The Librarian

THE BUNKER

I HAVE MORE than enough dramatic talent and artistic restraint to keep an ending secret, even when I know very definitely what it is. All that I have at the present moment is the closed space around me—a room eight paces long and the same across. A ceiling three metres high with a quietly purring, milky neon lamp on it. The sun’s light doesn’t penetrate in here. On two walls side by side there are dummy window frames, stage decorations flanked by heavy blue curtains. Landscape photo wallpaper has been stuck in the window spaces, representing the false views from the insultingly fake windows: one of Red Square in the morning, the other a view of a large city at night, with the tracer-bullet lines of car lights. And hanging on the wall like a small pictorial window is a reproduction of the painting The Ice Has Gone: a chilly bend in a little grey river, a sky the colour of frozen lead, an earthy bank, the ochre of thawed patches, snow, birch trees, a meadow on the far side of the river as red as a cow’s hide, and a distant fringe of forest.

The door in the room is real, made of riveted gunmetal, with a round peephole and two strong bolts—perhaps that’s why the room reminds me of a war bunker. The bolts aren’t shut, but the door doesn’t open anyway. The mica peephole is always black, its lens covered on the other side by a little curtain inaccessible to me—the peephole was designed for the convenience of those who are on the outside. Earlier I used to sit at the door, waiting for light to quiver in those black optical depths and indicate that, although locked in, I was still under observation. But alas, nothing ever trembled in that bottomless, spellbinding blur. I’m afraid it is simply not permitted to observe me. After all, I am a sacred figure.

One of the walls contains the shaft of a dumb waiter. The only part showing on the outside is the cover, which looks like the damper of a stove. The dumb waiter comes to life four times a day. I say “a day”, but that’s an arbitrary definition. I don’t have a clock or a watch to tell the time by. If the dumb waiter contains a plate of soup as well as other food, I assume that lunchtime has arrived, and that outside the bunker it is day, and I put a tick in an exercise book. There are a hundred and sixty nine of them and I presume that a few days might have been missed—I didn’t start keeping a calendar of my incarceration immediately. I have been under lock and key for more than five months, and outside it is March or April 2001.

I can’t complain about the quality of the food—it’s regular canteen fare. The standard breakfast is vermicelli with a meat patty, salad and tea. Lunch is pearl barley (or pea, or rice) soup, mashed potatoes with a large frankfurter, bread and stewed-fruit water. The afternoon snack is cocoa and a curd-cheese pastry. Supper is a potato cake with sour cream or perhaps, for a change, flapjacks with jam and tea. The side vegetable sometimes changes: instead of mashed potatoes there might be boiled buckwheat or millet; instead of soup there might be clear broth or thick cabbage soup. On my nominal Thursday the frankfurter is replaced by fried hake. I have plenty of food.

I used to send regular notes in the dumb waiter with requests to increase the standard ration, but nobody responded to my requests. There’s a radiator in the bunker. The rusty pipe oozes hot water, which doesn’t affect its heating function at all. I have appropriated a glass and now I put it under the sparse rusty drops. In about one “day” it fills up to the top.

About two months ago I started laying in reserves. Of course, I can’t keep meat products—they go off. The only thing I set aside is bread, and I have almost a kilogram of rusks…

It is not possible to get washed in the bunker. The problem of personal hygiene is solved by a large packet of cotton wool and a five-litre canister of medical spirit. Every three “days” I moisten some cotton wool and wipe down my body. Sometimes I pour some spirit into the compote and treat myself to a cocktail. In the morning and the evening, in addition to everything else, the tray bears a fragrant strip of chewing gum—a substitute for a toothbrush.

For answering the greater and lesser calls of nature, I have a porcelain bedpan. Our dumb waiter is divided into two parts. In the top is the tray with the plates and glass, and in the bottom is the bedpan. I felt ashamed the first time sudden acute anxiety instantly affected my intestinal tract. But all the awkwardness is far behind me now.

There is an excellent writing desk in the bunker—natural oak, a time-honoured office design, with a fabric-upholstered top. One of its corners is broken and crushed—I tried to use the desk as a battering ram and hammered on the door with it. There is a table lamp with a green shade. There are Books laid out on the fabric desktop. So far there are six of them.

After about two months they sent down a Book of Strength that roused wild hopes in me—they couldn’t simply “bury” such a valuable rarity of the Gromov world. I even ventured an attempt to blackmail my jailers, writing notes saying that I would destroy this extremely rare, and quite possibly unique, copy.

The Books of Power, Meaning and Joy arrived, and I shuddered. The neon light went out and the air in the bunker immediately condensed into a prickly fish’s backbone in my throat—I realized why the librarian Alexei Vyazintsev had been locked up. After short intervals I received the Books of Fury and Endurance…

Every time I raise the cover of the dumb waiter, I pray that the Book of Memory will not be there, although I know that one day it will happen. Such is the will of Polina Vasilyevna Gorn.

In a drawer of the desk there were about ten ballpoint pens, three simple pencils and a pencil sharpener. In addition, I have six general school exercise books—four with squared pages and two with lined pages. I wiped my behind the very first time with squared pages, and then my jailers took pity on me and sent down toilet paper.

In the first week they sent down the cotton wool and medical spirit, a comb and a Kharkov electric shaver, with signs of having been used; below the blades there was a lot of coarse, grey stubble that looked like a boar’s bristles—probably the old women used it to shave their hormonal moustaches. I kept my clothes on for a long time, but by the end of a month they were impregnated with the smell of sweat. I gave in and put them in the dumb waiter. In return they sent me hospital pyjamas, a dressing gown and stretched woolly socks.

For sleeping I have a couch—a sturdy, pre-war model. Instead of a pillow I have a cloth bolster under my head. There’s no sheet, but I do have a grey hospital blanket. In addition to the desk and the couch, there is a chair in the bunker. A fine chair with a soft back. True, it is a bit rickety, but that’s my fault. I smashed it against the door and then put it back together again.

The way the dumb waiter is built makes it impossible to climb into the shaft. And squeezing into the actual niche of the lift is quite out of the question. No matter how tightly I might curl myself up, there’s no way a man 190 centimetres tall can fit into a box the size of an oven.

I have studied the walls of the niche carefully. It is set in a solid metal beam that moves up and down the shaft in the manner of a lift. When the niche is in line with the cover, the cover opens and I can take out my food. For the rest of the time the cover is cunningly pressed closed by the edges of the beam. Using the Book of Strength, I have bent the cover slightly and seen the blank metal behind it.

I have tried to break through the wall several times. Behind the bricks there was concrete, and I abandoned any attempts to scrape through it with a splinter of wood. Soon I came into possession of a pair of nail scissors, but I felt reluctant to blunt them. Now I formally perform the ritual of “digging-out” with a disposable plastic spoon, which is already half used up.

My schedule is simple. I write or I read a Book—Endurance or Joy, depending on my mood. Twice a day I perform the ritual of “digging-out” by scraping diligently at the wall with the spoon. After supper I arrange myself on the couch and sleep until the dumb waiter creaks again.

I have got used to the views from the “windows”. I usually read by the “Avenue at Night”. But the writing goes better beside “The Kremlin in the Morning”—that’s where the desk is. In essence, nothing has changed since Polina Vasilyevna Gorn first brought me to the bunker—a former book repository. At that time I could still walk out of here…

I look at the dreary landscape in the wooden frame, and in my mind’s eye I see a different murky river with slippery banks. If you turn your back to the water and walk through the channel of a ravine for about ten minutes, you can climb up to a charred stockade. There is nothing there to remind you of the people who recently moved in here, the heroic defence of the village soviet, the blood and the death, but the deep ravine is a common grave, concealing for ever the bodies of thirteen Shironinites and about seventy of the deprived readers who attacked us.

Leaning my hands against the low window sill, I glowered as I watched the victors, supervised by morose female workers, carrying the bodies out of the yard. By evening all the seriously wounded had died—during the day they groaned, asked for water, tossed about, but at sunset they calmed down and went quiet. Then they were also carried into the ravine.

After dismissing her orderly, Gorn went through the bags in person. In one she discovered a portrait. Gorn broke it with a crunch, impatiently smashing the glass under her heel. She beat out the shards of glass by hammering the frame against the table. The photograph fell out and a small piece of paper with the title “ERRATA” swirled through the air to the ground…