Сергей Лебедев: Untraceable

“He’s only seventy. I assume he takes good care of his health. Physical and mental.”

“We have an address?”

“The source reported it.”

“Will that compromise the source?”

“Can’t say with certainty.”

“Is he valuable?”

“Moderately. Because of his past in the GDR he has not been promoted readily. And he’ll be retiring soon.”

“Understood. An order must be given to the station. Let them check it out. Send the very best.”

“If they determine it’s him, we can prepare the event. And start the coordination.”

“Interesting. If it’s Kalitin, then it’s very interesting.”

“Neophyte.”

“Yes. Neophyte. His favorite.”

“None of our operatives today have worked with Neophyte.”

“I am aware of that.”

“But there is one candidate—Shershnev. He did an operation with one of Kalitin’s early versions. He doesn’t have any experience abroad, however. But he was born and grew up there. His father was in our army. He knows the language well. Here’s his file.”

“I’ll take a look. Send all the necessary orders immediately.”

“Yes, sir.”

The deputy left the room.

The general opened the file.

The bowl and snake. The Bowl of Hygeia.

Kalitin sometimes thought this emblem, inconspicuous and familiar, was persecuting him.

Pharmacy signs. Ubiquitous ambulances. Labels on medicines. Hospital reception areas. Badges on medical personnel. He had almost learned to not be bothered, to pay no attention, not take it personally.

But not right now.

The doctors’ suspicions raised his own suspicions, which the doctors must not know. What was happening to his body could be the delayed reaction to long-ago experiments, the surf from yesterday’s wave. He had always followed safety measures exactingly, but his substances were too unpredictable, unmanageable to be fully understood. His children. His legacy.

Some of the medical procedures required local anesthesia.

The drug the anesthesiologist used had a hidden and harmless side effect, something like a weak, amateur truth serum. Kalitin experienced vivid and clear—almost digital—memories, sentimental dreams about the past, things he had not thought about for years.

He was a child again, a schoolboy, an obedient son, who had not yet found his calling and his mentor. He was at the stage of development where a child’s ability to fill the world with great mysteries and to experience horror and joy in the face of the inexplicable mixed with the beginnings of a rational autobiography; it is in this living contradiction—sometimes, and not in every life—that attractions, desires, symbols, and profound predeterminations of destiny are born.

…Every Easter his parents take him to visit Uncle Igor.

Actually, the boy does not know what Easter is. They make blini during the week before Lent. For Easter they dye eggs in onion peel water and bake kulich bread. Is that a holiday? It’s not listed on the wall calendar. They don’t mention it at school. His parents don’t seem to know why Easter should be celebrated. They wouldn’t do it on their own, he thinks. But if Uncle Igor invites you, you can’t say no. He calls on the telephone and names the day; not a word about Easter over the telephone, it is understood.

Who was Uncle Igor? The boy senses that he is not his real uncle. Or, rather, not quite an uncle—there was a blood tie, but it was complicated, requiring a meticulous, apothecary-like examination of units of relatedness, going through the old photo albums, which are kept in a distant corner and cannot be viewed without an adult. There, among the unfamiliar faces, unknown places, landscapes, houses, and idyllic backdrops used by provincial photography studios, a woman will appear in a white dress, sitting at the gigantic anthracite grand piano, looking at the cryptic musical notation. She would be the beginning of a mysterious chain of corporeal transformations from thin to fat, tall to short, dark to blond and back again, with the final link being Uncle Igor.

The boy had already learned that it was better not to ask about some people in the photographs. They wouldn’t tell him or they would make up some nonsense. However, it was all right to ask about the people around them, the neighbors, his father’s coworkers.

About all of them except Uncle Igor.

They lived in the new City. Ten years earlier it had been unpopulated taiga here. So they are all new settlers, enthusiasts; that’s how they are honored in official speeches. The City is surrounded by a Wall: a gray concrete fence with barbed wire. The Wall was built with room to grow: dug-up empty lots lie between it and the residential areas. Because of the Wall, they can’t be called on a home phone. Or get mail at home. Or have visitors. Their City does not exist on maps, in reference books, or in atlases. Passenger trains do not go there. Ordinary planes do not fly there. The newspapers don’t write about the City. The radio does not mention it. It is not shown on television. It is called Sovetsk-22. For the residents, it is simply the City.

The boy has no memory of being beyond the Wall. But he does know where he and his parents came from—his mother often misses the capital, where his parents were born, where they studied and met, where his grandmothers and aunt live.

Uncle Igor seems to have been born here. Appearing together with the City. Right in the six-room apartment on the third floor of a building that everyone in the City calls the House.

When someone says, “We’re moving into the House soon,” everyone knows with envy which house they mean. The one on Revolution Street. The most famous one in the City. Nine stories. With columns at the entrance and molding under the cornices. With handles on the doors that lead into lobbies, where visitors are met by the guard. With high ceilings and enormous apartments. With two elevators in every entry.

The rumors say there were supposed to be several such houses. But for some reason, only one was built. It was a big honor to live there. Father sometimes says that maybe one day they would get an apartment there. Mother turns her head and smiles sadly, ironically.

None of the boy’s classmates has ever been in the House. But he has. The House itself is not very interesting. It’s only a shell—in fact, molded shells support the cornices of the House—that surrounds the secrets of Uncle Igor’s life.

His parents seem to feel it. His father doesn’t like it. He would rather not bring him there. A different circle, he says. But Uncle Igor invites all three of them. His otherwise intractable father can’t disobey. Why? The boy wants to know.

His mother… Once, when his father was out, the boy secretly watched her trying on a robe, a birthday present from Uncle Igor. Not from here, unearthly, thin burgundy silk, embroidered with birds, flowers, and dragons. She looked in the mirror, pulling it tighter to show her figure then letting the robe’s long skirts open freely. May light splashed from the mirror. The yellow lotus leaves trembled. Twisting passionately and hugging her hips, the silver-and-gold dragons with emerald eyes breathed bead and pearl smoke from their broad violet nostrils. Dressed, she was so naked about her feelings that the boy grew embarrassed and shut the door. It was not shame that guided him, it was stung passion; he wanted to share the closeness to Uncle Igor that came through the gift.

Breathless from the double taboo of what he was doing, violating boundaries and wearing women’s clothes, he tried on the robe—and immediately threw it off, stunned by a nasty, longing sensation instigated by the vulgar deliberateness of transformation. However, the boy remembered the incident, the action, putting it away into a piggy bank as it were, with a premonition that it could come in handy.