Сергей Лебедев: Untraceable

Shershnev went into the corridor. There were no opponents left. He won the skirmish he had wanted to lose.

His phone vibrated silently in the pocket of his overalls.

“You? Tomorrow, eight o’clock at the Directorate. Got it? Over.”

The doctors at the hospital treated Kalitin with extreme respect. It wasn’t because of his expensive insurance. The doctors considered Kalitin a former colleague and at first expected him to be demanding. But he turned out to be an ideal patient: he wasn’t worried, he didn’t ask questions, he didn’t call the duty nurse at night, and he patiently dealt with the procedures.

They thought that he was not afraid.

Kalitin was afraid. The way he had been afraid only once in his life, during a long childhood winter. They had just moved to the City, where they were assigned a two-room apartment with kitchen and bath—it had seemed enormous to him after the small room in a communal flat. He went to a new school—where everyone was a newbie like him, and there were no huge second-grade and third-grade bullies, as there had been at the old school. Life seemed radiant and invigorating.

Suddenly something inexplicable happened to his mother and father. In the evenings, his parents placed a pot over the telephone—they had their own phone now—and shut themselves up in the kitchen. The water poured full-blast into the sink and the radio proclaimed loudly and solemnly: Today the entire country… Their voices could barely be heard: strange, aloof. He hid in the hallway behind his grandmother’s ancient, molting fur coat, trying to catch even a word.

His mother was a surgeon. Just recently she had told them proudly how well equipped her new operating theater was. Now she wanted to leave urgently. His father was trying to convince her to stay.

“You have my last name,” he said softly.

“You think they don’t have my personnel file?” she replied.

“It will be all right,” he said uncertainly. “Look, they made me a senior fellow. They gave me access. First category! Do you think I would have that if they suspected us of anything? Apartment. Salary. Rations. They approved my dissertation topic.”

“Have you read what they’re writing in the papers?” she asked bitterly. “Killer doctors! I studied with one of them, don’t you understand?”

His father stopped talking. Then he said: “Igor will help.”

“As long as Igor doesn’t fall himself,” she replied joylessly, dully. “This is just the beginning.”

Those nocturnal words destroyed the invisible, warm softness that was his home, leaving gaping holes open to uncertainty and fear. He began to think that some of the teachers regarded him strangely: as if they knew something. Fear became the spice in meals, the shadow of all feelings, the echo of all sounds. Fear took out all the bannisters and supports from the world, stole his usual sense of balance, took away his agility.

That’s why he fell in the locker room after gym class. He got tangled in his trousers. He clumsily knocked over someone’s canvas bag from the bench. A change of clothing fell out—and a deck of greasy photographs with torn, chewed edges.

Vovka Sapozhok, the class clown, hurried over and looked over his shoulder; he whistled in astonishment and then gave a salacious, disgusting smack of his lips.

The cards scattered, mixed up. Naked arms, breasts, buttocks, black-and-white glossy flesh, stockings, ostrich feathers, gauzy curtains, sofas, slippers. Women on their backs, crouching, kneeling. Naked men in black hats. Dark thickets of hair between plump female thighs. Penises in mouths. The nakedness was not of the bodies, but of the secret real life of men and women, covered by clothing, the frightening seriousness of what was taking place in the photos, it was like seeing birth or death. And strange, bizarre apparel, jewelry, belonging to a fairy tale theater, a foreign ritual, an extinct world.

He looked, frozen in place. Sapozhok grew quiet and bent forward, leaning on his shoulder as if in love.

Voices burst into the dressing room. Senior students, the volleyball team. Tall, sweaty, angry after the game. Sapozhok was first to sense danger and tried to jump away, but fell on his friend’s back, humping like a street dog, a hurrying runt, and then rolled off and vanished.

The older boys laughed and guffawed loudly and then suddenly stopped.

“You little rat.” A heavy blow knocked the boy toward the bench.

The boy knew that voice. The son of Colonel Izmailov, the City’s military commandant. He had seen him with his father at Uncle Igor’s house. He overheard the adults talking about how after the war the colonel had been sent to Germany to disassemble scientific equipment and came back with “a lot of interesting things for himself personally.”

Interesting. The boy realized that Izmailov junior had taken those dirty pictures from his father. Secretly of course. And if they were found, if a teacher walked in right…

He wet himself.

Izmailov picked him up by the scruff of his neck. The pictures were no longer on the floor.

Dark, round-headed, the commandant’s son looked at him but was also looking around furtively—apparently he didn’t trust everyone on the team. And the smaller kids were nearby as well.

“You spill this to anyone, I’ll kill you, you little shit!” Izmailov shoved him into the corner of the room.

Even before, when there was peace in the family, the boy would not have told his parents anything. How could he prove that he had not wanted them and had not intended to steal those cards? How could he admit that he had seen them at all?

Now the boy felt that even if he did confess—his parents would not listen to him, wouldn’t condescend to that.

They had no time for him.

During the following week, Izmailov “accidentally” ran into the boy three times at the classroom door. He just stood there and looked at him. His gaze was beginning to show his father’s stern nature; he could sit calmly at the table, looking around courteously at his fellow diners, and people would clam up, lay down their forks, and start rubbing the stems of their vodka glasses for some reason. The boy recalled the black-and-white bodies, submissively bent, the men in black top hats, Izmailov’s hand, his angry hot whisper, and felt that he did not have the strength to rid himself of that memory.

Then the day came when once again gym class coincided with volleyball practice. Earlier he would have managed to get out of it, for example, by eating snow to catch cold and staying home. But he couldn’t manage it. It required a little bit of strength on hand, you couldn’t borrow it, for that sort of ploy. The boy was tormented by fear and guilt: if he had not knocked over Izmailov’s bag, nothing would have happened.

He sat through the class. Put on skis that were too long and poorly waxed and had loose mounts for his gym period.

Cross-country.

He did the first lap with enjoyment, surprised by his body’s indifference, its dumb and uncomplaining skill despite the splintery skis and the horror ahead. The wind came up and the light frost grew even lighter, and the snow on the course, even though it was rolled and compacted, started sticking to the badly waxed skis.

A raw blizzard started. The whirling whiteness hid the figures of his classmates and the school building. Snow formed a tight hump on his right ski; the boy jerked his foot and the screws pulled out of the loose holes, with a spray of rusty wood particles.

He stood there, one foot with a ski, one without. He realized that there was no goodness in life that would save him from Izmailov waiting in the locker room; the knowledge was as obvious and final as a sentence; very adult. The boy prayed wordlessly, begging the blizzard, the sky, anyone—save me!