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.»