The Doomed City

1

The trash cans were rusty and battered, and the lids had come loose, so there were scraps of newspaper poking up from under them and potato peels dangling down. They were like the bills of slovenly pelicans that are none too picky about their food. The cans looked way too heavy to lift, but in fact, working in tandem with Wang, it was a breeze to jerk a can like that up toward Donald’s outstretched hands and set it on the edge of the truck’s lowered sideboard. You just had to watch out for your fingers. And after that you could adjust your mittens and take a few breaths through your nose while Donald walked the can farther in on the back of the truck and left it there.

The damp chill of nighttime breathed in through the wide-open gates, and under the archway a naked, yellow lightbulb swayed on a wire that was furred with grime. In its light Wang’s face looked like the face of a man with a chronic case of jaundice, but Donald’s face was invisible in the shadow of his wide-brimmed cowboy hat. The chipped and peeling gray walls were furrowed by horizontal slashes and adorned with obscene, life-size depictions of women. Dark clumps of dusty cobwebs dangled from the vaulting, and standing beside the door of the caretaker’s lodge was a disorderly crowd of the empty bottles and stewed-fruit jars that Wang collected, carefully sorted, and handed in for recycling…

When there was only one trash can left, Wang took a shovel and a broom and started sweeping up the trash left on the asphalt surface.

“Ah, stop scrabbling around, Wang,” Donald exclaimed irritably. “You scrabble around that way every time. It’s still not going get any cleaner, is it?”

“A caretaker should be a sweeper,” Andrei remarked didactically, twirling the wrist of his right hand and focusing on his sensations: it seemed to him that he had slightly strained a tendon.

“They’ll only make it all filthy again, won’t they?” Donald said with loathing. “Before we’ve even turned around, they’ll foul it up worse than before.”

Wang tipped the trash into the last can, tamped it down with the shovel, and slammed the lid shut. “Now we can do it,” he said, glancing around the arched passage. The entrance was clean now. Wang looked at Andrei and smiled. Then he looked up at Donald and said, “I’d just like to remind you—”

“Come on, come on!” Donald shouted impatiently.

One-two. Andrei and Wang lifted the can. Three-four. Donald caught the can, grunted, gasped, and lost his grip. The can lurched over and crashed down onto the asphalt on its side. Garbage flew out across ten meters as if it had been shot from a cannon. Actively disgorging as it went, the can clattered into the courtyard. The reverberating echo spiraled up to the black sky between the walls.

“God al-fucking-mighty and the Holy Spirit,” said Andrei, who had barely managed to leap out of the way. “Damn your fumblefingers!”

“I just wanted to remind you,” Wang said meekly, “that one handle’s broken off this can.”

He took the broom and shovel and set to work, and Donald squatted on the edge of the truck bed and lowered his hands between his knees. “Dammit…” he muttered in a dull voice. “Damned mean trick.”

Something had clearly been wrong with him for the last few days, and on this night in particular. So Andrei didn’t start telling him what he thought about professors and their ability to do real work. He went to get the can and then, when he got back to the truck, he took off his mittens and pulled out his cigarettes. The stench from the open can was unbearable, so he lit up quickly and only then offered Donald one. Donald shook his head without speaking. His mood needed a lift. Andrei flung the burned match into the can and said, “Once upon a time in a little town there lived two night-soil men—father and son. There weren’t any sewers there, only pits full of slurry. And they scooped that shit out with a bucket and poured it into their barrel, and what’s more, the father, as the more experienced specialist, went down into the pit, and the son handed the bucket down to him from above. Then one day the son lost his grip on the bucket and dumped it back on his old man. Well, his old man wiped himself down, looked up at him, and said bitterly, ‘You’re a total screwup, a real lunkhead. No good for anything. You’ll be stuck up there your whole life.’”

He was expecting Donald to smile, at least. Donald was generally a cheerful individual, sociable—he never got downhearted. There was something of the combat-veteran-turned-student about him. But this time Donald only cleared his throat and said in a dull voice, “You can’t shovel out all the cesspits.”

And Wang, scrabbling beside the can, reacted in a way that was really strange. He suddenly asked in a curious voice, “So what does it cost where you’re from?”

“What does what cost?” asked Andrei, puzzled.

“Shit. Is it expensive?”

Andrei chuckled uncertainly. “Well, how can I put it… It depends whose it is.”

“So you’ve got different kinds there then?” Wang asked in amazement. “It’s all the same where I’m from. So whose shit is most expensive where you’re from?”

“Professors’,” Andrei replied immediately. He simply couldn’t resist it.

“Ah!” Wang tipped another shovel-load into the can and nodded. “I get it. But out in the country there weren’t any professors, so we only had one price: five yuan a bucket. That’s in Szechuan. But in Kiangsi, for instance, prices ran up to seven or even eight yuan a bucket.”

Andrei finally realized this was serious. He suddenly felt an urge to ask if it was true that when a Chinaman was invited to dinner, he was obliged to crap on his host’s vegetable plot afterward—but, of course, it felt too awkward to ask about that.

“Only how things are now where I’m from, I don’t know,” Wang continued. “I wasn’t living out in the country at the end… But why is professors’ shit more expensive where you’re from?”

“I was joking,” Andrei said guiltily. “No one even trades in that stuff where I’m from.”

“Yes they do,” said Donald. “You don’t even know that, Andrei.”

“And that’s yet another thing you do know,” Andrei snapped.

Only a month ago he would have launched into a furious argument with Donald. It annoyed him immensely that again and again the American kept telling them things about Russia that Andrei didn’t even have a clue about. Back then, Andrei was sure that Donald was simply bluffing him or repeating Hearst’s spiteful tittle-tattle: “Take that garbage from Hearst and shove it!” he used to yell, shrugging it all off. But then that jerk Izya Katzman had appeared, and Andrei stopped arguing; he just snarled back. God only knew where they’d picked it all up from. And he explained his own helplessness by the fact that he’d come here from the year 1951, and these two were from ’67.

“You’re a lucky man,” Donald said suddenly, getting up and moving toward the trash cans beside the driver’s cabin.

Andrei shrugged and, in an effort to rid himself of the bad taste left by this conversation, put on his mittens and started shoveling up the stinking trash, helping Wang. Well, so I don’t know, he thought. It’s a big deal, shit. And what do you know about integral equations? Or Hubble’s constant, say? Everyone has something he doesn’t know…

Wang was stuffing the final remains of the trash into the can when the neatly proportioned figure of police constable Kensi Ubukata appeared in the gateway from the street. “This way, please,” he said over his shoulder to someone, and saluted Andrei with two fingers. “Greetings, garbage collectors!”

A girl stepped out of the darkness of the street into the circle of yellow light and stopped beside Kensi. She was very young, no more than about twenty, and really small, only up to the little policeman’s shoulder. She was wearing a coarse sweater with an extremely wide neck and a short, tight skirt. Thick lipstick made her lips stand out vividly against her pale, boyish face, and her long blonde hair reached down to her shoulders.

“Don’t be frightened,” Kensi told her with a polite smile. “They’re only our garbage collectors. Perfectly harmless in a sober state… Wang,” he called. “This is Selma Nagel, a new girl. Orders are to put her in your building, in number 18. Is 18 free?”

Wang walked over to him, removing his mittens on the way. “Yes,” he said. “It’s been free for a long time. Hello, Selma Nagel. I’m the caretaker—my name’s Wang. If you need anything, that’s the door to the caretaker’s lodge, you come here.”

“Let me have the key,” Kensi said, and saluted again. “Come on, I’ll show you the way,” he said to the girl.

“No need,” she said wearily. “I’ll find it myself.”

“As you wish,” Kensi said, and saluted again. “Here is your suitcase.”

The girl took the suitcase from Kensi and the key from Wang, tossed her head, and set off across the asphalt, clattering her heels and walking straight at Andrei.

He stepped back to let her past. As she walked by, he caught a strong smell of perfume and some other kind of fragrance too. And he carried on gazing after her as she walked across the circle of yellow illumination. Her skirt was really short, just a bit longer than her sweater, her legs were bare and white—to Andrei they seemed to glow as she walked out from under the archway into the yard—and in that darkness all he could see were her white sweater and flickering white legs.

Then a door creaked, screeched, and crashed, and after that Andrei mechanically took out his cigarettes again and lit up, imagining those delicate white legs walking up the stairs, step by step… smooth calves, dimples under the knees, enough to drive you crazy… He saw her climbing higher and higher, floor after floor, and stopping in front of the door of apartment 18, directly opposite apartment 16… Dam-naa-tion, I ought to change the bedsheets at least; I haven’t changed them for three weeks, the pillowcase is as gray as a foot rag… But what was her face like? Well, I’ll be damned, I don’t remember anything about what her face looked like. All I remember are the legs.

He suddenly realized that no one was saying anything, not even the married man Wang, and at that moment Kensi started speaking. “I have a first cousin once removed, Colonel Maki. A former colonel of the former imperial army. At first he was Mr. Oshima’s adjutant and he spent two years in Berlin. Then he was appointed our acting military attaché in Czechoslovakia, and he was there when the Germans entered Prague…”

Wang nodded to Andrei. They lifted the can with a jerk and successfully shunted it onto the back of the truck.

“…And then,” Kensi continued at a leisurely pace, lighting up a cigarette, “he fought for a while in China, somewhere in the south, I think it was, down Canton way. And then he commanded a division that landed on the Philippines, and he was one of the organizers of the famous ‘march of death,’ with five thousand American prisoners of war—sorry, Donald… And then he was sent to Manchuria and appointed head of the Sakhalin fortified region, where, as it happens, in order to preserve secrecy he herded eight thousand Chinese workers into a mine shaft and blew it up—sorry, Wang… And then he was taken prisoner by the Russians, and instead of hanging him or handing him over to the Chinese—which is the same thing—all they did was lock him up for ten years in a concentration camp…”

While Kensi was telling them all this, Andrei had time to clamber up onto the back of the truck, help Donald line up the cans there, raise the sideboard and secure it, jump back down onto the ground, and give Donald a cigarette, and now the three of them were standing in front of Kensi and listening to him: Donald Cooper, long and stooped, in a faded boilersuit—a long face with folds beside the mouth and a sharp chin with a growth of sparse, gray stubble; and Wang, broad and stocky, almost neckless, in an old, neatly darned wadded jacket—a broad, brownish face, little snub nose, affable smile, dark eyes in the cracks of puffy eyelids—and Andrei was suddenly transfixed by a poignant joy at the thought that all these people from different countries, and even from different times, were all here together and all doing one thing of great importance, each at his own post.

“…Now he’s an old man,” Kensi concluded. “And he claims that the best women he ever knew were Russian women. Emigrants in Harbin.” He stopped speaking, dropped his cigarette butt, and painstakingly ground it to dust with the sole of his gleaming ankle boot.

Andrei said, “What kind of Russian is she? ‘Selma’—and ‘Nagel’ too?”

“Yes, she’s Swedish,” said Kensi. “But all the same. The story came to me by association.”

“OK, let’s go,” Donald said, and climbed into the cabin.

“Listen, Kensi,” said Andrei, taking hold of the cabin door. “Who were you before this?”

“An inspector at the foundry, and before that, minister of communal—”

“No, not here, back there.”

“Aah, there? Back there I was literary editor for the journal Hayakawa.”

Donald started the motor and the vintage truck began shaking and rattling, belching out thick clouds of blue smoke.

“Your right sidelight isn’t working!” Kensi shouted.

“It hasn’t worked in all the time we’ve been here,” Andrei responded.

“Then get it fixed! If I see it again, I’ll fine you!”

“They set you on to hound us…”

“What? I can’t hear!”

“I said, catch bandits, not drivers!” Andrei yelled, trying to shout over the clanging and clattering. “What’s our sidelight to you? When are they going to send all you spongers packing?”

“Soon,” Kensi said. “Any time now—it won’t be more than a hundred years!”

Andrei threatened Kensi with his fist, waved good-bye to Wang, and plumped into the seat beside Donald. The truck jerked forward, scraping one side along the wall of the archway, trundled out onto Main Street, and made a sharp turn to the right.

Settling himself more comfortably, so that the spring protruding from the seat wasn’t pricking his backside, Andrei cast a sideways glance at Donald, who was sitting up straight, with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right on the gearshift; his hat was pushed forward over his eyes, his pointed chin was thrust out, and he was driving at top speed. He always drove like that, “at the legal speed limit,” never giving a thought to braking at the frequent potholes in the road, and at every one of those potholes the trash cans in the back bounced heavily, the rusted-through hood rattled, and no matter how hard Andrei tried to brace himself with his legs, he flew up in the air and fell back precisely onto the sharp point of that damned spring. Previously, however, all this had been accompanied by good-humored banter, but now Donald didn’t say anything, his thin lips were tightly compressed, and he didn’t look at Andrei at all, which made it seem like there was some kind of malicious premeditation in this routine jolting.

“What’s wrong with you, Don?” Andrei asked eventually. “Got a toothache?”

Donald twitched one shoulder briefly and didn’t answer.

“Really, you haven’t been yourself these last few days. I can see it. Maybe I’ve unintentionally offended you somehow?”

“Drop it, Andrei,” Donald said through his teeth. “Why does it have to be about you?’

And again Andrei fancied that he heard some kind of ill will, even something offensive or insulting, in these words: How could a snotty kid like you offend me, a professor? But then Donald spoke again.

“I meant it when I said you were lucky. You really are someone to be envied. All this just kind of washes right over you. Or passes straight through you. But it runs over me like a steamroller. I haven’t got a single unbroken bone left in me.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t understand a thing.”

Donald said nothing, screwing up his lips.

Andrei looked at him, glanced vacantly at the road ahead, squinted sideways at Donald again, scratched the back of his head, and said disconcertedly, “Word of honor, I don’t understand a thing. Everything seems to be going fine—”

“That’s why I envy you,” Donald said harshly. “And that’s enough about this. Just don’t take any notice.”

“So how am I supposed to do that?” said Andrei, seriously perturbed now. “How can I not take any notice? We’re all here together… You, me, the guys… friendship is a big word, of course, too big… well then, simply comrades… I, for instance, would tell you if there was something… After all, no one’s going to refuse to help, are they! Well, you tell me—if something happened to me and I asked you for help, would you refuse? You wouldn’t, would you, honestly?”

Donald’s hand lifted off the gearshift and patted Andrei gently on the shoulder. Andrei didn’t say anything. His feelings were brimming over. Everything was fine again, everything was all right. Donald was all right. It was just a fit of the blues. A man can get the blues, can’t he? It was simply that his pride had reared its head. After all, the man was a professor of sociology, and here he was down with the trash cans, and before that he was a loader. Of course, it was unpleasant and galling for him, especially since he had no one to take these grievances to—no one had forced him to come here, and it was embarrassing to complain… It was easily said: Make a good job of anything you’re given to do… Well, all right. Enough of all this. He’d manage.

The old truck was already trundling along over diabase rendered slippery by settled mist, and the buildings on both sides had become lower and more dilapidated, and the lines of streetlamps running along the street had become dimmer and sparser. Ahead of them these lines merged into a blurred, hazy blob. There wasn’t a single soul on the roadway or the sidewalks, and for some reason they didn’t even come across any caretakers; only at the corner of Seventeenth Street, in front of a squat, dumpy hotel best known by its title of “the Bedbug Cage,” was there a cart with a dejected horse, and someone sleeping in the cart, completely bundled up in tarpaulin. It was four o’clock in the morning, the time of the deepest sleep, and not a single window was glowing in the black facades.

A vehicle stuck its nose out of a gateway on the left, up ahead of them. Donald flashed his lights at it and hurtled past, and the vehicle, another garbage truck, pulled out onto the road and tried to overtake them, but it had picked the wrong guys for that. There was no way it could compete with Donald—its headlights glinted in through the rear window for a moment and then it dropped back, hopelessly outrun. They overtook another garbage truck in the Burnt Districts, and just in time, because the cobblestones started immediately after the Burnt Districts, and Donald was obliged to reduce speed anyway so the old rust bucket wouldn’t fall apart.

Here they met trucks already going the other way, already empty—they were coming back from the dump, no longer in any hurry to get anywhere. Then a shadowy figure detached itself from a streetlamp and walked out into the road, and Andrei slipped his hand under the seat and pulled out a heavy tire iron, but it turned out to be a policeman, who asked them to give him a lift to Cabbage Lane. Neither Andrei nor Donald knew where that was, and then the policeman, a beefy guy with big jowls and tangled locks of light-colored hair sticking out from under his uniform cap, said he would show them the way.

He stood on the running board beside Andrei, holding on to the door frame, twisting his nose about discontendedly the whole way, as if he’d caught a smell of something, God only knew what—although he himself reeked of stale sweat, and Andrei remembered that this part of the city had already been disconnected from the water main.

For a while they drove in silence, with the policeman whistling something from an operetta, and then, right out of the blue, he informed them that just today, at midnight, on the corner of Cabbage Lane and Second Left Street, they’d bumped off some poor devil and pulled out all his gold teeth.

“You’re not doing your job,” Andrei told him angrily. Cases like this infuriated him, and the policeman’s tone of voice made Andrei feel like punching him in the neck: it was immediately obvious that he couldn’t care less about the murder, or the victim, or the killer.

The policeman swung his broad face around quizzically and asked, “So you’ll teach me how to do my job, will you?”

“Maybe it could be me,” said Andrei.

The policeman screwed his eyes up ill-naturedly, whistled, and said, “Teachers, teachers! Whichever way you spit—teachers everywhere. He stands there and teaches. He’s carting garbage already, but he’s still teaching.”

“I’m not trying to teach you—” Andrei began, raising his voice, but the policeman wouldn’t let him speak.

“I’ll get back to the station now,” he informed them calmly, “and I’ll call your garage, and tell them your right sidelight isn’t working. His sidelight isn’t working—got it?—and on top of that, he’s teaching the police how to do their job. Pipsqueak.”

Donald suddenly burst into dry, grating laughter.

The policeman gave a hoot of laughter too and said in a perfectly amicable voice, “It’s just me for forty buildings, OK? And they forbid us to carry guns. What do you want from us? They’ll start knifing you at home soon, never mind the back alleys.”

“So what are you doing about it?” Andrei said, stunned. “You should protest, demand—”

“We have ‘protested,’” the policeman echoed acidly. “We have ‘demanded’…You’re new here, are you? Hey, boss,” he called to Donald. “Pull up. This is my stop.”

He jumped down off the running board and, without looking back, waddled off toward a dark crack between the lopsided wooden houses, where a solitary streetlamp burned in the distance, with a little knot of people standing under it.

“Honest to God, are they total idiots, or what?” Andrei said indignantly when the truck started moving again. “How can they do that—the city’s full of riffraff, and the police are unarmed! It’s absolutely crazy. Kensi’s got a holster on his hip, what does he carry in it, cigarettes?”

“Sandwiches,” said Donald. “‘Due to an increase in the numbers of cases of criminals attacking police officers in order to seize their weapons…’ and so forth.”

Andrei ruminated for a while, bracing himself like grim death with his feet to avoid being thrown up off the seat. It was almost the end of the cobblestones already.

“I think it’s incredibly stupid,” he said eventually. “How about you?”

“I think so too,” Donald responded, lighting up awkwardly with one hand.

“And you talk about it so calmly?”

“I’ve done all my worrying,” said Donald. “It’s a very old directive; you weren’t even here yet.”

Andrei scratched the back of his head and frowned. Well, dammit, maybe there was some sense in this directive. When all was said and done, a solitary policeman really was tempting bait for those creeps. If they took away the guns, then of course they had to take them away from everyone. And, of course, the problem wasn’t that idiotic directive but the fact that there weren’t very many police officers, and they didn’t carry out very many raids—but they ought to set up one grand raid and sweep all this filth away at a single stroke! Get the local people involved. Me, for instance, I’d be happy to go… Donald would go, of course… I’ll have to write to the mayor.

Then his thoughts suddenly took a new turn. “Listen, Don,” he said. “You’re a sociologist. Of course, I don’t reckon sociology is any kind of science at all—I’ve told you that already—it’s got absolutely no method. But, of course, you know a lot, a lot more than I do. So you explain to me where all this dross in our city comes from. How did they get here—the murderers, the rapists, the crooks? Didn’t the Mentors realize who they were inviting here?”

“They realized, probably,” Donald replied indifferently, shooting straight over a terrifying pit filled with black water without even pausing.

“But why then…?”

“People aren’t born thieves. They become thieves. And then, as everyone knows, ‘How can we tell what the Experiment requires? The Experiment is the Experiment…’” Donald paused for a moment. “Soccer is soccer: a round ball, a square pitch, and may the best team win.”

The streetlamps came to an end and the residential area of the city was left behind. Now the battered and broken road was flanked on both sides by abandoned ruins—the remnants of incongruous colonnades that had slumped into shoddy foundations; walls propped up by girders, with gaping holes instead of windows; tall grass; stacks of rotting timber; thickets of nettles and thistles; stunted little trees, half choked by creepers, standing among heaps of blackened bricks. And then up ahead a hazy glow appeared again. Donald turned to the right, carefully steered past an oncoming empty truck, spun his wheels for a while in deep ruts choked with mud, and finally braked to a halt a hair’s breadth away from the red taillights of the last garbage truck in the line. He killed the engine and looked at his watch. It was about half past four.

“We’ll be standing here for a good hour.” Andrei said cheerfully. “Let’s go and see who’s up in front of us.”

Another truck drove up from behind and stopped. “Go on your own,” said Donald, leaning back in his seat and pulling the brim of his hat down over his face.

Then Andrei also leaned back, adjusted the spring underneath him, and lit a cigarette. Up ahead, unloading was proceeding at full tilt—trash can lids clattered, the tallyman’s high voice shouted: “…eight… ten…,” a thousand-candle-power lamp under a flat tin plate swayed on its pole. Then suddenly voices from several different throats started yelling at once: “Where are you going? Fuck it!”; “Pull back!”; “You’re the blind asshole here!”; “You looking for a smack in the mouth?” There were massive heaps of garbage, compacted into a dense mass, looming up on the left and the right, and a ghastly smell of rotten food wafted on the night breeze.

A familiar voice suddenly spoke right in his ear. “Cheers, shit shifters! How’s the Great Experiment going?” It was Izya Katzman, life size and in person—disheveled, fat, grubby, and, as always, offensively cheerful. “Have you heard? There’s a scheme for a final solution to the problem of crime. They’re abolishing the police! To replace them they’re going to let the crazies out on the streets at night. It’s the end for the bandits and the hooligans—now only loonies will go outside at nighttime!”

“Cretinous,” Andrei said frostily.

“Cretinous?” Izya stood on the running board and stuck his head into the cabin. “On the contrary! Most ingenious! No additional expenditure. Returning the insane to their permanent places of residence is the responsibility of the caretakers—”

“For which the caretakers are issued supplementary rations in the form of one liter of vodka,” Andrei butted in, which sent Izya into inexplicable raptures: he started giggling, making strange, guttural sounds, spraying saliva, and washing his hands with air.

Donald suddenly swore in a hollow voice, swung open his door, jumped down, and disappeared into the darkness. Izya immediately stopped giggling and asked uneasily, “What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know,” Andrei said morosely. “Probably you made him want to puke… But actually, he’s been that way for a few days already.”

“Really?” Izya looked over the top of the cabin in the direction that Donald had gone. “A shame. He’s a good man. Only really badly maladapted.”

“So who’s well adapted?”

“I’m well adapted. You’re well adapted. Wang’s well adapted… Donald’s been getting indignant with everything just lately: Why do we have to stand in line to dump garbage? Why the hell is there a tallyman here? What’s he tallying?”

“Well, he’s right to feel outraged,” said Andrei. “It really is kind of cretinous.”

“But you don’t get all steamed up about it, do you?” Izya objected. “You realize perfectly well that the tallyman isn’t his own master. They’ve put him there to tally, so he tallies. And since he can’t keep up with his tallying, as you already know, a line forms. And a line… is a line…” Izya started gurgling and spraying again. “Of course, if Donald was in charge, he’d lay a good road here, with exit ramps for dumping garbage, and he’d transfer that great, muscly hulk of a tallyman to the police, to catch bandits. Or to the front line, to the farmers—”

“So?” Andrei asked impatiently

“What do you mean, ‘So?’ Donald isn’t the boss, is he?”

“So why don’t the bosses do it?”

“Why should they?” Izya exclaimed joyfully. “Think about it! Does the garbage get removed? It does. Does the amount removed get tallied? It does. Systematically? Oh yes. At the end of the month, a report will be presented: this month this many more cans of crap were removed than last month. The minister’s happy, the mayor’s happy, everyone’s happy, and if Donald’s not happy, well, no one forced him to come here—he’s a volunteer!”

The truck in front of them belched out a cloud of blue smoke and moved forward about fifteen meters. Andrei hastily sat behind the wheel and glanced out. Donald was nowhere to be seen. Then he cautiously started up the engine and advanced raggedly for the same distance, with the engine cutting out three times on the way. Izya walked alongside, shying away in alarm when the truck started shuddering. Then he started telling Andrei some story about the Bible, but Andrei didn’t really listen—he was soaking wet after all the strain he’d just been through.

Under the bright lamp they were still clanging garbage cans and the air was thick with obscenities. Something struck the roof of the cabin and bounced off, but Andrei took no notice. Oscar Heidemann walked up to them from behind, with his partner, a black man from Haiti, and asked for a cigarette. Almost invisible in the darkness, the Haitian, whose name was Silva, grinned with his white teeth.

Izya launched into a conversation with them, and for some reason he called Silva a “Tonton Macoute” and questioned Oscar about someone named Thor Heyerdahl. Silva pulled strange faces, made his fingers into eyeglasses, and pretended to fire a burst from an automatic rifle. Izya clutched at his stomach and pretended to be slain on the spot. Andrei didn’t understand a thing, and apparently neither did Oscar; very soon it became clear that he’d been confusing Haiti with Tahiti.

Something skidded across the roof again, and suddenly a massive lump of agglutinated garbage smashed into the hood, shattering into pieces.

“Hey!” Oscar shouted into the darkness. “Stop that!”

Up ahead twenty throats started yelling again, and the intensity of the invective suddenly rose to a stratospheric level. Something was going on. Izya gave a plaintive squeal, clutched at his stomach, and doubled over—this time for real. Andrei opened the door and stuck his head out, and immediately took a hit on it from an empty tin can—it didn’t hurt, but it was very insulting—while Silva ducked down and slipped into the darkness. Andrei gazed around, protecting his head and face.

He couldn’t see anything. A hail of rusty cans, pieces of rotten wood, old bones, and even fragments of bricks was showering down from behind the heaps of garbage on the left. He heard a jangle of breaking glass. A wild bellow of outrage rose up over the column of trucks. “What are those bastards doing over there?” voices yelled, almost in chorus. Engines roared as they started up and headlamps flared. Some trucks started jerking fitfully backward and forward; evidently the drivers were trying to turn them so as to light up the crests of garbage from which whole bricks and empty bottles were now flying down. A few more men, huddled over like Silva, dashed into the darkness.

Andrei noticed in passing that Izya had crouched down beside the back of the truck with a tearstained face and was feeling at his stomach. Then Andrei ducked back into the cabin, grabbed the tire iron from under the seat, and leaped out again. Smash their heads in, the bastards! He could see about a dozen garbage collectors down on all fours, clinging on with their hands as they clambered up the slope in a frenzy. One of the drivers managed to set his truck crossways to the line after all, and the beams of his headlamps lit up a ragged ridge, bristling with fragments of old furniture, frizzy with old clothes and scraps of paper, and glittering with broken glass, and above the ridge the scoop bucket of an excavator, raised high in the air, stood out against the black sky. Something was moving on the scoop bucket, something large and gray, with a silvery sheen. Andrei froze, staring at it, and at that very moment a despairing howl rang out above the babble of voices.

“It’s devils! Devils! Run for your life!”

Immediately men came pouring down the slope, tumbling over and over, on hands and knees, head over heels, raising clouds of dust, in a swirling vortex of torn clothes and tatters of paper. One man, clutching his head in his hands and pulling his elbows in tight to protect it, hurtled past Andrei, still squealing in panic, slipped in a rut, fell, got up again, and ran on, going flat out in the direction of the City. Another, breathing hoarsely, squeezed in between the radiator of Andrei’s truck and the back of the one in front, got stuck there, snagged on something, and started straining to break free, also yelling in a strange voice. Suddenly it turned quieter, with only the engines growling, and then, as sharp as blows from a whiplash, came the crack of shots. Up there on the ridge, in the bluish light of the headlamps, Andrei saw a tall, lean man, standing with his back to the trucks and holding a pistol in both hands, firing again and again at something in the darkness behind the ridge.

He fired five or six times in the total silence, and then from out of the darkness came the inhuman howling of a thousand voices, a baleful, mournful caterwauling, as if twenty thousand March tomcats had all started wailing into megaphones at the same time, and the lean man backed away, lost his footing, flapped his arms awkwardly, and slid down the slope on his back. Andrei also shrank away in anticipation of something absolutely appalling, and he saw the ridge abruptly stir into motion.

Suddenly the ridge was swarming with unbelievable silvery-gray, monstrously ugly ghosts, with thousands of blood-red, glittering eyes, and millions of damp fangs flashing in savage grins, and a whole forest of impossibly long, shaggy arms waving in the air. In the light of the headlamps, the dust rose up over them in a dense wall, and a solid deluge of broken bricks, rocks, bottles, and lumps of filth poured down on the column.

This was too much for Andrei. He ducked into the cabin, huddled into the far corner, and held the tire iron out in front of himself, frozen, as if this were a nightmare. He was totally dazed, and when a dark body obscured the open door, he yelled out, without even hearing his own voice, and started jabbing the iron bar into the soft, terrifying thing that resisted and came creeping toward him, and he kept on jabbing until Izya’s plaintive howl—“It’s me, you idiot!”—brought him to his senses. And then Izya climbed into the cabin, slammed the door behind him, and announced in a surprisingly calm voice, “D’you know what they are? They’re monkeys. What bastards!”

Andrei didn’t understand him at first, then he understood but didn’t believe him. “Is that right?” he said, stepping onto the running board and glancing around.

Right: they were monkeys. Very large, very hairy, very fierce to look at, but not devils and not ghosts, only monkeys. Andrei felt a hot flush of shame and relief, and at the same moment something solid and heavy smashed into his ear so hard that he smashed his other ear against the roof of the cabin.

“Everyone into the trucks!” an imperious voice roared somewhere up ahead. “Stop panicking! They’re baboons! Nothing to be afraid of! Get in the trucks and reverse!”

There was sheer pandemonium in the column: mufflers popping, headlamps flaring up and going out, engines roaring unmercifully, clouds of gray-blue smoke swirling up toward the starless sky. A face flooded with something black and gleaming suddenly dove out of the darkness, hands seized Andrei by the shoulders, shook him like a puppy, and shoved him sideways into the cabin, and immediately the truck in front reversed and smashed into their radiator with a crunch, and the truck behind jerked forward and struck theirs like a tambourine, shifting the trash cans and setting them rattling, and Izya tugged on his shoulder and started hassling him: “Can you drive or can’t you? Andrei? Can you?” From out of the bluish smoke came a bloodcurdling howl of despair: “They’re killing me! Save me!” and the imperious voice kept roaring—“Stop panicking! The truck at the back, reverse! Move it!”—and from above, from the left, from the right, hard objects came raining down, clanking across the hood, smashing into the windscreen, and setting it jangling, and horns incessantly honked and hooted, and the abominable shrieking and howling kept getting louder and louder.

Izya suddenly said, “Well, I’ll be going…” and, covering his head with his arms beforehand, he climbed out. He was almost run over by a truck hurtling in the direction of the City—Andrei caught a glimpse of the tallyman’s contorted face among the trashcans. Then Izya disappeared, and Donald appeared without his hat, scraped and scuffed, all covered in mud, flung a pistol down on the seat, sat behind the steering wheel, started up the engine, stuck his head out of the cabin, and started reversing.

Apparently some kind of order had been established after all: the howls of panic faded away, engines roared in unison, and the entire column edged backward little by little. Even the hail of rocks and bottles seemed to have died down a little. The baboons jumped up and down and strutted about on the ridge of garbage but didn’t come down—they just yelled from up there, with their dogs’ mouths gaping, and derisively turned their buttocks, gleaming in the light of the headlamps, toward the column of trucks.

The truck bowled along faster and faster, spun its wheels again in a mud-filled pothole, shot out onto the road and swung around. Donald changed gears with a grating sound, stepped on the gas, slammed the door, and flung himself back in the seat. Ahead of them, skipping about in the gloom, were the red taillights of trucks headed for the City, going flat out.

We’ve broken free, Andrei thought in relief, and warily felt at his ear. It had swollen up and it was throbbing. Would you believe it—baboons! Where could baboons have come from? And such great, hefty ones… and so many of them! There had never been any baboons here… if you didn’t count Izya Katzman, that is. And why precisely baboons? Why not tigers? He squirmed in his seat, and at that moment the truck jolted. Andrei went flying up and smashed back down onto something hard and unfamiliar. He stuck his hand under his backside, pulled out a pistol, and looked at it uncomprehendingly for a second. The pistol was small and black, with a short barrel and a ribbed handle. Then Donald suddenly said, “Careful. Give me that.”

Andrei handed over the pistol and watched for a while as Donald squirmed around and stuck the gun in the back pocket of his boilersuit. Andrei suddenly broke out in a sweat. “So it was you up there… shooting?” he asked hoarsely.

Donald didn’t answer. He blinked their single surviving headlamp as he overtook yet another truck. Several baboons darted through an intersection, right in front of their radiator, but Andrei wasn’t interested in them.

“Where did you get a gun from, Don?”

Again Donald didn’t answer; he just made a strange gesture with his hand—an attempt to pull a nonexistent hat down over his eyes.

“I’ll tell you what, Don,” Andrei said firmly. “We’re going to City Hall right now. You’re going to hand in the pistol and explain how you got hold of it.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” Donald responded, screwing up his face. “Why don’t you just give me a cigarette instead?”

Andrei mechanically took out his pack. “It’s not nonsense,” he said. “I don’t want to know anything. You kept it quiet—OK, it’s your private business. And anyway, I trust you… But in the City only bandits have guns. I don’t want to make anything of it, but basically, I don’t understand you… basically, you’ve got to hand it in and explain everything. And don’t go acting like it’s all nonsense. I’ve seen the state you’ve been in just recently. Better go and tell them the whole story at once.”

Donald turned his head for a second and looked into Andrei’s face. It wasn’t clear what that was in his eyes—maybe derision, maybe distress—but at that moment he seemed very old to Andrei, very infirm and somehow haggard.

Andrei felt embarrassed and perplexed, but he immediately pulled himself together and repeated firmly, “Hand it in and tell them everything. Everything!”

“Do you realize those monkeys are headed for the City?” Donald asked.

“So what?” said Andrei, bewildered.

“Yes indeed—so what?” said Donald, and burst into grisly laughter.

2

The monkeys were already in the City. They were dashing along the cornices of buildings, dangling from lampposts like bunches of grapes, dancing at intersections in macabre, shaggy hordes, clinging to windows, flinging cobblestones torn up out of the road, and pursuing frenzied people who had fled into the streets in nothing but their underwear.

Donald stopped the truck several times to let fugitives up onto the back; the trash cans had been flung off a long time ago. Once a deranged horse, harnessed to a wagon, dashed across in front of the truck, but now there was no one sleeping in the wagon, bundled up in tarpaulin, not any longer; squatting in it, swaying to and fro, waving its massive, long, hairy arms about and wailing stridently, was a huge, burly, silvery baboon. Andrei saw the wagon crash straight into a lamppost and the horse go hurtling on, trailing the snapped traces behind it, while the baboon flitted jauntily across onto the nearest drainpipe and disappeared up onto the roof.

The square in front of City Hall was a seething vortex of panic. Vehicles drove up and drove away, policemen ran around, disoriented people wandered around in their underwear, and at the entrance some men had pressed some official or other up against the wall and were shouting at him, demanding something or other, while he tried to fend them off by jabbing with his cane and swinging his briefcase.

“What an unholy mess,” Donald said, and jumped out of the truck.

They ran into the building and immediately lost each other in a stupefying crowd of men in civilian clothing, men in police uniforms, and men in underclothes. The air was filled with the confused babble of innumerable voices, and the tobacco smoke made Andrei’s eyes smart.

“You’ve got to understand! I can’t, not like this—in nothing but my underpants!”

“…open the arsenal immediately and hand out guns… Damn it all, at least hand out guns to the police!”

“Where’s the chief of police? He was hanging around here just a moment ago…”

“My wife’s still in there, can’t you understand that? And my old mother-in-law!”

“Listen, it’s no big deal. After all, monkeys are just monkeys…”

“Just imagine it, I wake up and there’s someone sitting on the windowsill…”

“And where’s the chief of police? Still snoring in the sack, is he, the fat-ass?”

“We had one streetlamp in our alley. They knocked it down.”

“Kovalevsky! Room 20, quickly!”

“But surely you must agree that in just my underpants…”

“Who can drive? Drivers! Everyone out into the square, gather at the advertising column!”

“But where, damn it all, is the chief of police? Has he done a runner, the lousy bastard?”

“Right, listen up. You take some guys and get down to the foundry. Get those… you know, those rod things, for the park fencing… All of them, take them all! And get straight back here…”

“And I hammered that hairy face so hard, I broke my hand, I swear to God… And he yells, ‘God almighty! What are you doing? It’s me—Freddy!’ Total darned bedlam…”

“But are air rifles any good?”

“Three trucks to seventy-second district! Seventy-third district—five trucks…”

“Kindly give instructions for the issue of supplementary kit. Only it has to be signed for, so they’ll return it afterward!”

“Listen, have they really got tails? Or was I seeing things?”

Andrei was jostled, squeezed, and pressed up against the walls of the corridor, his feet were trampled black and blue, and he himself jostled people, squeezed through between them, and shouldered them aside. At first he looked for Donald, in order to be present as a witness for the defense at the confession and the handing-in of the gun, and then it hit home that the baboon invasion was obviously very serious business, if it had stirred up a hornet’s nest like this, and he immediately regretted that he couldn’t drive a truck, didn’t know where the foundry with the mysterious rods was, and couldn’t issue supplementary kit to anyone, and it seemed pretty much like he was no use to anyone here. He did at least attempt to inform people about what he had seen with his own eyes—maybe the information would prove useful—but some simply didn’t listen to him and others interrupted as soon as he began and started telling their own stories.

He realized with a heavy heart that there were no familiar faces in this eddying whirlpool of uniforms and underpants—he only caught a brief glimpse of Silva with his head bandaged up in a bloody rag before the black man instantly disappeared—but in the meantime measures of some kind were clearly being taken, someone was organizing someone else and sending him somewhere, the voices were getting louder and louder, sounding more and more confident, the underpants started disappearing little by little while the number of uniforms noticeably increased, and the moment came when Andrei even fancied that he heard the measured tramping of boots and a marching song, but it turned that someone had simply dropped the movable safe and it had gone tumbling and crashing down the stairs until it got stuck in the doorway of the Department of Foodstuffs…

And then Andrei did spot a familiar face: a functionary, a former colleague of his from the accounts department of the Office of Weights and Measures. Elbowing his way through people coming the other way, he overtook the functionary, pressed him back against the wall and blurted out in a single breath that he, Andrei Voronin—“Remember, we used to work together?”—was a garbage operative now; “I can’t find anyone, send me somewhere to do something, you must need people, surely…” The functionary listened for a while, blinking crazily and making feeble, convulsive attempts to break free, then suddenly he pushed Andrei away, yelling, “Where can I send you? Can’t you see I’m taking documents to be signed!”—and he took off down the corridor, almost running.

Andrei made several more attempts to participate in organized activity, but everyone rebuffed him or gave him the cold shoulder—everyone was in a terrible hurry; there was literally not a single person who was just standing there calmly and, say, drawing up a list of volunteers. With bitter resolve, Andrei started flinging open all the doors one after another, hoping to find someone or other in charge, someone who wasn’t running around, who wasn’t shouting and waving his arms about—even the most basic reasoning clearly indicated that somewhere around here there had to be something like a headquarters, a place from which all this feverish activity was being directed.

The first room was empty. In the second, one man in his underpants was shouting loudly into a telephone receiver and a second was cursing as he pulled on a regulation warehouse coat that was too tight. Protruding from under the coat was a pair of police breeches and ankle boots that had been patched over and over again, with no laces. Glancing into the third office, Andrei was lashed across the eyes by something pink with buttons and immediately recoiled, catching only a brief glimpse of a remarkably corpulent frame, clearly female. But in the fourth office he discovered the Mentor.

He was sitting on the windowsill with his feet pulled up, hugging his knees and looking out through the window into the darkness illuminated by the scudding light of headlamps. When Andrei came in, the Mentor turned a benign, florid face toward him, jerked his eyebrows up slightly, as he always did, and smiled. And at the sight of that smile, Andrei immediately calmed down. His rancorous anger faded away, and suddenly it was clear that everything was bound to sort itself out in the end; everything would fall into place and basically turn out just fine.

“Just look,” Andrei said, spreading his arms and smiling back. “It turns out that I’m no use to anyone. I can’t drive, I don’t know where the foundry is… I can’t understand a thing in all this crazy uproar.”

“Yes,” the Mentor agreed sympathetically. “It’s absolute mayhem.” He lowered his feet off the windowsill, stuck his hands under his thighs, and dangled his legs, like a child. “Quite unseemly, really. Even shameful. Serious adults, most of them experienced… So they’re not organized enough! Right, Andrei? So certain important matters have been allowed to slide. Inadequate preparedness, a lack of discipline… Well, and bureaucracy too, of course.”

“Yes!” said Andrei. “Of course! You know what I’ve decided? I’m going to stop trying to find anyone, or trying to figure anything out, I’m just going to grab some kind of stick and go. I’ll join a brigade. And if they won’t take me, I’ll go on my own. There are women left out there, after all… and children.”

The Mentor nodded briefly at every word Andrei said. He wasn’t smiling any longer; his expression was serious and sympathetic now.

“There’s just one thing,” said Andrei, pulling a wry face. “What to do about Donald?”

“Donald?” the Mentor echoed, raising his eyebrows. “Ah, Donald Cooper?” He laughed. “Of course, you think Donald Cooper must already have been arrested and repented of his sins… Nothing of the sort. At this precise moment Donald Cooper is organizing a brigade of volunteers to repel this brazen invasion, and of course he isn’t any kind of gangster and he hasn’t committed any crimes, and he got the gun on the black market in exchange for an old repeating watch. There’s nothing to be done. He’s spent his entire life with a gun in his pocket—he’s used to it!”

“Well, of course!” said Andrei, feeling tremendously relieved. “It’s obvious! I didn’t really believe it myself, it’s just that I thought… OK!” He swung around to leave, but stopped. “Tell me… if it’s not a secret, of course… Tell me, what’s all this for? Monkeys! Where have they come from? What are they supposed to prove?”

The Mentor sighed and slipped down off the windowsill. “There you go again, Andrei, asking me questions…”

“No! I understand everything, I do!” Andrei said with sincere feeling, pressing his hands to his heart. “I only…”

“Wait. There you go again, asking me questions to which I don’t have answers. You must understand that at last: I don’t have answers! The soil erosion under the buildings, remember that? The changing of water into bile… but then again, that was before your time… And now this—baboons… Remember, you used to keep quizzing me, asking how come—people of different nationalities, all speaking the same language and not even suspecting a thing. Remember how it astounded you, how perplexed you were, how you tried to prove to Kensi that he was speaking Russian, and Kensi tried to prove to you that you were speaking Japanese, remember? But now you’ve gotten used to it—those questions don’t even occur to you any longer. It’s one of the conditions of the Experiment. The Experiment is the Experiment, what else can I tell you?” He smiled. “Right, off you go, Andrei, off you go. Your place is out there. Action first and foremost. Each in his place, and each doing everything he can!”

And Andrei walked out—in fact, he didn’t walk, he darted—into the corridor, which had completely emptied now, and skittered down the front steps into the square, where he immediately spotted a serious-looking crowd around a truck under a lamppost and merged into it without the slightest hesitation: someone thrust a heavy metal picket into his hand, and he felt armed, strong, and ready for decisive battle.

A short distance away someone—a very familiar voice!—was issuing stentorian commands to line up in a column three across, and Andrei, holding his picket on his shoulder, ran that way and found himself a place between a burly Latino wearing suspenders over a nightshirt and a skinny, flaxen-haired intellectual type in a rumpled suit, who was in a terribly nervous state—he kept taking off his eyeglasses, breathing on the lenses, wiping them with a handkerchief, sticking them back on his nose, and adjusting them with his thumb and forefinger.

It was a small brigade, only about thirty men. And the one giving the commands turned out to be Fritz Heiger, which was rather galling in a way, but on the other hand Andrei had to admit that in this situation Fritz Heiger, although he might be a random leftover from the Nazi defeat, had shown up in exactly the right place.

As befitted a former noncommissioned officer of the Wehrmacht, his manner of expressing himself was forthright, and listening to him was quite repugnant. “Cov-errr ooff!” he yelled loud enough for the whole square to hear, as if he were commanding a regiment on tactical exercises. “Hey, you there, in the flip-flops! Yes, you! Pull your belly in! And you, the one with your legs spread like a cow after she’s been mounted! That applies to you too. Trail pikes! Not shoulder pikes, I said trail—you, the woman in suspenders! Ten-shun! Following me, forward… As you were! For-ward maarch!” They shuffled off raggedly.

Someone immediately stepped on Andrei’s heel from behind; he stumbled, shoved the intellectual type with his shoulder, and the intellectual type, of course, dropped the glasses that he was wiping yet again. “Clumsy clod!” Andrei said to him, losing his temper.

“Be careful!” the intellectual type whined in a shrill voice.

“For God’s sake!” Andrei helped him find his glasses, and when Fritz pounced on them, choking on his fury, Andrei told him to go to hell.

Andrei and the intellectual type, who kept thanking him nonstop as he stumbled along, caught up with the column and covered another twenty meters or so before they were all ordered to “board the trucks.” However, there was only one vehicle, a special truck for transporting wet cement. When they got on board they could feel it squelching and slopping about under their feet. The man in flip-flops clambered ponderously back out over the side and announced in a high voice that he wasn’t going anywhere on that truck. Fritz ordered him to get back onto the truck. The man protested in an even higher voice that he was wearing flip-flops and his feet were soaked. Fritz made mention of a pregnant swine. The man in the soaked flip-flops, not frightened in the least, protested that he certainly wasn’t a swine, that a swine might possibly agree to ride in that filth—he offered his profound apologies to all who had agreed to ride in this pigsty, but… At this point the Latino clambered down off the back of the truck, spat disdainfully at Fritz’s feet, stuck his thumbs under his suspenders, and strolled away at a leisurely pace.

Observing all this, Andrei experienced a certain malicious delight. Not that he approved of the actions of the man in flip-flops, let alone those of the Mexican—they had undeniably acted in an uncomradely manner and in general behaved like philistines—but it was extremely interesting to wait and see what our bruised and battered Unterleutnant would do now and how he would extricate himself from the situation that had arisen.

Andrei was obliged to admit that the bruised and battered Unterleutnant extricated himself with honor intact. Without saying a word, Fritz swung around on his heels, hopped up onto the running board beside the driver and commanded, “Let’s go!” The truck set off, and at that very moment someone switched on the sun.

Struggling to stay on his feet, constantly clutching at the men next to him, Andrei watched with his neck twisted around as the crimson disk slowly kindled to a blaze at its usual spot. First the disk trembled, seeming to pulsate, growing brighter and brighter, turning orange, then yellow, then white, and then it went out for an instant and immediately flared up again at full power, so bright that it was impossible to look at.

The new day had begun. The impenetrably black, starless sky turned a hazy light blue—sultry, with a breath of wind as hot as if it were blowing out of a desert. On all sides the City seemed to appear out of nothing—bright, colorful, streaked with bluish shadows, huge and vast… Multiple stories heaped up on top of each other, buildings banked up above buildings, and not a single building was like any other, and the incandescent Yellow Wall could be seen, rising up and disappearing into the sky on the right, and on the left, in the openings above the roofs, an azure void appeared, as if the sea were over that way, and you instantly started feeling thirsty. Out of habit many of the men immediately looked at their watches. It was exactly eight o’clock.

They only drove for a short time. Apparently the monkey hordes hadn’t reached this area yet—the streets were quiet and deserted, as always at this early hour. Here and there in the buildings windows were being flung open and still-sleepy people were stretching drowsily and watching the truck indifferently. Women in nightcaps hung mattresses out across windowsills; on one of the balconies a wiry old man diligently performed his morning exercises in striped underpants, with his beard fluttering. The flood of panic hadn’t reached this far yet, but closer to the sixteenth district they started coming across the first fugitives—disheveled, not so much frightened as angry, some with bundles over their shoulders. When they caught sight of the truck, these people stopped, waved their arms, and shouted something. The truck roared as it turned onto Fourth Left Street, almost knocking down a very elderly couple pushing along a two-wheeled trolley with suitcases on it, and stopped. They all saw the baboons immediately.

The baboons were making themselves at home on Fourth Left Street, as if it were the jungle, or wherever it was they lived. With their tails curled into hooks, they shambled in slovenly crowds from sidewalk to sidewalk, bounded cheerfully along the cornices of buildings, swung from the lampposts, climbed up on advertising pillars and attentively searched themselves for lice, shouted to each other in booming voices, grimaced, fought, and made carefree, relaxed love. A gang of the silvery vandals was smashing up a food stall, two hooligans with tails were molesting a woman who was standing petrified in an entryway, white-faced with fear, and a shaggy-furred cutie, who had installed herself in a traffic controller’s booth, stuck her tongue out flirtatiously at Andrei. The warm wind carried along the street clouds of dust, feathers from eiderdowns, sheets of paper, clumps of fur, and the already established odor of a menagerie.

Andrei looked at Fritz in bewilderment. With the air of a genuine battle commander, Heiger surveyed the field of imminent action through narrowed eyes. The driver shut off the engine, and the silence that ensued was filled with wild, absolutely nonurban sounds—roaring and mewing, a low, velvety whooping, burping, champing, grunting… At that moment the besieged woman started shrieking at the top of her voice, and Fritz went into action.

“Disembark!” he ordered. “Move it, move! Deploy in a line… Deploy in a line, I said, not a huddle! Forward! Beat them, drive them away! Don’t jab at them, beat them! I don’t want to see a single ugly brute left here! Beat them on the head and on the spine! Don’t poke at them, beat them! Forward, move it! Don’t stop, hey, you there!”

Andrei was one of the first to jump down. He didn’t deploy into a line; instead he took a more comfortable grip on his iron bludgeon and went dashing straight to the aid of the woman. Catching sight of him, the long-tailed hooligans burst into peals of diabolical laughter and darted off down the street, hopping and skipping and wiggling their gleaming buttocks derisively. The woman carried on screeching with her eyes squeezed tightly shut and her hands clenched into fists, but she wasn’t in danger anymore, and Andrei left her and set off toward the bandits who were ransacking the food stall.

They were powerful, seasoned veterans, especially one, with a tail as black as coal—he was sitting on a barrel, lowering his arm into it up to the shoulder, fishing out pickled cucumbers and champing on them with relish, every now and then spitting at his cronies, who were frantically ripping away the plywood wall of the stall. Noticing Andrei approaching, the black-tailed character stopped chewing and grinned balefully. Andrei didn’t like the look of that grin at all, but retreat was impossible. He swung back his iron pole, yelled “Beat it!” and dashed forward.

The black-tailed character grinned even more malignly—he had fangs like a sperm whale—then skipped down lazily off the barrel, moved a few paces away, and started biting at something under his armpit. “Beat it, you pest!” Andrei yelled even louder, and swung the metal bar against the barrel. Then the black-tailed character darted off to the side and leaped in a single bound onto a second-floor cornice. Emboldened by his adversary’s cowardice, Andrei darted over to the stall and smashed his iron pole against the wall. The wall split open and black-tail’s friends scattered in all directions. The battlefield had been cleared and Andrei looked around.

Fritz’s battle formations had disintegrated and the soldiers were wandering in confusion around the street, which was now empty, peering into entryways or stopping and throwing their heads back to look up at the baboons, who were spread out along the cornices on the facades of the buildings. In the distance the intellectual type was stomping along the street, whirling his pole above his head and raising clouds of dust as he pursued a lame monkey that was indolently trudging along just two paces ahead of him. There was no one to do battle with—even Fritz was at a loss. He stood there beside the truck, scowling and gnawing on his finger.

Quietening down again when they sensed that they were out of danger, the baboons went back to exchanging comments, scratching themselves, and making love. The most insolent of them moved lower, ranting unmistakable abuse, grimacing mockingly, and displaying their backsides insultingly. Andrei spotted black-tail again: he was already on the other side of the street, sitting on a lamppost and roaring with laughter. A small, swarthy-skinned man who looked like a Greek set off toward the lamppost with a menacing air. He took a swing and launched his iron pole up at black-tail with all his might. There was a clang and a clatter, broken glass came showering down, and black-tail jumped about a meter in the air in his surprise and almost fell, but adroitly grabbed hold with his tail, assumed his previous pose, and suddenly, arching his back, drenched the Greek with a stream of liquid fecal matter. Andrei felt the gorge rise in his throat, and he turned away. The defeat was absolute; it seemed impossible to come up with any kind of response.

Andrei walked over to Fritz and asked in a low voice, “Well, what are we going to do?”

“Fuck knows,” Fritz said rancorously. “If only we had a flamethrower…”

“Maybe we could bring some bricks?” asked a pimply young guy in overalls who had walked across to them. “I’m from the brick factory. We’ve got a truck; we could be there and back in half an hour.”

“No,” Fritz said categorically. “Bricks are no good. We’d break all the windows, and then they’d pelt us with our own bricks… No. What’s needed here is some kind of pyrotechnics… Rockets, detonators… Ah, if I just had a dozen cylinders of phosgene gas!”

“Where would we get detonators in the City?” a scornful bass voice asked. “And as for phosgene, I think I’d rather have baboons…”

They began crowding around their commander. Only the swarthy-skinned Greek stayed away—he was washing himself off at a hydrant, spewing out infernal curses.

Andrei watched out of the corner of his eye as black-tail and his friends sneakily sidled over to the food stall again. Here and there in the windows of the buildings local inhabitants’ faces, mostly women’s, began appearing, pale from the terrors they had suffered or red with annoyance. “Well, don’t just stand there!” they shouted angrily from the windows. “Send them packing, you men! Look, they’re looting the food stall! Why are you just standing there like stuffed dummies? Hey you, the white-haired one! Give an order, can’t you? Why are you just standing there like that? Good God, my children are crying! Do something so we can come out! Call yourselves men? Frightened of monkeys!” The men snarled sullenly and shamefacedly in reply.

“The fire brigade! We need to call the fire brigade!” insisted the scornful bass voice that preferred baboons to phosgene. “With ladders, and hoses…”

“Aw, come on, where would we find that many firemen?”

“The firemen are on Main Street.”

“Maybe we should light up some torches? Maybe they’ll be frightened by fire!”

“Dammit! Why the hell did they take away the policemen’s guns? They need to reissue them!”

“Shouldn’t we be getting back home, guys? When I think that my wife’s there all alone right now…”

“Aw, now you come on. We all have wives. These women are someone’s wives too.”

“That’s true, right enough…”

“Maybe we could get up on the roofs? From the roofs we could use something to… you know…”

“What are you going to reach them with, cretin? That stick of yours?”

“Oh, the lousy bastards!” the contemptuous bass suddenly bellowed in loathing. He got a running start, strained hard, and flung his metal pole at the long-suffering food stall: it pierced straight through the plywood wall. Black-tail’s gang looked at it in surprise, paused for a moment, and then went back to devouring the cucumbers and potatoes. The women in the windows burst into derisive laughter.

“Well, anyway,” someone said judiciously. “At least by being here, we keep them here, we constrain their actions, so to speak. That’s something, at least. While we’re here, they’ll be afraid of moving farther into the City…”

Everyone gazed around and then suddenly started babbling, and the judicious individual was rapidly forced to pipe down. First, it turned out that the baboons were moving farther into the City, notwithstanding the presence of said judicious individual. And second, even if the baboons had not been moving farther in, was this judicious individual planning to spend the night here? Live here? Sleep here? Crap and piss here?

At that moment they heard the lazy clip-clopping of hooves and the creaking of a cart; everyone looked up the street and fell silent. Approaching along the roadway at a leisurely pace was a two-horse cart. Sitting sideways on it, dozing with his legs dangling in their crude tarpaulin-fabric boots, was a large man in a faded, Russian-style army tunic and cotton breeches faded to match. The man’s bowed head was crowned with a mop of light brown hair. He was holding the reins slackly in his huge brown hands. The horses—one chestnut, the other dapple gray—moved their feet lazily and also seemed to be dozing on the move.

“He’s going to the market,” someone said respectfully. “A farmer.”

“Right, guys, the farmers have it easy with this—when will these bastards ever reach them…?”

“Actually, when I imagine baboons in the crops…”

Feeling curious, Andrei took a closer look. He had never seen a farmer before in all the time he had spent in the City, although he had heard a lot about these people—supposedly they were dour folk and a bit on the wild and weird side. They lived far away in wild places, where they waged a harsh struggle against swamps and jungles, they only drove into the City to sell the produce from their farms, and unlike the City people, they never changed their profession.

As the cart slowly moved closer, the driver’s lowered head trembled and from time to time, without waking up, he smacked his lips and jerked lightly on the reins. Suddenly the baboons, who had been in a relatively peaceable mood so far, flew into a state of extremely vicious agitation. Perhaps the horses annoyed them, or perhaps they had finally grown tired of the presence of outsiders on their street, but they suddenly started kicking up a ruckus and tearing around with their fangs glittering, and several of the most feisty scrambled up the drainpipes onto the roofs and started smashing the tiles up there.

One of the first pieces hit the driver of the cart right between his shoulder blades. The farmer started, straightened up, and looked around at his surroundings with his bloodshot eyes wide open. The first person he noticed was the intellectual type in glasses, who was returning from his futile pursuit, a solitary figure looming up behind the cart. Without saying a word, the farmer dropped the reins (the horses immediately stopped), jumped down off the cart, and darted toward his assailant, swinging back his arm as he went, but just then another piece of roof tile struck the intellectual type on the top of his head. He gasped, dropped his metal pole, and squatted down on his haunches, clutching his head in his hands. The farmer stopped, bewildered. Pieces of broken tile fell onto the road surface around him, shattering into orange crumbs.

“Brigade, take cover!” Fritz commanded valiantly, and darted toward the nearest entryway. Everyone scattered, dashing in all directions. Andrei huddled against the wall in the dead zone, watching curiously as the farmer gazed around himself in total bewilderment, clearly unable to fathom even a single little thing. His clouded gaze slid over the cornices and the drainpipes draped with raging baboons. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, then opened his eyes wide again and exclaimed in a loud voice, “Hell’s fucking bells!”

“Take cover,” they shouted to him from all sides. “Hey, whiskers! Get over here! You’ll catch one to the dome, you swampland simpleton!”

“What the hell’s going on?” the farmer asked loudly, turning toward the intellectual type, who was crawling around on all fours, trying to find his glasses. “Who are all this lot here, can you tell me?”

“Monkeys, naturally,” the intellectual type responded haughtily. “Surely you can see that for yourself, my man?”

“Well now, the things that go on round here,” the dumbfounded farmer exclaimed, only now waking up completely. “You’re always coming up with something or other…”

This son of the swamps was in a philosophical and well-disposed mood now. Having satisfied himself that the offense he had suffered could not really be regarded as such, he was simply rather flabbergasted by the sight of the shaggy hordes frisking along the cornices and clambering up the streetlamps. He merely shook his head reproachfully and scratched his beard. But at this point the intellectual type finally found his glasses, picked up his pole, and dashed lickety-split for cover, so the farmer was left in the middle of the roadway all on his lonesome—the only target, and a rather tempting one for the hairy snipers. The highly disadvantageous nature of this position was not slow in revealing itself. A dozen large shards crashed down, shattering at his feet, and smaller debris started drumming on his shaggy head and his shoulders.

“What the hell is all this?” the farmer roared. A new shard slammed into his forehead. The farmer stopped speaking and dashed lickety-split for his cart.

The cart was exactly opposite Andrei, and at first he thought the farmer would slump sideways onto it, send the whole damned shebang to blazes and race off to his swamps, as far away as possible from this dangerous place. But the man with the beard had no intention of sending the whole damned shebang to blazes. Muttering “You damn whores…” he started hastily unlashing the load on his cart with great dexterity. His broad back blocked Andrei’s view of what he was doing there, but the women in the house opposite could see everything—they all suddenly started squealing at once, slammed their windows shut and disappeared from sight. Before Andrei could even blink, the hirsute farmer had squatted down on his haunches, and a thick gun barrel, gleaming with an oily shimmer, rose up above his head, pointing toward the roofs.

“As you were!” Fritz roared, and Andrei saw him dash out from somewhere on the right, moving toward the cart in huge bounds.

“Now, you bastards, you shits…” the bearded man muttered, performing some kind of intricate, extremely deft movements with his hands, to an accompaniment of slithering metallic clicks and jangling. Andrei tensed up in anticipation of thunder and flame, and the monkeys on the roof apparently sensed something too. They stopped hurling themselves about, hunkered down on their tails, and started twisting their dogs’ heads to and fro, exchanging their comments on something in dry clicks.

But Fritz was already beside the cart. He grabbed the bearded man by the shoulder and repeated peremptorily, “As you were!”

“Hold on!” the bearded man muttered irascibly, jerking his shoulder. “Hold on, will you, just let me cut them down, the long-tailed bastards…”

“I gave you an order—as you were!” Fritz barked.

Then the bearded man turned his face toward Fritz and slowly stood up. “What’s the problem?” he asked, drawling the words with immense contempt. He was the same height as Fritz, but noticeably broader then him across the shoulders and below the waist.

“Where did you get a gun?” Fritz asked abruptly. “Show me your papers!”

“Why, you little snot!” the bearded man said in baleful amazement. “He wants my papers! How do you like this, you white-haired louse?”

Fritz disregarded the obscene gesture. Still looking the bearded man straight in the eye, he barked loud enough for the whole street to hear: “Ruhmer! Voronin! Friese! Come here!”

Andrei was surprised to hear his own name, but he immediately pushed off from the wall and walked over to the cart, taking his time. From the other side, moving at a brisk jog, came sloping-shouldered Ruhmer—in the past he had been a professional boxer—and, running at full speed, one of Fritz’s cronies, the small, skinny Otto Friese, a consumptive youth with large jug ears.

“Come on, come on…” the farmer kept muttering with an ominous leer as he observed all these preparations for combat.

“I urgently request once again that you present your papers,” Fritz repeated with icy politeness.

“And you can stick your request up your backside,” the bearded man responded indolently. He was looking mostly at Ruhmer now, and he had set his hand, as if by chance, on the handle of an impressive looking whip ingeniously woven out of rawhide.

“Guys, guys!” Andrei admonished them. “Listen, soldier, drop it, don’t argue, we’re from City Hall.”

“Fuck your City Hall up the ass,” the soldier replied, examining Ruhmer balefully from head to toe.

“Well, what’s the problem here?” Ruhmer inquired in a quiet, very husky voice.

“You know perfectly well,” Fritz said to the bearded man, “that guns are prohibited within city limits. Especially machine guns. If you have a permit, I request you to present it.”

“And just who are you to go asking for my permit? Are you the police or something? Some kind of gestapo?”

“We are a voluntary self-defense brigade.”

The bearded man smirked. “Well, defend yourselves then. If you’re a self-defense brigade, who’s stopping you?”

A regular full-tilt jawing session was brewing up. The brigade gradually gathered around the cart. Even some of the local male population crept out of entrances—some with fire tongs, some with pokers, and some with chair legs. They gazed inquisitively at the bearded man, at the ominous machine gun perched upright on the tarpaulin, at something rounded and glassy, glinting under the tarpaulin sheet. They sniffed—the farmer was enveloped in a distinctive atmosphere, compounded of the odors of sweat, garlic sausage, and strong liquor…

Andrei was surprised at the strange tenderness he felt as he examined the faded army tunic with the sweat stains under the armpits and a solitary, small bronze button (not even fastened) on the collar, the fore-and-aft cap with the mark left by a five-pointed star, tilted down over the right eyebrow in familiar fashion, the massive, tarpaulin-fabric, shit-crusher boots—the immense beard was probably the only thing that seemed out of place, that didn’t fit the image… And then it occurred to him that for Fritz all this must evoke quite different associations and sensations. He looked at Fritz. The former Unterleutnant was standing erect, with his lips compressed into a thin line and his nose gathered into contemptuous creases, trying to freeze the bearded man with the glare of his steely gray, genuinely Aryan eyes.

“We’re not required to have permits,” the bearded man drawled in the meantime. “We’re not required to do anything at all, except feed you spongers.”

“All right, then,” the bass voice boomed from the back rows. “But where’s the machine gun from?”

“A machine gun—so what? It’s the coupling of town and country, isn’t it? A carboy of moonshine for you, a machine gun for me, all honest and aboveboard.”

“Oh no,” the bass voice boomed. “A machine gun, that’s not just some sort of toy, not a threshing machine or something of the kind.”

“It seems to me,” the judicious individual commented, “that farmers are actually allowed to have guns!”

“No one’s allowed to have guns!” Friese squeaked, and blushed violently.

“Well, that’s stupid!” the judicious individual responded.

“Damn right it’s stupid,” said the bearded man. “I’d like to see you out in our swamps, at night, in the rutting season…”

“Whose rutting season?” the intellectual type asked with keen interest, pushing through into the front row in his glasses.

“The rutting season for them as needs to rut,” the farmer answered him disdainfully.

“No, no, if you please…” the intellectual type said hastily. “I’m a biologist, you know, and I still can’t—”

“Shut up,” Fritz told him. “And as for you,” he went on, turning to the man with the beard, “I suggest that you follow me. I suggest it in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.”

Their glances clashed. And would you believe it, somehow, from some minute feature or other that only he could spot, the man with the luxurious beard sensed who he was dealing with here. His beard split apart in a malicious grin, and he pronounced in a repulsive, obnoxiously thin little voice, “Milch und eggsen? Hitler-kaput!” He wasn’t in the least bit afraid of bloodshed, unnecessary or any other kind.

It was as if Fritz had been punched on the chin. He flung his head back, his pale face turned crimson, the knotted muscles stood out on his cheeks. For a moment Andrei thought he was about to fling himself at the bearded man, and Andrei even leaned forward, ready to stand between them, but Fritz controlled himself. The blood drained back out of his face and he announced drily, “That has nothing to do with the matter. Be so good as to follow me.”

“Oh, leave him alone, Heiger!” the bass voice said. “It’s obvious he’s a farmer, isn’t it? When have you ever heard of anyone hassling farmers?”

And everyone around started nodding and muttering that yes, he was clearly a farmer, who would drive off and take the machine gun with him—he really wasn’t any kind of gangster at all.

“We need to repel the baboons, and here we are playing policemen,” the judicious individual added.

That relieved the tension immediately. Everyone remembered about the baboons, and the baboons turned out to be sauntering around wherever they fancied again, behaving as if they were at home in the jungle. It also turned out that the local population had apparently gotten sick of waiting for decisive action from the self-defense brigade. They had evidently decided that the self-defense brigade wasn’t going to do anything useful, and they’d have to somehow make shift for themselves. And women carrying pocketbooks, with their lips firmly clamped shut in no-nonsense determination, were scurrying about on their morning errands, many of them clutching sticks from brooms and mops to fend off the most persistent of the monkeys. The shutters were taken down off a shop window, and the stall-keeper walked around his looted stall and groaned, scratching his back and clearly trying to figure something out. A line sprang up at the bus stop, and the first bus—yes, there it was—appeared in the distance. In contravention of a municipal council bylaw, it sounded its horn loudly, scattering the baboons, who were not familiar with the traffic regulations.

“Yes indeed, gentlemen,” someone said. “Evidently we shall have to come to terms with this as well. So we can all go home, commander?”

Fritz glowered morosely at the street. “Well now,” he said in an ordinary human voice. “Home it is then.”

He swung around, sticking his hands into his pockets, and was the first to head toward the truck. The brigade straggled after him. Men struck matches and lit up, and someone asked what they could do about being late for work; it would be good if they could get some kind of official note… The judicious individual had an answer for that too: everyone would be late for work today, so what point was there in notes? The jawing session around the cart dispersed. The only ones left were Andrei and the biologist in glasses, who had set himself the firm goal of discovering exactly who it was that had a rutting season in the swamps.

As he dismantled the machine gun and stashed it away again, the bearded man condescendingly explained that the creatures who had a rutting season in the swamps were redbacks, and the redbacks, brother, were something like crocodiles. Had the biologist ever seen crocodiles? Right, then. Only covered in fur. This red kind of fur, coarse and stiff. And when they were rutting, brother, you’d best keep your distance. In the first place, they were big brutes, the size of bulls, and in the second place, during that business they didn’t notice a thing—a house wasn’t a house to them, a shed wasn’t a shed; they smashed everything to splinters…

The intellectual type’s eyes blazed and he listened avidly, constantly adjusting his glasses with outstretched fingers. Fritz called from the truck, “Hey, are you coming or not? Andrei?” The intellectual type glanced around at the truck, looked at his watch, groaned pitifully, and started mumbling apologies and thanks. Then he grabbed the bearded man’s hand, shook it with all his might, and ran off. But Andrei stayed.

He himself didn’t know why he had stayed. It was a rush of something like a fit of nostalgia. It wasn’t even as if he were missing the sound of spoken Russian—after all, everyone around here spoke in Russian—and it wasn’t as if this man with a beard seemed to him like the incarnation of his motherland, no way. But something about him definitely made Andrei feel thoroughly homesick, something or other that he couldn’t get from the stern, sardonic Donald, or from the jolly and passionate but still somehow alien Kensi, or from Wang, always good natured, always affable, but really badly downtrodden. And even less from Fritz, a remarkable man after his own fashion but nonetheless yesterday’s enemy… Andrei hadn’t even suspected how badly he’d been pining for this mysterious “something.”

The man with a beard gave him a sideways glance and asked, “From the home country, are you?”

“From Leningrad,” said Andrei, feeling embarrassed, and in order to gloss over this embarrassment somehow, he took out his cigarettes and offered them to the bearded man.

“So that’s the way of it,” said the man, tugging a cigarette out of the pack. “We’re fellow countrymen, then. But I’m from Vologda, brother. Cherepovets—ever heard of it? The wild and woolly Cherepovtsians…”

“Sure I have!” Andrei exclaimed, absolutely delighted. “They’ve built an iron and steel works there, a ginormous industrial plant.”

“You don’t say?” the bearded man responded rather indifferently. “So they’ve roped in Cherepovets too… Well, OK. And what do you do here? What’s your name?”

Andrei told him.

“I’m working the land here,” the bearded man continued. “A farmer, as they say here. Yurii Konstantinovich, and the surname’s Davydov. Fancy a drink?”

Andrei hesitated. “It seems a bit early,” he said.

“Well, maybe it is,” Yurii Konstantinovich agreed. “I’ve still got to get to the market, haven’t I? I arrived yesterday evening, you see, went straight to the workshops; they promised me a machine gun there a long time ago. Well, it was one thing and another: I tried out the gadget, offloaded some ham, you know, and a couple hundred liters of moonshine for them, then I look around—and they’ve turned the sun off already…” While he was telling Andrei all this, Davydov finished securing his load, untangled the reins, sat in the cart sideways, and started the horses moving. Andrei set off beside him.

“Yep, yep,” Yurii Konstantinovich continued. “So here they’ve already switched off the sun, and this guy says to me: ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he says. ‘I know a place near here.’ So we went and we had a drink and a bite to eat. You know how it is with vodka in the City, and I had moonshine. They provide the music, like, and I put up the drink. Well, women, of course…” Davydov waggled his beard as he reminisced, then went on, lowering his voice: “Out in our swamps, brother, women are kind of thin on the ground. You know, there’s this widow, well, we go to her… her husband drowned the year before last… Well, you know the way that works out—you go visit her, no way around it, but afterward, it’s fix her threshing machine, or lend her a hand with the harvest, or else it’s the tiller… Ah, what a paain!” He lashed a baboon that had tagged along behind the cart with his whip. “Anyway, brother, where we are, it’s like living in combat conditions—near as, dammit. Without a gun, there’s just no way. And who’s that bright-blond boy of yours? German, is he?”

“Yes,” said Andrei. “A former sublieutenant, he was taken prisoner near Königsberg, and he came here from captivity…”

“I spotted something repulsive about that ugly mug,” said Davydov. “Those wormy assholes drove me all the way to Moscow, drove me into hospital, blew off half my backside, clean as a whistle. I gave them what for afterward too. I’m a tank soldier, right? Last time I burned out was outside Prague…” He twisted his beard about. “Now, what do you reckon to this then? Of all the damned places to meet!”

“No, he’s a decent enough, no-nonsense kind of guy,” said Andrei. “And gutsy too. He likes to cut a strut, OK, but he’s a good worker, lots of energy. For the Experiment, I reckon he’s a very useful individual. An organizer.”

Davydov said nothing for a while, clicking his tongue at the horses. “This guy comes out to us in the swamps last week,” he said eventually. “Well, we got together at Kowalski’s place—he’s a farmer too, a Pole, about ten kilometers from me, got a good house, big. Yep, yep. So we got together. And then this type starts feeding us this hogwash: do we, like, have a correct understanding of the objectives of the Experiment? And he’s from City Hall, the Agricultural Department. Well, we can see where he’s heading: let’s say we do have a correct understanding—then a tax increase would be a good idea… Are you married?” he suddenly asked.

“No,” said Andrei.

“The reason I ask is, I could do with a place to stay tonight. I’ve got another piece of business set up for tomorrow morning.”

“But of course!” said Andrei. “No need even to ask! Come and stay the night, I’ve got loads of space, I’d be delighted.”

“Well, and so would I,” Davydov said with a smile. “Fellow countrymen and all that.”

“Make a note of the address,” said Andrei. “Have you got something to write it on?”

“Just tell me,” said Davydov. “I’ll remember it.”

“It’s a simple address: 105 Main Street, apartment 16. Entrance from the courtyard. If I’m not there, call round to the caretaker’s place—he’s a Chinese guy, Wang, I’ll leave a key with him.” Andrei really liked Davydov, although they clearly didn’t see eye to eye on everything.

“What year were you born?” Davydov asked.

“Twenty-eight.”

And when did you leave Russia?”

“In ’51. Only four months ago.”

“Aha. And I left Russia for here in ’47… So tell me then, Andriukha, how are things in the countryside—have they gotten better?”

“Well, of course!” said Andrei. “They’ve rebuilt everything, they’re reducing prices every year… I didn’t get out into the country after the war myself, it’s true, but to judge from the movies and the books, life in the country’s really good now.”

“Hmm… movies,” Davydov said doubtfully. “You know, when it comes to movies…”

“No, why say that? In town, the shops have got everything. They abolished ration cards ages ago. So where’s it all from? From the country, right…”

“That’s right,” said Davydov. “From the country… But you know, I got back from the front and my wife was gone, she’d died. My son disappeared without a trace. The village was deserted. OK, I think, we’ll put this right. Who won the war? We did! So now we’re calling the shots. They wanted to make me farm chairman. I agreed. There was no one in the village but women, so there was no need even to get married. We just about scraped through ’46; right, I think, now things will get a bit easier…” He suddenly stopped talking and said nothing for a long time, as if he’d forgotten about Andrei. “Happiness for all mankind!” he declared unexpectedly. “How about you—do you believe it?”

“Of course.”

“And I believed that too. No, I thought, the countryside’s a dead duck. Some kind of stupid blunder, I thought. Grabbed by the tits before the war, grabbed by the throat after it. No, I thought, this way they’ll crush us. And the life, you know, as grim as a general’s shoulder straps. I’d started drinking already, and then—the Experiment.” He sighed heavily. “So, you reckon this Experiment of theirs will work out?”

“Why is it theirs? It’s ours!”

“OK, so let say it’s ours. Will it work out or not?”

“It’s got to,” Andrei said firmly. “It all depends on us, and only us.”

“Whatever depends on us, we’re doing it. We did it there, we’re doing it here… Basically, of course, I can’t really grumble. Life’s tough, all right, but way better than it was. The main thing is, you do it for yourself, get what I mean? And if some stooge shows up, you can maybe drop him in the privy, and there you go, home free! Party member, are you?” he asked suddenly.

“Komsomol. Yurii Konstantinovich, you take altogether too gloomy a view of things. The Experiment is the Experiment. It’s hard, there are plenty of mistakes, but probably it couldn’t possibly be any other way. Everyone on duty at his own post—everyone doing what he can.”

“And what’s your post?”

“Garbage collector,” Andrei said proudly.

“A really serious post, that,” said Davydov. “And have you got a profession?”

“My profession’s very specialized,” said Andrei. “Stellar astronomer.” He pronounced the title shyly, glancing sideways at Davydov, anticipating mockery, but on the contrary, Davydov was terribly interested.

“Really, you’re an astronomer? Listen, brother, then you ought to know where this is we’ve all been fetched up. Is it a planet of some kind, or a star, maybe? Back out there, in the swamps I mean, folks fall out over that every evening—they come to blows, so help me! They get a skinful of moonshine and then they go at it hammer and tongs… There are some as think, you know, we’re stuck in some kind of fish tank—still right here on Earth. This great, huge kind of fish tank, only instead of fish, it has people in it. So help me! But what do you think—from the scientific point of view?”

Andrei scratched the back of his head and laughed. In his apartment people almost came to blows for the same reason—even without any moonshine. And as for the fish tank, Izya Katzman had expatiated on that in exactly the same way, word for word, giggling and spraying. “How can I put it, you see…” he began. “It’s all very complicated. Baffling. And from the scientific point of view, there’s only one thing I can tell you: it’s not likely that this is a different planet, even less a star. In my opinion, everything here is artificial, and it has nothing to do with astronomy.”

Davydov nodded a few times. “A fish tank,” he said decisively. “And the sun here’s a sort of lightbulb, and that Yellow Wall running right up to the sky… Listen, if I follow this side street, will I get to the market or not?”

“Yes, you will,” said Andrei. “You haven’t forgotten my address?”

“I haven’t forgotten it—expect me this evening.”

Davydov lashed at the horses and let out a whistle, and the cart rumbled onto the side street and disappeared. Andrei set off for home. What a great guy, he thought, feeling moved. A soldier! Of course, he didn’t join the Experiment, he ran away from his problems, but I’ve no right to judge him for that. He was wounded, his house and land were trashed—he was entitled to falter, wasn’t he? His life here is clearly no bowl of cherries either. And he’s not the only one here who’s faltered; we have plenty of those here…

On Main Street the baboons were sauntering about, totally free and easy. Either Andrei had gotten used to them, or they themselves had changed in some way, but they no longer seemed anything like as brazen, let alone as frightening, as a few hours earlier. They placidly arranged themselves in groups in the hot sun, jabbering and searching themselves for lice, and when people walked by, they held out their shaggy, black-palmed paws and blinked pleadingly with their watery eyes. It was as if an immense number of beggars had suddenly shown up in the City.

Andrei saw Wang at the gates of his building. He was sitting on a stanchion, hunched over sadly with his work-worn hands lowered between his knees.

“Lost the cans, did you?” he asked, without raising his head. “Look at what’s happening.”

Glancing into the passageway, Andrei was horrified. The heaps seemed to reach right up to the lightbulb. There was only a narrow little track leading to the door of the caretaker’s lodge.

“God almighty!” Andrei said, suddenly getting jittery. “I’ll go right now… hang on… I’ll be right back…” He tried feverishly to recall which streets he and Donald had raced along last night and the spot where the fugitives had dumped the cans off the truck.

“Don’t bother,” Wang said in a hopeless voice. “A commission’s already been here. They took down the numbers of the cans and promised to bring them this evening. They won’t bring them this evening, of course, but maybe they might by morning, eh?”

“You know, Wang,” said Andrei, “it was sheer hell and hullabaloo, I feel ashamed to remember it.”

“I know. Donald told me what it was like.”

“Donald’s home already?” Andrei asked, brightening up.

“Yes. He said not to let anyone into his place. He said his teeth ached. I gave him a bottle of vodka and he left.”

“So it’s like that…” Andrei said, examining the heaps of trash again.

And he suddenly felt a desire so unbearably intense it was almost hysterical, enough to make him cry out, to get a wash, to strip off his stinking overalls and forget that tomorrow he would have to scrabble through all this stuff with a spade… Everything around Andrei was suddenly sticky and rank-smelling, and without saying another word, he dashed through the courtyard and onto his stairway, bounding up the steps three at a time and trembling in impatience, reached his apartment, grabbed the key from under the rubber mat, and swung open the door—and the fragrant coolness of eau de cologne received him into its tender embrace.

3

First of all he undressed, crumpling up his overalls and underwear and flinging them into a box of filthy junk. Filth unto filth. Then, standing stark naked in the center of the kitchen, he looked around and shuddered with renewed revulsion. The kitchen was submerged under heaps of dirty dishes. Plates were banked up in the corners, covered with bluish cobwebs of mold that charitably concealed black lumps of something or other. The table was crammed with murky, finger-marked wineglasses, water glasses, and empty preserved-fruit jars. The sink was choked with cups and saucers; blackened saucepans, greasy frying pans, colanders, and casseroles sat on the stools, giving off a lethargic stench. He walked over to the sink and turned the faucet on. He was in luck! The water was hot! And he set to work.

After washing all the dishes, pots, and pans, he grabbed hold of a mop. He worked with zealous enthusiasm, as if he were washing the dirt off his own body, but he couldn’t keep that up for all five rooms. He limited himself to the kitchen, the dining room, and the bedroom, merely glancing into the other rooms with a feeling of bewilderment—he simply couldn’t get used to it, just couldn’t understand what one man would need so many rooms for, and such monstrously huge, musty rooms at that. He closed their doors tightly, wedging them shut with chairs.

Now he ought to pop down to the shop to buy something for the evening. Davydov was coming, and some of the usual mob were bound to drop in too… But first he decided to get washed up. The water was running almost cold already, but it was still wonderful anyway. Then he put fresh sheets on the bed, and when he saw his own bed with clean sheets and crisp, starched pillowcases, when he caught the scent of freshness that they exuded, he was suddenly overcome by a desperate urge to lay his own clean body down for a while in this long-forgotten cleanness, and he collapsed with a crash, setting the trashy springs screeching and the old polished wood creaking.

Yes, it was wonderful, so cool, fragrant, and squeaky, and there on the right, within his reach, there turned out to be a pack of cigarettes with matches, and on the left, also within range, there was a small shelf of handpicked detective novels. It was slightly disappointing that there was no ashtray anywhere within reach, and it turned out that he had forgotten to wipe the dust off the small shelf, but these were merely insignificant details. He chose Ten Little Indians, lit up, and started reading.

When he woke, it was still light. He listened. The apartment and the building were silent, with only the water, dripping copiously from the defective faucets, weaving a strange pattern of sound. And apart from that, everything around him was clean, and that was strange too, but at the same time inexpressibly delightful. Then there was a knock at the door. He pictured Davydov, with his powerful build and tanned skin, scented with hay and reeking of fresh alcohol, standing outside on the landing, holding his horses by their bridles, with a bottle of moonshine at the ready. And then there was another knock and he woke up completely.

“Coming!” he yelled, springing up and running across the bedroom, searching for his underwear. He came across a pair of stripy pajama bottoms and hastily pulled them on. The elastic was weak, and he had to hold the pants up at one side.

Contrary to expectations, he couldn’t hear any good-natured swearing from behind the front door, no neighing of horses or glugging of liquid. Smiling in anticipation, Andrei pulled back the latch, opened the door, gave a croak, and took a rapid step back, grabbing the cursed elastic with his other hand as well. Standing there in front of him was his recent acquaintance Selma Nagel, the new girl from number 18.

“Have you got any cigarettes?” she asked, without even a trace of neighborly conviviality.

“Yes… please… come in…” Andrei mumbled, backing away.

She came in and walked past him, scalding him with the mingled aromas of incredible perfumes.

She walked through into the dining room, then he closed the door, and with a despairing call of “Wait just a moment, I’ll be right there!” dashed into the bedroom. “Ay-ay-ay” he said to himself. “Ay-ay-ay, how could I…” In fact, however, he didn’t feel ashamed in the least; he even felt glad that he’d been caught out like this, so clean and washed, with his broad shoulders and smooth skin and magnificently developed biceps and triceps—it was actually a shame to get dressed. But after all, it was necessary to get dressed, and he stuck his hands in a suitcase and rummaged around in it, then pulled on a pair of gymnastics pants and a washed-out blue sports singlet with the intertwined letters “LU” (for Leningrad University) on the back and the chest. And that was how he appeared before Selma Nagel: chest thrust out, shoulders spread wide, with a slightly lingering gait and a pack of cigarettes in his outstretched hand.

Pretty Selma Nagel indifferently took a cigarette, clicked her lighter, and lit up. She didn’t even look at Andrei, and she had an air about her as if she didn’t give a damn for anything in the world. In fact, by daylight she didn’t look so very pretty. Her face was rather irregular, even coarse, her nose was too short, and her large mouth was daubed too thickly with lipstick. However, her little legs, so thoroughly naked, were far above and beyond all praise. Unfortunately he couldn’t get a proper look at all the rest—who in hell’s name had taught her to wear such baggy clothes! A sweater, and with that neck! Like a frogman.

She sat there in a deep armchair, with one beautiful leg crossed over the other beautiful leg, and looked around indifferently, holding her cigarette soldier fashion, with the burning end cradled inside her palm. Andrei sat down jauntily but elegantly on the edge of the table and also lit up.

“My name’s Andrei,” he said.

She turned her indifferent gaze onto him. Her eyes weren’t the way they had seemed last night either. They were large but quite definitely not black; they were pale blue, almost transparent.

“Andrei,” she repeated. “Polish?”

“No, Russian. And your name’s Selma Nagel—you’re from Sweden.”

She nodded. “Yes, from Sweden… So it was you they were beating in the police station yesterday?” she asked, abruptly setting a little lacquered box, slightly larger than a matchbox, on her knee. “Nothing but crackling and howling on every wavelength, no fun at all.”

Andrei cautiously took the little box from her and realized with surprise that it was a radio. “Oh, wow!” he muttered. “Is it really transistorized?”

“How should I know?” She took the radio back from him and there was a burst of wheezing, crackling, and mournful howling. “It just doesn’t work, that’s all. So you’ve never seen any like this, then?”

Andrei shook his head. Then he said, “Actually, your radio shouldn’t work. There’s only one radio station here, and that broadcasts directly through the mains.”

“Oh God,” said Selma. “Then what are people supposed to do here? There’s no box either.”

“What box?”

“You know, the telly… TV!”

“Ah… Yes, that’s not planned for any time soon around here.”

“Well, what a drag!”

“We can crank up the phonograph,” Andrei suggested shyly, feeling awkward. Really and truly, what was all this—no radio, no television, no movie theaters?

“The phonograph? What sort of thing is that, then?”

“You don’t know what a phonograph is?” Andrei asked in amazement. “Well, it’s a gramophone. You put on a record…”

“Ah, a record player…” Selma said in a totally uninspired voice. “Haven’t you got a tape recorder?”

“What a question,” said Andrei. “Do you think I’m a radio station or something?”

“You’re some kind of savage,” Selma Nagel declared. “Russian, that’s the word. OK then, you listen to your phonograph, you probably drink vodka, and what else do you do? Race around on a motorbike? Or don’t you even have a motorbike?”

Andrei got angry. “I didn’t come here to race around on a motorbike. I’m here to work. But what about you, I wonder—what do you intend to do here?”

“He came here to work…” said Selma. “Tell me, what were they beating you for in the police station? Drugs?”

“No one was beating me in the police station! Where did you get that idea from? And in any case, our police don’t beat anyone. You’re not in Sweden now, you know.”

Selma drew in her breath with a whistle. “Well, well,” she said mockingly. “So I imagined it.” She stuck her cigarette butt into the ashtray, lit another cigarette, got up, and set off around the room with a comical, waltzing movement. “And who lived here before you?” she asked, halting in front of a huge oval portrait of some woman in lilac with a toy dog on her knees. “In my place, for instance, it was obviously some sex maniac. Pornography in all the corners, used condoms on the walls, and an entire collection of women’s garter belts in the wardrobe. I can’t really tell what he was, a fetishist or a clit-licker…”

“You’re lying,” Andrei said, stunned. “That’s all lies, Selma Nagel.”

“What would I tell lies for?” Selma asked in astonishment. “Who was it who lived there? Do you know?”

“The mayor! The current mayor lived there, got it?”

“Ah,” Selma said indifferently. “I see.”

“What do you see?” said Andrei. “What is it that you see?” he yelled, growing frenzied. “What can you understand here anyway?” He stopped. That wasn’t something you could talk about. That was something you had to experience inside, for yourself.

“He’s probably about fifty,” Selma declared with the air of a connoisseur. “Old age creeping up on him, the man’s freaking out. Male menopause!” She laughed and stared at the portrait with the toy dog again.

Silence fell. Andrei gritted his teeth, feeling distressed for the mayor. The man was expansive and imposing; he had an exceptionally engaging face, with a full head of noble gray hair. He spoke beautifully at meetings of the municipal citizens’ council—about temperance, about proud asceticism, about strength of spirit, about inner moral fiber, charged with fortitude and virtue. And when they used to meet outside on the landing, he invariably held out his large, warm hand to be shaken and inquired with his perennial courtesy and consideration whether the tapping of his typewriter bothered Andrei at night.

“He doesn’t believe it!” Selma suddenly burst out. She turned out not to be looking at the portrait anymore but to be examining Andrei with an angry kind of curiosity. “If you don’t believe it, then don’t. Only it disgusts me, having to wash it all off. Isn’t there any way to hire someone for that here?”

“Hire someone…” Andrei repeated obtusely. “Screw you!” he said malevolently. “You can wash it off yourself. There’s no place for whiners here.”

For a while they examined each other with mutual animosity. Then Selma turned her eyes away and murmured, “Why the hell did I come here? What am I going to do here?”

“Nothing special,” said Andrei. He had overcome his animosity. This person needed help. Andrei had already seen plenty of new arrivals in this place. “The same thing as everyone else, that’s what you’ll do. You’ll go to the labor exchange, fill out a record card, drop it in the slot… We’ve got a job allocation device set up there. What were you in the other world?”

“A foxtailer.”

“What?”

“Well, how can I explain it… One, two, spread those legs…”

Andrei felt stunned again. She’s lying. The thought flashed through his mind. The minx is just feeding me a load of drivel. Trying to make a fool out of me. “And did you earn good money?” he asked sarcastically.

“You fool,” she said, almost affectionately. “It’s not for the money, just that it’s interesting. It’s out of boredom.”

“But how could that happen?” Andrei asked mournfully. “What on Earth were your parents thinking? You’re young, you could still be studying and learning for ages and ages…”

“What for?” Selma asked.

“What do you mean, what for? You could make a life for yourself… Be an engineer, or a teacher… You could join the Communist Party and fight for socialism…”

“Oh my God, my God…” Selma whispered hoarsely, collapsing into the armchair as if she’d been poleaxed and hiding her face in her hands. Andrei was frightened, but at the same time he felt a sense of pride, and his own prodigious responsibility.

“Oh, come on now, come on…” he said, awkwardly sliding closer to her. “What’s happened has happened. It’s over. Don’t get upset. Perhaps it’s good that things turned out this way for you. You’ll make up for everything here. I’ve got lots of friends, all real human beings…” He recalled Izya and frowned. “We’ll help. We’ll fight together. There’s a hell of a lot of work to do here! Lots of disorder and confusion, and simple trash—every honest person counts. You can’t imagine just how much trash of all kinds has come flooding in here! I don’t ask them, of course, but sometimes I’d really love to: What exactly brought you here anyway, what damn use are you to anyone here?”

He was on the point of giving Selma a friendly, even brotherly, pat on the shoulder, but at that moment, without taking her hands away from her face, she asked, “So not everyone here’s like that?’

“Like what?”

“Like you. Idiots.”

“Oh, for crying out loud!” Andrei jumped down off the table and started walking in circles around the room. What a bourgeois bitch. A whore, but she comes here too. Thinks it’s interesting, don’t you see… But then, Selma’s directness actually impressed him. Directness was always good. Face-to-face, across the barricades. Not like Izya, for instance: neither ours nor yours, as slippery as an eel, and he’d squirm through anywhere…

Selma giggled behind him. “Well, what are you running around for?” she said. “It’s not my fault if you’re such a little idiot. OK, I’m sorry.”

Determined not to relent, Andrei resolutely sliced his open hand through the air. “I’ll tell you this,” he said. “You, Selma, are a very badly neglected individual, and it will take a long time to scour you clean. And please don’t imagine that I am personally offended by you. The people who reduced you to this state, yes, I have scores to settle with them. But not with you, none at all. You’re here, and that means you’re our comrade. Work well, and we’ll be good friends. And you’ll have to work well. Being here, you know, it’s like being in the army: if you don’t know how, we’ll teach you; if you don’t want to, we’ll make you!” He liked the way he was speaking very much—it was so distinctly reminiscent of the speeches given by Lyosha Baldaev, the leader of the Communist Youth League group in his faculty at the university, before the unpaid working Saturdays. At this point he discovered that Selma had finally taken her hands away from her face and was gazing at him with frightened curiosity. He winked at her encouragingly. “Oh yes, we’ll make you, what were you expecting? We used to get real loafers coming to the building site—at first all they wanted to do was slip down to the beer kiosk and into the woods. But we fixed them! And they were as good as gold! You know, work can even humanize a monkey.”

“Do you always have monkeys roaming round the streets here?” Selma asked.

“No,” said Andrei, pulling a long face. “That only started today. In honor of your arrival.”

“Are you going to humanize them?” Selma inquired insinuatingly.

Andrei forced out a laugh. “We’ll see how things go,” he said. “Maybe we really will have to humanize them. The Experiment is the Experiment.” For all its contemptuous insanity, the idea still seemed to have to some kind of rational kernel to it. I’ll have to bring up the question this evening, he thought briefly, but then another idea immediately occurred to him. “What are you planning to do this evening?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Whatever comes up. What do people do around here?”

There was a knock at the door. Andrei looked at the clock. It was seven already—the gathering was already starting to come together. “Today you’re my guest here,” he told Selma firmly. With this dissolute creature, the only way to act was firmly. “I don’t exactly promise a load of fun and games. But I’ll introduce you to some interesting people. Deal?”

Selma shrugged one little shoulder and started tidying her hair. Andrei went to open the door. Someone was already hammering on it with his heel. It was Izya Katzman. “Have you got a woman in here, or what?” he asked while he was still in the doorway. “And when will you finally get a doorbell put in, that’s what I’d like to know.”

As always, for the first few minutes of his appearance at a gathering, Izya’s hair was neatly combed, his shirt collar was stiffly starched, and his cuffs positively gleamed. His narrow, well-ironed tie was arranged with great precision along the nose-navel axis. Nonetheless, Andrei would still have preferred to see Donald or Kensi right now. “Come in, come in, blabbermouth,” he said. “What’s wrong with you today, showing up before everyone else?”

“I knew you had a woman here,” Izya replied, rubbing his hands and giggling, “so I hurried over to take a peek.” They walked into the dining room and Izya made straight for Selma with broad, rapid strides. “Izya Katzman”—he introduced himself in a velvety voice—“garbage collector.”

“Selma Nagel,” Selma responded indolently. “Tramp.”

Izya actually grunted in delight and solicitously kissed the hand held out to him. “By the way,” he said, turning to Andrei and then back to Selma, “have you heard? The council of district commissioners is considering a draft resolution”—he lifted one finger in the air and raised his voice—“‘concerning the regularization of the situation that has arisen in connection with the presence within the city limits of large aggregations of dog-headed monkeys’… Oof! It is proposed to register all the monkeys, fit them with metal collars and disks bearing their names, and then assign them to institutions and private individuals, who will be responsible for them henceforth!” He started giggling, then grunting, and then began hammering his right fist into the open palm of his left hand with shrill, lingering little groans. “Superb! All other work has been abandoned—all the factories are producing collars and name disks. Our Mr. Mayor is personally taking into his care three mature baboons and is calling on the public to follow his example. Will you take in a female baboon, Andrei? Selma will be against it, but such is the requirement of the Experiment! And as everyone knows, the Experiment is the Experiment. I hope you are in no doubt, Selma, that the Experiment is definitely an experiment—neither excrement, nor exponent, nor even a permanent—wave, that is—but precisely the Experiment?”

Struggling to make himself heard above the gurgling and groaning, Andrei said, “There you go again, waffle, waffle, waffle!” This was what he had dreaded most of all. This kind of nihilistic, couldn’t-care-less attitude was bound to have a highly subversive impact on someone new. Of course, it was so incredibly alluring to wander from building to building like this, giggling and spraying disdainful spittle right and left, instead of gritting your teeth and—

Izya stopped giggling and started striding agitatedly around the room. “Perhaps it is waffle,” he said. “Possibly. But as usual, Andrei, you understand damn-all about the psychology of the management. Exactly what, in your opinion, is the function of the management?”

“To manage!” said Andrei, rising to the challenge. “To manage and not to waffle, by the way, not to prattle. To coordinate the activities of the citizens and organizations—”

“Stop! Coordinate activities—to what end? What is the ultimate goal of this coordination?”

Andrei shrugged. “That’s elementary. The universal good, order, the creation of optimal conditions for advancing—”

“Oh!” Izya thrust his finger into the air again. His mouth fell slightly open and his eyes rolled up. “Oh!” he repeated, and fell silent again. Selma watched him delightedly. “Order!” Izya proclaimed. “Order!” His eyes rolled back even farther. “And now imagine that in the city entrusted to you, countless herds of baboons appear. You can’t drive them out—you haven’t got the guts for it. You can’t feed them on a centralized basis either—there isn’t enough grub, not enough reserves. The baboons are begging in the street—outrageous disorder: we do not have and cannot have any beggars. The baboons crap without cleaning up after themselves, and no one intends to clean up after them. What is the conclusion begging to be drawn from all this?”

“Well, in any case, it’s not to put collars on them,” said Andrei.

“Correct!” Izya said approvingly. “Of course it’s not to put collars on them. The very first no-nonsense conclusion begging to be drawn is: conceal the existence of the baboons. Pretend that they are not even here. But that, unfortunately, is also impossible. There are too many of them, and so far our management remains nauseatingly democratic. And then a brilliantly simple idea appears: regularize the presence of the baboons! Legitimize the chaos and outrage, thereby rendering them an element of the harmonious order intrinsic to the administration of our good mayor! Instead of herds and gangs of beggars and hooligans—we have sweet household pets. We all love animals! Queen Victoria loved animals. Darwin loved animals. Even Beria, so they say, loved some animals, not to mention Hitler…”

“Our king Gustaf loves animals too,” Selma put in. “He has cats.”

“Excellent!” Izya exclaimed, slamming his fist into his palm. “King Gustaf has cats, and Andrei Voronin has his own personal baboon. And if he really loves animals a lot, even two baboons…”

Andrei gave up and went off to the kitchen to check his food reserves. While he was rummaging in the little cupboards, unfolding and carefully sniffing at dusty little packets with stale, darkened contents, in the dining room Izya’s voice carried on booming without a break and Selma’s laughter rang out, mingling with Izya’s own grunting and gurgling.

There was nothing to eat: a bag of potatoes that had already begun to sprout, a dubious can of sprats, and an absolutely stony loaf of bread. Then Andrei delved into the drawer of the kitchen table and counted his cash again. He had some cash—just enough to last until payday, as long as he was economical with it and didn’t invite any guests but went visiting other people instead. They’ll drive me into the grave, Andrei thought gloomily. Damn it, I’ve had enough. I’ll bleed them all dry. What do they think I’ve got here, some kind of cookshop? The baboons!

At this point there was another knock at the door and Andrei went to open it, chuckling malevolently. He noticed in passing that Selma was sitting on the table with her hands stuck under herself and her painted mouth stretched out to her ears, like a real little bitch, and Izya was pontificating in front of her, waving his baboon-like arms around, and all his gloss had deserted him: the knot of his tie was under his right ear, his hair was standing up on end, and his shirt cuffs were gray.

It turned out that former noncommissioned officer of the Wehrmacht Fritz Heiger had arrived, along with his personal sidekick and private of the same Wehrmacht, Otto Friese. “So you’ve come!” Andrei greeted them with a malevolent smile.

Fritz immediately took this greeting as an attack on the dignity of a German noncommissioned officer and put on a stony face, but Otto, a gentle man of somewhat nebulous moral profile, merely clicked his boot heels and smiled ingratiatingly.

“What kind of tone is that?” Fritz inquired coldly. “Perhaps we should leave?”

“Have you brought anything to eat?” Andrei asked.

Fritz executed a thoughtful movement of his lower jaw. “Eat?” he repeated. “Mmm, how can I put it…” And he glanced inquiringly at Otto. Smiling shyly, Otto immediately pulled a flat bottle out of the pocket of his breeches and held it out to Andrei. Like an entry pass, with the label upward.

“Well, OK then…” said Andrei, mellowing and taking hold of the bottle. “But bear in mind, guys, there’s absolutely nothing to eat. Maybe you have some money at least?”

“Maybe you’ll let us in after all?” Fritz inquired, his head turned slightly to advance one ear: he was listening to the bursts of female laughter in the dining room.

Andrei let them into the hallway and said, “Money. Cash up front!”

“Even here we are unable to avoid reparations, Otto,” said Fritz, opening his wallet. “Here!” He thrust a few bills at Andrei. “Give Otto some kind of bag and tell him what to buy—he’ll run down to the shop.”

“Wait, not so fast,” Andrei said, and led them into the dining room. While heels clicked, slicked-down hairstyles stooped over, and soldierly compliments resounded, Andrei dragged Izya off to one side and, before he could gather his wits, frisked all his pockets, which Izya didn’t even seem to notice—he just struggled feebly to break free, dying to finish the joke he had started telling. After Andrei had confiscated everything he could find, he moved away and counted the reparations. It wasn’t really all that much, but it was about enough. He glanced around. Selma was still sitting on the table and dangling her legs. Her melancholy had evaporated; she was jolly. Fritz was lighting her cigarette, while Izya, choking and wheezing, was preparing to tell another joke, and Otto, red-faced from the tension and uncertainty about his manners, was a solitary pillar at the center of the room, standing to attention and visibly wiggling his large ears.

Andrei caught hold of Otto’s sleeve and dragged him into the kitchen, intoning: “They’ll manage without you, they’ll manage…” Otto didn’t object; he even seemed pleased. Once he found himself in the kitchen, he immediately went into action. He took the vegetable basket from Andrei, shook the rubbish out of it into the trash pail (which Andrei would never have thought of doing), rapidly and neatly covered the bottom of it with old newspapers, and instantly found the bag, which Andrei had lost the month before. Declaring “Maybe we’ll find some tomato sauce…” he put an empty compote jar into the bag, after first rinsing it out, then stuck in a few folded newspapers in case of need (“What if they don’t have any packaging… ”), so that Andrei’s contribution was limited to moving the money from one pocket to the other, stepping impatiently from one foot to the other, and intoning mournfully: “That’ll do now… That’s enough… let’s go, shall we…”

“Are you going as well?” Otto asked in awed surprise when he finished getting everything together.

“Yes, why?”

“I can do it on my own,” said Otto.

“On my own, on my own. It’s quicker with two. You get in line for the counter, I get in line for the till.”

“That’s true,” said Otto. “Yes. Of course.”

They went out through the back entrance and walked down the back staircase. On the way they startled a baboon—the poor creature hurled itself straight out the window like a rocket, and they even felt afraid for its life, but everything was fine after all—the baboon was dangling from the fire escape ladder, baring its fangs in a grin.

“I could give him the scraps,” Andrei said thoughtfully. “I’ve got enough leftover scraps for an entire herd.”

“Shall I go and get them?” Otto suggested willingly.

Andrei merely looked at him, said “At ease!” and walked on. The stairway already stank a bit. In fact it had always stunk a bit here anyway, but now a distinctly new whiff had appeared, and after walking down another flight, they discovered its source—and more than just one.

“Yes, Wang will have a bit more work to do,” said Andrei. “God forbid that I should end up as a caretaker right now. Who are you working as at the moment?”

“A minister’s deputy,” Otto replied despondently. “This is the third day already.”

“Which minister?” Andrei inquired.

“What’s it called… professional training.”

“Is it hard?”

“I don’t understand a thing,” Otto said dismally. “Lots and lots of documents, instructions, reports… estimates, budgets… And no one else there understands anything either. They all run around, asking each other—Wait, where are you going?”

“To the shop.”

“No. Let’s go to Hofstadter’s. He’s cheaper, and he’s German, after all.”

They went to Hofstadter’s. Hofstadter had a kind of combined greengrocer’s and general grocery store on the corner of Main Street and Old Persian Street. Andrei had been there a couple of times, and every time he had left empty handed: Hofstadter didn’t have very many foodstuffs, and he chose his own customers.

There was no one in the shop and the shelves were filled with neat ranks of identical jars of pink horseradish. Andrei went in first and Hofstadter, raising his pale, puffy face from the cash register, immediately said, “I’m closing.” But then Otto turned up, after catching the basket on the door handle, and the pale, puffy face broke into a smile. The closing of the shop was, of course, postponed. Otto and Hofstadter withdrew into the depths of the establishment, where boxes immediately started rustling and creaking as they were moved, potatoes drummed as they were poured, a glass vessel filled with something jangled, and muted voices started talking in muted tones…

With nothing else to do, Andrei gazed around. Yes indeed. Mr. Hofstadter’s little private trading business was a pitiful spectacle. The scales, of course, had not undergone the appropriate checks, and the sanitary conditions weren’t all that great. But then, that’s no concern of mine, thought Andrei. When everything got organized properly, all these Hofstadters would simply go bust. You could say they already had. In any case, Hofstadter wasn’t capable of serving anyone and everyone. Just look at the way he camouflaged himself, standing all that horseradish everywhere. Kensi should be set on him—this was a black market he was running here, the lousy nationalist. Only for Germans…

Otto glanced out of the depths and spoke in a whisper: “The money, quick!” Andrei hastily handed him a bundle of crumpled bills. With equal haste Otto peeled off a few of them, gave the rest back to Andrei, and disappeared back into the depths. A minute later he appeared behind the counter with his arms completely stretched by a full bag and a full basket. Hofstadter’s moonlike physiognomy loomed up behind him. Otto was streaming with sweat and kept smiling all the time, and Hofstadter kept repeating amiably, “Come again, come again, young men, I’m always glad to see you, always glad to see genuine Germans… And give Herr Heiger my special greetings… Next week they’ve promised to bring me a little bit of pork. Tell Herr Heiger I’ll keep three kilograms or so for him.”

“Yes indeed, Herr Hofstadter,” Otto replied. “Everything will be conveyed precisely, don’t you worry, Herr Hofstadter… And please don’t forget to give Fräulein Elsa our best regards—from both of us, and especially from Herr Heiger…”

They carried on droning this duet all the way to the door of the shop, where Andrei took the massively heavy bag from Otto—it was stuffed full with robust, clean carrots, firm beets, and sugar-white onions, from beneath which protruded the neck of a bottle sealed with wax, while a jumble of leeks, celery, dill, parsley, and other green stuff bristled on the top.

When they turned the corner, Otto put the basket down on the sidewalk, pulled out a large checkered handkerchief, and started wiping off his face, panting for breath and intoning, “Wait… I need to take a rest… Pheeew…”

Andrei lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Otto.

“Where did you get those carrots?” asked a woman walking by in a man’s leather coat.

“They’re finished, all gone,” Otto told her hastily. “We took the last ones. The shop’s closed already… Damn, that bald old devil’s exhausted me,” he told Andrei. “All that nonsense I spun him in there! Fritz will tear my head off when he finds out. And I don’t even remember now exactly what nonsense it was…”

Andrei didn’t understand a thing, and Otto explained the situation to him in brief.

Herr Hofstadter, a greengrocer from Erfurt, had been filled with hope all his life, and all his life he had been unlucky. When in 1932 some Jew made a beggar of him by opening a large, modern greengrocer’s shop across the street from his, Hofstadter realized that he was a true German and joined a brigade of storm troopers. In the storm troopers he was on the point of making a career, and in 1934 he personally pummeled the face of the aforementioned Jew and was about to close in on his business enterprise, but then came the disaster of Röhm’s denunciation and Hofstadter was purged. And by that time he was already married, and his charming little blonde-haired Elsa was already growing up. He managed to get by more or less for a few more years, then he was called up into the army and was about to embark on the conquest of Europe, but at Dunkirk he was bombed by his own side’s planes and received a massive piece of shrapnel in the lungs, so that instead of ending up in Paris, he found himself in a military hospital in Dresden, where he lay until 1945 and was on the point of being discharged when the Allied air forces made their famous raid that destroyed Dresden in a single night. The horror he experienced made all his hair fall out, and he went a bit crazy, according to the way that he himself told the story. So after finding himself back in his native Erfurt, he sat out the most hectic period, when it was still possible to decamp to the West, in the cellar of his little house. When he finally plucked up the courage to emerge into the light of day, everything was all over. Admittedly, they did allow him to run a greengrocer’s shop, but any kind of expansion of the business was out of the question. In ’46 his wife died, and in his clouded state of mind he yielded to the blandishments of a Mentor and, without really understanding the choice that he was making, moved here, where he had improved a bit, but to this day he still seemed to suspect that he had ended up in a large, specialized concentration camp somewhere in Central Asia, to which all the Germans from East Germany had been exiled. His brainbox still hadn’t been restored to completely normal functioning: he adored genuine Germans and was convinced that he had a special nose for detecting them, and he was mortally afraid of Chinese, Arabs, and blacks, whose presence here he didn’t understand and couldn’t explain, but above all he worshipped and adored Herr Heiger. The point was that during one of Heiger’s first visits to Hofstadter’s, while the greengrocer was filling the bag, the brilliant Fritz had briefly flirted, soldier fashion, with blonde-haired Elsa, who had been driven to a frenzy by the lack of any prospect of a decent marriage. And from that moment a blinding hope had been conceived in the heart of the insane, bald Hofstadter—the hope that this magnificent Aryan, a staunch supporter of the führer and scourge of the Jews, would at long last escort the unfortunate Hofstadter family out of turbulently heaving seas into some quiet backwater.

“What’s it to Fritz!” Otto complained, constantly changing the arm that was stretched out of shape by the basket. “He only goes to Hofstadter’s place once, maybe twice a month, when we’ve got nothing to eat—he paws that little fool a bit and that’s the end of it… But I come here every week, even two or three times a week… Hofstadter’s a fool all right, a fool, but he’s a businessman, you know—the contacts he’s built up with the farmers, his food’s first class and it’s not expensive… I’ve turned into a hopeless liar. I have to assure him of Fritz’s eternal affection for Elsa. I have to assure him of the inexorable demise of international Jewry. I have to assure him of the implacable advance of the forces of the great Reich to his greengrocer’s shop… I’ve got totally tangled up in it all myself, and I think I’ve driven him completely insane. I feel guilty, after all: I’m driving an insane old man into total insanity. Just now he asked me, What are these baboons supposed to mean? And without even thinking, I blurted out, ‘It’s an Aryan assault force, a cunning trick.’ You wouldn’t believe it—he hugged me and smooched me like he was sucking on a bottle.”

“But what does Elsa think?” Andrei asked curiously. “She’s not insane, is she?”

Otto flushed bright crimson and started wiggling his ears. “Elsa…” he cleared his throat. “I’m working away there too, like a horse. It’s all the same to her: Fritz, Otto, Ivan, Abraham… The girl’s thirty years old, and Hofstadter doesn’t let anyone but Fritz and me get near her.”

“Well, you and Fritz are bad bastards!” Andrei said sincerely.

“As bad as they come!” Otto agreed sadly. “And you know what’s most terrible about it: I absolutely can’t imagine how we’re going to extricate ourselves from this business. I’m weak; I’ve got no character.”

They stopped talking, and all the way back Otto merely panted as he changed the hand holding the basket. He didn’t walk up the stairs.

“You take this up and put on some water in a large saucepan,” he said. “And give me some money, and I’ll run over to the shop—maybe I’ll be able to get some canned stuff.” He hesitated, turning his eyes away. “And don’t you… tell Fritz. Or he’ll shake the life out of me. You know what Fritz is like—likes to keep everything buttoned up and under wraps. Who doesn’t?”

They parted, and Andrei lugged the basket and the bag up the back staircase. The basket was incredibly heavy, as if Hofstadter had loaded it with cast-iron cannonballs. Yes, brother, Andrei thought bitterly. What sort of Experiment is it if there are things like this going on? How much experimenting can you get done with this Otto and this Fritz? Would you believe it, what bastards—no honor and no conscience. Where would they get them from? The Wehrmacht. The Hitlerjugend. Trash. Yes, I’ll have a word with Fritz! I can’t leave this the way it is—the man’s decaying morally in front of my very eyes. But he could be a real human being! He must! When you get right down to it, you could say he saved my life that time. They could have just slid a knife under my shoulder blade, and that would have been it. Everyone shit their pants, everyone all went belly-up. All except for Fritz. No, he is a human being. I have to fight for him…

He slipped on the traces of baboon activity, swore, and started watching where he put his feet.

The moment he stepped inside the kitchen, he realized everything in the apartment had changed. The phonograph was booming and hissing in the dining room. He heard the clatter of dishes and the shuffling of dancing feet. And rumbling out over and above all these other sounds was the familiar bass voice of his excellency Yurii Konstantinovich: “You, brother, all that stuff about the economics and sociology—we don’t need it. We’ll get by without. But freedom, brother, now that’s a different matter. Freedom’s worth breaking your back for.”

Water was already boiling up in a large saucepan on the gas cooker, a freshly sharpened knife was lying, ready and waiting, on the kitchen table, and there was a ravishing aroma of meat coming from the oven. Two paunchy sacks were standing in the corner of the kitchen, propped against each other, and lying on top of them were an oil-soaked wadded jacket with burn holes, a familiar whip, and some kind of harness. The familiar machine gun was standing right there too—assembled and ready for use, with a flat, burnished metal magazine protruding from the breech. A glass carboy was gleaming with an oily glint under the table, with corn shuckings and pieces of straw stuck to it.

Andrei put down the basket and the bag. “Hey, you loafers!” he yelled. “The water’s boiling!”

Davydov’s rumbling bass fell silent, and Selma appeared in the doorway, red-faced and with her eyes glowing. Fritz towered up behind her shoulder. Apparently they had just been dancing, and the Aryan had no intention of taking his massive red paws off Selma’s waist just yet.

“Hofstadter sends you his greetings!” said Andrei. “Elsa is concerned that you don’t call round. The child will be a month old soon, after all!”

“Stupid jokes!” Fritz declared in disgust, but he took his paws away. “Where’s Otto?”

“It’s true, the water is boiling!” Selma declared in surprise. “Now what do we do with it?”

“Take the knife,” said Andrei, “and start peeling the potatoes. And I think you’re very fond of potato salad, aren’t you, Fritz? So you get on with it, and I’ll go and play the part of the host.”

He was about to walk into the dining room, but Izya Katzman intercepted him in the doorway. His face was glowing ecstatically.

“Listen,” he said, giggling and spraying. “Where did you get that remarkable character from? It seems like they’ve got a genuine Wild West down on the farms. American wide-open spaces!”

“Russian wide-open spaces are every bit as good as American ones,” Andrei said peevishly.

“Oh yes! Oh yes!” Izya shouted. “‘When the Jewish Cossacks rebelled, there was a coup, a coup in Birobidzhan, and if anyone tries to take our Berdichev, a boil will spring up on his belly!’”

“You drop that,” Andrei said sternly. “I don’t like it… Fritz, I’m placing Selma and Katzman under your command: work, and quickly. I’m hungry—I’m starving… And don’t yell in here—Otto will be knocking, he dashed off to get some canned stuff.”

Having put everyone in their places, Andrei hurried into the dining room, where first of all he exchanged a firm handshake with Yurii Konstantinovich.

Yurii Konstantinovich, still as red-faced and strong-smelling as ever, was standing in the middle of the room with his feet planted wide apart in their tarpaulin-fabric boots and his hands stuck into his soldier’s belt. His eyes were merry and slightly wild—Andrei had often seen eyes like that in the faces of harum-scarum men who liked hard work and strong drink, and had no fear of anything on Earth. “There!” said Davydov. “I’ve come, just as I promised. Have you seen the big bottle? That’s for you. The potatoes are for you too—two sacks. They wanted to give me, you know, a certain something for them, but I thought what the hell do I want all this for? I’ll drive them round to a good man instead. They live here, rotting away in their stone mansions, never seeing the light of day… Listen, Andrei, I was just telling Kensi here, the Japanese, I told him: Give it all up, guys! What is there round here that you haven’t seen already? Collect up your little kids, your women, your girls, and all come on out to us…”

Kensi, still in uniform after his spell of duty but with his tunic unbuttoned, was working away awkwardly with one hand, trying to set the table with miscellaneous dishes. His left hand was bound up with a bandage. He smiled and nodded to Davydov. “That’s what it will come to, Yura,” he said. “Next there’ll be an invasion of squids, and then every last one of us will move out to those swamps of yours.”

“Ah, why bother to wait for those… what-d’you-call-ems… To hell with those damned squids. Tomorrow morning I’m leaving empty, nothing in the cart—I can easily load up three families. You’re not a family man, are you?” he asked, turning to Andrei.

“God has spared me,” said Andrei.

“Then who’s this girl to you? Or isn’t she yours?”

“She’s new here. Just arrived last night.”

“So what could be better? A pleasant young lady. Take her and let’s go, eh? We’ve got air out there. We’ve got milk out there. You probably haven’t drunk any fresh milk in a year, have you? And I keep on wondering why there’s no milk in your shops. I’ve got three cows all to myself. I hand over that milk to the state, I feed myself with it, I feed the pigs with it, I pour it away on the ground… You settle at our place, you’ll see, and you’ll wake up in the morning to go out into the field and your very own cow will give you a pitcher of steaming-fresh milk—straight from the cow, eh?” He winked strenuously with both eyes, one after the other, laughed, whacked Andrei on the shoulder, then set off across the room, making the floorboards creak loudly, stopped the phonograph, and came back again. “And the air there! You haven’t even got any air left here—you’ve got a menagerie here, that’s all the air you’ve got. Kensi, why keep making it so hard on yourself? Call the girl, let her set the table.”

“She’s peeling potatoes in there,” Andrei said with a smile. Then he pulled himself up short and started helping Kensi. Davydov was a really great guy. He felt very close to him, as if they’d known each other for a whole year already. So… what if he really did it—took off to the swamps? Milk or no milk, the life there had to be really healthy. Just look at the way Davydov was standing there, like a statue!

“Someone’s knocking,” Davydov told him. “Shall I open up or will you go yourself?”

“Just a moment,” Andrei said, and went to the front door. Standing outside the door was Wang—without his wadded jacket now, wearing a blue serge shirt down to his knees and a waffle-weave towel wrapped around his head.

“They brought the cans!” he said with a joyful smile.

“So screw them then,” Andrei responded no less joyfully. “The cans can wait. Why are you alone? Where’s Mei-lin?”

“She’s at home,” said Wang. “She’s very tired. She’s sleeping. Our son’s taken sick.”

“Well come in, don’t just stand there… Come on, I’ll introduce you to a fine human being.”

“We’ve already met,” Wang said as he walked into the dining room.

“Ah, Vanya!” Davydov shouted delightedly. “So you’re here as well! Yes,” he said, turning back to Kensi, “I knew Andrei was a regular guy. Look, all the good people get together at his place. Take you, now, or that little Jew… what’s his name… Well, now we’ll have a whale of a feast! I’ll go and take a look at what they’re fiddling with for so long in there. There’s nothing at all to do, and they’ve made a huge job out of it…”

Wang quickly squeezed Kensi away from the table and began neatly and deftly rearranging the knives and forks. Kensi adjusted his bandage with his free hand and his teeth. Andrei waded in to help him. “Donald still hasn’t shown up,” he said in a concerned voice.

“He locked himself in,” Wang responded. “Said he wasn’t to be disturbed.”

“He’s been down in the dumps recently for some reason, guys. OK, forget about him. Listen, Kensi, what’s wrong with your hand?”

Kensi pulled a wry face as he answered. “A baboon snapped at me. What a bastard—bit right through to the bone.”

“You don’t say!” Andrei exclaimed, astonished. “I thought they were kind of placid.”

“Sure, very placid… When someone catches you and starts riveting a collar round your neck…”

“What collar?”

“Directive 57. All baboons are to be registered and fitted with a numbered collar. Tomorrow we’re going to distribute them to members of the public. Well, we ringed about twenty of them and herded the others over into the next precinct; they can sort them out. Why are you just standing there with your mouth hanging open? Let’s have some shot glasses—there aren’t enough shot glasses…”

4

When the sun was turned off, the entire company was already flying high. In the darkness that instantly fell, Andrei clambered out from behind the table and made his way over to the light switch, along the way kicking over some saucepans or other standing on the floor. “Don’ you be frightened, sweet fräulein,” Fritz babbled behind him. “That’s what always happens here…”

“Let there be light!” Andrei declared, articulating the words laboriously.

The dusty lightbulb on the ceiling lit up. The light was pitiful, just like in the passage to the courtyard. Andrei turned around and surveyed the gathering.

Everything was absolutely fine. Ensconced at the head of the table, swaying slightly on his kitchen stool, was Yurii Konstantinovich Davydov, who half an hour earlier had finally and irrevocably become “Uncle Yura” to Andrei. Uncle Yura had a brawny roll-up smoking between his firmly clenched teeth and a thick glass tumbler clutched in his right hand, and he was waving the calloused index finger of his left hand through the air in front of the nose of Izya Katzman, who was sitting beside him, now entirely bereft of his tie and jacket, and with traces of meat sauce clearly displayed on the collar and chest of his shirt.

Wang was sitting modestly on Uncle Yura’s right; in front of him he had the very smallest plate, with a small piece of something on it, and the most battered fork, and for the moonshine he had taken himself a glass with a chipped edge. His head had sunk completely down into his shoulders and his face was raised, with the eyes closed and a blissful smile on the lips: Wang was basking in his peace.

Sharp-eyed Kensi, his cheeks brightly flushed, was snacking with gusto on sauerkraut and rendering an enthusiastic account of something to Otto, who was battling heroically against drowsiness, exclaiming in his brief moments of victory, “Yes! Of course! Yes! Oh, yes!”

Selma Nagel, the Swedish tramp, was out-and-out gorgeous. She was sitting in an armchair, with her legs thrown over the soft armrest, and those gleaming legs were exactly level with the chest of the bold Unter-officer Fritz, so Fritz’s eyes were blazing, and in his excitement he had broken out in red blotches. He kept thrusting his full glass at Selma, repeatedly attempting to drink to Bruderschaft with her, but Selma pushed him away with her own glass, laughed, swung her legs about, and from time to time brushed Fritz’s hairy, fondling paw off her knees.

Andrei’s chair on the other side of Selma was the only one that was empty, apart from the chair set out for Donald, also sadly vacant. What a pity Donald’s not here, Andrei thought. But we’ll survive—we’ll even get through that! We’ve had to cope with worse things… His thoughts were a little confused, but his general mood was spunky, with a light veneer of the tragic. He went back to his place, picked up a glass, and roared, “A toast!”

No one took any notice of him except Otto, who merely jerked his head like a horse bitten by gadflies and responded, “Yes! Oh, yes!”

“I came here because I believed!” Uncle Yura boomed in his deep bass voice, not giving the giggling Izya a chance to remove that gnarled finger from under his nose. “And I believed because there was nothing else left to believe in. And a Russian has to believe in something, don’t you see, brother? If he doesn’t believe in anything, there’ll be nothing left but vodka. Even to make love to a woman, you’ve got to have faith. You have to believe in yourself; without faith you’ll never even get it up.”

“That’s right, that’s right!” Izya responded. “Take away a Jew’s belief in God and a Russian’s belief in the Good Czar, and they become capable of all sorts of diabolical things.”

“No… hang on! Jews are a special case…”

“The most important thing, Otto, is to take things easy,” Kensi was saying at the same time, crunching with relish on his cabbage. “There isn’t any training anyway—there simply can’t be any. Think about it: who needs professional training in a city where everyone is constantly changing his profession?”

“Oh, yes!” Otto responded, his mind clearing for a second. “I said the same thing to the minister.”

“And what did the minister say?” asked Kensi, picking up his glass of moonshine and taking a few small sips, as if he were drinking tea.

“The minister said that it was an extremely interesting idea and suggested that I should draft a detailed proposal.” Otto sniffed and tears welled up in his eyes. “But instead of that I went to see Elsa…”

“And when the tank was only about two meters away from me,” Fritz droned, spilling moonshine on Selma’s white legs, “I remembered everything! You wouldn’t believe it, fräulein, all the years of my life flashed by in front of my eyes… But I’m a soldier! With the name of the führer—”

“Ah, your führer’s been gone for ages!” Selma kept trying to drum into his head, laughing so hard that she cried. “They burned that führer of yours!”

“Fräulein!” Fritz declared, thrusting his jaw forward menacingly. “In the heart of every true German, the führer still lives! The führer will live on down through the ages! You are an Aryan, fräulein, you can understand me: when th’Russian tank… only three meters away… with the name of the führer on my lips, I…”

“Ah, I’m sick of you and your führer!” Andrei yelled at him. “Guys! Come on, you bastards! Listen to the toast, will you?”

“A toast?” exclaimed Uncle Yura, suddenly getting the idea. “Come on! Go to it, Andriukha!”

“Fortheladiespresent!” Otto suddenly blurted out, shoving Kensi away from him.

“You shut up, will you!” Andrei barked. “Izya, stop grinning like that! I’m being serious! Kensi, damn you! Guys, I think we should drink… we’ve already drunk to it, but only sort of in passing, and we need to drink fundamentally, seriously, to our Experiment, to our noble cause, and especially—”

“To the inspirer of all our victories, Comrade Stalin!” Izya roared.

That put Andrei off his stride. “No, listen,” he mumbled. “What are you interrupting me for? OK, to Stalin too, of course… Damn, now you’ve completely thrown me… I wanted us to drink to friendship, you fool!”

“Never mind, never mind, Andriukha,” said Uncle Yura. “It’s a good toast: we ought to drink to the Experiment, and we ought to drink to friendship too. Boys, raise your glasses, we’ll drink to friendship and to everything turning out just fine.”

“And I’ll drink to Stalin,” Selma piped up stubbornly. “And to Mao Tse-tung. Hey, Mao Tse-tung, do you hear, I’m drinking to you,” she shouted at Wang.

Wang started, smiling pitifully, picked up a glass, and pressed it against his lips.

“Tse-tung?” Fritz asked menacingly. “Who’s ’at?”

Andrei drained his glass in a single gulp and, feeling slightly stunned, started hastily jabbing his fork at the hors d’oeuvres. Suddenly it was as if all the conversations were reaching him from the next room. Stalin… Yes, of course. There has to be some kind of link… Why didn’t that ever occur to me before! Phenomena of the same scale—cosmic. There has to be some kind of link and interconnection… Let’s say this is the question: the choice between the success of the Experiment and the health of Comrade Stalin. Which one, for me personally, as a citizen, as a warrior… Of course, Katzman says Stalin’s dead already, but that’s not important. Let’s suppose he’s alive. And let’s suppose the choice I’m facing is: the Experiment or the cause of Stalin… No, rubbish, that’s not right. To continue the cause of Stalin under Stalin’s leadership or continue the cause of Stalin in completely different conditions, exceptional conditions, unforeseen by any theory—that’s how the question is posed.

“And what makes you think the Mentors are continuing the cause of Stalin?” Andrei suddenly heard Izya’s voice say, and realized that he’d been speaking out loud for some time already.

“But what other work can they be doing?” he asked in astonishment. “There’s only one cause on Earth worth working for—building communism! That is Stalin’s cause.”

“That’s a D for you in the Basics of Scientific Communism,” Izya retorted. “Stalin’s cause is the building of socialism in one country, the consistent struggle against imperialism, and the extension of the socialist camp to include the whole world. Somehow I don’t see how you can achieve those goals here.”

“Borrring!” Selma whined. “Let’s have some music! I want to dance!”

But Andrei was already blind and deaf to everything. “You dogmatist!” he barked. “You’re a Talmudist and doctrinarian! And, in general, a metaphysician. You don’t see anything but the form. It doesn’t matter what form the Experiment takes! But it can only have the same content, and only one final result: the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the laboring farmers—”

“And the toiling intelligentsia!” Izya put in.

“What damned intelligentsia… What sort of shit-pie garbage is that—the intelligentsia!”

“Yes, true,” said Izya. “That’s from a different era.”

“The intelligentsia is altogether impotent!” Andrei declared bitterly. “A lickspittle social stratum. It serves whoever holds the power.”

“A gang of wimps,” barked Fritz. “Wimps and blabbermouths, an eternal source of slackness and disorganization!”

“Precisely!” Andrei would have preferred to be supported by Uncle Yura, say, but support was useful even from Fritz’s side. “There, if you please: Heiger. Basically the class enemy, but his position coincides perfectly with ours. So it turns out that from the viewpoint of any class, the intelligentsia is shit.” He grated his teeth. “I hate them… I can’t stand those spineless, four-eyed weaklings, blabbermouths, freeloaders. They’ve got no inner strength, no faith, no morality…”

“When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun!” Fritz proclaimed in a metallic voice.

“Ah, no,” said Andrei. “I part company with you there. You drop that! Culture is the great heritage of the liberated people. What’s needed here is a dialectical…”

Somewhere close by the phonograph was thundering and Otto was stumbling around drunkenly, dancing with drunken Selma, but Andrei wasn’t interested in that. The best part of all was just beginning, the thing for which he loved these get-togethers more than anything else in the world. The argument.

“Down with culture!” Izya howled, skipping from one empty chair to another in order to move closer to Andrei. “It’s got nothing to do with our Experiment. What is the goal of the Experiment? That’s the question! You just tell me that.”

“I already told you: to create a model of communist society!”

“What in hell’s name would the Mentors want with a model of communist society? Judge for yourself, cabbage-head!”

“And why not? Why not?”

“What I think, though, is this,” said Uncle Yura. “The Mentors aren’t real human beings. They’re, how can I put it… a different species, I suppose… They’ve planted us in a fish tank… or something like a zoological garden… and they’re watching to see what happens.”

“Did you think that up for yourself, Yurii Konstantinovich?” Izya asked, and turned toward him, suddenly immensely interested.

Uncle Yura fingered his right cheekbone and replied evasively, “It emerged in the course of debate.”

Izya actually slammed his fist down on the table. “How incredible!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “Why? Where does it all come from? Why do the most different kinds of people, and people who basically think in entirely conformist terms, come up with this idea that the Mentors are not human in origin? The idea that the Experiment is being conducted by higher powers of some kind?”

“Well, for instance, I asked him straight out,” Kensi put in. “‘Are you aliens?’ He avoided giving a direct answer, but he didn’t actually deny it.”

“And I was told they’re human beings from a different dimension,” said Andrei. It felt awkward talking about the Mentor, like discussing family matters with outsiders. “But I’m not sure I understood correctly… Maybe it was just allegorical.”

“But I won’t have it!” Fritz abruptly declared. “I’m not an insect. I am myself. Aha!” he exclaimed, swinging his hand through the air. “I’d never have ended up here if I hadn’t been taken prisoner, would I?”

“But why?” said Izya. “Why? I feel some kind of internal protest all the time too, and I can’t understand what’s wrong. Maybe in the long run their goals are close to ours—”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you!” Andrei exclaimed delightedly.

“Not in that sense,” said Izya, gesturing impatiently. “It’s not all as straightforward as you make it out to be. They’re trying to figure out the human race, right? Make sense of it. And problem number one for us is the very same: making sense of the human race, of ourselves. Maybe by figuring things out for themselves, they’ll help us figure things out as well?”

“Ah, no, my friends,” said Kensi, swaying his head from side to side. “Ah, don’t flatter yourselves. They’re preparing to colonize the Earth, and they’re using you and me to study the psychology of their future slaves.”

“But why think that, Kensi?” Andrei said disappointedly. “Why these terrible assumptions? If you ask me, thinking about them that way is simply unfair.”

“Well, I probably don’t really think that,” Kensi replied. “It’s just that I have this strange sort of feeling… All these baboons, the transformation of the water, the general bedlam day after day… One fine day they’ll hand us a confusion of tongues too… It seems like they’re systematically preparing us for some appalling kind of world that we’re going to live in henceforth, now and forever, and unto the ages of ages. It’s like at Okinawa. I was just a little kid then, the war was going on, and the Okinawa boys and girls like me were forbidden to speak their own dialect. Nothing but Japanese. And when they caught some kid, they hung a sign around his neck: I DON’T KNOW HOW TO TALK PROPERLY. And he walked around with that sign.”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” said Izya, tugging and pinching at the wart on his neck with a frozen smile on his face.

“But I don’t understand!” Andrei declared. “All this is probably perverse supposition, it’s delusory… The Experiment is the Experiment. Of course we don’t understand anything. But then, we’re not supposed to understand! That’s a fundamental condition! If we understood what the baboons are for, what the switching around of professions is for… that understanding would immediately condition our behavior, the Experiment’s integrity would be compromised, and it would fail. That’s perfectly clear! What do you think, Fritz?”

Fritz shook his blond head. “I don’t know. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in what they want. I’m interested in what I want. And I want to instill some order into this shambles. And, anyway, one of you, I don’t remember who, said that perhaps the entire purpose of the Experiment is to select those who are the most energetic, the most active, the staunchest… It’s not so people can prattle and babble, or dissolve into sloppy puddles like wet pastry, or start wallowing in philosophy, but to show that they can stick to their guns. Those are the ones they’ll select—the ones like me, or like you, say, Andrei, and drop them back on Earth. Because if we haven’t faltered here, we won’t falter there either.”

“It could well be!” Andrei said with a profound air. “I accept that as perfectly possible too.”

“But Donald thinks,” Wang said in a quiet voice, “that the experiment has already failed a long, long time ago.”

Everyone looked at him. Wang was sitting in the same pose of tranquility as before—with his head pulled down into his shoulders and his face raised toward the ceiling; his eyes were still closed.

“He said the Mentors got all snarled up in this stunt of theirs ages ago, they’ve tried everything they can, and now even they don’t know what to do. They’re totally busted, he said. And now everything’s just rolling along under its own inertia.”

Totally bemused, Andrei reached up to scratch the back of his head. So that was Donald’s problem! The reason he’d been so tetchy and out of sorts… Nobody else said anything either. Uncle Yura slowly rolled yet another crooked cigarette, Izya pinched and tormented his wart with a stony-faced smile, Kensi started guzzling cabbage again, and Fritz stared fixedly at Wang, thrusting out his jaw and then setting it back in place. This was the way demoralization set in, Andrei thought fleetingly. With conversations like this. The lack of understanding produced a lack of belief. And the lack of belief meant death. Very, very dangerous. The Mentor had told him bluntly: the essential thing was to believe in the idea to the very end, unconditionally. To realize that not understanding anything was an absolutely indispensable condition of the Experiment. That was the hardest part, naturally. The majority here had no real ideological toughness, no genuine certainty that the bright future was inevitable. That no matter how tough and difficult things might be today, and tomorrow as well, the day after tomorrow the star-spangled sky will surely unfurl above our heads, and life will be bright and festive…

“I’m not an educated man,” Uncle Yura said suddenly, lovingly gluing together his new roll-up with his tongue. “I’ve only got four years of schooling, in case you’d like to know, and as I’ve already told Izya, to be quite frank, I bailed out to get here… The same way you did,” he said, pointing the roll-up at Fritz. “Only for you the road led out of captivity, and for me it led out of the collective farm, you see. Not counting the war, I spent my entire life in the village, and in my entire life I never saw any light. But here I have seen it! I’ll tell you straight, brothers, it’s beyond me what fancy business they’re up to with this Experiment of theirs, and I’m not all that interested. But here I’m a free man, and as long as they don’t touch my freedom, I won’t bother anyone either. But if anyone here suddenly decides they want to change the current status of the farmers, then I can promise you for certain that we won’t leave a stone standing in this City of yours. We’re not a fucking troop of baboons! We won’t let you put any fucking collars round our throats! So that’s the way of things, brother,” he said, speaking directly to Fritz.

Izya giggled absentmindedly, and an awkward silence fell again. Andrei was rather surprised by Uncle Yura’s tirade, and he decided that life must obviously have been especially hard on Yurii Konstantinovich, and if he said he’d never seen any light, then he must have special grounds of his own for that, and asking him about them would be tactless, especially right now. And so Andrei simply said, “We’re probably raising all these questions too soon. The Experiment hasn’t been going on for that long, there’s a huge amount of work to be done, we have to work and believe in the correctness—”

“What makes you think the Experiment hasn’t been going on for very long?” Izya interrupted him with a mocking grin. “The Experiment’s been going on for a hundred years at least. I mean to say, it’s definitely been going on for a lot longer, only I can personally vouch for a hundred years.”

“And how do you know?”

“How far to the north have you gone?” Izya asked.

Andrei was at a loss. He had no idea that there even was a north here.

“You know, north!” Izya said impatiently. “Let us notionally consider that the direction toward the sun, the direction where the swamps and the farms are, is south, and the opposite direction, moving farther in through the City, is north. You haven’t gone any farther than the garbage dumps, have you? But from there the City goes on and on: there are huge city districts, entire palaces…” He giggled. “Palaces and hovels. There’s no one there now, of course, because there’s no water, but someone used to live there once, and let me tell you, that ‘once’ was a pretty long time ago. The documents I discovered in empty houses there—ay-ay-ay! Have you ever heard of the monarch Velarius the Second? There, you see! Well, as it happens, he used to rule there. Only in the times when he used to rule there”—Izya tapped one fingernail on the tabletop—“there were swamps here, and their serfs labored in those swamps… or their slaves. And that was at least a hundred years ago.”

Uncle Yura shook his head and clicked his tongue. Fritz asked, “And what about farther north?”

“I haven’t gone any farther,” said Izya, “but I know people who have gone very far, 100 or 150 kilometers, and plenty have gone and never come back.”

“OK, so what’s there?”

“The City,” Izya said, and paused. “Mind you, they tell shameless lies about those places too. That’s why I only talk about what I’ve discovered for myself. A hundred years for certain. Got that, have you, my friend Andriusha? A hundred years is long enough to give up on any experiment.”

“Well OK, just hang on, will you…” Andrei muttered, flustered. “But they haven’t given up on it!” he exclaimed, perking up. “If they’re still bringing in new people all the time, they haven’t dropped it, they haven’t despaired. It’s just that the problem that’s been set is extremely complex.” A new idea occurred to him and he perked up even more. “And anyway, how do you know what their time scale is like? Maybe our year is just a second to them?”

“I don’t know anything about any of that,” Izya said with a shrug. “I’m just trying to explain to you what kind of world you live in, that’s all.”

“OK!” Uncle Yura interrupted him decisively. “We’ve wasted enough time on empty talk Hey, kiddo! What’s your name… Otto! Leave the girl alone and bring us… No he’s totally wasted already. He’ll break my carboy. I’ll go get it myself.” He slid down off the stool, picked the empty pitcher up off the table, and walked off into the kitchen.

Selma plumped down across her chair so that her legs were higher than her head again and petulantly nudged Andrei on the shoulder. “How long are you going to carry on with this tedious crap? Don’t be such an incredible drag… The Experiment, the Experiment… Give me a light!”

Andrei gave her a light. The abrupt breaking off of the conversation had stirred up some kind of unpleasant sediment inside him—something had been left unsaid, something had been misunderstood, they hadn’t let him explain, unity hadn’t been achieved… And Kensi was sitting there looking sad somehow, and that was a rare thing for him. We think too much of ourselves, that’s what, he thought. The Experiment is all well and good, but everyone insists on doing things his own way, clings to his own position, and we have to do it together, together!

At this point Uncle Yura dumped a new batch of booze on the table with a thud, and Andrei gave up on the whole damn business. They drank a glass and took a bite; Izya threw out a joke and it fell flat. Uncle Yura flung out a joke too, a monstrously obscene one, but it was very funny. Even Wang laughed, and Selma was in stitches from laughing so hard. “In the pitcher…” she gasped, choking and rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. “It won’t fit in the pitcher!”

Andrei smashed his fist down on the table and launched into his mother’s favorite song:

They joined in with him, everyone trying his best, and then Fritz, with his eyes bulging wildly, bawled out a duet with Otto, a song that Andrei didn’t know, but an excellent one, about the quaking bones of the old, decrepit world—a magnificent battle song. Watching Andrei enthusiastically trying to sing along, Izya Katzman giggled and gurgled, rubbing his hands together, and then Uncle Yura fixed his drolly rakish, bright-eyed stare on Selma’s naked thighs and abruptly roared out in a voice like a bear:

This was an absolute hit, and Uncle Yura carried on:

At that Selma took her legs down off the armrest, shoved Fritz away, and said resentfully, “I’m not promising you anything. I don’t need any of you.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” said Uncle Yura, seriously embarrassed. “It’s not like I’ve got any use for you either.”

To smooth over the incident, they drank another glass. Andrei’s head started spinning. He was vaguely aware that he was fiddling with the phonograph, and he was going to drop it in a moment, and the phonograph really did fall to the floor, but it wasn’t damaged at all—quite the opposite. It seemed to start playing even louder. Then he was dancing with Selma, and Selma’s sides turned out to be warm and soft, and her breasts were unexpectedly firm and large, which was one helluva of a pleasant surprise—finding something beautifully formed under those formless folds of prickly wool. They danced, and he held on to her sides, and she took his cheeks in her open palms and said he was a really nice boy and she really liked him, and in his gratitude he told her that he loved her and he had always loved her, and now he’d never let her get away from him again… Uncle Yura slammed his fist into the table, proclaiming, “I feel a sudden chill in here, time for another glass of cheer.” Then he put his arms around Wang, who had completely wilted by this stage, and kissed him three times in the Russian fashion. Then Andrei found himself in the middle of the room, and Selma was sitting at the table again, throwing bread pellets at apathetic Wang and calling him Mao Tse-tung. That put Andrei in mind of the song “Moscow-Peking” and he immediately performed that beautiful composition with exceptional passion and fervor, then he and Izya Katzman suddenly found themselves standing, staring wide-eyed at each other, lowering their voices deeper and deeper in a sinister whisper and holding up their index fingers as they repeated, over and over: “Lis-tening to us! Lis-tening to us!” After that he and Izya somehow found themselves crammed into a single armchair, with Kensi sitting on the table in front of them, dangling his legs, while Andrei fervently tried to persuade him that he, Andrei, was willing to perform any kind of work here—that any work at all gave him especial satisfaction, and he felt just great working as a garbage collector. “Here I am—a garb-… age col-lector!” he exclaimed, enunciating the words with a struggle. “A grab-… grabbage collector!”

And Izya, spitting in Andrei’s ear, kept harping on about something unpleasant, something offensive: saying that Andrei actually experienced a sweet humiliation from being a garbage collector (“Yes… I’m a grab-bage collector!”), that he was so intelligent, so well read and capable, fit for much greater things, but even so he bore his heavy cross with patience and dignity, unlike certain others… Then Selma appeared, bringing him immediate consolation. She was soft and affectionate, and she did everything he wanted, and she didn’t contradict him, and at that point there was a sweet, devastating gap in his sense impressions, and when he surfaced from out of that gap, his lips were puffy and dry and Selma was already sleeping on his bed. He straightened her skirt with a paternal gesture, flung the blanket over her, adjusted his own attire appropriately, and went back out into the dining room, trying to walk with a brisk stride and stumbling on the way over the outstretched legs of poor Otto, who was sleeping on a chair in the hideously uncomfortable pose of a man killed by a shot to the back of the neck.

Towering up on the table was the large carboy itself, and all the revelers were sitting there, propping up their tousle-haired heads and warbling in a soft-voiced chorus, “In the desolate depths of the steppe a coachman was freezing…” and large tears were rolling down out of Fritz’s pale, Aryan eyes. Andrei was about to join in when there was a knock at the door. He opened it, and a woman wrapped in a shawl, dressed in her underskirt with boots on her bare feet, asked if the caretaker was here. Andrei shook Wang awake and explained to him where he was and what was required of him. “Thanks, Andrei,” Wang said after listening carefully to him, and left, feebly shuffling his feet. The others finished singing the song about the coachman in the steppe, and Uncle Yura suggested a drink “to folks at home not grieving,” but then it turned out that Fritz was asleep, so he couldn’t clink glasses. “That’s it, then,” said Uncle. “That means this will be the last one…” But before they drank one last glass, Izya Katzman, who had suddenly turned strangely serious, rendered one more solo—a song that Andrei didn’t entirely understand, but apparently Uncle Yura understood it perfectly well. The song included the refrain “Ave Maria” and an absolutely appalling verse that seemed to come from a different planet:

When Izya finished singing, there was silence for a while, then Uncle Yura abruptly smashed his massively heavy fist into the tabletop and swore at length in exceptionally florid style, following which he grabbed a glass and started swigging from it without any toasts at all. And Kensi, following some strange association that only he could understand, performed another song in an extremely unpleasant, squeaky, and vehement voice, about how, if the Japanese soldiers were all to start pissing at once against the Great Wall of China, a rainbow would appear above the Gobi Desert; about how the imperial army was in London today, tomorrow it would be in Moscow, and the next morning it would drink tea in Chicago; that the sons of Yamato had settled the banks of the Ganges and were catching crocodiles with fishing rods. Then he fell silent, tried to light a cigarette, broke several matches, and suddenly out of the blue told them about a little girl he used to be friends with in Okinawa—she was fourteen years old, and she lived in the house opposite his. One day some drunken soldiers raped her, and when her father went to the police to complain, gendarmes showed up and took him and the girl away, and Kensi never saw them again…

Nobody was saying anything when Wang stuck his head into the dining room, called Kensi’s name, and beckoned to him.

“That’s the way things go,” Uncle Yura said gloomily. “And just look: the same thing in the West, and back home in Russia, and in the yellow-skinned countries—the same story everywhere. Power is unjust. Ah, no, brothers, what would I want to go back there for? I’d rather be here.”

Kensi came back, pale-faced and preoccupied, and started looking for his belt. His uniform tunic was already fully buttoned.

“Has something happened?” Andrei asked.

“Yes. Something has happened,” Kensi replied in a crisp, staccato voice, adjusting his holster. “Donald Cooper shot himself. About an hour ago.”