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.