Olga never believed in God, or in the supernatural. But as a Jew she believed in fate. Although fate wasn’t so simple, either.
“Fate takes its own path,” her mother would say. “You have to feel your own fate, believe in it, and not scare it off.”
Her father would also mutter something about the “power of destiny.” But for the most part the question remained murky.
“The millions of Jews who died in the concentration camps also believed in fate, believed in God,” Olga thought. “So what? Fate turned away from them, God didn’t help. So that means you have to believe only in your own powers and rely only on yourself.”
Now, having become the victim of a mysterious Brotherhood, having lost her parents, and having ended up in this sinister bunker, Olga had lost belief in herself. Over the last two months she had realized there was something greater than herself, more powerful than her own will.
But what? Fate?
Bjorn didn’t help Olga answer the question.
With a wry smile, the old man Wolf said horrible things she didn’t want to believe. Wolf’s calm arguments emitted a feeling of inescapable death and nonbeing. Olga tried to discuss all of this with other inhabitants of the bunker. Liz, who sometimes gave Olga a bit of affection at night, was convinced that the people who had kidnapped her and maimed her with the ice hammer and the people who now kept her in the bunker weren’t connected. The infamous Michael Laird, who had lured them all to Guangzhou, had simply used information from police sources and organized a site for victims of this unknown cult in order to sell them all into slavery.
“But who needs straps from the hides of dead dogs?” Olga objected.
“Sweetie, in today’s world everything’s for sale,” Liz replied. “I’m sure the Chinese use these strips for medicinal purposes. And they probably sell them for a lot of money to wealthy Europeans.”
“But why can’t they openly skin the corpses? There’s a ton of cheap labor in China! To kidnap foreigners, support them, feed them, hide them — and force them to skin dogs! Nonsense!” Olga answered indignantly.
“Olga, it may very well be that these dog
s...
aren’t quite so simpl
e..
.” Liz intoned significantly.
“What are they — talking dogs?” Olga suggested sarcastically.
“A lot of us here are convinced that the dogs are infected with something. Or irradiated.”
“Liz, some people have been locked up here for years. Why haven’t they gotten sick?”
“Maybe all of us already have leukemia. The teeth of two of the Rumanian women have blackened. A lot of us have problems with menstruation, with digestio
n...
The men are quietly going ma
d..
.”
“That’s all from isolation! From a lack of vitamins! Leukemia has very definite symptoms.”
“They aren’t just regular dogs, believe me,” Liz insisted.
Olga felt that Liz was dragging her into her own mania. But the other Friends of Dead Bitches weren’t any better. Their opinions split them into three groups. The first group claimed that this was all the madness of a powerful corporation that was trying to unite ancient cults with the newest technologies in its quest for power over people; the second believed that it was somehow connected with forbidden experiments in cloning people; and the third believed that new psychotropic weapons were being tried out on the inhabitants of the bunker. The Russians had their own ideas, and, as always, they “knew absolutely everything.”
“It’s just one of the oligarchs who’s lost his marbles,” the gruff fellow Pyotr told Olga. “He watched too many films, read all kinds of shit. There’s a lot of goons out there in the world, just turn on MTV — they show all kinds of mutants there! But there aren’t that many of them with money: You’ve got bin Laden, and who else? So another one’s turned up. I tell you Olga, I’d bet my life on it — this asshole is one of us, a Russian! I’m dead sure. He’s getting off on it! Nothing else! And there ain’t no secrets. Or maybe it’s a group of mutants!”
“The shits’ve sniffed their noses right off and now they’re just enjoying the high,” Lyosha seconded Pyotr.
“Besides, China’s close by, it’s easy to make arrangements.” Igor, the quiet one, shook his head.
“But the ICE Corporation doesn’t belong to Russians,” Olga objected.
“Everything can be bought!” Pyotr shook his red head. “Every sign, every brandy.”
“The world went stark raving mad a long time ago, don’t you get it?” Boris asked her.
Olga did get it. On September 11, at home in New York, in NoHo, it had truly seemed to her that the world had gone mad. During the catastrophe, she stood at her south-facing window and watched the twin towers burning. When they collapsed, and lower Manhattan was engulfed in an impenetrable cloud of smoke and cement dust, the earth shook underfoot. Also shaken was Olga’s certainty that there was
somethin
g
fixed, unshakable, constant,
positive
in life, something which people had calmly relied on — a family, career, love, children, creative work, even money for that matter. For centuries people had stood fast on all of this. Now, though, everything had somehow cracked, collapsed, crept underfoot. Her parents had died. And even that wasn’t enough. Now this bunker with its dead dogs! A real horror fil
m...
Looking at Pyotr’s cheerfully spiteful face, caught up in his stories about “international” gangsters, Olga could barely hold back tears: The horror of it was that
this
could quite well be true! After September 11, after the blows with the ice hammer to the chest, after the death of her closest relatives, after the site www.icehammervictims.org, after the kidnapping, after the bunker, after the smell of carrion and thousands of dog-skin straps — anything, anything at all, everything could be true!
“The world has changed quite dramatically, Olga,” Wolf said to her after a meal. “An agonistic quality has appeared, don’t you think?”
“Do you think that it’
s...
because of the Brotherhood?”
“Absolutely.” The old man smiled. “Experiencing a premonition of its death, our world is producing discordant movements. It is jittery. There was nothing of the like in the nineteenth century. And the twentieth? Two world wars, the atom bomb, Auschwitz, Communism, the division of the world into Reds and Westerner
s...
Humankind somehow got the jitters in the twentieth century, don’t you think? Take any field, science or art: the cloning of sheep, contemporary art, the cinema, contemporary pop music — these are convulsions. The world is going mad before its demise.”
“How do you know abou
t...
contemporary pop music, living here?”
“From above, Olga, everything comes from above!” The old man stretched his yellow smile even wider. “Each person who ends up here has something new to recount. My picture of the world is quite adequate. The human tendency toward insanity is quite evident. Tomorrow some blue-eyed youth with a fractured chest will arrive here telling us that up above people are already eating nursing infants for breakfast, and presidents are chosen by the size of their genitals. And I won’t be surprised. New manners and new morals emerge, Miss Drobot, on the threshold of the end!”
Filling the plastic box with strips, Olga sealed it with sticky tape, placed it on the cart, raised her eyes, and met Wolf’s gaze. Smiling, he winked at her, as though he had read her thoughts.
“You are preoccupied with something, Miss Drobot?” the old man asked, smoothing a strip on the table with his yellowed, slightly trembling hands.
“You know what it is.”
“Cease racking your brains. Everything will be as it should be. Wait just a bit — and everything will end. And how — you know. Patience, my child.”
The old man’s calmly derisive tone had begun to irritate Olga.
“The sages teach us patience / gray old men, already patients / it’s easy when it won’t be long / before you finally pass o
n..
.”
Wolf laughed. “Wonderful! Who is that?”
“It’s Papa’s parody of Omar Khayyám. My father translated Arabic poetry.”
“I’m in full agreement with your late papa.” Wolf slowly placed a strip into the box. “Truly, it won’t be lon
g...
But patience, Olga, is what makes us rational people. You can cease being a rational individual and attack the guards. Or stab me with a knife for skinning our dear dogs. Or simply open a carotid artery with those scissors over there. There is always a choice between judiciousness and lunacy.”
“So, in your opinion, suicide is lunacy?”
“Not exactly lunacy but a forbidden move. As in chess, you can’t move the king beyond the edge of the board. The king has to play on the board. And man must live.”
“And if living is unbearable?”
“Living is unbearable in any event. And therefore necessary!”
“And if life i
s...
meaningless?”
“Much of life is meaningless.”
“And illnes
s...
pain, suffering? Cancer, for instance?”
“Do you have cancer, Miss Drobot?”
“Not yet!” Olga answered and grinned bitterly.
“But I — do. Congratulate me!” The old man smiled.
Olga stared at him silently.
“I found out yesterday. At the medical checkup. Cancer of the liver, as was to be expected.” The old man nodded.
Yesterday there had been an obligatory monthly medical checkup, the goal of which was to detect the seriously ill. As a rule, their fate was decided quickly — a few days later the guards would lead them away forever. In the bunker slang this was called “the ascension.” Olga had witnessed three such “ascensions”: an Irishman who had gone mad, a Hungarian woman who had slashed her veins open, and a Canadian with a serious form of asthma.
“Actually, Miss Drobot, I suspected that something of the sort would happen,” Wolf continued, with unruffled calm, smoothing out yet another strip. “Half a century ago my papa missed, and the ice hammer hit me in the middle of my back. I must admit, the blow was powerful.”
“And the
y...
they already informed you for sure?”
“The diagnosis is obvious. It’s time to ascend.”
“Bu
t...
when?” Olga asked and then caught herself. “Forgive my stupidity, Mr. Wol
f..
.”
“Not at all. It was an entirely proper question.” The old man smiled ironically. “Today, before the lights-out bell. As an old-timer they offered me a reprieve of two weeks. But I turned it down.”
Olga nodded her head in understanding. Suddenly she felt how very much she would miss old Mr. Wolf.
“In connection with my ‘ascension’ today, would you allow me to invite you to a farewell dinner? The last supper, so to spea
k..
.”
“Of course.”
“That’s marvelous. We’ll talk over dinner.”
Wolf lowered his eyes and returned to his work.
“Cancer,” Olga thought, glancing at his hands in their rubber gloves. “Tomorrow he won’t exist anymore. But I’ll still be here. Rotting aliv
e..
.”
Wolf said nothing new to Olga over dinner. She talked a great deal and asked him a lot of questions, trying as before to understand and process what had happened to her. Wolf spoke little, repeating what he had said long ago, not responding, chewing the simple food for a long time, savoring pieces of fish and vegetables as though saying farewell to them. When he finished his dinner, he drank his lukewarm green tea quietly. Then he began to speak.
“Olga, last night I remembered something. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t ever forgotten it. But I haven’t told you this yet. You will remember that I said I grew up in the villa of my father, a high-ranking member of the Brotherhood. The brothers often gathered at this villa. And one time when they gathered, I spied on them. Actually, they weren’t really hidin
g...
That evening there were quite a number of them, about fifty people. In the main parlor of the house they undressed to their waists, sat in a circle, and held hands. And then they froze stock-still. In fact, my father and some of the brothers had done this before, they’d embraced naked and stayed absolutely still for a long time. I even think they stopped breathing. For me, a boy, it was rather frightening to see this. But then I became accustomed to it. And when they made this circle, held hands, closed their eyes, and froze, I stood on the stairs of the second floor and watched. The servants were also
their own
; the cook, the gardener, three guards, and both governesses were sitting in the circle. In the entire house there was only me and my sister, who was asleep in her room. Previously, spying on someone embracing my father, I would hide. That time I suddenly realized that there was no one to hide from — no one would notice me! So I descended from the second floor. The door to the room was locked from the inside. But I went around to the porch, opened a narrow window, and climbed into the room. The curtains were drawn. Only the fire was lit; the chandelier was extinguished. And so I went in and stood in the room. Fifty men and women, naked to the waist, sat with closed eyes, holding hands. They were completely immobile, as though they were petrified. The flames in the fireplace illuminated their bodies. I stood there awhile, then walked around them, examining each of them. It was so strange! I knew that my father lived a strange life, that something very strange was happening around my sister and me, even something frightening. Father was cold with me, we almost never talked about anything except my responsibilities. I socialized more with the tutors, but they too were rather strange, as if they were thinking about something else all the time, and pretending, even when they joked and laughed. School was the only release for me. There I had fun, had friends, played, it was interesting, even the mathematics lessons that everyone found boring made me happy. But at home I was almost alone. After the strange death of my mother, who was hit by a car in Berlin, the only person in my life I was close to was my sister. But Renata was still a little girl, I could only play with her. So that is how I lived. In short, when I walked around that circle of immobile people, at first I felt scared. It was as if these people had died. But I knew that they were alive! And my fear was unexpectedly replaced by anger. What they were doing made me feel so bitter, so sick to my stomach, so unpleasant! I realized that they were
violating
something, something very important! But I didn’t understan
d...
what, exactly. I simply began to shake with anger and I burst into tears from a feeling of helplessness. An unexpected feeling! Crying, I ran around the circle and began to hit and slap these people on their backs to make them come to, to wake them up. But they kept on sitting there immobile. I ran around the entire circle. I was
very
scared. Fear literally choked, squeezed, and threw me down on the floor. I started sobbing out loud. My crying filled the room. I sobbed and heard my own voice. Next to me sat the living dead. Finally I cried myself out. I lay on the rug, whimpering. I had never felt such loneliness as I did in those minutes. That is something I will never forget. And then, lying on the rug, I suddenly noticed through my drying tears that a poker was lying in the fireplace. The bent end of it lay in the coals, glowing red. And suddenly, unexpectedly for myself, I stood up and took this poker, approached my father, and touched his back with the red-hot end of the poker. The skin on his back hissed. There was a smell of burning and a bluish-gray smoke rose. But my father didn’t even flinch. That smoke, that smell of burned flesh, that hissing in the absolute silence somehow calmed me down. I
understood
something. I realized that these people in the circl
e...
were not people. I, my sister, the pupils in my school, passersby in the street — these were humans. This discovery calmed me deeply. I hung the poker in its usual location, next to the fireplace. Then I crawled through the window again, walked up the stairs to my room, and fell asleep. I slept deeply and calmly. And in the morning, as usual, my sister and I had breakfast with our father. Father was a vegetarian and ate only fruits, vegetables, and germinating seeds. I realized that he hadn’t even noticed the burn on his back. And everything in our family continued as before. For a whil
e...
So that is the story, Miss Drobot.”