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.