Arkady Strugatsky - The Dead Mountaineer's Inn

CUSTOM RE-COMPILATION with ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover Design by Pahek Zeljko

Illustrated by Gennadiy Novozhilov

Copyright (c) 1970 by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Translation copyright (c) 2015 by Josh Billings

First Melville House printing: March 2015

Melville House Publishing

145 Plymouth Street

Brooklyn, NY 11201 and 8 Blackstock Mews

Islington

London N4 2BT

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strugatsky, Arkadii and Boris, authors

ISBN 978-1-61219-432-5 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-61219-433-2 (ebook)

Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

BY JEFF VANDERMEER

1.

" Every man wears the face he deserves ." Or put another way, the mournful cry of "Luarvik L. Luarvik!" from within the besieged Dead Mountaineer's Inn might as well be the mating call of some obscure species of Alps-dwelling penguin. Who is this Mr. Luarvik? Do we believe his version of dire events, or do we believe the hypnotist/motorcycle enthusiast? How about the physicist? Surely a scientist is more objective than a magician! But how can you be sure when dealing with preternatural events that might just be very imaginative lies? This is the dilemma facing the earnest but sometimes stumbling detective Peter Glebsky who narrates the novel you hold in your hands. Poor man-he just wanted a vacation away from the family, and instead has to not only solve a crime but also parse varying versions of reality. Back home, he's a cop who covers "bureaucratic crimes, embezzlement, forgery, fraudulent papers." Not exactly someone who deals with... murder . Much less metaphysics!

Also: Avalanche! Ghosts! Pranks! A lot of creeping around at night!

Confused? Don't be. Think instead of the movie Clue or any number of British slapstick mystery-comedies. Perhaps with a hint of The Twilight Zone . Because not only does every man wear the face he deserves, but in The Dead Mountaineer's Inn the Strugatsky brothers, creators of the Forbidden Zone in their classic science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic , give every reader the farce they deserve-with possible infernal devices thrown in to spice up the recipe.

I came to Russian literature through absurdism and dark humor; my encounters with Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Nikolai Gogol's The Nose are two of the pivotal experiences of my early adulthood. The idea of a standard, garden-variety realism doesn't figure into this sort of fictional equation. When the Devil's cat in The Master and Margarita begins to talk to the corrupt businessman and the businessman argues with the cat for a while before realizing I am arguing with a talking cat! , what we're seeing is not just interspecies communication at its most subtle, but one of the classic absurdist scenes in all of fiction. Even in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, you can sometimes see this quality, and the reason it rises again and again in the work I admire-Russian and not-Russian-is that the absurd admits to the illogic of our lives. To the internal inconsistencies that we try to keep in check. When they pile up, that is when comedy or tragedy occurs, as well as the unpredictable. When, in fiction, they spill over into the surreal or fantastical, this is just a psychological extension of what we know to be true in a more mundane sense in our daily lives. Whether we admit it or not.

If Glebsky is upset that he must be "on the job," then in part it may be that he had hoped that the irrationality and absurdity of his normal workweek might be suspended or kept in abeyance while on vacation. But the world doesn't work that way-reality's porous and strange, and we can't ever quite escape it.

The Dead Mountaineer's Inn 's finest moments occur at those points where the detective knows less than he thinks he knows, where clues do not add up, where people are acting irrationally and impossible doppelgangers proliferate. Writing explanations is hard, but creating convincing mysteries that are true to the world is more difficult. The Strugatsky brothers as good as tell us this through the inn's owner, Alek Snevar, who says to Glebsky, "Haven't you ever noticed... how much more interesting the unknown is than the known? The unknown makes us think-it makes our blood run a little quicker and gives rise to various delightful trains of thought. It beckons, it promises. It's like a fire flickering in the depths of the night."

In support of this treatise, the novel contains one of the better scenes in fiction about waiting in line to use the shower, and not only because there aren't many such scenes in fiction. Glebsky's train of thought as he decides whether or not to wait is a lovely little reverie of indecision. When he realizes there's something odd going on in the shower, it's both comic and unnerving because he's been lost in his own thoughts: "He's just here, I remembered. He doesn't drink, he doesn't eat-he just leaves footprints."

The "he" is probably the dead mountaineer, a figure given such a loving and complex mythology by Snevar that even the guests become complicit in propping up the stories. The spirit of the dead mountaineer and the hints of sentience given to the dog that's survived him are just two of the early elements of the novel that delight the reader. (And offset the off-putting weirdness of Glebsky's obsession with the gender of the hypnotist's child and the appearance of the one hackneyed character, a promiscuous maid.)

The Strugatsky brothers clearly loved writing these moments, loved creating a profusion of stories and tales about the stories. There's a jeweler's precision applied to the staging and execution of such scenes-a flair for expressing the foibles of human interaction. Execution's the key; in lesser hands, the legend of the dead mountaineer put forth by the inn's owner would be drab. In lesser hands, the almost Noises Off shenanigans on display throughout The Dead Mountaineer's Inn would be sad, unconvincing, louche. It's tough to stage this kind of production. You might spend as much effort on the timing of the inspector Ping-Ponging down corridors to question different suspects as you do mapping the internal logic of a Forbidden Zone. To the writer, all enclosed spaces pose unique challenges, and when you're creating a riff on classic elements like the eccentricities of an inn's staff or the even deeper eccentricities of its guests, your success lies less in originality than in the clarity of the writing.

So: An uncanny moment in a shower. A missing watch. A suitcase that contains... what? Do these elements as they assemble capture our imagination-seem most luminous-when mysterious or when explained? Perhaps it depends on the type of tale being told. A mystery with no solution is an irritation to a reader, usually. A science-fiction story with some things left unexplained is to be expected.

When the avalanche roars down, cutting you off from the world, it's just you and characters, and in a sense, you get to choose how to interpret the story

2.

All writers have a border around them: the constraints they have to work against and the way they're perceived by readers. In the case of the brothers, the historical context of their development created an automatic barrier-both for us as English-language readers and for them, existing as they did within a repressive system.