The thieves wisely decided not to tangle with Shulga any more. They couldn’t show him respect, but it would have been stupid to mess with a man who could have an authoritative criminal boss shamed with a single word.
After that Shulga’s life was subjugated to an unvarying routine. In the morning he read through the Book and for the rest of the day he lorded it over the skivvies and abused lowlifes. The authorities thought it best not to interfere in this situation. Shulga’s role as a social counterweight had brought the camp the calm and order that the authorities needed, and for that he was given secret support. As long as Shulga remained in the camp, the thieves tried not to commit any more outrages, and all the castes coexisted more or less peacefully.
Shulga’s closest associates in his future library were the former lowlife Timur Kovrov, and the skivvies Savely Vorontsov, Gennady Frolov and Yury Lyashenko. They were released several years earlier than Shulga, who got out in 1986 after serving fourteen years of the fifteen to which he had been sentenced.
Shulga sought out his old camp comrades, and together with them he immediately began strenuous efforts to collect the Books, since life itself had appointed him a “librarian”. He didn’t share the secret with anyone at first, speaking only in allusions and innuendo. In fact Shulga didn’t disclose the entire truth for a long time, even to the devoted Kovrov. When the first Book of Memory and Book of Joy were found, Shulga was always present at the readings, insisting that the Books’ effect was the result of his own presence.
Shulga surrounded himself with ordinary human material that he dredged from the depths of society, from the low dives and rubbish dumps. Former “shit-shovellers”, “scumbags” and “cocksuckers” became a dangerous force under Shulga’s leadership. Their prison-camp humiliation merely gave them a sense of solidarity, an implacable hatred of society and a single great desire for vengeance—on anyone, on everybody at once. This contingent was the main difference between Shulga’s library and other structures of a similar nature.
As opposed to Lagudov, who had put his money on the intelligentsia, Shulga based himself on the outcasts. In addition to the humiliated strata of criminals, recruits were also gathered from among disenchanted members of religious sects, street bums, bottle collectors, low-grade lumpens who had taken to drink and handicapped individuals who were capable of working. We know that the library was joined by an entire workmen’s cooperative of deaf and dumb carpenters—fifteen hulking great men who were very handy with axes. At the beginning of the 1990s the number of readers had passed the 150 mark.
To finance the clan, its “civilians” skilfully practised their customary professions of begging, petty theft and extortion. The “infantry”—dedicated trackers—got hold of the Books.
Shulga was not mistaken in his choice of social milieu. It was a delusion on the part of the greater society to assume that its outcasts were weak, unreliable and cowardly. On the contrary, the status of outcasts bordered on that of the chosen. Shulga’s men, who communed with the mystery every day, were in their own way no less spiritual and intellectual than Lagudov’s engineers. For them Gromov’s books opened the door into a new universe—a secret, awesome universe, full of riddles and thrilling mystery; there was a struggle taking place there too, there were many dangerous adversaries, there were codes of law for life and for battle, and there was a place for nobility and valour. Everything was decided in honest combat, face to face, like in the olden times. There was an emotional reward, far more powerful than the lift from vodka—hope and faith in the as-yet-unknown gifts that would be bestowed by Books to be found in the future, the Books that had not yet been read.
But of course, not everything went smoothly. In 1989 the library suffered a schism, initiated by Frolov and Lyashenko. They hid the Books of Power that had been found on one of the numerous search expeditions. Frolov and Lyashenko were the leaders of that expedition and, once they got their hands on the books, they wanted leadership for themselves.
Shulga realized that any harsh intervention would only make things worse. A schism was inevitable, and in order to avoid its ending in bloodshed, Shulga decided to lead it himself. A general meeting was held, at which the establishment of two more libraries was announced.
The division went through peacefully. According to the rumours, Frolov took forty men away to Sverdlovsk, and about thirty followed Lyashenko to Sochi. Shulga wasn’t mean with the new librarians; he gave each of them some start-up capital—three Books of Memory and three Books of Joy each—so that the new libraries would have no difficulty in recruiting readers.
Of the “old guard” from the prison camp, Kovrov and Vorontsov remained with Shulga. The clan had been reduced by half, but there was no immediate prospect of any threat to Shulga’s absolute authority. Kovrov and Vorontsov were both reliable and would never think of trying to take his place. Shulga’s library possessed six Books of Memory, nine Books of Joy, four Books of Endurance, a Book of Fury and a Book of Power.
MOKHOVA
IN THE LATE EIGHTIES and early Nineties skirmishes between clans for Books were especially frequent and especially bloody. The viciousness of Yelizaveta Makarovna Mokhova’s library became legendary. The story of this woman, which in many respects determined the fate of all collectors of Gromov, deserves close attention, especially since a great deal is known about it.
Mokhova grew up in a family without a father. She was a withdrawn little girl who was an average pupil at school and had no close friends, since from the earliest classes she was distinguished by a morbid vanity. After graduating from medical college she lived for two years at her mother’s expense, officially working somewhere as a cleaner, then passed the exams to join the evening department of an institute of pharmacology. During the day she worked in a chemist’s shop.
After receiving her second professional diploma in 1983, Mokhova found herself a job in an old folk’s home.
She enjoyed preparing the medicines there and the laboratory was cool and quiet. Among her powders and test tubes Mokhova secretly revelled in the covert power she held over her decrepit wards, aware that her mere wish was enough for any medicine to be transformed into a deadly poison, and it would be quite impossible to expose the poisoner—Mokhova had been an assiduous student and had a good grasp of the finer points of her trade.
Sometimes, just for a joke, Mokhova would sprinkle some caustic muck into an ointment for bedsores, imagining some old woman scrabbling away in bed as she struggled to reach the source of that fiery itch with her arthritic hand, or goggling blankly at the black ceiling for hours, trying to fall asleep after taking a sedative half composed of stimulant caffeine.
Another few years were passed with these amusements. Mokhova didn’t marry, and for that she blamed her mother, with whom she shared an apartment. As a result of these reproaches, or perhaps of some inner melancholy, the mother died. Without her pension Mokhova didn’t have enough money to live on, and she got herself another job, working half time as a nurse in the women’s section of the Home.
She found it hard there at first. There was a terrible stench in the wards—the bedridden old women relieved themselves where they lay. It wasn’t possible to wash a good hundred patients several times every day, and some nursing assistants preferred to keep the windows open to maintain the flow of fresh air. At first the old women caught cold and died, but the ones who survived actually grew hardier, and the staff suffered more seriously from the freezing cold than they did.