Part One
The kitchen window was above the entrance, above its screeching door, which wailed every time someone came in or out. In the burning, fiery impatience that Tamara Ivanovna was in, she would have heard the sound of the door from any corner, even from the bedroom on the other side of the apartment where her husband was sleeping, but she had been standing by the window for several hours, like a drawn string aimed at the street and awaiting a touch. But it was dark and silent out there. The spot of light from the bulb near the entrance barely reached the low fence that enclosed the square and the playground within it, amidst the tall, old poplars that spread their branches like a tent. And no one entered this motionless, faded circle of light. Tamara Ivanovna was so tense—frightened by the duration of the internal heat that still hadn’t consumed her—that she would have noticed any shadow in the black-to-dark square and heard any stealthy step from around the corner, if only they had appeared. But no, everything was frozen and paralyzed. At first, cars still made noise from the street, which was blocked and muffled by the sleeping houses: like late birds taking off from feeding; now even that had died down.
It must be the deepest hour of the night, probably past three.
Her husband is sleeping. How differently a mother and father are structured: could she possibly fall asleep? The children might have half of their father in them, but it is only a small half, without the gestation and without that eternal, inexhaustible presence in one’s womb that a mother feels. And giving birth to her child, who then turns into an adult, she does not expel everything during labor and pain: the same child, absorbed into her walls, remains within her forever. And it wasn’t just her heart that ached now; Tamara Ivanovna had become a clot of pain, everything in her was consumed by torture. But something else was scraping separately, with a special pain, scraping and scraping, tearing the tissue and groaning one word. It was her, Svetka, calling her mother…
In the evening, when this torture began, Anatoly, her husband, was not home. But Tamara Ivanovna knew he was at Demin’s; they were planning some joint business venture that hadn’t progressed beyond talk for a month. Demin was the instigator, more decisive and experienced in the new life. As soon as the old life rolled down the high hill, crashing, tumbling, and scattering debris, he immediately left the bus depot where he and Anatoly had become friends. He worked somewhere as a supplier, and now he had his own kiosk in the central market, selling all sorts of odds and ends, from light bulbs and paint to car spare parts. Anatoly, however, was stuck at the depot he had given twenty years to; he went out on trips less and less frequently, and even then, they were trivial, and he returned—shameful to say!—sometimes with firewood, sometimes with manure, and sometimes completely empty. He endured and endured until now they were showing him the door. Not only a part of his life but also a part of his soul was being mercilessly cut off as unnecessary: it was there, at the depot, that he met Tamara, who drove a steering wheel alongside the men for three years.
Tamara Ivanovna finally reached him by phone at Demin’s after eleven in the evening. Before that, she had run to the next street to see Svetka’s friend Lyusya, a tall and lush girl who could be mistaken for a fully matured woman, if not for her openly doll-like face—round, with large rotating eyes and cushion-cheeks. And by this face, artificially frightened and simultaneously ecstatic, it was impossible to tell if the girl was telling the truth when she claimed to have only seen Svetka during the day. She saw her at the market; they had gone to ask about work; Lida Topol was with them. They couldn’t find work, and she, Lyusya, left, abandoning her friends near the shopping complex. As she was leaving, she noticed some guy of Caucasian nationality in a denim jacket approaching Svetka and Lida.
There was only one benefit from this trip: Lyusya gave her Lida Topol’s address; she lived far away, in a microdistrict.
After returning home, Tamara Ivanovna called Anatoly and told him without any doubt that Svetka was lost. It had never happened before that she came home later than nine. That hour was set as her curfew, and she would not have dared to linger somewhere of her own free will after nine. Ivan, who was a year younger, was allowed more; he could run around until midnight in the summer, as it was now, and no one was scared: he was a boy. It was a completely different matter for a sixteen-year-old girl—pretty, unstable, curious, and already by this time having strayed from the laid-out path. She started school early, at six, and dropped out early, after the ninth grade, having caught the pervasive notion, which came from God knows where, that studying was optional. She enrolled in nine-month sales courses, aiming for the beautiful life. She finished the courses, but they wouldn’t hire her: she was underage. And so, with her friends from the courses, she started hanging around the market, begging for a sales job, shaking the owner’s goods in front of customers.
That was the situation.
Anatoly arrived with Demin, in Demin’s car. Tamara Ivanovna, unable to find any other spot for herself, was standing by the kitchen window just like this and saw the “Seven” car silently and heavily float up, searching for the way in the narrow, pitted-with-holes driveway in the thick twilight. Anatoly jumped out, then stopped short, waiting for Demin. It was so easy to guess: he didn’t want to go up to his home alone right now with the sudden threat that had descended upon it and meet his wife’s frightened and demanding gaze. But Tamara Ivanovna also breathed easier when she saw Demin. She felt safer with him. Demin got out of the car and, as always, hunched over, leaning forward, with long arms dangling from his shoulders, looking like a primitive man drawn in school textbooks, was the first to step into the entrance. Upon entering the open door and understanding from Tamara Ivanovna’s strained face that the girl was still missing, he said in his usual hollow and raspy voice:
“Don’t panic. It’s too early to panic. It’s still a child’s hour.”
But everyone heard, including himself, that these were just words. Useless words.
They left Ivan at home, instructing him not to go to bed until they returned, and to stay by the phone without fail, and then they left.
They drove off.
The night was approaching, warm, dark, and sluggish, probably signaling rain. There were no pedestrians left, but cars—imported here in the last three or four years from all over the world to organize races—sped wildly, sensing freedom. And this racing on foreign goods was now everywhere—on clothes and leather, on teapots and frying pans, on carrot and potato seeds, in teaching children and retraining professors, in arranging lovemaking and public amusements, in pocket gadgets and airplane engines, in street advertising and government speeches. Everything had rushed in at once as if into a void, displacing their own products into the dumps. Only funerals were held the old way. And they were holding funerals so often now, with church services, that it seemed that simultaneously with the crazy rush forward, into a sparkling and hot unknown, there was also a frightened regression back, into the familiar structure of life that ended in a funeral. And it seemed they were evenly divided—some, like moths, rushed toward the fire; others, like moles, burrowed into the earth.
They drove in silence; only Demin grumbled when foreign cars cut him off or blinded him with powerful oncoming headlights, not bothering to switch to low beams. They went down to the center, crossed the Angara River to the left bank over the old bridge, turned right, and left the city behind. Darkness stood up on both sides. To keep herself from going numb, Tamara Ivanovna, in the back seat, bending down and twisting her head past the window, started looking for little stars in the sky. There were none; high above, like pond scum, the iridescent-rotten glow from the city’s electrical sprawl spread wide. Unable to find any stars, Tamara Ivanovna began to wonder if she had made any wishes while looking for them, but she couldn’t remember, as if she had dissolved, divided into two parts between which communication was weak.
“Are we driving too slowly?” Demin asked, interpreting her movement in his own way.
“No, Demin, not slowly. We should have hurried earlier,” she said to herself. And she added to him: “When we enter, turn right at the second or third traffic light.”
“Couldn’t be more precise,” Demin grunted. After the silence, they were glad for any words.
“Yes… well…” Anatoly began, but what he wanted to say didn’t form.
“Where is ‘well’?” Demin didn’t understand.
“Where is what?”
“You said: well. Where is ‘well’?”
“I don’t know. I don’t come here,” Anatoly said so simply that Demin chuckled.
They searched for the street named Cheremukhovaya (Bird Cherry Street) for a long time; judging by the name, it should have been on the edge of the microdistrict and been made of wood. They turned both at the second and third traffic lights, ending up either in a swamp or on the Angara bank; they stopped at every intersection, shining the headlights on corner houses and fences to find a sign, but this side of the microdistrict was not designed for outsiders and did not display the names of its streets. There was no one to ask; it was after midnight. Only once did they spot a figure creeping along the sidewalk beside a fence; Demin, rolling down the window, hailed the figure with the friendliness he was capable of, but the figure, resembling a teenager, suddenly made a split-second jump and vanished into thin air. The wooden houses lay in a darkness that was especially dense, as if all the light from the illuminated center retreated here; there were more lit windows in the stone, multi-story buildings, but try knocking, try reaching them behind double and triple locks.
Tamara Ivanovna did not leave the car. Leaning back against the seat, with her knees pressed into the front seat, she waited in a strange, tense forgetfulness for them to find the right house. She stared blankly into the darkness and even more blankly into the complicated tunnel-like paths, through which the car circled, tearing the black flesh ahead of it with its headlights. She noticed and didn’t notice Demin blinking his lights at the rare oncoming cars, asking them to stop, and she was neither indignant nor surprised, feeling even a kind of solace when they sped past and accelerated. Finally, one brave driver braked. Demin strode towards it, a short man, resembling a barrel, emerged, and, stretching his legs, practically dancing in front of the huge Demin, began gesticulating with his hands.
Cheremukhovaya turned out not to be off to the side at all, but right next to the central street that ran through the whole microdistrict, and it turned out to be an alley with only a few four-story buildings. They stopped at the entrance, which was, of course, reinforced with an iron door, completely dark, as if pressed inward by the gloom. Demin groped and inserted one jagged pin into the round hole, then a second—the door clicked and yielded.
“Should I go?” he asked Tamara Ivanovna.
“No need.”
And now, before her and Anatoly, stood Svetka’s second friend—with an elongated, narrow, animal-like face on a head compressed at the sides, and with lively, round, blinking eyes that threw instant glances. Tall, dark-haired, clever, and older than Svetka and Lyusya, she used to visit the Vorotnikovs. Tamara Ivanovna had casually observed them: who was the leader? And she never found out; they were all drawn to each other by some equally small force—like temporary companions looking for shared activities. But this one, Lida, was sneakier. She had a special tool built into her, one not given to everyone, which she knew how to play. There are people who do not hide at all that they are cunning; their cunning is written on their face, betraying their search for intricate side paths, but it is so disarming, seems so innocent and foolish—moreover, pleasant—that it arouses no suspicion.
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