Like any real Uraler, at the appropriate time young Krylov took off into the mountains. He came to know what it was like to hike with a knapsack that gets heavier with every kilometer and smells more and more of canvas and sweat, exactly as if you were carrying an extra body of your own on your back. He found out what it was like to hammer test holes using someone's great-grandfather's chisels and hammers, and then chop the cold chunks up in the sun, with stone chips flying like sharp stars. Young Krylov had some minor success as welclass="underline" at home he assembled the standard assortment of samples wrapped in newspaper, and he even managed to sell a few pieces. He had one good find in the old tailings of an emerald mine that had been bought up whole by some Russian-Japanese firm and was lazily guarded by porky he-men in jigsaw-puzzle camouflage.
Krylov had the good fortune to dig up eight intact six-faceted bottles stuck in the ore, and in their white and green veins he was thrilled to glimpse live zones of transparency. The impression created was so strong that even while fleeing from the rangers through the booming pine forest, which resounded with their yelling and shooting, like an iron fence struck by a stick, Krylov continued to feel exaltation at this transparent substance.
It didn't take him long to realize that his luck was pretty poor, worse than average, and the industry, though it didn't reject him altogether, would never feed him. It wasn't that he'd had no encounters with the mountain spirits, either. Like many others, he'd had occasion to see lesser phenomena in campfires, when the fire, after crumbling the fragile blazing coals like wafers, suddenly seemed to rear up on tiptoe and start dancing, turning the team's faces into a flickering movie. Later, in the ash-gray fire ring, they would find characteristic «bruises»: solid patches of dark purple from which experienced prospectors found gold-bearing sand within a twenty-meter radius. Once, Krylov even observed a flying saucer — not such a rarity really: something elliptical literally galloped across the night sky covered with a thin ripple of soapy clouds, and then disappeared behind a high-tension tower, drowning in the tower's luminance like a spoon in cream. But even apart from what the spirits did, among the rock hounds, Krylov felt like he belonged.
There was something of the little boy — more infantile than his student years would lead you to expect — about the way he latched onto those tough but good-natured afficionados who in their collective subconscious clung to the notion that only someone who has a conscience gets a gem. The secretive, quick-off-the-mark rock hounds found a modus vivendi that threaded between the authorities and the thugs without yielding to the economic attraction of either side. The authorities, focused on the big picture, preferred to turn a blind eye to small-time evil and even permitted one modest private firm to organize monthly mineral shows — whose true turnover might have amazed the tax collectors — at a House of Culture on the edge of town. In turn, the thugs, with their limited, stubby nerves, which were too small and short, like a teenager's clothing, nonetheless had an inkling that somewhere in the forest lay real, unearthed money. This, of course, made the thugs sit up: they had divided up turf with their fists down to the very last stall and suddenly discovered around them an irritatingly inaccessible terra incognita. But even they, with their identical heads as tough and hard as boxing gloves, realized that no matter how many times they descended upon nature, which scared them with its cold uniformity in all four directions, they weren't going to find any gems. The few attempts to put the business under their control ended in failure. The rock hounds wouldn't subscribe to any of the extortion schemes the thugs understood, and the most zealous seller of protection, the ferocious general called the Wheel, was discovered one day beneath a prominent pine that looked like a hanger dangling wet winter caps, right at the cross-over from the Northern tract — without any traces of violence but without any signs of life, either. The autopsy showed that the small heart under his uninjured ribs had literally split in two, like an apricot. The perpetrators, naturally, were never found.
Krylov was drawn to the rock hounds. He realized that the gap between the millstones that ground the electorate into an endless stream off lour had to be defended not only by an economic conspiracy but also by a sustained spiritual effort, a constant churning of energy in the shared inner space and personal dues paid to the corporate moral capital. When he joined the rock hounds, Krylov for the first time in his life felt that he was joining something that was already in place. For a while at least he could simply be without taking responsibility for the perimeter of this strict little world of men. At the same time, Krylov observed substantial differences among the rock hounds. One man, for the sake of a single find, would process a full measure of stone and subsoil to the point that at night, eyes shut, he would still see the shovel taking dig after endless dig, letting the dark clumps fan out as they fell; another could pass through a ditch someone had labored over like a slave and then abandoned, kick over a scratched rock that was sending him mysterious signals, and discover a crystal of enviable purity.
Krylov realized, of course, that he would never be like these men, and that his place in rock hunting was always going to be well down the ladder. At the same time, something told Krylov that in fact he had landed right where he needed to be. He was very important to the community. He just didn't know yet in what way.
NATALIA SMIRNOVA
THE WOMEN AND THE SHOEMAKERS
NINA
Translated by Kathleen Cook.
THE WOMEN AND THE SHOEMAKERS
«Of course he will,» said the chemist, clicking his tongue.
«Parties in restaurants, masked balls, champagne. He'll have the time of his life, believe me.»
«But I'm sure he won't be led astray,» Charles objected.
Our idea of the literary hero is quite different today from that of earlier times. For writers then it implied above all deviation from the norm, hostility to society, even to a pathological extent. Their heroes were strange, unusual people, maniacally obsessed, out of place in real life, doomed to heroism.
«The poor creature should have bought herself a sewing machine!» a sympathetic reader once said of Madame Bovary in a mixture of real life and fantasy. To which her more sophisticated companion replied: «Then she wouldn't have been the heroine of the novel.»
Does this mean then that being a hero involves the destruction of life as a natural order of things; that the author is bound to cripple a perfectly adequate existence, that the novel is, in fact, a mutilated life resplendent with gaping mortal wounds?