The Librarian (8 page)

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, the 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.

There weren’t any graves in the crematorium section—only concrete walls in which the urns were immured. My uncle had been placed close to the ground, I had to squat down to read the words engraved on the brass plaque:

MAXIM DANILOVICH VYAZINTSEV. 1952–1999.

And in slightly smaller letters:

REST IN PEACE.

I put off the conversation with the administration of the cemetery until the sale of the apartment was settled.

B
UT
AT HOME
a surprise was waiting. A note, folded in four and wedged in the door, with a message for me from a certain Vadim Leonidovich Kolesov. He wrote that in Housing Department Office No. 27 he had heard from the manager, Mukhina, that I intended to sell the apartment and, as an extremely interested party, he wished to meet with me. His aged parents lived nearby, so the purchase of accommodation in this precise location would be ideal, and he asked permission to call round that evening at about ten.

The polite tone of the letter suggested a man of delicate manners. True, the thought did briefly flash through my mind that I hadn’t really told Antonina Petrovna anything much, but it was easier to convince myself that in my tired state I had simply not attached any significance in that situation to the question: “What are you thinking of doing with the apartment?”—and had replied automatically, without even realizing it.

Everything, of course, was suddenly going rather too well, but after a long sequence of setbacks in this worldly life, a minor indulgence from destiny seemed entirely justified.

A quick sale was the outcome that suited my plans to return home soon better than any other. I reread the message excitedly and put the sheet of paper in my pocket, promising myself that in the event of a successful deal I would give Antonina Petrovna a more substantial present than a box of sweets.

I still had half a day in reserve, so I put my feet up for a while and took a nap, and then tidied the apartment, washed the floors
and slipped out for half an hour to the grocery shop. Outside I saw the couple from the previous day chatting to each other again—the bald man with the bundle and the dacha lady in the headscarf. On my way back, they had been joined by another two: a man with a moustache, who was clearly another vegetable gardener, clutching the handle of the spade on which he was leaning with strong, sinewy hands, and a floppy-haired young guy in a threadbare mechanic’s boiler suit, with a toolbox. The young guy was cracking simple-minded little jokes to the dacha lady, and the sinewy man with the spade was laughing loudly.

An elderly woman in horn-rimmed spectacles who was sitting at the entrance to the building set aside her knitting and asked me sternly: “Who are you visiting, young man?”

I replied politely, “Only myself. I’m the late Vyazintsev’s nephew.”

Satisfied with my answer, the stern woman took up her needles again.

I spent the time until Kolesov’s arrival sorting through my uncle’s bunker. In addition to preserved goods and all sorts of builder’s lumber, the cupboards under the ceiling in the hallway contained a photographic enlarger, a Kharkov electric shaver in a box, a slide projector and a whole bundle of copies of the old
Outlook
magazine, with the flexible blue plastic records that came with them. I even tried to play one, but the speakers of the radiogram had a loose connection somewhere, and the sound kept cutting out. While I was edging my way in behind the wardrobe to drag out the wires, someone rang the doorbell.

At this point I must admit that Kolesov did not at all resemble the ideal buyer nurtured by my dreams—the bashful father of a small family consisting of a wife and a five-year-old daughter.

Vadim Leonidovich was bony and lanky, with intensely black slicked-back hair that was receding deeply above the temples, like Mickey Mouse. He smiled and gesticulated continually, and he had a very shrewd look about him, but in theory a shrewd man ought not to be interested in my apartment.

Instead of a wife and a little fair-haired daughter, Kolesov had brought with him a friend by the name of Alik. Vadim Leonidovich introduced him and immediately broke into profuse, staccato apologies for descending unannounced on me and for bringing his workmate along as well. Apparently this Alik—a character with a face as red as sunburn—had kindly given Vadim Leonidovich a lift in his car. Alik stood in one spot with his fists thrust into the pockets of his leather jacket, swaying to and fro from his heels to his toes with a springy movement, like a rocking chair, and only once asked for some water.

Vadim Leonidovich scampered round the sitting room as nimbly as a spider, glanced briefly into the kitchen, and soon I heard him cry out in joy from my uncle’s bedroom:

“Alik, Alik, come here quickly!”

“What’s up in there?” the sullen Alik muttered, but he answered the summons anyway.

Kolesov was standing in front of the shelves, exultantly leafing through a book.

“Would you believe it, eh?”

His eyes met Alik’s and Alik coughed.

“
The Quiet Grass
! Have you read it?” Kolesov asked, skewering me with a piercing glance.

“No,” I replied drily. I was thoroughly fed up of Kolesov’s scurrying about and fatuous exclamations. “Is it worth reading?”

“I don’t think so,” he said with a smile. “It’s a rubbishy little book. It’s just that for me it’s associated with a certain romantic memory that can’t be expressed in words. Koktebel, the sea… Alik here knows about it. I can tell you if you like…”

I took the book out of his hands and examined it cursorily. Published in the late 1970s. The narrow spine was half worn away and it was hard to understand how Kolesov could possibly have discovered this “romantic memory” on my uncle’s shelves.

“Listen!” he suddenly exclaimed. “You don’t need the book. Sell it to me, eh?”

I said guardedly that if we made a deal, I would make him a present of this piece of trash.

Vadim Leonidovich started fussing.

“Didn’t I say that everything suits me just fine?… I’m willing to lay out er, er, er… eight thousand greenbacks. What do you say?” he asked, and froze with an anxious air.

It was two thousand more than my very boldest forecasts. Inwardly exultant, I paused sagaciously to maintain gravitas, as if I were weighing up all the pros and cons, and then nodded.

Vadim Leonidovich declined tea and delighted me by taking a tape measure out of his pocket and measuring the walls, drawing the conclusion: “The suite will be a perfect fit.” Then, in confirmation of the seriousness of his intentions, Kolesov informed me that he would like to start registering the deal the next day. I reminded him that on a Saturday everything would be closed. He clicked his tongue in annoyance, postponed our meeting until Monday and dictated his home and work telephone numbers for me.

Vadim Leonidovich wheedled
The Quiet Grass
out of me anyway. “Oh, please, now we’ve struck a deal,” he whined jokingly, and I decided not to be petty and mean-spirited.

Vadim Leonidovich pressed the book to his chest and said it was this “lucky find” that had decided everything; for him it was a “good sign” about the apartment. He suddenly recollected that an acquaintance was waiting for him in the car and it was terribly impolite to keep him waiting. Vadim Leonidovich hadn’t mentioned any third party before that…

Now I realize it was my obliging nature that saved me. Who knows what would have happened if I had refused to let Kolesov have his present…

Somehow it happened, no doubt because the conversation ran on, that I followed my visitors out. As we walked down the stairs, Kolesov joked happily, saying that he had been searching
for
The Quiet Grass
for a long time, and now a stroke of luck had brought the book to him.

In the hours that had passed since I came back from the shop and then received Kolesov, it had turned completely dark. The yard was empty. The woman knitting by the entrance, the garrulous dacha folk, the bald man with the bundle and the mechanic had all gone home.

The car, a Zhiguli 2106, had two people in it: the driver and a passenger sitting beside him. When we appeared, they got out and Vadim Leonidovich waved the little book to them, after which the driver relaxed and leaned back against the car, while his companion came towards us. I had just enough time to realize that my visitors were not even a threesome, but a foursome…