Ice Trilogy (29 page)

And we sped off.

Along the way the foreigner began to ask me in French who we were and what we wanted. I answered that we wouldn’t hurt him. The minder moaned weakly the whole way, then grew quiet: his heart had stopped. Ep’s blow proved too powerful. Arriving at our location, we drove on to the territory of the dacha. We tied up the driver and locked him in the cellar. We took the foreigner into the house. As soon as we closed the door, we jumped on him, trembling from impatience. Rubu grabbed him from behind and pressed against him. Squealing, Fer tore the clothes from his chest and grabbed him by the knees. He was extremely frightened because he didn’t understand our actions. He offered us money. Retrieving an Ice hammer from the attic, I hit him on the chest so hard that he immediately lost consciousness and blood flowed from his ears and nose. We
fell
on him.

“Kovro, Kovro, Kovro,” he answered with his heart.

We cried from joy. Our hearts
rejoiced
. Undressing brother Kovro, we washed him, rubbed him down, bandaged his chest, and put him to bed. His awakened heart brought him out of the swoon. Powerless, he lay in the light of the kerosene lamp and looked straight ahead with wide-open greenish-blue eyes. We sat nearby. And carefully
touched
his heart. We
calmed
him. We already had experience dealing with awakening hearts.

Kovro began to mutter weakly in German. He lost consciousness, and again came to himself. The awakened heart made him completely powerless — he couldn’t move a finger. Fer stroked his hands, licked and warmed his pale face with her breath. We stroked his body.

He was a German. In the world of meat machines he was called Sebastian Wolf. He had just turned thirty-five. He came from a prominent manufacturing dynasty: his father and uncle owned coal mines in Bochum and a copper-melting plant in Düsseldorf. As soon as he finished the gymnasium, he volunteered to go to the front, was wounded by shrapnel, and demobilized. Studying in Hannover and Oxford, he received two diplomas — architecture and electronics degrees. Turning down a position as director of his father’s mines, Wolf began to make his own career. The architectural bureau he founded began to work on projects with great prospects — underground communications. At the age of thirty, Sebastian Wolf had become well known in Europe as an engineer and architect. He constructed underground factories and citadels, tunnels through mountains, and mines for building metro systems. The firm S. Wolf and Company became fashionable in underground construction. The Bolsheviks offered him an enormous sum for the project of laying down communications for the Moscow metro. Wolf agreed. Arriving six months earlier in Moscow, he signed a contract. His name didn’t show up officially in the press: Soviet propaganda could not allow anyone to know that a bourgeois engineer was taking part in the construction of the Moscow metro. He agreed to this as well: what was important to him was the project itself and the money. The project was almost ready; in Germany Wolf’s wife and children were waiting for him.

But his main passion was conquering the underground.

For entertainment he loved horse racing, sword fighting, and the circus. The circus was connected with a childhood dream. The family lived on an estate near Düsseldorf. One time, his older brother took eight-year-old Sebastian into town to show him the French traveling circus that had come to the city on tour. The boy really loved the circus. He was particularly struck by the blue girl on the pink elephant. The girl danced on the elephant, and it bowed to the audience and doffed its hat. People threw money into the hat. Sebastian fell in love with the blue girl. The next day he demanded that he be taken to the circus again. But the circus had already left Düsseldorf. Sebastian became hysterical. His temperature went up that night. He had a dream: he was in an empty circus ring, in the middle of which was an elephant made of ice. The blue girl sat on the elephant. She invited Sebastian to ride on the elephant. He walked over, the elephant picked him up with its trunk and placed him on its back. Sebastian sat on the elephant. The girl hugged him by the shoulders. And commanded the elephant: “Olé.” The ice elephant walked in a circle. And squeaked. The squeak of the ice elephant made Sebastian cry
sweetly
. Because the elephant was very cold but
very
kind. And
unbearably
intimate.

The blue girl embraced Sebastian from behind with her warm hands and whispered into his ear, “
Un enfant ne peut pas pleurer!
”

After that Sebastian fell in love with the circus forever, although his father’s family considered the circus a vulgar spectacle. Sebastian went to the circus when he was in high school, before the war, and as a student, and after that. He went to the famous circuses of Paris, Lisbon, London, and Hamburg. But he never again saw the blue girl on the pink elephant.

The ice elephant came to him in feverish dreams each time he hallucinated with a high temperature. And each time, Sebastian cried
sweet
tears in his dream, hearing the icy squeak.

We
protected
the calm of brother Kovro.

In the morning sisters Pilo and Ju came. They relieved us. They sat down near the bed of the newly acquired brother. Before the sun rose, we again got in the car with the chauffeur and rode farther from Moscow. We turned from the highway into a dense forest, shot the chauffeur, poured the remainder of the gasoline over the car and both corpses, and lit it. After that we walked for a long time to a railway station. We got on the train and traveled to Kazansk station. Fer and I were late to work by forty-four minutes. To make up for it, the boss required us to wash the floors after work. And he also “signaled the irresponsibility of the Deribases” to the Komsomol secretary, so that we would be “raked over the coals” at the Komsomol meeting. The boss’s face swirled powerfully.

“Did you forget where you work? Forget whose name you carry? Discipline above all! The OGPU — is no circus!”

It took
Kovro four days to recover. The blow of the Ice hammer had injured his chest muscles, which swelled up and hurt. But his awakening heart helped. We took turns on watch at the dacha, protecting brother Kovro. He was in shock and disturbed. His condition changed swiftly: sometimes he kissed us rapturously, pressing us to his broken chest, at others he would sob hysterically, calling on his mother and all the saints in German. His delicate fingers trembled, his eyes burned. And his heart quivered.

Fer and I
knew
that his heart had to go through the crying. For this reason it was dangerous to let Kovro out. When he woke up, he rushed for the door. We seized him, pressed him to us,
spoke
with his heart. He shouted furiously, thrashed about in our arms, then calmed down.

We knew that the OGPU was looking for him. And we tried to be extremely careful.

Finally, on the fifth day, Kovro collapsed into the
crying
. He sobbed, submerged himself in sleep, awoke, and sobbed again. Sisters Pilo, Ju, and Orti took turns sitting near him. Brothers Edlap and Bidugo guarded them.

Fer and I began the search again.

At first we had luck: as soon as we entered the unemployment office, where there were crowds of unemployed meat machines, our
magnet
detected a sister. But she turned out to be a tiny infant. Her unemployed mother held her in her arms, standing in line. Waiting until the mother was turned down yet again and went home, we followed her. It cost us a
great deal
of restraint not to take the baby from her. But we couldn’t preserve the life of our sister. We simply had to keep track of her, once we found the address. Thus we found out that our nameless sister was growing up in Krivokolenny Lane, in a communal apartment on the first floor of house No. 6. The meat machine who had squeezed our sister out into the world from her vagina was feeding her with her milk. We had to wait until the breast of
our sister
was strong enough to withstand the blow of the Ice hammer. And it was necessary to help this meat machine. That evening we gathered all the money that we had, placed it in an envelope, and left it with the nursing meat machine. She was very happy with the find, thinking the help came to her
from on high
. And in this she was correct.

Continuing our search, we quickly
understood
: walks through the street at rush hour were much too
difficult
for Fer and me. Moving through the crowd, our hearts were torn apart. To illuminate with our
magnet
a crowd of hurrying meat machines, as opposed to sitting or standing ones, was immeasurably harder. The moving crowd
oppressed
us, it
hummed and swirled
, as though it intended to carry us off with it, back into that terrible and lightless life. It yearned to swallow us. The crowd knocked us off our feet, it forced us to hold on to our brothers. Our knees trembled. As soon as we began to illuminate the crowd, we grew instantly exhausted, and after a few minutes our legs literally collapsed. Then days were required for our hearts and bodies to get back to normal.

We
decided
not to work anymore with moving crowds: it had become dangerous. We would instead
illuminate
meat machines in places where they worked, gathered, ate, watched shows, prayed, listened to speakers, and read books. Such places included plants and factories, theaters and movie houses, libraries, meeting rooms, churches, restaurants, and cafeterias.

The first two outings brought no results. There were none of
ours
at the evening of proletarian poetry in the Polytechnic Institute or at the Komsomol meeting of the OGPU.

However, we were very lucky on the third outing: we were able to acquire two free passes to the opera
The
Q
ueen of Spades
at the Bolshoi Theater. Squeezing through the cackling crowd into the vestibule, we sat in the gallery, high up amid the university students and Workers’ Faculty students. The brightly illuminated hall was full. The meat machines gradually calmed down and sat in their seats. The lights went out. The orchestra began to play. Meat machines in costumes from the beginning of the previous century came onstage and began singing in unison. All of them, thanks to their inborn characteristics and many years of training, could produce lengthy sounds of different frequencies and tones. The meat machines sitting in the audience weren’t able to produce those kinds of sounds. For that reason they came to hear the singing meat machines. The meat machines were pretending to be cardplayers. Then women appeared, dressed in crinolines. They began to sing in higher voices. The audience burst into applause; melomanes and students in the gallery shouted “Bravo!” The subject of the opera boiled down to two main themes — love and money, the merger of which, in the opinion of the meat machines, guaranteed complete earthly happiness. The orchestra played to the singers. The musicians tried hard to follow a particular harmony that meat machines had worked out over thousands of years. In these pitiful sounds, merging with the voices of the singer, you could feel an unconscious longing for a world of Higher Harmony, unattainable for meat machines.

Fer and I began to meticulously
examine
the hall. The meat machines sat immobile, enchanted by what was happening onstage. We could see them
well
. In the parterre where the Soviet higher-ups sat with their wives, we could see gymnasts and military uniforms; foreigners sat there as well; bureaucrats occupied the dress circle, the intelligentsia and music lovers sat farther up. We didn’t discover anyone in the parterre. But as soon as the
magnet
touched the dress circle, our hearts
jolted
: there was someone! We shivered: Fer squealed and ground her teeth; a loud moan escaped from me. The meat machines sitting nearby shushed us, taking us for half-mad music lovers. We were in ecstasy not over a German’s aria, however, but over a young woman in evening dress and a fur wrap in the third row of the dress circle. She was looking at the stage, frequently looking through a mother-of-pearl opera glass on a collapsible handle. Next to her sat a meat machine in a navy uniform. I didn’t try to
see through
her life — we were sitting too far away. During the intermission we came close to her. She was one of the “formers”: a private home on Piatnitskaya Street, a happy childhood with dolls, a dog named Rhett, a pony called Tsora, the gold epaulettes of her father, the plump hands of her mother, sisters, a brother, heavy periods, fear of losing all her blood, love for Antosha, marriage in Elokhovsky Cathedral, a miscarriage, Italy, another miscarriage, the Revolution, the death of her father, the flight of her mother, poverty, fainting from hunger, a second marriage, the heavy odor of her husband.

After the intermission we began to
watch
the balconies and the gallery. But then a murmur went through the audience, and everyone turned their heads. In the former royal box Stalin appeared with his wife. This was unexpected for
us
. But not for the meat machines: Stalin often attended the Moscow theaters. The figures of bodyguards appeared in the aisles. Fer and I
stopped
.
We ignored
the crowd of whispering meat machines for a moment and turned our
magnet
on the new ruler of Russia. He sat in a shadowy box. We
watched
him intently. He was not one of
ours
. His heart was a simple pump for moving blood. He himself — was a powerful meat machine. From afar I dimly
saw
his heavily swirling life: there was nothing in particular to distinguish him from the other meat machines sitting in the audience and looking at him. He was like many of them. He had an
enormous
love of power. But many in the audience loved power just as much. The meat machines continued looking back at their leader for a long time. Stalin calmly watched the stage. There a corpulent meat machine was singing that life was only a game in which he who “catches a moment of success” is happy, and the loser is doomed to cry, cursing his fate. He finished the aria, eliciting a stormy ovation in the hall. And then we
saw
a new brother
: an old man in the second level of the balcony. He clapped, shouted “Bravo!,” and was as joyous as a child. As a genuine music lover, he had come to the opera with binoculars. They lay in front of him on the velvet parapet of the balcony.