The Librarian

GROMOV

THE WRITER Dmitry Alexandrovich Gromov (1910–81) lived out his days in total obscurity. His books sank without trace in a bottomless abyss of recycled paper, and when political catastrophes finally demolished his Soviet Homeland, it seemed that there was no one at all left to remember the writer Gromov.

Not many people had read him. Of course, there were the Soviet editors who assessed the political loyalty of texts, followed by the critics. But it was hardly likely that anyone had ever pricked up their ears in startled interest at the titles The Proletarian Way (1951), Fly On, Happiness! (1954), Narva (1965), By Labour’s Roads (1968), The Silver Channel (1972) and The Quiet Grass (1977).

Gromov’s life story progressed step by step in parallel with the development of his Socialist Motherland. He was educated at a Soviet seven-year school and a teacher-training college, and subsequently worked as the executive editor of a factory’s in-house newspaper. The purges and repressions passed Gromov by and he calmly carried on as he was until June 1941, when he was drafted into the army and found himself on the front line as a war correspondent. In the winter of 1943 Gromov suffered frostbite in his hands—they managed to save the left one, but his right hand was amputated. After the victory was won, Gromov took his family from Tashkent, the city to which they had been evacuated, to the Donbas and stayed there, working in the editorial office of a municipal newspaper until he retired.

Gromov took up the literary pen late, as a mature forty-year-old. He often drew his subjects from the development of the country as a whole, celebrating the everyday, plain, cotton-print life of small provincial towns, settlements and villages, writing about mines, factories, boundless expanses of virgin soil and battles fought for the harvest. The heroes of Gromov’s books were usually “Red Directors” or collective-farm chairmen, soldiers newly returned from the front, widows who had preserved inviolate their love and their civic courage, and Young Pioneers or Young Communist League activists—resolute and jovial, ready and willing to perform some heroic “feat of labour”. Good triumphed with excruciating regularity: metallurgical combines sprang up in record times; a young man who only yesterday had been a student was transformed into a seasoned specialist after a mere six months of practical work in an industrial plant; a factory workshop over-fulfilled the plan and took on additional obligations; in autumn golden rivers of grain flowed into a collective farm’s storage bins. Evil was always re-educated or clapped in jail. And amorous passions also developed—but they were very chaste: following Chekhov’s axiom on firearms in plays, the gunshot of a kiss that was promised at the start of a book was fired as a damp, slobbery blank to a cheek in the final pages. But so much for the subject matter—all of this was also written in a dreary style, in soundly wrought but incredibly insipid sentences. Even the covers, with their tractors, combine harvesters and miners, were made out of some trashy kind of cardboard.

The country that gave birth to Gromov could afford to publish thousands of authors that no one read. The books lay in the shops, their prices were reduced to a few copecks, they were carted off to a warehouse and handed over for pulping, and more books that no one wanted were published.

The last time Gromov was published was in 1977, but after that all those people in the editorial offices, who realized that Gromov’s writings were the harmless verbal trash of a war veteran and that, while there was no particular social demand for them, society had nothing against the actual fact of their existence, were replaced by different people. Everywhere he went, Gromov received polite refusals. The state, already celebrating its own imminent suicidal demise, was hatching out the demonic literature of its own destroyers.

Gromov, a solitary widower now, realized that his allotted time had expired, and he too quietly expired, to be followed ten years later by the USSR, for which he had once written his books.

Although altogether more than half a million volumes of Gromov’s works were printed, only scattered, individual copies had found miraculous refuge in the libraries of clubs in remote villages, hospitals, corrective labour camps and orphanages, or been left to rot in basements, bound round crosswise with string and squeezed in between the documents of some Party Congress and multiple volumes of the Collected Works of Lenin.

And yet Gromov did have his own genuine devotees. And they scoured the country, collecting the surviving books, willing to go to any lengths to get them.

In everyday life Gromov’s books bore titles with references to river channels and steppe grass. But the titles used among Gromov’s collectors were quite different—the Book of Strength, the Book of Power, the Book of Fury, the Book of Endurance, the Book of Joy, the Book of Memory, the Book of Meaning…

LAGUDOV

VALERIAN MIKHAYLOVICH LAGUDOV could undoubtedly be considered one of the most influential figures in the universe of Gromovian discourse.

Lagudov was an only child, born to a family of teachers in Saratov. He demonstrated significant talent from early childhood. In 1945, as a youth of seventeen years, he set out for the war as a volunteer, but never reached the front—in April he contracted pneumonia and spent a month in hospital, and in May the war was over—the theme of a soldier who missed the war was an extremely painful one for Lagudov.

In 1947 Lagudov was admitted to the philological faculty of a university. After successfully defending his graduation thesis, he worked as a journalist on a provincial newspaper for twelve years, and in 1965 he was invited to join a literary journal, where he became the head of the review section.

Lagudov’s predecessor had departed from his post after letting a novel of dubious loyalty slip through. Khrushchev’s thaw had already taken place, but the boundaries of censorship remained blurred, and it wasn’t always easy to tell apart a text in the spirit of the new times and anti-Soviet propaganda. As a result both the journal and the publishing house had received a severe reprimand. And therefore Lagudov paid attention to everything that arrived on his desk. After glancing briefly through a story by Gromov one evening, he decided to polish the book off quickly and never come back to it. He had a positively warm review in mind—Lagudov’s conscience wouldn’t allow him to criticize a front-line veteran, even if the veteran’s politically correct text about anti-aircraft gunners was mediocre from an artistic point of view. Before nightfall he had finished the book. Without even suspecting it, the assiduous Lagudov had thus fulfilled the Condition of Continuity. Maintaining his vigilance, he had read the story from the first line to the last, without skipping the dreary paragraphs of nature description or any patriotic dialogue. And thus Lagudov had also fulfilled the Condition of Zeal.

He had read the Book of Joy, otherwise known as Narva. According to his former wife’s reminiscences, Lagudov experienced a state of turbulent euphoria and couldn’t sleep all night long; he said that he had subjected existence to a comprehensive analysis and had magnificent ideas about how to do good for mankind. He said that previously he had been enmeshed in life, but now everything had become clear, and he laughed loudly as he said it. By morning the emotions had subsided, and he drily informed his alarmed wife that it was too early to proclaim his ideas openly. That day he couldn’t go to work because he was in a depressed state, and he didn’t express any more ideas on the subject of universal harmony.

The substantive aspect of the euphoria that Lagudov experienced did not possess any conceptual points of intersection with Gromov’s storyline, and Lagudov himself did not link the events of the night with the book in any way. But nonetheless a certain emotional scar was left on his soul, which ensured that Lagudov did not forget the writer by the name of Gromov.

Eighteen years later Lagudov saw a short novel by Gromov in a seedy little shop at a railway station. Inspired by nostalgia for the happiness of that distant night, Lagudov bought the book; after all the reductions it cost only five copecks and it was not very large, about two hundred small pages—just right for the journey ahead.

In the suburban train circumstances once again assisted Lagudov in fulfilling the two Conditions. Some tipsy young louts travelling in his carriage were pestering the passengers. Lagudov, no longer young and not very strong, chose not to get involved with the burly yobs. As a man he felt ashamed of not being able to pull the villains up short, and so he stuck his nose into the book’s pages, pretending to be someone extremely interested in what he was reading.

The volume Lagudov had picked up this time was the Book of Memory (The Quiet Grass), which cast him briefly into a drowsy state. The book implanted in him a phantom of brilliant radiance, a mythical, non-existent memory. Lagudov was engulfed by such overwhelming tenderness for the life he dreamed of that he trembled in tearful ecstasy at this all-consuming, pure, lambent feeling.

Reading a second Book by Gromov wrought an abrupt change in Lagudov’s destiny. He left his job, divorced his wife and disappeared, leaving no tracks behind him. Three years later Lagudov surfaced again, and a mighty clan had already assembled around him, although its members called themselves a “library”. This was the term that came in time to be applied to all organizations of a similar nature.

In the first instance Lagudov’s library was joined by people on whom he had tested the Book of Memory. Initially he rather arrogantly took the miraculous effect to be the result of his own personal qualities. However, experiments showed that if the Conditions were observed, the Book affected everyone without exception. The psychiatrist Artur Friesman became Lagudov’s closest associate, although for the first few months Lagudov had doubted his mental health.

Lagudov was cautiously selective, recruiting members of peaceable professions that had been reduced to poverty—teachers, engineers, modest workers in the cultural sphere—those who had been intimidated and morally crushed by the sweeping changes of recent times. He assumed that the intelligentsia, humiliated by these new times, would provide amenable and reliable material, incapable of rebellion or betrayal, especially if the Books—and, by inference, Lagudov—could help realize the intelligentsia’s eternal yearning, as a class, for spirituality.

In many respects this supposition was mistaken. Gromov’s Books induced global personality change, and the circumspect Lagudov was merely fortunate with most of his new comrades, in addition to which he received professional assistance from Friesman, who by no means recruited anyone and everyone.

Those who joined the library usually felt profound respect and loyalty to Lagudov, and that was understandable—Valerian Mikhaylovich gave back hope to most of these despairing people tormented by poverty, offering them a meaning for their existence and a close community united around a single idea.

For the first two years the people whom Lagudov gathered under his banner were mostly humiliated and insulted members of the intelligentsia, but then he decided that the library was clearly lacking in a more robust kind of strength. And at this point Friesman came to Lagudov’s rescue. Men who had been shattered by the war in Afghanistan often came to his clinic for help. Friesman worked on these men first, and then handed them over to Lagudov. In 1991 the library was augmented by retired soldiers who had no wish to betray their Soviet oath. The former officers transformed the intelligentsia members into a serious combat unit with strict discipline and a security service. The library could turn out up to a hundred fighting men at any time.

Naturally, the system of selection did fail sometimes. Thoughtless prattlers appeared, who blabbed about the Books at every opportunity. On several occasions the shoots of conspiracy broke through the surface of the ground. But the mischief-makers all suffered an identical tragic fate—they disappeared without trace.

There were also cases of Books being stolen. Lagudov was betrayed by a rank-and-file reader, a certain Yakimov. After being issued the Book of Memory from the reserves when his turn came round, Yakimov duped the curator and fled to parts unknown. Lagudov had enough books, and the library was not impoverished, but the precedent was abhorrent in itself and, in addition, the traitor had managed to make his escape.

Other readers took their lead from this successful crime. These ones were caught. To restore Lagudov’s shaken authority and to deter any future miscreants, the book thieves were quartered in front of the entire library.

Yakimov was discovered by chance a year after the daring robbery. He had taken refuge in Ufa. A punitive assault force was immediately dispatched there, its mission to eliminate the thief and return the Book. Lagudov’s soldiers were greatly surprised when they discovered that Yakimov had not wasted his time in Ufa and had organized a library of his own.

Lagudov’s small detachment took the courageous decision not to wait for reinforcements to arrive. They openly informed Yakimov about the showdown in the laconic “we’re coming to get you” style. Cold weapons were agreed on and a spot outside the city, as remote as possible, was chosen.

It’s worth noting that the readers of Yakimov’s library lived according to the principle “the dead know no shame”. No one won the victory that night. Both adversaries withdrew, exhausted by the sanguinary conflict.

Lagudov didn’t hazard another punitive expedition. He needed to protect the book depository against the enemy closer to home and not send detachments off to the back of beyond, getting faithful readers killed in order to satisfy his own ambitions. His library was in any case surrounded by numerous aggressive rivals.

For a long time Lagudov assumed that knowledge of Gromov was being spread by traitors from his own library. He believed too strongly in his own chosen status and couldn’t possibly imagine that anyone apart from him had proved capable of penetrating the secret of the Books independently. Lagudov regarded all those who founded their power on his discovery as second-rate individuals, corrupt thieves. Even subsequently, when he was forced to abandon his ideas of exclusivity, he only accepted contact on an equal basis—and even then grudgingly—with initial, natural librarians: those who had solved the mystery of the Books with their own brains, without any prompting.

However, the proportion of those who became familiar with Gromov through information leaks was actually rather large and many new clans were organized around fugitive readers, without any theft necessarily being involved—at the end of the Eighties it wasn’t all that difficult to get hold of the Book of Memory if you really wanted to. The most important role was not played by renegades or by rumours, but by the missionary activities of the first “apostles”, whose names have long since occupied their posthumous places in the pantheon of this cruel and secretive society. Some of them are worth mentioning.

Pyotr Vladimirovich Shepchikhin. He worked in a print shop and typeset the Book of Memory. After confusing the dust jackets, instead of the detective novel he had set his mind on, he took home Gromov. By pure chance he got stuck in the lift with the book for the entire night, and when he was freed by lift engineers early in the morning, he came out a different man. A sensitive individual, Shepchikhin immediately realized that the reason lay not in his own physiology, but in the mysterious Book. Shaken by the mystery, he left his job and set off to wander the country, becoming one of Gromov’s most fervent propagandists.

Shepchikhin was killed—in fact he was probably bumped off by neophytes whom he himself had once told about the Book. They did away with him after deciding that Shepchikhin’s propagandist activities were too dangerous to the hermetic isolation of the Gromov world.

Yulian Olegovich Doroshevich. He was undergoing compulsory treatment at an occupational detoxification centre, and in order to avoid being driven insane by the sober boredom, he read. All sorts of garbage had settled in the libraries of those semi-punitive institutions—books that were even slightly worthwhile didn’t linger there for long. But thanks to that detoxification centre Doroshevich discovered Gromov and the Book of Endurance (The Silver Channel). This Book brought any afflicted soul a feeling of great consolation and reconciliation with life. It was said to be of help in cases of physical pain, acting as a general anaesthetic. The Book apparently had no substantial effect on feelings other than grief, fear and pain, but simply froze them into a general indifference. Doroshevich’s own psychological make-up determined the selective nature of his missionary work. He revealed the Book only to those people who, in his view, were the unhappiest. Doroshevich’s life was broken off in circumstances that have never been clarified; it is not known who killed him—probably someone who regarded the sin of murder as far less important than his own suffering.

It is possible that history exaggerates the spiritual qualities of the wandering “apostles” and that in actual fact they, like all librarians, coveted personal ascendancy and also tried to establish book communities, but failed to complete their mission.

Their strange selflessness rather contradicted the specific nature of the mystery. Every new reader who was introduced to Gromov realized that there would not be enough Joy, Endurance or Memory for everybody and it was better to keep mum about the author. In an organized community it was easier to keep the Books safe and increase their number, and therefore those lone wandering pathfinders died out. A library chose its own new readers, more readily recruiting solitary individuals without families and with some kind of mental problem, and examining each candidate at length to make sure they were worthy of communing with the miracle, and would be able to guard and protect it, and even, if necessary, give their lives for it.

In short, Lagudov had plenty of competitors. Soon not only the Books, but also the bibliographies of Gromov disappeared from every public library that was even slightly significant. Even in Moscow’s “Leninka” someone removed all the information from the card index. Consequently, during computerization the data on the missing author were not entered anywhere and Gromov formally disappeared. Someone also made free with the books on the shelves. Without the card index it was only possible to guess at the true number of publications.

By the beginning of the Nineties collectors of Gromov had a list of six already tried-and-tested Books. They also had information about a seventh, which they called the Book of Meaning. It was believed that when it was discovered the true purpose of Gromov’s creations would be revealed. As yet, however, no one could boast of having found a copy of Meaning, and some sceptics asserted that no such book actually existed.

All the libraries regarded a full collection of the works as an immensely powerful spell that ought to produce some kind of global result.

Lagudov’s theoreticians spoke of a “godlike condition” that lasted for the same length of time as the action of any particular Book. No one knew what benefits could be derived from this condition, correctly assuming that the ideas which occurred to someone inside God’s skin would transcend the human level. The rank-and-file readers were informed that, on becoming God, Lagudov would immediately make provision for his comrades-in-arms.

There were discussions about the end of the world, “book poisoning” that threatened the reader with death, or how all the Books, read straight through, would raise the dead. But these were only hypotheses.

It was assumed that Gromov himself might have had a complete set of works, but when Lagudov started searching, Gromov had been dead for a long time. When he died his apartment had gone to strangers and they had cleared out all the junk in the first week.

Gromov’s only daughter, Olga Dmitriyevna, lived with her family in Ukraine. One of Lagudov’s men paid her a visit, posing as a journalist, and was dismayed to discover that she had given the two Books she possessed to a casual visitor who had introduced himself as a literary scholar who was studying her father’s work. Olga Dmitriyevna did not remember the titles of the books either. They seemed to have been the Book of Memory and the Book of Joy.

Of course, Lagudov found out who had got there before him, but that was not much help. He didn’t engage in armed conflict with the competitors involved. After all, no one had deceived him, they had simply been quicker off the mark, and he only had himself to blame. Lagudov drew the appropriate conclusions for the future and tripled his efforts.

Gromov had a brother, Veniamin, to whom he also sent his books, and Lagudov had a stroke of luck with this brother—in addition to the Book of Memory and the Book of Joy, which Lagudov already had, a rather rare and valuable copy of the Book of Endurance (The Silver Channel ) was discovered. Acting like morphine, this book held all who were afflicted with pain and suffering firmly cemented into the library…

The years of systematic work were not entirely wasted. Rumour had it that Lagudov’s depository contained eight Books of Joy, three Books of Endurance and no fewer than a dozen copies of the Book of Memory (The Quiet Grass), which had been published last and was better preserved than the others: there were as many as several hundred copies of it in the world. The Book of Memory was strategically useful; its use made it easy to recruit and retain readers who were susceptible to tender feelings.

Two Books of Memory and an apartment in the very centre of Saratov were exchanged for a dangerous Book of Fury (By Labour’s Roads), which was capable of arousing a state of battle trance in even the most timid of hearts.

The other Books still had to be searched for. Lagudov had high hopes for the country’s outlying regions and its Central Asian neighbours, where Gromov’s Books could theoretically have been preserved, because by the beginning of the Nineties all the Books lying “on the surface” in Central Russia, eastern Ukraine and Belorussia had been picked up by collectors from various libraries.

But when the search became harder, methods that were far from noble came into play. Violent raids on depositories became more and more common.

At about the same time the so-called copyists became active— readers who made copies of the Books to sell for their personal enrichment. The copyists claimed that the effect of a copy was no different from that of the printed original.

But a manuscript almost always contained errors of some kind, or some words that had been omitted, and therefore proved ineffective. Photocopies that should have excluded the possibility of error also had no effect. It was thought that the decisive factor was the printing, and certain Books were reprinted. Rumours concerning the quality of a reprint “fake” were contradictory. In any case it was universally asserted that a copy would never compare with an original.

Forgeries provoked numerous skirmishes, which led to the demise of more than one library that had gone astray. The copyists were outlaws; they were liquidated by their own people and others alike. But they were highly successful in one regard—quite a lot of copies appeared.

That was when the cases of vandalism began. Original Books were sold and exchanged with a page skilfully removed and replaced by any other that was made of similar paper. Naturally, the mutilated Book had no effect. Whereas formerly people had restricted themselves to a cursory glance through a Book, after these incidents they went through the pages, comparing the typeface and the quality of the paper.

There had never been any great trust between the libraries—no one wished to reinforce the power of a rival. Exchanges or sales were extremely rare, and any fraud sparked a bloody conflict.

The resulting battle took place at a remote spot, with all due pomp and solemnity—members of the libraries brought Books attached to poles like holy banners. At first they were originals, later they were often replaced by replicas. Firearms were categorically forbidden. This was more than just some special noble warrior’s code. It was always easier to disguise stab wounds or crush injuries as accidents or ordinary “domestic incidents” for the outside world, with its morgues, hospitals and law-enforcement agencies. Bullet wounds could only be interpreted in one way. And apart from that, weapons of that sort were noisy.

Usually household items were employed in the fighting—knives as big as butchers’ cleavers, axes, hammers, crowbars, garden forks and rakes, flails. In general terms, the detachments of fighters armed themselves in the manner of Yemelyan Pugachev’s peasant army or the Czech Hussites, and the sight of these people inevitably brought to mind the idiom “battle to the death”, because with a scythe and a meat cleaver the sensation of death was especially keen…

No one saw Lagudov during his final years, apart from his very closest associates. It was said that Valerian Mikhaylovich went into hiding, fearful of hired killers from competing libraries.

SHULGA

NIKOLAI YURYEVICH SHULGA was born in 1950. He grew up a shy, timid boy, was a good pupil in school, but suffered from indecisiveness. A catarrhal infection left Shulga with a facial tic and he underwent several unsuccessful operations that left deep scars. Shulga was very embarrassed by his problem, which was emphasized by unwieldy glasses. He had almost no friends. In 1968 Shulga went to a teacher-training college, but in the third year he abandoned his studies and enlisted for a Young Communist League construction project in the north, where, as he put it, “people are not valued for their appearance, but for their labour valour”.

Defying his own nature as a member of the intelligentsia, Shulga spent a couple of years as a labourer in oil prospecting. The work was heavy and boring, and people laughed at Shulga anyway because he, with his far from heroic appearance, explained his tic and scars as the legacy of an unsuccessful bear hunt.

In 1972 Shulga signed on with a group of fur trappers. The team also included two hunters and a guide from the local population. A blizzard drove them into a hut and interred them under snow for a month. Centuries of human experience in the taiga warned of the dangers of collective incarceration and the guide worked a spell so that the men wouldn’t start shooting each other in their claustrophobic desperation.

The folk magic failed, overwhelmed by a mightier enchantment, and it all ended in disaster. In addition to salt meat and buckshot, the previous occupant had left behind about a dozen books, jumbled together with newspapers—as kindling. Out of sheer boredom Shulga started reading Gromov. He found himself with the Book of Fury (By Labour’s Roads). He didn’t understand much about literature, and the dreariness of the text suited his temperament. And so Shulga fulfilled the two essential Conditions of Zeal and Continuity.

And after the Book had been read, death came to the hut. In an attempt to conceal the crime, Shulga dismembered the dead men and carried them out into the taiga. The remains were discovered by a search party and the bodies were identified. Shulga appeared in court. He didn’t deny his guilt and sincerely repented of what he had done, attributing his appalling actions to intoxication by the sable poison that the hunting party carried—to avoid damaging the precious skins, the little animals were poisoned. He claimed that somehow the poison had found its way into his food.

Shulga told the court that he was reading by candlelight when he felt a “change of state”, as if boiling water had run through his entire body.

Very probably an offensive comment had been cast in Shulga’s direction. For instance, someone said: “Stop wasting the candles on useless crap, you twitchy wanker.” Men rendered bitter and exasperated by enforced incarceration are not particularly choosy about how they express themselves, and cramped conditions offer plenty of occasions for crudity.

Shulga experienced a surge of superhuman aggression, grabbed hold of an axe and did away with the guide and the hunters. After a few hours his fury evaporated and the realization of what he had done hit home.

Shulga underwent the relevant tests and no traces of poison were discovered in his body. Taking into account his confession, his cooperation with the investigation and the claustrophobic psychogenic aspect of the crime, the death penalty was commuted to fifteen years in a strict-security camp.

Shulga’s fearsome offence was no help to him in the camp. Ignorant as he was of the finer casuistic points of criminal culture, when questioned he mentioned in his ingenuous answers that he had spent two years studying in a teacher-training college. Lanky and scrawny, with spectacles and a twitching cheek, Shulga had already been dubbed “Head Teacher” at the pre-trial detention centre. He was a perfect target for mockery. Already depressed by his own unattractive appearance, he determined his own status in the camp: somewhere between a downtrodden “skivvy” and a lowly “gofer”—a perpetual “cleaner”.

Shulga was tormented by despair and fear. He was unable to put anything right in his life. On the front lines it was genuinely possible to make the move from coward to hero by performing some feat of heroism. But he didn’t know of any feat or action of any kind that would improve his position in the criminal world, and probably no such action even existed.

Shulga mostly befriended the same kind of misfortunates as himself, the “skivvies” and the “abused”. His neighbours in the barracks, who were “regular guys”, were loath to associate with him, realizing that he was sinking down the hierarchy, and they tried to avoid any unnecessary contact with a man whose excessive helplessness could lead at any moment to his being awarded “a plate with a hole in it”, that is, a demotion to the most despised and abused level of the prison hierarchy.

Shulga was unfamiliar with the prison-camp caste structure. Hoping to get his sentence reduced and receive privileges of some kind, he took the bait offered by the camp administration and joined the crime prevention section. And then he discovered that he had joined the ranks of the “scum”—that was what convicts who agreed to collaborate with the camp authorities were called.

Shulga became a member of the “team”. Wearing his armband on his sleeve, he stood watch at the checkpoint between the “living zone” and the “production zone” of the camp. Bearing in mind his liberal education, incomplete as it was, and his state of health—the tic had grown worse—Shulga was moved to a job in the library. Things were a bit easier there.

Shulga had been in prison for more than five years. In his free time he read compulsively, devouring anything and everything in order to occupy his mind. His fear had diminished somewhat and at moments of inner calm or in the peace of the night he often thought about what it was that had turned him, a good-natured and timid man, into a murderer. His reminiscences led him to that little book with the dirty grey binding that had perished in the fire.

Shulga found Gromov’s short novel Fly On, Happiness! in the prison-camp library. It was a completely different book, not the one that he had read, but he still remembered the author’s name. On Sunday evening, with his typical thoroughness, Shulga read the whole of the Book of Power. At a specific moment he sensed the inner transformation that had come over him, and his mind was suddenly filled with a pulsating awareness of his own importance. Shulga liked this new sensation very much and, even more importantly, he realized why it had happened and where it had come from.

Shulga observed that, thanks to the Book, he was capable of influencing people around him and imposing his will on them. Naturally, it wasn’t the world outside that had changed, but the man who had read the Book. A mysterious force temporarily transformed Shulga’s facial expressions, the look in his eyes and his bearing, operating on his opponent through his gestures, tone of voice and the words that he spoke. You could say that the Book helped Shulga to recruit the souls of those who were part of his social circle—the “scum”, “skivvies”, “gofers”, “stooges” and “lowlifes” (the downtrodden and sexually abused)—all the untouchables of the criminal world.

Meanwhile in the camp the old thieves’ elite was gradually supplanted by a generation of young bandits who no longer honoured the unwritten code of previous times that forbade the humiliation of anybody at all for no particular reason. The school of excess that had been born in the low-security camps invaded the relatively smooth-running strict-regime environment. Life became much more bitter for the lower castes. Downtrodden convicts were humiliated and even sexually abused for mere amusement, out of boredom. The reason for it could be anything at all—a cute appearance, weakness, excessive intellectual refinement.

One day an absolutely outrageous incident occurred in the camp when the lowlife Timur Kovrov “hit on” a young, promising criminal boss—Kovrov flung himself on the other man and started licking him. The high-status thief beat the lowlife almost to death, but he forfeited his previous authority for ever; even worse, now tainted himself, he joined the ranks of the outcasts and soon afterwards was found hanged by his own hand. Kovrov recovered in hospital and rumour has it that his sentence was reduced because of his serious injuries.

Probably no one even noticed that two days before this strange attack Shulga had a talk with Kovrov and urged him to commit the act. This Kovrov had been reduced to the status of a lowlife through trickery—as a novice he had been sat on the “sod’s seat” in the camp cinema. And certainly no one remembered that previously the young criminal boss had openly mocked and bullied Shulga, threatening to “shaft the four-eyed brainy scumbag up the back entrance”.

In this way Shulga invented his own means of defence against the criminal world—employing the inarticulate, filthy, tormented creatures with holed plates as badges of their humiliation and alienation, whose lot in life was merely to open their mouths and assume the pose.

In the space of a month several respected criminal bosses were hit on—all the ones who had ever molested Shulga. It should be noted that high-ranking thieves reduced to low status by a “kamikaze lowlife” didn’t live long afterwards; they slashed their veins and hanged themselves, otherwise their former victims would have raped and abused them with highly inventive cruelty…

Shulga read the Book regularly and every day it lent him an artificial, but nonetheless effective, charisma. Even seasoned convicts, quite unable to understand what was happening to them, couldn’t stand up to Shulga.

Word that he was inciting the lowlifes against the brothers reached the big boss himself—there were informers among the outcasts. The big boss was puzzled by how a worthless scumbag like that could suddenly have started radiating such psychic power. He had a gut feeling that Shulga was cheating in some incomprehensible fashion—and after pondering for a long time, he drew the right conclusion. That night the Book was stolen from Shulga. The big boss never figured out its secret, but essentially he guessed correctly about the source of the mysterious spell.

In the morning Shulga discovered his loss. And the barracks-hut skivvy passed on the message that the elders had summoned the Head Teacher for a parley. Shulga guessed how the meeting would end, but repeated experience of the sensation of power had turned him into a quite exceptional individual.

The showdown took place in the forestry plot. It was February and darkness came early. The big boss was not expecting any resistance. He only had one fighter from his immediate entourage with him, plus a “bull”, a man who had gambled away his life and become a “torpedo”—he was the one who was supposed to take out the upstart Head Teacher. But the big boss wasn’t expecting things to get that far. He intended to suggest that Shulga hang himself, so that the “bull” wouldn’t have to take the sin on his own soul. The noose had already been set up on a convenient branch.

Shulga looked so limp and jaded that no one even thought of checking to see if he had a weapon. But they should have. Hidden up his sleeve he had a heavy section of steel pipe, stuffed with sand to give it extra weight.

Gratified to note that the Head Teacher was no longer pulsating with self-confidence, the big boss was convinced yet again that he was dealing here with a faker who pulled off his trickery by using some kind of unusual hypnosis.

After hearing his sentence pronounced, Shulga merely asked where the Book was now, promising to reveal its fantastic secret. Intrigued, the big boss took the Book out.

Without hurrying, Shulga scooped up a handful of snow and waited for it to thaw into water, then shook his sleeve so that the pipe slid down into his hand and froze solid to his wet palm. He crashed the first blow down onto the head of the “torpedo”. The two thieves drew their knives, but the crushing weapon demonstrated its superiority. Shulga sustained serious damage too. He had just enough strength left to pick up the Book before he passed out.

There was a secret witness to the duel—the prisoner Savely Vorontsov, who had been under Shulga’s magical influence for a long time. Sensing that something was wrong, he had decided to follow Shulga, and had been proved right. Vorontsov’s help could not have been timelier for the librarian, who was bleeding to death. Prising the length of pipe out of Shulga’s hand, Vorontsov flung it over to the dead “torpedo” and raised the alarm.

After some stage-setting the scene looked different: the “bull”, who had lost at cards, had taken violent revenge on the criminal elite and Shulga had been injured when he tried to intervene.

The camp authorities didn’t really believe in this fairy tale, but they accepted it as their primary scenario, especially since there were only two witnesses—Vorontsov and the injured Shulga—and they both said the same thing. Shulga spent a month in a hospital bed and then returned to the camp.

Shulga was able to thwart a second attempt on his life by preventative measures. The thief who was preparing to attack that night was “tainted” that same day by the lowlife Volkov, who died from knife wounds on the spot, but saved his master.

The thieves wisely decided not to tangle with Shulga any more. They couldn’t show him respect, but it would have been stupid to mess with a man who could have an authoritative criminal boss shamed with a single word.

After that Shulga’s life was subjugated to an unvarying routine. In the morning he read through the Book and for the rest of the day he lorded it over the skivvies and abused lowlifes. The authorities thought it best not to interfere in this situation. Shulga’s role as a social counterweight had brought the camp the calm and order that the authorities needed, and for that he was given secret support. As long as Shulga remained in the camp, the thieves tried not to commit any more outrages, and all the castes coexisted more or less peacefully.

Shulga’s closest associates in his future library were the former lowlife Timur Kovrov, and the skivvies Savely Vorontsov, Gennady Frolov and Yury Lyashenko. They were released several years earlier than Shulga, who got out in 1986 after serving fourteen years of the fifteen to which he had been sentenced.

Shulga sought out his old camp comrades, and together with them he immediately began strenuous efforts to collect the Books, since life itself had appointed him a “librarian”. He didn’t share the secret with anyone at first, speaking only in allusions and innuendo. In fact Shulga didn’t disclose the entire truth for a long time, even to the devoted Kovrov. When the first Book of Memory and Book of Joy were found, Shulga was always present at the readings, insisting that the Books’ effect was the result of his own presence.

Shulga surrounded himself with ordinary human material that he dredged from the depths of society, from the low dives and rubbish dumps. Former “shit-shovellers”, “scumbags” and “cocksuckers” became a dangerous force under Shulga’s leadership. Their prison-camp humiliation merely gave them a sense of solidarity, an implacable hatred of society and a single great desire for vengeance—on anyone, on everybody at once. This contingent was the main difference between Shulga’s library and other structures of a similar nature.

As opposed to Lagudov, who had put his money on the intelligentsia, Shulga based himself on the outcasts. In addition to the humiliated strata of criminals, recruits were also gathered from among disenchanted members of religious sects, street bums, bottle collectors, low-grade lumpens who had taken to drink and handicapped individuals who were capable of working. We know that the library was joined by an entire workmen’s cooperative of deaf and dumb carpenters—fifteen hulking great men who were very handy with axes. At the beginning of the 1990s the number of readers had passed the 150 mark.

To finance the clan, its “civilians” skilfully practised their customary professions of begging, petty theft and extortion. The “infantry”—dedicated trackers—got hold of the Books.

Shulga was not mistaken in his choice of social milieu. It was a delusion on the part of the greater society to assume that its outcasts were weak, unreliable and cowardly. On the contrary, the status of outcasts bordered on that of the chosen. Shulga’s men, who communed with the mystery every day, were in their own way no less spiritual and intellectual than Lagudov’s engineers. For them Gromov’s books opened the door into a new universe—a secret, awesome universe, full of riddles and thrilling mystery; there was a struggle taking place there too, there were many dangerous adversaries, there were codes of law for life and for battle, and there was a place for nobility and valour. Everything was decided in honest combat, face to face, like in the olden times. There was an emotional reward, far more powerful than the lift from vodka—hope and faith in the as-yet-unknown gifts that would be bestowed by Books to be found in the future, the Books that had not yet been read.

But of course, not everything went smoothly. In 1989 the library suffered a schism, initiated by Frolov and Lyashenko. They hid the Books of Power that had been found on one of the numerous search expeditions. Frolov and Lyashenko were the leaders of that expedition and, once they got their hands on the books, they wanted leadership for themselves.

Shulga realized that any harsh intervention would only make things worse. A schism was inevitable, and in order to avoid its ending in bloodshed, Shulga decided to lead it himself. A general meeting was held, at which the establishment of two more libraries was announced.

The division went through peacefully. According to the rumours, Frolov took forty men away to Sverdlovsk, and about thirty followed Lyashenko to Sochi. Shulga wasn’t mean with the new librarians; he gave each of them some start-up capital—three Books of Memory and three Books of Joy each—so that the new libraries would have no difficulty in recruiting readers.

Of the “old guard” from the prison camp, Kovrov and Vorontsov remained with Shulga. The clan had been reduced by half, but there was no immediate prospect of any threat to Shulga’s absolute authority. Kovrov and Vorontsov were both reliable and would never think of trying to take his place. Shulga’s library possessed six Books of Memory, nine Books of Joy, four Books of Endurance, a Book of Fury and a Book of Power.

MOKHOVA

IN THE LATE EIGHTIES and early Nineties skirmishes between clans for Books were especially frequent and especially bloody. The viciousness of Yelizaveta Makarovna Mokhova’s library became legendary. The story of this woman, which in many respects determined the fate of all collectors of Gromov, deserves close attention, especially since a great deal is known about it.

Mokhova grew up in a family without a father. She was a withdrawn little girl who was an average pupil at school and had no close friends, since from the earliest classes she was distinguished by a morbid vanity. After graduating from medical college she lived for two years at her mother’s expense, officially working somewhere as a cleaner, then passed the exams to join the evening department of an institute of pharmacology. During the day she worked in a chemist’s shop.

After receiving her second professional diploma in 1983, Mokhova found herself a job in an old folk’s home.

She enjoyed preparing the medicines there and the laboratory was cool and quiet. Among her powders and test tubes Mokhova secretly revelled in the covert power she held over her decrepit wards, aware that her mere wish was enough for any medicine to be transformed into a deadly poison, and it would be quite impossible to expose the poisoner—Mokhova had been an assiduous student and had a good grasp of the finer points of her trade.

Sometimes, just for a joke, Mokhova would sprinkle some caustic muck into an ointment for bedsores, imagining some old woman scrabbling away in bed as she struggled to reach the source of that fiery itch with her arthritic hand, or goggling blankly at the black ceiling for hours, trying to fall asleep after taking a sedative half composed of stimulant caffeine.

Another few years were passed with these amusements. Mokhova didn’t marry, and for that she blamed her mother, with whom she shared an apartment. As a result of these reproaches, or perhaps of some inner melancholy, the mother died. Without her pension Mokhova didn’t have enough money to live on, and she got herself another job, working half time as a nurse in the women’s section of the Home.

She found it hard there at first. There was a terrible stench in the wards—the bedridden old women relieved themselves where they lay. It wasn’t possible to wash a good hundred patients several times every day, and some nursing assistants preferred to keep the windows open to maintain the flow of fresh air. At first the old women caught cold and died, but the ones who survived actually grew hardier, and the staff suffered more seriously from the freezing cold than they did.

Attempting to fight the stench at its origin, the nursing assistants frequently didn’t feed the especially messy patients adequately. The only thing that the old women were not denied was food for thought; they were always given newspapers, the magazines Health and Working Woman, or the books that were in the library.

Mokhova rapidly found her feet in her new job and, what’s more, she resolved the problem of the overpowering smells far more humanely than her colleagues. Her professional knowledge prompted the answer. Mokhova made up a binding medicine that the nursing assistants added to the old women’s food, and after that even the worst “poopers” relieved themselves in goat’s pellets, and no more frequently than once a week.

The decisive milestone in Mokhova’s life was the day when the extremely rare Book of Strength, known to the outside world as The Proletarian Way, came into the hands of eighty-year-old Polina Vasilyevna Gorn.

It was more than a year since Gorn had lapsed into senile dementia. She didn’t talk much, having lost the skill of speech, but her memory retained the ability to read. She didn’t understand the words very well, but was still able to construct graphic symbols out of them—she no longer needed the meaning. Because of her insomnia Gorn read the entire Book of Strength in a single session, satisfying the two Conditions, and arose like Lazarus. For a while the Book gave her back her pep and part of her mind.

Mokhova glanced into the ward at the noise and saw a bizarre scene.

Gorn, who always lay there in a filthy, soiled nightshirt, was dashing about between the beds with a rapid, mincing gait, grabbing at everything that came within reach. Suddenly halting in the middle of the ward, Gorn gave an agonized cry, as if she had forced a cork out of her dumb throat—“Ilya Ehrenburg!”—and burst into violent laughter. After that the words came tumbling out one after another, like grains of hail falling on a tin roof: “So long ago! It worked! Soldier, soldier! Lady’s! Raw! Lady’s! I forgot, you know!” Gorn tried to name the objects she came across, but her memory couldn’t manage that, and she described their qualities out loud. Grabbing the cushion out from under the head of the woman next to her, she growled: “Lopill? Wollyp? Soft, comfy! Sleepy time!” Or, when she knocked over a box of sewing accessories, she cried out: “Fumble, thumble. Mustn’t prickly! Jab-jab!”

The other old women started falling asleep and Mokhova got ready to tie Gorn down and give her a sedative injection.

Gorn saw the syringe of cloudy liquid in Mokhova’s hand and her eyes flashed spitefully. But she didn’t dare to attack Mokhova and chose a tactical retreat instead. Gorn skipped lightly over lockers and beds, like a goat. Mokhova, who was fifty years younger than her, simply couldn’t keep up. She felt ashamed of her slowness and vented her spite on the women who had now woken up, all popping up on their beds like little roly-poly dolls and following the chase. Mokhova dealt out stinging slaps left and right, knowing that the unfortunate old women’s sclerosis would never let the truth be known.

Mokhova pursued the nimble Gorn with the syringe for a long time, dreaming of jabbing her with the medicine that would freeze her high spirits just as soon as possible. Eventually Mokhova drove Gorn into a corner and tumbled her over onto a bedside locker. Gorn tried furiously to fight Mokhova off, kicking off her slippers and scratching furiously like an animal with all four limbs at once. She wheezed out words that almost made sense: “You’ll dirty! Prostitute! Infect me! Whore! How old are you?” And her hooked nails, which looked like excrescences of amber, ripped Mokhova’s white coat.

After her night-time injection Gorn lay without moving for two days, then she revived slightly and, early on the third evening, reached out her hand for the book. Mokhova didn’t bother Gorn, but as she walked through the ward occasionally, she heard intermittent muttering—Gorn was monotonously reading the book aloud.

At about midnight a racket broke out in the ward again. The same story was repeated, with the difference that Gorn had grown even stronger now and didn’t run away, but joined full-blooded battle.

Soon Gorn was lying strapped down on a bed, tossing her head about wildly, with a crimson bump swelling up on it.

Mokhova had been mauled as badly as Lermontov’s novice in his battle with the badger: her neck, face, breasts and arms were covered with deep, bloody scratches. She was very finicky about her appearance, and the wounds made her absolutely furious.

Mokhova darted across to the bed, swung her hand and punched Gorn hard on the jaw. Her fist felt the crack of the dental plate as it broke.

The old woman pushed the two fragments out with her swollen tongue and suddenly said quite lucidly: “Don’t hit me, Lizka!”

Mokhova had just raised her hand for a second punch… The old woman started squirming about and added resolutely, building sentences out of the growling words: “I’ll. Do. What. I’m. Told. Read. The. Book. There’s. Strength. In. It.”

Gorn told Mokhova everything that she’d understood about the Book. At first Mokhova didn’t believe what Gorn said, but she wiped away Gorn’s blood and applied a cold compress to the bump. Mokhova spent all the next day pondering something, then she volunteered to take a night shift out of turn. The nursing assistant who was supposed to help Mokhova was allowed to go home.

Mokhova hadn’t been intending to read the book herself; she was expecting Gorn to do that, and she was planning to observe her. But the bump on the head affected Gorn’s health badly: after the effect of the Book of Strength wore off, she didn’t even return to her former feeble, semi-demented state; she just slept, groaning intermittently.

Mokhova sat down not far from Gorn, in order to follow her reactions, and started reading aloud. It wasn’t easy; her voice gradually became hoarse and her attention faded. But Mokhova had completed courses in a training college and a higher institute, and she knew how to cram.

Early in the night Mokhova completed the Book. Silence reigned in the ward. Mokhova looked at Polina Gorn and shuddered in surprise. The old woman was already sitting up on the bed with her legs dangling over the side like black branches.

“Lizka!” Gorn barked, but in a perfectly amicable manner, and started darting about the ward, working off her excess strength.

Suddenly the other old women started getting up. A cold shudder ran down Mokhova’s spine. The Book hadn’t started to affect her yet. Reading aloud, directing the words outward, not into herself, had retarded the effect. Slipping out into the corridor, Mokhova locked the door of the ward and set a chair against it, in order to observe what was going on through the window above it.

What she saw was both terrifying and amusing. The old women were making extremely strong, sweeping movements with their arms, making it look as if they were hugging themselves, and jerking their legs out forward like the soldiers who guarded Lenin’s mausoleum. At the same time the expressions on their faces were a succession of every possible contortion and grimace. Sometimes the old women blurted out words—“intestine”, “health”, “labour merit”—or else they simply laughed.

Like Gorn on that first night, they tried to name the objects around them. “Spenil, Pilsen!” an old woman with tangled hair shouted out, looking at a ballpoint pen. “Make letters!”

“Plamp!” howled another, staring at the ceiling.

A third one chanted: “Kittle! With warm water!”

A fourth one grabbed hold of an alarm clock and wheezed intensely: “Lome! Lome! Tefelome! Don’t remember!” And she growled furiously: “Tame!”

When they crashed into each other, the old women tried to introduce themselves; “What name? Anna Kondratyevna! Forgot what I wanted! How old? And my name’s Tarasenko! What name? Krupnikova. Anyway, it was a good dress. And we ate well! What did you eat? Is your name Alimova? Galina! Alimola? I told you, old you, sholed you. You’re called Galina? Galila. Dalila. How old are you? Six point two roubles. No, point three roubles!”

When she saw Mokhova’s face pressed up against the glass in the door, the old woman with the alarm clock shouted out ferociously: “Mirror!”

Mokhova’s fear left her when she felt the Strength. And from that moment on she thought about how to make use of this property of the Book that had been revealed to her. Naturally, she didn’t intend to write a sensational article for a medical journal.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a heavy blow against the door. The old women had lined up into a live battering ram, determined to break out.

Mokhova wasn’t afraid of the encounter. She already knew that the berserk old women could be subdued and pacified. Gorn’s example proved that. Mokhova had prepared a club in advance—a length of high-voltage cable with a heavy tin-bound core of metal wires.

A blow shook the door. Bed castors squeaked across the linoleum. Mokhova understood the tactical concept when the glass in the window above the door flew out and an old woman appeared in the aperture. The metal mesh of a bed had served as an excellent trampoline, tossing the old woman two metres up into the air. There were still fragments of glass in the frame and the old woman had impaled her stomach on them. Bleating in fury, she carried on trying to crawl through. Inverted Himalayas of blood slowly oozed down the door, making it look as if the old woman had put out bloody roots.

The second assault was launched more successfully. First a mop flitted about in the broken window, knocking out the shards of glass. A metal mesh bed base creaked again and a different old woman flew into the opening and started climbing down the door into the corridor.

Before the old woman could crawl out, Mokhova stunned her with a blow of the club. Then she opened the door and skipped back a few metres.

The old women came piling out of the ward and surrounded Mokhova. Gorn stood beside the door, indicating that she wasn’t getting involved in the fight.

The old women raged and howled, but they didn’t dare attack. Anyone who bared her teeth, as if she was about to pounce, earned a heavy blow from the club. Eventually an old woman by the name of Reznikova assumed the role of leader.

Stepping forward, she fended off a blow from the club with the mop. She raised her hand, calling for silence. Mokhova was in no hurry and she let the old woman have her say. An utterance vaguely resembling coherent speech followed; “Now, in the first place, first of all! We have to do! The same way as yours, that time! Today I did forgot, as they say! I did very bad today!”

The old women started murmuring approvingly in response to this gibberish and only Polina Gorn asked: “Reznikova, are you married?”

“Four years already!” Reznikova snarled, then swung round ferociously towards Mokhova, flinging up the mop.

The heavy cable whistled through the air and reddish-brown glop splashed out of Reznikova’s mouth onto the wall. Mokhova swung her arm back again and the old women trudged into the ward, whimpering discontentedly.

The pacification was achieved with minimal casualties: Reznikova had a broken jaw and the old woman who got stuck in the window over the door had deep cuts on her stomach. The injured were carried onto beds and Mokhova gave them first aid.

The effect of the Book was soon exhausted and the old women started dropping where they stood, like wind-up dolls in which the spring has run down.

Mokhova dragged the bodies onto beds, washed the blood off the door and swept up the glass.

The second group reading was not accompanied by any outbursts of aggression against Mokhova. The old women submitted to her completely, for which most of the credit belonged to Gorn, who influenced her comrades by using both argument and the club, which Mokhova had personally handed over to her, conferring upon her local authority.

Polina Gorn’s former garrulity did not return; her mind became rational and her thoughts succinct.

On Gorn’s advice Mokhova held new readings in different wards during the week. Gorn herself and about ten pacified old women attended the reading in order to suppress any possible focal points of rebellion.

The militia expanded every time that Mokhova was on duty. The Book had a salutary effect on senile organisms. In their normal condition, of course, the old women still did not possess even a hundredth part of the strength that the Book gave them, but their minds remained relatively clear.

In part they attributed the miraculous effect of the Book to Mokhova. They were old, lonely and abandoned by their own children, and the lingering spark of motherhood still glimmered in their hearts. Not the raucously domineering kind, but the self-sacrificing kind.

Gorn picked up this mood among the old women. The next night Mokhova was dubbed the “little daughter” and the old women were dubbed the “mums”. Gorn had thought through the ritual of adoption very thoroughly. In Mokhova’s view it was not particularly pleasant or hygienic, but Gorn persuaded Mokhova to go through with it.

Every old woman smeared Mokhova’s face with her vaginal secretions, as if symbolizing in this way that Mokhova had appeared in the world via her womb, and swore to protect the “little daughter” to her last breath.

Sixty old women went through the ritual. Twenty or so recent converts watched them, raging and roaring—and in the meantime they were pacified by overseers who dealt them slaps round the back of the head to drive home the idea that the greatest happiness they could ever be granted was to become a “mum” as soon as possible.

That same night Gorn said to Mokhova: “The staff! Get rid!”— and ran her hand across her throat, imitating the movement of a butcher’s knife.

The time had come for decisive action. Someone had snitched to the director about the noise at night, the broken window panes and the bruises. It was obvious that these emergencies occurred during Mokhova’s shift, and she could have faced serious unpleasantness. To carry out the operation Mokhova had the faithful Gorn and a militia of about eighty old women in total.

Mokhova informed the director, Avanesov, that at the weekend she intended to hold a recreational reading session in the women’s section, because she believed that the old female patients needed it. Avanesov did not object.

At eleven in the morning the female half of the old folk’s home started stirring. The corridors were filled with the creaking of beds being trundled about as the ambulatory old women moved their bedridden friends to the site of the assembly.

Mokhova was already experienced in reading rapidly and intelligibly, and she ran through the text in record time. Curious nurses came down several times from the men’s floor above. They were told that everything had been agreed with the director. One way or another, Mokhova won herself three hours’ grace. And when the duty sister called the director at home and complained about the pandemonium that Mokhova had caused, it was too late.

Avanesov arrived in time for the final pages. He curtly ordered the patients to be taken back to their wards. Mokhova openly raised her voice. Avanesov repeated his order, again in vain. He threatened to sack Mokhova for these outrageous excesses. The nurses and nursing assistants came running at the sound of his shouting. Taking hold of the heads of the beds, they started trundling the old women away to their wards. Seeing Mokhova still not responding to what he said, the director started walking towards her. And in that second Mokhova shouted out, “The End!”—and clapped the Book shut.

At that very moment the old woman Stepanida Fetisova grabbed the drip tube out of the vein of her ward neighbour Irina Shostak and deftly flung this improvised garrotte round Avanesov’s neck. Deprived of her flow of medication, Shostak fell into a coma, from which she emerged a minute later when the Book took effect.

The rebels were unstoppable. The slaughter began and Avanesov, strangled with a drip tube, became the first victim.

Mokhova’s army went through its baptism of fire at its official place of residence. As victims for its lynching it had four nurses, five nursing assistants, three female cooks, two dishwashers-cumservers, the building manager, the caretaker, who also doubled as the electrician and plumber, and all the patients in the men’s section, about fifty in total.

The old women had been divided in advance into squads of ten. Each squad was led by a sergeant-mum, who took her orders from Mokhova or Gorn.

Two squads were dispatched urgently into the yard to guard the gates and the fence—no one could be allowed to slip away.

The approaches to the director’s office and the reception area were blocked off to exclude the possibility of a phone call. From the cubbyhole of the caretaker Chizhov, who was drinking his vodka for the last time in his life, they took a wood cleaver, a carpenter’s axe, a small sledgehammer, a screwdriver with a long blade, a crowbar, a shovel and a spade for clearing snow.

The old women infiltrated the kitchen, where they found half a dozen knives and a meat cleaver, with which they promptly and pitilessly dispatched two of the female cooks and the dishwashers. The third cook, Ankudinova, was a massive woman: scattering the old women with her mighty arms, she managed to get to the door and hid somewhere on that floor of the building. They didn’t pursue her for the time being.

The cutting weapons were given to the strongest old women, those who in their previous lives had been used to slitting the throats of cattle and poultry. The sledgehammer went to a large individual of proletarian origin, a former structural fitter.

The death squads scattered across the various floors. The nurses mistakenly thought they could escape by locking themselves in the wards. The sledgehammer broke down the door and the old women poured in through the breach, jostling and growling. They threw the nurses on the floor and, not having any cold weapons, tore at them with their hands and gnawed on them with their false teeth or removed the rubber pad from a crutch so that it wouldn’t soften the blow and beat the nurses on the face, the breasts and the stomach with the wooden frame.

Three nursing assistants managed to get up onto the roof and batten the hatch behind them. They tried to get down the fire-escape ladder. Old women, prepared to die themselves in order to prevent an escape, jumped out of nearby windows and clutched on tight to the fugitives’ dressing gowns. Dragged down by the extra weight, the nursing assistants tumbled off the ladder with a squeal and fell, breaking their bones.

In the men’s section a squad of ten old women with pillows ran from bed to bed, suffocating the paralysed old men. On Gorn’s orders the men who could walk were herded together and driven onto the knives. The old men went as meekly as sheep, making no attempt to escape.

Only one man managed to flee—a war veteran, the retired colonel Nikolai Kaledin. Despite his age, he had retained the ability to think and fight.

Kaledin, the cook Ankudinova, the nursing assistants Basova and Shubina, and the building manager Protasov offered worthy resistance. They managed to break through to the firefighting-equipment point and get hold of two crowbars and a gaff.

With courage worthy of the Ryazan folk hero Yevpaty Kolovrat, the small group broke through the lines of old women several times, but there was nowhere they could go to escape from them. The first to fall was Shubina, and then the building manager was killed. The cook Ankudinova, the nursing assistant Basova and the colonel were pinned against the wall and held there with crutch blows from a distance until the old women with the axes and knives arrived.

The old women piled corpses on beds to increase the force of the blow. Loaded up with bodies, the beds smashed into the small group like trucks with battering rams. The colonel, Ankudinova and Basova were crushed against the wall. Kaledin fell and was finished off immediately, and Mokhova ordered the old women not to finish off the courageous cook and nursing assistant

These women were no longer young and they possessed exceptional strength and fighting spirit—Gorn had informed Mokhova of this and suggested luring Ankudinova and Basova over to their side.

The outcome was that the nursing home was taken in less than an hour. Mokhova’s army lost only six old “mums”. Another ten of them were slightly injured.

On Monday a new shift came to work—a female doctor, a senior nurse and nursing assistants. These were easily captured, frightened and enslaved. No further killings were necessary; the old women had already realized their own strength.

Paradoxically, no one found out about the bloody battle. The building stood out on the very edge of town. Not many people visited the old folk. The last check had been a month before the skirmish and no review committee was expected now until the New Year. In any case, times were getting difficult and the authorities had no time for the elderly.

Mokhova made a careful study of the personal files on each employee of the Home who had been killed. In all cases personnel without families had been selected.

The old director Avanesov lived alone. They put an old woman in his flat, and she told everyone she was Avanesov’s sister. Any visitors and review commissions could be dealt with by the tamed doctor and senior nurse. Mokhova herself attended meetings at the social-security department, presenting a fake letter with Avanesov’s seal.

The nursing assistants proved to be gratifying material. These women, who had come here twenty years earlier from remote villages, had been completely written off by their relatives. Their lives were failures, they had worked hard, never married and vegetated in hostels. Mokhova sent appropriate letters to the hostels, saying that so-and-so had finally been allocated her own living space.

The caretaker Chizhov, two unmarried nurses and the dishwashers had been living temporarily in an outhouse on the grounds of the Home, so no problems at all arose with them. The dead continued to receive wages for many years and were then sacked retrospectively.

A document was cooked up, supposedly from Protasov, to say that he had been recruited to a job somewhere in the Urals. False documents were also used to dispatch the dead cooks to some remote back-of-beyond. The cohabitee of one nurse was sent a fake letter from her, saying that she was leaving for the Soviet Far East with her lover. Another nurse was divorced and had only a mother and a son. They were finished off by a suicide granny who was sent to them and poisoned both her victims and herself with carbon monoxide.

That left the numerous dead old men and the problem of burying them. Even with the strength that the Book granted them, the old women could not have buried so many corpses rapidly. Mokhova simply hired an excavator, explaining that a foundation pit needed to be dug for a new laundry.

The excavator dug the pit in one day and they piled the corpses into it. The old men didn’t have any near and dear ones, and if any were to show up suddenly, there was an appropriate record of death ready and waiting.

The captured Home became Mokhova’s citadel. In civilian terms, it was effectively impregnable, with a three-metre-high wall and sturdy gates. A vigilant female guard was always on duty at the checkpoint and the wall was patrolled by an armed detachment.

The army was distinguished by iron discipline and obedience. Mokhova had found something with which to oppose both Lagudov’s select representatives of the intelligentsia and Shulga’s lumpens—the principle of collective motherhood proved to be a reliable ideological platform.

As a former dean of a faculty of Marxism-Leninism, Polina Vasilyevna Gorn knew many things, and in particular that no organization would survive for long without a General Line. “Promise them eternal life. And then we’ll see how it goes,” Gorn wisely suggested to Mokhova.

Mokhova lined up her militia in the yard and told them the story of the Books and the Great Goal. The conclusion to be drawn from her story was that anyone who stayed with Mokhova to the end would be rewarded with eternity. When they heard these dubious good tidings, the old women set the parade ground ringing with roars of triumph. They had acquired a Great Dream.

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.

LIBRARIES AND READING ROOMS

A READING ROOM was the name given to a small group organized round some particular Book—of Joy, Memory or, more rarely, Endurance.

The entire Gromov world had begun with small communities like this. When a solitary individual who had penetrated the mystery of a Book turned up, a reading room would form around him, including those comrades whom he had decided to take into his confidence. If someone with a family became a member of a reading room, then soon his nearest and dearest became members too, and that was tolerated indulgently. But every piece of string comes to an end, and at a certain stage the community stopped expanding.

A reading room was the foundation or basis on which, in time, a library could spring up. The opposite also occurred. Following an armed clash a small clan might be reduced to a reading room.

All kinds of people were taken in, from all age groups and all professions. Every reader was free, both morally and—more importantly—financially. This was an advantage that reading rooms had over libraries, where people donated part of their income, the so-called “membership fee”, to fund the search for Books and support the administrative structures.

Just like a library, a reading room had a leader, who was known as the librarian. He or she was the owner of the Book or the person to whom the reading room had entrusted it. Reading rooms did not become involved in the search for Books; people were satisfied with what they had and honestly waited their turn to use it.

At first there were no points of intersection between the libraries and the reading rooms, although they knew about each other. Later the libraries built up their strength and accumulated more Books. The existence of competitors was incompatible with their totalitarian plans.

Reading rooms were blackmailed and intimidated. Suggestions were made that they should voluntarily give up their Book, and they were promised a place in a library if they did so. Sometimes Books were expropriated. There was an official explanation for this blatant banditry: the reading rooms were declared a hotbed of copyists and the leaders of large libraries called for copying to be halted at any price.

From out of a black void the “torch-bearers” appeared—hellhounds spawned by the will of the large clans. The torch-bearers attacked reading rooms, stole their books and burned them. These losses had practically no impact on the libraries, which had numerous spare copies in their depositories, but the wretched readers who had been deprived of their only Book were left with nowhere to go except into a library.

Against the background of this contradictory situation Mokhova’s star rose high in the Gromov firmament. Following several successful raids on the depositories of influential libraries it became clear that a major battle was inevitable. An appropriate field for it was found in the north of Russia, beside the abandoned village of Neverbino.

And then the members of several clans, including Lagudov’s and Shulga’s, appealed to the reading rooms for help in the struggle against Mokhova, promising them absolute immunity from all financial levies in the future. That was why so many volunteers assembled near Neverbino. They came from every corner of the country to bear arms and stand up for their own reading rooms and Books.

THE BATTLE OF NEVERBINO

THE COALITION’S DETACHMENTS were organized in a primitive fashion, after the example of the Russian forces at the Battle of Kulikovo Field. The individuals in its staff headquarters were remote from modern military tactics, but nonetheless—as became clear later—quite practical in their approach.

The avant-garde of the formation consisted of the patrol and advance regiments, made up of reading rooms. Located behind them was a large regiment made up of brigades from six libraries, with its flanks protected by right-flank and left-flank regiments, each consisting of four combined brigades. Sheltering behind the large regiment was Shulga’s clan, which called itself the reserve regiment, and the ambush regiment stationed in a small stretch of forest nearby was the detachment from Lagudov’s clan, which also had only moderate claims to excellence as a fighting force.

Books of Endurance were extracted from secret depositories. Special readers, gathering groups of fifty people around them, read through the Books, straining their voices as they rendered the listeners’ bodies insensible to wounds.

The allusion to Kulikovo Field was reflected in the challenge to a duel issued to all comers by the crane driver Dankevich as she whirled her terrible hook round her head. No duel took place, however— no Peresvet could be found among the ranks of the libraries.

Battle commenced at about two o’clock in the morning. Pumped full of strength, the “mums” moved in to attack the patrol and advance regiments. After suffering heavy losses, the reading-room militias pulled back.

Polina Gorn issued orders from a low hill where she was surrounded by her guard. Seeing that the frontal attack had run out of momentum and was threatening to turn into a pointless, drawn-out battle, Gorn created an advantage of numbers on the flank by throwing six units of a hundred women against the left-flank regiment, which fifteen minutes later no longer existed, having been crushed by the hammers of former railway workers.

Shulga’s reserve regiment, which was responsible for preventing outflanking movements, abandoned the left-hand regiment to its fate, swung round the right-hand regiment and made straight for the high ground where Gorn’s headquarters was located.

The detachments led by the mighty Dankevich emerged at the rear of the combined forces, creating a genuine threat of encirclement. Lagudov’s ambush regiment struck at the rear of the mums who had broken through. The sudden introduction of fresh forces did not change the situation significantly. What saved the coalition was the passage of time. The effect of the Book of Strength had partially worn off—it had been read to the old women in advance, to provide the strength required for the forced march from the railway line to Neverbino.

Gorn’s bodyguards perished in the cruel skirmish. An old woman who looked very much like Gorn was cornered by Shulga’s soldiers. She fought desperately until she suddenly weakened and Shulga, goaded on by the Book of Fury, split his opponent’s head open.

The death of their general was the signal for mass flight by Mokhova’s army. Weakening as they ran, the old women were pursued like Mamai as far as the railway station. No more than a few dozen survived.

Rumours circulated that Gorn herself did survive, that it was her double who had been killed, that Gorn and two dozen of her closest comrades in arms who had retained their agility managed to hide and several days later reached their citadel, the nursing home. But it was preferred not to broadcast this information widely.

Many clamoured that Mokhova should be polished off in her lair and the Home should be taken by storm, otherwise the hydra would sprout more grey-haired heads, but this suggestion was stifled with the argument that Mokhova was finished anyway and “her fangs had been drawn”: a scorched fragment of the Book of Strength was found at the site of Gorn’s headquarters—it was believed that Gorn, sensing defeat, had destroyed this unique copy, probably the only one still in existence.

The price of victory was great. The combined forces had lost about a thousand men in the battle and hundreds had been wounded or maimed. Needless to say, the reading rooms had lost most of all.

The bodies of the dead were carried to a deep ravine, covered with caustic fertilizer to accelerate decomposition, and earth was scattered over everything, so that no pit remained. Seeds of common burdock and other fast-growing weeds were also thrown into the earth. In spring, burdock of gigantic size sprouted across the ravine, concealing for ever the bodies of those who had fallen at Neverbino.

On their way home, the reading-room militiamen and even the leaders of libraries that had taken a mauling spoke bitterly, in half whispers, saying the Neverbino bloodbath had been deliberately planned by Mokhova’s, Lagudov’s and Shulga’s analysts in order to cut back the exorbitantly swollen numbers of people who knew about Gromov. The battle had reduced that world by a quarter.

At about the same time a new agency of power and administration was established—the Council of Libraries. Lagudov, having emerged from the battle with minimal losses for his clan, had more influence than ever, and he promoted the idea that only “natural librarians”—that is, those who had independently penetrated the essence of Gromov’s Books—should have the right to be the chairman of the council. And after the Battle of Neverbino, there were officially only two of those left—Lagudov and Shulga. The Krasnoyarsk librarian Smolich, Nilin from Ryazan and Avilov from Lipetsk had been killed.

The council confirmed the official decision to grant the reading rooms financial immunity. A thorough census was carried out; reading rooms were normally named after the places where their members lived, or sometimes the name was derived from the surname of the librarian or founder.

All the reading rooms, with the exception only of those who fought at Neverbino, undertook to pay the council a tax of ten per cent of members’ income. Naturally the proceeds were deliberately reduced by readers who concocted false documents. The council therefore toughened up the rules and replaced the moderate tithe with a unitary annual tax—a specific sum was set for every individual Book.

At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, it should be said that the council did not rest on its laurels at this stage and went on to repress the independent groups completely. The reading rooms were coerced into becoming branch lending libraries. Henceforth a Book only nominally belonged to a reading room—the true owner of the Book was the council, which rented it out.

A table of fines was also drawn up. Any reading room that was heavily fined twice was disbanded in the name of the council and its Book was subject to confiscation. Non-compliance was punished with great severity.

Offences included, for instance, the presence of a copyist among a reading room’s members, excessive garrulity on the part of any reader, theft and concealment of a newly found Book—any action capable of posing a threat to the conspiratorial secrecy of the Gromov universe.

Unfortunately the edict of immunity was systematically violated, if only because by no means every library accepted its legality—those who had not taken part in the Battle of Neverbino, for instance. These clans, who were not members of the council, acted crudely and cruelly, like all aggressors. Even if a reading room successfully defended its Book in battle, it lost so much blood in the process that it became easy prey for looters or other predatory clans.

Artfully engineered provocations also took place. It was enough to discredit an undesirable reading room twice for the council to take an immediate decision to disband it. For situations like this several programmes of social rehabilitation were developed. It was considered a great stroke of luck if the readers were all registered with the nearest library, without being broken up—and the concept of —near” was distinctly relative: quite often people had to travel more than a hundred kilometres to a Book. Membership dues and the cost of travel together took a heavy toll on readers’ pockets

More often a different, tragic scenario was played out. Local or regional libraries refused to take all the strangers at once, arguing that they were already overfull. Preference was given to applicants who earned at least a minimally acceptable wage, out of which membership dues were then deducted. The readers with low incomes were scattered to any libraries where there were vacancies. We can imagine what an assignment to Irkutsk or Krasnoyarsk meant for someone who lived in Omsk. Many refused to make the move and joined the queues of “victims”. As a rule these broken people went to seed, becoming vicious and violent. It was from their numbers that the council formed its brigades of torch-bearers. These mercenaries willingly carried out even the very vilest of missions since, after all, the reward for the job was a Book.

Readers who rejected this situation could only accept the challenge and face up to an enemy who outnumbered them many times over. It is obvious how these battles ended, when twenty brave defenders of a reading room fought against hundreds of choice warriors sent by the council…

During these troubled times I became a librarian. My reading room owned a Book of Memory and was frequented by seventeen readers.