Different-sized photos, but most of them were three-by-fives, and I could scarcely imagine the total number. One by one I looked at them. There were no duplicates.
“Look over there,” Gemow said, pointing toward the door. Hanging on the door we came in through was a large photo that looked to be of a sunrise, the sun just peeking over the horizon and a jungle silhouette in the white orb.
“That was taken seventy-five years ago in the Congo. Its diameter,” he said, draining his glass, “was 105 meters. When it exploded, it turned two hectares of forest to cinders and boiled away a small lake. The weird thing is that this superball of lightning appeared during daytime.”
I took a glass from beside Lin Yun and poured myself a drink, drained it, and let the craziness of it all begin to spiral. She and I did not speak, but sought to calm our shock. I turned my attention to the pile of books on the table and picked up the closest one, but this time I was disappointed. I couldn’t read Russian, but from the photo on the frontispiece of the author with a world map birthmark on his head, I knew what it was. Lin Yun took a look at the book and then passed it back.
“Perestroika,” she said.
Now I knew why, when we’d come in, the pile of books hadn’t seemed too messy: they were all impeccably and identically bound. Perestroika, all of them.
Gemow said, “I used to have the materials you’re looking for, more than would fit in this building, but ten years ago I torched them. Then I bought tons of books as a new way to make a living.”
We looked at him in confusion.
He picked up a volume. “Check out the cover. The lettering is gilded, and gold dust can be washed off with acid. You can procure these books wholesale, then return them to the distributing bookstore as unsold merchandise, only you paint in the lettering with fake gilding. Later on you don’t even regild them, since they don’t notice anyway. There’s a lot of money in this. My only complaint about the author is why the hell he didn’t pick a longer title, something like New Thinking on the Establishment of a New Democratic Institution for the Soviet Socialist Union, Its Integration into a New Democratic Society, and the Possibility of Becoming an Intimate Member. But the money had only just started coming in when the red flag came off the spire, and then there wasn’t any gold on the book cover, and finally the book itself went away. These are from the last lot I bought. They sat in the basement for ten years, and now that the price of kerosene is going up, I remembered that they make pretty good fuel for the stove. Ah, when you’ve got guests, you really ought to fire up a stove…” He picked up a book, lit it with a cigarette lighter, and stared at it a while. “The paper’s good quality. A decade and it hasn’t yellowed. Who knows—maybe it’s made from Siberian birchwood.” Then he tossed the book into the stove, followed by two more. The fire kicked up, and the countless balls of lightning in the photos danced in the red light, lending a bit of warmth to the chilly room.
Without turning his gaze from the fire, Gemow asked us a few simple questions about our situation, but didn’t touch on ball lightning at all. At last he picked up an old rotary telephone. After he’d dialed, he spoke a few words into the receiver, and then stood up and said, “Let’s go.”
The three of us went downstairs, and then out into the frozen wind and snow. A jeep pulled up in front of us, and Gemow beckoned us inside. The driver was roughly his age, but burly like an old sailor. Gemow introduced him: “This is Uncle Levalenkov. He’s a fur trader. We use him for transportation.”
The jeep drove along a roadway with few cars, and before long we had driven out of the city and into a vast snowy plain. We turned onto a bumpy road, and after another hour or so, a warehouse-like building appeared in the snow and fog ahead of us. The vehicle stopped in front of the entrance. The gate rumbled as Levalenkov pushed it open, and we entered. Pungent animal skins were piled high on both sides inside the warehouse, but right in the middle was an open space where a plane was parked. It was an ancient biplane with a tattered fuselage and some tears in the aluminum skin.
Levalenkov spoke a few words in Russian, which Lin Yun translated: “This used to be used for spraying the trees. I bought it when the forest was privatized. The old fella’s a little worn on the outside, but it still works well. Let’s strip everything out of it.”
And so, from the plane’s narrow cabin, we carried out bundles of furs—what animal I couldn’t say, but they were clearly of high quality. When all the bundles were out, Levalenkov emptied a canister of oil underneath the plane and lit it, while Gemow explained that the cold had caused the engine pipes to freeze, and that they needed to be roasted a bit before starting up. While they were heating, Levalenkov took out a bottle of vodka and the four of us passed it around, taking swigs. After two sips, I had to sit on the floor and couldn’t get up, but Lin Yun continued drinking with them, and I had to admire her alcohol tolerance. When the bottle was drained, Levalenkov waved us up, and then, with an agility that belied his years, jumped nimbly into the pilot’s seat. He had not appeared so agile before, but the alcohol was evidently like lubricant for this Siberian. The three of us squeezed through the tiny door into the cabin, and Gemow picked up three heavy fur coats and passed two to us: “Put them on. You’ll freeze otherwise.”
The plane’s engine coughed to life, and the propellers began to turn. Slowly the biplane eased out of the warehouse and into the world of wind and snow. Levalenkov jumped out of the pilot’s seat, went back to lock the door, and then sat back at the controls to accelerate the plane across the snowfield. But before long, the engine quit, and then all we could hear was the sound of the snow beating against the window glass. Levalenkov cursed, then clambered around and tinkered for ages before he got the plane started again. When it resumed taxiing, I asked him from my seat in the back, “What happens if the engine stops in midair?”
After Lin Yun translated, he shrugged nonchalantly. “We drop.”
He added a few more sentences, which Lin Yun translated. “In Siberia, a one hundred percent guarantee isn’t necessarily a good thing. Sometimes you fly all the way only to discover it would have been better to have fallen halfway. Dr. Gemow knows this from experience. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”
“That’s enough, Captain,” Gemow said, obviously pricked by the remark.
“You used to be an air force pilot?” Lin Yun asked Levalenkov.
“Of course not. Just the last guard commander at the base.”
We felt a sudden heaviness, and out the window the snowy fields fell away as the plane took off. Now, apart from the engine sound, the snow beat even more urgently on the plane. The air currents blew away the snow that had accumulated in the window troughs. Looking outside beneath the plane, we could see through the dense snow and fog the vast forests slowly slipping past, or the occasional iced-over lake, spots of white dotted through the black forests that reminded me of the photos on Gemow’s wall. Looking down at Siberia, I felt immensely gratified that ball lightning had brought me to a place I never imagined I would go.
“Siberia, hardship, romance, ideals, sacrifice…,” Lin Yun murmured, her head leaning on the glass as she raptly watched the foreign land.
Gemow said, “You’re talking about the Siberia of the past and of fiction. Today all that’s left is greed and loss. Everywhere on the ground below us is rampant logging and hunting, and black crude from oil-field leaks flows unchecked.”
“Chinese,” said Levalenkov from the pilot’s seat. “Lots of Chinese. They exchange fake alcohol that turns you blind for our furs and timber. They sell down jackets filled with chicken feathers…. But friends of Dr. Gemow I’ll trust.”