Chapter I
The archaeologists dug the earth, dug and dug, but dug up nothing at all. Meanwhile, August was already coming to an end: quick, slanted rains had swept over the counters and gardens (it always rains in Alma-Ata at this time), and at most, only one month remained for work.
And yet it was still sultry during the day; the expedition’s large white titan (water tank/boiler) heated up so much that you couldn’t touch it. You walk uphill, splash out a bucket of water, and the puddle dries up immediately, while the earth remains dry, deaf, and gray. And once, one of the expedition workers suffered a real sunstroke. What a commotion arose! They ran to the collective farm’s first-aid post for a stretcher. It stood by the wall, and when Zybin—the head of the Central Museum of Kazakhstan’s expedition—bent over it, a smell of iodoform and carbolic acid wafted up from the gray canvas. He almost dropped his pen. Just think: a garden, wind, the smell of herbs and apples, the gleam and tremor of leaves, their sensitive black shadows on the grass, and here is a hospital and death.
Well, and then everything went very quickly—the patient was covered with a green terry blanket and hauled down. Everyone shouted foolishly: “Quiet, quiet! Why are you handling him like that? He’s sick!”—they stopped a passing five-ton truck downhill—at this time, all the cars from the holiday homes rush back empty—carefully lifted the stretcher and placed it near the engine—it shakes less there—and immediately two young diggers, their boots shining sharply, jumped up and sat down on either side of it. They had already managed to iron, polish, wash, and comb their hair somewhere. Well, the workday, of course, was lost. Everyone scattered around the garden, some went to the river, and from the bushes there, an accordion struck up and a girl began to scream.
They screamed here, as at all gatherings, loudly, shrilly, like a cat.
“Oh, hear that,” said Kornilov with satisfaction, lifting his dazed, sweaty head. “They’re delighted! What workers we’ve found, Georgy Nikolaevich, eh? With them, we’ll surely find a treasure.”
There were two of them. The head of the expedition, Zybin, and the archaeologist Kornilov.
Both of them—he and Zybin—stood over the icy mountain stream (this was the Almaatinka River) with white one-liter tin cans from under compote and poured the water over themselves from head to toe.
“Ah, to hell with them,” said Zybin. “The day is over anyway.”
“Yes, of course, to hell with it, the day is over,” Kornilov agreed listlessly and submerged up to his shoulders in the current. “But what does that mean?” he continued, surfacing and snorting. “It means that while we were fretting over this Polikarpov, someone had already managed to rush to Potapov, the foreman, for an accordion, and I tell you, that’s two good versts through the mountains. I once looked at my watch while walking—half an hour, two good versts.”
“Did you see Potapov today?” Zybin quickly asked.
“I did. And how they were shouting, those devils, how they were shouting. One even flew right into my tent. I was developing photos, and the brute deliberately threw everything wide open! ‘Our comrade is dying, and you’ve spread out your…’ His comrade is dying, the devil, you see. He needs a comrade a lot!” And he plunged back into the stream up to his shoulders.
Zybin waited for him to surface, snort, curse, open his eyes, and said:
“They’re fed up with us, Volodya, to hell and back. They’re tired, disillusioned, lost faith.” (“Exactly,” Kornilov agreed, “exactly, they’ve lost faith, the scoundrels!”) “But remember how it was at first? Heat, rain, and they just kept gnawing and gnawing at the hill. And now, when two months have passed in vain, not a pot nor a horn, well, of course… Well, at least you could have dug up those cattle bones again, or something.”
Kornilov stood silently and maliciously, rubbing his stomach, chest, and neck crimson with the icy water. His movements were broad and strong. When Zybin mentioned the cattle bones, he suddenly paused and asked:
“Did anyone call me while I was in the city?”
“No…” Zybin began dully, and then suddenly clapped his hands. “Oh, they called, they even called twice! Potapov came looking for you. Some woman called. I told her to call the museum phone number. Did she get through to you?”
Kornilov’s eyes suddenly sparkled sharply.
“The woman?” He snatched a shaggy towel from a large blue boulder and began rubbing—as if sawing—his back quickly, deftly, and cheerfully. He was short, tanned, muscular, dark-haired, and very agile. Everything about him was constantly moving: his hands, back, muscles, lips, eyes. “An actor,” Zybin thought, admiring him. “Oh, he’s an actor! He must be doing this for the Sandunov Baths.”
“It’s nothing, nothing, my dear Georgy Nikolaevich,” Kornilov exclaimed cheerfully. “And not only nothing, but even very, very good.” He crumpled the towel and threw it at Zybin. “Get ready, put on your new ‘sotny’ trousers, and let’s toddle off. The Director must be waiting for us.”
He always spoke like this when he was excited: ‘sotny’ (likely meaning ‘hundred-ruble’ or ‘best’), ‘toddle off’ (потопали), or even ‘you’ll see, you’ll be swaying’ (закачаешься).
“The Director?” Zybin even sat on the boulder (the Director on top of this chaos!). “But surely he…”
“Well, of course,” Kornilov replied cheerfully and kindly, looking with pleasure at his full white face and light, watery eyes, which seemed to have grown even more foolish for a second. “Well, of course, my dear Georgy Nikolaevich? He loves you, right? Well, if he loves you, he’ll come himself, and bring guests. And what guests. You’ll see, you’ll be swaying. That’s what he told me: ‘Wait, I’m coming.’ Come on, let’s go meet them.”
They climbed the gentle hill through the shrubs. On one ledge, Zybin suddenly stopped and said affectionately to Kornilov:
“Volodya, just look over there, way over there, at the road.”
“What about it?”
“It’s like an old engraving.”
It was already getting dark. A thin mist was creeping along the ledges, and everything—the fiery-crimson, blue, dark-green, violet, and just white—the round leaves of the aspen grove, already filled with a wine-like purple; the dense forget-me-nots on the bright marshy meadow, the angry black reeds; the damp, very green, and also dense and clean field, like young onions—with lacy white umbrellas swaying on one side, and tall, strict stalks of fireweed standing on the other with sharp, sensitive leaves and violet flowers—all of this, immersed in the evening and the mist, subsided, dimmed, quieted down, and became delicate, distant, and fantastic.
“Like an old engraving under tracing paper,” Zybin repeated.
“But look where you’re standing,” Kornilov suddenly shouted angrily, “you’ve ruined your ‘sotny’ trousers, oh my grief!”
Zybin had climbed into a bush of wild sage, and it had stained him with yellow, tightly clinging dust.
“Why with your hands, why with your hands?” Kornilov shouted even more angrily. “You’ll only rub it in more. When we get back, we’ll have to get a dry brush and scrub you all over. But let her do the scrubbing. Her, not you. Otherwise, nothing will come of it.” He shook his head playfully. “What a commission, creator. They’ll arrive, take a look. The workers are guzzling vodka. One has already been taken away half-dead. The scientific staff is tipsy, and the head is sitting shirtless in a hut. Beautiful! And the scientific results, eh?”
“And your little bones, Volodya,” Zybin said affectionately. “Your little horns and legs. We’ll present those. You haven’t buried them yet, have you?”
Kornilov looked at him mysteriously.
“Why should I bury them,” he said. “Why bury them, if…”
And the story with the bones was like this. When, after the first timid successes of the expedition, a stretch of continuous failures began, Kornilov, based on some signs understandable only to him, suddenly decided that the spot they were digging was certainly hopeless, but what if they tackled a small, gentle hillock in the apple glade…
“But that’s a burial site,” he convinced Zybin, “a very rich one, probably even an equestrian burial. We absolutely must try. Absolutely.”
They dug for a long time and hopelessly. They changed locations, dug up the entire area, and finally got down to it. They unearthed a huge pit full of bones. Apparently, the remains of some giant feast had been dumped here—for about a thousand people. Cows, sheep, goats, horses, pigs! In short, probably no one had ever seen such a pile of bones before. Well, what of it! They dug it up and buried it, what else to do with bones? But a rumor had already spread through the collective farm that the scientists had unearthed a glanders cemetery. What a ruckus started then! First, the collective farm revolted, then the ladies from the SNK (Council of People’s Commissars) holiday home became worried, and after the SNK holiday home, the People’s Commissariat of Health called and boomed across all their telephones. A swift commission from the epidemic control department flew to the excavation site with young employees in pince-nez, looking like terrorists, and with boxes containing crosses, flasks, and test tubes. The pit was dug up again, roped off, and a grim man with a holster was posted. And while the trial and investigation were underway, two young diggers had their heads smashed in at a party somewhere. “You’re spreading glanders, you cursed lot! Just wait until we catch your foreman! We’ll knock everyone’s heads off!” No one’s heads were actually knocked off, and the commission left, even drawing up a report that the bones posed no danger due to their antiquity, but everything could have turned out very badly had it not been for Foreman Potapov. He—the clever one!—dragged two buckets of carbolic acid at dawn and poured it into the pit. The stench, of course, was terrible, but it immediately calmed everyone down. It smelled of the twenties, the train station, the barracks, the assembly point, the disinfection chamber—that is, something strictly mundane; in any case, glanders emerging from a thousand-year-old grave doesn’t smell like that.
The Director only learned about this story a month later when he returned from an urgent assignment in the capital. He summoned Zybin and said glumly (though his eyes were laughing):
“Well, the fact that you buried state money without me, to hell with you—’science knows many tricks,’ and what a trick is, no one knows, so there’s no demand for answers. But what if your collective farmers knock your scholarly heads off, then what? I am not responsible for you fools!”
So the pit stood in the middle of the garden, smelled of the twenties, and everyone passing by spat and cursed the scientists.
…Kornilov looked at Zybin mysteriously.
“Why should I bury them?” he said. “Why bury them, if they will be taken to the city tomorrow?”
“Why is that?” Zybin stopped. “For jelly, or something?”
“It’s because,” Kornilov answered with magnificent ease, “it’s because, my dear fellow, the Veterinary and Zoological Institute is buying bone material from us. So, tomorrow the Director will arrive with Professor Dubrovsky, he will inspect everything, draw up the papers, and then transfer the money to us in the amount of our expenses. But that’s tomorrow, tomorrow is not today, as the lazy people say. I only told you for fright that it was today.”
Zybin laughed.
“It won’t work, Volodya. The surname betrayed you. You should have chosen someone else. Professor Dubrovsky was arrested a month ago.”
“But that’s not the one, my dear,” Kornilov sweetly sang. “That one is a historian, my dear, and this one is a veterinarian.”
Zybin looked at Kornilov, wanted to say something sarcastic, and suddenly stopped. He remembered that there really were two Dubrovskys and one of them, the senior one, was indeed in charge of the zoology department at the Veterinary and Zoological Institute.
“No, really?” he asked timidly (his knees were very, very yellow).
“The blessed truth,” Kornilov replied sincerely. “We sold bone material from purebred lines of livestock from the 3rd–4th centuries. You still don’t believe it! You know what then? Potapov has a genuine Nicholas of Myra hanging up. Come on—I’ll bow to it. There’s vodka there, too. Let’s go.”
Zybin bent down and began to brush off his knees with sharp sideways strikes of his palms. Kornilov stood over him and watched. Zybin’s trousers no longer bothered him.
“You are a genius,” Zybin finally said decisively, lifting his head from his now hopelessly stained dark-olive knees. “The second Ostap Bender. To invent such a thing… no, definitely a genius!”
“Not me,” Kornilov replied modestly. “I am a genius, I am Ostap Bender, but only the general idea belongs to me, and its execution…” he paused mysteriously, “tomorrow you will see this execution yourself. Oh, they are already hitting the rail. The porridge is ready! Let’s go to Potapov’s.” I told him: ‘Wait, I’ll bring your scholar!’”
The commission swooped in by the end of the next day in two cars. In the first, rattling, dented, but known to the whole city “M-1,” rode the Director and an old carpenter. God knows why they brought the old man here. But he sat, proudly smoking and surveying the surroundings. Both to this side and to that. He looked soberer than sober.
“An eagle,” Zybin thought.
The third person in the car was a tall, very beautiful girl resembling an Indian woman, with a clean, elongated, matte face and shiny black hair. Klara Fazulaevna, Head of the Storage Department. She looked over the top of the car and was thinking entirely her own thoughts. And behind the “M-1” was another car—long, thin, yellow, swift, like a hound or a greyhound (Zybin didn’t understand car brands at all). There were only two people in it: a tall, thin old man in a tussah silk suit and a plump German fellow, blond, delicately freckled, bespectacled, in a pith helmet, and with a camera over his shoulder. He was driving the car.
The museum car reached the hill, rumbled up it, and stopped, swaying and growling. The old man and the Director jumped out. Klara remained. The Director asked her something or told her something (he poked a finger at the tents and snorted), but she only shrugged in response. Both archaeologists watched them from the top of another hill. Workers stood around—some with a pickaxe, some with a shovel. This hill was now being excavated. Only now it was supposed to be not a citadel, but the tomb of a leader—a kurgan.
“And half a day is lost again! And the most productive hours, in the cool,” sighed Zybin, looking at the road. “Well, Volodya, go meet them, and I’ll run to the shop for a bit. Since they brought the old man, we can’t do without it.” And he ran down.
Kornilov watched him for a second, thinking, and then shouted:
“But only take vodka! There is champagne, it’s chilling in the backwater.”
“What about that?” Zybin stopped, surprised.
“Just like that,” Kornilov snapped and tumbled down.
Zybin stood, thought, and shrugged.
“Why the champagne?” he asked in confusion. “He’s always up to something…”
“She failed him,” the guy standing next to him happily explained, “She didn’t come. So he sold you his pre-arrangements!”
“Who? Nonsense!” Zybin sharply waved him off and was about to go down, but then another worker, Mitrich, an elderly, respectable man whom Foreman Potapov had pushed into the expedition (the collective farm got little use from him anyway), authoritatively confirmed:
“No, she did come, she did. He came with her from the city. They left the car near the river—she was driving it herself—and both immediately went to the pit. He said: ‘Stop, I’ll show you—here, here, and here!’—he took her umbrella and started shooing [digging with it], and she immediately put her nose in her handkerchief: ‘Don’t, don’t, I understand you anyway.’”
Everyone laughed. “They don’t like Kornilov,” Zybin thought, and he couldn’t tell if he found it pleasant or not, but in any case, at that moment he realized that it was possible not to like Kornilov.
“Well, what then?” he asked.
“And then they came to me. ‘Mitrich, welcome guests.’ My wife cooked them scrambled eggs with onions, and they sent me for cognac. On the way back, I picked the three biggest, absolutely biggest apples for her; she even got scared: ‘Oh, oh, what apples, do they really get this big?’”
Zybin glanced at the workers. They were listening and smirking.
“Who is she?” Zybin asked, stunned. “Where is she from?”
“That’s where she’s from!” Mitrich said with pleasure. “I don’t know where! I wasn’t listening. I only understood this much. She seems to have met you somewhere. Either you vacationed together or went somewhere.”
“Me? No!” said Zybin. “That can’t be.”
“No, definitely, definitely, she knows you, she was very interested! She says: ‘He won’t recognize me now.’ And he says: ‘He will.’ Then he ran off and brought her two skulls, goat ones, or something. The tablecloth was clean, so he put them right on it! My wife had to wash it in ash afterward. Then they went to the river together…” He paused and added: “To wash their hands!”
Everyone burst into laughter.
“All right, Mitrich, let’s go, you’ll help me! While they are there…”
“And she’s beautiful,” Mitrich said, walking behind him. “Plump! Yellow hair, twenty-five years old, no more! The hairdo! A chain! A watch!”
The clouds parted, the sun peeked through, and it immediately became very hot. The summer was dry overall. The rains had only recently passed—rare, slanted, fine rains. Such rains, if they flew by somewhere near Moscow or Ryazan, are called mushroom rains. But here, the earth, exhausted by the heat, accepted them eagerly, openly, with all the hills and valleys of the foothills, all the hectares of brown quaking-grass and white bellflowers, the faded leaves of the shrubs. White parachutes floated in the air—the dandelions had bloomed out. The lifeless, delicate blue chicory on tall, knotty, strong, and straight stems, like ropes, was fading and turning pinkish-porcelain, white, gray, colorless. The heat trembled, like the warmth above a samovar. But the grasshoppers were chirping at full volume. In bad weather, they quieted down, but in the sun, they chose the driest, most scorched slopes, and everything then shook from their chirping; it was so murderously even that Zybin had imagined that not just silence, but a deadly stillness had surrounded him all these months. But now everything around was full of fragments again—small, sharply wounding. The grass sang, groaned, chirped. Zybin could even distinguish individual voices. Someone clearly and plaintively pleaded: come, come, come… And there, having listened to him to the end, someone answered clearly and angrily: no, no, no! Passing by a clump of grass, Zybin saw her—a green, large-eyed grasshopper, as if cut out of a green-white silvery corn leaf. “Her?” he thought. “But locusts don’t chirp, do they?”
The Director and Professor Dubrovsky stood in the middle of the clearing. And Klara was standing with them too.
“‘Irrigate your stomach with wine. The constellations have completed their circle. Softly the gentle cicada, crouching, groans from the heat,’” said Zybin as he approached and squeezed Klara’s hand. “A poem by Alcaeus, translated by Veresaev, collected works, volume nine. Hello, comrades!”
“No, it looks like we’ll wait on the wine,” the Director replied cheerfully, “we haven’t even earned kvass yet. So, it seems we have nothing to irrigate our stomachs with. Well, hello, hello, custodian! We’ve come to you for bones.”
He spoke and looked into his face with kind, laughing eyes.
“But we have probably earned it,” Klara quietly said to the Director.
“But we have,” the Director waved his hand, “we, you know, are gold! We are business people, precise; no jokes with us. So,” he turned to the Professor. “Let me introduce you—Georgy Nikolaevich Zybin. You’ve probably read his article in Kazakhstan Pravda about the library. What a scandal he created there! And in our terms—a custodian of antiquity. The head of all the work. And this, custodian, is Nikolai Fedorovich Dubrovsky, our buyer from the VetZoo Institute. Well—will we give him your bones or not?”
“Volodya is a genius,” Zybin thought, but said:
“Why give them away? They were drenched with carbolic acid. You can’t even get near them.”
“It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter at all,” the gray-haired Professor, who resembled a pastor, sang out energetically. “We, dear colleague, will soak them and wash them. And you know what kind of preparations we will get! Your failure is a great fortune for us. Nowhere is there such a quantity of bone material from purebred lines of livestock from the beginning of the era for Central Asia! And for Arthur Germanovich,” he nodded towards the pit, “this is a real treasure! He’s a horse specialist! He’s currently writing his candidate thesis on the history of the Kirghiz and their relationship with Przewalski’s horse. Look,” he waved his hand across the clearing. “See?”
Zybin looked and smiled. The German fellow—that’s what he immediately christened him—rolled up his trousers and climbed into the pit. Kornilov jumped in after him.
“And our fool is in there too,” the Director became angry and shouted: “Vladimir Mikhailovich, if you keep rooting around in that filth, I’ll send you to the titan to steam your hands off. They might have a hundred pounds of antediluvian syphilis on them!”
The Professor laughed and placed a hand on the Director’s shoulder.
“No, it can’t be!” he said thoughtfully. “Impossible, my dear Stepan Mitrofanovich. You yourself say, a thousand and a half years. What kind of…!” He suddenly and elegantly, purely professionally, hooked his arm under the Director’s. “Let’s go take a look at them instead…”
…The bones lay in a continuous heap. On top, they were black from the carbolic acid, but when they were stirred, they turned white, yellow, and creamy. Apparently, they had been blown by the wind, washed by the rain, and covered with snow for a long time—centuries, perhaps—and so they became dry, light, and resonant. But generally, something resembling a pile of multi-colored lace foamed in the pit beneath the assistant’s cane—the ruddy assistant sat above the pit and turned a horse skull in his hands.
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