundle.

  A sharp-nosed little man, as frisky as a mouse, settled in above the maiden with a small plywood suitcase. The little man drank tea and told the maiden about his difficult lot in life, repeatedly intoning, “When you’re poor, you’re poor.” He had already managed to soften the female conductor’s heart and get a mattress for free, and every now and then he ran to fill up his glass with hot water, because he was carrying his own strong brew with him.

  I tried to remain reticent and when the “kindly schoolteacher” asked: “Where are you going to?” I replied curtly: “To visit my uncle”—and then deftly stuck my nose in a book and didn’t allow myself to be drawn into conversation.

  On the first night we crossed the border. About a dozen snorers had congregated in the carriage and so I slept badly; even covering my head with the pillow wasn’t much help.

  In the morning the train got stuck at the small station of Zhelybino. My window was opposite a memorial plaque screwed to the peeling station wall: “Here died a valiant death Sergeant Stepan Yakovlevich Gusev, Private First Class Ivan Matveyevich Usikov, Privates Khamir Khafunovich Khazifov, Pavel Kuzmich Fyodorov and Husein Izmailovich Alikperov.” After an hour I had learned this list of the dead off by heart and then the train finally set off again. At midday we passed through Moscow.

  It was hot in the carriage. I gazed interminably at the fleeting whirligig of the landscape. The sky blazed bright blue, little lakes glinted brilliantly. When a bird launched itself off a tree and flew into the grass, the wind carried it away, spinning it round like a scrap of paper. Hills of crushed stone sprang up, only to be replaced by sparse green forest with a clearing full of dandelions spreading through it like a hole. A pine forest began, with reddish-brown bogs stretching away behind it: the rotten trunks of birch trees stuck up out of the water. Then a spruce forest started and was broken off by a bridge. On the other side of the river a modern-looking village with three-storey prefabricated apartment blocks was fenced off by poplar trees. After that came an open field, overgrown with weeds, with a rusty goal frame for football and a spotted goat tethered to it.

  Looking at the abandoned goal, for some reason I imagined a disaster: children were playing football, the ball flew off onto the rails and a child didn’t notice the train. In keeping with my sad thoughts a cemetery and a gingerbread church appeared.

  Station platforms looking like airport landing strips hurtled by so fast that I didn’t have time to read the names. The district towns with their endearing, simple names followed one after another: Pozyrev, Lychevets. The stations there often had only two tracks. While we were standing, local pedlars slouched through the train, offering newspapers and magazines, beer and simple provisions— sunflower seeds, meat pasties, dried fish.

  On the third day I was already sick and tired of travelling and was glad when we passed Kolontaysk in the morning. A few hours later the massive grey, watery expanse of the Urmut Reservoir appeared outside the window, followed by the smoking funnels of a nuclear power station, like chess pieces, and endless stretches of industrial plants, barracks-style buildings with walls of smoke-stained glass.

  The old station building was like a high-domed church, and deep inside it faded Soviet frescoes depicted the Socialist happiness of the past.

  After tumbling out onto the station platform the passengers were surrounded by taxi drivers clamouring insistently like gypsies to offer their motorized services. I asked the one who looked the least mercenary to me how I could get to Chkalov Street. The driver worked his lips a bit, figuring out the profit in his head, and named a price, but I still couldn’t tell if it was acceptable or not—I was confused by the difference between Russian roubles and Ukrainian hryvnias. In roubles it sounded more expensive.

  I apologized, said I didn’t have much money and asked if he could tell me how to get there on public transport. The taxi driver hesitated for a moment before taking pity on me and showing the way. He waved his hand in the direction of a McDonald’s mast with a neon “M” on the top, which was visible beyond the roofs of the buildings.

  Skirting round the buildings I saw a trolleybus-turning circle and a route-taxi stop. To be on the safe side I asked a cultured-looking old woman about the central market and she confirmed what the taxi driver had said, that it was five stops away. Then she asked me if I could remember which tree had come into leaf first this year: the alder or the birch? She explained, “If it was the birch, it will be a good, warm summer. But if the alder was first, we’ve had it, it’s going to be rainy and cold.”

  I already liked the town because it was filled with festive sunshine, and I could smell the blossoming lilac’s intoxicating scent even through the windows of the trolleybus. Most of the buildings were pre-revolutionary, with large windows, ornate moulding work that had come away in places on the walls and wide front doorways. The atmosphere of modest merchant-class serenity was spoiled by numerous kiosks with clumsily daubed signs: “Pies”, “Ice Cream”, or “Irina Ltd”. I was delighted to see the Russian letter “y” at the end of so many Russian shop-name signs “Produkty” (“Groceries”), “Soki, Vody” (“Juices, Waters”), “Sigarety” (“Cigarettes”). In my native parts, where Ukrainian nezalezhnyst (“independence”) had been raging for almost nine years, this letter had disappeared completely.

  The town centre was green and spacious. The intersection of Gagarin Prospect and Komsomol 50th Anniversary Prospect formed a small square, which had a bronze Lenin three metres high. Standing to the right of the statue was an armoured car of Civil War vintage, and to its left was a T-70 World War II tank, as if Lenin were being urged to choose more contemporary military technology but wasn’t taking the hint, stubbornly thrusting out his hand in an attempt to flag down a foreign automobile on the main avenue.

  Right beside him was a cosy little park. A granite pedestal with a howitzer gun towered over the flower beds. Below the golden figures “1941–1945” lay wreaths and flowers, evidently left over from the Victory Day celebrations on 9 May. Rising up behind the little park was a cathedral with reddish, samovar-shaped domes and a bell tower with a steeple covered with a dull, mossy-emerald patina.

  The trolleybus stopped beside an old brick wall surrounding the cathedral that had grass sprouting through it. I walked along a short little street smothered in lime trees and came out directly opposite the metal fence of the market, at the point where the fish stalls began and there was a smell of riverine scum.

  I asked some women with stuffed shopping bags where the number eighteen bus stop was. They explained that it was at the other side of the market, but advised me against taking the bus— “it’s not reliable”—it was better to wait there for the route taxi, which also ran along Chkalov Street.

  I found the Trust agency that I needed in the semi-basement of a sleek nine-storey building faced with tiles, between a delicatessen and a hairdresser’s.

  The interior was a standard example of a modest “Eurostandard” renovation. The black imitation-leather furniture, white blinds and rambling pot plants inspired a distinct feeling of trust.

  There was only one woman ahead of me in the queue, but I was mistaken to feel glad about this—she stayed in the notary’s office right up to the lunch break, so I was forced to spend the best part of another hour browsing through the local newspapers.

  By the time the seals had been applied and I had spent more time in the queue to the little window in order to pay the required fee and handed in the receipt to the notary, the day was already declining into evening.

  In the delicatessen I bought a bottle of Absolut vodka and a large gift box of chocolates. Who could tell which sex of bureaucratic individual I would e
ncounter at my uncle’s local housing department? I needed gifts to accommodate both possibilities.

  The Comintern-era housing complex was a collection of fivestorey, prefabricated slums on the very edge of town. Housing Department Office No. 27 seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Tired and angry, I repeatedly asked local people to help me, but no one knew where it was. Eventually a woman with a garbage pail volunteered to show me the way.

  As if in deliberate mockery, the metal doors of the Housing Department Office, with a crookedly attached schedule of water outages for June, were locked with a large metal bar. And there were no encouraging notes such as “Back soon”.

  The woman studied the schedule and the hollows under her eyes were instantly flooded with black melancholy. She looked at me reproachfully, as if I were to blame for the imminent outage. As she left, shaking her head, the garbage pail in her hand squeaked pitifully.

  At that moment I realized that I now faced either a search for a cheap hotel or a night out on the street. In helpless despair I started pounding on the door, which rumbled like theatrical thunder.

  A little old man in a taut singlet, with a tattoo on his skinny shoulder and grey curls on his chest, stuck his head out of the closest window on the first floor. He swore at me amiably—so that I wouldn’t abuse him in return, and struck up a conversation.

  I explained that I had just arrived from out of town, I needed to get into an apartment, otherwise I had a night on the street ahead of me, and the keys were in the housing department office.

  The old man pondered for a moment and disappeared into the room. Just when I had already decided that he had satisfied his curiosity, he emerged from the entrance, tucking his singlet into a pair of tracksuit trousers with side stripes as he walked along.

  “Wait here,” he said and set off, flapping his slippers briskly, towards the next high-rise. Ten minutes later the old man came back, and he was not alone. Plodding along behind him was a plump woman of about forty in a polka-dot dress with a black belt round her stomach. Her chubby calves were completely covered in terrible bites, so she occasionally stopped and scratched her legs fervently. She smiled at me coquettishly, displaying gold teeth that looked like grains of maize. “A sweet woman, look, even the mosquitoes love me…” Then she introduced herself as Antonina Petrovna.

  Behind the steel door there was a set of prison-style bars through which I could see a small corridor covered with scuffed linoleum and a rusty barrel with the word “Sand” on it. Hanging on the wall at the entrance were a fire extinguisher and an old poster showing a shaggy-haired Valery Leontyev, the pop idol of the Eighties, looking like a spaniel.

  The old man squirted a small gob of spit onto the poster and declared profoundly: “Has all the virtues of a man, apart from his faults.”

  I put my passport, a stack of documents and the letter of attorney down on the desk, secretly hoping that my unshaven features did not provoke suspicion. To be on the safe side I explained: “I’ve come straight from the train. It took me three days to get here.”

  Antonina Petrovna took a perfunctory look at the documents and the passport—my name was the same as my uncle’s, after all—then opened the safe, rummaged inside it and pulled out a bunch of keys.

  I said, “This is for the inconvenience”—and handed Antonina Petrovna the box of chocolates. I presented the bottle of vodka to the old man, who said, “There was no need for that”—and stuck it in the pocket of his trousers, which immediately slipped down under the weight of a litre of liquid.

  I learned from Antonina Petrovna that no one had reported the death of the former owner of the apartment to the telephone exchange. She advised me that to keep the telephone line I should contact them and pay the outstanding charges as soon as possible.

  The building in which my uncle used to live was a five-storey structure from the Khrushchev era, standing on Shironin’s Guards Street, right on the edge of town, beside a flooded construction pit overgrown with sedge. If not for the poplars that had been planted there, the building would probably have slipped down the slope in a few years’ time. I was distressed when I figured out how much could be realized from selling an apartment in such a seedy spot.

  Led by Antonina Petrovna, I walked along the path past a couple engaged in conversation—a man and a woman, both middle-aged. I caught a scrap of their talk: “I’d tear that bastard Yeltsin apart with hooks myself.”

  “And not just him either,” the woman replied.

  The man was large and well-fleshed, with a bald patch that was on the offensive, and he was gesticulating militantly with a long paper bundle. The woman was clutching some sort of kitchen-garden implement—the metal head of it was wrapped in a rag. With her faded anorak and plaited hair, she looked as if she had just come back from her dacha. There was a bag standing by her feet, with a plastic bottle protruding from it.

  The pitiful grin of the doorway was flanked by two old women sitting opposite each other like a pair of rotten teeth. Anticipating their curiosity, Antonina Pavlovna said, “This is the late Vyazintsev’s nephew.”

  It seemed to me that the chatting couple also noticed us—the woman glanced round, and the man was already looking in our direction anyway. He stopped talking for a moment, then carried on waving his bundle about even more vigorously, apparently devising further forms of execution for the retired president.

  We walked up to the top floor, the fifth. Antonina Pavlovna removed the plasticine seal with its thread. I signed a piece of paper, and Antonina Pavlovna wished me good luck and plodded off heavily down the stairs.

  First of all I locked myself in the toilet and relieved the pressure that had built up during the day. As I flushed, I thought that now I had marked the apartment as mine, like some wild animal. Then I took a stroll round my two-room estate.

  The telephone wasn’t working. The windows were still sealed with paper from the last winter. I immediately tore the paper off and flung the balcony door in the sitting room wide open to get rid of the musty smell.

  The horizon was already pink and the low sun had turned into a slow-moving egg yolk. A strong wind created an impression of flight, amplified by the high-rise buildings in the distance, somewhere beyond the quarry and the highway. My fifth floor seemed to be on the same level as them. Two wires for hanging washing out to dry stretched along the length of the balcony like musical strings, and the wooden clothes pegs hanging on them looked like small gudgeons. The dried-out railings were thickly entwined with Virginia creeper.

  All in all, I liked my uncle’s residence. The entrance hall was hung with the “brick-effect” wallpaper that had once been so fashionable. The sitting room contained a cumbersome sofa-bed, two armchairs, a standard lamp with a brass pole, a coffee table and a maroon wall unit that held tableware, crystal, books and a radiogram set in a deep glassy niche.

  I examined the drawers for any “treasures”. What I discovered was a heap of receipts, a box of gilded teaspoons, a stethoscope, an eye-pressure tonometer and a pile of crumpled cardboard boxes of medicine.

  In the bedroom, in addition to the bed, there was a writing desk, a set of shelves with books and a walnut wardrobe. To my surprise, among the clothes I discovered a motorcycle helmet, a whopping great hammer and several broad pieces of tyre tread, cut from the tyres of some massive truck—to be quite honest, I couldn’t figure out the function of these neat slabs of rubber.

  But in the narrow side cupboard, between the sheets and the towels, my uncle had hidden two pornographic magazines, both in some incomprehensible European language, perhaps Dutch or Swedish. My heart ached as I thought how lonely my Uncle Maxim had been…

  The bathroom made an even more painful impression on me. Lying there on the washbasin in front of the mirror, beside the toothbrush and the tube of toothpaste, was a safety razor with dried-out stubble on the blade—all that was left of Uncle Maxim…

  The kitchen was small, with barely enough space for the cooker, the Northern refrigerator, th
e table, the stools and the cupboard hanging on the wall above the sink. There was a small portable television set standing on the wide window sill.

  Although the apartment didn’t look a total wreck, it was definitely in need of renovation. Assessing my own strength and experience, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to manage the wallpaper and the tiles that had come away all on my own—I would have to hire workmen in order to get the apartment into marketable condition.

  I scoured the bathtub thoroughly with baking soda and took a bath with a sliver of pink soap that I scraped off the washbasin. My uncle’s kitchen reserves yielded up macaroni, canned mackerel and a tin of peas. I relieved the tedium of my supper by watching some episode or other of the TV serial The Eternal Call.

  I spent the night on the sofa-bed in the sitting room. Although I was worn out, I couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. I was obsessed by the thought that the phone line had been disconnected and without it the price of the apartment was sure to fall, and I was also haunted by dreams of a generous buyer showing up immediately and offering me six thousand dollars without even bargaining. Then I imagined a bad buyer, greedy and cunning, who wouldn’t give me more than three thousand and tried to swindle me. I tossed and turned, grinding my teeth.

  First thing in the morning I drank some tea and ran off to the local post office, which I had spotted during my wanderings around the area the day before. I called home from the international phone there and reported to my father on the work that had been done so far.

  I also enquired at the post office where the local telephone exchange was. I had primed myself unnecessarily for difficulties here. They gave me a bill that had to be paid at the savings bank (the accumulated debt amounted to an insignificant sum, even including the penalties) and promised to reconnect the phone within a week. Absolutely delighted by how easily the matter had been resolved, I immediately set off to visit my uncle at the cemetery.