Pyotr Vladimirovich Shepchikhin. He worked in a print shop and typeset the Book of Memory. After confusing the dust jackets, instead of the detective novel he had set his mind on, he took home Gromov. By pure chance he got stuck in the lift with the book for the entire night, and when he was freed by lift engineers early in the morning, he came out a different man. A sensitive individual, Shepchikhin immediately realized that the reason lay not in his own physiology, but in the mysterious Book. Shaken by the mystery, he left his job and set off to wander the country, becoming one of Gromov’s most fervent propagandists.
Shepchikhin was killed—in fact he was probably bumped off by neophytes whom he himself had once told about the Book. They did away with him after deciding that Shepchikhin’s propagandist activities were too dangerous to the hermetic isolation of the Gromov world.
Yulian Olegovich Doroshevich. He was undergoing compulsory treatment at an occupational detoxification centre, and in order to avoid being driven insane by the sober boredom, he read. All sorts of garbage had settled in the libraries of those semi-punitive institutions—books that were even slightly worthwhile didn’t linger there for long. But thanks to that detoxification centre Doroshevich discovered Gromov and the Book of Endurance (The Silver Channel). This Book brought any afflicted soul a feeling of great consolation and reconciliation with life. It was said to be of help in cases of physical pain, acting as a general anaesthetic. The Book apparently had no substantial effect on feelings other than grief, fear and pain, but simply froze them into a general indifference. Doroshevich’s own psychological make-up determined the selective nature of his missionary work. He revealed the Book only to those people who, in his view, were the unhappiest. Doroshevich’s life was broken off in circumstances that have never been clarified; it is not known who killed him—probably someone who regarded the sin of murder as far less important than his own suffering.
It is possible that history exaggerates the spiritual qualities of the wandering “apostles” and that in actual fact they, like all librarians, coveted personal ascendancy and also tried to establish book communities, but failed to complete their mission.
Their strange selflessness rather contradicted the specific nature of the mystery. Every new reader who was introduced to Gromov realized that there would not be enough Joy, Endurance or Memory for everybody and it was better to keep mum about the author. In an organized community it was easier to keep the Books safe and increase their number, and therefore those lone wandering pathfinders died out. A library chose its own new readers, more readily recruiting solitary individuals without families and with some kind of mental problem, and examining each candidate at length to make sure they were worthy of communing with the miracle, and would be able to guard and protect it, and even, if necessary, give their lives for it.
In short, Lagudov had plenty of competitors. Soon not only the Books, but also the bibliographies of Gromov disappeared from every public library that was even slightly significant. Even in Moscow’s “Leninka” someone removed all the information from the card index. Consequently, during computerization the data on the missing author were not entered anywhere and Gromov formally disappeared. Someone also made free with the books on the shelves. Without the card index it was only possible to guess at the true number of publications.
By the beginning of the Nineties collectors of Gromov had a list of six already tried-and-tested Books. They also had information about a seventh, which they called the Book of Meaning. It was believed that when it was discovered the true purpose of Gromov’s creations would be revealed. As yet, however, no one could boast of having found a copy of Meaning, and some sceptics asserted that no such book actually existed.
All the libraries regarded a full collection of the works as an immensely powerful spell that ought to produce some kind of global result.
Lagudov’s theoreticians spoke of a “godlike condition” that lasted for the same length of time as the action of any particular Book. No one knew what benefits could be derived from this condition, correctly assuming that the ideas which occurred to someone inside God’s skin would transcend the human level. The rank-and-file readers were informed that, on becoming God, Lagudov would immediately make provision for his comrades-in-arms.
There were discussions about the end of the world, “book poisoning” that threatened the reader with death, or how all the Books, read straight through, would raise the dead. But these were only hypotheses.
It was assumed that Gromov himself might have had a complete set of works, but when Lagudov started searching, Gromov had been dead for a long time. When he died his apartment had gone to strangers and they had cleared out all the junk in the first week.
Gromov’s only daughter, Olga Dmitriyevna, lived with her family in Ukraine. One of Lagudov’s men paid her a visit, posing as a journalist, and was dismayed to discover that she had given the two Books she possessed to a casual visitor who had introduced himself as a literary scholar who was studying her father’s work. Olga Dmitriyevna did not remember the titles of the books either. They seemed to have been the Book of Memory and the Book of Joy.
Of course, Lagudov found out who had got there before him, but that was not much help. He didn’t engage in armed conflict with the competitors involved. After all, no one had deceived him, they had simply been quicker off the mark, and he only had himself to blame. Lagudov drew the appropriate conclusions for the future and tripled his efforts.
Gromov had a brother, Veniamin, to whom he also sent his books, and Lagudov had a stroke of luck with this brother—in addition to the Book of Memory and the Book of Joy, which Lagudov already had, a rather rare and valuable copy of the Book of Endurance (The Silver Channel ) was discovered. Acting like morphine, this book held all who were afflicted with pain and suffering firmly cemented into the library…
The years of systematic work were not entirely wasted. Rumour had it that Lagudov’s depository contained eight Books of Joy, three Books of Endurance and no fewer than a dozen copies of the Book of Memory (The Quiet Grass), which had been published last and was better preserved than the others: there were as many as several hundred copies of it in the world. The Book of Memory was strategically useful; its use made it easy to recruit and retain readers who were susceptible to tender feelings.
Two Books of Memory and an apartment in the very centre of Saratov were exchanged for a dangerous Book of Fury (By Labour’s Roads), which was capable of arousing a state of battle trance in even the most timid of hearts.
The other Books still had to be searched for. Lagudov had high hopes for the country’s outlying regions and its Central Asian neighbours, where Gromov’s Books could theoretically have been preserved, because by the beginning of the Nineties all the Books lying “on the surface” in Central Russia, eastern Ukraine and Belorussia had been picked up by collectors from various libraries.
But when the search became harder, methods that were far from noble came into play. Violent raids on depositories became more and more common.
At about the same time the so-called copyists became active— readers who made copies of the Books to sell for their personal enrichment. The copyists claimed that the effect of a copy was no different from that of the printed original.
But a manuscript almost always contained errors of some kind, or some words that had been omitted, and therefore proved ineffective. Photocopies that should have excluded the possibility of error also had no effect. It was thought that the decisive factor was the printing, and certain Books were reprinted. Rumours concerning the quality of a reprint “fake” were contradictory. In any case it was universally asserted that a copy would never compare with an original.