Yakov felt an uncomfortable presence inside, as though the boatman's bony hand reached into him and sifted through the contents of his soul panning for gold nuggets.
"This will do, he finally said. Yakov felt a twinge when something in him tore loose. You want to think it one last time?"
Yakov shook his head. Just take it, he said, and closed his eyes.
The boatman's vision teemed with so many memories, so many visions, but this new one was a welcome addition. It had a complex bouquet-a hint of habitual misery provided a weakly bitter background to red-hot rage and feeling of helplessness that buckled the boatman's knees and made him want to forget his immediate task. The pole dug into the silty bottom, pushed away, heaved up in a familiar movement that let him concentrate on savoring his new acquisition. Good choice, he thought, good choice. Not exactly original but nonetheless exciting. Intense. Sadness so profound, his dead heart felt crimson and heavy, like a Persian rose dripping with honey and dew.
Divorce, a slow melancholy regret, swirled milky-white, obscuring the pulsing black hole in the center of the memory. The boatman marveled that there were no names here, nothing was alluded to directly-just oblique hints and sideway glances that people used to hide the pain from themselves, to swathe it in many gauzy layers of circumstance and irrelevant detail. Shivering with anticipation, the boatman pulled them back, like bandages from a wound, cringing at the inevitable febrile blooming of a gangrenous flower.
And there it was. Swaddling cloth, blue blanket with yellow ducklings and red-and-green watermelons, a swirl of downy white hair, going clockwise around the summit of a tiny skull. Wonder, the same in every adult, at how small the fingers and toes were, how diminutive the nails like small pink shells one finds on the sandy beaches of the Baltic. How small and how human and how alive-the mind refused to believe it. And accepting it (him) as your own seemed beyond the realm of possibility.
The boatman marveled briefly at Yakov's skill at self-deception-this memory had been buried so deep under heaps of irrelevant debris that the boatman almost overlooked it. He never tired of the novelty, of these strange nuggets of pain and joy he extracted so carefully, so lovingly from the souls that came to the banks of his river; he could not understand why they tried so desperately to hide them.
He rolled the image of the baby, of its squeezed-shut eyes and balled-up fists, in his mind, like a child turning a piece of hard candy on his tongue, savoring its unique scent and texture. And then the infant disappeared, just like that, leaving in its place a balled-up blanket with red-and-green watermelons and yellow ducklings, and the boatman could not understand where it went. He rifled through the memory, turning bits and images over like wilting petals, looking, searching for answers but finding only one veil after another, one discarded wrapper after the next, and only ash, ash in between.
He finally looked outside of himself, at the people crouching at the bottom of the boat. Yakov, the light-haired man who footed the bill a few minutes ago, sat with his head cradled in his arms, and the woman sat next to him, patting his shoulder in a weak gesture of support. Come on, she kept repeating. It can't be that bad. Can it?"
The man just shook his head and looked up with tormented eyes.
"I'm sorry, the woman said. Can I do anything?"
"No, he said.
The boatman had collected his fee; he knew he had no right to ask for more. But his curiosity had gotten the best of him. He let the pole trail in the black water behind the stern. What happened to the child? he asked Yakov.
"What child? he whispered.
"Don't play with me, the boatman said. You know what I've taken. The memories he extracted were not gone; they just lost the emotional meaning, but the facts, their empty exoskeletons, remained.
"I don't have to tell you anything, Yakov said, petulant. Leave me alone."
The boatman returned to the contemplation of his new memory. It was unlike any other, so small and yet so distorted and twisted. He ran through its labyrinth, untwisting every snag and dead end, every turn and hidden corner. He was good at it-he had been feeding on their memories ever since they first started coming here, and he could not remember what he used to do before then; the memories taken from others had subsumed his own.
He thought of the American dancer, her memories swathed in unfamiliar language; he only recognized the images of her surrounded by several children (her own? Someone else's?) trembling in the snowy night, by the black pier in some strange port, where the dark sea water was fringed with ice, and floes rubbed against each other with a slow, grating sound. He remembered the stage and the tense faces of the audience, and the red drapes, swirling in her field of vision as she swirled, arms outstretched, for eternity. She remembered the face of a yellow-haired man, once handsome but now wrecked by hard drink and late nights, and the same face later a smoldering ruin shattered by a pistol shot. These images stood as signifiers of mystery, unexplained but precious all the same.
The boatman wondered if it was a sickness, this compulsion for the taste of other people's memories. He wondered if he could take something else as his payment, perhaps food or money, or if he should just take them across for free. He did not enjoy inflicting pain; in fact, he used to believe that he was helping them, taking away the emotional torment and intensity of unfulfilled desires. He used to think that he was doing good.
No matter how much their memories tormented them, they suffered even more when these memories were removed-like wounds left by splinters, they festered and grew inflamed, and one had to wonder if they were better off with all their splinters and warts. They became a part of them, developed from foreign bodies into integral parts of the souls. He could never understand that, but he could not stop either, compelled into removing and absorbing every painful nugget, so it could become a part of him, so he could feel real just for a little while longer.
The boat touched the opposite bank, as deserted and stony and black as the one they had just left-it felt like ages ago to Yakov, though he knew that only a few minutes had passed. He climbed onto the bank on awkward wooden legs, and stretched. Galina stood by him, silent but exuding sympathy and guilt. It's all right, he told her. It's not your fault."
Zemun clambered out of the boat, her hooves sliding on the wet rocks of the embankment. Koschey and Timur-Bey followed, both avoiding stepping into the black water.
Ahead of them there was a forest-Berendey's forest, and Yakov immediately guessed that this was where Father Frost spent his days. The trees and branches were covered in snow, festooned with icicles, gleaming with rime. Berendey's Forest had real trees for a change-Yakov recognized white and black-speckled trunks of birches, the slender branches of willows, the tall high-strung groups of quaking aspens. There were sturdy oaks and grey-barked ashes, red maples that swept upward with the grace of dancing girls, dense green paws of spruces, the haughty grandeur of pines he didn't realize how much he had missed them.
"It's winter here, Galina whispered. Do you think it's winter on the surface?"
"Don't be silly, we've been here just three days, Yakov answered.
"What if time passes differently here?"
"Then there isn't much we can do about it, is there? he said with rising irritation.
"I guess not, she said, and fell back, next to Zemun.