Сергей Лебедев: Untraceable

His mind, his solid rational world cracked. Through it was the unknown.

Apparently unaware of what was happening to Kalitin, he went on. “They told me I was an anomalous occurrence. I was supposed to die. And in fact, I did. My former self was dead. I gave sermons later. Ordinary words. No miracle in them. As for my face, the doctors said it was a hormonal reaction. That may be so. Physically. But it is a mark. God’s mark.”

Kalitin reeled.

Travniček’s face floated before his eyes. It changed rapidly: human, animal, stone, forest, snake, a multilayered, composite mask. All the dead creatures poisoned by Kalitin were resurrected in it. Horses. Goats. Dogs. Monkeys. Rats. Mice. People.

The last face to rise out of the vortex, from the depths, to flash and fade, was Vera’s.

Kalitin imagined that the resurrected souls sought to settle in him: there was no refuge for them except the body of their murderer. He felt his own face turn to stone, while Travniček’s became human again.

The pastor embraced him. Patted his head.

Kalitin could tell that the pastor was not lying. Travniček was the miracle that crossed out Kalitin’s destiny, rendered Neophyte meaningless, insignificant. It had aimed for absolute power over matter, and the absolute was destroyed. Kalitin tried to persuade himself that Neophyte would have killed the priest and saw that the irrationality of a miracle was higher than his thinking, plans, calculations.

He was conquered; he was filled with deathly hatred. Kalitin wanted to kill the priest; he had only one weapon at hand. Kalitin began whispering, telling the pastor the blackest and most evil things that had happened to him—his own life; pouring it into Travniček like poison. Kalitin could not pause, unstoppering all the secrets of the past as if they had been sealed in test tubes and ampoules, shouting without hearing what he was shouting, so that the wonderful pastor would swallow the poisonous revelation and die like the mice and dogs, apes and humans, Kazarnovsky and Vera—the death of creatures. Death without miracles.

Only now, on the mountain road, did Shershnev appreciate that Grebenyuk was a real master. Minute by minute, the major was stubbornly regaining the time stolen by the police.

Cliff-face on the left. On the right, warning stripes, then an abyss. The flat yellow lamps in the tunnel—the car flew without resistance, the wipers flipping once in a while to remove bugs from the windshield, the headlight cutting through the dusk, and the golden disco music of his adolescence played softly, a melody from the eighties, “Modern Talking.”

Shershnev had never felt so acutely the exchange of space for time, an exchange in their favor, as if Grebenyuk were paying generously from the pocket of his future successes.

The white arrows in the lanes said forward! Forward! The road rose higher toward the pass, the former border.

The tunnel. Narrowed to two lanes. Grebenyuk did not slow down, turn, turn. The bright red scattering of stop signals up ahead. The car stopped. They could hear the exhaust fans on the concrete ceilings. They were trapped inside the mountain.

Other cars drove in behind them and the drivers obediently turned off their engines. Grebenyuk tried the radio: nothing but static on every station.

They looked at each other—both faces betraying concern. Shershnev got out and knocked on the window of the car in front. Three guys, students probably, were smoking—and not tobacco. He could smell weed.

“Do you know what happened?” he asked. “Is there a long wait?”

The driver laughed and said in a blurry, happy voice, “It’s the mountains, man. Something’s always happening here. Want a hit?” he offered the joint.

He went down the row of cars. No one knew anything. Mobile phones didn’t work, GPS systems turned themselves off. Shershnev noticed a phone on the wall, a red box with the emergency sign. He picked up the receiver and pushed the button: beep, beep . Long beeps. No answer.

People sat in their cars, calm, obedient. Sheep, thought Shershnev. He remembered how their convoy once ran into a herd of thousands of sheep in a ravine. The shepherd gloated as he looked at the military vehicles trapped in the river of sheep, which headed down, paying no attention to the blaring horns, leaving bits of wool on the trucks. Stupid, obedient creatures. Like these people. They wouldn’t let him through, wouldn’t move aside. They would just wait.

He went back.

“Too bad we didn’t bring the siren light,” Grebenyuk said. The joke died like a bad match. The cooling hood creaked. They lacked the strength to think, compare, build suppositions.

Shershnev had no problem in enclosed spaces. Reverse claustrophobia, their doctor called it. He went down into tight forest caches, underground irrigation canals turned into secret pathways, he wandered for days through the damp tunnels of a former missile base that the enemy had turned into a lair. Stone did not scare him, tightness and dark did not scare him, nor did stale air low on oxygen.

But here, in the dry, well-lit tunnel with evacuation hatches, he felt uncomfortable underground for the first time. The smell of gasoline and exhaust pushed into his nose, and the cliff seemed to push down on him from above, like a press.

Duplicitous stone, its unreliable solidity! So many times he had seen huge boulders fallen on the road, smoldering cars buried beneath them, round spots of soot from wheels, burned and tossed aside by the explosion, human heads… or that tunnel in 2008. The mountains there were much higher. Narrow tunnel without light, filled with diesel exhaust, the dull headlights of tanks, and it felt like the ceiling would collapse from the roar of the engines, the fear of the armored bodies the drivers were urging into the narrow funnel, too narrow for two vehicles, in the mountain.

The air was so wonderful on the other side—neither the fires nor the smell of death spoiled its purity, divine purity! They got through, they did, Shershnev told himself.

Red lights flashed ahead. The head of the bottleneck slowly began to move.

It was dark outside. The cars stopped again. Shershnev got out, swallowed the icy, raw air, redolent of mountain wildness. Along the distant spurs, red stars blinked on electric wind turbines, and clumps of thick fog crawled along the road. The headlights dissolved in the vapor, creating an unnatural, otherworldly reflection.

Shershnev shook his head. Had he breathed in some weed?

The cars moved. Beyond the turn lay the former border between Czech territory and Germany. Abandoned control posts. Empty duty-free stores. A police helicopter blocked the road. Traffic officers directed the cars to the former border parking lot.

This is for us, Shershnev first thought.

But he quickly changed his mind: they would have done this differently. They would have stopped only their car, brought in the special forces. These were ordinary policemen, not even equipped with bulletproof vests.

Grebenyuk pulled up by a policeman and opened the window.

“Avalanche,” the overwhelmed traffic cop shouted. “It’s the rain. They’ll open the road by morning. They’re working on it now. Wait in the parking lot. If you need fuel, there’s a gas station twenty kilometers below, you’ll have time.” He waved his lit baton.

The truck drivers settled down in their cabs. Car drivers folded down their rear seats. Grebenyuk parked at the very exit of the lot. Right, thought Shershnev. The whole herd will head for the exit in the morning, and we have to be first.

He suddenly realized how tired and hungry he was.

“Let’s go look around,” he said.

“Wouldn’t hurt to get some food,” Grebenyuk replied. “We’ve worked up an appetite.”