The Librarian (20 page)

I
HEARD TANYA
burst into tears. Marat Andreyevich scurried between Kisling and Zarubin. Timofei Stepanovich grabbed Latokhin by the sides of his chest, saying something threatening to him. They barely managed to drag the old man off.

Ogloblin came over to me and spoke to Akimushkin and Tsofin.

“I’ll just have a few words with Alexei Vladimirovich, all right? Alexei, the most important thing is not to get nervous. Your armour’s superb; no one’s got anything like it, I’ve checked—no axe or sword will pierce it, let alone a bayonet… And another thing, it might just help you…” Ogloblin added hastily. “Before a battle I always try to remember a song, best of all from the Great Patriotic War, about heroic death: that immediately puts me in the right mood, it rouses my fighting spirit. Of course, it’s not the Book of Fury, but it’s still a kind of doping. By the way, Margarita Tikhonovna hinted to me that when you were at her place, you understood all about it…”

This was an unforgivable lapse of memory. I hadn’t spent all those hours in Margarita Tikhonovna’s home, listening to the voices of Soviet skalds flying out of the black holes of her gramophone records, just to pass the time. I only had a few minutes left, and I had to use them to apply this still-unexplored technique of courage.

Ogloblin waved his hand in farewell and rejoined the ranks. I tightened my grip on the handle of my hammer. Golenishchev was standing just a metre away from me, resolutely clutching his axe, and behind him was Tsofin, who had readied two knives for the
duel. The beak of Latokhin’s pickaxe glowed dull silver. Akimushkin toyed calmly with his mace, warming up his stiff wrist.

The seven Pavliks facing us also warmed up—smooth, faceless figures who looked like huge white pawns, but with sharp-pointed crutches held at the ready.

“It seems to me at times that soldiers who have not returned from fields of blood were not laid in our earth at all, but turned into white cranes,” I started crooning in my mind. “From those distant times until today they have been flying, calling to us. Is this not why so often we fall sadly silently when we gaze up at the sky?” I cautiously examined my own condition—absolutely nothing was happening in my soul. Panicking, I hurried through the next lines. “The weary wedge flies on and on across the sky, flying in the grey mist at day’s end, and in that line there is little gap, perhaps a place for me…” But the song dashed from the right hemisphere of my brain into the left one in a mute whine. I thought I must have remembered about this too late, but I stubbornly carried on invoking the spell of avian death: “The day will come when I too shall fly through this grey gloom with a flock of cranes, calling in a bird’s voice from the heavens to all I left behind down on the ground…”

Chakhov wound the entrails into a bundle, then suddenly swung back his arm and tossed them in our direction. The Pavliks shot forward like greyhounds, switching places as they ran, and my opponent turned out not to be the warrior I had been preparing myself for. He was almost right beside me when I finally grasped what my job in this duel was. A rush of adrenalin warmed me like a gulp of vodka, my stomach shuddered happily, and I guessed that this was not fear, but deadly fervour.

I saw Golenishchev take a step back to intensify the stroke to come, and his opponent, standing with his back to me, became an ideal target for the hammer. A sharp blow from a bayonet between the shoulder blades only flung me towards my goal. Ogloblin had
done a really good job for me—the Belaz tyre tread didn’t let me down; it withstood the blow.

I swung the hammer down on the nape of Golenishchev’s foe. There was a wooden crack. The next second I felt a cast-metal lightning bolt pierce my boot and run into the ground. A nauseating pain splashed up from my wounded foot into my head and clouded my mind. The butt of a crutch flashed by, scalding my temple, ear and cheekbone with lead. A red jangling drowned my hearing. I fell, and the Pavlik fell on top of me, flinging out his arms. He screamed silently with his mouth pulled inside out, hoisted himself up on his arms and suddenly struck a terrible blow on the bridge of my nose with his forehead—and then the Pavlik’s head split open for some reason and a Vologda axe soared up out of it into the sky, like a bird, and the battle ended there…

I had wondered before what it meant “to lose consciousness”, picturing it as a state similar to a nightmare or sleep. In actual fact it was much more boring than that. At first I simply didn’t exist. Then I appeared, together with the light from the large window, lying on my back with a plaster ceiling extending above me.

I rapidly made sense of the world and immediately felt its first inconvenience: my face was tightly swaddled. I managed to lift my hand with a struggle and saw a drip protruding from my forearm. I was able to touch my face. It felt numb and limp, like a rag.

A man with a moustache, who looked like a veterinary surgeon and an agronomist at the same time, cautiously put my hand back where it should be. He was wearing a white coat and a little doctor’s cap.

“Awake are you, biker? Welcome back!”

I realized I had survived, but for some reason I didn’t feel any great jubilation. The recent black vacuum didn’t seem at all frightening to me.

“Oh, I’ll run and tell your family the good news,” a concerned female voice suddenly cooed in my ear. “All your relatives have
gathered round. Your uncle, your sister and her husband, and your grandfather. They’re completely burned out. They didn’t sleep all night…” A figure as white as a snowman drifted towards the door, flapping its slippers.

“Righto. And I’ll go home, I’m tired,” said the man. “Last night your uncle knocked the stuffing out of me, I swear to God. I told him: ‘Believe me,’ I said, ‘I’ll try my very best for a colleague and I’ll do a great job…’”

“Are you a librarian too?” I asked with half my mouth, my blood running cold at this surprise. The thought that I was paralysed drove out the question of how my Uncle Maxim had “knocked the stuffing” out of him.

“What librarian?” the man asked in sympathetic surprise. “I’m a surgeon. A traumatologist.”

“A traumatologist…” I repeated in a mumbled echo.

“You were brought into our hospital last night. Second-degree coma… Don’t let that frighten you! In simple terms, it’s just a concussion with loss of consciousness for a couple of hours. You went straight into intensive care, and then came here. Your uncle was champing at the bit to operate himself, but I explained to him: ‘You can’t operate on relatives!’ I said, ‘Don’t you worry about it. We’ll do a great job!’ So your nose will be just like new; that is, just like the old one—no changes!” He laughed.

“But why doesn’t my mouth move?”

“What a droll fellow! You got jabs across half your face. I mean, they gave you anaesthetic. When you were at the dentist’s, didn’t they ever give you injections of novocaine?”

“Yes… I suppose…”

“You just tell me this… Who goes riding around a building site on a motorbike, and in the middle of the night too?”

“What motorbike?” I asked, just to be on the safe side. But this precaution was superfluous and came too late. I’d already blundered over my librarian uncle, and if the jaunty surgeon was from a hostile clan, my life was hanging by a thread.

“You can fake amnesia somewhere else. Why lie to me? I’m not a traffic cop…”

“I really don’t remember…”

And then, to my inexpressible relief, I saw Marat Andreyevich and Tanya. Ogloblin and Timofei Stepanovich were craning their necks round the door.

“What an actor,” the doctor said to Dezhnev with a smile. “Do you hear, your nephew here says he’s lost his memory…”

“How’s that, Antosha?” Marat Andreyevich asked briskly. “You and your comrades decided to hold a rally on a building site, you caught your foot on a steel reinforcement rod that ran straight through you and naturally you went flying off the bike and smacked your head against some planks. And there you have it…”

“Now I remember,” I said. “Thanks.”

“That’s good,” the doctor said with a smile. “Well then, you can do your talking and kissing, but only for ten minutes. The patient needs rest…”

The Shironinites perched on my bed like birds. Marat Andreyevich gave me a brief account of the evening’s events.

“Alexei, we won. The Kolontayskites kept their book! But if it hadn’t been for your heroism, everything could have turned out very differently! Your fearless and self-sacrificing heroism immediately neutralized your opponent and gave us a numerical advantage. He was finished off by Golenishchev, then Tsofin lent a hand and the two of them decided the outcome of the whole duel!”

“If you only knew how proud we are of you!” Ogloblin said fervently.

“Oh, come on,” I said, embarrassed. “I just didn’t want to die for nothing, without taking anyone with me…”

“Alexei, that
is
heroism,” Marat Andreyevich said with conviction. “A feat that even a complex individual like Semyon Chakhov appreciated!”

“If he could see me here,” I said, feeling at my gauze-covered face, “he’d take me into his own library. I’m the spitting image of a Pavlik now.”

Tanya took my hand and kissed me several times. Timofei Stepanovich sniffed and deftly brushed away a tear, then smiled and reached for his handkerchief.

“Don’t say things like that, Alexei!” exclaimed Marat Andreyevich, upset. “Nothing terrible has happened to you. You’ve got facial contusions. The swelling will go down completely in two or three weeks. Yes, and your auricular cartilage is broken too, but don’t worry, it won’t affect your hearing, your ear will just be soft. And I think you were really lucky with your foot. The tendons weren’t affected. You’ll spend another day in bed here, and tomorrow we’ll take you home. Everyone’s waiting for you!”

“I forgot to ask. What about the others? And Latokhin, is he pleased?”

“We didn’t want to upset you…” Marat Andreyevich said and hesitated. “But I think it’s best to tell you. Right, comrades? Latokhin died a heroic death. And Zarubin too. Veretenov has replaced Latokhin as the Kolontayskites’ leader. They send you their very best wishes and thanks from whole reading room.”

“And where are the Pavliks?”

“They left, as they promised. They’ve gone to Kazakhstan,” said Ogloblin, waving his hand in the direction that he assumed was south. “All seven of their men were killed. They didn’t beg for mercy; they fought to the bitter end. And by the way,” he said with a smile, “the help from the council arrived yesterday… Punctually late.”

Timofei Stepanovich snorted contemptuously.

“Missed the boat, as usual…”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. We politely told them it was all over and done with and in general it’s better to serve the mustard when dinner’s still on the table, so they cleared off. You’re a celebrity for everyone now!”

“
F
IGRUTDIN ANVAR-OGLY GUSEYNOV
, Aslan Imanvedi-Ogly Guseynov, Ramazan Rustamovich Dzhabrailov. Rashid Akhmedovich Khaytulayev, Akhmadrasul Khaybulatovich Magomadov, Khasan Panuevich Yusupov…” I ploughed halfway through the list. Millstones started shifting about nauseatingly in my head—the recent concussion still bothered me, especially when I read anything. Conquering the sensation of nausea, I narrowed my eyes and ran over the gaudy string of names and patronymics, like bumps and ruts, to the end of the list: “Iskander Kazbekovich Bachayev, Abdulkhamed Timerbekovich Izmailov, Alvi Bakhayevich Sadulkhadzhiyev.”

“Have you taken a look, Comrade Vyazintsev?” the liaison officer asked in a soft voice. My visitor was called Roman Ivanovich Yambykh; he was the one of the orderlies of Kovrov, the deformed observer from the council who had been present at our satisfaction three months previously. I noticed immediately that Yambykh’s way of speaking successfully reproduced the menacingly ingratiating manner of his immediate superior.

The liaison officer’s appearance was unpleasant—a slimy individual with a wet little forehead that looked as if it had been licked. The middle finger of his right hand was adorned by a blue perforated ring with a little heart in it, and his left forearm bore a green tattoo of a busty violin.

“The final individual on the list, a certain Sadulkhadzhiyev, is an associate of Girei, or Biygireyev, who is the head of an influential
criminal organization in the region, with a wide range of activities— from dealing in arms and narcotics to violent robbery, extortion and contract killings. Your dead men met him to discuss, if I might put it this way, the purchase of a licence for appropriating local assets. This is what we know so far.”

“You’ve made a great effort, Roman Ivanovich,” I said, handing him back the list. “You remember everyone by name. What other complaints does the council have against the reading room?”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Comrade Vyazintsev. We still don’t know what the outcome of your vigilante actions will be! And note that this isn’t the first time! The flight of the reader Shapiro and the incident with the Gorelov reading room earned you a category “A” reprimand… Haven’t you received the council’s report yet? They’ll send it to you… And straight away—another problem. Possibly even worse than the previous one. Do you really not understand that you have put all of us at risk?”

“Roman Ivanovich, I get the impression that you feel sorry for these Khasbulatovs,” said Dezhnev. “We acted in the interests of our common security…”

“Matters of this kind are discussed collectively!” Yambykh retorted. “But you showed once again that you don’t give a damn for the council! Am I not right, Comrade Selivanova?”

“Not entirely. First, the individuals who were the source of danger are all dead. Secondly, we did not arouse the slightest suspicion on the part of the authorities or the criminal elements. What more do you want? And thirdly, not even your experts have been able to discover any hidden motive!”

“And they won’t, either!” said Timofei Stepanovich, who had remained silent so far.

“Actions are a shout in the mountains; let us wait and see what kind of echo there is. The problem that has arisen is far more serious than it seems at first. First…”—Yambykh smiled venomously at Margarita Tikhonovna—“… the Shironinites attracted the attention of outsiders, and rather aggressive outsiders at that. All this
indicates gross violations of the code of secrecy. And permit me to object. Secondly, we have good reason to suspect that the raid on your reading room was prompted by a tip-off. Which means that someone from the outside is trying to penetrate the mystery of the Books. If this information is confirmed, then I am afraid that your reading room will most likely be disbanded.”

“The average annual growth of all libraries and reading rooms is two hundred members,” Lutsis put in hastily. “More than enough for a minor leak to occur anywhere at all. What has this got to do with us?”

Yambykh nodded.

“Well yes, but
you
have a new librarian… Oho, Comrade Selivanova is ready to kill me!” He laughed with a crackling sound. “Let me repeat, we still don’t know what we’re talking about here: monstrous bad luck, criminal negligence on the part of the Shironin reading room, or an external conspiracy. Whichever it is, our common security is at stake. Even if formally speaking this has nothing to do with you, there are higher priorities…”

“Does it not seem to you that a certain prejudice can be discerned in this decision of the council?” Margarita Tikhonovna interrupted.

“And does it not surprise you, Comrade Selivanova, that it is precisely the Shironin reading room that finds itself at the epicentre of the problem yet again? Can it really be nothing but malicious fate?” Yambykh asked reproachfully. “I’m not a superstitious man, I’m a pragmatist. Problems pursue those who have deserved them. We are investigating. If there are no consequences from your high-handed behaviour, the business will go no further than a reprimand. I promise that no one intends to persecute you for no good reason. But meanwhile the Shironinites are under house arrest for a few days, and after that we’ll see…”

Disaster had descended on us out of the blue a week earlier. Until then everything had been going really well. For six weeks the reading room had been a haven of calm. On 12 July we had returned in
triumph from Kolontaysk. A week later my bandages were removed in Marat Andreyevich’s hospital. I tried not to show myself outside, feeling shy on account of my appearance. The swellings on my cheekbone and the bridge of my nose stubbornly hung on right until the beginning of August.

Sometimes I looked at myself in the mirror, studying my unfamiliar blue features in alarm. However, the unknown doctor had not deceived me—my nose really did remain as it was before, without any boxer’s twists or humps. The foot that had been run through with a bayonet healed up, leaving only a scar that looked like a navel. Marat Andreyevich jokingly called it “the librarian’s stigma”.

As soon as we got back, I called my parents. The novocaine no longer distorted my speech and I informed them in a cheerful, relaxed voice that I had found a job—running a theatre studio in a local House of Culture. I realized that I would never abandon the Shironinites and I had to prepare my family.

My father took the news calmly; he had anticipated this kind of possibility for a long time, but my mother, on the contrary, started worrying about how I would manage in a strange town, and complained that she couldn’t come to see me—Vovka couldn’t manage Ivan and Ilyushka on her own. I said that I would be earning decent money and would probably apply for Russian citizenship soon. Then I assured my parents that I would visit them at the very first opportunity.

The Book was still with Margarita Tikhonovna for safekeeping. I had suggested this myself, motivating the request by saying that I found the readers’ daily pilgrimages exhausting and I needed complete peace and quiet. The Shironinites didn’t argue, but they said that while bed rest did not require a guard, a nurse was necessary. I chose Tanya for this role.

After the events at Kolontaysk I suddenly realized that I had a right to a woman. For the next two weeks Tanya lived with me. For a while I felt rather awkward in Veronika’s presence—I really
didn’t want this powerful girl to feel insulted by my choice. But no matter how closely I watched her, I couldn’t spot even a hint of jealousy or resentment in her eyes. I think I made the right choice. Devoted to the reading room and the Book, Veronika had only been concerned for my “male comfort”, but Tanya simply loved me…

In short, for a month and a half everything went well. Then suddenly one August evening the phone rang. A slightly embarrassed Margarita Tikhonovna informed me that problems had arisen for the reading room and it was a matter of urgency. She had informed the readers and they were all gathering at my place.

“What exactly has happened, Margarita Tikhonovna?”

“It’s too serious for a phone call…”

An hour later the Shironinites were all assembled. Agitated and outraged, Lutsis reported to us on what had happened.

“Yesterday Grisha and I were walking back from Margarita Tikhonovna’s place. He had read the Book and I promised to see him home…”

Vyrin had been discharged from the hospital in July. He was making a rapid recovery, although he still needed help. After all, the Book was a powerful emotional upheaval and one of our group always accompanied Grisha on his way back home. This time Denis was with him.

Just outside the entrance to Vyrin’s building they had been stopped by two young men who looked as if they came from the Caucasus and had the accent to prove it. These were the Guseynov cousins, Figrutdin Anvar-Ogly and Aslan Imanvedi-Ogly, known by the nickname “the Uglies”. Denis had already heard about them.

The older Ugly—Figrutdin—was twenty, and the younger was nineteen. The cousins were still only starting to spread their criminal wings, gradually mastering the simple skills of blackmail and extortion. So far their new gang had only eight members—scraggy and spiteful children of Chechnya and Azerbaijan—and they
plied their trade at the lowest level on the outskirts of town, where there were no competitors. After a short time the Uglies and their comrades had subjugated the old people and miserable bottle-collectors in the district and imposed a tax on them. When they grew a bit stronger, the Uglies moved on to the collection points for jars and bottles. When obstinate owners didn’t want to pay up, their depots caught fire.

In a long side street outside a small bus station a little market had spontaneously sprung up in the mornings—women from local suburbs brought the surplus from their vegetable plots to sell here. The Uglies set the illegal traders a price for their spots, and if anyone refused to pay they promised to set the cops on them or threatened them with expropriation of their entire stock. The female lawbreakers had no one to complain to, and they agreed to pay the protection money.

The next victims were the private taxi drivers. A threat to burn their cars worked without fail. The people were absolutely terrified of Chechens, and the Uglies had no scruples about exploiting their gang’s menacing ethnic profile.

The Uglies first demonstrated their character in a showdown with the gypsies. They suggested dividing up the territory half and half and claimed that their protector, or “roof”, was the well-known criminal boss Girei, whom they didn’t even know. To avoid a conflict, the gypsies agreed. Half the job was done; now they only had to persuade Girei to take them under his protection.

Securing their status, the Uglies rapidly took control of all the local drug dens, to provide outlets for the future. They were hoping to squeeze the gypsies out at some stage and become the undisputed masters of the suburbs…

“They told us ‘the old woman’s joint’ was being taken over,” Lutsis said, continuing his account of the situation. “They said they knew all about us, said they’d been watching Selivanova for a long time. They mentioned Denis’s address, and Sasha’s…”

“And the worst thing,” said Vyrin, “is that they know Alexei’s address. They really have been watching us…”

“Let me sum up, comrades,” Margarita Tikhonovna concluded. “Absurd as it sounds, some villains have decided that I run a drug den. By the way, today they approached me in person with the same threats. I don’t understand anything,” she said with a dispirited sigh. “And I used to love the Caucasus so much. I often used to go there on holiday…”

It was quite possible that the Chechens’ visit was a subtle provocation, that we were being tested, that someone was trying to set us up. But in such cases the council’s machinations never went beyond the bounds of the Gromovian universe, with its own etiquette and rules. The uncontrollable spontaneity of an attack from the outside made it something to be feared. The questions that arose were: who were these intruders; why had they chosen us; and what was the ultimate goal that they were actually pursuing?

We supposed that they had latched onto us through some misunderstanding or annoying set of coincidences that came together in the appearance of ideal bait for bandits. Margarita Tikhonovna had told us there had been whispers among her neighbours before about Selivanova trading in moonshine and telling fortunes for money—all sorts of different people came to her place far too often. The haggard Vyrin and Sukharev with his plastered hand, and I myself, limping and covered in bruises, gave the impression of asocial personalities and provided grounds for gossip. It wouldn’t have been too bad, but those words—“We’ve been watching you for a long time”—determined the Uglies’ fate. We couldn’t afford to delay.

“Take the wogs out, no messing,” Sukharev said simply. “That’s the safest thing. They’ll never cut loose on their own.”

“But how do we do it?” I enquired. “A mass road accident?”

“Too difficult, Alexei,” Dezhnev said thoughtfully. “It would be easier to simulate a banal gangland rumble with the gypsies, a
knife fight. The gypsies could easily have grudges to settle with the Uglies. They used to run everything, then Girei squeezed them out, and the Uglies are keen to get in with Girei. The cops shouldn’t have any doubts. Afterwards Biygireyev can sort things out with the local barons himself if he wants to…”

“I’ve got an idea,” Sukharev suggested. “The lowlifes are always hanging out in the kebab house at the reservoir—you know, the old Village Hut café. They’re bound to show up there at the weekend. It’s a remote spot; there won’t be any witnesses. When the Uglies celebrate, all the normal people leave—they’re afraid. No, there won’t be any problems with an ambush.”