The price of victory was great. The combined forces had lost about a thousand men in the battle and hundreds had been wounded or maimed. Needless to say, the reading rooms had lost most of all.
The bodies of the dead were carried to a deep ravine, covered with caustic fertilizer to accelerate decomposition, and earth was scattered over everything, so that no pit remained. Seeds of common burdock and other fast-growing weeds were also thrown into the earth. In spring, burdock of gigantic size sprouted across the ravine, concealing for ever the bodies of those who had fallen at Neverbino.
On their way home, the reading-room militiamen and even the leaders of libraries that had taken a mauling spoke bitterly, in half whispers, saying the Neverbino bloodbath had been deliberately planned by Mokhova’s, Lagudov’s and Shulga’s analysts in order to cut back the exorbitantly swollen numbers of people who knew about Gromov. The battle had reduced that world by a quarter.
At about the same time a new agency of power and administration was established—the Council of Libraries. Lagudov, having emerged from the battle with minimal losses for his clan, had more influence than ever, and he promoted the idea that only “natural librarians”—that is, those who had independently penetrated the essence of Gromov’s Books—should have the right to be the chairman of the council. And after the Battle of Neverbino, there were officially only two of those left—Lagudov and Shulga. The Krasnoyarsk librarian Smolich, Nilin from Ryazan and Avilov from Lipetsk had been killed.
The council confirmed the official decision to grant the reading rooms financial immunity. A thorough census was carried out; reading rooms were normally named after the places where their members lived, or sometimes the name was derived from the surname of the librarian or founder.
All the reading rooms, with the exception only of those who fought at Neverbino, undertook to pay the council a tax of ten per cent of members’ income. Naturally the proceeds were deliberately reduced by readers who concocted false documents. The council therefore toughened up the rules and replaced the moderate tithe with a unitary annual tax—a specific sum was set for every individual Book.
At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, it should be said that the council did not rest on its laurels at this stage and went on to repress the independent groups completely. The reading rooms were coerced into becoming branch lending libraries. Henceforth a Book only nominally belonged to a reading room—the true owner of the Book was the council, which rented it out.
A table of fines was also drawn up. Any reading room that was heavily fined twice was disbanded in the name of the council and its Book was subject to confiscation. Non-compliance was punished with great severity.
Offences included, for instance, the presence of a copyist among a reading room’s members, excessive garrulity on the part of any reader, theft and concealment of a newly found Book—any action capable of posing a threat to the conspiratorial secrecy of the Gromov universe.
Unfortunately the edict of immunity was systematically violated, if only because by no means every library accepted its legality—those who had not taken part in the Battle of Neverbino, for instance. These clans, who were not members of the council, acted crudely and cruelly, like all aggressors. Even if a reading room successfully defended its Book in battle, it lost so much blood in the process that it became easy prey for looters or other predatory clans.
Artfully engineered provocations also took place. It was enough to discredit an undesirable reading room twice for the council to take an immediate decision to disband it. For situations like this several programmes of social rehabilitation were developed. It was considered a great stroke of luck if the readers were all registered with the nearest library, without being broken up—and the concept of —near” was distinctly relative: quite often people had to travel more than a hundred kilometres to a Book. Membership dues and the cost of travel together took a heavy toll on readers’ pockets
More often a different, tragic scenario was played out. Local or regional libraries refused to take all the strangers at once, arguing that they were already overfull. Preference was given to applicants who earned at least a minimally acceptable wage, out of which membership dues were then deducted. The readers with low incomes were scattered to any libraries where there were vacancies. We can imagine what an assignment to Irkutsk or Krasnoyarsk meant for someone who lived in Omsk. Many refused to make the move and joined the queues of “victims”. As a rule these broken people went to seed, becoming vicious and violent. It was from their numbers that the council formed its brigades of torch-bearers. These mercenaries willingly carried out even the very vilest of missions since, after all, the reward for the job was a Book.
Readers who rejected this situation could only accept the challenge and face up to an enemy who outnumbered them many times over. It is obvious how these battles ended, when twenty brave defenders of a reading room fought against hundreds of choice warriors sent by the council…
During these troubled times I became a librarian. My reading room owned a Book of Memory and was frequented by seventeen readers.
PART II
The Shironin Reading Room
THE BOOK OF MEMORY
I MYSELF DID NOT read the Book of Memory until a month after I took up the job, and I must confess that I have not reread it often. The “memory” induced has always been the same, and it sometimes seemed to me that it might be worn out by repetition, like a pair of trousers.
Actually the sensation experienced cannot really be called memory or recall. Dream, vision, hallucination—these words also fail to capture the essence of the complex condition in which the Book immersed me. Its gift of deception to me personally was an entirely invented childhood, full of warm emotion and joy, and I immediately believed in it, because the sense of living this vision was so totaclass="underline" in comparison, real memories were mere bloodless silhouettes. In fact this three-dimensional phantom was experienced more brilliantly and intensely than any life and consisted only of little crystals of happiness and tender sadness, shimmering with the bright light of one event after another.
The “memory” had a musical lining, woven out of many melodies and voices. I caught echoes of ‘The Beautiful Distance’ and ‘The Winged Swing’, a polar-bear mother sang her lullaby to little Umka, a troubadour lauded a “ray of golden sunlight” in a velvety baritone, a touching little girl’s voice asked a deer to whisk her away to magical deerland, “where pine trees sweep up to the sky, where what never was is real”. And following those pine trees, my heart tore itself out of my breast and flew away, like a bird released out of warm hands.
To the accompaniment of this pot-pourri filled with rapturous tears, I saw New Year round dances, fun and frolics, presents, sleigh rides, a puppy with dangling ears yelping clamorously, thawed patches in spring, little streams, May Day holidays with banners and streamers, the unbelievable height of a flight on my father’s shoulders, a vast expanse of smoky dandelions sprawling in front of me, cotton-wool clouds drifting across the sky, a picturesque little lake, pierced through with reeds, trembling in the wind, silvery small fry darting through the warm, shallow water, grasshoppers chirring in grass tinted yellow by the sunlight, purple dragonflies suspended motionless in the air, swivelling their precious, spangled, glittering heads.