Ice Trilogy (6 page)

“You’re so dull, Snegirev, like porridge,” she’d say.

I would just answer with a crooked grin. I didn’t like to joke and fool around between classes. I would wander the schoolyard, avoiding all my noisy, frolicking classmates.

I was no more social at the university. University life didn’t interest me at all. The auditoriums seethed with discussion, lectures grew into debates. There was an ongoing struggle between the “Red” professors and the old, “bourgeois” professors. The Komsomol committee played a significant role in this struggle. The Komsomol could disrupt a professor’s lecture with an accusation of “disguised counterrevolution” or “religious obscurantism.” Famous Bolsheviks were invited to the university for open debates. Lunacharsky argued with the Metropolitan Vvedensky about the existence of God; Zinoviev gave a lecture on the role of the Komsomol in building the new society; Krupskaya led a debate on the women’s question.

I was distant from all of this. After classes I would wander around the city. I wasn’t anxious to go home: Auntie’s sewing machine chirred away; the neighbor women argued in the communal kitchen. Wandering around Petersburg, I touched the stones. I liked to place my hands on the cold granite. The stones exuded a calm that didn’t exist in people. I touched the battered pedestals of building, stroked the smooth columns of St. Isaac’s, touched the manes of granite lions, the polished toes of Atlases, the breasts of marble nymphs, and the wings of marble angels. Stone sculptures calmed me.

Arriving home, I would eat the meager dinner that Auntie had left for me, and lose myself in books I took out of the university library. For the most part these were books on astronomy and the story of the Universe. I was excited by the planets and the infinity of the starry world that surrounded the Earth. Sometimes I took out books on mineralogy: I didn’t read them, just spent long stretches looking at the color illustrations of stones. I could do this for hours, lying on my rug. I didn’t read books on mathematics and physics at all, making do with what I heard in lectures. Literature didn’t interest me: the world of people, their passions and ambitions — all that seemed petty, fussy, and ephemeral. You couldn’t
rely
on that like you could on stone. The world of Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky was really no different from the world of my neighbors who fought and swore in the kitchen over Primus stoves or the slop bucket. The world of planets and stones was richer and more interesting. It was eternal. I tore a picture of Saturn from an astronomy atlas and hung it on the wall. When Auntie sat down to sew, her head was on the same level as Saturn. But could Saturn be compared in any way with Aunt Flora’s head, muttering something about the Bolsheviks, Renovationists, and the price of woolen cloth and crepe de chine?

Astronomy was studied only in the third year at university. Nevertheless, I began to race from my physics and mathematics classes to attend the lectures of Professor Karlov, a well-known astronomer and specialist on the spectral analysis of planets. Listening to his rather muffled voice talking about the stellar parallax, the satellites of Mars, sunspots, the orbits of comets, and meteorite showers, I closed my eyes and forgot about everything. I collapsed inward and
hung
in starry space. And this feeling turned out to be stronger than all others. It was
incredibly
pleasurable. I even stopped hearing Karlov himself. And I forgot about astronomy. I simply
hung
amid the planets and stars. It continued this way from month to month. I went to other lectures less and less frequently. I barely passed the first term and just managed to begin the second semester. During the summer all the students worked to make money. I also decided to help Auntie with money. At first I was set up at the Krasny Putilovets factory as a maintenance worker, but on the second day I experienced an extraordinary irritability and feeling of oppression from the machines and mechanisms. The people working with these huge machines irritated me even more: there was something menacing and doomed about them. The plant itself I found
unbearably
ugly
. I left Krasny Putilovets and got a job washing dishes in a restaurant at a gambling house on Vladimirsky Prospect. The place was maintained by a typical nepman who looked like he’d come straight out of a Mayakovsky poster — fat and constantly smoking a cigar. I thought about the planets and stars while I washed the dishes. They were always with me: I followed their orbits, delighted in the
fluid
rotation of the heavenly bodies.

In September I again headed for Karlov’s lectures. The astronomy course lasted one school year. Karlov always began his course with a new stream of third-year students. I again plunged into the introductory lectures with pleasure. I closed my eyes. And I
hung there
imagining the huge star Betelgeuse. Auditorium No. 8 became my second home. I stopped going to other lectures entirely.

And once, when I was
hanging
, someone touched me on the shoulder.

“Are you all right?” a woman’s voice asked me.

I opened my eyes. The auditorium was already empty. A girl sat next to me. She had short black hair and slightly slanted eyes that looked at me with amusement.

“Do you work at night or something? Don’t get enough sleep?”

“N
o...
” I parted with
my
stupor with displeasure.

“I always watch you, how you doze during the lectures,” she grinned.

“I’m not dozing,” I answered, looking into her eyes.

She stopped grinning.

“Whic
h...
class are you in?”

“I’m a second year,” I answered.

“Then why do you come to our lectures?”

“I truly love the Universe,” I admitted openly.

She looked at me with interest. We got to talking. Her name was Masha Dormidontova. She had been observing me for a whole month. The student who always sat in lectures with closed eyes and an aloof expression interested her. Leaving the physics and mathematics building, we walked along the embankment. Masha asked me questions. I answered absentmindedly. She was animated, with quick reactions and a lively mind. Her father served in the navy. She was studying physics and was enthralled by a fashionable science — meteoritics. Walking around the city with her and listening to her rapid, emotional speech, at first I believed that her only passion was indeed meteorites. Her slanted eyes shining, she spoke enthusiastically about meteorite showers, zodiacal light, iron meteorites with Widmanstätten patterns and stone figures — chondrites and achondrites. But fairly soon it became clear that behind meteoritics there was a specific person, “bold, smart, and decisive,” who was presently searching for the largest meteorite in Siberia. She talked about this person with obvious excitement. His name was Leonid Kulik. He was a senior scientific worker at the Mining Institute. Clearly, Masha was far from indifferent to him. I asked about the meteorite that Kulik was searching for. She said that it was an enormous fireball, which had fallen twenty years ago and had caused a sensation throughout Siberia. Still talking, we eventually came to her home on Ligovka Street, near the Moscow station. Masha said goodbye to me affably, adding: “See you tomorrow!”

And I made my way back home to the Moika. The meeting with Masha changed nothing in me. I continued attending Karlov’s lectures, collapsing inwardly and
hanging
. This intrigued Masha. She always sat next to me. At first she tried to ask me funny questions in a whisper. But I didn’t answer. And she stopped. But after Karlov’s last words, she would poke me in the shoulder and say, “
Finita!
” And I would open my eyes.

Karlov’s lecture was always last. If Masha didn’t stay in the department on Komsomol business or didn’t go off to see Kulik at the Mining Institute, I would walk her home. We went on foot or took the tram. I always accompanied her home. She accepted this as a matter of course. She stopped expecting masculine attention from me, deciding, most likely, that I was “a bit touched.” Having assigned me the role of confidant of the male sex, she would pour out her soul to me on our walks, telling me her innermost secrets. She enjoyed this. She spoke about Kulik very cautiously, though always with excitement. When Kulik set off for a three-month expedition looking for the mysterious meteorite, Masha begged “desperately” to go with him, but there was an iron rule on expeditions: no women allowed. The expedition didn’t find the meteorite. But it did determine the exact time and place of its descent. When Masha showed me a clipping from a newspaper with Kulik’s article “The Tungus Meteorite,” I immediately saw when it fell to earth: June 30, 1908. I suddenly remembered the unusual
thunder
that Mama had heard during my birth. I closed my eyes. And laughed unexpectedly.

“What is it?” asked Masha.

“I was born that very day. June 30, 1908,” I replied.

She was struck by this coincidence. And she promised to tell Kulik about it. But I forgot about the Tungus meteorite (after all, it had
already
fallen) and once again plunged into the dear world of the Universe.

I passed the winter term with two incompletes. But, miraculously, I wasn’t expelled; they just made me retake physics and logic during the summer terms. I vaguely followed what was happening not just in the university but in the country as well. Students were discussing Trotsky’s exile to Alma-Ata, the struggle in the Party leadership, the peasants’ sabotage of state grain procurements. I would pass them by or sit with a remote look. I felt
good
. I had a fulcrum — the planets and the stars. They were always with me. I didn’t think about the future at all. I aspired to nothing. What should one strive for when everything
was there already
? I pressed my forehead to the marble lion. And floated in Ganymede’s orbit, between Io and Callisto.

But reality soon reminded me of its existence.

In May, returning home from the university, I found Chekists there. They were searching of our closet. Auntie wasn’t there. It turned out that in the church where she served, they had conducted a confiscation of church valuables, during which Auntie grabbed a heavy baptismal cross from a Chekist and hit him over the head. She was arrested. I was taken to the GPU on Gorokhovaya Street and interrogated. But they let me go. I tried to find out what happened to Auntie, but only learned that she was imprisoned in Kresty and awaiting trial. A month passed. Auntie was sentenced to five years and sent to Solovki. I never saw her again.

And a few weeks after the trial I was dismissed from the university. There were more than enough reasons: a non-proletarian background, an anti-Soviet aunt, my poor progress. Nor was I a member of the Komsomol. The secretary of our department’s Komsomol had long ago christened me an “alien element.”

I took my dismissal calmly. I could attend Karlov’s lectures without a student card. And I managed to steal two books on astronomy from the library. But Masha was very upset. She went to the dean twice and to the Komsomol committee on my behalf, but without any results. We continued to meet at the lectures and to walk around the city.

Soon I realized that I had nothing to eat: Aunt Flora’s stores of barley and flax oil had dried up. I sold her sewing machine. Buying grain, crackers, lard, sunflower oil, carrots, and garlic, I ate my fill and hid the remainder in the chest of drawers. In the morning I set off for the university. But there I found something I had neglected to consider: the lecture course in astronomy was over. Exams were beginning. Disappointed, I headed home. News awaited me there as well: the building manager was sitting in my room. He told me that if I didn’t stop my anti-Soviet propaganda, the tenants would petition for my eviction. I listened to him silently. He left, slamming the door. I realized that, taking advantage of my helpless situation, the building manager simply wanted to take my room away from me. I picked up my two books on astronomy and went outside. It was a warm, sunny June day. I wandered aimlessly around the city and felt that it was
pushing me out
. There was no place left for me in it. And nothing tied me to it. I walked as far as Nevsky Prospect, turned, and ambled in the direction of St. Isaac’s. I wanted to put my hands on its columns. And press my face to the cold, smooth stone. I took a few steps and ran into Masha. We bumped into each other so hard that my books fell on the pavement. Her portfolio fell open, and her papers tumbled out.

“Lord,” Masha muttered, recoiling and pressing her palm to her forehead: her forehead had hit my chin.

I looked at her, crazed. Collecting herself, she started laughing. I helped her put her papers together and picked up my books.

“This is insane!” she said, shaking her head and laughing. “You know, I was talking about you just half an hour ago.”

“With whom?” I asked.

“With Kulik. Do you want to go on an expedition? Two of their people have come down with dysentery. And they’re leaving the day after tomorrow.”

I looked at her silently, rubbing my chin. And suddenly, in one second, just as it happened after the blast, after my head spinning, after Kiev and counting all the corners, I felt that I
was setting out
. I had to move. Farther on.

And I answered, “I want to.”

The next
day at 9:00 a.m. Masha and I entered the building housing the Mining Institute. We walked down a dim hallway and soon stopped near a door with a new copper plate that read
METEORITE DEPARTMENT
. The plate looked unusual. Masha knocked on the door. No one answered. She put her ear to the door.

“Lord, don’t tell me he’s already in a meeting!”

“Not yet, but he’ll definitely be heading there soon,” came a slightly haughty, high-pitched voice behind our backs.

We turned around. Before us stood a thin man with glasses and thick, light-brown mustaches à la Nietzsche. He was dressed in an emphatically casual manner.

“Leonid Andreich!” Masha prattled, and I realized that she was deeply in love with Kulik.

“This is your protégé?” asked Kulik, glancing at me with his intelligent, piercing, and somewhat mocking eyes. “He’s the one who was born June 30, 1908?”