Forgeries provoked numerous skirmishes, which led to the demise of more than one library that had gone astray. The copyists were outlaws; they were liquidated by their own people and others alike. But they were highly successful in one regard—quite a lot of copies appeared.
That was when the cases of vandalism began. Original Books were sold and exchanged with a page skilfully removed and replaced by any other that was made of similar paper. Naturally, the mutilated Book had no effect. Whereas formerly people had restricted themselves to a cursory glance through a Book, after these incidents they went through the pages, comparing the typeface and the quality of the paper.
There had never been any great trust between the libraries—no one wished to reinforce the power of a rival. Exchanges or sales were extremely rare, and any fraud sparked a bloody conflict.
The resulting battle took place at a remote spot, with all due pomp and solemnity—members of the libraries brought Books attached to poles like holy banners. At first they were originals, later they were often replaced by replicas. Firearms were categorically forbidden. This was more than just some special noble warrior’s code. It was always easier to disguise stab wounds or crush injuries as accidents or ordinary “domestic incidents” for the outside world, with its morgues, hospitals and law-enforcement agencies. Bullet wounds could only be interpreted in one way. And apart from that, weapons of that sort were noisy.
Usually household items were employed in the fighting—knives as big as butchers’ cleavers, axes, hammers, crowbars, garden forks and rakes, flails. In general terms, the detachments of fighters armed themselves in the manner of Yemelyan Pugachev’s peasant army or the Czech Hussites, and the sight of these people inevitably brought to mind the idiom “battle to the death”, because with a scythe and a meat cleaver the sensation of death was especially keen…
No one saw Lagudov during his final years, apart from his very closest associates. It was said that Valerian Mikhaylovich went into hiding, fearful of hired killers from competing libraries.
SHULGA
NIKOLAI YURYEVICH SHULGA was born in 1950. He grew up a shy, timid boy, was a good pupil in school, but suffered from indecisiveness. A catarrhal infection left Shulga with a facial tic and he underwent several unsuccessful operations that left deep scars. Shulga was very embarrassed by his problem, which was emphasized by unwieldy glasses. He had almost no friends. In 1968 Shulga went to a teacher-training college, but in the third year he abandoned his studies and enlisted for a Young Communist League construction project in the north, where, as he put it, “people are not valued for their appearance, but for their labour valour”.
Defying his own nature as a member of the intelligentsia, Shulga spent a couple of years as a labourer in oil prospecting. The work was heavy and boring, and people laughed at Shulga anyway because he, with his far from heroic appearance, explained his tic and scars as the legacy of an unsuccessful bear hunt.
In 1972 Shulga signed on with a group of fur trappers. The team also included two hunters and a guide from the local population. A blizzard drove them into a hut and interred them under snow for a month. Centuries of human experience in the taiga warned of the dangers of collective incarceration and the guide worked a spell so that the men wouldn’t start shooting each other in their claustrophobic desperation.
The folk magic failed, overwhelmed by a mightier enchantment, and it all ended in disaster. In addition to salt meat and buckshot, the previous occupant had left behind about a dozen books, jumbled together with newspapers—as kindling. Out of sheer boredom Shulga started reading Gromov. He found himself with the Book of Fury (By Labour’s Roads). He didn’t understand much about literature, and the dreariness of the text suited his temperament. And so Shulga fulfilled the two essential Conditions of Zeal and Continuity.
And after the Book had been read, death came to the hut. In an attempt to conceal the crime, Shulga dismembered the dead men and carried them out into the taiga. The remains were discovered by a search party and the bodies were identified. Shulga appeared in court. He didn’t deny his guilt and sincerely repented of what he had done, attributing his appalling actions to intoxication by the sable poison that the hunting party carried—to avoid damaging the precious skins, the little animals were poisoned. He claimed that somehow the poison had found its way into his food.
Shulga told the court that he was reading by candlelight when he felt a “change of state”, as if boiling water had run through his entire body.
Very probably an offensive comment had been cast in Shulga’s direction. For instance, someone said: “Stop wasting the candles on useless crap, you twitchy wanker.” Men rendered bitter and exasperated by enforced incarceration are not particularly choosy about how they express themselves, and cramped conditions offer plenty of occasions for crudity.
Shulga experienced a surge of superhuman aggression, grabbed hold of an axe and did away with the guide and the hunters. After a few hours his fury evaporated and the realization of what he had done hit home.
Shulga underwent the relevant tests and no traces of poison were discovered in his body. Taking into account his confession, his cooperation with the investigation and the claustrophobic psychogenic aspect of the crime, the death penalty was commuted to fifteen years in a strict-security camp.
Shulga’s fearsome offence was no help to him in the camp. Ignorant as he was of the finer casuistic points of criminal culture, when questioned he mentioned in his ingenuous answers that he had spent two years studying in a teacher-training college. Lanky and scrawny, with spectacles and a twitching cheek, Shulga had already been dubbed “Head Teacher” at the pre-trial detention centre. He was a perfect target for mockery. Already depressed by his own unattractive appearance, he determined his own status in the camp: somewhere between a downtrodden “skivvy” and a lowly “gofer”—a perpetual “cleaner”.
Shulga was tormented by despair and fear. He was unable to put anything right in his life. On the front lines it was genuinely possible to make the move from coward to hero by performing some feat of heroism. But he didn’t know of any feat or action of any kind that would improve his position in the criminal world, and probably no such action even existed.
Shulga mostly befriended the same kind of misfortunates as himself, the “skivvies” and the “abused”. His neighbours in the barracks, who were “regular guys”, were loath to associate with him, realizing that he was sinking down the hierarchy, and they tried to avoid any unnecessary contact with a man whose excessive helplessness could lead at any moment to his being awarded “a plate with a hole in it”, that is, a demotion to the most despised and abused level of the prison hierarchy.
Shulga was unfamiliar with the prison-camp caste structure. Hoping to get his sentence reduced and receive privileges of some kind, he took the bait offered by the camp administration and joined the crime prevention section. And then he discovered that he had joined the ranks of the “scum”—that was what convicts who agreed to collaborate with the camp authorities were called.
Shulga became a member of the “team”. Wearing his armband on his sleeve, he stood watch at the checkpoint between the “living zone” and the “production zone” of the camp. Bearing in mind his liberal education, incomplete as it was, and his state of health—the tic had grown worse—Shulga was moved to a job in the library. Things were a bit easier there.