The Dead Mountaineer's Inn (2 page)

I came to Russian literature through absurdism and dark humor; my encounters with Mikhail Bulgakov's
The Master and Margarita
and Nikolai Gogol's
The Nose
are two of the pivotal experiences of my early adulthood. The idea of a standard, garden-variety realism doesn't figure into this sort of fictional equation. When the Devil's cat in
The Master and Margarita
begins to talk to the corrupt businessman and the businessman argues with the cat for a while before realizing
I am arguing with a talking cat!
, what we're seeing is not just interspecies communication at its most subtle, but one of the classic absurdist scenes in all of fiction. Even in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, you can sometimes see this quality, and the reason it rises again and again in the work I admire—Russian and not-Russian—is that the absurd admits to the illogic of our lives. To the internal inconsistencies that we try to keep in check. When they pile up, that is when comedy or tragedy occurs, as well as the unpredictable. When, in fiction, they spill over into the surreal or fantastical, this is just a psychological extension of what we know to be true in a more mundane sense in our daily lives. Whether we admit it or not.

If Glebsky is upset that he must be “on the job,” then in part it may be that he had hoped that the irrationality and absurdity of his normal workweek might be suspended or kept in abeyance while on vacation. But the world doesn't work that way—reality's porous and strange, and we can't ever quite escape it.

The Dead Mountaineer's Inn
's finest moments occur at those points where the detective knows less than he thinks he knows, where clues do not add up, where people are acting irrationally and impossible doppelgängers proliferate. Writing explanations is hard, but creating convincing mysteries
that are true to the world is more difficult. The Strugatsky brothers as good as tell us this through the inn's owner, Alek Snevar, who says to Glebsky, “Haven't you ever noticed … how much more interesting the unknown is than the known? The unknown makes us think—it makes our blood run a little quicker and gives rise to various delightful trains of thought. It beckons, it promises. It's like a fire flickering in the depths of the night.”

In support of this treatise, the novel contains one of the better scenes in fiction about waiting in line to use the shower, and not only because there aren't many such scenes in fiction. Glebsky's train of thought as he decides whether or not to wait is a lovely little reverie of indecision. When he realizes there's something odd going on
in
the shower, it's both comic and unnerving because he's been lost in his own thoughts: “He's just here, I remembered. He doesn't drink, he doesn't eat—he just leaves footprints.”

The “he” is probably the dead mountaineer, a figure given such a loving and complex mythology by Snevar that even the guests become complicit in propping up the stories. The spirit of the dead mountaineer and the hints of sentience given to the dog that's survived him are just two of the early elements of the novel that delight the reader. (And offset the off-putting weirdness of Glebsky's obsession with the gender of the hypnotist's child and the appearance of the one hackneyed character, a promiscuous maid.)

The Strugatsky brothers clearly loved writing these moments, loved creating a profusion of stories and tales about the stories. There's a jeweler's precision applied to the staging and execution of such scenes—a flair for expressing the foibles of human interaction. Execution's the key; in lesser hands, the legend of the dead mountaineer put forth by the inn's owner would be drab. In lesser hands, the almost
Noises Off
shenanigans on display throughout
The Dead Mountaineer's
Inn
would be sad, unconvincing, louche. It's tough to stage this kind of production. You might spend as much effort on the timing of the inspector Ping-Ponging down corridors to question different suspects as you do mapping the internal logic of a Forbidden Zone. To the writer, all enclosed spaces pose unique challenges, and when you're creating a riff on classic elements like the eccentricities of an inn's staff or the even deeper eccentricities of its guests, your success lies less in originality than in the clarity of the writing.

So: An uncanny moment in a shower. A missing watch. A suitcase that contains … what? Do these elements as they assemble capture our imagination—seem most luminous—when mysterious or when explained? Perhaps it depends on the type of tale being told. A mystery with no solution is an irritation to a reader, usually. A science-fiction story with some things left unexplained is to be expected.

When the avalanche roars down, cutting you off from the world, it's just you and characters, and in a sense, you get to choose how to interpret the story

2.

All writers have a border around them: the constraints they have to work against and the way they're perceived by readers. In the case of the brothers, the historical context of their development created an automatic barrier—both for us as English-language readers and for them, existing as they did within a repressive system.

Arkady Natonovich Strugatsky (1925–1991) was born in Batumi but grew up in Leningrad, leaving only during the siege of 1942. He served in the Soviet army, and it was in the Military Institute of Foreign Languages that he became proficient in English and Japanese. From 1955 on, he worked as a writer, and in 1958, he started to collaborate with his brother. Unlike Arkady, Boris Strugatsky (1933–2012) stayed
in Leningrad during the siege and then became an astronomer and computer engineer. During the course of their careers, the two brothers would become icons of Russian science fiction, but also of Russian literature in general, although mostly known in Europe. They've never been well known in the United States.

Literary influences on the Strugatsky brothers include Stanisław Lem, who tended toward satire and societal commentary that's not so much funny as tellingly observant. Yet not all literary influences are literary: the siege of Leningrad was among the most brutal events of World War II, and Arkady's flight from the city proved to be its own kind of tragedy: it ended in the death of the brothers' father. But even if they had been shielded from the worst of what happened during the war, it seems unlikely that the deprivation and desperate acts surrounding them could have been without impact. Soviet censorship also was an issue for the brothers, as it was for any honest writer of the time; some of their works did not appear in print until after the fall of the USSR. And in their fiction, over time, relatively optimistic views of the future and of humanity would give way to dystopias, to alienation and a generalized cynicism about human institutions.

Only two years after
The Dead Mountaineer's Inn
, the Strugatsky brothers would publish the iconic
Roadside Picnic
, turned into the classic movie
Stalker
by Andrei Tarkovsky. The two books could not be more different—the latter is an iconic anvil of a book, the former a delicate cobweb of timing and absurdity.
Roadside Picnic
fits perfectly within the brothers' overall body of deeply science-fictional work, while
The Dead Mountaineer's Inn
seems like an amusing one-off—among the last of their works to value pure play above all else.

So where exactly did
The Dead Mountaineer's Inn
come from? In Boris Strugatsky's short memoir
Comments on the Way Left Behind
(Комментарии к пройденному), published
in Russia in 1999, he states that they had wanted to write a detective story (Russian equivalent, “детектив”) for some time, based on a familiarity with Rex Stout, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, John le Carré, and others. This in the context of being aware of a “fundamental vice” of any detective story: “Two vices, to be precise: first, the pettiness of any criminal motive, and second, the imminence of a boring, disappointingly dull, plausibility-killing, awkward explanation. You can count all possible motives on the fingers of one hand … Your interest inevitably declines as soon as whos and whys are revealed.”

Thus they strove to create a narrative that, underneath its seeming whimsy, would be “paradoxical,” complete with an unexpected twist. In 1968, in the midst of writer's block caused by external pressures—i.e., Soviet censors—they came upon the solution, in part to “learn to write well but for money,” even if they later came to see the endeavor as impossible to achieve due to the inflexibility of mystery-fiction tropes. A locked-room mystery that wasn't. A whodunit that becomes something else. Whatever their later reservations, Boris and Arkady found
The Dead Mountaineer's Inn
“sheer pleasure” to write—and that pleasure comes across to the reader today.

In the same memoir, Boris recounts how they anticipated having no trouble publishing
The Dead Mountaineer's Inn
—originally titled
The Murder Case: Yet Another Requiem for the Detective Novel
—only to find out to their surprise that they were wrong, because of prior ideological “misbehavior” that had created suspicion. “It turned out we had gone too far with being apolitical and asocial. It turned out that our editors wished there were some struggles in the novel—class struggle, struggle for peace, struggle of ideas, just anything.”

As a result, when the novel was finally published, the gangsters in this edition had to be changed to neo-Nazis, a
move the brothers thought was in extreme bad taste. When
The Dead Mountaineer's Inn
was later published as a children's book, a different change had to be made: deleting the mulled wine Glebsky pours into his coffee, since children's books of the time could not mention drinking alcohol. (Eventually, the novel also became a video game and a Russian movie.)

But no matter how the brothers might have been influenced by crime fiction, their science-fictional souls still glimmer darkly upon the fallen snow of the chapters in
The Dead Mountaineer's Inn
, a novel that revels in every kind of tension, that inhabits every available transitional space. The mystery that wants to explain, and the science-fiction story that wants to leave something vague or unexplained: the unexplored horizon, the limits of human understanding. I can almost imagine each brother as the advocate for one of the two causes—the cause of order and the cause of not-order—and only this tussle can create the requisite balance between the two.

Early on, before the two are cut off from the world by an avalanche, the inn's owner says to Grebsky: “But as soon as the unknown becomes known, it's just as flat, gray and uninteresting as everything else.”

For the very longest time, the Strugatsky brothers endeavor to make this novel complex and kinetic and fun.

You are about to enter the Dead Mountaineer's Inn.

Are you who you say you are?

Are you
what
you say you are?

What, exactly, will you tell Grebsky when he comes knocking on your door?

I stopped the car, got out and took off my sunglasses. Everything was exactly as Zgut had said it would be. The inn was two stories high, a yellowish-green color, with a mournful-looking sign hanging over the front porch that read, “
THE DEAD MOUNTAINEER
'
S INN
.” Deep spongy snowdrifts on either side of the porch bristled with different-colored skis—I counted seven of them, one with a boot still on it. Knobby dull icicles thick as your arm dangled off the roof. A pale face peered out of the rightmost window on the first floor, and now the front door opened and a bald, stocky man wearing a red fur vest over a dazzling nylon shirt appeared on the porch. He approached with slow, heavy steps and then stopped in front of me. He had a coarse, ruddy face and the neck of a heavyweight champion. He did not look at me. His melancholy gaze was focused somewhere to the side, expressing a sad dignity. No doubt this was Alek Snevar himself, owner of the inn, the valley surrounding it, and Bottleneck Pass.

“There …” he said in an unnaturally low and muffled voice. “It happened over there.” He pointed with his hand. There was a corkscrew in it. “On that peak …”

I turned, squinting towards the terrifying-looking blue-grey cliff that enclosed the valley to the west: at the pale tongues of snow and the serrated ridge, which looked so
distinct against the sky's deep blue background that it might have been painted there.

“The carabiner broke,” the owner continued in the same muffled voice. “He fell two hundred meters straight down, to his death. There was nothing for him to catch hold of on the smooth rock. Perhaps he cried out. Nobody heard him. Perhaps he prayed. Only God was listening. When he hit the cliffs we heard the avalanche here, like the roar of an animal being woken up: a hungry, greedy roar. The ground shook as he crashed into it, along with forty-two thousand tons of powder …”

“What was he doing up there?” I asked, staring at the evil-looking cliff.

“Allow me to immerse myself in the past,” the owner said, bowing his head and laying his fist with the corkscrew in it against his bald temple.

It was all completely how Zgut had told me it would be, only I couldn't see a dog anywhere. Still, I noticed a large number of his calling cards lying in the snow near the porch and around the skis. I climbed back in the car and pulled out the basket full of bottles.

“Inspector Zgut sends his greetings,” I said. The owner immediately emerged from his reverie.