Olga’s workmate cut the 1,128th strap from dog hide with crude iron scissors. It slid across the metal table and Olga caught it, used her left hand to press the rib spur down, and began to clean off the black fur stuck to the skin. Her co-worker, a blue-eyed, broad-shouldered Norwegian named Kristina, stole a glance at the clock.
“It’s already five of.”
Olga didn’t want to look at the clock: after a week of work in the Friends of Dead Bitches Society, she had lost any sense of time. In her head time either stretched out and crawled like a snail along the stone banister of Mama’s house in Newark, or raced ahead like the train from Newark to New York, where Olga had first gotten her degree in economics, then an MBA, then lived in NoHo in a small loft near the university, a cozy loft with two windows facing south and two facing north, a loft on the sixth floor, a loft where there were books, little statues, knickknacks, Papa’s Arab and European pictures, Mama’s music collection, a large stuffed tiger she slept with, and the parrot Fima who could say “lo-co-mo-tive,” and whom she would never, ever hear again...
“Begone!”
Having cleaned the strap, she swept the fur into a garbage bag and placed the finished strips in a transparent box. Each box like this could hold five hundred strips. In one day she and her co-worker were supposed to fill two of these boxes. For two days now Olga and Kristina had exceeded the quota, for which they were to receive a bonus. Having finished cutting the strips, Kristina placed the dog hide in a special bag and set about wiping the scissors, which were crusty with dog blood, with a rag. Olga sealed the transparent box of strips, walked over to the wall, and pressed a button; a white niche opened up. Olga put the box in it and pressed the button again. The niche closed. Returning to her work station, Olga took off the canvas apron and hung it on a hook. She sprayed disinfectant on the metal table and began wiping it clean with a paper towel.
The bell signaling the end of the working day sounded.
Olga glanced over at the other end of the shop: Bjorn was wiping his table and talking to his neighbor. Both were smiling.
“He has the energy for humor.” Olga sighed, and tossed the paper towel into the trash.
Kristina put the scissors and knife away in the table’s metal drawer, rose, and, taking off her gloves, stretched and groaned with relief.
“Blessed Virgin...that’s it!”
“The end of a rotten business,” Olga muttered, throwing her gloves into the bin.
“The day is over, thank God,” a plump Danish peasant girl with a fabulous blond braid who worked at the next table said to them with a tired smile.
“Yeah, yeah,” yawned her co-worker, a rough, masculine Polish woman. “If only all their damned ice would melt tomorrow...melt!”
“Do you mean the company or the ice?” Olga asked, as she rubbed her neck.
“The one the other!” the Polish woman answered in her awkward English.
They all laughed in exhaustion and strolled toward the women’s showers, while the men, talking to one another, wandered off to shower too. The guards let them all stream out into the hallway, opened the doors to the showers, admitted them, and locked the doors behind them. One hundred and eighty-nine people worked in the Friends of Dead Bitches Society. There were more women — a hundred and four. As an old-timer of the bunker, the Australian, Sally, explained to Olga, this was because after the blows from the ice hammers women survived more often than men. Sally was number 8. She had spent four years in the bunker and was the senior female. The head of the men was the stooped Horst, who wore glasses and had been abducted by the Brotherhood back in East Berlin. He had been brought to the bunker six years ago. According to him, nine people worked there at the time.
Olga found her hook with the number 189, the last in the long dressing room, took off her clothes, which smelled of dog, pulled off her socks and underwear, and walked across the warm tiles to enter the showers with the crowd of naked women. A light steam filled the room, and ten lines formed around ten showers. Everyone took a turn under the shower. Olga got in line behind a small, plain girl with dark-blond, tousled hair. The girl stood, her lackluster, slightly bulging blue eyes vacantly staring at the nape of the woman ahead of her who was laughing, telling a joke to two other women in an unknown language.
“Albanian? Moldavian?” Olga thought without energy. “Are there really three of them? There aren’t any Russian women here at all. Nine Americans. Fourteen Germans. Ten French, it seemed. Swedes — twenty-five in all. I’m the only Jew. Russians and Jews the weakest women? Forgotten how to survive? It’s strange...”
On the other hand, in the men’s section, there were seven Russians. And they were all fairly nice guys. One of them was a former athlete, another a chef, the third a professional thief, the fourth some kind of bureaucrat. And all of them cheerful. Olga thought of them with warmth: she liked to sit with these guys after her shower and talk in the forgotten language of her childhood.
“Dozhdik dozhdik, kap, kap, kap.” Rain, rain, drip drop, drip drop, she muttered in Russian, and licked her lips nervously: she really wanted to smoke. But that was possible only in the bunker.
“Are you American?” the woman standing behind her asked in an unusually muffled voice.
“Why, do I look like one?” Olga turned around and saw a swarthy, svelte woman of about forty-five with a terribly deformed chest.
An intricate purple-white cavity yawned in the area of her breastbone; the right breast was missing; the collarbone, broken in two place, had grown back bent into a half circle. Nevertheless, the woman was truly beautiful: a well-proportioned, stately figure, Indian cheekbones, light-chestnut hair with gold highlights, and dark-blue, deep-set eyes.
“Wow! They really gave it to you.” Olga stared at the cavity.
“Nineteen blows,” the woman said in a flat voice.
Her breathing was fast and shallow, and her narrow nostrils flared. The cavity moved in time with her breath, as though she were breathing in the humid steam of the shower room.
“Liz Cunnigan, Memphis,” said the woman, holding out her dark hand.
“Olga Drobot, New York.” Olga shook her hand.
“Olga? Are you Polish?”
“A Russian Jew.”
“Are you brand new?”
“Well, not entirely. I’ve been here a week. And you?”
“My sixth month.”
“Yikes. Are you used to it?” Olga kept glancing at the moving cavity, the edge of which was covered in drops of sweat.
“People get used to everything.” Liz’s eyes looked at her calmly. “Do you play with anyone?”
“Yes. And you?”
“I’m with the Swedes.” Liz smiled slightly. “Come over to our Swedish corner. It’s nice there.”
“The Americans aren’t bad, either.” Olga stood under an available shower, remembering that she had never seen Liz at the American corner. “I’ll come over sometime. Thanks.”
The hot water embraced her body pleasantly. Olga moaned with pleasure, leaning back her head and putting her face under the stream of water. But she had to wash up quickly. Letting the water flow over her, she bent her head under a plastic faucet, and pulled down on a small handle. A silvery drop of shampoo dripped on her head like snot. She squeezed out a second on her palm, rubbing the shampoo between her legs, under her arms, and over her breasts. Then, turning to face the queue, she let the stream run down her back and washed her hair. For the first few days, she always looked at the wall when she showered, turning away from the line, not wanting to share this short-lived pleasure, not even a glance, with anyone. Now she liked to look at the naked women waiting their turn. They were all waiting. And in this waiting there was something helpless and inexpressibly intimate and dear. They all had marks on their chests, they had all tasted the ice hammer, they had all survived, they had all been lured here, under the ICE, and they were all like her. The estrangement of the first days had passed. Olga stopped feeling shy and wild. She had already grown accustomed to it.
Olga put her soapy head under the shower and washed the foam off her hair. She put her thigh under the water and began to wash it with her hands.
“Any dog fur grown in yet?” Liz asked and the Norwegians standing in the nearby line laughed.
“It’s more likely bitch tits will grow in.” Olga grinned, washing her crotch and glancing at Liz’s one neat nipple. “The only problem is who to nurse?”
“What do you mean who? The Chinese!” said a Norwegian, laughing.
“There’s not enough milk for all of them,” Liz objected calmly.
Everyone roared with laughter. There was a certain comfort and freedom in this laughter. A certain oblivion. Olga liked standing under the streams of warm water and listening to the laughter. It allowed her to forget about everything for a moment. She closed her eyes.
“Sweetie, speed up!” others in line shouted.
Olga came to. It was time to hand over her place of natural oblivion. She left the water, shook herself off, and headed for the exit. A Czech girl slapped her rear end and whistled at her. Kristina winked and poked a finger at her wet stomach. Olga, laughing, shook a fist at them as she walked by. Leaving the showers for the changing room, she took a thin but clean towel from her hook, rubbed her hair, then her body. Leaving her gray working clothes on the upper hook, she took down the “inside” outfit, a sand-colored pair of pajamas with the number 189 on the shoulders, and put it on. She took a short brush from the breast pocket and brushed her dyed hair while looking in a round mirror attached to the wall between the hooks. She observed that her natural reddish hair was already quite noticeable at the roots. Sticking her socks and underwear in a pocket, she put on her slippers and went into the cafeteria through an adjoining door.
The spacious, calm, light-green cafeteria contained all of the prisoners in the bunkers. It smelled like boiled vegetables, and the same light classical music played. Men and women, coming out of the showers, lined up together for food. Olga looked for Bjorn in the crowd but couldn’t find him: he was probably still washing. However, she immediately noticed the Russians, who had a lively conversation going. She walked over to them.
“Ah, here’s our Stakhanovite!” said Sergei, a tall guy with a white-toothed smile and a shock of smoky-blond hair.
“What’s a Stakhanovite?” asked Olga.
“It’s a worker who massively exceeds quotas,” explained Lyosha, a chubby fellow with a round child’s face and lively, dark-blue eyes.
“Forgotten Russian in that America of yours, have you?” grinned Boris, a homely, thin man. “Go on, get in ahead of us.”
“I don’t remember all the words,” said Olga, getting in line in front of them.
“Well, that’s as it should be,” said the unsmiling Igor, gloomily scratching his unshaved cheek. “There’s all kinds of bullshit in Russian...”
“Now, you blockhead, don’t go insulting Russia,” said the earthy, fiery-red-haired Pyotr, poking him in the stomach. “I’ll friggin’ lay you flat, don’t you worry!” he said in a comically threatening voice.
“Get lost, Azazello,” said Igor, shoving him in reply.
“Gentlemen, don’t quarrel. We’re on enemy territory,” said Sergei in a pretend official voice, and they all laughed tiredly.
Olga looked at them with a smile. The Russians here in the bunker reminded her of her childhood on the outskirts of Moscow. Along with their words and jokes, the world of her earliest memories surfaced: gray prefab buildings, filthy snowdrifts at the entrance, kindergarten with a potted palm and songs about the little creature Cheburashka and Lenin, her hurried, frantic mother, her stubborn, incredibly talented, and very loud father, her sick grandfather, the “Red October” upright piano, strep throat and the customary Russian New Year’s tree, the neighbor’s cat Bayun, the first grade of Soviet school, the second, the third, the game of rubber bands at recess. And emigration.
After that — it was only memory.
For some reason, here in the bunker, Olga cherished first memories more than other memories. Distant and lost in the twilight as they were, it was more pleasant and comforting to fall asleep to these memories of snowdrifts, cats, and strep throat.
Their turn in line had come. Two Chinese in white coats furnished her tray with the usual food: vegetable soup, a boiled egg with mayonnaise, rice, cabbage salad, two pieces of cold fish in tomato sauce, Jell-O with whipped cream, and a glass of orange juice. Picking up the tray, Olga moved to the third Chinese standing between two pans with the main course. On the left was fish, on the right chicken fingers. Olga chose the fish, and tray in hand, walked toward the Russian table. Three people sat there. But then someone from the American table called her name. A tall, golden-haired fellow, slightly resembling Bjorn, stood and gestured for her to come over. The Russian table was also actively waving at her...Olga halted indecisively, not knowing which to prefer — the forgotten, dimly familiar, but touching Russian world or the well-known, comprehensible, and reliable American.
“Miss, would you deign to share this modest meal with me?” An old voice with a strange accent sounded next to her.
Olga lowered her eyes and saw an old man sitting alone at a table. All of the tables here were for two, but most of them were pushed together to form national groups. Virtually no loners remained. She hadn’t noticed this old man earlier.
“Believe me, I wouldn’t dare to insist. If you have other preferences, do not hesitate to follow them. But I would be extraordinarily touched even by your brief presence at this miserable little table.”
He spoke perfect, terribly old-fashioned English. But the accent indicated that the old man wasn’t English. Olga placed her tray on his table and sat down across from him.
“Marvelous. I thank you.” The old man stood, his shaking hands raising his napkin to his narrow, colorless lips and wiping them. “Let me introduce myself — Ernst Wolf.”
“Olga Drobot,” she said, reaching over the food to shake his hand.
The old man touched his lips to her hand. His bald head trembled slightly.
“You betrayed us with the Jerries.” The Russian table laughed caustically.
“Are you German?” Olga asked.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you sit at the German table? There are so many of you here.”
“There are two reasons, my dear Miss Drobot. First, in the course of fifty-eight years of imprisonment, I have come to understand that solitude is a gift from on high. Second, I simply have nothing to talk about with my current compatriots. We have no common themes.”
“And you think that they will emerge with me?” Olga broke off a piece of her roll.
“You reminded me of a certain lady who was very dear to me. A very long time ago.”
“And it was only for this that you...” Olga lifted her fork to put a piece of fish in her mouth but suddenly realized exactly what he had told her. “What? Fifty-eight years? You’ve been here fifty-eight years?”
“Well, not exactly here.” He smiled, baring his old dentures. “But with them. With the Brothers of the Light.”
The fork slipped out of Olga’s hand. “Fifty-eight?”
“Fifty-eight, my dear Miss Drobot.”
She stared at him. The old man’s face was calm and otherworldly. His pale-blue eyes were attentive. The whites around them were extremely yellow. Judging by the even features of his wrinkled face, now unhealthily yellow and liver-spotted, in his youth he had been a handsome man.
“When did it happen?”
“In 1946, October 21. At the villa of my father, Sebastian Wolf.”
“They hammered you?”
“Yes. And decided that I was ein taube Nuss. An empty nut.”
“And then what?”
“And then I successfully became a slave of the Brotherhood. Although, in fact, I had been one before the hammering as well.”
“They used you before as well? In what way?”
“The most direct. It is quite easy to use children, honorable Miss Drobot.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My father, Sebastian Wolf, was one of the better-known members of the Brotherhood. And we lived with him. One fine day he decided to hammer me. And my sister as well. She perished, and I survived. Before this he had used us as obligatory decorations. And Mama as well. But she died earlier.”
“But...how old were you when you were hammered?”
“Seventeen.”
Olga stared at the piece of fish on her fork. She picked it up and lifted it to her mouth. And once again dropped it on her tray. “I don’t feel like eating.”
The old man nodded his yellow head with understanding. “Nor do I. After the final bell everyone has a poor appetite. But then in the morning everyone’s hungry as a horse! The reasons are entirely objective!”
He laughed.
There was a childlike helplessness in his laughter.
“Solitude — is a gift from on high...” Olga recalled.
“What happened to your father?” she asked, looking at the old man’s trembling hands.
“The last time I saw my father was when he crushed my ribs. My sister, I admit, had tired him out. And he wasn’t very precise with me: the rib broke in and hit my liver. But I survived. Although since that time my face is yellow, like the Chinese. Believe me, Miss Drobot, in the first days after my arrival here they took me for one of them! I’m friends with the Chinese.”
He pinched off a piece of chicken and put it in his mouth. His dentures clacked softly. He chewed as though performing hard labor. His thin white hair shook on his yellow head.
“Tell me, why didn’t they just kill you...us? It would have been so simple. Keeping you and hiding you for fifty-eight years! What for? And us as well...”
Wolf finished chewing and wiped his lips with the napkin.
“You see, Miss Drobot, when a person is killed and then burned, something of him still remains. The ashes, for example. And not only that. Something more essential than ashes. When he leaves this world against his will, a man forms a kind of hole in it. Because he is torn from this place forcibly, like a tooth. This is the law of life’s metaphysics. And a hole is a noticeable thing, my esteemed Miss Drobot. It’s visible. It takes a long time to heal. And other people feel it. If the man continues to live, he leaves no holes. Thus, to hide a person is much simpler and more advantageous. From the metaphysical point of view, that is.”
Olga grew thoughtful. And understood.
“They killed ‘empties,’ as they call us, only in Russia. Under Stalin, when the Great Terror was on, and later, when the ‘small terror’ took place. The Brotherhood wasn’t worried about metaphysical holes created after the death of individual beings.”
“Why not?”
“Because Russia itself was one large metaphysical hole.”
“Really? When I lived there I didn’t notice it.”
“Thank God!”
“Why?”
“If you had noticed it, Miss Drobot, you would have an entirely different expression on your face. And believe me, I wouldn’t have invited you to sit at my table.”
Olga looked at him attentively. She laughed and clapped her hands. The old man giggled in satisfaction.
“Eat, eat, Miss Drobot. There’s a long night ahead.”
Olga set about eating. The old man took his portion of Jell-O and put it on Olga’s tray.
“And don’t argue with me!”
His hand and the Jell-O trembled in time.
“Danke, Herr Wolf,” said Olga.
“Pazhaluusta,” the old man said in Russian and laughed, his dentures clacking.
Olga slowly ate half of her dinner. She wiped her lips with a paper napkin and dropped it in her soup.
“I will take the liberty of asking, Miss Drobot, what is your profession?”
“Manager. And you? Oh, that’s right...forgive me.”
“Your question is utterly appropriate. During my prison affair with the Brotherhood, I have done time in seven places. Four of them had rather good libraries. Thanks to them I managed to master three professions: translator from the English (I translated three of Dickens’s novels for myself), cartography, and — you’ll find it difficult to believe, Miss Drobot — an ocean navigator, that is, a pilot.”
“Cool!”
“Cool! I love that American word.”
The old man also finished his meal.
“Tell me, is there any way they might let us out of here? Sometime?” Olga asked.
“What for?” The old man’s colorless eyebrows arched, and yellow wrinkles ran across his large forehead.
“They won’t...let us out?”
“Miss Drobot, you are too young. That’s why you’re asking such questions.”
Dejected, Olga fell silent.
“Stay calm. And stop comforting yourself with illusions. Our life is now divided into two parts: the first and the second. And we can’t get away from that. Therefore we have to try to make the second part more interesting than the first. It is difficult. But it is quite possible. I, to give one example, have managed to do this. And you have to agree that the Brotherhood provides a great deal of help in this regard. Local conditions are incomparable to those in normal prisons. Despite all their ruthlessness, the Brothers of the Light have been extremely humanistic toward us empty shells. They know our weaknesses quite well, and the needs of the meat machines.”
“Meat machines? Who’s that?”
“It’s you and me,” said the old man, rising and picking up his tray. “So keep your chin up, Miss Drobot.”
Smiling, he wandered over to the dish-washing window. The tray shook terribly in his hand. Olga remained at the table. The old man’s words had struck a deep chord in her, making her blood run cold.
“Two lives. Before and after,” Olga thought, turning the empty glass dripping with orange juice. “So what now? Scrape hides forever? And wait for the lights-out bell to ring? Learn to be a pilot...Ridiculous! No, it’s not possible! No way! I’d rather hang myself in the toilet stall. So what then, after the bell? I won’t go to the windows. They murdered my parents, David turned out to be an asshole...What do I have to lose? I couldn’t have children. Twice...What am I living for? For whom? For Fima? Here, or anywhere, what’s holding me back? I have nothing to lose. Pilot, pilot, now what shore should we head for...‘Baby can you twice find the way to fuckin’ paradise?’ I can’t find it, either...I’ll hang myself. Today. Tonight. For sure, as Pyotr says...”
She closed her eyes.
A large, familiar hand touched her back.
“Bjorn!” she said, without opening her eyes.
“Why do Russians wash and eat so fast?” Bjorn hung over Olga like a bell tower, smelling of cheap shampoo and clean clothes.
“You know, I’m actually Jewish.” Olga opened her eyes.
Bjorn’s face was content. His cheeks were flushed from the shower.
“What a positive personality,” Olga thought enviously as she looked up at him. “A regular walking security complex. Healthy food throughout childhood...and they have good dairy products in Sweden...”
“I just wanted to eat with you,” he admitted honestly.
“Tell me, do you ever get depressed?” Olga stood, picking up the tray with the remains of her food.
“It happens sometimes,” he said, taking her tray. “But I know how to fight it off.”
“Teach me.”
“There’s no basketball court here. Only a hockey rink!” Smiling at her, Bjorn took a few sweeping steps with her tray.
Olga followed him.
“I wonder, are there rebellions here?”
“You already asked. No, there haven’t been any group ones.”
“You already told me.” She yawned nervously. “Well, so, should we go?”
“I have to eat.”
She clenched and unclenched her fists.
“Do you want to hang out together today?”
“I wouldn’t mind...Which corner?”
“We could go to ours, the Swedish table.”
“They invited me over there today, too!”
“We’ve got a tight group.” He set the tray in the return window.
“Let’s try...” Olga yawned nervously again, and shivered. “Am I pale?”
He leaned over.
“A little. Do you feel like getting together?”
“No! Not at all.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know...I’ll go and read something.”
“I’ll come to the library.”
“Okay.”
Olga walked out of the cafeteria into the hallway and went into a large, clean bathroom. After urinating into a Japanese toilet with a disgustingly warm seat, she washed her hands, looking at herself in the mirror. Next to her a Romanian girl, a tall, beautiful model, was brushing her teeth.
“The chicken has a strange aftertaste today.” The Romanian spit out water. “They’re obviously mixing something into it for us.”
“I had the fish.” Olga touched and smoothed out the wrinkles around her eyes.
“A sort of metallic aftertaste,” said the Romanian, looking at her teeth. “What is it? Lead? What if it’s mercury? And my teeth are getting discolored. Some kind of metal...Haven’t you felt it?”
“I ate fish,” Olga repeated, and left the restroom.
Walking down the hallway, she reached the living quarters. It was very spacious, and fresh from the air-conditioning. Dim lighting illuminated rows of double bunks, stools, and shelves with personal items. The male and female sections were divided by a small passage with no doors. The walls and ceiling of the male half were a grayish green, while the women’s were pinkish gray. The men’s half was called the Garage; the women’s, the Ham. In the Garage and the Ham, dozens of empty beds awaited new owners.
Olga went over to her bed, took a pack of super-light Chinese cigarettes and a tube of hand cream from her night table, lit up, squeezed out some cream, and, rubbing it in, threw herself on her bed with pleasure.
“Oh my God...”
From above, the golden-curled head of the Irish girl Meryl hung down. “Olga, do you have any pads?”
“Yes.”
“I forgot to order them. Would you give me a couple?”
“They’re in the night table.”
“I’m too lazy to get down.” The Irish girl grinned.
“And I’m too lazy to get up,” said Olga, blowing a stream of smoke at her.
Meryl got down, opened the drawer, and took a few.
“I saw you eating with that yellow German guy.”
“That’s right. He asked me to.”
“So he’s got a thing for you.”
“Probably...He’s an interesting old guy.”
“They say he’s their old stool pigeon.”
“So what? Do we have anything to hide?”
“Well” — Meryl shrugged her shoulders, pulling down her pants and putting on the pad — “a lot of people want to get out of here.”
“Somehow it’s not really noticeable,” said Olga, smoking with pleasure, staring at the plastic bottom of the upper bed where she’d scratched “Fuck off, Ice!” the first night she’d been there.
“You’re new. That’s why you think everyone here is content. Everyone just dreams about waiting for the bell and standing up at the gates.”
Smoking, Olga grabbed her foot and held her smooth heel with pleasure.
“Meryl, I have neither the energy nor the desire to argue with you.”
“So I’m right!” Meryl whacked Olga on the sole of her foot.
The Ham gradually filled up. Conversations hummed, and it smelled of cheap Chinese perfume. Some of the women slept, some played cards, and others went over to the Garage. Men dropped by “to have a cup of water.” It was the only drink allowed in the living quarters; each section had automatic water fountains marked with the characters that meant “water,” which filled plastic cups with ice-cold or hot water. They drank water endlessly in the bunker, in large and small groups, in pairs and alone. The prisoners of the ICE respected water and the characters that stood for it. They invited one another to drink it, they marked birthdays and holidays with it, and with it they remembered the dead.
After smoking two cigarettes in a row, Olga dozed for about forty minutes to the sound of women’s conversations and the clack of scissors; nearby one Lithuanian was cutting another’s hair. As soon as the click-clack ended, Olga opened her eyes and looked at the wall clock: it was 6:30. Stretching, she stood up, drank a cup of ice-cold water, and headed for the library. There was no television and not even a simple screen with a video machine in the bunker. They never brought magazines and newspapers here, either. Still, the library was quite respectable. Olga walked through the hallway, opened a door with a picture of an open book on it, and found herself in a long, light room with shelves and dozens of tables. The books were on shelves. About fifteen people were sitting and reading. It was forbidden to remove books from the library.
Olga walked over to the bookshelves.
Most of the books were in English. There were a few in German, French, and Italian as well. Trying to find something in her almost completely forgotten written Russian, just for the hell of it, the only thing Olga noticed was the collected works of Leo Tolstoy. After spending several hours in the library, Olga had understood its strict principle: Only fiction was to be found on the shelves. There were no books at all on technology, medicine, philosophy, history, culture, geography, or the exact and applied sciences. Likewise there were no newspapers, magazines, or other periodicals. Reference books were entirely missing. There wasn’t any poetry. On the other hand there were quite a number of dictionaries. The largest share of the underground library was occupied by world classics in English translation and a great number of collected works. The authors of detective and pulp-fiction novels were similarly represented in multiple volumes, and the books were at least thirteen years old. Contemporary literature was completely absent. There were very few individual works.
Olga moved along the shelves slowly. Yesterday she had begun to read Nabokov’s The Gift, but quickly grew bored and picked up Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Reading about the charming Poirot was comforting, but when she was on page 62, lights-out sounded in the bunker. For some reason she didn’t want to return to the Orient Express now. She stopped at the shelf marked “F.” Flaubert? She’d read Madame Bovary in college. It was at the beginning of May when everything was blooming. The image of the decisive and passionate woman, eating arsenic by the handful, had merged with the aroma of blooming narcissus. A strange aftertaste remained in her memory, one which she didn’t care for at all right now. Faulkner? The Bear, which her parents loved, she had never read to the end. Feuchtwanger woke memories of something boring and German. Anatole France? She wasn’t familiar with the author. Fielding? Once again, probably an Englishman. Fitzgerald! Tender Is the Night had been one of her favorite novels when she was younger. She randomly pulled out the third volume of Fitzgerald’s collected works, opened it in the middle. The story was called “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Olga didn’t know it. She sat down at the nearest table and plunged into the story. Olga read quickly. In the charming language she’d loved since her youth, Fitzgerald described the diamond mountain, overgrown with thick forest, which a stingy, powerful man stumbled on by chance one day. He settled on its slopes. The fantastic treasure turned him into a monster. He imagined that he was equal to God, and built a marvelous castle on the mountain. With him in the fantastic castle lived his two enchanting daughters — Jasmine and Kismine — and his obedient wife, mute as a plant. Olga imagined the diamond mountain, covered with forest.
“Diamonds look like ice,” she thought. “But diamonds don’t melt ...The ice mountain. And we live under it...”
She raised her head and looked at the ceiling. Little lamps were burning there.
“Fitzgerald? Boring!” said a woman sitting behind her, who had unceremoniously looked at her book. “Syrup with shit!”
Olga looked around.
The woman was plain, with tangled red hair. Her fading, pale-blue eyes looked at Olga with malice and tenaciousness. Her thin lips shook nervously. A whitish mustache grew over those lips. Olga hadn’t seen her before.
“This is what you should read.” The woman showed Olga a book with comic depictions of a soldier on the cover.
“The Good Soldier Švejk,” Olga read.
“Do you know it?” the woman asked aggressively.
“I don’t like army humor,” said Olga, and turned away.
“Idiot! It’s the healthiest humor there is!” the woman shouted fiercely.
“Doris, leave her alone,” advised a fat, rosy-cheeked Italian sitting next to the redhead.
“Idiots! What do they read!” The redhead shook with anger.
Olga continued reading, not paying attention. The redhead bickered lamely with the Italian. And suddenly, shouting out “Fuck you!,” she spat at her. The Italian slapped her in the face. The redhead began to beat the Italian with a book. They grabbed each other. The redhead’s cry turned into a hysterical, anguished shriek. People moved away; people sitting behind jumped up and tried to separate them. The rest of the library visitors hooted and whistled. Two Chinese guards rushed in the door, grabbed the fighting redhead, and dragged her out of the library while everyone else hooted and howled.
Everything happened so fast that Olga only shook her head and laughed. “What a bunch of nonsense!”
“That redhead’s a witch,” the Italian muttered, looking over her scratched hand.
“Is she out of her mind?” Olga asked. “Who is she? I haven’t seen her before.”
“She’s from South Africa. They let her out once in a while,” the Italian woman said, sighing. “Her and two other psychos. Why do they keep them here? They should just send them up there, to a normal psychiatric ward...”
“A Chinese one?” joked a French guy with a buzz cut. “Maybe you’d like to go there?”
“Ladies and gentlemen, don’t forget what’s written on the walls,” a gray-headed old Icelander spat out.
On the wall hung a black sign: QUIET!
Everyone who was reading grew quiet. Again Olga immersed herself in the bitterly touching work of Fitzgerald. When the government planes bombed the castle belonging to the owner of the diamond mountain, when he himself grew quiet forever under the shards of diamonds and his lovely daughters became poverty-stricken orphans, Olga’s eyes filled with tears. She read...
“I love washing,” Jasmine said quietly. “I have always washed my own handkerchiefs. I’ll take in laundry and support you both.”...
“What a dream it was,” Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. “How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fiancé!
“Under the stars,” she repeated. “I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to someone. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.”
“It was a dream,” said John quietly. “Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”
Olga shuddered, holding back sobs, and covered her face with her hands. Tears leaked through her fingers, and then burst out like a child’s.
“Just hold on, honey, there’s only forty-two minutes left.” A tattooed fellow slapped The Spy Who Loved Me down on the table. “Bastards, they couldn’t have made the bedtime bell at eight!”
“Quiet, Shtamp.” A strapping Serb tore himself away from Chase and glanced sideways at the observation camera. “Everything is just fine here. We’re happy with everything.”
“I want to go-o-o ho-o-o-mmme.” Olga sobbed. “I have a p-p-par-ro-rot there...”
It felt terribly sweet and bitter to feel tiny and helpless under this mountain of ice.
A small, pretty American, Kelly, sat down next to Olga, hugged her shoulders, and said, “Sweetie, just hold on. It’ll be soon now.”
“No, it’s even worse to wait in the library.” A gloomy, light-bearded German spoke up as he got up and put a volume of Simenon back in its place on the shelf. “Sally, let’s go have some water.”
Sally, the senior inhabitant of the Ham who resembled Martina Navratilova, waved him on without looking up from Fiesta. The tattooed guy followed the German. And so did the quiet, sickly Estonian who had been reading Thomas Mann.
“The men’s nerves break down.” Kelly took out a handkerchief and wiped away Olga’s tears. “Calm down, sweetie. Your home is here now. And we all love you. We...are your family...”
“Your brothers and sisters,” muttered an Italian girl, leafing through the copy of Švejk that the redhead had abandoned. “Is this really funny?”
“It’s a great book,” a Hungarian in glasses answered.
Olga sobbed quietly.
Bjorn entered the library.
“What happened?” He went straight over to Olga, who was still crying. “Did someone hit you?”
“No, she just got sad.” Kelly stroked Olga.
“They beat me!” The Italian laughed and suddenly began to sing loudly and deliberately in a man’s bass voice.
Kelly laughed and applauded. Sally whistled, without lifting her eyes from Fiesta. An old man with cornflower-blue eyes plugged his ears with his fingers. Bjorn sat down next to Olga.
“Are you all right?”
“It’s too...” Olga slammed the book, wet from her tears, closed.
“Fitzgerald,” Bjorn read the author’s name. “I’ve heard of him. Is he the one who was an alcoholic?”
“Yes.”
“A lot of American writers are alcoholics.”
“Yes, yes,” Olga muttered feebly.
Bjorn stared at Olga. She sat, remote, in Kelly’s embrace.
“Do you have a bonus today?” Bjorn asked softly.
“I guess so...”
“I do too.”
Kelly’s ears perked up.
“So you’ll come to us?” Bjorn asked, examining Olga’s ear.
“Probably...”
“Hey, big boy, you’re not the only one with a bonus.” Kelly’s yellowish-blue eyes stabbed Bjorn with a glance from behind Olga’s head. “Olga, you were already with us. Our corner is really tight. Really powerful guys. Did you like it yesterday?”
“Olga,” Bjorn spoke up, “ours is cooler. The Swedish corner is the coolest.”
“Don’t talk that nonsense in front of me!” exclaimed the Italian girl. “The Swedish corner! You’ll waste your bonus. Come to us. We’ve already merged with the French. And the Albanians are with us, the Romanian, and three Macedonians. The Greeks want to join too. It’ll be the coolest corner of all!”
“Don’t listen to her, Olga. You know you’re one of us; Americans are the coolest of the lot! And not just up there.”
“Our group is cooler. Much cooler.” The Italian wouldn’t give up.
“Olga, you know you were invited to the Swedish corner — ” Bjorn smiled nervously.
“Don’t go, you’ll waste your bonus for nothing!” Kelly didn’t let up.
“Shut up!” Sally clapped her book shut and swung it down on the table. “You want to end up in solitary?”
“There are rules about waiting for the lights-out bell, ladies and gentlemen!” The old man shook from indignation.
“We’re all equal here, for God’s sake!” exclaimed a pockmarked Swede with bristling white hair.
“Olga, make the right decision!”
“Think, Olga!”
“Quiet, all of you!” Sally clapped her hands. “Read.”
She opened Fiesta again.
Kelly stood up, put The Hobbit back on the shelf, and left, cursing. Bjorn sighed deeply, glancing at the camera. Olga turned to him.
“It’s unbearable,” he whispered, wiping the sweat off his pale face.
“Twelve minutes.”
“Sometimes time is elastic,” he muttered. “It stretches and stretches...”
“And then — snaps.”
“Right. And then it snaps.”
Olga sighed and stood up. “All right. I’ll go and drink some water.”
“Great idea!” Bjorn grinned nervously.
Olga put Fitzgerald on the shelf and went into the Ham. Bjorn hurried after her. Inside you could feel the tension: women were sitting on the beds, gathered in groups; the conversation got quieter when Bjorn entered. All of the women held cups of water. The French girls sat near the water dispenser. They were embracing, entwining their arms, pressing their towheads together. Olga walked up, stepping over someone’s legs, pulled out a plastic cup, and pressed the blue button on the automatic water dispenser. Cold water flowed. A French woman with a luxurious mane of tight gold curls lifted her homely, pimpled, long-nosed face, and fastened her large gray-blue eyes on Olga. Olga took the full cup, lifted it to her lips, and sipped a bit. Cold water calmed her.
“Can’t you come with us?” the French woman asked.
Olga shook her head. And went to her bed.
“I just shouldn’t look at the clock,” she persuaded herself.
She sat down on the blanket. Drank a bit. And looked at the clock: four minutes till. Sally, the Italian, and two Ukrainians came in. Olga drank water in small sips.
“Youth — is always a dream...” she recalled, looking at the plas- tic cup.
“One minute!” Sally called out.
Immediately everyone came to life and moved around. Dropping their things, taking their cups of water, the women went into the hallway.
“Here we are. The eighth time,” Olga thought, mixing with the crowd and trying not to splash her water.
In the hallway everyone got all mixed up — men and women. The crowd approached large doors of opaque glass. The doors glowed blue. Conversations and muttering quieted down, the crowd grew still. All the prisoners of the bunker stood next to the door holding plastic cups filled with water. A siren sounded and the door opened. The crowd slowly and tensely began to push into a passageway, which was illuminated by a blue light. In the wall opposite were five windows. Near the windows were two guards with clubs. The prisoners stood, packed tightly against one another, but tried not to push so as not to spill their water. Pressed against the back of a limping Ukrainian, Olga carefully held her cup to her chest, covering the top with her hand. Her heart beat rapidly. Its heavy beats cleared her head of chaotic thoughts. Olga only looked ahead, moving toward the bluish window. Someone cried out briefly, someone else pushed. But the calmness of the crowd controlled the nerves of its individual members. The crowd of prisoners dragged itself to the windows. Each received his own and immediately left the blue room.
Finally it was Olga’s turn. Leaning over toward the window she placed her dogtag against the electronic reader. A signal beeped and two transparent tablets with ICE stamped on them rolled out. Olga grabbed them and swallowed them immediately, washing them down with the water. She threw the cup into the trash and left the gateway, as the blue space was called. Her heart beat ever more strongly.
“I’ll go to the Swedes right away,” she thought.
Behind her she heard noise, yelps, and shouts: someone was trying to take someone’s tablet.
“There they go...” Olga walked along the hallway and turned into the Ham. Some groups had already formed, sitting close in preparation for their voyage. But the Swedes weren’t there.
“The Swedes are in the Garage today!” Olga guessed.
The French, Greek, Romanian, and Ukrainian girls began to reach for her hands, muttering, trying to convince her. An albino Icelander threw himself at her feet, grabbed her knees, and whispered in Icelandic, butting his forehead, sweaty with desire, against her. From his hysterical whisper only one comprehensible word issued: “Bonus!”
Plugging her ears, Olga ran into the Garage. She immediately noticed the Swedish corner: about ten people were already sitting on the floor, getting ready. She walked over, murmured something, reached out with a shaking hand, collapsed on her knees, and began to touch the others sitting there. They were expecting her, they welcomed her joyfully, touching her in turn with shaking hands, moving aside and letting her in. Eyes, light- and dark-blue, pale-sky colored and deep-sea colored, stared at her, shining and sparkling, promising joy shared among all. Trembling, she squeezed in, merged with them, held hands that were moist with excitement, feeling how the heart wave grew, how the chest brimmed over with joy, how the head spun, how the blood beat in the temple. The strength of the Swedish corner amazed her.
“Here it comes...already!” she thought, closing her eyes with pleasure.
New people who had just swallowed their portions of happiness came; they sat down, pressing in close, holding each other’s hands tight, in an unbroken chain of pleasurable anticipation. Liz appeared, touched them, and by virtue of her presence found her place among them. Strengthening the joy, her red lips trembling. Silver curled. Greeks and fiery-red Israelis turned up; then a broad-shouldered Swede with sky-blue eyes and the pink cheeks of his disfigured face shaved bare. American woman were also present. They all had bonuses. They all craved happiness.
“The best are all here!” Olga’s blood pulsed joyfully.
And — the moment of flight had arrived. Holding tight to her comrades in joy, she closed her eyes. But they wouldn’t let her lose herself in the precious and joyous.
“Criminal! She ate the ice!”
Strong hands pulled, dragged her along the hallway. She felt with every cell how the two pieces of ice were melting, melting, melting in her stomach, the two divine, inimitable pieces that provided an unearthly joy. Oh, if only they would have time to melt. Just another few seconds! Melt, melt, melt, faster, my sweethearts, my body wants you, my body is crying out with desire, my body is sucking you and moaning...
“Open her mouth!”
Merciless faces, cold eyes, rough hands in rubber gloves. They separate her teeth with a stick, and a steel instrument spreads her mouth open painfully, against her will.
“The probe!” A plastic snake slips into her throat, crawls along her esophagus, spreads it open, and doesn’t let her breathe.
Her body thrashes, writhes in their hands, but they hold her tight, tight, tight, and there, in the stomach, the nimble snake sucks out the exquisite, sweet, beloved, desired bits of ice, preventing them from dissolving, and already there is nothing, absolutely nothing to breathe, breathe, breathe...
Olga cried out.
And woke up.
“What’s wrong?” Liz, lying near her, placed her hand on Olga’s chest. “You’re covered with sweat...”
Olga threw off the thin cotton blanket, lifted her head, sat up, and hung her legs over the bed. “Yuck, what rubbish I dreamed...”
It was dim in the Ham. The electric clock showed 3:47 a.m. The women were sleeping. Olga wiped her sweaty face with her hand. “Nonsense...”
“What is it, honeybunch?” Liz embraced her from behind. “Want me to bring you some water?”
Olga laughed sleepily and shook her head.
“I dreamed that they were feeding us some kind of ice narcotic...clear tablets of some sort...and I wanted them so badly, I craved them...and they took them away from me...”
“There are a lot of ice dreams here. It’s normal.” Liz stroked her. “At the beginning I dreamed that I was little, like a bug, and that I was frozen in ice. Forever. Forever and ever in that ice...”
“Oh, yeah...and there was a...library, too!”
“What library?”
“In the dream we had a library here.”
“Fabulous. I want into your dream.”
“And some kind of collective trips with those tablets...the Swedish corner...”
“The Swedish corner beat us in foosball this evening.”
“Jeez, there’s a gym here, not a library...” Olga shook her head. “And the men live separately...how absurd!”
“We can get by without men.” Liz kissed Olga between her shoulder blades, and slipped down from the bed.
Walking over to the water fountain, she filled a cup with water, drank some, returned, and handed it to Olga. “Drink.”
Olga drank the icy water.
“Strange...I’ve never once dreamed of home here.”
“Neither have I.” Liz embraced her.
“But that’s...really strange!”
“No, sweetheart, it’s not strange.”
“Why?”
“Because our home is here now. And there won’t be another one.” Liz yawned and pressed against Olga.
As she fell asleep, remembering her strange dream, Olga’s shoulder could feel the cavity in Liz’s chest.
“Bonus...bonus...icy...rubbish...bonus — just a bar of Swiss milk chocolate. Chocolate...chocolate...shaped like a bird, shaped like Fima. Fimochka’s a gooooood bird. Fimochka’s the best...”