The next day, Ilya saw for the first time how the town managed not to remember.
He and Maya went from one address in the old register to the next. Varya stayed in the park because, after the red tapes and the loss of the town supply board, every spark had become a personal insult. Klava Sinitsyna sat with Nina Pakhomova. Two old women whom the town had made convenient scapegoats at different times now drank tea and kept a silence so dense that it made you reluctant to turn on the light beside them.
Ilya and Maya began with the former deputy head teacher. She said the camp had always been orderly, then forgot which year she had retired. The former driver said it had not been his bus, though the photograph showed him at the wheel. The archivist at the works gate found a folder, saw the stamp and suddenly remembered that his lunch break had begun ten minutes ago.
Then the real thing began.
Not refusals. Refusals would have been more honest.
The camp's former nurse brought stools out into the corridor for them and would not let them into the kitchen. On the wall behind her hung photographs of grandchildren, graduation sashes, a magnet from Anapa and a calendar with kittens. She listened to Maya, nodded at every date and knew the surnames before the local officer had time to say them. But when Ilya asked who had signed the certificates after the assembly, the woman looked at the photographs of her grandchildren.
"My girl works in the council offices," she said. "She's no one important. Just carries papers around. She has a life to live."
The old foreman from the bus depot did not open his door. He spoke through the gap held by the chain. At first he claimed he could not hear. Then, when Maya raised her voice, he answered more quietly:
"I was changing tyres that day. Didn't see who got on. Didn't see who got off. That's what you write: I was blind."
"You do understand that isn't true," said Ilya.
The chain pulled taut.
"The truth is whatever lets you go out for bread in the morning."
The third was a woman who had once typed the lists. She lived in a room with two wardrobes and the smell of valerian. The same old typewriter stood on her table, covered with a towel. When Maya showed her the stamp, the woman did not recoil. She merely laid her palm on the towel.
"I typed the letters. Not the decisions."
"But you saw that the names didn't match."
"A great many things in our town didn't match."
"Who brought the lists?"
The woman looked not at the door or the windows, but at the telephone. An old push-button model lying beside her tablets.
"If I tell you, he won't hear it from you."
"He?" asked Maya.
The woman tucked the towel more tightly around the typewriter.
"Don't make old people be brave for the young. We already were. Not for long."
No one said, "It never happened."
They all said something softer:
"Not while I was there."
"I don't remember."
"Best leave it alone."
"There are families left behind."
The last words came from an old man in a cap who sat outside a block of flats with a chessboard. Maya showed him the stamp. The old man looked at it, then at Ilya, then at the windows of his building.
"There are families left behind," he repeated. "You need to live your lives, not wake the dead."
"What if the dead are knocking themselves?" asked Ilya.
The old man flinched.
Not at the meaning. At the word "knocking".
Maya leant closer.
"Who counted those lists?"
The old man fell silent.
Behind him, Ilya heard a lock click inside the building. Someone opened the door a crack, heard the question and immediately closed it again.
"Who?" Maya repeated.
The old man packed the chessmen into their box.
"People don't say his name."
"Why?"
"Because he's alive."
That evening they returned to the park empty-handed and full of silence.
Nina Pakhomova listened to their account without interrupting. Then she asked them to close the ticket-booth door. Ilya closed it.
"The light too," said Nina.
Varya switched off the overhead lamp. Only the small desk lamp remained, yellow and dim.
Nina warmed her hands around her mug for a long time. There was nothing mystical in her face. Only the exhaustion of someone who had spent her whole life walking around the same pit and now realised the pit had reached her door anyway.
"They called him the Counter," she said.
The word was spoken quietly.
The Room of Fear answered all the same.
The lamp on the shop floor went out. The empty till drawer clicked in the booth. Beyond the closed assembly-room door, the whistle gave a brief shrill note. The red tapes at the entrance lifted without a wind and settled again.
Maya did not move.
"His name," she said.
Nina shook her head.
"The nickname first. His name later. First we need to get used to no one dying because of the word."
"Who was he?"
"First a boy with money behind him. Then a man with lists under his hand. Then everyone understood: if he counted you as surplus, you became surplus. In the payroll. In a room. In a hospital bed. On a bus. In the ground."
Ilya remembered the right half of the ledger.
The night entries without sums.
Only a name. A debt. Paid or unpaid.
"Did Grandad know?" he asked.
Nina looked at him with something close to pity.
"Your grandfather wasn't a saint, Ilya. Saints didn't last long in their jobs here. He knew some of it. Did some of it. Hid some of it. And some of it he was afraid to open, because then all the rest would open too."
Varya stood by the switch-room door and did not ask about her father. That made the question hang in the room more heavily than any shout.
The ledger opened by itself.
There was no name on the new line.
Only a place.
The pond that wasn't there. Unpaid.
Maya raised her head.
"We have a pond."
Ilya looked towards the dark window. Poplars stood black beyond it, and somewhere behind them lay the water.
Varya said:
"We do. Only it doesn't exist in the records."
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