Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (60 page)

No!!

“
Thank ... you,
”
Pozushan struggled to pronounce. His throat seized, as if choking.

Hand to cap in salute, with bitterness like never before:

“
Permission to leave.
”

But major Fatianov looked on—open, approving, friendly, understanding.

“
Life marches on,
”
he said quietly.
“
You cannot turn it on a dime anyway, no matter what. You cannot change human nature even under socialism.
”

And with a playful squint:
“
Let them finish cooking those potatoes. No
se
n
se letting them rot
.
”

The lieutenant saluted crisply one more time, turned himself to the left, and pushed open the door.

~ * ~

2

Hard to believe,
but just before the war, men were still hauling
bargeloads
of salt from the mouth of the Angara up to the mouth of the Ilim. They did it in teams, harnessed to a tow-rope. In places they would take horses along for a boost, and waited on some stretch until help came from a tailwind. They managed all right, three runs a season.

In time, a fleet of small motorboats plied up and down the Angara, and for another twelve years after technical school Anatoly piloted different craft down to the
Tenisey
. But in
‘
74 they started impounding the river near Boguchany, and motorboats were finished. No hydro station, either: just a mess. Further upstream, the Bratsk and
Ust
-Ilim dams had already been put up, leaving fewer than three hundred navigable miles, and little more than a hundred of them, up to Kezhma, that weren
’
t dead, that still had any life. On this remnant, the boy who once went by
Tolik
—himself now fifty—would pilot what turned up.

So it was today. Both captain and steersman, he sat in the cabin behind the wheel, dressed in a heavily worn blue jacket, and guided a jet-propelled cutter, with a salon full of guests below deck. His soul was all in knots. He ached for this last reach of the river—in her true, undefiled banks—as though the pain were his own: Can we convince them? Could it work?

The side window was slid open, and the familiar fresh breath of river air flowed in.

Over on the River Lena, lit buoys and markers were still intact. You could make as many runs as you can manage, and soon you would earn enough for an apartment. But here all the buoys had disappeared over the past twenty years, despite a guaranteed depth of just two feet. So you guide by memory, by wit, by a sharp eye. You must see every whirlpool ahead of time and note where it spins.
Forward,
and you read the river: all fifteen of the rocky shallows until Kezhma, with their slight elevation drops. But then no
bankside
slope, no rock, no cliff face, no little cape, no estuary could be confused with any other. It is only to the untrained eye that it appears all the same, like sheep in a herd, or like moose.

Moose and bears, for their part, had stopped swimming across the Angara: The water had grown much colder because of the Ilim hydro station. The waters of the Lena are so much warmer.

But the captain loved the Angara like his wife, and he would not trade her in for another.

Over the stately river, a sunny day was slowly breaking out. A glitter evenly covered the surface.

A line of white clouds stretched far beyond the right bank. But it would melt away.

The waters of the Angara are always quiet in June. From mid-August, the northerly wind will churn up hefty waves. August is also when the
Sayan
Mountains thaw and the big waters come rolling.

The low, narrow door from the interior stairs opened. The mechanic Khripkin squeezed through—head like a ball, body like a ball—and sat on the side bench. You couldn
’
t fit a third into the cabin without blocking the door.

“
What
’
s going on down there, Semyon?
”

Semyon may have been an unkempt fellow, with black, ungroomed hair and a face as if it was poured cast iron, but he had quick and perceptive eyes.

“
Who wants anything to do with work, Anatol Dmitrich? Valentina Filippovna barely got started, but Scepura is already serving up drinks, right from early morning. The minister has his eyes on the appetizers, too, I think.
”

The captain took a course to the right bank, with a barren gradual slope in the distance.

It hadn
’
t always been barren. Time was—an evergreen taiga stood here. Then a timbering camp was thrown up. The land was not part of the flooding zone, but adjacent, and the timber was valuable. So they clear-cut it. But once pine is cleared, it does not grow back; only aspen does, eventually.

Since pine logs do not sink, they were floated downriver.
“
All the local pine,
”
he sighed,
“
just got jammed up senselessly near Boguchany, while in other places, look what great larch they took down! What birch! Except those logs sink, and there were no barges to carry them, so the trees still lie up there, rotting.
”
He fell silent.
“
You try lying around like that.
”

“
When was this?
”
asked Khripkin in his impatient tone.

“
Ten years ago.
Then seven.
”

“
During perestroika, already?
”

“
Then too.
One shipment after another.
They threw up twenty-seven camps along this stretch, down to Boguchany.
”

Yet how much healthy forest stood even now, higher up in the hills.

He made his way to the left bank, since he could see a swirl gathering over the rocky shallows to the right.

Going with the current, the bow does not stir up the water.

A water
not yet entirely robbed of its blues.

The repetitive rumbles of the motor could be felt all the way up in the cabin.

“
If only he asked me,
”
Khripkin figured aloud,
“
I would give him my piece.
”

The captain thought about it, without turning.

“
Well, maybe go, liven things up a bit; just don
’
t ruin it. We all know you have a . . .
”

“
I don
’
t believe any of those bosses, whether the old ones or the new ones.
”

The captain turned around, by no means agreeing, but answering softly still.

“
No, how come?
You can talk sense with the new ones.
”

The mechanic sat a bit longer, glancing at the water.

He thumped his way down the stairs.

And came out into the front of the hall.
Facing him were a few people on leather chairs that were bolted to the floor. Next to the minister— a hale and hearty fellow in a bright-colored summer suit—sat Valentina Filippovna. She kept a stack of papers on her knees, but carried on without looking down, without pause, with conviction. Behind them sat two from the entourage: one an athletic, broad-shouldered bull of a man; the other— with a big open notebook. Across the aisle
was
regional head Zdeshnev and a dried-up-looking fellow from Irkutsk, wearing a black suit.

Back yet farther, behind the seats, was a similarly bolted table, already fitted with a white tablecloth, two servers in white aprons carrying and setting down on it plates, bottles, glasses. Here too was the fat man Scepura, his graying hair in a crew cut, in a bright
multicolor
American sweatshirt underneath an unbuttoned
sportcoat
. He gave orders quietly, but with quick, sure motions of his hands.

The mechanic would have been happy to stand by and listen, but he was not endowed with a mug that belonged here. And he would have been even happier to have his say, but there was no butting in.

So he went—slowly, one steep step after another—down to the motor room.

Valentina Filippovna was chairman of the regional committee for environmental protection and rational use of natural resources. Although she was
still very young, no one called her by the diminutive
“
Valya.
”
She had a
n
open face, a head-on look without any flirting mannerism, and she was
chiseling
away at the high-placed guest that had flown in.

“
They started building the Boguchan hydro station two years before the project was even ready, such was the hurry. But it has been twenty years now, and the whole project has become outdated. Even at the intermediate level to which the water has been raised, the entire sturgeon hatch is dying.
Musquash
are
dying by the tens of thousands. Nearer the dam, algae blooms are turning the Angara into a swamp.
”

The minister listened on—not just attentively but sympathetically. He shook his head in disbelief. Once or twice he signaled his aide, a slender man with an elongated, intelligent face, and the latter took notes down quickly.

She spoke with such passion, fingers touching her throat, as if it were about her own fate.

“
And now, if the latest decree of the government is acted upon, completing the station to its maximum project height, it would mean flooding another half-million square miles. Underneath that land are more than 120 million cubic feet of peat. And a magnesium ore deposit, several hundred million tons ...
”

“
Ore, too!
”
tossed the minister over his shoulder to the aide.

He was in middle age, naturally vibrant, alert. His tie, according to some new fashion, was lowered; and the collar was unbuttoned at the top.
Leg over leg, even swinging back and forth at times.

To either side, behind the wide clean windowpanes of the salon, the bluish-gray river water rushed by; while farther off the banks passed by, now hill, now meadow.

The waterjet motor did not impede their conversation.

Valentina Filippovna, herself an applied chemist, a graduate of the Forestry Academy and with work experience at her back, did not stumble and did not tire in explaining to the high-placed guest—with an increasing hope—what troubles had already piled up; how the treatment systems at Bratsk and
Ust-Ilimsk
and the
Baikalsk
pulp and paper plant were unwisely applying chemicals that killed nature
’
s own capacity for biological treatment.

The minister, one could sense, was calm, firm in his accomplishment, sure of himself. If someone like that takes up an issue—how could he not succeed?

. . . But there is more: All the timber that was hastily felled is now decomposing at the bottom of the Angara—it is giving off phenols and turpentine, so that the once legendary pristine waters of the Angara have degraded down to Class V, now even Class VI, the worst level of ecological hazard. But if one were to
stop the completion of the Boguchan hydro station, more than a hundred miles of running river could be saved, and in those miles reached the Angara can cleanse itself. Otherwise, the whole of the Angara dies; all of it will be stagnant water . . .

Even in her rather short service, Valentina Filippovna had seen her fill of bosses who were endlessly calm, even if matters were falling apart in front of their eyes. They were groomed to be that way; and they were all large, too, following some rule of selection different from the rest of us. But this one— no, he is different. And his is so highly placed besides! If this one speaks
…
His youthful, perhaps cheerful look also gave her comfort for some reason.