The Librarian

THE BOOK OF MEMORY

I MYSELF DID NOT read the Book of Memory until a month after I took up the job, and I must confess that I have not reread it often. The “memory” induced has always been the same, and it sometimes seemed to me that it might be worn out by repetition, like a pair of trousers.

Actually the sensation experienced cannot really be called memory or recall. Dream, vision, hallucination—these words also fail to capture the essence of the complex condition in which the Book immersed me. Its gift of deception to me personally was an entirely invented childhood, full of warm emotion and joy, and I immediately believed in it, because the sense of living this vision was so total: in comparison, real memories were mere bloodless silhouettes. In fact this three-dimensional phantom was experienced more brilliantly and intensely than any life and consisted only of little crystals of happiness and tender sadness, shimmering with the bright light of one event after another.

The “memory” had a musical lining, woven out of many melodies and voices. I caught echoes of ‘The Beautiful Distance’ and ‘The Winged Swing’, a polar-bear mother sang her lullaby to little Umka, a troubadour lauded a “ray of golden sunlight” in a velvety baritone, a touching little girl’s voice asked a deer to whisk her away to magical deerland, “where pine trees sweep up to the sky, where what never was is real”. And following those pine trees, my heart tore itself out of my breast and flew away, like a bird released out of warm hands.

To the accompaniment of this pot-pourri filled with rapturous tears, I saw New Year round dances, fun and frolics, presents, sleigh rides, a puppy with dangling ears yelping clamorously, thawed patches in spring, little streams, May Day holidays with banners and streamers, the unbelievable height of a flight on my father’s shoulders, a vast expanse of smoky dandelions sprawling in front of me, cotton-wool clouds drifting across the sky, a picturesque little lake, pierced through with reeds, trembling in the wind, silvery small fry darting through the warm, shallow water, grasshoppers chirring in grass tinted yellow by the sunlight, purple dragonflies suspended motionless in the air, swivelling their precious, spangled, glittering heads.

I “recalled” my school years. There was a new little satchel, coloured crayons lying on a desk and an open copybook with my favourite words for ever—“Motherland” and “Moscow”—scrawled in awkward handwriting. My first teacher, Maria Viktorovna Latynina, opened her register and gave me a red “A” for penmanship. There was a new maths textbook with a wonderful smell, in which rabbits were added together and apples were taken away, and a nature-studies textbook as fragrant as the forest.

Imperceptibly the lessons matured, moving on to algebra and geography, but all this knowledge was grasped with mirthful ease. The winter holidays spilled out into the smooth, frosty surface of the skating rink and a snowball fight started up; then came spring with its chatter of starlings and a hand traced out some funny love note that was passed two desks along to the girl with the cute, light-brown plaits.

Holidays soared through the air like balloons, bright with the rainbow colours of flower beds, and the sun glinted in every window. Summer came and the euphorically blue sky of July swept across over the earth and fell, becoming the Black Sea with cloud foam on its waves. The cornflower-blue mass of Kara Dag loomed through the southern heat haze, the air was a-rustle with cypress trees and fragrant with juniper. With every caressing gust of the wind the bright two-storey building of the Young Pioneer Camp surfaced out of the greenery. Lenin, as white as sugar, towered up on his granite pedestal and bright-coloured alleys of flowers ran out in all directions from the statue like the rays of a star. Scarlet, resounding happiness fluttered on the slender mast of the flagstaff…

Described in words, of course, this doesn’t sound particularly impressive. But that evening, when the effect of the Book came to an end, I gazed for a long time at a cloud as dark as a liver, creeping across a stormy sky. And I realized then that I would fight for Gromov’s Book and my invented childhood.

It’s incredible how easily my memory accepted this distinction. The phantom from the Book had no claim to kinship with me, and in the final analysis it was no more than a glossy heap of old photographs, the crackle of a home movie projector and a lyrical Soviet song.

Even so, my real childhood—that long, hateful caravan of commonplace events, for which I cared nothing—was immediately relegated to the sidelines.

But all that happened much later; for the first few weeks in the Shironin reading room I cursed my inheritance—without even wishing it, my late Uncle Maxim had played a really dirty trick on me. Together with my uncle’s apartment I had inherited the position of librarian and the Book of Memory.