Untraceable

CHAPTER 9

Kalitin shut the door behind him, turned on the entry light, and glanced around at the corners. He had lived alone for too long, he had almost no interaction with others, and he was interested solely in himself. Deprived of research, of real work, he scrupulously observed his own habits, registered the preferences or antipathies that explained them, mere stubs, wax casts of the bigger emotions that had once ruled him.

Even now, as he brought into his house the terrible news of the disease that would relentlessly destroy his daily rituals, acquired over years, take him away from his desk, chair, and book shelves, whose existence would outlast his and were no longer absolutely in his possession—Kalitin had to check the corners: Were there any rats?

As a child, he was not afraid of animals that usually scare children, dogs for example; the closed city was too new, it arose in the idyll of the woods, people moved there hurriedly without knowing what to expect and left their pets with relatives. There were no stray dogs, because there was nowhere from which they might come.

As an adolescent, he did not seek pleasure in torturing creatures. Later, during his studies and work, he treated animals indifferently. An entire host of them, thousands of mice, hundreds of dogs, rabbits, monkeys, dozens of horses, goats, and sheep died in torment—but that had been necessary, they served a greater good. If he could have managed without test subjects, he would not have used them. But nature did not want to give up its secrets without force, without sacrificial death, without dull foam in the mouth.

When tests were performed on dummies, he did not see the process and only read the results. Age. Weight. Disease. Reaction to the substance. The dummies excited him intensely—he wanted to delve deeper into the mystery of human death. Kalitin saw that there were no two identical deaths. Similar complexion, identical age, but the final moments passed in different ways, the symptoms of the final agony were expressed in different ways. Physiology? Psychology? Character? Fate? He did not perceive the test dummies as people. They were an infinitely complex collection of parameters, animated brainteasers. He did not need explanations that these were state criminals sentenced to death, corpses in waiting. Those legalistic details stayed outside the testing chamber. Inside, there was only the body and the substance in it, injected by the lab technician skilled at assuaging any sense of deceit, pretending to be a kindly doctor.

Of all living creatures that had been in his power, populating the laboratory ark, Kalitin prioritized only the rats.

On the Island, in the ancient monastery building, they had hundreds of artificially bred rats, identical, docile fools. But from somewhere in the monastery cellars, deep down in the limestone, abandoned, sealed off, in the auxiliary and working rooms of the laboratory, which only the most select, tested, and retested personnel could enter, real, feral rats came and went unhindered.

The first to be defeated were the construction laborers, armed with cement, plaster, iron, brick, and ground glass. There were only a few with the level of security clearance required to work in the lab. They worked assiduously to fill and seal all the holes they found. But the rats kept coming from somewhere, devouring sandwiches left in briefcases, ruining paper and cardboard. The old-timers said you couldn’t get rid of the rats because they swam over from the numerous grain barges that traveled the river. But the rats continued their outrageous behavior in the winter, when the river iced over and the barges had to wait in backwaters.

Then they sent a rat catcher with an express security clearance; they had all kinds of specialists in their system! The rat catcher with all his powders didn’t succeed, either.

That’s when Kalitin announced the competition, as if for fun. He was affronted that some pathetic rodents had the run of his place while they, the poison masters, the researchers and creators of the most toxic substances in the world, could not destroy them.

It turned out that everyone was sick of the rats. His staff, especially the young people, were zealous in developing recipes and inventing traps. It seemed the end had come for the rats, and Kalitin joked: see what science can do! But he soon discovered that not all of the rats were dying. They destroyed most of them, but some, at the cost of their companions’ deaths, learned to recognize bait and avoid traps. There weren’t many of them, just a few. But they couldn’t kill them, and all human tricks had limited effect.

Kalitin learned their traces and habits. He could tell which rat had visited. One, a huge rat with a bitten tail, seemed to tease him, flashing by in the dim corridor and then vanishing. Kalitin could have gotten rid of them, but only by poisoning everything, endangering himself and the staff, paying a price that was not worth a rat’s life.

Ever since, he had had a watchful, uneasy respect for rats, as if nature was showing him an important exception that had to be taken into account. Later, in his new life, when he felt like a cornered rat, Kalitin discovered to his surprise that this association reassured him, as if he had become that exception to the laws of hunt and capture, manifested in only one breed of creatures.

He received a sign that his sensations were correct. A sign that came from the long bygone past of his new house. With an unpredictable rhyme it merged the two halves of his biography, separated by defection, border, death sentence.

Cars never came to his house, except for the yellow postal van and the taxis he ordered. It was on a dead-end road. No landmarks nearby, so tourists wouldn’t wander in by mistake. Hunting was banned, leaving the boar population to expand, but the old hunting towers still stood on the slopes and along the brook.

However eleven, yes, eleven years ago he saw a car beneath his windows, a shabby gray sedan, an unobtrusive vehicle used for surveillance and hired killers. Even though Kalitin realized that people sent to kill him would not reveal themselves that openly, he quickly went down to the cellar, trying not to be visible through the windows, opened the gun cupboard, and returned upstairs with a loaded rifle.

The doorbell rang; long, demanding: in the manner of the police or courier delivery. Kalitin decided not to open the door, even though his own car parked under the overhang showed that he was probably in. He was afraid to approach the peephole. And he was afraid, completely irrationally, that if this were say an insurance agent, or surveyor, or an official from the nature preserve—they would spread talk that the professor did not open the door even though he was home and someone, a someone he made up in his own head, would suspect that the inhabitant of the lonely house on the hill had something to fear and something to hide.

He had not yet equipped the house with the soundproof steel door, made to look like wood. The surveillance cameras that he could monitor from the computer. Kalitin could not see who was at the door without giving away his presence.

The visitor stepped down from the porch and started walking around the house. Through a space between the curtains, Kalitin saw a face—a typical Englishman, curly reddish hair, glasses, the only Englishman for dozens of kilometers around—certainly not sent by the homeland, they sent their own people, Slavs—and it wasn’t a visitor from his new masters, they would have warned him. A journalist? Had he sniffed something out? A leak? Someone turned him in?

Kalitin realized that fear had made him forget his secret companion, the joker, Neophyte. The preparation slept in its reliable flask behind the door of a special safe for active substances. Kalitin suddenly imagined what could happen if Neophyte woke on its own and found even a micron-sized opening in the hermetic flask, got free, bypassing the dosimeter, and escaped completely, dissolving instantaneously in the air. He would fall asleep without knowing that he was dead. The curious Englishman would be dead. The swallows that made a nest under the eaves and their babies. Butterflies and mosquitoes. Tree beetles, worms, woodlice, even moles. In the morning the mailman would see a corpse by the house, he would call the police, they would break down the door but find and smell nothing except the heavy, particular smell of yesterday’s death. Neophyte would be gone, lost amid the atoms and molecules of the astral plane. Only an experienced and sensitive senior officer, an old bloodhound, would say, sniffing in irritated surprise, “A luxurious house, and clean, but it smells of bedbugs!”

His deputies would assure him that it did not smell of bedbugs.

Kalitin chuckled. He had such a clear vision of the dead Englishman, so incongruous and comic in his plaid wool jacket among the fresh molehills, that he stopped being afraid of him. It was as if Neophyte had sighed in its sleep, and that breath was enough to chase always the fears of its imperfect creator.

Kalitin hid the rifle in the closet. Open? Not open? If it’s a journalist, it’s better to find out what he knows. Better to have a chance to give his own version.

Deceive.

Justify.

He opened the door.

The Englishman turned toward the sound. A thin ocher sweater under his jacket. Light classic jeans. Suede moccasins. Camera on a strap over his shoulder. A big, expensive camera, clearly often used, since some paint had worn off the lens rim. Thin. Not an athlete, but agile and energetic. Externally a polite friendliness, embarrassment at disturbing the owner. Inside, a masterful self-confidence, a trained ability to play along with whatever the owner said and in five or six phrases bring the conversation to the point. A journalist. Excited, following a trail, and for all that, like a loud shot missing the mark, missing Kalitin’s particular destiny.

He wasn’t there for him, but for some other mission that was inciting him, prodding, filling him with the joy of discovery. The Englishman was staring with the sharp, visionary greed of an archaeologist, the madman Schliemann—but at the house, not the owner.

Kalitin knew who the previous owners were: descendants of salt traders. The house had been their country villa. Allegedly one member of the family made a career under the Nazis in occupied Poland, and Kalitin assumed the journalist was writing a book and had come to learn about that official of the general governorship. Unexpectedly, Kalitin realized this made him uncomfortable; as if he were tied to the former owners by the shackles of inherited family secrets, and the obnoxious visitor was trying to learn about his life, too.

He would have kept it to a quick chat on the porch. But he did not want the journalist to notice his taciturn reluctance to talk and keep it in his professionally long and tenacious memory, so he played the part of a friendly and bored simpleton and invited him in.

If only the journalist could have known that there were two related stories associated with the house, that the shell had landed a second time in the same crater, he would have noticed how unexpectedly deep and animated was the new owner’s surprise when he was told why the journalist was there.

Beyond the nearby mountains, divided by an angry, restless river, beyond the dark crests covered in old forests that had borrowed the long life of stone, there was a fortress that had known prisoners of several centuries and realms. During the war, it had been a concentration camp.

In spring of 1945 the roar of war had quieted over the eastern plains, the artillery fire had dimmed. That was when they came to the house—along the old grass-covered road across the mountains, along the path of woodcutters who made the supports for the salt mines, where neither motorcycle nor car could travel. Several SS officers serving as guards and a scientist who experimented on the camp prisoners. One of the SS knew about this remote villa. He had been a guest there.

Germany had lost the war. Below, in the valleys, in larger towns Allies set up garrisons. But here, closer to the peaks, in the mountain forests and meadows, there was no regime yet. The former owners had already abandoned the villa property and fled. The accidental residents could relax there.

In fact, the journalist was trying to find out if this was the house. Turned out it was. He had a description given during interrogation by an officer of the camp guards, arrested in the British occupation zone. The rest had vanished, gone along the ratlines, the secret escape routes from Europe across the ocean to the other continent.

He said ratlines, in his flawless English. And then with his student intonation he repeated it in German: Rattenlinien.

“Escaping rats always use the same paths,” the journalist had said then.

He meant the underground network of secret aid for fugitives: officials who would issue false documents and trusted people like priests and policemen; seamen who would take illegal passengers. He was writing a book about medics in camps, and it was easy to talk to Kalitin, an émigré from the land of the victors. He was enthralled by his hunt for ghosts of the past and therefore blind in the present. He asked permission to photograph the house and look at all of it. He peeked into the cellar, passing within a yard of Neophyte in the safe. He asked about the old furniture. No, nothing was left, Kalitin told him sincerely.

When the journalist had taken his leave, Kalitin instantly took a heart pill.

It was not just the ratlines that had amazed him.

In his previous life he had known only one German scientist who had worked in a concentration camp. He had been brought back as a trophy after the war by Uncle Igor, Igor Yuryevich Zakharyevsky.

Officially, the German did not exist. The closed city was his prison. But he was a sinister specialist, who had performed experiments that even they would not have countenanced; he had looked much farther beyond the edge of pain and death—and he was ready to share his experience scrupulously.

Kalitin remembered how Zakharyevsky told him the prisoner’s story. Kalitin was outraged, even though he had already taken more than one life. But that German, he might have tortured and killed our soldiers; perhaps Kalitin’s maternal grandfather, a mathematician who fought in the artillery and died in a POW camp, had fallen into his hands.

Kalitin was ready to kill the German. But a few days later, he noticed that his anger had waned. He still hated the prisoner scientist, he thought, but he was ready to work with him.

First of all, Zakharyevsky wanted that to happen: his plan was to develop a substance based on the previous generation elaborated by the German. Second, Kalitin appreciated the prisoner’s verified scientific method. And third, he felt, despite his upbringing, despite the compulsory image of the enemy he was taught, that there was a strange, forbidden affinity in their inner desires, that went deeper than nationality, ideology, enmity: to find the shortest path to knowledge that makes one an indispensable creator regardless of the circumstances. This gives the greatest protection and power. The German proved by his own example that it was possible.

Guessing his new colleague’s feelings, the German did not push himself forward, did not force himself on him, did not talk about the past. He just worked: steadily and swiftly. Eventually Kalitin realized that this lonely old man was closer to him than the general and Party bosses who ran the laboratory. They were his own people by blood and citizenship, but alien by their nature, while the German was alien, as much as one could be, and yet his own. One of the people who hid from the state within the state, making it serve him and paying with loyal service, merging with it to the point where you could not tell who directed whom.

It was that German who, once he understood that his junior colleague was ready for the next, even more difficult level of knowledge, opened his eyes to the shadow within the shadow: the dual past of the laboratory, that is, of the place, the Island, where it was located. The German had been there before—before the war, before Hitler was chancellor, when a secret joint Soviet-German testing ground was located there.

Even though he knew some of the dark secrets of the Island, Kalitin refused to believe this. Then the German described the installation from memory—the location of the airfield, the wooden laboratory building, staff barracks, the menagerie, the guardhouse, the fence line; he told him where in the present-day, enlarged testing ground you could find old foxholes and craters left by artillery fire; he took Kalitin there, dug around with a stick in the dried grass, showed him a shell casing left after an explosion. It had German markings. Seeing that Kalitin still had doubts, the German took him to the archives; there was a special section for documents brought out from various European countries after the war, heaps of papers from various scientific institutes, some charred, warped by water. No one had gone through them carefully; Klaus opened a nondescript army box for Kalitin. It held reports on joint experiments. In 1933, German scientists took them to Germany. In 1945 a special NKVD team found them in the ruins and brought them back.

Kalitin read, recognizing the locations described, the names of scientists from the Soviet side. Zakharyevsky’s name appeared. Kalitin knew it all: the specifics of the climate that appeared in the course of the experiments, the scientific logic.

And there was Klaus’s last name.

He sensed that he no longer consider Klaus an enemy.

Having said goodbye to the journalist, Kalitin started thinking about Klaus. The knowledge he had revealed. Kalitin pondered the systematic tautologies of history, elicited by the extreme rareness of truly secret places, good for hiding, for protecting a secret. He thought about himself and how he had chosen a house on someone’s old path. A ratline. That meant he could count on its patronage, on the enduring luck of refugees, since the people who had been protecting him now wanted to kill him.

The journalist had shown him copies of the interrogation pages. The guard officer who had a technical education gave evidence about the experiments in the camp. There was much he did not know, he mixed up terminology, but Kalitin instantly understood: it was the work of a butcher. Cheap, crude death for masses herded to slaughter. Visible, obvious death that did not hide itself. They must have taken the documentation with them or hidden it somewhere along the way—like a bank deposit, like stocks that had temporarily lost value but could have their former prices restored if the new masters of Europe, hiding their mutual hostility, should need to kill someone: Communists, for example. Or the capitalist bourgeoisie.

Kalitin had left a secret cache like that in his homeland, a tube buried beneath an inconspicuous tree in the woods. It was like looking into an ideal, absolute mirror, and he looked without surprise, without anxiety, as if he had lived all those disjointed lives, separated by time. Or at least was the link connecting them.

Ever since that meeting, Kalitin imagined there might be a rat in the house. He lived cleanly, far from the village, why would rats come there—and yet he kept imagining a gray shadow.

He took off his coat and lit the fire. Twilight was falling rapidly. Darkness came quickly in the valley, as if the hills, trees, and grasses radiated it. He looked out the window. A plane flew above the dimmed and darkened clouds. Its feathery trail was still reddish yellow in the light. Splitting wood the old way for kindling, Kalitin thought about the plane and the people in it. Where was it going, was the captain competent, how old was the plane?

Kalitin was ready to think about anything at all, do whatever, split kindling, haul firewood—anything to put off the moment when he would be home for good, and the thought of death would return with new, almost overwhelming force; it would go on the attack.

He knew he was in for a sleepless night. A long night of fear and memory. He wanted flames in the fireplace, the humming updraft in the chimney, and the sweet smoke of apple logs, so hard they made a ringing sound, unyielding to fire.