Brothers

We came to in the morning.

Ep was weak, his injured chest hurt. But his heart was already speaking timidly with our hearts. Exhaustion and shock had immobilized his strong body: he barely moved. Tears constantly rose to his eyes. Fer and I constructed a hut from the branches of bushes and young trees and placed brother Ep inside it. When he fell asleep again, Fer and I kneeled and spoke heart to heart for a long time. In the green, rough hut our hearts learned from each other and from the great Ice lying so close by. The huge block of Ice resonated with our tiny hearts. It was as though they were created for each other. Our hearts were drawn to each other like the opposite poles of magnets. Separately, everything was harder for them. But together they were capable of a great deal. Sensing the awakening power of our hearts, we trembled. Resonating with the Ice, our hearts suggested a solution to us. When we came to and had eaten some berries, our lips gave sound to the Wisdom of the Light. We spoke in the miserly language of the mind, aided by the language of the heart.

We had to go and search for our brothers and sisters. But the Ice should always be with us. It would be more convenient that way, easier. It shouldn’t lie here and wait for us to bring a newly acquired brother or sister to it. It should always be with us, among people. We would fashion icy hammers from the Ice. Dozens, hundreds of Ice hammers. They would strike the chests of brothers and sisters. And their hearts would begin to speak.

It took three days for Ep to get back on his feet. His awakening heart helped his body. From a depressed, mortally exhausted being, Ep was transformed into an inexhaustible and bold brother. He kissed our feet from joy, and we taught his inexperienced heart the first words.

Now there were three of us. We were young, strong, and ready to do anything for the Light. In the hut we decided what our plan of action would be: While waiting for the cold autumn, we had to carve out several large pieces of the Ice, haul them on a sleigh to the Khushma, prepare and load the Ice, and sail first along the Khushma, then along the Chamba to the Katanga. There, on the shore, we would dig a hole, place the Ice in the permanently frozen earth, and cover it. From this store we would take a few large pieces of Ice with us and set off on our search.

That was what we did.

Fer, Ep, and I spent two months in the dead taiga near the Ice. We lived in the hut all that time. And we were absolutely happy. The Ice was with us; our hearts matured and grew wiser; our bodies filled with a new strength. This strength wasn’t only physical, although our muscles became stronger than before. The new strength had forever conquered fear, hunger, and illness in us. The three great enemies had been vanquished, never to be resurrected in our bodies. We fed on berries and the roots of swamp grasses. We slept on the moss, embracing each other, unafraid of the permafrost cold that rose every night from the Tungus earth. Wolves howled and bears roared in the dark, but it didn’t scare us: we fell sweetly asleep to the howling of the wolves. Animals avoided our hut. Nor did people bother us: after the fire I started, the expedition left the area. The Evenki continued to be wary of the “accursed” place. Speaking in our new language to our hearts’ content, we would light a campfire. Embracing, we stared silently at the fire. It was of this planet, ephemeral, a weak reflection of the Heavenly Fire — the blinding, imperishable fire that had given birth to the worlds of Harmony.

The Siberian summer ended in the middle of August. The leaves of the bushes and the gnarled birches surrounding the swamp turned yellow. A cold northern wind began to blow. And one morning occasional snowflakes spun over our hut — harbingers of the long Siberian winter. The first snow was a sign: the time had come to act. During those two months we not only had spoken with our hearts but had found the shortest passage to the Ice and laid eighteen fallen logs across the swamp. The bog engulfed the logs, but one could lean against them. Undressing, taking an ax and knives, we traversed this log road to the Ice. We cut out eight huge pieces of the Ice and carried them to shore. Each piece weighed about as much as a man. On the shore we built a drag of young trees, and in three trips we hauled the Ice to the Khushma, which ran about a kilometer from the swamp. This river was about twice as narrow as the Katanga and its shores were not so high. We quickly put together a raft as well, and tied the logs with bast fiber torn from young trees. Loading the Ice onto the raft, we attached it to the raft logs with wet bast, took the long oars that Ep had carved, and pushed off from the shore.

The journey by water took three days. Our raft sailed successfully along two rivers and reached the Katanga. We tried very hard to keep the Ice intact. And during the trip we didn’t allow ourselves to speak with the heart. The cold water brought us to the place where we had sat that night with Ep by the fire, listening to his incoherent story. Upon landing, we untied the Ice and carried it to the shore. Pieces had melted slightly during the voyage. We dug a hole not far from the shore. It didn’t take long to dig it — one and a half meters down the ax struck the icy soil of the permafrost. Gouging out a cavity in it, we put several pieces of the Ice in it, wrapped in moss and leaves; then we covered it all with earth. Ep and I pushed a heavy stone on top of the store of Ice. We dug a hole for the eighth piece of Ice right on the shore. Having hidden the precious Ice, we embraced. Night fell, the stars came out. We built a fire and gave our hearts their will. They spoke all night.

In the morning we dragged the raft, which had been hidden in the bushes, back into the water, and dug up the eighth piece of Ice. We wrapped it in moss, placed it on the raft, and started off. Our hearts told us we had to sail west. That was where the waters of the Katanga carried our boat. None of us knew just where we would meet our brothers and sisters, but our hearts helped us to search. Having sailed along the river for two days, we saw a large settlement.

“It’s Lakura,” Fer told us. “Baptized Tungus live there.”

Mooring the boat, we quickly buried the Ice in the sand near the shore and headed to the village. Our hearts were calm. We were met by Evenki, and Fer spoke with them. They told us the latest news: the Russians had gone to the “accursed” place to look for the gold that fell from the sky, but the god of fire, Agdy, burned their dwelling, and they turned back. All of the Evenki in the area already knew this. Despite their Russian Orthodox faith and the old wooden church in the middle of the village, the Evenki remained pagans. They also informed us that the runners who had visited their village not long ago had lost one fellow along the way — he had been kidnapped by the Maiden of the Water. At first it was far from simple for us to socialize with people: I could barely restrain laughter, Ep looked at ordinary people with bewilderment, and Fer struggled to utter forgotten words. But here, too, our hearts helped us; they didn’t let us down for a second. We had become wise of heart. And we knew how to behave with people. Our hearts and the Ice taught us to foresee much.

The local priest, Father Bartholomew, was happy to meet with us. Every Russian who passed through Lakura became a family member for him. First off he had the bathhouse fired up. We washed and steamed our bodies with great pleasure. Then the priest’s Evenka wife laid the table for us. Here something unexpected awaited us: the food people normally ate had become for us, brothers of the Light, inedible. We looked at the fish pies, pelmeni with venison, eggs cooked in lard, freshly baked bread, and marinated mushrooms with disgust. In all of this we felt the monstrosity of human life, its lack of freedom. Humans had to do something to food before they ate it: fry, boil, chop, marinate, grind, or cure it. For that matter, they always overate tremendously, disfiguring their bodies and willpower. But the most horrendous thing was — that humans devoured living creatures with great pleasure, taking their lives from them only in order to stuff their stomachs with their meat. Meat was digested in their stomachs and fell out of humans in disgusting-smelling excrement. Man’s will transformed a living bird into a pile of excrement — and this was completely normal for Homo sapiens. Sharing this planet with other living creatures, people gobbled them up. And this great monstrosity was called the law of life.

We could eat only fresh fruits and berries. This was the only food that did not repulse us. In general, after our hearts awoke, we ate much less. A handful of fresh berries sufficed for several days. Moreover, we didn’t tire, didn’t lose our strength like ordinary fasters. Our hearts gave us tremendous energy. With such energy we were not afraid of any hunger. Sitting down at the table, I apologized to the hosts and told them that yesterday we had been taken very ill from some fish we ate, and consequently, today we could only keep down raw vegetables and berries. With sighs and groans, the priest’s wife brought us turnips and lingonberries. We refused vodka as well. The priest and his wife didn’t deny themselves the “pleasure” of drinking to the health of the travelers. Seeing how they poured pure spirits diluted with water into their mouths in order to lose control over their bodies and feelings for a time, we were filled with disgust. The amazing popularity of vodka among humans, and their dependence on it, proved once again that man was incapable of being happy. People drank vodka and wine to “forget,” “have a good time,” “relax” — that is, to forget themselves and their lives for at least a moment. Drinking until they were drunk, they felt they were happy.

“Where are you going, young folks? Winter is just around the corner!” asked the increasingly drunk Father Bartholomew.

We answered that we were looking for a large construction site where we could make some money.

“Stay with me to build a new church. Weasels have taken over the old one! I’ll pay you more than the Soviets,” he cajoled.

But we didn’t want to stay in the village: our heart saw none of our own there. We had to travel farther. We spent the night with Father Bartholomew, bought some carrots and turnips from him, dug up the Ice, loaded it, and sailed off. The Stony Tungus River coursed west toward the Yenisei. We floated past three villages, stopping in each one. And found none of our own. Fortunately, it grew colder, the nights were frosty, and our Ice melted very little. We tried not to touch it, which was hard, traveling with it in one boat. Touching the Ice reminded us acutely of the Primordial Light. Our hearts felt very good at those times.

The taiga grew yellow and red, preparing itself for the long winter. The first snow fell and covered everything. Then came the first cold snap. The river began to freeze at the edges; we traveled down the middle where the water had not yet frozen. Steam hovered above the Tunguska. Two more days passed and the river merged into another — wide and powerful. This was the Yenisei. It carried its lead-colored waters to the north, toward the Arctic Ocean. Its current was so turbulent that ice didn’t have time to cover the river — it was carried away. It became harder to navigate — the boat was buffeted, whirlpools spun it around. Our hands never let go of the oars. But our hearts guided us. They told us that there were 23,000 of us — a small drop in the ocean of people, but that the Ice, lying here in Siberia these twenty years, was drawing many of ours to it. They were intuitively moving toward it, they saw tormenting, sweet dreams about it, they were looking for it. Their sleeping hearts yearned for the blow of the Ice hammer. And so we sailed patiently, fighting the strong Yenisei, warming one another’s hands, grown cold in the wind.

We hadn’t sailed for more than half a day when the first small landing dock appeared. Near it huddled the huts of a fishing village. A little steam-powered tugboat was moored to the dock, its funnel smoking. We decided to pull up onshore and have a look at the village. A little way before reaching the dock, we sailed into the rushes, pulled the boat ashore, rested, and ate some carrots and berries. Then, among the willow clusters, we began to bury the Ice in the sand. We hadn’t yet finished our task when three armed, rough-looking fellows emerged from the bushes.

“Now, don’t breathe!” a bandit with a black mustache ordered in a hoarse voice, pointing a Mauser at us. “Hands up!”

We raised our hands. The two others approached and searched us. They took away our gold dust and money, as well as the firearms and bullets from the raft.

“What did you bury?” the man with the black mustache asked.

We said nothing. It was an important moment. We had to answer these people somehow. As usual, my brain began to give me ideas about how to deceive them, ensnare them with intricate lies in order to save the Ice and ourselves. But my heart cut through the cobwebs of my brain with an order: Speak the truth! And this was the best step to take.

“We buried the Ice,” I answered calmly.

Fer and Ep understood me.

“What kinda ice?” the man with the black mustache asked hoarsely. “Come on, then, dig it up!”

Ep and I dug up the piece of Ice wrapped in moss and buried in a shallow hole. Black Mustache walked over and pushed the moss off with the barrel of his Mauser. He looked at it and touched it.

“Go on, dig deeper.”

He thought that we had buried the treasure deeper. With an ax and a knife we dug deeper. Black Mustache waited, then spit in the pit.

“What the hell you want ice for?”

I answered, “In order to awaken the hearts of our brothers and sisters.”

The bandits looked at each other. Black Mustache grinned. “And just how you plan on doing that?”

“We will make hammers of the Ice, and strike the breasts of our brothers. Their hearts will awaken and begin to speak in the language of the Light.”

The bandits looked at one another again.

“They’re cuckoo,” said one of them to Black Mustache. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” The steamboat whistle sounded. The bandits perked up. “Get rid of them, Semyon, and let’s go.”

“Wait, Kochura. They ain’t locals. Take ’em to the admiral first. You there, pick up that ice. And get your feet moving.”

With silent joy I lifted the Ice: it was with us! The bandit led us to the dock. It was empty, and two murdered sailors lay on it. A woman’s weeping could be heard from the village. The steamboat sounded again. The bandits pushed us quickly across the gangway and onto the deck. I noticed the name of the tugboat: Komsomol. They pulled in the gangway. And the little steamboat set off immediately.

As soon as Fer and I were on the deck of this miserable tugboat that had bent, rusted sides and a soot-covered smokestack, our hearts gave a jolt. There was one of us on the ship! I broke into a hot sweat of joy. By myself I didn’t know that there was one of us nearby. Neither did Fer, when she was alone. But together, Fer and I comprised a unique heart magnet, which unerringly detected a brother. With Ep this kind of magnet didn’t work.

They took us into the crew’s quarters; eight people were crowded in there. They were all armed. Hunting rifles lay on the floor, along with animal pelts, clothes, and simple household tools. The bandits had just finished robbing the village and were sorting out the loot. The boss was a short man in a leather jacket, leather pants, and tall, laced boots. A large pair of binoculars hung around his neck, a holster with a Mauser was at his hip. From underneath a leather cap with a red star blond hair stuck out; his dark-blue eyes, framed by whitish eyelashes, sparkled coldly from underneath white eyebrows. The leader’s wide face was remarkable for its intensely severe expression.

Fer and I saw him.

“Kozlov, you asshole! I’ll shoot you!” he shouted at the fellow with the mustache. “Where were you loafing about, you shit? You want us dead, you provocateur?”

The leader was an obvious psychopath. Cunning and mean.

“Admiral, we caught these three here,” Black Mustache said hoarsely. “We went into the bushes to do our business, and they were burying something in the ground.”

The leader directed his angry gaze at us. Fer was standing closest to him. I stood behind her with the Ice in my hands.

“What was it?” the leader replied curtly.

“Some kind of ice,” Black Mustache replied.

“What — what’s that?” the admiral asked again, squinting angrily.

“Ice,” I said clearly and emerged from behind Fer with the piece of Ice in my hands.

The admiral froze. His thin, purplish lips blanched. His tiny eyes settled on the Ice. Then he glanced at us.

“Who...who are you?” he said, speaking with difficulty.

“I am Bro, he’s Ep, and this is Fer,” I answered. “We’ve come for you.”

His body stiffened.

The din of the bandits stopped. Everyone stood quietly and looked at us. We were looking at the admiral. Our heart magnet was working. I remembered the runner Nikola sitting in the boat between Fer and me. The situation was repeating itself. But the admiral was a different sort of person. Shaking off the stiffness, he withdrew the Mauser from its holster and pointed the steel-blue barrel at us.

“Come on now, troops, tie them up.”

They tied us up. The Ice fell on the floor.

“Now sit them down in the corner. And all of you — back on deck,” ordered the admiral. “I’ll have a quick parlay with them.”

The bandits unwillingly climbed up on deck: it was warmer in the hold.

The admiral stood with his Mauser and look at us. His heart shuddered. But he fought it off with all his might.

“Tell me again: who have you come for?”

“For you,” I said.

Fer didn’t have time to help me. The admiral laughed maliciously.

“Admiral, where are we going?” A head with bangs hung down through the hatch.

“To Kolmotorovo.”

“Didn’t we want to have a look at Yartsevo?”

“The GPU is there, you idiot. I said Kolmotorovo!” he shouted. “Full speed ahead! Three-whistle greetings to oncoming ships! Take the machine gun off the deck! Hide the rifles!”

“Yes, sir!” The head retreated.

The steamboat began to turn around. A flea-bitten fellow brought down the machine gun and set it at the admiral’s feet.

“Admiral, the thing is, I wanted...” Fleabite mumbled. “I’ve got two pals in Yartsevo and also — ”

“Batten down the hatch!” shouted the admiral, turning white.

Fleabite climbed up the ladder with a sigh and closed the hatch. The admiral walked up to me and squatted. His belt and holster squeaked. He put the muzzle of the Mauser to my forehead. And I felt that he wanted to shoot. My heart froze.

“Now then, who did you come for?” he asked for the second time.

Now Fer helped me.

“We came for you,” we spoke simultaneously.

His heart throbbed. The Mauser shook in his hand. He exhaled, lowered the Mauser, and leaned on it as the floor of the hold rocked.

“Who are you?” he asked uncertainly.

“Your brothers,” I answered.

“I am your sister,” said Fer.

The magnet began to work. And Ep also helped. “I am your brother, too,” he said.

The admiral’s broad-cheeked, muscular face became distorted: his brain was resisting furiously. I realized that, recently, the admiral had been suffering. Just as Nikola had. Just as I had during the expedition. Now he was very afraid. His thin lips blanched. Sweat broke out on his pale forehead. The admiral began to shake.

“God...damn...” he whispered and began to raise the Mauser.

The barrel danced in his trembling, bloodless hands, white with fear. He farted loudly and pointed the Mauser at Fer.

“G-g-god...damn...shits...”

Our hearts froze. And I realized that we were ALWAYS prepared for death. His shaky finger was already pulling on the trigger. Our hearts jolted. And the Ice answered them.

The admiral glanced at the Ice in terror. And shot at it. Pieces of Ice flew about the hold. We cried out. The admiral stood up abruptly. His eyes rolled back in his head. He took one step and collapsed on the floor.

We began to free ourselves from the ropes. The warrior Ep tore his ropes off and untied us. Fer rushed to the Ice. Ep — to the unconscious admiral. I made an immediate decision: the machine gun! Equipped with a new cartridge, it shone all oily and new near the fallen admiral. The very same kind lay in the trunk of the porter, Samson, who had sheltered me as an adolescent at the Krasnoye station in the winter of 1920. I grabbed it, released the safety lock, and pulled back the bolt, just as Samson had done that morning, in order to scare away the bullies who wouldn’t stop bothering us.

Ep opened the leather jacket covering the admiral’s chest, tore the army-issue shirt and striped sailor’s skivvies underneath. On his chest was a tattoo of an eagle carrying a dragon in its talons. Fer grabbed a large piece of Ice.

“No!” I whispered. “Tie him up.”

They didn’t understand. I motioned upward with my eyes. “They’ll try to stop us.”

They understood everything. And immediately tied the admiral’s hands and feet with our own ropes.

Ep took the admiral’s Mauser. Fer took the rifle. We climbed up the iron ladder and I knocked on the hatch. They had hardly managed to open it when I aimed the fat barrel of the machine gun at the bandit. He was chewing something and took a step backward. We climbed up onto the deck. The bandits saw us.

“Back!” I ordered.

They began shuffling toward the stern. Most of them were still chewing on something. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed some meat wrapped in paper, bread, and a bottle of moonshine on the bench of the stern. After their work, they had decided to have a bite.

“Stop!” I ordered.

They looked at one another cautiously. Their brains had begun working.

“Take it easy, brother, we can work this out,” Black Mustache said hoarsely. “What is it you want?”

“To awaken the heart of our brother.”

I truly would have preferred to make a deal with them. To say, “Don’t get in our way. If you do this we’ll give you everything we have.” But my heart told me: they would not keep their word.

“Everyone overboard!” I ordered.

“Whatcher in such a stew about, man?” Black Mustache smiled with yellow teeth and moved toward me. “We’ll shower you with gold, as much as you...”

His hand slipped into his pocket.

I aimed the barrel at him and pulled the trigger. The machine gun rumbled and shook in my hands. Bullets pierced Black Mustache’s body and flew out the other side with bits of clothes and meat.

I had killed a man for the first time in my life. And I realized: we would NEVER be able to REACH AN AGREEMENT with people. The bandits jumped overboard. But some shot at us from the deck cabin. Ep began to shoot awkwardly with the Mauser; Fer shot skillfully with the rifle. I aimed the smoking barrel of the machine gun at the deck cabin and pulled the trigger. The machine gun once again rumbled and shook in my hands. The bullets ripped through the sheet metal of the cabin, old white paint flaked off and flew in every direction; so did a strange red inscription: LOM O SMOKINGI GNI, KOMSOMOL!, with a red star. Having destroyed the deck cabin, I let go of the trigger, but it was stuck: the machine gun continued to shoot. It pulled to the left, I lowered the barrel; the bullets pierced the deck, splinters flew everywhere, and the machine gun thundered on, it just kept pulling and pulling to the left. Choking from the gunpowder smoke, I lifted the barrel. The machine gun kept firing and tried to pull itself out of my hands. In this fraction of a second I understood with my heart what a machine is and why it was created by humans: man cannot get along without machines because he is WEAK, he is born an eternal CRIPPLE and needs crutches, supports that help him to live. A machine of destruction, created by the human mind, was trying to escape my hands. It was alive. Bullets flew toward the sky, shells rained down on the deck.

I didn’t have the strength to handle it, so I stepped to the edge and with a desperate movement threw the machine gun overboard. It kept on firing as it fell. But the Yenisei soon swallowed up the machine of destruction.

Gunpowder smoke drifted over the deck. The Komsomol was sailing. We broke into the wheelhouse. There the wounded helmsman in a sailor’s uniform writhed on the floor, and Fleabite lay dead with his mouth open. Ep stood at the helm.

“Who else is on the ship?” I asked the helmsman.

“Stokers...two...They locked them...Don’t shoot,” he moaned.

“How do I get there?”

“Behind the galley...the hatch...”

We found the hatch. It was closed with a bayonet. The stokers were working in the furnace room like a piece of the steam engine. We returned to the deckhouse.

“Hold the wheel,” I told Ep.

“I’ve never steered a ship,” he said, squinting at the Yenisei.

“And I’ve never shot a machine gun,” I answered.

Fer and I descended into the captain’s quarters. The bound admiral had come to and was rolling around furiously on the floor, trying to free himself. We seized him and held him to the floor. He moaned and bit. He smelled of excrement: he had soiled himself when he felt the Ice with his unawakened heart. We tied him to the handrail of the ladder. Fer grabbed a piece of the Ice. My eyes scanned the place; there were no sticks or hammers to be seen. Next to a heap of animal skins lay some weapons. I grabbed a sawed-off rifle from the pile and tore a shoulder strap from the admiral’s jacket. With the thin belt we attached the Ice to the rifle. Fer held the head of the moaning, howling admiral against the handrail. I ripped off his skivvies, swung the Ice hammer back, and struck his tattooed chest with all my might. His breastbone cracked. The Ice shattered in all directions. The admiral jerked and then hung helplessly from the ropes. We froze: we heard nothing at all. His heart was silent. This couldn’t be happening. Just beyond the bulkhead, the iron heart of the steamboat beat faintly. “Hit him again! It can’t awaken!” Fer cried out.

But the Ice hammer was destroyed. I looked at the floor: as it pitched, pieces of Ice slipped in and out of puddles. Fer grabbed the largest of them. We began to tie it to the rifle again. Suddenly the admiral twitched. We pressed against his chest, now red from the blow.

“Rubu...Rubu...Rubu...” his heart spoke, awakening.

We cried out joyously. Our hearts caught up the newly born heart. The admiral moaned and opened his eyes. We untied him and placed him on the ancient leather couch. Rubu again lapsed into oblivion. His heart was small and weak. In comparison to his, Fer’s heart seemed a mighty giant.

I climbed onto the deck. Standing at the helm, Ep cried out. His heart knew what had happened in the captain’s quarters. I ran to the deckhouse and took the helm. Shaking and sobbing, he rushed below. And from the captain’s quarters came his joyous howl.

Rubu was with us.

He turned out to be a former sailor and Red Commander. For his thirty-seven years, Rubu, known in the world of men as Kazimir Skoblo, had had an extremely colorful biography. Before the Revolution, as a boy, he had run away from his prosperous family to join the navy. He did his naval service in the Baltics, working his way up from ship’s boy to bosun. Then he went underground, joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, and carried out propaganda work; in Odessa, he married the bomber Marina Yezvovich, was arrested and sent to Siberia; his wife died in Kiev during a terrorist action, and he ran away from his exile to St. Petersburg. There he lived illegally and threw two bombs; during the October coup he was a commissar of the naval regiment, then worked in the Cheka; during the Civil War he fought in the Ukraine, where he was Commissar of the Proletarian Sword Division; in an argument he shot the commander of the division, for which Trotsky condemned him to execution. He ran away to join the anarchists, commanded a machine-gun platoon for Makhno, suffered a severe concussion, and spent three months lying in the attic of a small house under another name. He returned to the Reds, up beyond the Urals, joined the partisans, and was the political leader of the detachment; after the war he ran river steamboats on the Tobol, then on the Irtysh, and became a family man. Three months ago, a former division soldier recognized him; not waiting to be arrested, Kazimir Skoblo ran, taking the money from the steamboat with him, along with weapons and documents; while in hiding, he organized a small band of thugs, made it to the Yenisei, stole the tugboat Komsomol, and managed to plunder five villages and two cargo ships.

About two months earlier Kazimir Skoblo had had a dream: he was a seventeen-year-old sailor on leave in Vyborg, in the small room of a prostitute; they were sitting on the bed, in front of which there was a small table; a bottle of New Bavaria beer stood on it, as did a bottle of the sweet water Fruit Honey; there was a pound of Crawfish Tail candies, a pound of French cookies, and a pack of Vazhnyia cigarettes — all that he could buy with the money he had. Kazimir had never had a woman before; the prostitute’s name was Lyalya, and she had already slept with his friends — the sailors Naumov, Sokhnenko, and Grach. Kazimir was nervous, he tried to behave roughly, he was embarrassed that his member had been standing up like a stick for quite some time now, pushing against his black bell-bottoms; the prostitute noticed this and laughed at him; she shoved him with her chubby shoulder and blew cigarette smoke into his ear; he blushed, laughed stupidly, and poured the beer into glasses. They drank and smoked; the prostitute asked him to pour some Fruit Honey into her beer; Kazimir poured it nervously, in a hurry; the prostitute’s glass was full to the brim. She giggled and gave Kazimir one condition: if he could bring the glass to her lips without spilling it, she’d sleep with him; if he spilled it, she’d kick him out. Kazimir didn’t know whether she was joking or speaking the truth; he carefully lifted the glass, carried it to Lyalya’s red, laughing lips; suddenly, outside, there was a distant but very powerful clap of thunder; Kazimir froze with the glass in hand; he looked at the curve of the overfilled glass and saw barely noticeable waves running along it. He felt that they came from that far-off, powerful thunder. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the miniature, sweeping waves and kept on staring and staring at the glass; suddenly, in the liquid he saw a blind pilgrim who came to their house on occasion to drink water when he was eight years old: she had been born blind, she didn’t have any eyes at all, but she could heal all sorts of illness and foretell fates. To the young Kazimir she said, “When you grow up and become utterly confused about yourself and life, two brothers and a sister will come to you and they’ll show you something that will change you forever.” She left, and Kazimir forgot her prophecy; he remembered it only now, when he heard the distant thunder; he dropped the glass, the prostitute laughed, and when he looked at her — she had no eyes. At this point he woke up.

On awakening, Kazimir remembered: this dream was what happened to him in reality, when, as a seventeen-year-old sailor in Vyborg, he had gone ashore from the mine cruiser Watch Guard. That time he dropped the glass. But the prostitute let him have her anyway. And he immediately forgot about his vision.

He began to have the same dream frequently. At night, tortured, he tried to fight off the dream, he wanted to see something else in his sleep, but to no avail. During the day he felt a growing agitation, as though something enormous were moving inexorably toward him.

Speaking with his heart, Rubu understood the meaning of the prophecy and sobbed. His past life seemed like a nightmare to him. As it did to all of us.

We sailed down the Yenisei for two days and nights. On the third, the stokers locked in the boiler room informed us: all the coal had been used up. About twelve kilometers shy of Krasnoyarsk we ran the Komsomol up on a shoal and debarked onto the forest-rimmed shore. We took a pouch of money from the steamboat, gold dust, and some revolvers. We changed clothes as well: the bandits, having plundered five villages, had quite a lot of quality clothing. Rubu was weak, we held him by the arms. But we didn’t have to walk for long: a road ran along the shore of the Yenisei. The first cart that came by had been ordered to take a sick Red Commander to Krasnoyarsk. Riding into the city, we immediately rented a house on the edge of town and hid there: Rubu needed time to recover, his broken sternum hurt. But his new heart helped his body: our wounds healed more quickly than humans’ did. Four days later brother Rubu was already on his feet. We embraced him. Standing together on the small porch, the four of us silently rejoiced in one another. We didn’t need lightweight, short-lived human words. We had our own language. I opened the window onto the veranda: a golden autumn still held in Krasnoyarsk, the first snow hadn’t stuck to the ground. Silently, we gazed at the street with its wooden fences, birch trees, and one-story houses. It was evening. Watchdogs barked back and forth, somewhere an accordion played its wheezing notes. A drunken carter drove an empty dray down the street. His old horse plodded along unwillingly. The carter lashed her with the reins, cussed, and, noticing us, gave a drunken laugh, nodding at the horse.

“There’s a heartless nag, the old cunt!”

Rubu winced. And we winced as well. The heartless carter reproached the horse for heartlessness, beating her and exploiting her. This was a living picture of earthly life, an example of the “harmony” of being. Rubu let out a sob and clutched at his chest. A shiver ran through his body, tears burst from his eyes. We understood: his weeping-heart time had come. Sobbing, he fell into our arms. Sobs wracked him for a week. When he emerged from them he was entirely different.

We didn’t know what to do in Krasnoyarsk: the Ice was far from us, our hearts were silent, and we needed to be cautious with Rubu — the GPU was looking for him. But the help of the Light came to us. And a few days later, we understood the reason we had ended up in Krasnoyarsk.

That morning we decided to take a look at the town. I was certain that the heart magnet Fer and I possessed could find others like us if the pull of the Ice had brought them to this old Siberian town. We hired a cabbie, sat in the carriage, and drove around as slowly as possible. Wandering the streets, we moved toward the center. Our hearts were silent. Finally we turned onto Voskresenskaya, the main street, and rode down it. Mourning flags hung near a large building that looked like a theater, and a crowd of people had gathered. It was impossible to go any farther: cavalry stood in front of us and a brass band waited. I ordered the driver to turn around. And suddenly out of the crowd a young man in glasses, wearing a Chekist’s uniform and a black ribbon tied round his arm, ran toward us.

“Are you from Achinsk? Comrade Kudrin?” he asked Rubu anxiously.

“Yes,” Rubu answered unexpectedly.

“Well, what are you waiting for then, comrades?” The fellow in glasses waved his hands reproachfully. “They’re already about to bring the body out, and you still haven’t arrived! Let’s go, come on...”

We descended from the carriage and followed him through the crowd. The guards standing at the entrance with black bands on their bayonets let us into the building. In the spacious hall it was quiet and calm. There was a coffin, covered in flowers and wreaths. In the coffin lay a balding, middle-aged man with a mustache in the uniform of a Chekist, with a medal. Around him stood an honor guard of the local top brass. At some distance was a crowd of mourners. Almost all of them were military or Chekists in leather coats and jackets. As in an Orthodox church, the women stood apart from the men. Fer went to stand with the women; Ep, Rubu, and I with the men. People approached the coffin single file to bid the deceased farewell: first the men, then the women. Then there was a modest, quiet command; the coffin was lifted and carried from the hall. People began to sort through the wreaths.

“Comrade Kudrin! This one’s yours...” the same young man said, handing Rubu a wreath.

Rubu took the wreath and nodded at me. I walked over to him and we carried the wreath. On the black band in gold letters were the words REST IN PEACE, OUR VALIANT FRIEND! FROM THE CHEKISTS OF ACHINSK. The most astonishing thing was that no one but us claimed this wreath. The rest of the people took their own wreaths. As soon as we were outside, the brass band thundered. The coffin was carried along Voskresenskaya Street. Behind it came the wreaths, then the authorities, strolling at a leisurely pace; the band marched, the cavalry rode carrying a flag, and then a huge crowd followed. Fer and Ep ended up in the first rows of the crowd. Walking in step with Rubu, I suddenly felt a slight excitement in my heart. Looking back, my eye met Fer’s. But she shrugged her shoulders. I had felt that we weren’t here by accident. Judging by the situation, they were burying the head Chekist of Krasnoyarsk.

The funeral march played as we walked to the cemetery; we stood around the freshly dug grave. The coffin was set upon a wooden podium covered in red satin and black crepe. Next to the grave they placed a plywood cube painted a dark red. The crowd moved aside and a middle-aged Chekist in a uniform decorated with two medals stood on the cube. I hadn’t seen him in the auditorium during the farewell proceedings. Probably he had only just arrived. His face — resolute, intelligent, and rough — was framed by a small, light-chestnut beard and hair of the same color that was combed back unevenly. His grayish-blue eyes were stern. He scanned the crowed, rolled back his sloping shoulders, grabbed his belt with his left hand in a practiced gesture, and closed his right into a fist. Then he spoke.

“Comrades! Death has torn a valiant friend from our ranks, a comrade-in-arms, and an indefatigable warrior for the proletariat and world revolution, Comrade Valuev. The ardent heart of this faithful soldier of the Revolution gave out. A brilliant Communist, iron-hard Chekist, a man with an expansive soul and true Leninist-Stalinist temperament burned up in battle and the work of the Party. The fiery heart of this Chekist has stopped beating — ”

He suddenly stopped speaking. And my heart beat faster.

He paused, took a deep breath, and continued.

“Today, Communist Pyotr Valuev, we are all distressed to be burying you in the damp earth. But for me, your old comrade, it is especially painful. We met, Pyotr Frolovich, in the era of bloody czarism. The czar exiled us to the same small town, to Obdorsk, for our underground revolutionary work. They wanted us to sit there quietly, cease our campaign, stop drilling into the oppressed people. But then you and I up and showed those vermin — bam!” Here he shot his fist forward sharply and fiercely. His sunken cheeks filled with blood for a moment.

My heart could feel how Fer’s heart was throbbing. Our magnet had begun to work: we recognized a brother! There was no sweeter moment for our hearts. I closed my eyes. This resolute Chekist was one of us. That was why we had ended up in Krasnoyarsk.

I opened my eyes. The Chekist spoke passionately, aided by his fist. His face burned with indignation. He truly did not want to believe in death. I looked at Rubu. His inexperienced heart did not yet know. But his brain recognized the speaker.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Deribas. The head of the OGPU for the Far East.”

I squeezed the fingers with which Rubu held the wreath. He looked me in the eyes. My face shone with joy.

“Yes!” I whispered.

And Rubu’s heart understood. Rubu began to shake, and tears poured from his eyes. We moved our excited gaze to our new brother. Who as yet had no clue. “It was not in battle that you fell, dear comrade, not near Kherson from a White Guard saber, not in Pavlodar from a counterrevolutionary bullet. You died on another front, Pyotr Frolovich. On the most difficult and most necessary battle with counterrevolution, with the hidden scum, vermin, and enemies of the people. To our bright future, to the great ideas of Lenin-Stalin! Our Party, our people, our Chekists will not forget you, Communist and Chekist Pyotr Valuev. Rest in peace, dear comrade!”

He stepped off the red cube.

Then the secretary of the oblast Party committee and coworkers of the deceased spoke in turn.

They placed a cover on the coffin and nailed it shut. They lowered it and swiftly began to fill in the grave. Some Chekist waved his hand, and the hurried cavalry shot their weapons. He waved it again — and the band played “The Internationale.” Everyone standing around the grave began to sing.

They stuck a red star in the fresh hillock and covered it with wreaths. Fer and I, without saying anything, made our way through the crowd to Deribas. He stood with the secretary of the oblast committee, smoking. Chekists milled around them.

“Comrade Deribas!” I said in a loud voice.

The Chekists turned toward us. And the bodyguards immediately blocked our way. Deribas lifted his stern gray-blue eyes to look at us.

“We have very important business with you,” I said.

“Who are you?” Deribas asked abruptly.

“Your brother.”

He looked at me carefully. His heart was absolutely calm.

“What’s your name?”

“Bro.”

At that moment his heart winced. Fer and I felt his heart.

“What?” he asked again, frowning.

“Bro!” I repeated loudly and grasped Fer by the shoulders. “And this is your sister, Fer.”

Deribas’s sunken cheeks blanched. His heart flared up. But a very strong will struggled with his heart. Restrained it. And his heart yielded. Trying not to show this inner struggle, he finished his cigarette. He tossed the butt, stepped on it, and said, “Mikhalchuk, arrest them.”

The Chekists aimed their revolvers. We were searched, they took my Walter and Fer’s Browning.

“Put them on the train,” Deribas ordered. “We’ll have a chat along the way.”

We were led through the crowd. I saw Ep and Rubu out of the corner of my eye. Standing stock-still, they looked at us. But we walked along calmly, without giving any signs: as usual, we didn’t know what to do, but we believed in our hearts. The Chekists took us to the station. There was a train with two cars surrounded by a chain of guards. We were led to the second car and locked in a compartment. We embraced joyfully: we had found another brother! Our hearts began to speak. They already knew each other well and knew how to gain strength from conversations of the heart. We didn’t notice the train setting off. Some time passed, and our heart conversation was interrupted: the door was opened by the sentry. Next to him stood a Chekist.

“Out!” he ordered.

We left the compartment and moved along the corridor. The car was half empty. The few soldiers of the guard sat in compartments. We passed between the train cars and found ourselves in a first-class car that had been refurbished for the trains of high-level personnel. Many of the partitions had been torn out and sofas placed along the shuttered windows; rugs lay on the floor, and in the corner near a window were a machine gun and a gunner dozing on his feet. Deribas sat, in charge, surrounded by four Chekists in uniform and two Party workers in typical tunics. They had just eaten: a soldier and a woman in a white apron were removing the dirty dishes. On the table stood two empty bottles of Shustovsky prerevolutionary cognac. Deribas opened a pack of Cannon papirosy and put them in the center of the table. He looked tired. His heart was not on guard against strong emotional experiences. But his brain suppressed them. Judging by his haggard face, even though it was rosy from alcohol, he had buried a very dear friend today.

Everyone seated lit cigarettes.

“Let me introduce you, comrades,” Deribas spoke, drawing hard on his cigarette. “Before you stand my brother and my sister.”

Everyone around the table looked at us. He continued.

“Here you have the life of a Chekist — we bury friends and find relatives. And each of these relatives has a pistol in a pocket. Not bad, eh?”

The Party functionaries laughed. The Chekists smoked calmly.

“Who are you?” Deribas asked me.

“I am Bro,” I answered honestly.

“And you?” His gaze pierced Fer.

“And I am Fer.”

“Who sent you?”

Fer was silent: she didn’t know how to express our truth in the language of humans.

I answered. “The Primordial Light. Which exists in you, in me, and in her. The Light. It lives in your heart, it wants to awaken. You have been asleep all your life and lived like everyone else. We have come to awaken your heart. It will wake up and will speak in the language of the Light. And you will become happy. And you will realize who you are and why you came into this world. Your heart yearns for awakening. But your reason fears and hinders the heart. Your past, meaningless life will not let go of you. It wants you to keep on sleeping, and for your heart to sleep with you. It hangs on your heart like a sack of stones. Throw it off. Trust in us. And your heart will awaken.”

Deribas glanced at his companions. He winked at them.

“So that’s the way the cookie crumbles! I shall soon awaken, comrade Communists.”

The Party functionaries laughed. The Chekists looked at me angrily. But our magnet was working: Fer helped me a great deal. Deribas’s heart quivered. But he was fighting until the last: mortally pale, he continued to joke.

“And exactly how are you going to awaken it? With bullets?”

“No. With an Ice hammer. We will make it from the Ice sent to the Earth in order to awaken our Brotherhood. This is the Ice of Eternal Harmony, the Ice that we all created together when we were rays of Light. We committed a Great Mistake and fell into a trap. The Ice returned to us in order to save us. So that we can again become Light, so that this ugly planet will disappear forever. The Ice hammer will strike you in the chest. And you will call out your true name.”

He listened, his body rigid. His nerves were stretched to the limit. We felt his heart, like a little wild animal that has been cornered.

“Hmmm...” Deribas opened his whitened lips and grinned awkwardly. “These are the kinds of lunatics we have here in Siberia...this, uh...nowadays there are many, quite a few.”

His joke didn’t work.

“No, there are very few of us,” said Fer.

“Altogether there are 23,000. And you — are one of us,” I added.

He glanced at me furiously, tore open the collar of his tunic, and began to rise. His hand shook, his beard trembled.

“You...you...you’re an enemy.” he hissed.

His eyes rolled back and he collapsed in a faint. The Chekists caught him.

The Party people jumped up.

“He’s tired...heart problems,” muttered one of them.

“Is there a doctor on board?” another worried.

“He doesn’t need a doctor,” I answered.

The Party boss gave a nod to the Chekists. “Take away those...”

And we were led back to our compartment. But not for long. An hour later I was again take to Deribas. He lay on the sofa in his spacious compartment. Near him sat a Party functionary and a Chekist. They had opened the window and the wind fluttered the curtains. The wheels of the train clacked loudly. Deribas was pale. He made a sign to me. I sat down.

“Go out, I’ll talk to him,” said Deribas.

“Terenty Dmitrich, you’d do better to rest,” objected the Party functionary.

“Go on out, go on, Pyotr.”

They left. I remained seated. Deribas stared at me for a long time. But now it was without fear and anger.

“You knew my grandfather?” he finally asked.

“No,” I answered.

“Then who told you about the ice?”

“The Ice.”

He paused for a moment. “Is that a nickname?”

“No. It’s the Ice that flew through space and fell to Earth near the Stony Tungus River.”

“And it knows how to speak? It has a mouth?”

“It doesn’t have a mouth. But there is the memory of the Primordial Light. I hear it with my heart.”

Deribas looked at me attentively. Fer wasn’t with me, and our heart magnet wasn’t working. Reason once again enchained Deribas’s heart in armor.

“You have three days until Khabarovsk. If you won’t tell me who sent you and where you heard about the ice, you won’t leave this train on your own. You’ll be thrown off it. Got it?”

“I have already told you the truth,” I answered.

He called the guards and I was taken back to Fer.

It took us almost four days to make it to Khabarovsk. During this time no one asked us about anything anymore. When the guards brought us food — boiled potatoes — we refused them. Then a young Chekist showed up to ask why we weren’t eating. We told him about our preferences. We were brought four carrots. We ate them. And spoke with our hearts in the half-lit compartment with gated windows. And we hung in the abyss. Amid the stars and the Eternity. The Light shone in our hearts. They became stronger. We learned more and more new words of the Light. We perfected ourselves. And we forgot about the difficult world of humans. As soon as we arrived in Khabarovsk, we were reminded of it.

As soon as the train stopped, we were brought to Deribas.

He stood in his compartment, dressed in a leather coat.

“Well, then?” he asked, lighting a cigarette. “There are two ways for you to go: on the ground or under it. If you tell me who sent you and who told you about the ice, you will go the first way. If you don’t talk, you’ll go the second. Tercium non datur,” he added with a terrible accent.

We remained silent. But our magnet began speaking.

“Made up your mind?” he continued, but he could feel us.

His armor had cracked, ever so slightly.

“We will go the first way,” I said. “And you will go with us. After the Ice awakens your heart. The Ice, which awaits you.”

He blanched. His reason began to fight his heart once again. It grabbed on to laughter.

Deribas laughed nervously.

“Seryozha!” he called.

A young Chekist entered the compartment.

“Listen, what should I do with these Pinocchios?” he asked with a grin, trying not to look at us.

“Comrade Deribas, let me interrogate them. I can make the deaf and dumb talk.”

“Maybe they really are crackers? Ice, for fucking sake...Where is this ice of yours?”

“Four days’ walk from the Stony Tungus. And part of it is buried on the shore.”

His heart trembled. Reason yielded, but slowly. Deribas tossed his unfinished papirosa on the rug.

“To hell with all of them! My friend died, the counterrevs are on the move, and now — ice, goddamnit! Seryozha, to the cellar with them. And question them so they’ll start talking.”

He left the compartment in irritation, but also with obvious relief. The young Chekist was puzzled: something was happening to his iron chief. The steamroller of willpower with which Deribas so skillfully crushed and shattered people didn’t seem to work against us.

From the train station we were sent to the OGPU building, located on Volochaevskaya Street, and placed in different cells. They were in the cellar and were crowded. For the most part, my cell contained formerly affluent people who had lost everything after the Revolution. In Fer’s cell were their wives. Now the ruthless Soviet authorities had taken the last thing these people had — their freedom and life. They were accused of counterrevolutionary plots, concealing gold, and anti-Soviet propaganda. The men were exhausted from the interrogations and the crowdedness of the gloomy cell; some of them had been ferociously beaten. Fear paralyzed these people; they conversed in whispers, prayed, and cried secretly. Beyond the wall of my cell were criminals who cursed loudly and often sang: the new authorities were softer on them than the old regime, as they considered them socially close to the proletariat, but having gone astray.

Ending up in the cellar of the OGPU, I listened carefully to the quiet conversations between the prisoners. From them I learned that in the city and the entire Far East region there were two all-powerful men — Deribas, the head of the OGPU; and Kartevelishvili, the secretary of the Party Regional Committee. They were the sovereign bosses of the Far East. But recently they hadn’t been getting along very well. Deribas, according to the prisoners, was the soul of evil, who had descended upon Khabarovsk from Moscow. He was stern and merciless to all the “formers,” and arrests went on continuously. One of the imprisoned, who had fought with the Whites during the Civil War, said that Deribas had the staunch belief, which had become his rule of action, that all the “formers” should either dig ditches for Stalinist construction projects or feed the worms. Articulating this maxim during interrogations and witness confrontations, Deribas usually added his awkwardly pronounced “Tercium non datur.” Accordingly, the arrested “enemies of the people” were either condemned to long sentences in the camps or to execution.

I spent the night half dozing, trying to reach Fer’s heart. And at dawn I was successful. Our hearts touched each other through the brick walls of the underground. It was a miracle given to us by the Light. Now things were much easier for us: I could speak with Fer’s heart at any moment, and she also felt me. We could help each other, using our heart magnet. The next morning I used the magnet for the first time.

As soon as the prisoners had eaten their breakfast of fried dough, I was taken to interrogation with that same young Chekist from Deribas’s train. Sitting behind a table, he introduced himself as Investigator Smirnov and demanded that I name the “participants in my counterrevolutionary conspiracy.” If I refused, he promised to disembowel me.

My heart told me: it was time to act. I answered that I was ready to name the people who had sent us, but only personally to Deribas and in a face-to-face encounter including Fer. An hour later, Fer and I were brought to Deribas’s office. He was alone, sitting behind a table and writing something. Above him hung two portraits: Stalin and Karl Marx. While he was writing, Fer and I tuned our magnet. Deribas raised his eyes to look at us. And immediately turned them away. And I felt that we were the first people in his life whom he didn’t understand...Which meant — he didn’t know how to treat us. He couldn’t simply execute us: something torturous prevented him from doing that. Serving in the penal system, he had come across all sorts of prisoners. He’d seen courageous White Guards ready to die, who spat in his face; uncompromising priests, who saw the Communists as the demons of hell; violent monarchist-plotters, who prayed for the murdered czar; fanatical SRs, who thought the Bolsheviks had betrayed the Revolution; anarchists, who placed no value on their own lives; and people who simply had strong spirits. The machine of the OGPU ground them all up, and for each of them Deribas had his approach. He understood each of them; each of them had a shelf in his mind. Us, he failed to understand. Because he was the same as us.

I told him everything I knew about the Ice.

He listened with a stony face, his eyes lowered.

“This is what I’ve decided,” he said, his fingers trembling as he retrieved a cigarette. “Today I will send my people to the Stony Tungus, to the place where you buried your ice. They will bring it here in good condition. If there isn’t any ice there — I will personally shoot you.”

We were taken away.

In the cell I moaned and growled with excitement, frightening the “formers.” We had broken through the iron armor of Deribas! In the logic of the OGPU his order to make the expedition to the Katanga seemed complete madness. Any other Chekist of his rank would have had us tortured long ago, and then executed. The next day he would have forgotten about the madmen who talked about Ice flying in from outer space. And our bullet-pierced hearts would have happily allowed the worms inside.

But our hearts had not awoken in order to make the worms happy. Their job was to awaken the sleeping. Our heart magnet was drawing in the “iron” Deribas, slowly but surely. The Chekist expedition returned in about two weeks. And the Chekists brought the Ice! The hearts in our bodies, locked in the underground, were overjoyed.

We saw our Ice in Deribas’s office. One of the seven pieces lay on a silver tray. Deribas sat behind his desk. Over the last two weeks he had grown pinched and lost weight. In his light-chestnut hair and his slightly reddish beard, streaks of gray had appeared. Two bodyguards stood next to him: he was afraid.

“You spoke the truth,” he said, lighting up and blowing out the smoke as though trying to shield himself from us. “They found the ice you buried. Seven pieces of it.”

We approached the Ice and placed our hands on it.

Deribas didn’t interfere. He sat with his eyes closed. He had lost himself completely. We were in bliss, speaking with the Ice.

“And what...now?” Deribas muttered, as though asking himself.

“Now order a simple stick and a strip of leather be brought here,” I said.

Deribas lifted the telephone receiver. “Pospelov, bring me a simple stick and a strip of leather.”

When the order had been carried out, I asked Deribas to remove the guards and lock the door. The guards didn’t look at us or him like madmen: the office of the head Chekist of the Far East had seen stranger things.

Deribas ordered the guards to leave. Then he stood with difficulty and walked to the door. It was only about eight meters, but for him the distance became eight kilometers. I will never forget how this man walked, this man we had broken. Slumping, he could barely drag his legs in his squeaky boots. His head trembled, his mouth was half open, his strong peasant hands hung loose. He was literally dragging himself to the door. In order to lock it forever. And leave behind it the terrible world of people.

Reaching the door, Deribas turned the key in the lock and leaned his forehead against the door.

“I will...shoot you,” he whispered.

But his weak hand couldn’t even reach his holster. His sluggish fingers clenched and unclenched. I turned him around sharply, his back to the door, unbuttoned his tunic, and ripped open his undershirt. There was no cross on his neck.

Fer and I lifted the Ice and threw it on the floor. It cracked. We grabbed an appropriate piece, tied it with the leather to the stick. And approached Deribas. He passively waited for us. His heart waited.

I swung back and struck him in the chest with the Ice hammer. He cried out briefly and, losing consciousness, began to fall on us. We caught him and laid him flat on his back on the floor. The blow had been strong: blood flowed from the broken breastbone. Deribas’s eyes rolled back, his body quivered and jerked, as though he were having an epileptic fit.

We waited for the awakening of the heart.

It trembled. And suddenly stopped.

Deribas stopped jerking. We froze. His face had turned deathly pale. His heart wasn’t beating.

There was a knock at the door, and the voice of his secretary asked, “Comrade Deribas?”

He felt that something had happened in the office. And immediately the phone on the table rang. Deribas lay before us, lifeless.

“Comrade Deribas!” the secretary cried and knocked on the door.

But Deribas answered neither us nor the humans.

“Break down the door!” cried the secretary.

The guards threw themselves at the door. I froze. Because I didn’t know what to do. And suddenly Fer clutched at his shoulders, shaking him.

“Brother, speak with your heart! Little brother, our dear, sweet little brother, speak with your heart!”

His heart didn’t answer.

The door cracked.

Fer lay on top of Deribas, embracing him. A piercing cry escaped her mouth. And I felt how her heart stirred our brother’s stopped heart.

And his heart came to life.

“Ig, Ig, Ig,” it spoke.

We cried out for joy.

The door flew open and the Chekists rushed into the office. But we didn’t notice them: our faces were pressed to the bloody chest, our heart caught the voice of the awoken heart, and our lips repeated the name of our brother.

“Ig, Ig, Ig!”

Someone hit me on the head with the handle of a revolver, and I lost consciousness.

I came to in an isolation cell.

It was almost dark: light pushed through the iron “muzzle” on the tiny cellar window. I lay on a wet floor. It smelled of human urine. I raised my head and touched it: there was a large lump on the back of my head, and my hair was sticky with dried blood. I rose carefully, holding on to the wall. My head spun slightly. But my heart beat evenly: as if it had been resting while I lay without consciousness. I looked around: there was nothing in the cell. I walked around carefully. My head hurt. I pressed it to the cool “muzzle.” And suddenly remembered everything.

My heart trembled joyously: I had another brother, Ig!

I moaned with joy, closed my eyes, and smiled in the darkness. My heart began to search for Fer. The thick brick walls were no impediment: Fer was nearby, in the cell. We began to talk. And we felt very good...

A few days passed.

I was woken by the scraping of the locks. The door opened and the warden jerked his head: “Out.”

I left the cell. And soon I stood in the office of the director of investigations, Kagan. Small, swarthy, with a cruel and intelligent face, he started asking me questions about what happened. I realized that I shouldn’t tell him the truth. Therefore I said that Deribas was interrogating us, then he had an epileptic fit, he fell and hit his chest on the table. And we tried to help him. This answer, strange as it seemed, satisfied Kagan. Turning a sharpened pencil in his hands, he pressed a button, ringing a bell.

I was sent to the general cell.

And a few days later Fer and I were taken to the hospital where Ig lay. At the entrance to a separate ward sat a guard wearing a white doctor’s robe over his tunic. He opened the door and let us into the spacious, light room. Ig lay on the only bed in the room. He had turned almost completely gray. His face shone with inexpressible joy. We ran to him, embraced him. And he began to sob from happiness. Our hearts began to touch his awakening heart. It was so young! Ig quivered and cried.

We spoke the first words to the awakening heart.

A large, red-cheeked woman doctor came in.

Seeing us embracing the crying Ig, she broke into a smile.

“So these are your relatives, Comrade Deribas?”

Ig nodded.

She placed a glass of medicine on the stool and sighed, her large breasts heaving.

“What great happiness it is to find your dear kin on earth.”

We completely agreed with her.

We were freed the same day, and Ig’s assistant, the Chekist Zapadny, congratulated us: in the department everyone already knew that Deribas, who had lost his family in the Civil War, had found a sister and brother. The witnesses of our talk about the Ice and a secret mission were told that, trying to get to Krasnoyarsk, we had eaten virtually nothing (this was true!), which meant that we were slightly “touched in the head” by the time we arrived. Congratulating us, the broad-faced Chekist Zapadny apologized for the “laying on of hands” and the “forced lack of hospitality.”

“Gracious, you really do look a lot like our Terenty Dmitrich!” he admitted to us quite sincerely.

“Well, of course: blue eyes!” I thought secretly and joyously.

They gave us quarters in the OGPU dormitory.

Ig left the hospital three days later. The doctors diagnosed him with “extreme exhaustion and stress, causing a deep loss of consciousness with features of a quasi-epileptic seizure.” From Moscow came Yagoda’s directive: send Deribas on vacation to regain his health. The chairman of the OGPU of the USSR loved and valued “the ferocious Deribas, whose iron hand had brought order to the Far East.”

In Khabarovsk, Ig occupied a lovely house on Amursky Boulevard. His former wife and son stayed in Moscow, and here he was living with an actress of the Dramatic Theater. In Ig’s home we once again met alone, just the three of us. Ig had recovered, his chest was healing, and his heart had begun to live. In the small but cozy living room we started a fire in the fireplace, drew the drapes, threw off our pitiful human clothes, lowered ourselves onto the rug, and froze in an embrace.

Time stopped for us.

When we awoke, for the first time since we met, Fer and I were able to eat our fill of fruit, which was plentiful in Ig’s house. The head of the regional OGPU sent Crimean grapes and peaches, Astrakhan watermelons and plums, pears and mandarin oranges from the Caucasus. Ig enjoyed watching how, our naked bodies illuminated by the flames from the fireplace, we enjoyed the fruit, us. He resembled an infant learning to walk. Once cruel and implacable, seeing life as an unending, ruthless struggle, it was as though he had crawled out of his old, steel armor, riddled with bloody spikes, and now, soft and defenseless, was taking his first step.

Our hearts gently touched his.

Fer and I told our newly acquired brother about our lives. And he told us about his. The life of forty-five-year-old Terenty Deribas had followed a path marked by the sign of Eternal Struggle: a peasant childhood in a remote village, then the town trade school, a working-class factory milieu, an illegal group of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, the romanticism of the revolutionary underground, belief in a bright future, leaflets and proselytizing, Russian Marxism, arrest, exile, escape, again arrest, again exile, Revolution, workers’ brigades, an inborn ability to lead, to infect people with his own anger and bend them to his will, the Civil War, becoming commissar first of a regiment, then a division, afterward came the army, victory over the Whites, experience and authority, a position in the All-Russian Cheka, ruthlessness toward remaining enemies, Lenin’s personal gratitude, steadfastness and cruelty, absolute loyalty to the Party, the position of director of the OGPU’s Secret Department, member of the collegiums of the OGPU, and then — ambassador plenipotentiary of the OGPU for the Far East.

During the war and later, Deribas had personally shot dozens of people; thousands were executed on his orders. For the Bolsheviks he was an ideal machine of suppression and destruction.

When the Ice hammer struck him in the chest, Deribas died.

And Ig appeared on earth. And became our brother.

He told us an amazing story. In 1908 he was living in exile again in western Siberia, in a little village on the banks of the great Irtysh River. He was waiting for winter, when the Irtysh would freeze and it would be possible to make a deal with a driver and escape over the ice to Omsk on a sleigh. At the end of June he had a dream: he dreamed about his grandfather, Yerofei Deribas. In his dream his grandfather’s entire body was made of ice — his head, his crooked cavalry legs, and the stump of his right arm, lost during the war with the Turks. His grandfather was sitting at a new table that still smelled of freshly planed wood, in a newly built cottage of the Deribases’, in the very same settlement, Uspensk, where Terenty had been born and grown up. In the middle of the table lay a roasted pig head. Seven-year-old Teresha sat across from his grandfather. Grandfather cut off pieces of the hot, steaming pork with his only, and extremely deft, left hand, and offered a piece to each member of the family, along with a humorous remark. Everyone was laughing and eating the pork with a good appetite. Terenty felt how delicious the meat smelled, he was very hungry; he drooled, he couldn’t wait any longer — he was terribly hungry. However, Grandfather was taking his time: the ice hand, armed with a knife, cut off another piece, handed it out, but again it was not for Terenty. While Grandfather told his joke, he held the warm pork in his hand; grease dripped from it in large drops. Finally everyone except little Terenty had received his piece and was eating the warm pork with relish. Grandfather himself was eating as well.

“Grandpa, what about me?” Terenty asked.

Grandfather ate and looked at Terenty with icy eyes.

“Grandpa, what about me?” Terenty asked again, on the verge of tears.

Quickly swallowing the last of his piece, Grandfather wiped his icy beard with his ice hand, burped, and said, “It ain’t needful for you.”

Terenty’s face was contorted with hurt.

“And what do I need?”

“This is what,” Grandfather answered, and suddenly his icy fist slugged Terenty sharply and very painfully in the chest.

After that blow, Terenty’s entire being understood that he needed the Ice.

That night in Siberia, sleeping on the tile stove in his hut, Terenty was awakened by an enormous clap of thunder. The hut swayed. His chest hurt as though someone had actually hit him. And he sensed that his grandfather had died at that very moment. It was true: Grandfather Yerofei passed away the morning of June 30, 1908.

Hearing the first story about the Ice from me on the train, he remembered his grandfather and the fantastical dream. At the same time he began to have the feeling that I had known his grandfather. That was why he had asked me about him so obsessively.

Ig’s dream strengthened our faith in the power of the Ice. Each of our people had had dreams related to the Ice. And in this was the Great Wisdom of the Light.

After catching up on sleep, we got ready to travel. The Chekist Deribas was supposed to go to a sanatorium on the Crimean shore of the Black Sea in order to regain his health. We traveled with him. We were given new documents with the celebrated surname Deribas: I became Alexander Dmitrievich, Fer was Anfisa Dmitrievna. We had to stop in Krasnoyarsk and find Rubu and Ep, so as to take them with us. We were worried about them — the OGPU was looking for Rubu. Furthermore, we had to preserve the remaining six pieces of Ice. Ig hid four pieces in his attic: it was cold there, and winters in Khabarovsk were very cold. He packed two pieces in wooden chests, closed them with the lead seals of the OGPU, and ordered that they be loaded onto the train. They were placed in the unheated space between the cars.

At the end of October the train set off. Traveling in it were guards, a cook, a doctor, Deribas’s secretary, and us. It was already winter in eastern Siberia — the snow lay on the hillocks that swam past the windows and it swirled around the cars. The train with a red star on the nose of the locomotive rushed toward the west. The wheels clacked along the frozen rails of the Trans-Siberian. The three of us sat in Deribas’s compartment and talked about the future. A very significant endeavor awaited us. The endeavor of our lives. We stood at the beginning of the great road to the Light. It was important not to make any mistakes, not to act in haste. Neither did we have the right to move too slowly.

There were only five of us, five awakened hearts. There remained 22,995 brothers and sisters scattered about the complex world of this planet. They lived in different countries and spoke different languages, unaware of the Great Kinship, knowing nothing about their true nature. Their hearts slept, pumping blood like wordless machines in the corporeal darkness. Then they wore out, grew old, and stopped. And they were buried in the earth. But the Light, on leaving the dying heart, immediately passed to the heart of a newborn person, making him our brother. And this tiny heart began to pump blood again in the darkness of an infant body.

We had to break this vicious cycle. By means of the Ice hammer we had to separate the Divine Light from vile, short-lived flesh.

Our hearts burned with passion.

But passion alone was not much. We had to begin a long, persistent war against humankind for our brothers and sisters. This required huge resources. In order to sift through the human race, searching for the golden grain of our Brotherhood, we had to control this race.

Money provided power in the world of people. But in Soviet Russia money didn’t play the same role as in the rest of the world. In a country living under the red flag with the hammer and sickle, only the state wielded absolute power. In order to achieve success in Russia, we would have to become part of the state machine, take cover under it, and, wearing the uniforms of officialdom, go about achieving our goal. There was no other way. Any secret society existing outside of the totalitarian state was doomed. We couldn’t allow ourselves to become underground members of a secret order, hiding in the dark corners under the hierarchical ladder of power. That road led only to the torture chambers of the OGPU and the Stalinist camps. We had to clamber up this ladder and stand solidly on it. Then the difficult and painstaking process of searching for our people would possess the necessary protection. The fellowship had to enter the power structure. We had to make our way through its thick skin. In order to search for our brothers and sisters.

That was what our heads decided.

That was what our wise hearts prompted us to do.

So we began the search. We decided to stop in every large town. And we did. The train stopped in Chita. Ig called his secretary and right before our eyes climbed easily back into the steel armor of the Far East’s top Chekist. With others he again became Deribas, ruthless and principled, the guard dog of the Revolution. He ordered his secretary to bring the head of the local OGPU. When the boss, perplexed, climbed into the car, Deribas ordered him to provide us with a car, a driver, and a Chekist escort. Fer and I drove around the city in the car. Our heart magnet began to work. We were looking. Stopping on the streets, we went into markets and stores, into Soviet organizations and barracks. All day we moved around the cozy, two-story town of Chita, surrounded by mountains, white with snow. But our hearts were silent: there were none of us in Chita. Exhausted and despairing from the heart’s anticipation, I decided that we should return to the train station. On the way back I realized just how widely we were scattered among humans: in a town with a population of forty thousand, there wasn’t a single one of us! Fer’s heart, and mine, appreciated the miraculous and rapid acquisition of three brothers. The Light living in our hearts helped us.

Arriving at the small square in front of the station, strewn with cigarette butts and pine-nut shells, we began to get out of the car. And suddenly our hearts felt a jolt. Somewhere nearby a flute sounded plaintively. Fer looked around. Her heart felt our presence more powerfully than mine. Like a sleepwalker, she moved across the square, bumping into idlers and passengers waiting for the trains. I followed her. The Chekist, not understanding whom we had been searching for so intensely all day, stood by the car and smoked. As I walked, my heart began to tremble. The feeling got stronger and stronger. My eyes, watching Fer’s back, clouded with tears. How I loved my sister at such fateful moments! She led me. And our hearts called out to each other.

Fer stopped short. I almost ran into her.

On a wooden box, there sat an intelligent-looking, middle-aged man dressed in a once-expensive but now tattered dirty coat with a soiled Arctic-fox fur collar. He was playing the flute. A cracked pince-nez trembled on his long, hooked nose. His reddish mustache was covered in frost. His light-blue eyes looked vacantly doomed: this man no longer had anything to lose. There were holes in his old gray felt boots. He was playing something plaintive and mournful.

We stood stock-still in front of him.

Our hearts trembled: he was our brother!

His sleeping heart could feel the power of the Light, which flared in our hearts, for the first time. The melody stopped abruptly. Our brother raised his eyes. They met with ours. His pince-nez trembled, his eyes widened in horror. He raised his flute to fend us off, and fell from the box. He cried out hoarsely, “Nooooooo!”

We lifted him under his arms. He wailed in a raspy, congested voice and tried weakly to break loose. His terror wasn’t a sham: his delicate, emaciated face paled, and a spasm ran through the muscles of his mouth.

“Noooo! No! Noooo!” he wailed, writhing in our hands.

People looked at us with curiosity. The Chekist ran over.

“We were looking for him!” I informed the Chekist with a voice breaking with joy.

“I know this guy, the rat!” the Chekist grabbed the station musician by his collar. “White scum! Come on then, you, enough pretending!”

The three of us dragged the struggling musician to the platform where our red-nosed train stood. Along the way the musician lost consciousness. The flute fell from his stiff fingers. But we didn’t pick it up. What would he need a flute for now? Joy burst from our hearts. We wanted to laugh, squeal, and roar from happiness.

“This cockroach here played in the White’s orchestra,” the Chekist muttered. “They didn’t knock him off, felt sorry for the turd: after all, he’s a musician...Comrade Babich told him to stay away from Chita — ‘Don’t let me hear there’s a trace of you in town, you piece of White shit’ — but no, he had to crawl back, the scoundrel. Were you looking for him for the old stuff?”

“For new things!” I answered joyously.

The Chekist remained silent.

We carried the unconscious flautist into the main compartment; Deribas gave the command. And the train began to move. The local Chekists standing on the platform saluted. The city of Chita, which had presented us with a brother, swam past the window, away from us forever: there were no more of us there. Evening fell, in the two-story houses the windows lit up dimly. The snow-covered mountains hid the town.

The guards brought the box with the Ice into the compartment. Then they left. Ig locked the door. His hand trembled with impatience. We opened the crate. We took the Ice and placed it on the floor. And, unable to restrain ourselves, grabbed it with our hands. Our hearts resonated with the Ice. Moans and cries burst from our lips.

The musician moved and opened his eyes. He looked at us in terror.

It was time to awaken our brother.

“Don’t be afraid of anything,” I told him. “You are among the people closest to you.”

He screamed like a wounded hare. Ig covered his mouth, tied it with a handkerchief. We began to undress the wandering musician. Under his coat was a woman’s old top, torn at the elbows; under that, a dirty tunic. It teemed with lice. His body was thin and hadn’t been washed for a long time, like a truly homeless man. He writhed in our hands and moaned weakly. Ig broke off the necessary piece of Ice with the handle of a revolver. Fer pulled the laces from her boots and looked around: in the corner of Deribas’s compartment stood a red flag. On Soviet holidays it was attached to the locomotive. Fer grabbed the flag and tore the faded red cloth from it. We tied the Ice to the stick; Ig lifted the moaning musician and pressed the man’s back to his own chest. I aimed at the thin, dirty chest bone, drew back, and struck it with the Ice hammer. The blow was so powerful that the musician and Ig toppled backward, tripped on the sofa, and fell. The stick broke, pieces of the Ice skittered all around. One of them cut Fer on the forehead above her eyebrow. The musician lost consciousness. Ig rushed to him and removed the gag from his mouth. He wasn’t breathing.

“You killed him!” Ig exclaimed.

But Ig’s heart was still very young compared to ours. We knew that the brother was alive. Blood began to run from his nose. Fer pressed her ear to the flautist’s chest. His heart remained silent.

“Speak with your heart,” she whispered passionately.

“Speak with your heart.” I gave his heart a little push.

“Speak with your heart,” Ig growled.

And our brother began to speak with his heart.

“Kta, Kta, Kta.”

Our exclamations of joy were so loud that Deribas’s secretary knocked on the door.

Ig shouted out happily.

Brother Kta moved and let out a moan. He was in pain: the force of the hammer had cracked his chest bone. But his awakened heart beat and spoke, beat and spoke.

“Kta! Kta! Kta!”

We cried for joy. Kta moaned. Blood dripped from the wound and flowed down his thin ribs. Ig pressed a kerchief to the wound and, tears pouring out of his eyes, shouted so loud that his face turned purple.

“Furman, get the doctor!”

“Yes, sir!” came the answer on the other side of the door.

I rushed to collect the precious Ice. But my heart suddenly let me know: I should not pick up these pieces; the Ice hammer strikes ONLY one heart. There was the Wisdom of the Light in this. I froze, squatting over the pieces lying on the rug. A louse crawled across one of them. It shook me out of my stupor. Lifting the main piece, I placed it back in the crate, closed the top, and nailed it shut with the handle of a revolver. Ig grabbed the splinters of wood from the stick and pushed them and the red material under the sofa.

There was a knock at the door. Ig opened it. The doctor entered, followed by the secretary Furman.

“His sternum is broken,” said Ig, pointing to Kta. “Do what you need to, Semyonov. You are responsible for his life.”

The doctor touched the chest. Kta cried out.

“A crack,” muttered the doctor. “We need a soft splint.”

“Do it...do what you have to! Or I’ll shoot you!” Ig shouted, losing control of himself.

The doctor turned pale: Deribas had never spoken to him that way.

I put my hand on his back and nudged him with my heart: “Calm down.”

Unlike Fer and me, Ig had not yet cried with his heart. And he had not yet discovered the Wisdom of the Light.

The doctor placed a soft bandage on Kta’s chest and gave him a shot of morphine. Kta fell into a deep sleep. We covered him with a blanket and left him on a sofa in the compartment. The guards carried the crate with the Ice back to the cold space between cars. We sat around Kta as he slept. Night fell. I turned off the light in the compartment. The car rocked. Outside stretched a black, impenetrable forest; occasionally we caught sight of the starry sky. We held hands in the dark. Our hearts beat regularly. They protected our newborn’s sleep.

The next morning Kta came to. Fear had not yet left his emaciated body. But we did everything to make sure that he understood who we were.

The next day was spent along the shore of the Baikal, the huge Siberian lake. Suddenly we stopped. Deribas was informed that two trains had collided up ahead. Fixing the rails took four days. Over this time, Kta finally returned to his old self. We saw the design of the Light in this: the trains collided to allow an awakening heart some rest.

Kta told us about himself: he, Iosif Tseitlin, came from a moderately well-off Jewish family. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in flute, played in the Bolshoi Theater orchestra, during the Civil War escaped from the capital to the area beyond the Urals, was captured by the Whites, played the trumpet in a military band, was then imprisoned by the Reds, miraculously escaped execution, lived four years in Chita giving private music lessons, then was arrested as a “former person,” again miraculously escaped the repressions, was exiled from the town, wandered here and there, playing at stations, then for some reason returned to Chita, although the head of the OGPU there, Artyom Babich, had threatened him with the firing squad.

Tseitlin had also had a strange dream: June 29, 1908, outside of Moscow at the dacha of the pianist Maria Kerzina, there was a musical evening in honor of her husband’s birthday; he was a well-known industrialist, a patron of the musical arts, the chairman of the Moscow Circle of Russian Music Lovers; chamber music was played at the party, Tseitlin also performed, playing with a string quartet; everything ended with a traditional dacha table and a noisy nocturnal swim in the Kliazma River. That evening Iosif drank more than usual and early in the morning he awoke thirsty, with a headache; descending from the attic so as not to bother the sleeping guests, he went out into the small garden, found the well, opened its wooden top. The bucket on the rope had already been lowered, he had only to lift it; Iosif grabbed the iron handle of the drum and began to turn it, pulling up a full bucket. The well was deep, very deep; Iosif turned and turned the iron handle, raising the bucket and thinking about the healing, teeth-chattering cold of the well water; but the bucket wouldn’t appear; tortured by thirst and impatience, Tseitlin looked in the well; it was incredibly deep: you couldn’t see the bottom! The well walls narrowed to a black point over which a small bucket hung — it was still very far away; Iosif began to turn it with all his might; the rope wrapped around the drum, making it fatter and fatter, until it turned into a thick skein; Iosif grew tired and began turning with both hands; they trembled from tension. Finally the bucket appeared, and Iosif looked at it: it was cubic in form; the unexpectedness of this caused him to stop turning and stare at the unusual bucket; the purest well water splashed in it; at this moment the sun rose, and its rays touched the water in the bucket; the surface of the water instantly shone with light and it was as though it had become a light-bearing icon; the picture on this icon was of a blue-eyed, blond youth and a young woman with a large chunk of ice in her hands; from them a new strength arose, and shook Tseitlin so profoundly that he let go of the handle. He woke up on a bed in the dacha’s attic, very thirsty. He went out into the garden, as in his dream, found the well in the same place, and opened it; a full bucket of water stood on the edge of the well chamber; he began to drink greedily from the bucket; having drunk his full, he stepped back, saw his reflection in the water, and understood that someday a young man and a girl with a piece of ice would come for him.

When Fer and I approached him on the square in front of the train station, he recognized us and cried out because his dream had come true.

We spoke with Kta.

Then the train moved.

The next stop was Irkutsk. We did the same thing as in Chita: sat in a Chekist car and rode around the city. It was more civilized then Chita, here there were not only one- and two-story homes, but we came across fairly beautiful buildings as well. And again we spent the whole day driving through the city, taking a look at busy places. And again no one noticed our heart magnet. Evening fell quickly. Arriving at the station, Fer and I got out of the car. The train station was bigger than in Chita. But the square in front of it was smaller. It was also strewn with cigarette butts, the shells of seeds and pine nuts. We stopped in the middle. But here no one was playing the flute.

Irkutsk was empty.

We returned to our train and it departed. After illuminating Irkutsk with our hearts, Fer and I felt an enormous exhaustion: it was as though we had run the gauntlet, like soldiers who had committed some offense in the czarist army. Our hearts had been squeezed and were empty. We didn’t even have the strength to cry. Barely making it to our beds, we collapsed and fell asleep.

When we awoke, we were already in Krasnoyarsk.

Here we had to look for Ep and Rubu — and for new brothers and sisters. We were met at the station: the Irkutsk Chekists had informed Krasnoyarsk about Deribas’s train; a car took Ig and me to the municipal directorate of the OGPU. Fer remained in the train with Kta. The first order of business was to drive to our old address. The little house, on whose terrace I had heard the drunken carter talk to his horse, was empty. Our brothers had left. The neighbors knew nothing. Returning to the directorate, Ig demanded the operational summaries for the last month. In one of them there was a report about the theft of a truck belonging to the city bakery. Three days later this car had been found abandoned in Kansk. There the thieves got on the train; the ticket seller at the station recognized them. They bought tickets to Khabarovsk. That meant that they were already there! Ep and Rubu were struggling to come to our aid, not knowing that we had already been helped. Now we had to find them in Khabarovsk. Or in some other Siberian town? But we were heading for the Crimea! It was impossible to return: we had taken the Ice westward in order to find and awaken other hearts. Ep and Rubu waited for us somewhere in the east. Russia’s huge distances were oppressive: people could get lost like grains of sand in such expanses. But brothers all the more so. Ig sent a telephonogram to Khabarovsk: to detain the two dangerous criminals alive; anyone who dared to shoot them would be tried. The sinister wheels of the OGPU began to turn: the search for Ep and Rubu took on new life.

We began our search: the black Ford drove through the gates of the OGPU building on Lenin Street. Fer and I were seated in the back. Krasnoyarsk brought us no joy, either: for two days the Black Maria rolled through the city, reminding its inhabitants of nighttime arrests; for two days the doors of the university, the barracks, three dormitories, four schools, and a hospital were opened to us. The faces of people swam past the heart magnet in an endless stream. But there were none of us among them.

On the third day we left Krasnoyarsk.

Fer and I became accustomed to our work. We no longer became so exhausted from the heart illumination of whole cities.

Next was Novosibirsk.

There we were lucky. We had hardly x-rayed the market when Fer’s sensitive heart began to throb: there was someone. At first I didn’t feel anything. Then — I did feel it, but together with my amazing sister. We circled around the market, but didn’t see our brother, though we could feel him keenly. This continued for more than an hour. Fer began to despair: she screamed and beat her chest, as though trying to force her heart to see more clearly. And suddenly it became clear where the source was: just a little way from the market stood a small church. The Bolsheviks hadn’t touched it, and a service was being held. The doors opened and closed, letting the believers enter and leave. This was precisely what had distracted us. The source was inside. We entered the church. And closed our eyes in rapture: he was leading the service! Tall and stately, about forty-five years old, with a mane of blond hair, a broad beard, a courageous, noble face, and close-set blue eyes, he stood at the gates of the altar wearing the gold-flecked garments of a priest; waving a smoking censer, he called to the believers in a strong, deep voice.

“Let us pray for the Lord’s world.”

They prayed, crossing themselves and bowing. Fer grabbed my hand and squeezed it until it cracked. Our hearts rejoiced. The service went on too long. But we were enjoying the anticipation. We understood that this service was our brother’s last. Occasionally he glanced at us, picking us out of the crowd. But his heart was calm. Finally the whole thing was over. Those who took Communion lined up in front of the priest. As soon as he was finished administering the Sacrament, he was arrested and brought to our train. He turned out to be courageous not only on the outside: he resisted, threatened us with the tortures of hell, and began chanting the psalms. The Ice hammer interrupted his singing. He lost consciousness, and when he came to he was already a different man.

“Oa! Oa! Oa!” his heart said.

We cried for joy, embracing him.

Oa brought us happiness: after him in each large city on our route we acquired more brothers. Not only brothers. There was more than one sister. That was how the will of the Light was accomplished.

In Omsk we found Kti.

In Chelyabinsk — Edlap.

In Ufa — Em.

In Saratov — Ache.

In Rostov-on-Don — Bidugo.

It’s possible that there were other brothers in these cities, but when we found one, we could no longer search for others: we didn’t have the strength. The newly acquired were immediately taken to the station, to the train. Then the search would be interrupted and the divine process of awakening would begin. It amazed not only the new brothers, but everyone who held the newly found in their trembling hands, gagged the wailing mouths, swung back, and with all their might struck the chests with the Ice hammer; everyone who greedily listened to the flutter of awakening hearts, and then, sobbing with ecstasy, repeated the sacred names of the brothers in the impoverished language of humans.

“Kti! Edlap! Em! Ache! Bidugo!”

After this exertion, we could not get back into a Chekist Black Maria and set off on our search again: our hearts demanded rest. So the train with the red star moved on. The newly acquired were placed in the second car, where there were separate guest compartments. The doctor took care of them. All of them were blue-eyed and blond. Like Fer and me, and Ig. Like Rubu and Ep. And we understood definitively that this was an identifying sign of the Light: the dark-haired and gray-eyed could not be one of us. Our search needed to be only among the blue-eyed and light-haired.

Our hearts made us wise. So that his assistant and the local Chekists didn’t start asking questions about our not quite ordinary search, Ig told them that we were looking for a secret spy network along the Trans-Siberian, organized by a certain religious sect. This story dismissed all questions. The Chekist doctor Semyonov had stopped caring long ago whom he treated and for what. The guard and Deribas’s assistant, hearing cries and blows from the compartment of the boss, were certain that we were torturing the arrested.

We were awakening them from a dead dream.

But we understood that soon we would not have the means to do this: after Saratov the weather warmed considerably, the outside thermometer showed ten degrees Celsius. The Ice in the crates began to melt. We had to do something. Ig and Fer and I made a decision: to leave the crates of Ice in Rostov-on-Don, placing them in special refrigerators. In 1928 the only place in town where there were large industrial freezers was at the sausage factory. The Ice was placed in iron crates, closed with locks, and put in the freezer. By Deribas’s decree, the director of the refrigeration guild had personal responsibility for them.

We decided to continue the search, but without the Ice. Ig proposed simply arresting our brothers and keeping them in the same prison car where Fer and I had been kept on the way to Khabarovsk.

But after we parted with the Ice, luck turned its back on us: our magnet found no one in either dusty, fruit-filled Simferopol or in the seaside city of Sevastopol. Emptied by our hearts and distressed, Fer and I fell into a deep sleep.

When we awoke we were already in a car: we were being driven along a serpentine mountainous road. Between us sat Ig, who had changed into a white tunic without any marks of rank and white trousers. His face shone with joy, he held us by the hand. We raised our heads and looked outside: it was a sunny, warm autumn day in the Crimea; mountains of yellow and red vegetation floated past us. I looked around. There was another car behind us: four of our newly acquired brothers rode in it — Oa, Kta, Kti, and Bidugo. Ig had directed that the rest be placed in the Simferopol military hospital. In the early-morning Crimean air, just in front of us, was a splash of bright red — the automobile in which the local bosses rode: the secretary of the Crimean oblast Party committee, Veger, had decided to personally accompany the legendary Deribas to the RKKA sanatorium. They had known each other well since the Civil War.

Passing through Yalta, that most beautiful Crimean city, we arrived at the sanatorium, drowning in yellowed chestnut trees and acacia. There we stopped. What we had long expected happened to brother Ig here. First, the director of the sanatorium descended the marble staircase — a smiling, fat Georgian with Stalinist mustaches, dressed in the same white tunic Ig was wearing and greasy gray trousers.

“To your health, dear guests!” He threw his pudgy hands up and with a clap placed them on his chest, bowing to the new arrivals.

“Hello there, Georgy,” said the ugly, large-faced secretary of the obkom, extending him a hand. “Just look who I’ve brought you.” Veger nodded at Ig, who was getting out of the car.

“Comraid Deribass!” The fat Georgian minced along to our car. “We’re worn out waiting for you, I swear on my honest, is autumn already, the warmth, he is going, and you all the time are not coming and not coming! Vy you don’t have enough respect for your health, you don’t take care, I swear on my honest, please, Comrade Stalin is standing on you!”

The secretary laughed. Ig smiled, as Deribas was meant to, and shook hands with the large man. They were acquainted.

“Good. We traveled and traveled, and now we’ve arrived. Haven’t been here for two years, is that right?”

“That’s very bad, very bad, Comraid Deribass, I swear on my honest!”

“But this time — I’ve come with relatives! How are things here with you? Can we rest?”

The fat man pressed his pudgy palms to his pudgy chest.

“Comraid Deribass, I always sed, that Red commanders rest with their heart.”

Ig grew pale.

“What’s that...you said?”

“With their heart! With their very heart, I swear on my honest!” said the director, patting himself on the chest.

Ig’s heart shuddered. And Fer and I understood what would happen now. With a sob, Ig drew air into his lungs, threw his head back, and began to fall backward. We caught him.

“Epilepsy!” I told everyone.

In truth it was Ig’s heart crying. And he cried along with it.

There was a lot of hustle and bustle, the doctor on call ran over. Ig sobbed and beat himself. He was carried off to the ward and given an injection of morphine. Our room was nearby, in the next ward.

“So you see, my friends.” The secretary of the obkom patted Fer and me on the shoulders. “Suppressing enemies in the Far East — it’s not like shucking sunflower seeds. Comrade Deribas is tired, he’s overworked. He needs calm. Take care of your brother’s heart. The Party has great need of it.”

“And so do we,” Fer replied.