The Librarian

* * *

They left. I meekly withdrew into the other room, but of course I had no intention of sleeping. And, to all appearances, neither did my guard. I heard the sound of ponderous steps, and then the springs of an armchair sighed under his weight. A strip of light came in under the door. I heard the rustle of a newspaper and the jingle of a circling teaspoon.

About halfway through the night the light went out and, after waiting for the sound of regular snoring, I tried to get out into the sitting room without making any noise. The treacherous door didn’t merely creak, it whinnied like a horse. The snoring immediately broke off, Igor Valeryevich lifted his head up off the cushion, sleeked down round his bald patch the hair that had straggled across his temples and the back of his head, and turned on the standard lamp with his other hand.

“Alexei, the toilet’s right beside the front door, only the tank’s acting up,” he said, screwing his eyes up drowsily against the bright light. “That’s Sanya’s fault, the pest, he broke the handle again last night. There’s a green bucket in there, fill it with water and pour that in, and I’ll fix the tank in the morning…” Igor Valeryevich was wearing tracksuit trousers and a singlet that emphasized his bovine fleshiness. The knife was lying beside him on a nightstand. “Finding it hard to sleep in a strange place?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s no big deal, I was only half dozing anyway… If you need anything, don’t stand on ceremony, just go ahead and get me up…”

As I came out of the toilet, I noticed an oval plaque on the door, with a bas-relief image of a little urchin peeing into a chamber pot. One exactly like it used to hang in our home about twenty years earlier, but then it had got lost somewhere. Strangely enough, the sight of this tranquil urination that had been going on for decades in apartments of the most various kinds suddenly relieved my anxiety. Or perhaps the fear had simply drained out of me spontaneously and I had flushed it away with water out of the green bucket.

I suddenly felt terribly tired. And the back of my neck hurt, as if someone had been stubbing out fag ends on it with his boot. I closed my eyes and dreamed of a headache.

In the morning Igor Valeryevich buzzed annoyingly with his electric shaver and worked away noisily in the kitchen—dishes clattered in the sink while the frying pan hissed.

“How did you sleep, Alexei?” he shouted, hearing that I was up, and glanced out, holding a fork with a slice of bread stuck on it. “Have a wash, we’re going to have breakfast in a minute. Do you like toast? With ham and cheese?…”

Igor Valeryevich’s surname was Kruchina, a word signifying “grief” in Russian, but nothing could possibly have been more inappropriate to his bright, sunny temperament. He acted as if we were old friends and spoke in the cheerful manner of the presenter of Morning Exercise on the radio. I tried to avoid meeting his glance, but every time he ambushed me with a broad smile.

“Don’t be shy now, Alexei, pile it up and I’ll toast some more. That’s it, good lad! Maybe I should make a salad?”

I hastily declined, because the sight of Igor Valeryevich with a knife—even a kitchen knife—would have been too much for me.

“How about some tea with lemon? You don’t mind? That’s grand, then!” And he immediately started crooning some bouncy little tune to himself.

Half a day of this excessive bonhomie wore me out finally and completely. I didn’t trust him and was expecting this performance to come to an abrupt end at any moment, after which Igor Valeryevich would reveal his true, ferocious face.

But in the meantime he enquired enthusiastically about what I’d done in my life. On learning that I had a degree in metallurgy he positively blossomed.

“Alexei! We’re colleagues, you and me. I’m a foundry engineer!”

I listened to him, but kept casting anxious glances at the nightstand with the previous day’s weapon lying on it. It wasn’t really a knife, more like a bayonet with a very long blade.

Igor Valeryevich spotted my glance, but interpreted it in his own way.

“Like it? It’s an antique. From the First World War. How it came to be in our parts is a mystery, probably it was during the Civil War…” He reached out to the nightstand, and my heart suddenly contracted painfully.

But in fact nothing terrible happened. Igor Valeryevich carefully placed the bayonet in my hands. I touched the letters inscribed in an arc on the long, sturdy blade—“Modelo Argentino 1909” and “Solingen”—and the smooth wooden facings of the handle, then followed the cliché and ran the ball of my thumb along the edge of the blade.

“Sharp,” Igor Valeryevich confirmed proudly. “Why, of course it is! Handsome, isn’t it?” It was clear that he loved his weapon and valued it highly.

Then Igor Valeryevich brought over a photograph album and I leafed right through it out of politeness.

“The old man and my mum… No longer with us,” Igor Valeryevich commented as I turned the pages. “My brother Nikita— he’s in Arkhangelsk now… That’s me in the army. I served in the Transcarpathian region… My college… I studied in the evening faculty, and I worked as well, of course. I’ve been in a foundry shop almost twenty-five years… My ex-wife. We didn’t get on… And this is me being awarded my medal. Believe me, I would have been nominated for a Hero of Socialist Labour if the Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed, the documents were all ready, and then… Fucking disaster struck and they cut back production. We were lucky they didn’t shut down the plant…”

The final pages were filled with group photographs; Igor Valeryevich in the company of various people, among whom I recognized my abductors of the previous day and my Uncle Maxim.

“Our reading room. That’s me with Fedya Ogloblin, who was driving yesterday, and beside him is Sasha Larionov, they’re kind of backwards namesakes—one’s Fyodor Alexandrovich and the other’s Alexander Fyodorovich… Pavel Pavlovich, only without his moustache—he grew it for conspiratorial purposes… Sasha Sukharev and Tanya Miroshnikova, Margarita Tikhonovna… Well, you’ll meet the others today anyway… The Vozglyakovs: Maria Antonovna and her daughters Anna, Svetlana and Veronika. Denis Lutsis… and Marat Andreyevich Dezhnev, our family doctor. A remarkable man… Vadka Provotorov, Grisha Vyrin… And this,” he said, jabbing his finger at a Gigantopithecus with a shaved head, standing behind everyone and embracing almost the entire freak show in his huge, immensely long arms, “is Nikolai Tarasovich Ievlev. No words can possibly express how strong he is. You’re never afraid with a comrade like that around… And here, to the left of Margarita Antonovna, this is Pashka Yegorov… he’s dead and gone now, Pashka. Like Maxim Danilovich… And this here, with Sveta Vozglyakova…”—he pointed to an individual in dark glasses, clinging to the very edge of the photo like some kind of polyp—“… is a very bad man, Boris Arkadyevich Shapiro in person. Yes, indeed… You could say he’s the reason for all our troubles.” Igor Valeryevich’s face darkened.

“But what kind of meeting is this, and who’s going to be there?” I asked, plucking up my courage.

“All sorts of people. Both friends and enemies… All considered, it’s a long story.” Igor Valeryevich smiled guiltily. “It’s just that Margarita Tikhonovna asked me not to alarm you by filling your head up with too much information…”

After suddenly recalling that I was due to “testify” that evening, Igor Valeryevich left me in peace. I spent the time until Margarita Tikhonovna arrived sitting on the sofa, pretending to prepare my “speech”, but really only scribbling fitful squiggles on the sheets of paper that Igor Valeryevich had issued me with.