The Librarian

THE MOKHOVA THREAT

GROMOV’S BOOKS still had to be sought out, and in this area Mokhova was exceptionally successful. She began a lot later than her competitors, but she quite rapidly made up for lost time and overtook the leading libraries where collecting was concerned.

Like the “steel bird” in the well-known Soviet song, the old women found their way into places that no armoured train could streak into, no surly tank could creep into and no search parties from hostile clans could penetrate.

The old women’s world was a separate, expansive universe, rich in opportunities and connections. The old women knew people right across the country, and the “mums” wrote letters, got on the phone and sent telegrams to their friends. Quite often trivial “natter sessions” at the entrance to some building were more productive than the months-long expeditions undertaken by Shulga’s or Lagudov’s scouts. There were old women everywhere who had access to bulk stores of information as they supplemented their pensions by working part time for pitiful rates as cleaning ladies or attendants in libraries and archives. Mokhova’s rivals referred to these women who wormed their way in everywhere as “mops”.

The old women entangled the Gromov world in the web of their espionage networks. They easily intercepted hostile agents returning home, all unsuspecting, with their booty. They filled those agents with fatal amounts of drink in trains, ambushed them in the night at railway halts and in pitch-dark entrances on deserted streets. The books flowed to Mokhova.

If the libraries had not taken countermeasures, Mokhova would certainly have acquired a complete set of works. They say that the list of Gromov’s works was stolen from the Lenin Library for Mokhova, but it never reached her—for which the credit must go to the now-defunct clan of Stepan Guryev, a former gold prospector.

His library was located in the Altai Mountains, close to the Bagryany and Severny gold mines. The gold works had been abandoned for a long time and the “readers” began working them again, thereby earning the means to live and to search for the Books. These men were old hands who had been around: we know that migrant Chechen marauders took a passing interest in the mines, but the overconfident sons of the Caucasus were burned alive, after being lured into a trap in a barracks hut…

Guryev’s men caught a female courier carrying material. Demonstrating exceptional self-sacrifice, the old woman ate the tablets of cheap cardboard. Hoping to reconstitute the books somehow, they dissected the old woman’s gastrointestinal tract. They extracted only thoroughly chewed, unreadable shreds, but from the number of cardboard scraps they could conclude that there had originally been seven Books.

Searches required not only patience, but also money. Mokhova conveniently got one of her women hired as senior accountant in the social-security department. This adroit bookkeeper managed things so that the nursing home somehow dropped out of the authorities’ field of view, and yet continued to be financed with government money for many more years.

The Home could hold as many as four hundred “mums”. The flow of pensioners was continuous: following established practice, the men were exterminated immediately and the women were put under armed guard.

After two years Mokhova possessed the largest and most powerful army of all the clans. And in addition, the relative age profile of the “mums” gradually grew younger. From the example of the cook Ankudinova and the nursing assistant Basova, Mokhova realized that the army needed younger recruits. The decrepit old women had shown that they were outstanding warriors, but only when the Book transformed them. For the rest of the time most of the army had only a third of that strength. Literally a week after the Home was captured the recruitment of fresh forces began.

The idea of eternal life in one’s own body had a lot in common with the ideology of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Perhaps that was why Mokhova often reinforced the ranks of her middle-aged warriors with members of the sect, who gladly made the switch to her, preferring the knife and the axe to handing out stupid leaflets.

The old women involved their own elderly, but still sound, daughters. Semi-alcoholics, divorced or simply solitary, bitter and angry at the whole world, they stayed in the Home, opting to commit to the struggle for immortality.

No one was taught to fight. Gorn wisely assumed that there was no point in disturbing old reflexes. The women were given items with which they had been familiar throughout their lives. The village women were equally skilful with an axe, a knife, a scythe or a flail. Those who had worked at transport depots, factories and construction sites or mended roads were issued with the familiar orange waistcoats, crowbars, sledgehammers, spades and picks.

It should be said that to believe these women were weak was a serious error. In years and years of heavy labour their bodies had all accumulated immense muscular strength. They had simply become psychologically decrepit and forgotten that they once used to swing crowbars and axes untiringly at construction sites, lug sleepers and sections of rail on the railways or carry buckets and stretchers filled with immensely heavy cement.

No one was surprised by the ability of some Chinese martial-arts master, a frail little man, to handle dozens of young opponents. The women, having worked all their lives, also possessed immense reserves of physical strength. The Book was necessary only to help them recall the blunted sensation of Strength.

This infantry of female road labourers and collective-farm women, whose bodies seemed to consist of flesh that was moulded like lead, crushed the clans of Shulga’s former comrades in arms, Frolov and Lyashenko. In particular the fifty-year-old crane driver Olga Petrovna Dankevich distinguished herself in these bloody campaigns. She had grown so strong that her preferred weapon was the hook of a crane, which she carried on a three-metre-long pole. A blow from that mace would have flattened a rhinoceros. Dozens of readers, and even librarians, met their death from that monstrous hook.

When Guryev’s clan was liquidated and Mokhova took cruel revenge for the courier’s dissected gastrointestinal tract, the imminent danger became clear. For a long time after that an old woman was a symbol of danger and a synonym for cruel cunning.

In 1995 the libraries united against Mokhova’s tyranny. The coalition also had another highly important goal—to wrest from Mokhova the Book of Strength that she possessed. It was said that any copies of the extremely rare Book of Strength that showed up had been assiduously destroyed and perhaps there was now only one copy left in existence. Just how the libraries intended to divide it up among themselves afterwards was not clear.

The opinion was expressed that the Book of Strength would have to be burned or become common property, but no one explained exactly how. The question was swept under the rug to avoid introducing confusion and disunity. In any case everyone was unanimous that Mokhova had to be disposed of.

The coalition army included detachments from sixteen libraries— about two thousand men from various different cities: Saratov, Tomsk, Perm, Kostroma, Ufa, Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, Lipetsk, Sverdlovsk, Penza, Belgorod, Vladimir, Ryazan, Vorkuta and Chelyabinsk. They were joined by a militia of six hundred people fielded by reading rooms.

Mokhova flung almost three thousand mums into the battle. She herself wisely did not take part in the fighting. The army was commanded by Polina Gorn.