The world, it seemed, did not respond.
He took off the second ski and meekly headed for the gym.
There was no one on the stoop. The volleyball net was still swaying gently. A whistle lay on the referee’s stool. The ball had rolled into a corner.
It felt as if he had walked through some dangerous hole in the blizzard and ended up in an alternative world, without people. If a war had started, there would have been air raid sirens wailing throughout the City. Had the enemy attacked suddenly?
He peeked into the cafeteria. Glasses of tea and unfinished pieces of bread on the tables. He could smell scorched buckwheat porridge. The old cat, Duska, sat by the trash can for bones and peels.
The door to the auditorium was slightly open. He could hear stifled sobs.
It was dark in the auditorium, just a few lights were on. It was filled with teachers, students, guards, and cooks. The director was on the stage. He raised his only hand, as if trying to catch someone flying away, and in the same voice he used when he had sent his tank battalion into attack, shouted:
“The moment of silence is over! On your knees! On your knees!” He knelt first, and everyone followed.
“Let us remember,” the director’s voice broke. “Let us remember… Our dear—” The old crooked scar that went across his temple and cheek turned white and his face was suffused with bad blood. An old concussion, a German shell striking the tank turret, deafened him once again, he sank to the floor, while a simple-hearted cook cried out:
“They killed him!”
Everyone started to cry, the words released the cries.
Someone put a hand on his shoulder. Izmailov. His mouth was twisted and there were tears in his empty, wild eyes. The boy felt that he was crying, too. Izmailov got up and wandered off. People stood up, holding on to one another, stunned.
A portrait of a man with a mustache hung in the middle of the stage. The boy knew the City had been founded on his direct orders. The portrait had a black ribbon draped across one corner.
Believing in this man’s immortality, in his name’s immortality, the boy could not accept that he was actually dead, that he was reduced to a body emptied of its spirit. He thought that he had not really died, but had merely sacrificed himself for an hour, a day, in order to stop Izmailov’s revenge, to save him, the most insignificant of the insignificant. He was engulfed by an uncontrollable wave of happiness and pain, the desire to sacrifice himself in return, to give his entire life, present and future, to the benevolent power embodied in that familiar, comforting portrait. He sobbed passionately, discharging the fear, and the ceiling flipped upside down and the lamps flew in a tight arc.
Darkness. Serenity.
The sharpness of smelling salts.
Izmailov no longer approached him. At the end of the summer, he disappeared from the City. Along with the commandant father.
His parents no longer locked themselves in the kitchen in the evening or covered the telephone with a pot. His mother started praising her new operating theater again.
“They removed Izmailov,” Uncle Igor said with marked indifference, when they came to visit. “He turned out to be an accomplice of Beria, that enemy of the people.”
The boy thought that this was all orchestrated by the benevolent power that he had managed to reach. He now knew that the man with the face in the portrait had in fact died; died forever. However, he divined the presence of the same power in Uncle Igor; in his simple, radiant word “removed,” which obscured his triumph; the covert, great knowledge of causes and effects.
At the hospital, the same childish fear of inferiority and abandonment gnawed at him.
But now there was no more saving strength. All its mirages had vanished, like the banners and heraldry of the country where he had been born.
What was left was a patient’s obedience. And thoughts in which he tried to rationalize his fear and find the path to and support for an unconditional hope, and not an illusory one.
Kalitin set aside the newspaper. He did not like reading on a screen, his eyes tired too quickly, and he had made reading newspapers part of his self-image: the conservative scientist, an émigré who could not reach previously attained heights in his historical homeland and retired.
He also had an instinctive fear of computers and smart-phones that collected and saved metadata; he tried not to use search engines that remembered your questions; he did not trust VPN protocols or encryption.
Just an anonymous print paper; a fresh edition, bought at a kiosk.
Now the newspapers were brought to him by hospital staff, who joked respectfully about the lonely old man: Who else could leaf so calmly through the hysterical pages of news while he knew there was a suspicion of inoperable cancer and that at any moment the test results and final diagnosis would be revealed?
A chemist by education, Kalitin knew a lot about the human body, but only from a narrow and specific point of view: how to kill the body. He had a fairly good idea of modern methods of treating cancer, some of which were distantly related to his research; after all, on some level he had studied the directed destruction of specific cells.
But he remained ignorant in medicine. His academic, theoretical thoughts about death and his routine closeness to it in the laboratory gave Kalitin the perverted arrogance of a technocrat who believes that destruction and creation, killing and healing were equally possible; anything that could be broken could be fixed—thing, body, spirit—it was the job of other specialists who would be at hand when needed: repairmen, doctors, psychologists.
He who developed substances from which there was no salvation, who knew the effect of their virulent molecules, still believed childishly that salvation was always possible in the case of an ordinary illness, it was just a question of timely intervention, a question of means, effort, and price; Kalitin was prepared to pay the highest price.
He could afford a good hospital. Good doctors. But that was not enough for firm hope. It would be stupid to expect help. They let him know that more than once. The invitation to consult the investigative group was a farewell gesture, a perfunctory administrative kindness. They knew or guessed that most likely he would be gone in a year. National frugality: squeeze the last of the toothpaste from the tube. He had to work off the hospital bills, balance the debit-credit, for his insurance would not cover everything. And then there was the funeral.
They didn’t tell him over the phone which crime the group was investigating. Secrecy. Not over the phone. What do they know about secrecy? In his ancient past, an armed messenger would come to Kalitin with a sealed envelope in a sealed pouch. Secrecy… As if he couldn’t guess since it was all over the newspapers. Anaphylactic shock or its simulation. It was probably a substance of natural origins. Not his lab, not his work. In a restaurant, at close distance. Before witnesses. Risky. He didn’t die right away, he held on, whispered. Distance? Dose? Method? Weather? Specific information on the organism? Food? Incidentally, it wasn’t clear whether he had time to eat or not, what he had eaten didn’t interest the press at all, and there wasn’t a word about alcohol, the stupid fools. Interesting, interesting… He had to read about it some more.
In the first few years after his defection, Kalitin had not read any newspapers. The news did not interest him. The laboratory, his baby, was back there in his homeland that betrayed him. Research was frozen and the staff given unpaid vacation.
He had hoped that they would believe him here and give him resources and colleagues. He would restore his arsenal and continue his interrupted research. Special services, Kalitin told himself, were the same everywhere. Certainly former enemies from the other side of the Iron Curtain, who had to collect information on his laboratory grain by grain and who had seen his creations at work—they would understand what goods he was bringing: excellent, with prospects, invaluable.