The Doomed City

PART VI Conclusion

The sun was at its zenith. Its disk, copper colored through the dust, hung at the center of a dirty white sky, and his misshapen shadow writhed and bristled right under the soles of his shoes, sometimes gray and blurred, sometimes suddenly seeming to come alive, acquiring sharply defined outlines and flooding with blackness—and then it was especially ugly. There wasn’t even a hint of any road here—there was bumpy, yellow-gray clay, cracked and dead, as hard as stone, so naked it was quite impossible to understand how there could be so much dust everywhere.

The wind, thank God, was blowing at his back. Somewhere far behind him it had sucked up countless tons of this abominable, incandescent powder and was dragging it with obtuse stubbornness along this sunbaked ledge squeezed in between the Abyss and the Yellow Wall, sometimes flinging it in swirling protuberances right up to the sky, sometimes spinning it into lithe, flirtatious, swan-necked dust devils, or sometimes simply tumbling it along in a billowing wave, and then, suddenly enraged, it would fling this fine, prickly flour against his back and into his hair, hurling it furiously at the sweat-soaked nape of his neck, lashing his hands and ears with it, filling his pockets with it, pouring it in behind his collar…

There was nothing here; there hadn’t been anything here for a long time. Maybe never. Sun, clay, wind. Only occasionally, swirling and skipping like some antic jester, the prickly skeleton of a bush would go hurtling by, torn out by the roots at some spot lying God only knew how far behind him. Not a drop of water, not a single sign of life. Nothing but dust, dust, dust, dust…

Every now and again the clay under his feet disappeared and a covering of crumbled stone began. Everything here was as scorching hot as in hell. Sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, gigantic, craggy fragments of cliffs peered out of the clouds of swirling dust—looking as gray as if they had been sprinkled with flour. The wind and heat had given them incredibly strange and astonishing forms, and the way they appeared and then disappeared again, like ghosts, was frightening, as if they were playing a crags’ game of hide-and-go-seek. And the crumbled stone he walked over kept getting coarser and coarser, until suddenly the deposit ended and the clay rang under his feet again.

The stones behaved very badly. They squirmed out from under his feet or did their damnedest to pierce as deeply as possible into the soles of his shoes, to pierce through them into his living body. The clay behaved a bit more decently. But it still tried every trick it knew. It suddenly bulged up into bald mounds, or out of the blue produced idiotic inclines; it parted to form deep, steep-sided ravines, on the bottom of which the stagnant heat of millennia made it impossible to breathe… It played its own game too, its own clay version of “statues,” inventing tricky metamorphoses within the limits of its own clayey imagination. Everything here played its own game. But everything played on the same side…

“Hey, Andrei!” Izya called hoarsely. “Andriukhaaa!”

“What do you want?” Andrei asked over his shoulder, and stopped. Wobbling about on its loose little wheels, the cart ran on by inertia and hit him on the back of his knees.

“Look!” Izya was standing about ten paces behind Andrei, holding out his hand to show him something.

“What is it?” asked Andrei, not particularly interested.

Izya laid into his harness and trundled his cart toward Andrei, without lowering his hand. Andrei watched him as he approached—a terrible sight, with his beard hanging down over his chest and his hair, gray with dust, standing up on end, in an unbelievably ragged jacket, with his wet, hairy body showing through the holes. The fringe of his trousers barely covered his knees, and his right shoe was gaping wide open, as if it were begging to be fed, exposing a set of dirty toes with broken, black nails… A luminary of the spirit. A priest and apostle of the eternal temple of culture…

“A comb!” Izya proclaimed triumphantly when he got close.

It was the very cheapest kind of comb—plastic, with broken teeth—not even a comb, really, more a fragment of a comb, and at the point where it was broken off, it was still possible to make out some kind of Soviet Industrial Standard number, but the plastic had been bleached by many decades of the sun’s heat and ferociously corroded by a scab of dust.

“There now,” said Andrei, “and you keep harping on: no one before us, no one before us.”

“That’s not what I harp on about at all,” Izya said amicably. “Why don’t we sit down for a while, eh?”

“OK then, let’s sit,” Andrei agreed without any enthusiasm, and Izya instantly plumped his backside down on the ground, without even taking off his harness, and started stuffing the fragment of comb into his breast pocket.

Andrei set his cart crosswind, took off his harness, and sat down, leaning his back and his head against the hot canisters. Immediately there was noticeably less wind, but now the naked clay burned his buttocks cruelly through the old, worn fabric.

“Where’s this reservoir of yours?” he said derisively. “Windbag.”

“Keep on looking!” Izya replied. “It’s got to be there!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s this joke, about a merchant,” Izya gladly explained. “A certain merchant went to a bawdy house—”

“Here we go again!” said Andrei. “Still yammering on about that? There’s no way to cool you off, Katzman, I swear to God…”

“I can’t afford to cool off,” Izya explained. “I’ve got to be ready at the very first opportunity.”

“The two of us are going to croak here,” said Andrei.

“God forbid! Don’t even think about it, don’t even imagine it.”

“I don’t think about it,” said Andrei.

It was true. The thought of death—which was inevitable, of course—entered his head only very rarely now. Either the cutting edge of this sense of doom had already been completely blunted, or his flesh was so desiccated and exhausted that it had given up yelling and howling, and now only croaked faintly somewhere on the threshold of audibility… Or perhaps quantity had finally been transformed into quality, and he had begun to be affected by the presence of Izya, with his almost unnatural indifference to death, which constantly circled around them, sometimes moving in right up close, then suddenly moving away again, but never letting them out of its sight… Whatever way it was, for many days now, if Andrei did start talking about the inevitable end, it was only to convince himself again and again of his growing indifference to it.

“What did you say?” Andrei asked.

“I said: the important thing is, don’t you be afraid of croaking here.”

“Ah, you’ve told me that a hundred times already. I haven’t been afraid for ages, and you just keep yammering on.”

“Well, that’s good,” Izya said peaceably. He stretched out his legs. “What could I tie this sole up with?” he inquired profoundly. “It’s about to fall off in the very next increment of time.”

“Cut off the end of the harness there and tie it up with that… Shall I give you a knife?”

Izya contemplated his protruding toes for a while. “Never mind,” he said eventually. “Later, when it completely comes off… Maybe we could take a little nip?”

“Hands and feet too cold to jig,” Andrei said, and immediately remembered Uncle Yura. It was hard to remember Uncle Yura now. He was from another life.

“Maybe we should take a swig?” Izya joined in exuberantly, glancing searchingly into Andrei’s eyes.

“Screw you!” Andrei said with relish. “Know what water you can swig? That water you read about somewhere. You lied to me about the reservoir, right?”

Just as he expected, Izya immediately blew his top. “Go to hell! Who do you think I am—your nanny?”

“Well, your manuscript lied, then.”

“Fool,” Izya said contemptuously. “Manuscripts don’t lie. They’re not books. You just have to know how to read them.”

“Well, you don’t know how to read them, then.”

Izya merely glanced at him and instantly started fidgeting about, getting up. “There’ll be all sorts of shit here…” he muttered. “Come on, get up! You want a reservoir? Then stop sitting around here… get up, I tell you!”

The wind exulted, lashing Andrei’s ears with prickles, and joyfully started swirling dust around in circles above the bald clay, like a playful dog, but the clay moved sluggishly toward him, behaving docilely for a while, as if it were gathering its strength, and then started tilting up into an incline.

If I could just finally figure out where the hell I’m rushing so fast, thought Andrei. All my life I’ve been rushing somewhere—like a stupid fool, I just can’t stay still… And the worst thing is, there’s no meaning to it any longer. There always used to be some kind of meaning. Even if it was absolutely paltry, maybe even totally screwy, but even so, whenever I was getting beaten, let’s say on the face, I could always tell myself: it’s OK, it’s in the name of… it’s the struggle…

“Everything in the world is worth no more than shit,” Izya had said. (It was in the Crystal Palace; they’d just eaten chicken, pressure-roasted, and they were lying on mattresses of bright synthetic material on the edge of a pool with transparent, backlit water.) “Everything in the world is worth no more than shit,” said Izya, picking his teeth with a well-washed finger. “All those plowmen of yours, all those lathe operators, all those blooming mills, cracking plants, branched varieties of wheat, lasers and masers. All that is shit, manure. It all passes away. Either it simply passes away without a trace, forever, or it passes away because it changes. All this only seems important because the majority believes it’s important. And the majority only believes it’s important because its goal is to stuff its belly and gratify its flesh with absolutely as little effort as possible. But if you think about it, who gives a damn about the majority? I personally have nothing against it—to some extent I am the majority. But I’m not interested in the majority. The history of the majority has a beginning and an end. At the beginning the majority eats what it’s given. And at the end it spends its entire life trying to solve the problem of choice. What special, tasty sort of item can I choose to eat? Something I haven’t eaten before?”

“Well, that’s still a pretty long way off,” Andrei said.

“Not as far off as you imagine,” Izya objected. “And even if it is a long way off, that’s not the point. The main thing is, there’s a beginning and there’s an end…”

“Everything that has a beginning has an end too,” Andrei said.

“Right, right,” Izya said impatiently. “But I’m talking about the magnitudes of history, not the magnitudes of the universe. The history of the majority has an end, but the history of the minority will only come to an end together with the universe.”

“You’re a lousy elitist,” Andrei told him lazily, before getting up off his mat and plunking into the pool. He swam for a long time, snorting in the cool water and diving right down to the bottom, where the water was icy cold, greedily gulping it there, like a fish…

No, of course I didn’t gulp it. Now I’d gulp it. My God, how I’d gulp it! I’d gulp down the entire pool, I wouldn’t leave any for Izya—he can go search for his reservoir…

Over on the right, some kind of ruins peeped out from behind the swirling yellowish-gray clouds—a blank, half-collapsed wall, spiky with dust-covered plants, the remains of a clumsy quadrangular tower.

“There now, see,” Andrei said, stopping. “And you say: no one before us…”

“Ah, I never said that, you great lunkhead!” Izya wheezed. “I said—”

“Listen, maybe the reservoir’s here?”

“It very easily could be,” said Izya.

“Let’s go and take a look.”

They both slipped out of their harnesses and trudged over to the ruins.

“Ha!” said Izya. “A Norman fortress! Ninth century…”

“Water, look for water,” said Andrei.

“Ah, to hell with your water!” Izya said angrily. His eyes opened wide and started bulging, and with a long-forgotten gesture he reached under his beard to search for his wart. “Normans…” he muttered. “Well, well… I wonder how they lured them here?”

Catching their tattered rags on prickles, they forced their way through a gap in the wall and found themselves in a calm spot. Standing there in the smooth, quadrangular space was a low building with a collapsed roof.

“The union of the sword and wrath…” Izya muttered, hurrying toward the doorway. “Or maybe I don’t understand a damn thing about what that union is… Where would a sword come from here? How can you make sense of something like that?”

Inside the building the devastation was total, total and ancient. Centuries old. The collapsed roof timbers had mingled with fragments of rotted boards—the remains of a long table that ran the full length of the building. Everything was dusty, crumbling, and decayed, and the wall on the left was lined with equally dusty and decayed benches. Still muttering, Izya waded in to rummage through this heap of decay, and Andrei went out and walked around the building. He very soon came across what had once been a reservoir—an immense round pit lined with stone slabs. The slabs were as dry as the desert now, but there was no doubt that there had been water here at one time: the clay at the edge of the pit was as hard as cement, and it preserved the deep imprints of booted feet and dogs’ paws. Things are looking bad, thought Andrei. The old terror clutched his heart and then immediately released its grip: at the far end of the pit the broad, shaggy leaves of a “ginseng” plant were flattened out on the clay in a star shape. Andrei jogged around the pit toward them, feeling for the knife in his pocket on the way.

For several minutes, panting and streaming with sweat, he scrabbled furiously at the rock-hard clay with his knife and his nails, raked out the crumbs and scrabbled again, and then, grabbing hold of the thick stock of the root with both hands, he pulled hard, but cautiously—God forbid that the root should break off somewhere in the middle.

The root was a big one, about seventy centimeters long and as thick as a fist—white, clean, and glossy. Pressing it against his cheek with both hands, Andrei set off back to Izya, but along the way he gave in, sank his teeth into the succulent, crunchy flesh, and started chewing delightedly, relishing it, trying not to hurry, trying to chew as thoroughly as possible, so as not to lose even a single drop of this delightful minty bitterness that made his mouth and his entire body feel as fresh and cool as a forest in the morning, and cleared his head, so that he no longer feared anything, and he could move mountains…

Then they sat in the doorway of the building, joyfully gnawing and crunching and champing, merrily winking at each other with their mouths full, and the wind howled disappointedly over their heads and couldn’t reach them. They’d deceived it again; they hadn’t allowed it to toy with their bones on the bald clay. Now they could match their strength against it one more time.

They drank two swallows each from a hot canister, harnessed themselves into their carts, and strode on. And it was easy to walk now; Izya didn’t drop behind anymore but stepped out beside Andrei, with the half-detached sole of his shoe slapping.

“By the way, I spotted another little plant there,” Andrei said. “A small one. On the way back…”

“That’s a mistake,” said Izya. “We should have eaten it.”

“Didn’t you get enough?”

“Why let good stuff go to waste?”

“It won’t go to waste,” said Andrei. “It’ll come in useful for the return journey.”

“There’s not going to be any return journey.”

“That’s something no one knows, brother,” said Andrei. “Why don’t you just tell me this: Is there still going to be water?”

Izya threw his head back and looked up at the sun. “At the zenith,” he announced. “Or almost at the zenith. What do you think, Mr. Astronomer?”

“Looks like it.”

“The most interesting part will start soon,” said Izya.

“What could be so interesting about it? So, we pass through the zero point. Then we start walking toward the Anticity…”

“How do you know that?”

“About the Anticity?”

“No. Why do you think we’ll just simply pass through and walk on?”

“I’m not thinking a damned thing about it,” said Andrei. “I’m thinking about water.”

“Oh Lord, give me strength! The zero point is the beginning of the world, do you understand? And he talks about water!”

Andrei didn’t reply. The ascent of yet another hillock had begun; walking had become hard, and the harness was cutting into his shoulders. That “ginseng” is great, he thought. How come we know about it? Did Pak tell us? I think that was it—Ah, no! Skank brought a few roots into camp one day and started eating them, and the soldiers took them away from her and tried them themselves. Yes. They were all strutting and swaggering afterward, and they tumbled Skank all night long… And later Pak said that this “ginseng,” like the real ginseng, is only found very rarely. It grows in places where there used to be water, and it’s really good when your energy’s low. Only it’s impossible to store it—you have to eat it immediately. Because after an hour or even less, the root withers and becomes almost poisonous… There was a lot of this “ginseng” near the Pavilion, a whole truck farm of it… That was where we stuffed ourselves with it, and all Izya’s sores disappeared overnight. It was good at the Pavilion. And all the time there Izya kept pontificating about the edifice of culture…

“All the rest is just the scaffolding around the wall of the temple,” he had said. “All the best things that humankind has invented in a hundred thousand years, all the important things it has understood and achieved through the power of thought, go into that temple. Through all the millennia of its history, howling, starving, lapsing into slavery and rebelling, guzzling and copulating, humanity carries this temple along on the turbid crest of its wave, without even suspecting it. Sometimes it suddenly notices this temple on its back and stumbles, and then it starts either taking the temple apart brick by brick or frenziedly worshipping it, or building a different temple next to it in order to vilify it, but humankind never really understands what it’s dealing with, and after it despairs of making use of the temple in some way or other, it’s soon distracted by its own so-called vital needs. It starts dividing up all over again something that has already been divided up thirty-three times, crucifying somebody, glorifying somebody—but the temple just carries on growing and growing from century to century, from millennium to millennium, and it’s impossible either to destroy it or to ultimately abase it.

“The most amusing thing,” said Izya, “is that every little brick of this temple, every eternal book, every eternal melody, every unique architectural silhouette, bears within itself the compressed experience of this humankind, its thoughts and thoughts about it, ideas about the goals and contradictions of its existence; that no matter how separate it might seem from all the vital interests of this herd of swine, at the same time it is always inseparable from this herd and inconceivable without it…

“And another amusing thing,” Izya said, “is that no one actually builds this temple consciously… It can’t be planned out in advance on paper or in the brain of some genius; it grows of its own accord, unerringly absorbing all the best that human history produces.

“Maybe you think,” Izya asked acidly, “that the most exceptional builders of this temple aren’t swine? Lord Almighty, what hideous swine they are sometimes! The thief and scoundrel Benvenuto Cellini, the hopeless drunk Hemingway, the pederast Tchaikovsky, the schizophrenic and black reactionary Dostoyevsky, the thief and gallows bird François Villon… My God, the decent people among them are the rare ones! But like the coral polyps, they know not what they do. And neither does the whole of humankind. Generation after generation they guzzle, wallow in pleasure, ravage, kill, turn up their toes—and before you know it an entire coral atoll has sprung up, and how beautiful it is! And how enduring!”

“Well OK then,” Andrei said to him. “So it’s a temple. The only imperishable embodiment of value. OK. But then, what have we all got to do with this? What have I got to do with this?”

“Stop!” said Izya, grabbing his harness. “Wait. The stones.”

Yes, the stones here were certainly convenient—rounded and flat, like solidified cowpats.

“Are we going to build yet another temple?” Andrei asked with a chuckle. He took off his harness, stepped to one side, and picked up the nearest stone. The stone was exactly the kind required for a foundation—lumpy and prickly underneath, and smooth on the top, worn down by the dust and the wind. Andrei set it on a fairly level deposit of small pieces of crumbled stone, ground it in with movements of his shoulders as deeply and firmly as he could, and went to get another one.

While he was laying out the foundation he felt something like satisfaction: after all, this was work, wasn’t it, not meaningless movements of the legs but actions performed with a definite goal in mind? The goal could be contested; Izya could be declared a psycho and a crank (which, of course, he was)… But working like this, stone after stone, Andrei could lay out, as evenly as possible, the platform for a foundation.

Izya panted and grunted beside him, rolling the largest stones, stumbled, and tore the sole completely off his shoe, and when the foundation was ready, he galloped to his cart and extracted another copy of his Guidebook from under the rags.

When, at the Crystal Palace, they had finally realized and almost believed that they would never meet anyone again on the journey north, Izya had sat down at a typewriter and dashed off at supernatural speed A Guidebook to the Crazy World. Then he had personally reproduced this Guidebook on a bizarre copying machine (in the Crystal Palace they had all sorts of different amazing machines); he had personally sealed all fifty copies in envelopes of a strange, transparent, and very strong material that was called “polyethylene film” and loaded up his cart right to the top, leaving only just enough room for a sack of rusks… And now he only had about ten, or maybe even fewer, of these envelopes left.

“How many of them do you still have?” asked Andrei.

Setting an envelope at the center of the foundation, Izya replied absentmindedly, “Damned if I know… Not many. Give me some stones.”

Again they started dragging stones, and soon a pyramid a meter and a half tall had sprung up over the envelope. It looked rather strange in this desolate landscape, but to make it look even stranger still, Izya poured poisonous red paint over the stones from a huge tube that he had found in the storeroom under the Tower. Then he moved away to his cart, sat down, and started binding the detached sole of his shoe with a piece of string. While he was doing it, he kept glancing at his pyramid, and the doubt and uncertainty in his face were gradually replaced by a look of satisfaction and burgeoning pride.

“Eh?” he said to Andrei, completely puffed up with conceit at this stage. “Not even an absolute fool would walk past it—he’d realize it had a purpose.”

“Uh-huh,” said Andrei, squatting down beside Izya. “And a fat lot of good it’ll do you when this pyramid is excavated by some absolute fool.”

“Never mind, never mind,” Izya growled. “A fool is a rational creature too. If he doesn’t understand, he’ll tell others about it…” He suddenly brightened up. “Take myths, for instance! As we know, fools are the overwhelming majority, which means that the witness to any interesting event has generally been a fool. Ergo: a myth is a description of a real event as perceived by a fool and refined by a poet. Eh?”

Andrei didn’t answer. He was looking at the pyramid. The wind cautiously crept up to it, uncertainly stirred the dust around it, whistled feebly between the stones, and Andrei suddenly pictured very clearly to himself the countless numbers of kilometers left behind them, and the thin dotted line of pyramids like this, stretching across those kilometers, abandoned to the wind and to time… And he also pictured a traveler, almost a desiccated mummy, crawling up to this pyramid on his hands and knees, dying of hunger and thirst… how frantically, straining every last ounce of strength, he tugs out these stones and thrusts them aside, breaking his nails, and his inflamed imagination is already painting him a picture of a secret cache of food and water, there under the stones… Andrei let out a hysterical snigger. At that moment I’d definitely shoot myself. It’s not possible to survive something like that…

“What’s wrong with you?” Izya asked suspiciously.

“Nothing, nothing, everything’s fine,” Andrei said, and got up.

Izya got up too, and looked at the pyramid critically for a while. “There’s nothing funny about it!” he declared, and stamped the foot that was bound with shaggy string. “It will do for a start,” he declared. “Shall we go?”

“Yes, let’s go.”

Andrei harnessed himself to his cart, but Izya couldn’t resist the temptation and walked around his pyramid once again. He was obviously imagining something, pictures of some kind, and these pictures were flattering to his inner spirit; he smiled stealthily, rubbing his hands together and panting noisily into his beard.

“Well, you’re a real sight!” Andrei said, unable to stop himself. “Just like a toad. You’ve dumped a load of eggs, and now you’re totally stupefied with pride. Or like a keta salmon.”

“You watch your mouth!” said Izya, threading his arms into the harness. “The keta dies after that business.”

“Precisely,” said Andrei.

“So watch your mouth!” Izya said menacingly, and they moved on.

Then Izya suddenly asked, “Have you ever eaten keta?”

“Tons of it,” said Andrei. “D’you know how great it is with vodka? Or on a sandwich with tea… Why?”

“I just wondered,” said Izya. “But my daughters have never tried it.”

“Daughters?” Andrei exclaimed in surprise. “You have daughters?”

“Three of them,” said Izya. “And not one of them knows what a keta salmon is. I explained to them that keta and sturgeon are extinct fish. Like the ichthyosaurs. And they’ll tell their children the same thing about herring…”

He said something else, but Andrei was too stunned to listen. Would you ever believe it! Three daughters. Izya has three daughters! I’ve known him for six years and nothing like that ever even occurred to me. So then how come he took the plunge and decided to come here? Way to go, Izya… What damned crazy people there are in the world… But no, guys, he thought. It’s all right, it all fits: no normal person will ever reach this pyramid. Once any normal person has reached the Crystal Palace, he’ll just stay there for the rest of his life. I saw them there, those normal people… You can’t tell their faces from their asses… No, guys, if anyone does reach this pyramid, it can only be some kind of Izya number two… And how eagerly he’ll dig up this pyramid and rip open the envelope, and then immediately forget about everything—he’ll die here, still reading… But then, on the other hand, I ended up here, didn’t I? For what? It was good in the Tower. It was even better in the Pavilion. And in the Crystal Palace… I’ve never lived like I did in the Crystal Palace and I never will again… So all right… It’s Izya. He’s got an awl up his ass and he can’t sit still anywhere. But if Izya hadn’t been with me, would I have left that place or stayed? That’s the question!

“Why do we have to go forward?” Izya asked at the Plantation, and the little blackface girls, with smooth skin and big tits, sat nearby and meekly listened to us. “Why, after all, do we have to go forward, regardless of everything?” Izya pontificated, absentmindedly stroking the nearest one on her satin-smooth knee. “Why, because behind us there is either death, or boredom, which is also death. That simple observation must be enough for you, surely? After all, we’re the first, do you understand that? After all, not a single person has yet passed right through this world from one end to the other: from the jungles and the swamps all the way to the zero point… And maybe this whole bag of tricks was only set up in order to find a man like that? So that he would go the whole way?”

“What for?” Andrei asked morosely.

“How should I know?” Izya exclaimed indignantly. “But what is the temple being built for? It’s obvious that the temple is the only goal in sight, but asking what it’s for isn’t the correct question. Man has to have a goal, he can’t manage without a goal, that’s what he was given reason for. If he doesn’t have a goal, he invents one.”

“And you’ve invented yours,” said Andrei. “You have to go all the way. What sort of goal is that?”

“I didn’t invent it,” said Izya. “It’s my unique one and only. I’ve got nothing to choose from. It’s either the goal or aimlessness—that’s the way things are for you and me.”

“But why do you keep hammering that temple of yours into my head?” Andrei asked. “What has your temple got to do with all this?”

“It has a lot to do with it,” Izya parried keenly, as if this was exactly what he’d been waiting for. “The temple, my dear Andriushka, is not only eternal books, not only eternal music. Otherwise they would only have started building the temple after Gutenberg or, as you were taught, after Ivan Fyodorov. No, my dear man, the temple is also built out of deeds. If you like, the temple is cemented together by deeds; it is held up by them, it rests on them. It all began with deeds. First the deed, then the legend, and all the rest only comes afterward. Naturally, what is meant here is the exceptional deed, one that exceeds the normal bounds, inexplicable, if you like. That’s what the temple began with—the significant deed!”

“The heroic deed, in short,” Andrei observed, chuckling derisively.

“Well, so be it, let’s call it heroic,” Izya agreed condescendingly.”

“In other words, you turn out to be a hero,” said Andrei. “In other words, you long to be a hero. Sinbad the Sailor and the mighty Ulysses…”

“And you’re a stupid fool,” said Izya. He said it affectionately, without the slightest offense intended. “I assure you, my friend, that Ulysses didn’t long to be a hero. He simply was a hero. That was his nature. He couldn’t be any other way. You can’t eat shit—it makes you puke, and it made him feel sick being a little king in his seedy little Ithaca. I can see that you pity me, you know: what a crank, a total screwball… I can see that. But there’s no need for you to pity me. Because I know with absolute certainty that the temple is being built, that nothing else serious is happening in history apart from this, and there’s only one purpose in my life—to protect that temple and increase its wealth. Of course, I’m not Homer and I’m not Pushkin; I won’t get to put a brick in the wall. But I am Katzman. And that temple is in me, and that means I’m a part of the temple, it means that with my recognition of myself the temple has expanded by one more human soul. And that’s already wonderful. Even if I don’t add a single scrap to the wall… Although I’ll try to add one, you can be quite sure of that. It will definitely be a very small speck—and, even worse, in time that speck might simply fall off, it won’t be any use to the temple, but in any case I know that the temple was in me, and I also lent it strength…”

“I don’t understand any of this,” said Andrei. “Your explanation is too confused. Some kind of religion: temple, spirit…”

“Well, of course,” said Izya, “since it’s not a bottle of vodka and it’s not a twin mattress, it’s got to be religion. What are you getting bristly about? You’re the one who’s been nagging me about how you’ve lost the ground under your feet and you’re suspended in empty space… And that’s right, you are. That’s what had to happen to you. It happens to any man who thinks even the tiniest little bit… Well, I’m giving you some ground. The most solid ground there can ever be. Plant both feet on it and stand there, if you want, and if you don’t, then bug off! But don’t bellyache afterward!”

“You’re not presenting me with ground to stand on,” said Andrei, “you’re fobbing me off with some kind of amorphous cloud! Well, OK. Let’s say I’ve understood all about this temple of yours. Only what good is that to me? I’m not good enough to be one of the builders of your temple—I’m no Homer, either, to put it mildly… But you at least have the temple in your soul, you can’t live without it—I can see the way you run around the world like a little puppy, avidly sniffing at everything, and whatever you come across, you lick it or take a bite to see how it tastes! I see the way you read. You can read twenty-four hours a day… and you actually remember everything too… But I can’t do any of that. I like to read, but in moderation, after all. I love listening to music. But not twenty-four hours a day either! And my memory’s absolutely ordinary—I can’t possibly enrich it with all the treasures that mankind has accumulated… Even if I never did anything else—I still couldn’t. With me it flies in one ear and out the other. So now what good is your temple to me?”

“Well that’s true, that’s right,” said Izya. “I won’t argue. The temple’s not for everyone… I won’t deny that it’s the heritage of the minority, a matter of human nature… But you listen, and I’ll tell you the way I see it. The temple has”—Izya started counting on his fingers—“builders. Those are the ones who construct it. And then, let’s say… goddammit, I can’t find the right word, religious terminology keeps coming to mind… Well, all right. Let’s call them priests. They’re the ones who bear it within themselves. The ones through whose souls it grows and in whose souls it exists… And there are consumers—those who, so to speak, partake of it… So then Pushkin is a builder. I’m a priest. And you’re a consumer… Don’t pull that face, you fool! That’s really great! After all, without a consumer, the temple wouldn’t have any human meaning. Just think how lucky you are, you blockhead! After all, it takes years and years of special processing, brainwashing, and supremely cunning systems of deception to provoke you, the consumer, into attempting to destroy the temple… And there’s no way the kind of consumer you’ve become now can be pushed into that sort of thing, except maybe under threat of death! Just think, you rattlebrain: the ones like you are an extremely small minority too! Give the majority the wink, give them permission, and off they’ll go, whooping and hollering to smash everything with crowbars, burn everything to the ground with blazing torches… that has already happened, many times over! And it will probably happen again, time after time… And you complain! But if it is possible at all to ask, what is the temple for? there can only be one answer: for you!”

“Andriukha!” Izya called in that familiar, obnoxious voice. “Maybe we should grab a drink?”

They were standing right on the very top of a massive hillock. On the left, the side where the Cliff was, everything was concealed behind a murky veil of dust hurtling along at furious speed, but on the right the air had cleared for some reason, and they could see the Yellow Wall—not smooth and even, the way it was within the limits of the City, but completely covered in mighty folds and wrinkles, like the root of some monstrous tree. Ahead of them at the bottom of the Wall, a field of white stone began—not loose chips but solid stone, a single, monolithic mass—and this field of stone extended as far as the eye could see, and swaying above it half a kilometer away from the hillock were two tall, scrawny dust devils—one yellow and the other black…

“This is something new,” Andrei said, screwing up his eyes. “Look, solid stone.”

“Eh? Yes, I suppose so… Listen, let’s have a glass of water—it’s been four hours already.”

“Yes,” Andrei agreed. “Only let’s go down first.”

They walked down from the hillock and slipped out of their harnesses, and Andrei lugged a red-hot canister out of his cart. The canister caught on the belt of his automatic, then on the sack with the broken remains of the rusks, but Andrei dragged it out anyway, squeezed it between his knees, and opened it. Izya skipped around beside him, holding two plastic mugs at the ready.

“Get the salt,” said Andrei.

Izya instantly stopped skipping. “Oh, come on…” he whined. “Why? Let’s just down it…”

“You’re not getting any without salt,” Andrei said wearily.

“Then let’s do it like this,” said Izya, struck by an inspired idea. He had already put down the mugs on a rock and was rummaging in his cart. “Let’s say I eat my salt and then wash it down with the water.”

“Oh God,” said Andrei, astounded. “OK then, do it that way.” He half-filled the two mugs with hot water that had a metallic smell, took the pack of salt from Izya, and said, “Give me your tongue.”

He sprinkled a pinch of salt on Izya’s thick, furry tongue and watched Izya wince and choke, reaching out greedily for his mug, then he salted his own water and started drinking it in miserly little sips, without taking any pleasure in it, as if it were medicine.

“Good!” Izya said with a croak. “Only not enough. Eh?”

Andrei nodded. The water he had drunk immediately emerged as sweat, and everything in his mouth remained the same as it had been, without even the slightest feeling of relief. He lifted up the canister, figuring something out. There’d probably be enough for a couple of days, and then… And then something else will turn up, he told himself fiercely. The Experiment is the Experiment. They won’t let you live, but they won’t let you croak either… He cast a glance at the white plateau that stretched out ahead of them, radiating heat, bit on his dry lip, and started setting the canister back in the cart. Izya had squatted down and was binding up the sole of his shoe again.

“You know,” Izya panted, “this really is a strange kind of place. Actually I can’t recall anything like it at all.” He glanced at the sun, shading his eyes with his hand. “At the zenith,” he said. “I swear to God, at the zenith. Something’s going to happen… Oh, dump that damned lump of iron, will you, what are you fumbling with that for?”

Andrei carefully arranged the automatic beside the canister. “Without that lump of iron the two of us would have left our bones behind the Pavilion,” he reminded Izya.

“That was behind the Pavilion!” Izya retorted. “Since then we’ve been walking for more than four weeks and we haven’t even seen a fly.”

“All right,” said Andrei. “You don’t have to carry it… Let’s go.”

The stone plateau turned out to be amazingly smooth. The carts rolled over it as if it were asphalt, with the wheels squeaking. But the heat became even more terrible. The white stone flung the sun’s rays back up, and now there was no escape for their eyes. Their feet burned as if they weren’t wearing any shoes at all, and strangely enough, there was as much dust as ever. If we don’t snuff it here, Andrei thought, then we’ll live forever. He walked with his eyes screwed almost closed, and then closed them completely. That made it a bit easier. This is the way I’m going to walk, he thought. And I’ll open my eyes, let’s say, every twenty steps. Or thirty… Take a quick look and move on…

The basement of the Tower had been floored with very similar white stone. Only there it had been cool and dark, and there were lots of thick cardboard boxes standing along the walls, mysteriously full of various hardware items. There were nails, screws, bolts of every possible size, cans of different kinds of glue and paint, bottles of different-colored varnishes, carpentry and machine-work tools, ball bearings wrapped in oilpaper… They hadn’t found anything edible, but in the corner a short, rusty pipe protruded from the wall, with a thin trickle of cold, incredibly delicious water flowing out of it and disappearing under the ground…

“Everything in your system is good,” Andrei had said, setting his mug under the trickle for the twentieth time. “There’s just one thing I don’t like. I don’t like it when people are divided into the important and the unimportant. It’s not right. It’s abhorrent. There’s the temple, and there’s the inane rabble swarming around it. ‘Man is a poor soul, burdened with a corpse.’ Even if that really is true, it’s still not right. The whole damn system should be changed.”

“And am I saying it shouldn’t?” said Izya. “Of course it would be a good thing to change that order of things. Only how? So far all attempts to change the situation and level out the human playing field and set everyone on the same level, in order to make everything right and just—all these attempts have ended in the demolition of the temple so that it wouldn’t tower over everyone, and the severing of any heads that jutted up above the general level. And that’s all. And then the foul-smelling pyramid of the new political elite started growing over the leveled field, expanding as rapidly as a cancerous tumor, even more repulsive than the old one. And so far, you know, no other ways have been invented. Of course, all these excesses haven’t altered the course of history and they haven’t been able to completely destroy the temple, but plenty of brilliant heads have been chopped off.”

“I know,” said Andrei. “But even so. Even so, it’s vile. Any elite is odious.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon!” Izya exclaimed. “Now, if you said, ‘Any elite that controls the lives and fates of other people is odious,’ then I’d agree with you. But an elite in itself, an elite for itself—who does that interfere with? It irritates people; it makes them furious, it drives them wild!—that’s a different matter, but then, after all, irritating people is one of its functions… And complete equality is a stagnant swamp. We should thank old Mother Nature that such a thing as complete equality is impossible… Don’t get me wrong, Andrei, I’m not proposing a system for rearranging the world. I don’t know any system like that, and I don’t believe it exists. Too many different kinds of systems have been tried, and basically everything has remained the way it was… All I’m offering you is a goal for existence… dammit, I’m not even offering it, you’ve confused me. I’ve discovered this goal in myself and for myself—the goal of my existence, do you understand me? Of my existence and the existence of others like me… After all, I’m only talking to you about it and talking to you at this time because I felt sorry for you—I can see a man who is ready, who has burned everything that he used to worship, and now he doesn’t know what to worship. And you can’t live without worshipping; you imbibed that with your mother’s milk: the need to worship something or someone. They beat it into your head once and for all that if there’s no idea that’s worth dying for, then it’s not even worth living. And people like you, who’ve reached a final understanding, are capable of terrible things. A man can blow his brains out, or turn into a supernatural villain—a convinced villain, a principled, disinterested villain, do you understand? Or else even worse: he’ll start taking revenge on the world because the world is the way it really is, and doesn’t conform to some predetermined ideal or other. And another good thing about the idea of the temple, by the way, is that dying for it is positively counterindicated. You have to live for it. Live every day, with all your strength, at full throttle.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Andrei. “Probably that’s the way it all is. But even so, this idea still isn’t mine!”

Andrei stopped and took a tight grip on Izya’s sleeve. Izya immediately opened his eyes and asked in a frightened voice, “What? What is it?”

“Shut up,” Andrei said through his teeth.

There was something up ahead of them. Something was moving, not spinning around in a column, not trailing about just above the stone, but moving through all of that. Toward them.

“People,” Izya said delightedly. “Listen, Andriukha, people!”

“Quiet, you jerk,” Andrei said in a whisper.

He’d already realized that they were people. Or one person… No, it looked like two. Standing there. They’d probably noticed him and Izya too… Now he couldn’t see a damned thing through the cursed dust again.

“There, you see!” Izya said in a triumphant whisper. “And you kept moaning: we’re going to croak…”

Andrei cautiously took off his harness and backed toward his cart, keeping his eyes fixed on the indecipherable shadows ahead of them. Dammit, how many of them are there, after all? And how far is it to them from here? About a hundred meters, maybe? Or less? He found the automatic in the cart by touch, slid back the bolt, and said to Izya, “Move the carts together, lie down behind them. You can cover me if anything…”

He stuck the automatic in Izya’s hands and slowly set off forward, without looking back, holding his hand on his holster. The visibility was abominable. He’ll shoot me he thought, meaning Izya. Plant a bullet right in the back of my head…

Now he could make out that one of the others was also walking toward him—an indeterminate, lanky silhouette in the swirling dust. Does he have a gun or not? Here’s the Anticity for you. Who could ever have thought it? Oh, I don’t like the way he’s holding his hand! Andrei cautiously unbuttoned his holster and took hold of the ribbed handle. His thumb automatically set itself on the safety catch. It’s OK, everything will work out fine. It has to. The main thing is not to make any abrupt movements.

He pulled the pistol out of the holster. The pistol got caught on something. Suddenly he felt afraid. He tugged harder, then even harder, and then with all his strength. He clearly saw an abrupt movement by the man who was walking toward him (tall, tattered, exhausted, with a dirty beard right up to his eyes)… It’s stupid, he thought, squeezing the trigger. There was a shot, there was the flash of a return shot, he thought there was a shout from Izya… and there was a blow to his chest that instantly extinguished the sun.

“Well now, Andrei,” the Mentor’s voice said with a note of solemnity. “You have passed through the first circle.”

The bulb under the green glass shade was lit, and in the circle of light a fresh copy of Leningrad Pravda was lying on the desk, with a large leading article entitled “The Love of Leningraders for Comrade Stalin Is Boundless.” A radio was buzzing and muttering on a set of shelves behind him. Mom was rattling dishes in the kitchen and talking to the woman who shared the apartment. There was a smell of fried fish. In the enclosed yard outside the window little kids were squealing and kicking up a racket in a game of hide-and-go-seek. The damp autumn air came in through the small transom at the top of the window, which was wide open. Only a minute ago, all this had been completely different from the way it was now—far more ordinary and familiar. It had been without a future. Or rather, separate from the future.

Andrei aimlessly smoothed out the newspaper before he spoke. “The first? Why the first?”

“Because there are many more still to come,” the Mentor’s voice said.

Then Andrei got up, trying not to look in the direction the voice came from, and leaned his shoulder against the cupboard by the window. The black well shaft of the yard, weakly illuminated by the yellow rectangles of the windows, was below him and above him, and somewhere far above, in a sky that had already turned dark, Vega was shining. It was absolutely impossible to leave all this again and absolutely—even more!—impossible to stay here among all this. Now. After everything.

“Izya! Izya!” a woman’s voice called stridently in the yard. “Izya, come home for supper already! Children, have you seen Izya?”

And the children’s voices down below started shouting, “Izka! Katzman! Go on, your mom’s calling you.”

Tense in every muscle, Andrei stuck his face right up against the glass, peering into the darkness. But all he could see were indecipherable shadows darting between the banked-up stacks of wood on the wet, black bottom of the shaft.