NINE

OLGA SLAVNIKOVA KRYLOV'S CHILDHOOD

Translated by Marian Schwartz.

On a relief globe, the Urals look like an old, stretched out scar. There used to be a globe like that at the local history museum; its hollow bumps resembled a cardboard mask. A clumsy contraption caged inside four wooden ribs, you could spin it, and if you rubbed the globe's rough side it would make three or four turns with a plaintive creak, tumble across its own axis for the last time, and land with South America on the bottom. There, underneath, some irritating little piece of it would take a while to settle down. Young Krylov's mother, although in those days a thirty-year-old woman in high heels, had an old woman's job at the museum. She sat on an ordinary chair among the museum's marvels and kept people from touching the skeleton of the brown antediluvian mammoth, whose sole tusk looked like a broken ski with a splint jutting out in front.

But neither the globe nor the mammoth, to say nothing of the turgic cobra in green denatured alcohol, or the dusty dioramas on prehistoric themes, held any allure for young Krylov. His imagination was drawn by the crystals. They rested in the display windows in cardboard nests lined with cotton wool, and they also towered in the museum lobby, balancing out its patterned, cast iron plangency with their absolute and intact muteness. The most powerful rock crystal, inside of which iridescent mealy stone-snow seemed to be melting, turning into water, was taller than 12-year-old Krylov by its entire blunt fissured point. No less amazing were the black morions: two chunky druses, as if they'd been chopped out of solid resin with an ax. In the smoky quartzes called Venus's hairstone, through their tea-yellow, it was as if you were seeing bundles of iron needles, or the prickly leavings from a cut at the barber's. The crystals' sides, if you looked at them from a specular angle, were cross-hatched here and there, the way they teach you to cross-hatch figures in drawing class, while others had polished patches, as if they'd been through major renovations underground.

The museum had other, nontransparent minerals, too. Visitors always took a special interest in the massive gold nugget that looked like the mummy of some tiny animal. The woman guide, whom Krylov remembered by her black skirt and heavy feet stuffed into her stretched out scuffs, would tell the schoolchildren that a miner who dies underground petrifies sometimes and turns into his own statue. Afterward Krylov wasted no time clarifying whether or not this was so. It turned out that, indeed, under specific conditions organic remains can be replaced by sulfur-pyrite. There was no impermeable boundary between the mineral world and living nature.

Young Krylov, who often showed up at the museum despite the prohibitions of his mother, who feared for the exhibits, felt that he was closer to knowledge there than he was in his classes at school. Knowledge yet to be discovered but quietly promised held a pleasure shaped somehow like the complex space of an old cathedral, from volume to volume, its surfeit on top, where the white-washed dome was rough and uneven, like the shell of an ancient egg. Later on it occurred to Krylov that it was temple configurations that were best suited to the introducing, teaching, and placing of exhibits. In some prof ound way they corresponded to the templates of human thought. In any church he saw a misinterpreted museum.

The conical crystals chopped off at the root and transferred to the plinths of rusty cloth possessed in full measure a quality that had bewitched young Krylov since his very first glimmers of consciousness: transparency. Man's early memories have an obscure and confused origin. When later Krylov had occasion to spend time on business in the ancient emir's capital where he had passed his first years, he had the feeling that he had not once lived amid these huge glazed ceramics and crude, oxidized copper engravings, this Asiatic vegetation, but that he had dreamed it all. The dream of his early childhood was vibrant and trembled at the mere sight of the marble-hard white grapes on the fruit stand under the harsh Ural snow — and then dropped right back into his subconscious. The episodes accessible to Krylov's memory as an adult consisted in part of his parents' stories and in part of restorations from his imagination; it didn't seem possible to separate out the grains of what was genuine and what was unconditionally his. Just one episode was steeped in ammonia-like reality. All he had to do was wish to see it and in his mind an osier bush immediately flashed above the soap-green irrigation water, and in his hand he found a sliver of blue glass, curved, from a bottle probably, through which the flashes of sunlight on the irrigation canal looked (this is a later insertion) like welding sparks. Something sticky was smeared along the edge of the piece of glass, and on his finger, buzzing and thick, there emerged, as if from a half-shut eye, a fat red tear. Who was that stout man he knew, who leaned over him, smelling of sweat through his clean, blindingly white shirt? He demanded that Krylov throw it away that instant, or give him the glass, but young Krylov, smeared all over with blood, as if it were chocolate, stubbornly held his find behind his back and retreated into the leafy shade, which was as hot as splashes of tea (this is a later insertion). He felt it with inutterable clarity at the time: the blue sliver contained something that almost never occurs in the simple matter around us: transparency, a special, prof ound element, like water and sky.

Actually, it was dating from this episode that Krylov remembered himself, that he became aware of himself as an intact human continuity. His attraction to the transparent, to the mystery of the gem, which subsequently inserted Krylov into the true Ural mentality, must originally have been an emanation of the dry, flat Asiatic world, where water was highly valued, where everything earthly under the red-hot sky was divided into what would seem to be fit for being ground into pigment, on one hand, and untinted monotony, on the other. Young Krylov perceived transparency as a substance's highest, most enlightened state. Transparency was magic. All simple objects belonged to the ordinary world, this world. No matter how cleverly they were arranged or how tightly sealed, you could open them and see what they had inside. The transparent belonged to a world of a different order, and you couldn't open it up and get inside. Once young Krylov attempted to extract the orange glass-juice that was trapped in the thick walls of his aunt's vase and that was much better than the colorless water poured into the vase. One afternoon, on the balcony, on a carefully spread out newspaper, young Krylov struck the vase with a hammer, exploding its emptiness like a grenade in a war movie. The shards, though — some of them flew into the sneering sycamore or under his aunt's tubs — were just as self-contained as the intact object. Choosing the very best, bottom piece, with the thickest color, young Krylov continued to smash it on the scraps of the now slivered and silvered newspaper until he ended up with a totally white, hard powder. The only color in the powder came from his, Krylov's, unanticipated blood, which looked like a chewed up raisin. Not a drop remained in the powder of the transparency for whose sake his experiment had been performed.

The experiment that ended in powder made a much bigger impression on Krylov than the fatherly beating that followed. He had learned that what is transparent is unattainable and, like everything precious, is connected with blood. What he gleaned about stones at the children's library, where the papery dust choked him (Krylov could barely remember a time when he couldn't read), confirmed his intuition's findings. «Great Moghul,» «Excelsior,» «Florentine,» «Shah» — the names of the world-class diamonds were as much music to him as the names of world capitals are to romantics of another bent. Famous stones were the heroes of adventures on a par with d'Artagnon, Captain Nemo, and Leatherstocking.

Meanwhile, his mother and aunt had precious stones, too: large earrings on slender gold hooks, with pale blue stones, holding more patterns than a cardboard kaleidoscope; and four rings. One, bent, had a gaping black hole, but in the others marvelous transparencies winked like cat's eyes. Young Krylov was as certain of the high value of these objects as he was of the fact that the painting by Shishkin, Morning in the Piney Woods, hung in the living room of his neighbors, the Permyakovs, over their lumpy couch, whose solid dilapidation arose powerfully in his memory when a few years later young Krylov was secretly researching the museum's taxidermied deer and wolves. Later, when he had done some reading, Krylov learned that the picture was in fact held at the Tretyakov Gallery. It was hard for him to believe in the Tretyakov's reality and, consequently, Shishkin's painting itself vanished from reality. The world appeared to young Krylov as a string of copies without an original — assuming an original, striving to engender it with their spontaneous accumulation and merge with it, but in vain. All this wasn't formulated until much later, but the feeling joined the sum of those nonverbal intuitions that young Krylov was infatuated with and reveled in secretly from the adults. Even after his disappointment in the painting's copy, though, his belief in the precious stones kept in the shabby box covered in nettle-green velvet remained intact.

Young Krylov understood from the grownups' conversations that they all earned very little money. For some reason his aunt, considered a beauty, earned the least of all. She had a habit of puffing out her ribs, tensing the slender veins on her neck, and circling her waist with her hands so that the fingers nearly met in the crumpled silk of her shift; her hair, which poured smoothly down her back all the way to her waist, was piled up and hovered in the air like the striated smoke from his father's cigarettes. She was the first to lose her job. One day she came home walking — and looking — utterly off, as if her feet had kept landing in invisible holes, and to all questions she turned to face the wall. The old Yuryuzan refrigerator, which his mama and aunt had been planning to get rid of, chuckled with glee. To young Krylov, though, it seemed that both this refrigerator, and the worn red carpets, which in spots looked like colored batting, and the lack of a car of their own, which his father, who was nota thief, grumbled about on Saturdays behind his half-lowered newspaper — that all this was just a game because the family in fact kept a treasure. The certainty never left young Krylov that everything transparent was worth insane sums — and stones in gold settings weren't just any old buttons. In essence, he saw them as magical objects capable of granting Ivan the Fool's every wish. The very presence of these stones elevated his mother and aunt above ordinary laboring women with nasty-smelling kitchen hands into the ranks of titled ladies. That is, it gave them a special dignity, which later young Krylov dreamed of seeing in women but never did find. He dwelled for a time in the happy confidence that should some calamity suddenly befall them, the stones, sold to some fairy-tale merchants in luxurious turbans that looked like white roses, would save the day.

They did not save the day. Everything changed. Nothing seemed real anymore but rather as if you were seeing it in a mirror. You couldn't tell who was doing what in this mirror or who was going where. Young Krylov still didn't have the right words but he did have a visceral sense of the disorientation of things; he noticed that many people on the street now seemed off. Others, who didn't speak Russian well, seemed to double in this mirror: each time in the courtyard he ran into mocking Mahomet with his iron fingers, or Kerim with the blue-gray head from the seventh floor, young Krylov felt with his contracted shoulder blades that, while they were in front of him, they were simultaneously standing behind his back.

Several times strangers came to the Krylovs' apartment: two who looked liked they were from the market, in identical jackets that looked like they had been glued on the inside to a piece of warped cardboard. The strangers walked through the house, looking around cautiously and meticulously, as if they were playing hide-and-seek and were ready to dash for the starting wall at any moment. One, with temples like pieces of gray coal under his skull-cap, was asking Krylov's frightened mother something, his angry, effeminate voice rising from time to time to a quizzical whine; the other said nothing but seemed to be thinking, and the wrinkles on his forehead were exactly like the ones you get on the front of crumpled trousers. One day these two, whom his parents referred to privately as «the buyers,» brought with them an utterly senile and bent old granddad, whose body looked like a skinny dog in man's clothing. While the young men were crawling under the bed and in the closets — now without any ceremony whatsoever, as if in hopes of finding hidden players — the granddad sat on a stool, his bowed legs in their soft, dusty shoes folded in an impotent curl. Granddad looked absolutely nothing like the rich merchant whom young Krylov's imagination had created with a little help from the Arabian Nights and the movie about old Hattab the Djinn. His robe, belted with a dirty cotton scarf, had burned up from the heat to shreds of brown batting, and his beard was like the threads from a torn-off button. When young Krylov happened to look into his eyes, where some kind of warm wax was accumulating, he felt — as clearly as if he had become transparent for a second — that Granddad didn't care what happened to him, or to these young men, or to the Russian inhabitants of this profane apartment, who to Granddad were no more than shadows on the unfamiliar walls around him. When they had completed this latest inspection, the strangers lifted the doddering djinn by his spread elbows and carried him off, adjusting to his small felt steps — but from the vestibule you could see the Permyakovs' door open across the landing and the anxious neighbors waiting inside. There were fewer «buyers» than «sellers.»

The «move» dated from this time. Far from all the familiar items that disappeared here later showed up there, in the cold northern city where the trees' summer greenery functioned as raincoats, in the tiny apartment stingily lit by windows the size of an open newspaper. In the same manner his aunt disappeared as well — the princess, his friend, the beauty with the round face that had the ability to glow in the dark — she vanished without a trace, and young Krylov understood from the muffled tone of the new apartment silence that in no instance was he to ask about her. It turned out that the precious stones were all gone, along with Mama's savings, to pay for the containers in which their furniture arrived, crippled and suffering from, now chronic, dislocation of the joints. The wardrobe where his aunt's colorful dresses once hung now tended to come apart, the way the slick magician's painted box comes apart in the circus ring.

No matter how hard his parents tried to get it out of him why he had done that terrible thing, young Krylov preferred to keep his own counsel. You didn't see him asking why they hid the only photograph of his aunt as far away as possible, under the technical manuals from the nonexistent microwave and sewing machine, although he suspected foul play — a reluctance to look at the person they had for some reason abandoned. One evening, scarily close to his parents' return from work, he up and poked into the stiff drawer under the mirror, which was stuffed like a briefcase. Hastily tossing the uninteresting papers aside, afraid now that what he'd been searching for would not turn up among these scraps, he suddenly saw his aunt — taken in the same studio where they had taken him, standing as if she were a singer on stage, in front of folded drapery which young Krylov remembered as red but in the photo was brown. All at once his urge to steal from his parents the sole copy, which had no original, was superseded by another. Feeling the tears that had welled up press on his nose, Krylov ripped the photograph into sticky pieces, some of which ended up on the floor. Then he managed to unseal the damp ventilation pane and released his aunt from his fist, like a small bird, onto the dark October wind, which was scraping its belly over the earth, so that she might overcome the mass of air and withered leaves pulling her down and fly south. He didn't notice that some of the scraps fluttered back into the room and got tangled up in his hair like confetti.

So, when his parents, tired from the bus, dragged themselves and their bags of groceries into the absolutely quiet, unlit apartment with the electric drizzle on the unshuttered windows and the little criminal hiding in the dark W.C., all the clues were in evidence. Young Krylov couldn't remember another fatherly punishment like this one: the belt seared his clenched, trembling buttocks, and the pain made him wet himself on the clammy oilcloth his father had thrown down as a precaution on the new ottoman brought from the house. His mother, clutching her crushed beauty parlor hairdo, sat at the empty table in front of a solitary dish of marmalade and the remnants of some colored sugar — and remained sitting like that while the criminal, holding his trousers and upturning chairs, stumbled back to the W.C., where he kept tattered matches and smelly butts wrapped in paper behind the wastebasket.

Actually, what shook young Krylov at the time was not his parents' behavior but his newly discovered capacity to commit terrible crimes. He developed this capacity further in school and the yard, which was notorious for its drunken brawls, teen rumbles, and the giant puddle, shaped like a grand piano, that appeared spring and fall in an unvarying outline in the exact same spot — and which in the course of dangerous experiments with substances pilfered from the chemistry closet burned up and exploded more than once, splattering foamy water on the metal garages. After the «move,» young Krylov got out of hand, as they say. A ceasefire was in effect only on museum territory, where, if his mother didn't pester him too much, Krylov quietly did his homework in the staffroom with the thick walls and sloping window, where the raspberry sun of the winter sunset sat like a loaf of bread in the oven, or the spring branches melted in the March blue. All the rest of the time he led an independent life.

With his thrill-seeking buddies he would ride the freights that dragged past the gray buildings lined up in a long row — as if to demonstrate the relativity of motion to the abstract observer. Or he'd flatten pieces of scrap under train wheels, scrap that seemed to retain some of its monstrous weight and quaking power, like the echo of the caboose, as if the freight train, making its groaning sounds, were retreating from him in two directions. With that same enterprising gang, young Krylov climbed the abandoned TV tower the Uralers called the Toadstool. The town's main attraction, which had never been used for its designated purpose and for a good ten years had been deteriorating in a striated mirage above the cubist apartment blocs and cellophane river, was guarded by the police, but only very theoretically. There, inside the concrete pillar, which had holes like a whistle, the rusted stairs were rickety and some places were like a creaking swing. The wind up top, bursting through the cracks, instantly dried your sweat, making the thrill-seeker feel as if his whole body had been trapped in a sticky spider web. Despite the difficulties of the climb, though, the column was covered in all kinds of graffiti just as solidly as any proletarian entryway. At the very top, on the wind-lashed circular platform, which bobbed around like an airborne raft, he couldn't keep his feet at first, even in the relatively safe center; he felt like lying flat on his belly and not watching the skinny grating of the guard rail, buried by winding tendrils, ladle the sun-drenched blur, not watching the pink rag that was tied to it and ripped to shreds furiously flap.

Teen Krylov had already figured it out, though. If you wanted to be a real Uraler, you had to take risks — lots of them, and the more reckless the better. Standing at the very edge, feeling where the low wall stopped and emptiness began, just above knee height, like a cello bow passing across strung nerves, he was one of the few who could piss straight into the abyss, where his output scattered like beads from a broken strand. When out-of-town base jumpers first showed up at the tower and started jumping over the side, flicking the long tongues of their parachutes, Krylov decided he was definitely going to jump, too, but it was not to be. «Don't even think about it, buddy,» the guy with deeply set kind eyes that glistened amid his wrinkles and lashes like drops of dark oil, told him. «You have to train for sixmonths to base-jump. It's all a matter of seconds here, get it? You'd fuck yourself up good…» The good man explained what exactly would happen to Krylov, using an expression of exceptional profanity while watching good-naturedly the thrill-seekers' hangout, where an empty balloon drifted, drunk on the thin air and shining like a 60-watt bulb in absolute sun. «So I fuck myself up. So what? It's my right.» Krylov wouldn't back down, although his stomach was in knots and the abyss below seemed to turn like a hatch being opened. «See this parachute?» the good baser nodded over his shoulder. «It costs two grand. If you fuck yourself up, I'm not getting it back.»

This argument convinced Krylov. The two grand figure made an impression. Krylov's activities outside the house now tended to be commercial. He and his buddies, wearing loose Chinese-made Adidas sweats, shoplifted on a small scale from «their» supermarket, the Oriental, keeping cheeky outsiders off their territory. They prospected at Matrosov Square, formerly Haymarket, where the river lay on the sand like a woman on a sheet, and under the sand, in the black, foul-smelling muck that used to be cleaned off the bottom by the municipal cleaners, they'd find different coins, gold ones even, the size of a Soviet kopek, with a two-headed eagle the size of a gnat. Soon teen Krylov's mind had come up with something like virtual bookkeeping. A parachute was two grand. A used PC — two hundred fifty. The new World Coins catalog — fifty-four. A headlamp for crawling through the vaulted shallow underground mines — eight hundred rubles. A sturdy Polish knapsack — four hundred fifty. Not all — or even many — of his dreams could come true. Teen Krylov adjusted to jumping from the Toadstool in his dreams. As he drifted off, his URL was a specific array of sensations — in particular, the image of a balloon being borne off, which tuned every nerve in his body to the four hundred meters of altitude, at which point the balloon reminded him of an astronaut stepping out for a space-walk. Not always, but often Krylov reached a state where everything was swaying, tossing, whistling. As in real life the clouds' wet shadows floated deep in the golden abyss and were greedily collected by the city blocks, the way water collects pieces of sugar, but the Toadstool's harsh shadow wouldn't dissolve — which made it hard to accept himself as a dot on the rim of a broken hat of shadows or on the crest of a small brown roof. In his dreams, Krylov broke away from the concrete by making a special effort with his tensed diaphragm; immediately, his ears and head felt like a jammed receiver, and the insane air slipping into his mouth fluttered his puffed out cheeks from the inside like tattered banners. After losing himself like a dot on the bottom of a prettier, livelier abyss, Krylov had an unbearably sharp presentiment of merging with himself as he hurtled down, like a crazed motorcyclist — but the paradisiacal two-thousand-dollar parachute on his back just wouldn't open, so he had to dissolve in the wind as quickly as possible and without a trace, which Krylov set about doing quite practically, surrendering utterly to the logic of his dream and its vibrating, vanishing words.

When he started earning some money, teen Krylov felt more grown up than he really was. He'd been through all the trivial agonies of a self-centered young oaf with a laughable father (by this time his father had become a toadying chauffeur for a piss-ugly boss and was driving a Mercedes, just like he'd always wanted), and things got much easier for him with his parents. His silence in response to their helpless cries now seemed perfectly natural, and from time to time he would even leave his school report in the kitchen, by way of impersonal information, a perfectly proper school report with good marks. Studying came easy to Krylov, it was as if there was no science at all. Everything bubbled up and evaporated, like steam: quadratic equations, English verb tenses, and Einstein's definitions, which were in some way like Krylov's dreams. What was worse was that his parents' mere presence kept Krylov from having a good read. They obviously suspected him of hiding a porno magazine under his algebra textbook, not a Frederic Paul novel. All in all, relations between teen Krylov and his parents consisted of endless suspicions. Imagining what they were imagining while they waited up for their sonny boy at night under their stupid kitchen lamp, Krylov admitted that no matter how hard he tried he could never be as bad as those two, who had once conspired to give birth to him, thought he was. Looking at them, dressed at home in identical old jeans with saggy butts, which looked like identical shopping bags, Krylov could more readily have believed that he'd been conceived in a test tube. Even more, he could not imagine why they'd needed to do it. He was perfectly well informed about where children come from, and he had enjoyed the favors of Ritka and Svetka — two sisters one year apart who never said no and who had coarse kissers and soft asses that afterward got hot spots on them that blossomed like roses. Krylov could not possibly imagine his mother and father getting it together to have him; if any sound ever reached him at night from their dark, gloomily smelly bedroom, then it was nothing but the unending family opera.

In short, his parents believed that Krylov committed all the crimes in their neighborhood, just as in the past common people thought that Lenin had invented the electric bulb and Stalin everything else. The image created by his parents' imagination coincided with Ritka and Svetka's ideal — someone to share, like all their boyfriends and their cheap dresses with golden sparkles and puff paint designs. They pictured this ideal as a tough guy who saw life as having control over everything that moved, and who was controlled in turn by a benign papa-thug, whose thick shaved neck looked like a cold meat patty with a layer of white fat and who sported a gold chain as chunky as a tractor tire. All the guys — from the clean-shaven lookout, whom Krylov had only seen from behind, to puny Genchik, famous for his ability to send his bubbly spit flying several meters — possessed a common quality: a nauseating «soulfulness». They took serious offense if something seemed amiss to them — and some fuzzy-eyed jerk with a head no more complexly constructed than a gearbox could for some reason remember a guy and chase him like a jackrabbit, becoming the ubiquitous godling of their home courtyards and garages as far as his victim was concerned.

These tattooed punks horsed around for a long time before installing their own general at the Oriental — Krylov's classmate, Lekha Terentiev, who'd repeated two grades and whose concave forehead and thick-lipped smirk, hanging as it were from his left ear, provoked a rush of malicious energy in Krylov, an urge to crush not only Lekha but the store he'd taken over as well. Actually, Lekha himself, being both curious and clumsy, had overturned a rack of housewares, and as a result of the crash the unfamiliar object that had caught his eye was buried under a heap ofenameled cookware and detergents gurgling in plastic squeeze bottles, a heap that looked like ruins of antiquity. Ever since, the general, rather than working personally, had just shot the breeze with the guard while the guys, shielding each other from the TV eye, lifted the expensive compacts and perfumes he'd told them to get. Ritka and Svetka worshipped Lekha and marked his presence with the highest sign of respect — silence — which made their little mouths look like lipstick-smeared baby belly buttons. Krylov was all set to fight him for the business. Out of pure rage he beat up that big lug Lekha in the boys room at school and somehow managed to stick this unzipped hulk under the sink with his head right under a wet pipe, where his head got stuck in an unnatural position, making a gurgling noise. After they freed Lekha's head by pouring vegetable oil over it and his paws grabbed onto the parallel legs of the girl mathematician who'd rescued him, when he'd worked himself free, centimeter by centimeter, and sat down, making strange movements as if he'd suddenly landed in a full bathtub, Krylov actually felt guilty at the sight of Lekha's tears smeared over his dirty, oily cheeks.

Lekha wasn't long in being avenged, though, they made it hot for Krylov. After that chat with the gang (the victim's sneer had drifted even farther back toward his ear, as if after rubbing against the pipe it just wouldn't go back in place), Krylov's teeth were wobbly and salty for a long time, and his ribs on the right side felt like they had current running through them so that he couldn't take a deep breath. It became perfectly clear to him that mixing with tattoos cost too much. The gang was a freak of nature, a genetic phenomenon, and occasionally, when he watched the tiniest residents of the courtyard banging their toys on the bench and running away in their flannel booties from their pale mothers mincing after them, Krylov would suddenly catch a glimpse of their future man — as if marked from birth by some secret sulkiness, a concavity in his hard forehead, the corporeal weight of his raw being.

Because of Lekha, Krylov lost a substantial portion of his income — which he didn't regret particularly as the romance of the supermarket, with its standard Chinese-Turkish assortment, had lost its allure by then. On the other hand, he had other interesting occupations the thugs couldn't touch. The thugs, whose main output was the physiological terror they produced in people, themselves went around full of that terror, like jugs, up to their ears in it — and so were incapable of pure pointless risk. All of them, striving for outward gang unity, were copies without an original — without the ideal that Krylov's parents had glimpsed and that Ritka and Svetka had seen in their maidenly Siamese dreams. Krylov didn't want to be a copy, even of someone or something that actually existed.

Nor did he want to resent the world that lay before him like one big amusement park. In order to achieve this in his relations with the world he had worked out and followed his own rules of equilibrium. For instance, if some collector ripped off Krylov for a rare Soviet twenty, then Krylov, in turn, would rip off someone else, but only one someone, and not necessarily the same someone. What was important here was keeping it impersonal; the owner of a major collection of Soviet coins could hang out right there, where the deals went down, but Krylov wouldn't come near him. Instead, he would carelessly show a worn prewar lat to a snippety old lady with a puffy powdered face who looked like an owl-moth and who had shown up for no one knew what dividend, and when he'd made an unfair deal would feel perfectly satisfied. Teen Krylov didn't want to hold on to anything extra — not insults, not the memory of all the people who had come and gone. He was like an ecologically pure apparatus that returns to the environment precisely what it takes in. He thought that by maintaining this equilibrium he was in some magical way protecting the world from collapse, maintaining its substance. If someone lifted a book from his bag, he'd take one from a bookstall or the school library; if someone didn't return the head-lamp he'd lent, he wouldn't buy another, he'd pinch one from a subway construction worker, crawling through the gaps in the patched link fence behind which the dusty excavation site sputtered and boomed. For himself, Krylov made no distinction between the people who insulted him and the people who suffered at his hands, especially since many of those remained unknown to him. The «me versus everyone else» correlation was, of course, unequal, as it would be for anyone, not just a guy from the crummy projects who had the slimmest of social chances; but Krylov had no wish to admit any inequality.

In search of adventure for his own pathetic ass, teen Krylov tried to grasp the character of his new northern homeland, the essence of true Ural-ness. As in any Babylonian-type city, four-fifths settled by outsiders, refugees, ex-convicts, and the graduates of thirty or so functioning colleges, natives of the Urals' capital were in the minority. The city, by taking people in, had subsumed carbon copies of all the geographically proximate towns and urban settlements — in some instances copies bigger than their original size. Plus it exchanged bureaucratic elites with an ever-watchful Moscow, as a result of which its low-slung architectural landmarks changed hands and were repainted more often than the pale landscape could withstand. Given this spontaneous growth of the inhabited environment it was hard to understand what the city's primordial territory, the expression and symbol of the Ural spirit, actually was. Especially since the city itself originally had not been inclined to create a center. The old merchant mansions adorned with thick cast iron lace on front balconies the size of beds had been put up without any consideration for the style of their neighbors, as if they had no neighbors at all in fact. It looked as if the willful prospector, in erecting his beloved monstrosity, had known for certain that it would outlast the surrounding structures, which the beauty of his mansion had already eclipsed. In short, the old part of town didn't have a basic notion of its simultaneous existence. The city administration, experiencing a natural need for a proper center, responded by razing decayed mansions and putting up new housing that combined the idea of a barracks and a Petrine Monplaisir. The Uralers were offered a choice of symbols: the open-air geology museum, where the big chunks of jasper flushed out by the dam reminded him of pieces of stone meat shot through with quartz veins; a life-size model of a locomotive, invented here, that looked like a meat grinder; or the monument to the city's two founders, who stood in their stony German garb, their identical polished faces turned toward the black dam tunnel and waterfall, above which some hotshot, one of the ones who liked to dangle his legs over the abyss, had written in bright white waterproof paint: «There is no God.»

In reality, the true symbol and expression of the Ural spirit was the bluish Toadstool that loomed over the city, the largest of those irrational structures that seemed to have arisen purely to arouse the Uralers' principal instinct, which you might say was the instinct to climb something just because it was there, to conquer what you weren't supposed to, or, even better, were forbidden to. There was a special connection here. The place was a physical password to which any Uraler deep down had a ready response. The Uraler's world was patently nonhorizontal — like an insect's, in this sense. The Toadstool was their cult, and for the town's teens, it was an ant trail to heaven. Grown-up guys would climb, with God's blessing, 8,000-meter Himalayas, they would organize international (with only melancholy Finns participating) competitions for climbing the red sausage-like Ural pines, and schedule insane rallies on forest roads, which were nothing but raw steepness with boulders jutting out, and also winter motorcycle races down the frozen river, which involved scooting nimbly under the vaults of the Tsar Bridge, which looked like iced-over runny nostrils. Though what they were doing was much worthier of punks, the grown-up Uralers nonetheless took it quite seriously — maybe because they held on inside to something solid, some cold, crystalline filler. Teen Krylov figured out early on that a true Uralers' soul possesses the quality of transparency: you could see straight through it but never get inside.

Soon he had a similar formation in his own chest — an accumulation of the tiny spots and fissures of insult from his earliest youth that he could no longer return to his environment. Krylov learned that when something irreparable happens, then at first it's interesting, like finding yourself in a movie. That's how it was when his father drank his boss's whiskey and drove the Mercedes into a silly but solid billboard. He was trapped by the air bags and got off with literally a scratch, whereas his boss had half his skull ripped off by a post that rammed through the car, and his hairless scalp lay there on the back seat, like a scrap from a torn ball. Although the accident was the fault of a Moskvich that was never found and that skidded and clipped a line of cars (there were plenty of reckless drivers among ordinary engineers driving rusty old wrecks, and not only among the new rich, on the Ural roads), his father, as a consequence of the deceased's stature and the alcohol he'd drunk, was put behind bars. Krylov saw him for the last time in the courtroom and fixed in his memory his small, focused eyebrows and his patient pose of an ice fisherman. After that his father went away in a convoy and never came back, honestly serving out his four years but, like many in his situation, making his escape from reality.

The splendid Toadstool's dramatic demise made a much bigger impression on Krylov. Despite the special qualities of the reinforced concrete used in it, the 400-meter tower had deteriorated so badly it was unsafe. Meanwhile, there was absolutely nowhere to drop it. During the years the Toadstool had adorned the low-slung Ural skies, around it were built, first, your standard nine-story apartment blocks and then prestigious red-brick housing complexes, and on the most dangerous, almost always windy side, there was a shopping mall that looked like an enormous greenhouse. Delay threatened calamity, though, such as the Emergency Administration had never seen. One fine summer noted for its mighty white rains, which rumbled in the drain pipes like anchor chains, the municipal administration summoned the will and the means and gave the go-ahead. Naturally, the Toadstool remained standing over the city all the next winter, sparkling like sugar and leading Uralers into temptation to climb it with amateur radio stations and drag a battery up for their broadcasting needs. Prices for suburban real estate went up and down, and insider realtors close to the mayor's office made a tidy sum.

The following summer, which, unlike the previous year's, was so dry that the town stream turned into a coffee-like muck, military specialists took over the Toadstool. They spent two months evacuating the nearby blocks, which came to resemble a Martian city where dusty dogs ran in packs, while blasters drilled holes in the concrete, spread cables, and replaced the explosives looted the previous year. On D-day it became obvious that these were pros at work: the air in town shuddered, and the Toadstool turned into a neat pile of dust, like a candle that had burned up very quickly, plunging, halfway to the ground, into rising clouds of solid ash. Where it had just been, a blinding spot formed on the thin and cloudy amalgam. Even when the cumulus dust, thinning and translucent, rose to almost the full height of the vanished tower, the lambency didn't disappear; the dusty specter of a fatter Toadstool lingered in the air for several days, settling on the wan leaves and broken glass that crunched under the feet of the returned inhabitants and sobbed under the janitors' brooms, forming fragile, layered piles of trash. Afterward, whenever the dust came up, it was like a faint impression being powdered in the air, or if the sun came out from behind a cloud at an unusual angle, the tower became visible; people saw it in a thick snowfall, as if it had washed the violet shadow with soap. Lots of Uralers had trouble believing they'd ever physically been there, where now the wind roamed freely; drifting off to sleep with this thought, the punks and even college students who already shaved their soft beards flew in their dreams. Maybe it was thanks to the Toadstool phenomenon that young Krylov — who at the time of the explosion was studying in the history department and almost nightly took himself up with a heavy breast-stroke into the inauthentic air to see the abyss turning beneath him, like a foggy dial — kept growing until he was twenty-five and had markedly exceeded the genetic limit set by his parents.

The Ural Mountains, windswept and blanketed by smoke that passes through hundreds of gradations of gray, look like decorative park ruins. There's nothing for a painter to do amid this readymade lithic beauty. Every landscape, no matter where you look, already has its composition and basic colors, a characteristic correlation of parts that combine into a simple and recognizable Urals logo. The picturesqueness of the Ural Mountains seems intentional. Horizontals of gray boulders green with lichen and softened by slippery pillows of rusty needles are intersected by verticals of pines huddled in tight groups, and like everything in the landscape, they avoid simplistic uniformity; overall it seems to have been constructed according to the laws of the classic opera stage, with its unwieldy sets and choristers facing the parterre. The Urals' waters are also distributed for picturesque effect. Some streams, poisoned by industry, have the workaday appearance of a pipeline accident, but others have retained the architect's intent. Their banks, as a rule, are cliffs; the dark and fissured layers of slate look like stacks of printing spoilage whose dark layers probably contain illustrations; the pink-spotted cliffs seem stuck with pieces of cellophane; their pebbles, which retain as one the idea of a cube, pour abundantly from the fissures. Each bend in a stream reveals new likenesses of what was just seen, which is why the banks seem to be moving rather than the water, which itself seems to be straining to retain the reflection of the sky and the silvered clouds. The sky reflected in Ural waters is much bluer than it is in reality; this is because of the summer's northern chill that even on hot days can make itself felt in a gust of wind, in the vicinity of a deeply frozen bedrock. Gentle lizards bask on the heat-retaining outcroppings of gold-laden quartz; these are the Uraler's friends, living pointers to subterranean riches. The same is true of the grass-snakes and tiny dark vipers resting among the cliffs in shiny ringlets; at the slightest disturbance one will tense like an arrow against a bow-string, but usually they slither away peaceably into a stone crack, leaving behind a light rustling in the bitter green grass.

The lakes in the Urals are many and huge. Their large, amazingly empty, glassy surface serves as a mirror not so much for material objects as for the weather. The slightest changes in the atmosphere are reflected there as incorporeal images with no counterpart on the shores, melting into dark oil and becoming solid at some indeterminate point. Often you can't see the boundary between water and land. At times the atmospheric specters are not just reflected but seen above lake surface quite distinctly. This Martian television is best observed from high up, where the boats near the cottage shore look like seed husks. Some lakes are stunningly clear: at a perfectly still midday, the sun-net on the sloping bottom achieves the perfection of gilt on porcelain; the fisherman in his sun-warmed flatboat, smelling of fish soup, sees through his own shadow the distant clump of bait and the dark backs of the large perch eager to taste it. On the Urals' bounteous southern reaches, where the homely forest strawberry, with fruit like nodules but amazingly aromatic, grows and the garden strawberry sometimes gets as big as a carrot, the lakes take up even more of the beautiful scenery. Looking down, you can't always tell what there's more of in front of you — water or land; they envelop each other, blend into each other. There are islands all over; one, like a cup, will hold another irregular oval of shining water, though this is not a part of the mother water world but its own internal lake, fed by its own springs, and inside it is yet another little island: a decorative cliff with a scattering of pebbles, looking like a broken piggy bank. From the cliff leading to the edge of a neck of land, circles of water, land, and stone seem once again to spread out over the entire expansive breadth; the place erases the boundary, the distinction between the named geographical location and the unnamed specific object — like the burly birch on the very smallest island whose stiff little leaves shimmer in the wind as if it were adorned, to supplement its own weeping mane, by tinsel-rain.

The Ural range is undoubtedly situated in one of those enigmatic regions where the landscape has a direct effect on minds. For the true Uraler, the land is rock, not soil. Here, he is the possessor of a prof ound — in the literal and figurative sense of the word — geologically grounded truth. At the same time his land is also fruitful. Just as the inhabitant of Central Russia goes out «to nature» to pick berries and mushrooms, so the Uraler drives his old jalopy out looking for gems; to him, a place without deposits and veins makes no sense. Far from everyone who grows up in the Urals later joins the community of rock hounds — gem miners without a license who, while having other professions, often intellectual ones, in town, structure their budgets around their illegal endeavors, which spill over into a passion. However, virtually every Ural schoolboy goes through a collecting phase; it's the rare family whose attic isn't strewn with fused cobbles and malachite scales covered with black oxides, quartz druses that look like the city's spring ice, and polished chips of all the commonly found gemstones.

Meanwhile, the Urals' subterranean riches are no longer what they once were. Everywhere they go on the territory of known deposits, professional rock hounds and even tourists stumble across old mining pits. These might be flat holes long since grown over with wet bracken and made impassible by wooly-leaved wild raspberries; only the experienced eye would discern the prospecting holes that date back to his great-grandfathers' day. Sometimes a hole in the ground that looks like an old man's toothless, sunken mouth leads the prospector to a mine from the century before last that looks like a buried, low hut half crushed by a rock: cold larch braces flaking with dead, time-eaten splints, varnished on top by soot from the torches that stole the miners' sweet subterranean oxygen, and noises that emanate from the darkness exactly as if someone were scuffling over the damp grainy stone. Sometimes the mine is located not in a remote mountain corner but on the edge of a potato field where a small tractor jolts around. It's a common occurrence: from the substrate leading to the prosaic collective gardens, another diverges, a little fainter, and quickly climbs the slope, and from the slope a view opens out onto an old surface mine that surrounds, bezel-like, a strangely harmonious volume of air, like a tear of nothingness. You can't tell right away that the surface mine is filled to a certain level with water. You can't see the water. The reflection of the quartz walls, one of them burning in the hot noonday and the other icy, is so detailed and perfect that your eye doesn't catch where the real cliff leaves off and its reflection begins. This marvelous symmetry is accomplished by the mirrored image of the reflected sky with the dots of birches leaning into it. You have to descend into the surface mine down a well-trodden, rustling path, one hand touching the wall that rises by your temple; sometimes a flat pink stone comes out in your hand like a book from a shelf, and when you throw it down, a raw, pipy sound leaps up. Only from the fat watery circles do you discover where you shouldn't step; the water, like clay on a potter's wheel, really seems to be trying to turn into a vessel. This doesn't happen, though. Slowly, almost infinitely, the disturbed perfection is restored — and suddenly the moment comes when the water disappears again literally beneath your feet. Once again the viewer is left with a stunning void where the mountain was taken out. The sunny wall, amazingly vivid and finely detailed, seems lit from below by powerful electricity, and the sugar vein in it sparks.

Virtually everything that could be extracted from the top has been. The Urals' surface has been depleted. The same can be said of the surface of the Urals' natural beauty. The nature logos that make it so easy to assemble the components of a recognizable landscape on canvas have always encouraged amateur rather than professional painters. Realism, be it a method of art or — more broadly — a way of thinking, has here been a characteristic of fundamentally superficial people, well-intentioned dilettantes who take the use of ready-made forms for a type of patriotism. In this sense, the Urals proved cunning. From the very beginning there has been all the ready-made material you could want. As a result, there came to be a specific stratum of artists, poet-songwriters, collectors, and ethnologists who were seized by splendid impulses. These serious-minded guys, who were old by the time they were thirty, wearing sardine-colored jackets and carrying various membership cards in their inside pockets, had the vague feeling that something was expected of them by all this stone and industrial might, the loaded sky above it that kept transporting tons and tons of clouds without end — but they never got past the surface, which seemed to satisfy the demands for artistry and Ural distinctiveness.

When an ecological crisis came that was as real as can be, it became clear that the true Uraler's thinking was fantastic thinking. The farther from the soil, the better! It turned out that an anchorite living in some Lower Talda and studying Sanskrit expressed the essence of his little homeland more accurately than the peony-ruddy composer of songs for folk chorus.

The authorities' pet idea was to restore the monastery where for the last forty years there had been a colony for juvenile delinquents. From a distance, the monastery looked like a huge dirty snowdrift that had settled. Close up you noticed the torn barbed wire and prison lamps in smashed cases that looked like its iron fruit. With the priest's blessing they began to build. For starters they razed the long barracks on the monastery territory and dragged off (to be carted away later to the dump) the rotting boards with the rusty nails poking out, which called to mind the remains of exhumed coffins, scraps of painted tin, and pieces of brick. Immediately after, an unprecedented fire broke out in the shantytown adjoining the monastery. That fateful night the fire flew, fanned by the wind, and the water thrown on it flew from the pails and troughs and turned into a hot exhale, as from a drunk's maw after a swallow of vodka. The black huts, sluiced from low-power hoses, squealed when they caught fire, and their pink frames collapsed with a hot rustle. In the morning, the surviving trees looked like bathhouse besoms, and in the ashes, amid the disintegrating wooden flesh, still red under the ash, the people wandered, digging their incinerated property out of the coals with sticks. Now another concern was tacked onto the authorities' list. With no hope, however, of a free hotel room, the locals dragged off the barracks' remains and in record time knocked together more shacks. After that, no matter how many subsidies were issued from the top, the population categorically drank them up, continuing to live in what they'd taken from the prison; even the barbed wire had a practical use: they wound it around their rather shaky constructions for stability, which made some of the huts, with their tiny skewed windows, look like hives being swarmed by iron bees. Financially, the shantytown and monastery became communicating vessels. It would have been awkward to finish building a church when right outside its walls all lay in ruin and ash. Bent old women cooked food in the hissing, smoking cracks of stove carcasses, and not far away, in the papery shade of desiccated birches, erstwhile breadwinners lounged on bare iron cots; the men themselves looked like bundles of salvaged but useless property. And this whole outrage was photographed by opposition journalists. By way of lowering the general level in their communicating vessels as much as possible, the burned-out residents dedicatedly stole everything that wasn't nailed down: sacks of cement, paint, work gloves. The unstable equilibrium, supported by two comparatively identical streams of financial infusions, threatened to turn into a catastrophe at any moment.

All this had very little to do with the spiritual life of a Uraler, who put candles, by the way, in front of popular icons and during the Blessing of the Water at Epiphany readily took a dip in a moonlit ice-hole whose solid ice grabbed his wet soles like strong glue. No matter how far from his ordinary place and life a Uraler's intellectual interests strayed (many rock hounds, in the licit part of their lives, worked in space research and defense), he knew that the veins of ore and gems were the rock roots of his consciousness. The world of mountain spirits where the Uraler has always resided is a pagan world. It includes, specifically, UFOs three to fifteen meters in diameter whose movements through the air look like the bobbing of a spindle, as well as the silky green quasi-men that outsiders take for aliens. In fact, these are the locals: practical reptiles guarding semi-precious lenses. From time to time, prospectors get to see the Great Snake. This subterranean snake with the head of a gigantic old man looks like something straight out of Ruslan and Ludmila — except that the Great Snake's head is bald, with dark, burnished spots; his lips are mottled and fleshy, too, and he has a broken nose the size and shape of a boot. The Great Snake travels underground as if it were underwater. His body, stretching out in rings in front of the dumb-struck prospector, looks like a stream of thundering gravel being dumped from the back of a truck: dust rises, whitened bushes stir, the ground turns gray in spots, forming a wrinkly trench — and it is along this trench that one should search for the alluvial and vein gold that royally fills the prospector's ruined trousers.

Sometimes a mountain spirit is hard to tell from a human. The Stone Maiden, also known as the Mistress of the Mountains, looks nothing like the beautiful actress in the fake blue eyelashes and green headdress who represents the Mistress in the matinees at the local drama theater. The Stone Maiden can appear to a rock hound in the most ordinary guise, for instance, as a middle-aged lady vacationer stained with berries, besieged by mosquitoes, and carrying a pail of cucumbers; or like the woman at the train station snack bar, with her starched tower of bleached hair and puffy, yearning eyes; or like a fifteen-year-old girl who has a breeze flying down the neck of her loose t-shirt as she bends over and works the pedals of her rickety bike. The Stone Maiden doesn't keep just to the remote parts of the forest and mountains. She's no beast. She feels perfectly free to appear in the city with its four million inhabitants, which is standing without realizing it on mighty knobs of malachite, like a subterranean cabbage field, and on fat gold in ribbed quartz.

In the narrow eddies of the urban population the Stone Maiden is recognized only by whoever she has come to see. Suddenly, at the sight of a perfectly unremarkable woman, the rock hound's soul is strangely magnetized. Suddenly, unfamiliar features and gestures compose themselves into a dear and desired face, and to the atheist it seems as if literally before his very eyes, out of ordinary matter, of which there is so much in a crowd, God has created for him a unique and miraculous being, as if he has been presented with obvious proof of man's creation by divine sleight-of-hand. And the bearded fool can't stop himself from making a bee-line for the stranger, who is filled with inexpressible fascination, who serves as proof of his uniqueness among all other men, and who everyone else around him is prepared to reject.

It's not true that the Mistress of the Mountains needs stone-cutting skill from a man. In reality, she, like any woman, needs love, but it must be real love of that special and genuine composition whose formula no one has ever been given. Any feeling has shadowy parts, sometimes it itself is a shadow. Lacking any basis for comparison or real expertise, the Stone Maiden's chosen one feels he has been granted much more than ever before. Doubts lay intersecting wrinkles on the chosen one's face, and the life lines that the ordinary man sees in his palm and in some sense holds in his hand appear on his brow. The subject alternatively does and does not believe in the authenticity of his own emotion; on a disturbing night, when his girlfriend's perfectly still body suddenly gets very heavy in her sleep and crushes her half of the bed, like a toppled statue, it occurs to the man that it would be easier to rip open his own belly than to open up and check on his own soul — at least the former is physically possible. Suicide over a happy love, over a fully reciprocated feeling, is not such a rarity in the Ural capital. If you dig in the police files, you'll find quite a few puzzling instances of suicide, when the deceased was found with a blissful smile on his petrified lips — that is, his mouth had literally turned into a mineral, into a hard stone flower, lying there as an eternal adornment on his sunken face. Somewhere nearby, in an obvious spot, there was a neat white document accompanying the deceased and lying parallel to the lines of the furniture and room — his suicide note, addressed to a woman and consisting for the most part of mediocre verse. She whom the suicide addressed had vanished completely, as if she had fallen straight through the earth. Descriptions of her, related by the deceased's family and neighbors, proved so contradictory that it was a wonder how the powerful optics of their collective — and now even greater — dislike had distorted the suspect.

Sometimes, though, a Uraler would survive an encounter with the Stone Maiden. Never again did a man like that venture beyond the city limits or have anything to do with the gem business, and according to rumors he couldn't see himself in mirrors, as a result of which he lost his feeling of self and would restlessly finger his own face, squeezing the solid parts hard and grabbing the soft flesh into thick folds. Whenever anyone addressed him, the poor man would immediately get distracted with verifying his own presence and the presence on his person of appropriate clothing. The pause, which was accompanied by a survey of his buttons and a bow to his own trousers, was brief but so unpleasant to his interlocutor that a former rock hound who sincerely promised himself to henceforth lead only an ordinary, licit life could never get a career going at all. In individual cases, the Stone Maiden's lover would run off with his girlfriend, taking none of his possessions along, and laying out his money — sometimes wads of dollars in rubber bands — neatly in that same obvious place where his last letter would have lain had he killed himself. Experienced cops who had studied the m.o. of these kinds of disappearances called this the «post office.»

Like any real Uraler, at the appropriate time young Krylov took off into the mountains. He came to know what it was like to hike with a knapsack that gets heavier with every kilometer and smells more and more of canvas and sweat, exactly as if you were carrying an extra body of your own on your back. He found out what it was like to hammer test holes using someone's great-grandfather's chisels and hammers, and then chop the cold chunks up in the sun, with stone chips flying like sharp stars. Young Krylov had some minor success as well: at home he assembled the standard assortment of samples wrapped in newspaper, and he even managed to sell a few pieces. He had one good find in the old tailings of an emerald mine that had been bought up whole by some Russian-Japanese firm and was lazily guarded by porky he-men in jigsaw-puzzle camouflage.

Krylov had the good fortune to dig up eight intact six-faceted bottles stuck in the ore, and in their white and green veins he was thrilled to glimpse live zones of transparency. The impression created was so strong that even while fleeing from the rangers through the booming pine forest, which resounded with their yelling and shooting, like an iron fence struck by a stick, Krylov continued to feel exaltation at this transparent substance.

It didn't take him long to realize that his luck was pretty poor, worse than average, and the industry, though it didn't reject him altogether, would never feed him. It wasn't that he'd had no encounters with the mountain spirits, either. Like many others, he'd had occasion to see lesser phenomena in campfires, when the fire, after crumbling the fragile blazing coals like wafers, suddenly seemed to rear up on tiptoe and start dancing, turning the team's faces into a flickering movie. Later, in the ash-gray fire ring, they would find characteristic «bruises»: solid patches of dark purple from which experienced prospectors found gold-bearing sand within a twenty-meter radius. Once, Krylov even observed a flying saucer — not such a rarity really: something elliptical literally galloped across the night sky covered with a thin ripple of soapy clouds, and then disappeared behind a high-tension tower, drowning in the tower's luminance like a spoon in cream. But even apart from what the spirits did, among the rock hounds, Krylov felt like he belonged.

There was something of the little boy — more infantile than his student years would lead you to expect — about the way he latched onto those tough but good-natured afficionados who in their collective subconscious clung to the notion that only someone who has a conscience gets a gem. The secretive, quick-off-the-mark rock hounds found a modus vivendi that threaded between the authorities and the thugs without yielding to the economic attraction of either side. The authorities, focused on the big picture, preferred to turn a blind eye to small-time evil and even permitted one modest private firm to organize monthly mineral shows — whose true turnover might have amazed the tax collectors — at a House of Culture on the edge of town. In turn, the thugs, with their limited, stubby nerves, which were too small and short, like a teenager's clothing, nonetheless had an inkling that somewhere in the forest lay real, unearthed money. This, of course, made the thugs sit up: they had divided up turf with their fists down to the very last stall and suddenly discovered around them an irritatingly inaccessible terra incognita. But even they, with their identical heads as tough and hard as boxing gloves, realized that no matter how many times they descended upon nature, which scared them with its cold uniformity in all four directions, they weren't going to find any gems. The few attempts to put the business under their control ended in failure. The rock hounds wouldn't subscribe to any of the extortion schemes the thugs understood, and the most zealous seller of protection, the ferocious general called the Wheel, was discovered one day beneath a prominent pine that looked like a hanger dangling wet winter caps, right at the cross-over from the Northern tract — without any traces of violence but without any signs of life, either. The autopsy showed that the small heart under his uninjured ribs had literally split in two, like an apricot. The perpetrators, naturally, were never found.

Krylov was drawn to the rock hounds. He realized that the gap between the millstones that ground the electorate into an endless stream off lour had to be defended not only by an economic conspiracy but also by a sustained spiritual effort, a constant churning of energy in the shared inner space and personal dues paid to the corporate moral capital. When he joined the rock hounds, Krylov for the first time in his life felt that he was joining something that was already in place. For a while at least he could simply be without taking responsibility for the perimeter of this strict little world of men. At the same time, Krylov observed substantial differences among the rock hounds. One man, for the sake of a single find, would process a full measure of stone and subsoil to the point that at night, eyes shut, he would still see the shovel taking dig after endless dig, letting the dark clumps fan out as they fell; another could pass through a ditch someone had labored over like a slave and then abandoned, kick over a scratched rock that was sending him mysterious signals, and discover a crystal of enviable purity.

Krylov realized, of course, that he would never be like these men, and that his place in rock hunting was always going to be well down the ladder. At the same time, something told Krylov that in fact he had landed right where he needed to be. He was very important to the community. He just didn't know yet in what way.