The Librarian

SEVEN AGAINST SEVEN

I HEARD TANYA burst into tears. Marat Andreyevich scurried between Kisling and Zarubin. Timofei Stepanovich grabbed Latokhin by the sides of his chest, saying something threatening to him. They barely managed to drag the old man off.

Ogloblin came over to me and spoke to Akimushkin and Tsofin.

“I’ll just have a few words with Alexei Vladimirovich, all right? Alexei, the most important thing is not to get nervous. Your armour’s superb; no one’s got anything like it, I’ve checked—no axe or sword will pierce it, let alone a bayonet… And another thing, it might just help you…” Ogloblin added hastily. “Before a battle I always try to remember a song, best of all from the Great Patriotic War, about heroic death: that immediately puts me in the right mood, it rouses my fighting spirit. Of course, it’s not the Book of Fury, but it’s still a kind of doping. By the way, Margarita Tikhonovna hinted to me that when you were at her place, you understood all about it…”

This was an unforgivable lapse of memory. I hadn’t spent all those hours in Margarita Tikhonovna’s home, listening to the voices of Soviet skalds flying out of the black holes of her gramophone records, just to pass the time. I only had a few minutes left, and I had to use them to apply this still-unexplored technique of courage.

Ogloblin waved his hand in farewell and rejoined the ranks. I tightened my grip on the handle of my hammer. Golenishchev was standing just a metre away from me, resolutely clutching his axe, and behind him was Tsofin, who had readied two knives for the duel. The beak of Latokhin’s pickaxe glowed dull silver. Akimushkin toyed calmly with his mace, warming up his stiff wrist.

The seven Pavliks facing us also warmed up—smooth, faceless figures who looked like huge white pawns, but with sharp-pointed crutches held at the ready.

“It seems to me at times that soldiers who have not returned from fields of blood were not laid in our earth at all, but turned into white cranes,” I started crooning in my mind. “From those distant times until today they have been flying, calling to us. Is this not why so often we fall sadly silently when we gaze up at the sky?” I cautiously examined my own condition—absolutely nothing was happening in my soul. Panicking, I hurried through the next lines. “The weary wedge flies on and on across the sky, flying in the grey mist at day’s end, and in that line there is little gap, perhaps a place for me…” But the song dashed from the right hemisphere of my brain into the left one in a mute whine. I thought I must have remembered about this too late, but I stubbornly carried on invoking the spell of avian death: “The day will come when I too shall fly through this grey gloom with a flock of cranes, calling in a bird’s voice from the heavens to all I left behind down on the ground…”

Chakhov wound the entrails into a bundle, then suddenly swung back his arm and tossed them in our direction. The Pavliks shot forward like greyhounds, switching places as they ran, and my opponent turned out not to be the warrior I had been preparing myself for. He was almost right beside me when I finally grasped what my job in this duel was. A rush of adrenalin warmed me like a gulp of vodka, my stomach shuddered happily, and I guessed that this was not fear, but deadly fervour.

I saw Golenishchev take a step back to intensify the stroke to come, and his opponent, standing with his back to me, became an ideal target for the hammer. A sharp blow from a bayonet between the shoulder blades only flung me towards my goal. Ogloblin had done a really good job for me—the Belaz tyre tread didn’t let me down; it withstood the blow.

I swung the hammer down on the nape of Golenishchev’s foe. There was a wooden crack. The next second I felt a cast-metal lightning bolt pierce my boot and run into the ground. A nauseating pain splashed up from my wounded foot into my head and clouded my mind. The butt of a crutch flashed by, scalding my temple, ear and cheekbone with lead. A red jangling drowned my hearing. I fell, and the Pavlik fell on top of me, flinging out his arms. He screamed silently with his mouth pulled inside out, hoisted himself up on his arms and suddenly struck a terrible blow on the bridge of my nose with his forehead—and then the Pavlik’s head split open for some reason and a Vologda axe soared up out of it into the sky, like a bird, and the battle ended there…

I had wondered before what it meant “to lose consciousness”, picturing it as a state similar to a nightmare or sleep. In actual fact it was much more boring than that. At first I simply didn’t exist. Then I appeared, together with the light from the large window, lying on my back with a plaster ceiling extending above me.

I rapidly made sense of the world and immediately felt its first inconvenience: my face was tightly swaddled. I managed to lift my hand with a struggle and saw a drip protruding from my forearm. I was able to touch my face. It felt numb and limp, like a rag.

A man with a moustache, who looked like a veterinary surgeon and an agronomist at the same time, cautiously put my hand back where it should be. He was wearing a white coat and a little doctor’s cap.

“Awake are you, biker? Welcome back!”

I realized I had survived, but for some reason I didn’t feel any great jubilation. The recent black vacuum didn’t seem at all frightening to me.

“Oh, I’ll run and tell your family the good news,” a concerned female voice suddenly cooed in my ear. “All your relatives have gathered round. Your uncle, your sister and her husband, and your grandfather. They’re completely burned out. They didn’t sleep all night…” A figure as white as a snowman drifted towards the door, flapping its slippers.

“Righto. And I’ll go home, I’m tired,” said the man. “Last night your uncle knocked the stuffing out of me, I swear to God. I told him: ‘Believe me,’ I said, ‘I’ll try my very best for a colleague and I’ll do a great job…’”

“Are you a librarian too?” I asked with half my mouth, my blood running cold at this surprise. The thought that I was paralysed drove out the question of how my Uncle Maxim had “knocked the stuffing” out of him.

“What librarian?” the man asked in sympathetic surprise. “I’m a surgeon. A traumatologist.”

“A traumatologist…” I repeated in a mumbled echo.

“You were brought into our hospital last night. Second-degree coma… Don’t let that frighten you! In simple terms, it’s just a concussion with loss of consciousness for a couple of hours. You went straight into intensive care, and then came here. Your uncle was champing at the bit to operate himself, but I explained to him: ‘You can’t operate on relatives!’ I said, ‘Don’t you worry about it. We’ll do a great job!’ So your nose will be just like new; that is, just like the old one—no changes!” He laughed.

“But why doesn’t my mouth move?”

“What a droll fellow! You got jabs across half your face. I mean, they gave you anaesthetic. When you were at the dentist’s, didn’t they ever give you injections of novocaine?”

“Yes… I suppose…”

“You just tell me this… Who goes riding around a building site on a motorbike, and in the middle of the night too?”

“What motorbike?” I asked, just to be on the safe side. But this precaution was superfluous and came too late. I’d already blundered over my librarian uncle, and if the jaunty surgeon was from a hostile clan, my life was hanging by a thread.

“You can fake amnesia somewhere else. Why lie to me? I’m not a traffic cop…”

“I really don’t remember…”

And then, to my inexpressible relief, I saw Marat Andreyevich and Tanya. Ogloblin and Timofei Stepanovich were craning their necks round the door.

“What an actor,” the doctor said to Dezhnev with a smile. “Do you hear, your nephew here says he’s lost his memory…”

“How’s that, Antosha?” Marat Andreyevich asked briskly. “You and your comrades decided to hold a rally on a building site, you caught your foot on a steel reinforcement rod that ran straight through you and naturally you went flying off the bike and smacked your head against some planks. And there you have it…”

“Now I remember,” I said. “Thanks.”

“That’s good,” the doctor said with a smile. “Well then, you can do your talking and kissing, but only for ten minutes. The patient needs rest…”

The Shironinites perched on my bed like birds. Marat Andreyevich gave me a brief account of the evening’s events.

“Alexei, we won. The Kolontayskites kept their book! But if it hadn’t been for your heroism, everything could have turned out very differently! Your fearless and self-sacrificing heroism immediately neutralized your opponent and gave us a numerical advantage. He was finished off by Golenishchev, then Tsofin lent a hand and the two of them decided the outcome of the whole duel!”

“If you only knew how proud we are of you!” Ogloblin said fervently.

“Oh, come on,” I said, embarrassed. “I just didn’t want to die for nothing, without taking anyone with me…”

“Alexei, that is heroism,” Marat Andreyevich said with conviction. “A feat that even a complex individual like Semyon Chakhov appreciated!”

“If he could see me here,” I said, feeling at my gauze-covered face, “he’d take me into his own library. I’m the spitting image of a Pavlik now.”

Tanya took my hand and kissed me several times. Timofei Stepanovich sniffed and deftly brushed away a tear, then smiled and reached for his handkerchief.

“Don’t say things like that, Alexei!” exclaimed Marat Andreyevich, upset. “Nothing terrible has happened to you. You’ve got facial contusions. The swelling will go down completely in two or three weeks. Yes, and your auricular cartilage is broken too, but don’t worry, it won’t affect your hearing, your ear will just be soft. And I think you were really lucky with your foot. The tendons weren’t affected. You’ll spend another day in bed here, and tomorrow we’ll take you home. Everyone’s waiting for you!”

“I forgot to ask. What about the others? And Latokhin, is he pleased?”

“We didn’t want to upset you…” Marat Andreyevich said and hesitated. “But I think it’s best to tell you. Right, comrades? Latokhin died a heroic death. And Zarubin too. Veretenov has replaced Latokhin as the Kolontayskites’ leader. They send you their very best wishes and thanks from whole reading room.”

“And where are the Pavliks?”

“They left, as they promised. They’ve gone to Kazakhstan,” said Ogloblin, waving his hand in the direction that he assumed was south. “All seven of their men were killed. They didn’t beg for mercy; they fought to the bitter end. And by the way,” he said with a smile, “the help from the council arrived yesterday… Punctually late.”

Timofei Stepanovich snorted contemptuously.

“Missed the boat, as usual…”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. We politely told them it was all over and done with and in general it’s better to serve the mustard when dinner’s still on the table, so they cleared off. You’re a celebrity for everyone now!”