As the king and his men advanced, Ivan removed the thimble of salt from his cloak and held it above the lagoon. The king ordered his men to stop.
“Behold,” said Ivan, “this is what’s left of your salt. By the iron laws of economics, here is the wealth of your kingdom coalesced into a single thimble. This is the sum of your dreams and ambitions, your scheming and manipulations. Take one more step and it will be lost forever.”
In exchange for the remaining salt, the king agreed to spare Ivan’s life. But with his ship sunk, Ivan could not return home. Nor could he recover his gold. He wondered whether he had made another bad transaction, rendering his life equal to a thimble of salt.
After neither a short time nor a long time, another traveler arrived in the kingdom. Upon learning of Ivan’s predicament, he offered to organize the men and equipment to lift the gold from the lagoon’s floor, even though Ivan was now penniless. The stranger asked only for half the gold that would be recovered.
If Ivan had not been held back by his men, he would have killed the stranger. It was, after all, Ivan’s gold. Why should a stranger, this vulture, get any piece of it at all? The king tried to persuade Ivan to change his mind, saying that he would get no use from the gold as long as it was trapped under water. “On the contrary,” Ivan replied. “It’s as safe there as it would be in a vault.”
Despite Ivan’s rebuff, the traveler did not leave the city, but employed local artisans to draw up plans for the ship’s salvage and to construct the necessary equipment. The traveler financed this by selling to speculators shares of his nonexistent share of Ivan’s gold, a swindle that infuriated Ivan, especially because it was accomplished so openly. By some evil wizardry, founded on the chance that Ivan would someday change his mind, the city returned to prosperity. Meanwhile, the traveler and his emissaries plied Ivan with gifts and favors, seeking permission to raise his ship.
Ivan’s resolve remained firm until the morning he spied the king’s beautiful daughter spinning a length of golden thread. He decided to perpetuate a swindle of his own. He offered his gold to the king, who believed it could still be recovered, even though it was long out of sight beneath the lagoon’s burgeoning layers of silt, drifting down into the underworld of memory and longing, a mere concept of a symbol. In exchange Ivan asked to marry the princess, as well as for a good, fast ship.
The king clapped his hands. “Done,” he cried.
That night there was a wedding banquet, attended by the king’s court and nobility. Jugglers, acrobats, and dancing bears provided merriment. The guests feasted on savory dishes prepared with the last thimbleful of good Russian salt. Toast after toast was raised to Ivan’s health and good fortune. At dawn Ivan and his bride set sail for home.
The ship sailed for neither a long time nor a short time and was then becalmed on the desert sea. The princess, wearing a white cotton tunic, sat at the prow of the ship. Her eyes were as bright as the word incandescent and her lips were as red as the idea of red. She stared at the endless sea, her profile etched against the sky. Her hair was the color of gold.
The princess was beautiful, it was said. Ivan had tasted the salt on her skin at the nape of her neck. But what did her beauty consist of? A certain vividness to her features, an unblemished skin, a posture that conformed to banal notions of aristocratic birth, a particular shine to her hair? These qualities meant nothing beyond themselves. A pair of lustrous eyes did not denote passion but was something strictly physiological, arising from the eyes’ pigmentation and the flow of moisture from their tear ducts. It had no practical consequence. And perhaps her hair was not really the color of gold; one might just as easily have called it yellow. A woman declared to be beautiful was only a symbol of real beauty, which itself remained imperceptible to human vision.
Her attractive features were as transitory as they were arbitrary. Her supposed beauty was fading at that very moment, as it had been fading since the night of the wedding banquet. Soon she would be drained, transformed into an empty symbol like a coin declared counterfeit. The memory of the banquet’s great festiveness instilled in Ivan an equivalent amount of regret and bitterness. He recalled the king’s parting smile.
Ivan now ordered his men to reverse course, back to the king’s city. At once the wind picked up and the sails billowed and grew taut.
NOVELLA
Peredelkino
ПереДелКИHO
One
Just as in our dreams, a fist thumped at the door, and I opened it and there stood a greatcoated lieutenant of the Committee for State Security. He was at least a head taller than me; that head was blond and square-jawed, without a blemish. Frigid, almost transparent blue eyes floated in their sockets.
“Documents.”
I handed over my passport as he allowed himself into the flat. He compared my photograph to my face and then examined the stamp that gave me the right to live in the capital, a right that had degenerated into the occupancy of this tottering apartment building on the outskirts. After checking my face again, he opened a leather purselike bag at his side and removed a sheaf of papers.
I became aware that the apartment smelled of fried eggs. In advance of his arrival I had tried to put the place in order, but the sagging bookcases and the pile of unmarked student composition books gave evidence of its chronic dishevelment. These days I taught literature at the Pedagological Institute.
“Sign here,” the lieutenant said, pointing a manicured finger at the top sheet of his papers. “Here. Here. Here.”
Another officer of lesser rank stepped into the flat. He carried a brown cardboard carton that later proved to be quite heavy, though he himself didn’t show any strain. The lieutenant waved at the table in the little room on the other side of the entrance foyer. The officer deposited the carton there and left, not once looking at me.
The lieutenant inspected my signature and then found another half-dozen places for me to sign on the other pages. As I leaned over the credenza in order to write my name, the lieutenant walked deeper into the cramped, overstuffed flat. He stopped at a photograph of me and Varvara, taken in the Crimea, and then at some unanswered personal mail on a chair. He was most interested in the locked, glassed-in bookcase and its shelf of notebooks. He studied their bindings for a minute.
“My personal journals,” I confessed.
He examined them a moment longer and then reclaimed his papers. After patiently confirming that my signature was at each required place, he returned the papers to his pouch and, with a barely perceptible nod of acknowledgement, departed as well.
I remained several minutes in the foyer, breathing deeply, trying to shake off the image of the lieutenant’s lacquer-clear fingernails. When my composure had returned, I telephoned Anton Basmanian at his office.
“They’ve arrived,” I said, looking at the carton on the table.
“All right, shall we say”—he paused while, I presumed, he looked at his calendar—“December 3? A first draft, reviewing the trilogy as a whole. Twenty pages doublespaced at a minimum.”
“That’s fine. That’s great. I’m looking forward to reading the books.”
“Rem,” he said sternly, detecting sarcasm where there was none. “Many on the board were opposed to giving you this assignment. I’ve gone out on a limb, you know. But it’s time to get you back into print, to forget the past. This could be the beginning.”